Media Mentions

When the University of Arizona started accepting a generic graduate school exam for law school applicants last year, the national group that oversees such admissions chastised the university and threatened to oust it from its membership. But now that Harvard, the gold standard, is following suit, there is growing hope that dropping the traditional Law School Admissions Test as a requirement for applicants across the country could lead to a larger and more diverse group of lawyers entering the field...Accepting the GRE could make the school more attractive to international students, graduate students applying from fields such as computer science, and low-income students, said Jessica Soban, the associate dean for strategic initiatives and admissions. “Introducing choice into the process can lower the barriers for students, and that could have benefits for any law school,” Soban said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court justices are an occasion for a national conversation about constitutional law and interpretation. Because Judge Neil Gorsuch is being billed as an originalist, his hearings this week are a great opportunity to ask him five pressing questions about that much-vaunted school of constitutional thought. Start with the most basic: Why should judges use originalism in the first place? Originalism holds that judges should interpret the Constitution based on the original meaning of the text, but the Constitution itself is silent about how it should be interpreted.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Robert Silvers, who died on Monday morning, was the editor of the New York Review of Books since 1963, meaning that for more than 50 years he presided over the leading literary magazine in the English language. I was privileged to work with him on numerous occasions, going back to 1992. He was not only a giant, but also the incarnation of what a democracy needs: civility, considerateness, fairness, authenticity, humility and unfailing attention to detail, which, in his hands, turned out to be a form of love.

Is the Trump administration's early turmoil a gift to legal education? Pundits have speculated that Washington's recent turbulence will spur a surge in law school applicants, given the armies of lawyers—hailed by many as defenders of democracy—that assembled at airports around the country in the wake of President Donald Trump's so-called Muslim ban...Harvard Law School has seen a 5 percent increase in applications this year, said Jessica Soban, associate dean for strategic initiatives and admissions. But the school also saw a 5 percent rise in applications last year, before Trump took office, so it's hard to chalk the difference up to the man now in the Oval Office.

...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.”