Media Mentions

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A Massachusetts judge has vacated the first-degree murder conviction of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez. He was convicted in the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd. Hernandez was found hanged in his prison cell last month. His death was ruled a suicide, which led to today's news that Superior Court Judge Susan Garsh has overturned Hernandez's conviction.

An article by Lawrence Susskind...The average planner in America earns about $80,000 a year, but most are less concerned with the salaries they make than they are with playing an active role in helping communities solve key problems like the provision of affordable housing, enhancement of meaningful job opportunities, protection of important natural resources, managing the risks associated with climate change, improving basic urban and regional infrastructure (including better transit and mobility), and providing greater opportunities for citizens to participate in helping their communities make decisions that affect them. The full list of problems is much longer, especially in the developing world.

A growing group of political newcomers are lining up early to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. John Faso for a coveted congressional district in the Hudson Valley and Catskills. Gareth Rhodes [`18], a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on Monday became the latest to explore a Democratic bid for the 19th district. Announcing his interest in running, Mr. Rhodes, a Harvard Law School student who held several communications positions in the governor’s office and was close to Mr. Cuomo, wrote an online essay describing his upbringing in the district and becoming the first in his family to graduate from college. “We need a new generation of leaders to step up and fight for the communities that raised them,” Mr. Rhodes wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Plenty of Donald Trump’s decisions have been outside the conservative mainstream. But when it comes to judicial nominees, the Republican president seems to be calling them right out of the Federalist Society playbook. First came his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, whose selection was predictable based on his elite legal conservative credentials. Now the individuals in his first wave of appellate nominees seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Are the most important negotiations the ones you have with yourself? There will always be days where we don’t feel centered. Maybe it’s a tough deadline, raised expectations, or a personal conflict, but it can trigger a fight-or-flight response. In those moments, we are forced to make decisions that don’t always sit well with us in the long term. Is there a way to negotiate from within, and come out a winner? Erica Ariel Fox is on the faculty at Harvard Law School, she's a New York Times best-selling author, and the founding partner of Mobius Executive Leadership. Her latest book is Winning from Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change. I recently interviewed Erica for the LEADx podcast to learn more about how to win in your inner struggle.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When it comes to Middle East policy, usually all roads don’t lead to Rome. But President Donald Trump has good reason to visit the pope on the same circuit as his peace mission to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s plan, which has a small but not trivial chance of success, depends on creating a grand anti-Iran alliance running through Jerusalem and Riyadh. To put it bluntly, it doesn’t involve too many countries or people that the rest of the world likes. If he can get Pope Francis to bless the idea, even obliquely, that would add a moral dimension to the brutal business of dealmaking that is to come.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s executive order on religious liberty is a significant win for liberals -- not for what it says, but for what it doesn’t say. For months, evangelical conservatives have anticipated and liberals have feared an order that would have invited anti-gay discrimination under the rubric of religious freedom. A document purporting to be a draft order to that effect began circulating shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Yet the order issued Thursday is silent on gay marriage or gay rights. It includes just three brief substantive sections, none of which is of great practical or symbolic significance. The underlying message of the executive order is that the Trump administration is tired of issuing symbolic orders and then having them frozen in court. This order is constitutionally kosher -- in part because it does so little.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If a nation wants to increase productivity, it is natural to focus on promoting innovation, improving education and decreasing regulation. But a positive step, potentially supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, could come from an unlikely place: increasing both the availability and the size of the earned-income tax credit. True, the EITC is not normally thought to promote productivity at all. Most people see it as an antipoverty measure, designed to help the working poor. Its goal is to redistribute wealth, not to increase it. But that’s much too simple.

...And he said he added some new furniture: Chairs across from the Resolute desk -- the seat of power for presidents including John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan -- where he asks his visitors to sit. "I changed the -- the way it works," Trump said, motioning toward chairs right in front of the famous desk. "I'll have people sitting here. Used to be they never had chairs that anybody can remember in front of the desk. But I've always done it this way where I'm at the desk and I have people here."...Meanwhile, negotiations experts say that sitting across a table or desk from an opponent doesn't usually send a signal of cooperation. "It's fair to say that if you deliberately have people sitting across the table from you, you’re conveying less of a collaborative approach and more of a hierarchical or adversarial approach," says Guhan Subramanian, a professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.

A member of the Navy SEALs was killed and two other American service members were wounded in a raid in Somalia on Friday, the first American combat fatality there since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle...As a result, the military is reviewing all its potential targets, examining updated intelligence reports on flows of displaced civilians, and confirming with aid organizations where they are operating in Somalia, as first reported by The Intercept last week...“D.O.D. has more cover to act aggressively when the president has a reputation for restraint and less cover when the president has a reputation for aggressiveness, because everything D.O.D. does will be judged through that lens,” said Jack Goldsmith, referring to the Department of Defense. Mr. Goldsmith is a Harvard law professor who dealt with counterterrorism legal policy as a senior Bush administration official.

An article by Emily Broad Leib. Ready your tractors and plows—the farm bill is upon us. This omnibus package of legislation, reauthorized every 5 to 7 years, shapes virtually every aspect of our food and agricultural system. Yet this wide-ranging, $500 billion piece of legislation, which aims to ensure a safe and sufficient food supply for our nation, fails to take steps to guarantee that the food we produce actually makes it to our plates. Congressional agriculture committees recently commenced hearings to begin preparation for the 2018 Farm Bill, which makes this the perfect time to discuss how the next farm bill can invest in solutions to reduce the nearly 40% of food that goes to waste in the U.S.

In a new study, Dr. Anderson examines why so many companies land in what he dubs “the Delaware Trap.”...Dr. Anderson’s research doesn’t take into account various factors that prior research has shown to influence incorporation decisions, such as the antitakeover statutes of a business’s state of headquarters, says Lucian Bebchuk, the James Barr professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard Law School and the director of its program on corporate governance. A study by Dr. Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, a professor of empirical practice at Harvard Law School, found that companies are more likely to incorporate in Delaware rather than their state of headquarters when they have more employees or sales, when they’re based in the Northeast or South or when their state of headquarters has fewer antitakeover statutes.

President Trump’s promised bonfire of Obama-era banking legislation is unlikely to happen, according to an emerging consensus among Wall Street bankers, lawmakers and regulators. Instead, bankers are switching their deregulation hopes to a changing of the guard of US bank supervisors, who have considerable scope to loosen the shackles on banks within the bounds of existing law...Hal Scott of Harvard Law School, who was earlier in the running to be the Fed’s new regulatory chief, said that excessively cautious and secretive stress testing was the “binding constraint” on bank capital. “That’s untenable,” he said.

An op-ed by Amanda Kool. Post-election, everyone is talking about rural America. But what are we doing about rural America? Since President Donald Trump took office, lawyers have been at the forefront of a crusade in support of democracy. Our law students at Harvard and UC Davis tell stories about classmates who dropped everything to assist immigrants at airports across the country. Nonlawyers, too, have taken up the causes of justice and civic engagement, participating in study sessions on the Constitution and gathering record crowds at town hall meetings. With lawyers in the spotlight, mobilized to help those in need, we must remember that Trump's win was a call for help. Rural folks are telling us they are hurting and they are angry.

As the United States continues to grapple with growing Islamophobia, Harvard Law School has launched a “flagship research venture” to organise the world’s information on Islamic law: SHARIAsource. The project aims to provide a repository for scholars, journalists and policy makers, by making knowledge freely available, Sharon Tai, SHARIAsource’s research editor, told Middle East Eye...“Islamic law is so often seen as an esoteric and impenetrable base of law. There’s this kind of perception of a lack of logic, because it’s based in theology,” Tai continued, “but actually there is a very clear logic behind it. The way it’s laid out historically, it worked well for the societies in which it was applied.” The project was conceived nearly a decade ago, by Dr Intisar Rabb, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a director of its Islamic Legal Studies Programme.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With Venezuela on the brink of a constitutional crisis, President Nicolas Maduro has called for the election of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. It’s a terrible idea -- potentially more of a power grab than a genuine attempt to resolve the crisis through negotiation. It’s also a reminder that creating a new constitution shouldn’t be an excuse to stop the operation of an existing elected government. An orderly constitutional transition requires an orderly process. The crisis is largely of Maduro’s making. In late March, the Venezuelan Supreme Court, dominated by Maduro supporters, claimed to assume all the powers of the democratically elected National Assembly.

In November, the newly installed Wells Fargo chief executive, Timothy J. Sloan, told employees that retaliation against whistle-blowers would “not be tolerated at Wells Fargo.”...Last month, Wells Fargo released a long-awaited independent investigation into the scandal, conducted with the assistance of the law firm Shearman & Sterling. The subject of whistle-blowers and how they were treated was relegated to a footnote in the 110-page report. “That’s a red flag in itself,” said Howell E. Jackson, a professor at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “It’s buried on Page 87. My concern is whether whistle-blowers were handled properly and to what degree the board bears responsibility. You don’t find any answers in this mumbo-jumbo.”

An op-ed by Ronald Sullivan. Who is Buddy Jacobs, and how does he block criminal justice reform in Florida?...For almost 50 years, Jacobs has served as General Counsel and Lobbyist for the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association – an organization that includes the 20 elected prosecutors for every district in Florida. Jacobs, now in his late 70s, started lobbying on behalf of the FPAA just a few years out of law school. The FPAA sees itself as primarily educational, and its voice is particularly strong in the state capital as it advises the legislature on criminal justice issues. Florida’s prison population increased by more than 1000% and correction spending increased 98% ― 1.1 billion dollars ― between 1994 and 2014. During that time, Jacobs has been a stalwart advocate for retro superpredator-era pro-carceral policies. Indeed, Buddy Jacobs is one of the most powerful forces keeping the state stuck in the past.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it. First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show us. They are, they often remind regulators, only aggregators rather than content originators or editors. Second, the opacity by which these platforms offer us news and set our information agendas means that we don’t have cues about whether what we see is representative of sentiment at large, or for that matter of anything, including expert consensus.

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. The Kora Shrine Circus’ recent stint at Androscoggin Bank Colisee serves as a stark reminder of the importance of LD 396 — a bill being considered by the Maine Legislature that would ban the use of elephants in traveling acts. The Hamid Circus — the notorious company that puts on the Kora Shrine Circus — exemplifies the need for this kind of legislation. Hamid has partnered with an elephant exhibitor who racked up hundreds of animal welfare violations, including repeatedly chaining an elephant so tightly she could barely move. According to a whistleblower’s report to the federal government, this trainer also “turned off the lights and beat” his elephant while she “was staked down by all four legs” and “directed others to take part in that by using other objects such as [a] sledge hammer and shovel handles.”

Can historians make their work count in the courts without compromising on their academic principles? It’s a question more scholars now have reason to grapple with. Historians say they feel that they are being asked to write or sign amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases more frequently...Ms. [Tomiko] Brown-Nagin is a strong proponent of historians’ playing an active role in court. She says worrying about whether a position in one case will hurt an argument in another "assumes a consistency and coherence in law that is just not there." Furthermore, there’s a growing need for people with a firm grasp of the facts to weigh in on consequential cases, she said. "We’re in an era where there’s skepticism of expertise," Ms. Brown-Nagin said. "It’s important for historians and others to assert their authority and push back."