Media Mentions

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.

More than 20,000 drug cases tied to a disgraced former state chemist appear headed for dismissal, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders said Tuesday as they combed through legal filings from local prosecutors in Massachusetts...he scandal led drug labs around the country to re-examine their protocols, said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, which has some clients who are affected by the scandal. Mr. Sullivan, who described the wave of dismissals as “wholly unprecedented,” said, “There will be literally tens of thousands of people whose lives will change.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The brouhaha unleashed in academic and media circles over a free speech editorial published last week by the Wellesley College student newspaper is both justified and overstated. It’s justified in that college campuses matter for setting the intellectual conditions for free inquiry and debate. It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the editorial for its poor history, hostility to open campus discussion and misstatement of free-speech doctrine in current law. The objections are overstated, however, because of a crucial aspect of the editorial that seems to have been missed by critics, and maybe by the authors themselves: the distinction between the First Amendment right of a private college to regulate student speech and the First Amendment right of the individual to be free from government speech regulation.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I’ve spent the last few months visiting scrappy cities all over America that are charting their own destinies. They’re planning for economic growth and social justice; they’re looking hard at the challenges they face, including workforce development and affordable housing; and no one I talk to mentions Donald Trump. What these cities have in common is that they treat fiber optic internet access as a utility, like water, electricity, sewer service, and their street grid: available to all, without discrimination, at a reasonable cost. That’s completely at odds with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plans for the country. And the tension between these two views is shaping up to be an explosive issue for the next presidential election.

...This is one more arena in which Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns becomes relevant. “One of the many problems with the president’s continuing business dealings with foreign countries is that without his tax returns, we do not know the full extent of his violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution,” Libowitz explains. “We seek to change that.” Indeed, where there is no legal compunction for the president now to release his tax returns absent action by Congress (which Republicans will never permit), litigation offers an avenue for ferreting out his finances. “All kinds of relevant information — including the tax returns Trump is fighting to hide — are likely to be demanded in the course of discovery,” says attorney Laurence H. Tribe, one of the lawyers on the case.

Three Harvard professors were awarded prestigious Guggenheim research fellowships, an award honoring “exceptional creative ability in the arts,” last week...Of this year’s 173 scholarship recipients, Law School professor Adriaan Lanni, Drama, English, and Comparative Literature professor Martin Puchner, and Education School professor Natasha K. Warikoo will receive grants to assist their respective research projects spanning six to twelve months. Lanni said she will use her fellowship to conduct research for her book “Crime and Justice in Democratic Athens.” She wrote in an email that she hopes to explore what it means to have a truly “popular” justice system through her studies in ancient law.

Over the last eight years, food policy has gone from being a topic for industry insiders and wonks, to a regular staple on mainstream America’s menu of interests. Case in point: A plurality of Americans now believe healthy food should be more affordable, farm subsidies should be used to grow that healthy food, farming should happen in harmony with the environment, and food system workers should be treated—and paid—fairly...Emily Broad Leib thinks it can be done...“This isn’t pie in the sky—we have the tools in the U.S. and have used them to create national strategies on lots of other things that are not as foundational as food,” Leib said.

...Campus disciplinary proceedings are, in theory, educational rather than punitive. School officials may hold hearings, take testimony and make factual findings, but they cannot convict or incarcerate—which is why the accused are not entitled to the full range of protections they would have in a court of law. But while the punishment isn’t prison, it can be hugely significant. Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School and a well-respected feminist scholar says, “I would ask people to think, what would it be like if your brother or your son was expelled. It’s not nothing. Its the end of a life plan.”

In his drive to dismantle President Barack Obama’s regulatory legacy, President Trump has signed executive orders with great fanfare and breathed life into a once-obscure law to nullify numerous Obama-era regulations. But his administration is also using a third tactic: Going to court to stop federal judges from ruling on a broad array of regulations that are being challenged by Trump’s own conservative allies....“If the courts uphold the previous administration, you still have the discretion to change things, but you’ve lost the argument that you were forced to do it or that the previous administration exceeded legal bounds,” said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard University.

...If the president was happy with Lichtman's analysis then, he might not be so thrilled with this next prediction: "the prediction of impeachment," as Lichtman calls it. He expects the House of Representatives will formally vote that the Senate should try, convict, and remove the President from office within his first term...Still, to initiate impeachment proceedings in the House would require overwhelming public support for legislators to consider forming the judiciary committee. The committee would have to find the person has committed specific articles of impeachment — treason, bribery or "high crimes or misdemeanours," a catchall term vague enough to permit impeachment "even in the least appropriate cases," says Harvard University Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, like "the garden-variety offence" of lying under oath about a prior sexual affair.

The repeated censures BHP Billiton copped from aggressive New York hedge fund Elliott Management last week signalled the wave of shareholder activism that has engulfed the United States has descended to Australia with brute force....Yet the most comprehensive academic research led by Harvard University law professor and corporate governance expert Lucian Bebchuk debunks claims that activist hedge funds cause long-term underperformance and losses to other shareholders. Bebchuk and two academic colleagues reviewed all of about 2000 interventions by activist hedge funds from 1994 through 2007, finding no evidence that target companies' performance or share prices suffered in the five years after an activist fund announced a campaign. "During the third, fourth, and fifth year following the start of an activist intervention, operating performance tends to be better, not worse, than during the pre-intervention period," the academics conclude. The study found no evidence of "pump-and-dump" patterns where stock prices collapsed after activists sold out.

As President Donald Trump prepares to put his own stamp on the all-important U.S.-China trade alliance, experts are urging the White House to avoid being distracted by potential quick market access victories and instead prioritize a comprehensive approach to resolving the partners' deep-seated problems. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping emerged from their bilateral summit in Florida last week with a 100-day plan to create a new framework for trade talks. The U.S. has been holding bilateral economic talks with China in some form or another for several years, but each new administration has been eager to reset that conversation on its own terms...Those are the kinds of things that can pay dividends for U.S. companies in the near term, which has been a key priority for the Trump administration, but Harvard law professor and former U.S. trade negotiator Mark Wu said that such steps are ultimately a bandage on the deeper issues facing the two trade behemoths.

A jury on Friday cleared Aaron Hernandez of committing a double murder in 2012, handing the former New England Patriots star his first significant legal victory since his shocking arrest for a third slaying in 2013...When the verdict came down, Jenkins-Hernandez, his fiancee, cried, holding the hands of two friends and nodding furiously with her eyes shut. She later told reporters she was “very happy.” It was a sentiment echoed by Ronald Sullivan, one of Hernandez’s lawyers, who said the “actual perpetrator of this crime was given immunity by the Commonwealth. He [Hernandez] was charged with something that someone else did."

Cities have a way to go before they can be considered geniuses. But they’re getting smart pretty fast. In just the past few years, mayors and other officials in cities across the country have begun to draw on the reams of data at their disposal—about income, burglaries, traffic, fires, illnesses, parking citations and more—to tackle many of the problems of urban life...Widespread use of sensors and video can also present privacy risks unless precautions are taken. The technology “is forcing cities to confront questions of privacy that they haven’t had to confront before,” says Ben Green, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and lead author of a recent report on open-data privacy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The votes from Turkey’s constitutional referendum are in, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed victory for his side, even as the result remains disputed. What’s clear is who the winner is not: constitutional democracy. On the surface, the amendments turn Turkey into a presidential system instead of a parliamentary one. Underneath, they strengthen the personal authority of Erdogan, who in the last decade and a half has gone from prime minister to president to quasi-authoritarian leader.