Media Mentions

Family and high-profile friends of Aaron Hernandez, the convicted killer and former New England Patriots star who hanged himself in his prison cell last week, on Monday paid their final respects to the notorious felon during a private funeral service in his hometown....Hernandez’s attorneys, including Jose Baez, Ronald Sullivan, Linda Kenney Baden, Robert Proctor, Leontire, and Michelle Medina, exited the funeral home around 4 p.m. to read a brief statement on behalf of the family. Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor, read the statement, thanking the public for “its thoughtful expressions of condolences.” “The family wishes to say goodbye to Aaron in privacy,” Sullivan. “They love him and they miss him.”

...Thirty-five videos, featuring Harvard experts in science, business, law, health, economics, engineering, public policy, design, and the arts, have been assembled over the last year and a half as a resource for members of the public who want to learn more about climate change.....While every viewer will take home different lessons from the videos, Griswold was struck by the discussion of climate change economics and public policy from Associate Professor of Public Policy Joe Aldy and Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government Robert Stavins. He also pointed to perspectives on law from Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman

Former U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power is writing a memoir about her transition from writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning condemnation of foreign policy to becoming a leading public advocate for the government. Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had acquired Power's "The Education of an Idealist." A release date has not yet been determined..."Making the transition from critic of U.S. foreign policy to U.S. government official was not easy, but public service proved the most gratifying experience of my life," Power, now a professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, said in a statement. "I am looking forward to stepping back to explore the highs and lows, and to share ideas for how, even in troubled times, we can each do our part to shape a more humane future."

Why would Harvard Law School, one of the most elite law schools in the country, decide to change the admissions criteria that it has used for the past 60 years? One would be tempted to assume that it’s a response to the plummeting number of applicants at law schools around the country: even Harvard’s number of applicants is down 18% since 2011, though it still has far fewer spots than applicants. So why Harvard, why the change and why now?...It is to Harvard’s advantage to increase access to top talent and to be able to cast a wider net. As Jessica Soban, Harvard Law School’s Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions, put it, “Harvard Law School works to eliminate barriers to legal education for top talent. We seek that talent from a variety of backgrounds: across different academic disciplines, different countries, and different socio-economic backgrounds.”

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Jessica Brand of Harvard Law's Fair Punishment Project about the chronic problem of bad lawyering on capital punishment cases. All eight death row cases in Arkansas had examples of attorney failures, including drunk lawyers, a conflict of interest affair involving a judge, lawyers missing deadlines, and failure to disclose mental disorders.

Every day in courtrooms across the United States, lawyers rely on evidence to make their cases. But when it comes to what works in serving clients or enhancing access to justice, lawyers and judges are stubbornly resistant to evidence-based research. That, at least, is the premise underlying the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School, where director and Harvard Law professor James Greiner and his staff are working to compile rigorous evidence of what works in law and what doesn’t, using randomized control trials...In this regard, the legal profession today is roughly where the medical profession was in the 1940s, when insurers began demanding evidence of the efficacy of procedures and drugs, Greiner said at a recent showcase of the Access to Justice Lab’s work. Drug testing is a good example of why the “trust me” approach is unacceptable in medicine. Of all drugs that enter phase-one testing, only 10 percent make it to phase three. “But what do we do in law?” Jim Greiner asked. “We go from idea straight to the field. Why? Because we know. We’re professionals.”

Thousands of public records about animal welfare have vanished from the internet, part of a government database that included atrocious puppy mill conditions, improper veterinary care and other mistreatment of animals. Now activists are hitting back at the USDA in the courtroom and by posting deleted records online...Delcianna Winders, an academic fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, said that no new enforcement records had been posted online since 2016...Winders, who uses the documents for her own work at Harvard, sent thousands of the records she's saved to Kick to publish on his site. "The impact is huge, I don’t think it can be overstated," she said of the documents' removal.

...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.