Media Mentions

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.

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.