Media Mentions

Harvard Law School recently announced that it will no longer require the Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT, as its only admissions exam. Beginning this fall, students can either take the Graduate Records Exam, known popularly as the GRE, or the LSAT. Jessica Soban, associate dean for strategic initiatives and admissions at Harvard Law School, tells GoodCall® the change is designed to increase access for U.S. and international students...Also, Soban explains that some students who consider going to graduate school also consider going to law school. “Students with technology or other STEM backgrounds might also want to get (for example) a master’s degree in Computer Science, but it is burdensome and costly to study for and take one test to get in graduate school and have to repeat the cycle to get into law school.”

Last week, President Donald Trump signed a controversial new law, allowing internet providers to continue gathering sensitive information on their users and selling that data to advertisers. News sites erupted with recommendations for keeping browsing history private—but because all the data people send and receive online goes through their service providers, that’s easier said than done...Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center and the author of Schneier on Security, warned against underestimating internet providers’ ability—and drive—to see through data-obfuscation tactics. “The question is, after 100 years of coding theory, how good are those algorithms at finding the signal in the noise?” he asked.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With the swearing-in Monday of Justice Neil Gorsuch, the U.S. Supreme Court’s configuration shifts to … a 4-4 balance with a single centrist justice as the swing vote. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s been the normal state of affairs since 1986, when Justice Antonin Scalia joined, and on some issues all the way back to Richard Nixon’s administration.

In this podcast, John McDougall of McDougall Interactive and the www.legalmarketingreview.com blog speaks with Dr. Heidi Gardner of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession about law firm rainmakers and collaboration following her keynote address at the Thomson Reuters Marketing Partner Forum.

On walls, pillars and billboards across Budapest, the far-right Jobbik party has plastered the face of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and assorted cronies above a simple slogan: "They Steal." Corruption has been an increasingly salient feature of Orban's rule, but the heist most recently contemplated by Orban and his Fidesz party, which dominates Hungary's parliament, is an unusual one: They want to steal a university...In an email interview, Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University professor who has studied Hungary's constitutional transition from communism, provides some context. "Since summer 2015, Orban has been demonizing George Soros and blaming the refugee crisis on him. Orban has argued that the refugee crisis is Soros’s way of guaranteeing pluralism in Europe because Soros doesn’t support the current government’s defense of Christian Hungary."

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn and Stephen Wertheim. We now know how many cruise missiles it takes to turn you from pariah to respected member of the American foreign policy establishment: 59 — the number President Trump fired on a Syrian government airfield on Thursday. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria gushed. And yet firing missiles at half-empty air bases does not make up for a lack of foreign policy acumen, let alone a strategy for dealing with a Middle East that has consumed American blood and treasure for at least 15 years. In fact, the good money says that Mr. Trump is, through plan or happenstance, likely to push us further into the fighting, whatever he promised on the campaign trail.

Jurors in the Aaron Hernandez double-murder trial began their second day of deliberations today, while behind the scenes the former New England Patriots player's lawyers and the judge were squabbling over perceptions of racism. Suffolk Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Locke, exhuming a fight thought buried Thursday, told Hernandez's defense team he found it "astounding" they would object to his selection of a white woman to serve as foreperson...But Hernandez attorney and Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. said what Locke did was make sure a white woman was put in charge and could not be removed as an alternate. "We find it offensive that with the jury predominantly filled with people of color, they cannot self-govern. We think it violates Mr. Hernandez's due process rights," Sullivan said.

A Miami-based neurologist who has treated Florida Panther players says a "turf war" is preventing neurologists from being represented on the National Hockey League's Concussion Subcommittee. Since 1997, the subcommittee has been advising the league on how best to treat players who suffer head injuries and brain trauma...One Harvard University law professor says that the NHL should overhaul its medical structure to free team doctors and trainers from any real or perceived conflicts of interest. Glenn Cohen, a Montreal native who is the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, published a report in November that urged the NFL to adopt new guidelines for team medical staff so doctors who treat players are not required to report to coaches and other team management. "For both the NFL or the NHL, whenever you have a club physician who is trying to serve both the interests of an injured player and management, there's a recipe for an ethically problematic state of affairs," Cohen said in an interview this week.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The “extreme vetting” proposals floated this week by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly include the idea of making visitors to the U.S. open their phones and disclose their contacts, passwords and social media handles to immigration authorities. This might potentially be constitutional, because visitors outside the U.S. don’t necessarily have privacy protection. But it’s a serious threat to Americans’ constitutional rights anyway. The intrusion into core privacy of visa applicants through the fiction of consent can easily be extended to U.S. citizens in a wide range of situations.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Forget Robert Bork. The confirmation of Neil Gorsuch after the rejection of Merrick Garland marks the new high-water mark in the overt, partisan politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court. After the Democratic Senate rejected Bork 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan got to choose another appointee. After the Republican Senate refused to vote on Garland last year, President Barack Obama was denied the same chance. We’ve entered a brave new world, in which the party that controls the Senate can now control court appointments.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. Governments want to spy on their citizens for all sorts of reasons. Some countries do it to help solve crimes or to try to find "terrorists" before they act. Others do it to find and arrest reporters or dissidents. Some only target individuals, others attempt to spy on everyone all the time. Many countries spy on the citizens of other countries: for reasons of national security, for advantages in trade negotiations, or to steal intellectual property. None of this is new. What is new, however, is how easy it has all become. Computers naturally produce data about their activities, which means they're constantly producing surveillance data about us as we interact with them.

President Trump ordered the military on Thursday to carry out a missile attack on Syrian forces for using chemical weapons against civilians. The unilateral attack lacked authorization from Congress or from the United Nations Security Council, raising the question of whether he had legal authority to commit the act of war...On Thursday, Mr. Trump said, “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.” He also invoked the Syrian refugee crisis and continuing regional instability. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the Bush administration, wrote that this criteria for what is sufficient to constitute a national interest was even thinner than previous precedents and would seemingly justify almost any unilateral use of force.

Richard Lazarus is known as the "dean of environmental law," but he'd rather be called the "solicitor general for environmental law." To his close friends, he's Richy. The Harvard Law School professor is well known in environmental and legal circles. He's argued before the Supreme Court 14 times and participated in 42 cases before the high court. He's also the former roommate of Chief Justice John Roberts. Lazarus has taught at top law schools, worked in the Justice Department's environmental division and was executive director to the commission investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. He recently spoke to E&E News about his longtime friendship with Roberts, sizing up Supreme Court justices and his stint selling ice cream in Urbana, Ill.

As Harvard’s Title IX Office splits into two separate offices in response to “community feedback” about the University’s response to sexual assault on campus, some student activists and professors question whether that change will lead to substantive improvements...“In many ways, it seems to be more about optics than about function,” said Katherine Leung [`17], a third-year Law student and co-president of the Harassment Assault Law-Student Team...Concerns about the separation between different stages of Harvard’s response to sexual assault complaints are not new. In 2014, 28 Law professors sharply criticized the University-wide Title IX procedures when they took effect, arguing in an op-ed in the Boston Globe that these procedures put “the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office.” Law professor Janet Halley, who signed the letter, called the new structure “window dressing.” “It does not provide either neutrality or independence of decision-makers handling particular cases,” Halley said. “The Law School procedures show how to do that, and at some point the University is going to need to move to a structure like those."

For more than 15,000 students across the country, Wednesday marked the first day of Resistance School — a program where the educational focus is mobilizing against President Donald Trump's administration. "Each one of us has people in our lives who were disturbed by the outcome of the election and saw it as a call to action," said Joe Breen, one of the Resistance School co-founders. He's a third-year student in a joint degree program at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School. "We recognized that we had the opportunity to help them develop the skills that they would need to get involved in political action." Resistance School organizers — a group of Harvard graduate students — said a couple hundred people participated in the first lesson in person at the Ivy League campus in Boston on Wednesday, while about 15,000 people of all ages tuned in via livestream from 50 states and 20 countries. They estimated the total participation was even larger because students were encouraged to host watch parties in groups.

After Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 7, Samuel Garcia [`19] described the scene at Harvard law school as one of despair. Garcia, 22, called his brother Ricco Garcia, 26, to discuss the surprising election result. That conversation between the Rio Grande Valley natives would eventually lead to a new book co-authored by the brothers. “How A Goat Became Mayor and the Political Spring That Followed” is a true story about how a goat became mayor in a small Texas town after dissatisfaction with the local politicians. The book is the third for Samuel Garcia, who grew up in Mission. Garcia is now a law student at Harvard.

...The 2011 bombing of Libya, initially meant to prevent a feared imminent massacre by Qaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, was authorized by a Security Council resolution and conducted under the auspices of NATO, but as Jack Goldsmith pointed out on Lawfare last night, Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel also argued at the time that the president has the right to act unilaterally in defense of the “national interest,” which in the Libya case was “preserving regional stability and supporting the UNSC’s credibility and effectiveness”—language not all that unlike what Trump used last night.

Taking a step back from the particulars of the Susan Rice story and the investigation into Russian collusion, Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes explain the broader implications of an eroding public trust in the nonpartisanship of American intelligence agencies. After decades of misbehavior, including spying on American citizens for political ends, the intelligence agencies had lost credibility with the American public. In the 1970s, Mr. Wittes and Mr. Goldsmith write, the intelligence community entered a “grand bargain” with Congress that limited its power but restored its integrity. That “grand bargain” is now in peril.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Everyone agrees that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are forbidden from discriminating on the basis of sex. Are they also forbidden from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation? In a momentous decision earlier this week, with large implications for employers all over the country, a federal court of appeals ruled that they are. Superb opinions were delivered by both Judge Diane Wood, author of the majority opinion, and Judge Diane Sykes, author of the dissent.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. After the nuclear option, what’s next? There really are only two choices to react to the Republican decision to eliminate the Senate filibuster permanently for Supreme Court nominations: mourning or celebration. So for the record, let me begin by saying that Judge Merrick Garland should’ve been confirmed after he was nominated to this seat by President Barack Obama, and that it’s tragic that Judge Neil Gorsuch, who is comparably qualified, will be confirmed in his stead. Then let me tell you how I feel now: I come to bury the filibuster, not praise it.

...In March 2016, the Law School also took steps to address its historical ties to slavery—specifically, the Law School recommended discarding its former seal featuring the crest of the Royall family, slave-owners who endowed the school’s first professorship in the late 18th century. In the days following that decision, the Law School sought to physically remove all traces of the Royall crest from its campus and website...After being contacted by The Crimson, Law School Dean for Administration Francis X. McCrossan wrote in an email that he was aware the school’s “large-scale” effort to remove the seal last year may not have been entirely successful. “We did away with the shield in all the places where we found it, but occasionally we still come across instances that weren't caught during that review,” McCrossan wrote.