Media Mentions

...In the fall of 2018, McIntyre plans to return to Cambridge with the second class of students admitted through the Harvard Law School’s Junior Deferral Program...Jessica L. Soban ’02, associate dean of admissions at the Law School, declined to provide admissions statistics for the program because, she said, it is still in a pilot stage. The first class of students accepted through this program will begin their studies at the Law School this fall. Soban said, however, that the school does not have a fixed number of spots available in any given JDP application cycle. “We have no preset notion going into any JDP cycle about how many students we will be admitting, so our goal is to get and admit and to find all of the talent that is available with no set number of applicants in mind,” Soban said. “Given that the number of applicants has fluctuated and the number of admits has fluctuated, the admit rate has also fluctuated in each of the three years.”

Delcianna Winders is the Academic Fellow of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program. In addition, she’s co-plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to reverse a recent decision by the Department of Agriculture to remove a host of animal-welfare records from its website. Winders spoke to Splice Today about what’s at stake in the legal battle, the USDA’s flimsy justification for its move, and her efforts to hold animal abusers accountable.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. European employers have been told they may ban the hijab provided they ban other visible signs of political, philosophical or religious beliefs, a form of neutrality that wouldn’t wash in U.S. employment law. At the same time, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. face 50 million euro fines for failing to regulate hate speech to the satisfaction of German authorities, another legal impossibility in the U.S. where the First Amendment protects even hate speech. The two cases show how deep the divergence is between liberal American ideas about freedom of speech and religion and European conceptions of equality.

Last year, on a presidential debate stage opposite Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump vowed, once president, to appoint “pro-life judges” to the Supreme Court. After enough of them, he said, the reversal of Roe v. Wade—the 44-year-old opinion that made abortion legal throughout the United States—would “happen automatically.”...“There’s a lot of reason to be concerned if you’re a big fan of women’s reproductive rights,” says Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “As soon as you overturned the trimester framework in Roe, you’re no longer in the realm of being bound by precedent.”

When the journalist Kurt Eichenwald opened an animated image sent to him on Twitter in December, the message “You deserve a seizure for your posts” appeared in capital letters along with a blinding strobe light. Mr. Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, immediately suffered a seizure...“This is an interesting and unique case in that there are lots of online attacks that can have physical consequences, such as an attack on an electrical grid or the control of air traffic control,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, an assistant director at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “But this is distinguishable because it is a targeted physical attack that was personal, using a plain-Jane tool.”

In every multibillion dollar settlement with a big bank that peddled faulty mortgage securities, a major provision has been a requirement that the bank provide “consumer relief.”...Eric D. Green, the monitor in the Goldman settlement, said the Wall Street bank had received $113 million in credit to fulfill its consumer benefit requirement. In a report issued in February, Mr. Green, a principal with Resolutions, which settles disputes, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said, “Goldman Sachs is off to a good start.” In an interview on Wednesday, he said that it was not surprising that Goldman “was more active” in buying mortgages since the settlement.

The Trump administration filed notice Friday that it plans to appeal a preliminary injunction issued this week in Maryland, and it's widely expected to do the same in Hawaii. But no matter the outcome before the federal appeals courts, experts agree that the matter will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court..."This is such new territory and such broad use of that power – it's likely [the court will side with the administration], but it's not a slam dunk," says Phil Torrey, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who specializes in criminal and immigration law.

Cass Sunstein wants you to get out of your bubble. In fact, the Harvard Law School professor says that democracy depends on it. “In a well-functioning democracy, people do not live in echo chamber or information cocoons,” Sunstein writes at the outset of his new book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media...Social media lacks the characteristics that make cities great, Sunstein says. A Twitter feed full of people who think the same things, “might seem liberating because all that clutter is gone, but you’re putting a jail sentence on yourself,” he says.

Last week, Harvard Law School announced that starting in Fall 2017, it will accept the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT from applicants to its J.D. programme. This makes it the second U.S. law school – the University of Arizona launched a similar pilot last year – and the only top-tier one to open up this option...“There are any number of potential applicants who might be impacted by this announcement in one way or the other,” said Jessica Soban, Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions at Harvard Law School. The school covers multiple groups with its new policy, she pointed out, including those who have already completed graduate studies in another field, the international student population, U.S. college students studying abroad, and those with financial need

Public companies could be required to disclose whether they have board members with cybersecurity expertise under bipartisan legislation introduced by three U.S. senators...Harvard Law professor John Coates told Bloomberg BNA that the proposal reinforces “what better-governed boards of directors already understand.” Cybersecurity is a “first-order risk” in many industries, and institutional investors are evaluating public companies on how well they communicate their strategies for building their expertise and resilience against cyberattacks, said Coates, who teaches corporate and securities law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As the saga of President Donald Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. from six majority-Muslim countries unfolds, a federal judge in Honolulu on Wednesday blocked the operation of the second version of the executive order nationwide. The decision rests on the logic that the second iteration is the same old wine in a new bottle. As a Muslim ban, the court ruled, the executive order violates the establishment clause of the Constitution by sending a message to Muslims that they are disfavored members of the political community.

As part of what the Alabama House's Republican leaders dubbed "pro-life day," lawmakers passed legislation Thursday that would write anti-abortion language into the state constitution, allow doctors to refuse to perform services and ban assisted suicide. Representatives in the deeply conservative state also held a moment of silence for the "millions of babies" who are aborted every year...Khiara Bridges, a visiting professor of law at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview that the state is playing "the long game" for the potential repeal of Roe under the administration of President Donald Trump. "The language is capacious enough to conflict with an abortion right or be consistent with it," she said. "It's like they want to have their cake and eat it too."

The Minnesota Department of Human Services is probing the Mayo Clinic for possible violations of civil- and human-rights laws by putting a higher priority on patients with commercial insurance...But the practice does raise some ethical questions, especially as Washington is debating major changes to Medicaid that health policy experts say would put millions at risk of losing coverage. It also raises questions about the cost of care in the United States, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, executive director of the Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center. "I think it's challenging and troubling to say that we are going to prioritize people who can pay more over people who can pay less," she said. "Better approaches would be a focus on the quality of care for less cost."

Writers frequently debate whether or not the Oxford comma is a necessary piece of punctuation. In an unlikely turn of events, a group of Maine dairy drivers have yielded the answer: Yes, it is. A case brought by the dairy drivers against Oakhurst Dairy and Dairy Farmers of America Inc. about whether or not they qualified for overtime hinged on the lack of a comma in a sentence outlining duties that were exempted from overtime pay...Because a comma does not appear after "shipment," U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Judge David Barron reasoned it is unclear if "packing for shipping or distribution" is one activity or if "packing for shipping" is separate from "distribution."...Ian Samuel, Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, says at least one prominent legal text, written by Justice Antonin Scalia and his co-author, Bryan Garner, recommends that "courts should not rely much if any" on text omitting an Oxford comma because some legislative style guides follow newspaper style, which often doesn't use the comma.

In the recent issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, the target article addresses the ethics of finding participants for clinical trials on social media sites. The authors, from Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School, analyzed the particular ethical issues that occur in the online setting compared to in-person recruitment and provide practical recommendations for investigators and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). "Recruitment to clinical trials is extremely challenging, raising distinctively practical and ethical issues, and social media is beginning to show real promise as a recruitment tool, due largely to its ubiquity and use among just about every demographic," Professor [fellow] Luke Gelinas of Harvard Law School told Phys.org.

In a move that illustrates how the professional services market is changing, about half of General Electric’s tax department — once described as as ‘the world’s best tax law firm’ — is moving to PwC in April...David Wilkins, a Harvard Law Professor who is researching the Big Four, said it is an example of how these firms have expanded beyond accounting, and gained a foothold in the legal market by selling their expertise across a broad range of areas well beyond tax, and into compliance, regulatory planning and other specialties. “It is the evolution of the professional service firm model,” said Wilkins, who is faculty director of the Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession.

Daniel Ramirez Medina has been locked in a Tacoma, Washington, immigrant-detention center for a month. Neither he nor his attorneys are entirely sure why. Ramirez’s parents brought him into the country illegally as a child, but he is now a beneficiary of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program...“The government’s position is that the liberty of a human being can be treated as nothing,” he said. But that can’t be right. “If any process at all is protected by the Constitution,” [Laurence] Tribe continued, “then that was violated here. Given that [DACA recipients have] lawful presence, doesn’t that at least mean that they can’t simply be snatched up arbitrarily and put, essentially, in a prison? They are entitled to rely on government’s promise of liberty.”

San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell has assembled a group of business, privacy and academic experts to discuss crucial, early-stage questions surrounding Farrell’s plan to wire the city with high-speed Internet service...Farrell will serve as the panel’s co-chair alongside Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford. Crawford, who teaches courses on municipal uses of technology, Internet law and communications law, worked as an assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy in Barack Obama’s administration and co-led the FCC’s transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations...Crawford called Internet access the “the key economic and social justice issue of the 21st century. Whether it’s educating kids, providing advanced health care, moderating our use of energy and making it possible for people to work where they live — all of that is going to be helped by a better, faster and far cheaper data network,” she said.

A study of 1.25 million media stories says a Breitbart-centered media ecosystem fostered the sharing of stories that were, at their core, misleading. Steve Inskeep talks to researcher Yochai Benkler.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I’m not sure who decided that the Democratic critique of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch would be that he doesn’t side with the little guy. It’s a truly terrible idea. Like other liberals, I’m still shocked and upset that Judge Merrick Garland never got the vote he deserved after his nomination by President Barack Obama, and I’d rather have a progressive justice join the court. But the thing is, siding with workers against employers isn’t a jurisprudential position. It’s a political stance. And justices -- including progressive justices -- shouldn’t decide cases based on who the parties are. They should decide cases based on their beliefs about how the law should be interpreted.

A little over a year ago, Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare, made the case that Donald Trump, as a Republican presidential candidate, represented nothing less than a national-security threat...The warning was an early sign of the opposition to Trump that has since hardened among the national-security professionals and observers for whom Lawfare serves as a kind of bulletin board...Lawfare observes rules that most publications don’t, including a pledge never to publish classified information. Contributors generally tend to be hawkish and “more sympathetic to the executive, and more accepting of the seriousness of the counterterrorism threat and the need for tools like targeting and surveillance, than a lot of writers in the national-security space,” [Jack] Goldsmith says.