Media Mentions

...Tibor Fischer is correct that media discussion of the Fidesz regime in Hungary would be better informed if more people spoke Hungarian. For readers who do not, I would suggest Éva Balogh’s Hungarian Spectrum blog, and Kim Lane Scheppele’s forensic analyses of Viktor Orbán’s “constitutional coup” in the academic literature, and her account of changes introduced to electoral rules to facilitate his re-election in her contribution to Paul Krugman’s blog in the New York Times.

The proportion of Harvard’s tenured faculty who are women or people of color jumped from 30.8 percent to 39.2 percent over the past decade, according to the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity’s annual report. The report, released on Monday, provides demographic statistics for each of Harvard’s schools and the four divisions of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences...Among tenure-track professors, the Divinity School and the Law School have the highest minority representation with 75 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

A conference on the evolution and current state of immigration to be held on the Western Kentucky University campus April 25 will feature a graduate of the college who’s now at Harvard Law School and working with teenage refugees from Central America. Mario Nguyen [`17] sees the refugee crisis first-hand in his work with Harvard Legal Aid. He says some people mistakenly think of the wave of immigrants from Central America as people coming to take American jobs. “In reality these are 14-year-old children I’ve been face-to-face with, 13-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 16-year-olds, who had to literally cross a few countries on their own on foot. A lot of them have been sexually abused or physically abused.” Nguyen says he’s been aware of immigration issues from an early age. His father was a refugee from Vietnam and his mother was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

No one wants murder videos on Facebook. But no one wants Facebook to censor their baby videos, either. Technology isn’t ready to step in and tell the difference. So what are the legal options for stopping videos like the appalling killing uploaded last week from hitting Facebook? None of them will be easy for Americans to swallow...“We want a free and open internet, and we want a space that we aren’t paying a subscription for,” says Kate Coyer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an expert online extremism. “But we also don’t want to encounter some of the worst elements of humanity on there. … At a certain point we may have to make a compromise.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to news reports, is re-evaluating whether to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing leaked classified material in 2010. This raises a First Amendment flag. The department previously decided it wouldn’t proceed because it couldn’t distinguish WikiLeaks from the New York Times or the Washington Post. So what, really, is the difference between unlawfully leaking information to the press and publishing it directly to the public? If one is unlawful, why can’t the other be?

Justice Neil Gorsuch made a difference Thursday in his first 5-4 vote on the Supreme Court, siding with his fellow conservatives to deny a petition from eight Arkansas inmates who sought to stop back-to-back-to-back executions. Gorsuch’s vote on one of several 11th-hour petitions, in effect, allowed the state of Arkansas to carry out its first execution in nearly 12 years...Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan filed an amicus brief on Thursday urging the Supreme Court to halt Lee’s execution and go the extra step of ending the “failed experiment” of capital punishment once and for all. In a later statement to The Huffington Post, he deplored the justices’ failure to act in the face of Arkansas’ brazenness. “The Court’s role is to vigorously police overzealous exercises of government power,” Sullivan said.

Talk is already heating up that President Trump could have a chance to appoint a second person to the Supreme Court...Pryor, who was on Trump’s original list, was seen as a controversial choice last time around given his public criticisms of Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that established abortion rights...“One advantage Gorsuch had over Pryor was he had some chance of not being filibustered, but now they know they don’t have to worry about that,” said Ian Samuel, a Climenko fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, who clerked for Scalia.

An op-ed by Byron Ruby `17 and Neil Longo. Earlier in February, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA on a largely party line vote. Both Utah senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, voted for his confirmation. Conventional political wisdom suggests this was unsurprising. But should it be? Many Republicans, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lindsay Graham, Hank Paulson and several Republican House members, including Utah's Mia Love, publicly support taking action on climate change. But more need to take up the mantle. In our increasingly polarized world, the messenger has in no small part become the message.

...In the first three months of the year more than 2,021 refugees have made the risky journey across fields in states such as North Dakota, Minnesota and Vermont to seek asylum in Canada, according to government data. With the snow starting to thaw, the number of people attempting to cross the 9,000km US-Canada border, the longest undefended frontier in the world, is set to rise...The US has become a tougher destination for refugees in recent years, even before Mr Trump’s election. More than 100,000 asylum requests in the US were pending at the end of 2015 — eight times more than in 2011. Moreover, more than half have their claim rejected after waiting three to four years to receive an answer, says Deborah Anker, director of Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic.

Cass Sunstein, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, suggested that Facebook experiment with an “opposing viewpoints button” in the website’s newsfeed but cautioned against the company curating content based on policy positions. “You could just click on it and you would get, for a certain amount of stuff that comes on your newsfeed, things that think differently from how you think – and it could make you very unhappy that you clicked the button because ‘why are they sending me this nonsense?’” he said during a discussion about his book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, at the American Enterprise Institute.

Harvard University professor Lawrence Lessig is a major advocate for privacy and online freedom and also tried to run for the 2016 Democratic nomination. He is in Paris to promote a documentary entitled "Meeting Snowden," something he has done several times. He tells FRANCE 24 why it's so important for him to defend the US whistleblower. Lessig also shares his thoughts on US democracy in light of the election of Donald Trump.

On March 4, 1865, Andrew Johnson drank several glasses of whiskey to stave off what might have been nerves or a fever. Then, the vice president-elect headed off to his inauguration. The weather outside was terrible, so the ceremony took place in the crammed Senate chamber. Things went downhill after Johnson was sworn in...To find out, Business Insider spoke with Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard University and the author of "Andrew Johnson." According to Gordon-Reed, Johnson's tarnished reputation is well-deserved, thanks to his deeply-held prejudices and general failings as a leader. "I think he's one of the worst," she told Business Insider.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...Outbursts of campus activism can be good, potentially even great. But far too often, they turn out to be about expressing what students regard as the correct values, rather than actually improving people’s lives. Expressive protests take up a lot of time and energy, and produce an abundance of passion. But they tend to do little or nothing to address the injustices that students say they want to remedy. Efforts to shut down speakers are the worst and the most extreme form of campus expressivism. It should go without saying that at colleges and universities, free speech is indispensable, and interferences with it are deplorable.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch waited until almost the end of Wednesday’s oral argument in the major church-state case of Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer to make his voice heard. But his comments seemed to foreshadow his vote, which he will likely cast in favor of the church that wants to use a state grant to resurface its playground despite a Missouri constitutional provision banning state aid to religious organizations. Gorsuch’s vote, however, may matter less than that of his old boss, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who seemed not to have made up his mind. That could be a good thing.

An op-ed by Holly Fernandez Lynch and Steven Joffe. It’s often portrayed as a story of exploitation. In the early 1950s, Henrietta Lacks, a poor, young African-American woman, learned she had terminal cancer. Cells collected from a biopsy of her cancer were cultured without her knowledge or permission to develop a cell line, called HeLa...Many aspects of Ms. Lacks’s story reflect genuine injustice: the racism that characterized the health care system of her day; the suffering of her young family after her death; their own lack of access to health care. But should we be outraged by what happened to her cells, and could happen to our own? Actually, no.

Aaron J. Hernandez, who had the phrase “God forgives” tattooed onto his arm, marked his forehead with a reference to a biblical passage before apparently taking his own life in his cell at the state’s maximum security prison Wednesday, according to records and a law enforcement official...About seven hours earlier, Hernandez was on the telephone with Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, his longtime fiancee and the mother of his 4-year-old daughter, according to Ronald Sullivan, one of his lawyers. “She spoke to him until telephone hours were over at about 8[p.m.],” Sullivan wrote in an e-mail Thursday. He did not say what they discussed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. After the prison suicide of former NFL player Aaron Hernandez on Wednesday, his conviction for murder, under appeal at the time of his death, is going to be reversed. This has nothing to do with Hernandez’s acquittal five days ago on separate murder charges. The reason is a fascinating and obscure doctrine known as “abatement ab initio.” Under Massachusetts law, a conviction that has not been finalized at the time of the defendant’s death is reversed back to the indictment “at the beginning” of the prosecution -- ab initio, in law Latin. Legally speaking, the presumption of innocence therefore attaches to Hernandez. And that could have consequences for a range of purposes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The split-personality defense is back in court. This time it’s radio host and provocateur Alex Jones who’s using it to combat his soon-to-be ex-wife’s charge that he’s an unfit father because of his on-air rants against the likes of Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Lopez. Jones’s answer is that he’s a “performance artist” who is “playing a character” in his Infowars broadcasts...The Trump-backing conspiracy theorist and the exhibitionist ex-wrestler aren’t exactly appealing figures for the avatar theory of the self. It’s still worth asking: Should the courts take seriously the idea that a public persona is legally different from the private identity of someone who’s in the news?

A message from Vladimir Putin can take many forms. It can be as heavy-handed as a pair of Russian bombers buzzing the Alaska coast, or as lethal as the public assassination of a defector on the streets of Kiev. Now Putin may be sending a message to the American government through a more subtle channel: an escalating series of U.S. intelligence leaks that last week exposed an NSA operation in the Middle East and the identity of an agency official who participated...“I think there’s something going on between the U.S. and Russia that we’re just seeing pieces of,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at IBM Resilient. “What happens when the deep states goes to war with each other and doesn’t tell the rest of us?”

State police are probing the suicide of convicted killer and ex-New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez in a Massachusetts prison this morning, and his legal team is vowing its own investigation. "The family and legal team is shocked and surprised at the news of Aaron’s death," Hernandez's defense lawyer, Jose Baez, who had just won his acquittal on double-murder charges on Friday, said in a statement this morning....Ronald Sullivan, a member of Hernandez's most recent defense team, said a statement would be forthcoming, "but right now, we just don't have enough information to comment."

Georgia Congressman John R. Lewis received the Kennedy School’s Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award at the Institute of Politics Tuesday afternoon, where he also spoke and answered student questions. At the event, Lewis, who represents Georgia’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, said he felt “blessed” to receive the Gleitsman Award, which honors politicians “who have sparked positive social change.”...The question and answer session was moderated by Business School professor Nancy F. Koehn and ImeIme A. Umana '14 [`17], who became the first black woman to lead the Harvard Law Review earlier this year.