Media Mentions

An op-ed by Philip Heyman. Last week, President Obama granted clemency to 153 individuals who had been incarcerated under mandatory minimum drug-sentencing laws, bringing to more than 1,100 the number of clemency petitions the administration has granted. “You don’t just try to hammer everybody for as long as you can, because you can,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told the New York Times. That is the right attitude for someone tasked with the fair administration of justice. Unfortunately, Yates and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch have, for the past year, rebuffed efforts by me and many other former senior Justice Department officials to even discuss another prosecution in which justice fell far short: the case of Sholom Rubashkin, a Brooklyn-born rabbi who was sentenced to 27 years for bank fraud.

A month after President-elect Donald Trump announced a deal with air conditioning company Carrier to save hundreds of U.S. factory jobs that were slated for Mexico, officials say the agreement has yet to be finalized, and they have released few details about its terms...Jonathan Bruno, a legal scholar at Harvard University, said the law does not stop the state from providing such records before a final deal, but it does give the option. “It’s hard to defend the continued secrecy of the deal,” Bruno wrote in an email. “Pence et al. are trying to have it both ways — they’re suggesting that the deal is ready for public consumption by taking credit for one aspect (some indeterminate number of jobs saved), while simultaneously asserting its confidentiality by withholding every other aspect of the terms.”

Before New York's famed 21 Club steakhouse drew attention in November for hosting Donald Trump, the wealthy U.S. president-elect, it quietly fed other public representatives: trustees of Paris-based AXA SA investment funds...The trustees' dining experiences emerged in a federal case decided in August. Investors including a teacher and a retired police officer accused the firm of collecting excessive fees, a charge the firm denied...A common concern is that the boards are more focused on following technical rules than looking out for shareholder interests, said Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance.

A letter by Laurence Tribe and Mark Green...All the moves discussed by the Trumps to resolve their potential conflicts of interest add up to sacrificing pawns to protect the king(dom) — the Trump Organization. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause is unambiguous. It forbids an American president from accepting anything of value from a foreign entity, without congressional consent, because that would open the door to bribery or extortion. The only way for President-elect Donald Trump to cure this problem would be an arms-length sale by a public trustee, not piecemeal judgments after Jan. 20 about the thousands of possible winks and nods between foreign leaders and the new administration.

Aaron Hernandez walked into a California tattoo shop in the spring of 2013 and allegedly asked a tattoo artist to add three new symbols onto his heavily inked physique. Two were pictures of handguns, and a third said, “God forgives” — written backward so it could be read in a mirror. Together, prosecutors say, those new tattoos tell a story that links the former New England Patriots star to the fatal shootings of two men in Boston’s South End in 2012 and then, in 2013, to the shooting of a one-time friend alleged to have seen him commit the murders...“That people get tattoos with a gun on them does not mean that the Commonwealth is allowed to file inference on top of inference on top of inference and get to the point that this is an admission,” attorney Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. said.

One would think that an iconic Michael Jackson “Bad Tour” glove, covered in Swarovski crystals and worn on his first solo tour, would rest in a place of honor, perhaps at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Hardly. The bejeweled glove is thousands of miles away in the oil-rich, deeply impoverished country of Equatorial Guinea. And the people of this West African nation, most of whom live on less than $2 a day, have paid dearly for it. The glove, and its odd stewardship, embody the profound difficulties surrounding the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, a six-year effort by the United States to seize assets owned by kleptocrats — government officials who use their countries’ wealth to enrich themselves...“The election of Donald Trump might impede the commitment of the United States to fight kleptocracy,” said Matthew C. Stephenson, a professor who teaches anticorruption law at Harvard Law School. “The political consequences are that it reduces U.S. leverage because of the perceived hypocrisy. The moral case is drastically undermined.”

A surviving family member of Jack Johnson and a prominent Harvard Law School professor said that a series of reports on PIX11 News about the boxing legend inspired them to join our campaign to officially get the name of the boxing legend cleared...The reports of PIX11 News reporters Jay Dow, Mario Diaz and James Ford resulted in Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of the criminal justice institute there to join the campaign to win Johnson's posthumous pardon...It's a "very direct and personal appeal, saying, 'Mr. President, I'm a family member,'" said Sullivan in an interview with PIX11 News at Harvard earlier this week. "'Here are ways in which my family was impacted.'"

...2. Discuss your career goals: Cameron Dare Clark, a second-year student at Harvard Law School, says the central theme of his law school application was his dream to become a civil rights attorney. Clark says his experience as an African-American man from a low-income family inspires his hope that law can be used as a tool to fight for social justice. He says conveying a compelling vision of your future strengthens your law school application. "The most effective way to create a clear and coherent application is to start with the vision and work backwards," Clark said in an email.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If there were to be a legal man of the year for 2016, it would have to be Antonin Scalia. The justice died in February and has cast a long shadow over the whole year. His seat remains unfilled. His jurisprudence seems likely to be the touchstone for Donald Trump’s nominee. Indeed, if Trump gets two or more Supreme Court picks, Scalia’s judicial legacy stands a chance of being vindicated rather than forgotten -- which seemed almost unthinkable when he died. Scalia’s legacy is therefore poised to set the tone for future constitutional battles in a way not seen since the 1935 death of Oliver Wendell Holmes, another great dissenter.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. As everyone knows, the most coveted of the year-end movie awards are the Becons -- the Behavioral Economics Oscars. It’s no surprise that winning the Becon has catapulted previously unknown talents -- including Jessica Chastain, Tom Cruise, Taylor Swift and Daniel Day-Lewis -- to sensationally successful careers. Here are this year’s winners.

Student and faculty activists argue that colleges and universities should call themselves “sanctuary campuses,” a label that they say would help underscore institutional commitment to supporting undocumented students in a time when the future of immigration in the U.S. seems all the more uncertain...“I think many college leaders are probably concerned about what a new administration might do in terms of federal funding, which can get really tricky and complicated,” said Phillip Torrey, lecturer on law with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and the Supervising Attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project. “There are also concerns that by labeling their university a sanctuary campus there will be a bullseye on the university for targeted enforcement.”

An op-ed by Simon Hedlin `19. I was walking home from an election watch party in Stockholm, the Swedish capital. It was September 19, 2010. At the time, I was working as an adviser to the Swedish Minister for European Affairs, and people were celebrating the reelection of the government. But many also felt gutted, because Sweden had for the first time elected the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in neo-Nazism, to the Parliament. The electoral success of the Sweden Democrats made many Swedes feel as if a part of their country had been lost. Fast-forward six years, and the feelings were reminiscent as I was walking the streets of the liberal stronghold Cambridge, Mass., after the presidential election on November 8...A study that I have co-authored with Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School suggests that people may, due to resentment, even begin opposing a policy that they actually support if they think that the governing class paternalistically pushes people to adopt said policy.

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. It is a commonplace that being an American is a matter neither of blood nor of cultural connections forged over time. It is, instead, a commitment to a set of ideals famously laid down by the country’s founders, and refined over generations with a notion of progress as a guiding principle. The Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson’s soaring language about the equality of mankind and the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is the most powerful statement of those ideals. It is sometimes called America’s “creed.” Of course, what it means to be an American is not—has never been—so simple a proposition. Seeing the men most typically described as the “founders” of the United States as sources of inspired ideals equally available to all conflicts with our knowledge of the way most of them saw and treated Native Americans and African-Americans during the founding period.

Last Thursday, as forces loyal to the Syrian government advanced through eastern Aleppo and despondent civilians there wondered whether they would be massacred, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, stood in a sunlit courtyard in Damascus, dressed in a crisp blue suit, and compared his victory to the births of Jesus Christ and the prophet Muhammad...“If civilians are being told that they should leave or risk being deliberately targeted by military forces, that amounts to forcible transfer,” Alex Whiting, a former prosecutions coördinator at the I.C.C., who now teaches at Harvard Law School, told me. “The ‘force’ in forcible transfer is not limited to physical force,” he added. “It also includes threats of force or coercion, or fear of violence or duress.”

An op-ed by Nani Jansen Reventlow, Vivek Krishnamurthy and Christopher T. Bavitz. Imagine going online to do some research. You want to look up the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, read up on the recently deceased king of Thailand or learn about the Armenian genocide. You enter the search terms in your search engine of choice, and you get nothing. Zero results. This scenario might become reality if France’s highest court — the Council of State — rules against Google in a case that threatens to make anything on the Web that’s remotely controversial unsearchable. The case imperiling search as we know it stems from an order issued in 2014 by France’s data protection authority, CNIL. The order commands Google to remove 21 links from the results of a search on the name of a particular French citizen who asserted a “right to be forgotten.”

Twelve days before the presidential election, FBI Director James B. Comey dispatched a senior aide to deliver a startling message to the Justice Department. Comey wanted to send a letter to Congress alerting them that his agents had discovered more emails potentially relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said that the controversy shines a light on Lynch’s compromised position and failed leadership as attorney general. “If she thought [the letter] violated department policy or was otherwise a bad idea, she could have ordered him not to send the letter,” said Goldsmith, who noted that soon after the letter was released, Justice officials proceeded to criticize Comey when Lynch had the power all along to stop him. “It was an astonishing failure of leadership and eschewal of responsibility, especially if Lynch really thought what Comey did was wrong.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Well, no one saw that coming. “Rogue One,” the new stand-alone Star Wars movie, is the best since the beloved original trilogy. With a new tale, it’s much better, and far fresher, than last year’s fun but nostalgic “The Force Awakens.” The surprise is fitting, for here’s a little secret about Star Wars: Its narrative arc wasn’t fully planned out in advance. Some of the most important plot points came to George Lucas, author of the first six episodes, awfully late. At the early stages, he had no clue that Darth Vader would turn out to be Luke Skywalker’s father. And Luke and Leia as twins? That was a late inspiration -- an ingenious (if also creepy) way of resolving the romantic triangle involving Luke, Leia and Han.

Hillary Clinton’s top advisers never publicly backed an effort by Democrats on the Electoral College to block Donald Trump’s election. When it failed on Monday, one aide mocked it as an unserious “coup” attempt. But a batch of correspondence obtained by POLITICO shows members of Clinton’s inner circle — including senior aides Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri — were in touch for weeks with one of the effort’s organizers as they mounted their ill-fated strategy. And despite repeated requests for guidance, Clinton’s team did not wave them off...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University constitutional law professor deeply involved in recruiting Republicans to rebel against Trump, said he sensed a Clinton team that was undecided about “to what extent they should be encouraging this.” “I imagine that in the end, nobody was sure they could survive the political blowback if you became president because you flipped the college,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. This became the year of the obscure, unlitigated constitutional clause. The First and 14th Amendments usually hog all the glory, and each did get a few big moments over the last year. But much more important were ignored and unheralded provisions like the "advice and consent" clause, the Electoral College clauses, and most improbably, the emoluments clause, which since the election has featured prominently as one of the only defenses against conflicts of interest in the Trump White House.

In the last twenty years, capital punishment has fallen out of favor in the United States. Death sentences have dropped from 315 a year in the mid-1990s to 49 in 2015. Executions have declined from 98 in 1999 to 28 in 2015. The number of states with the death penalty has fallen to 31. And polls indicate that opposition to capital punishment (fueled in part by DNA evidence of wrongful convictions, a dramatic drop in crime rates, and the isolation of the United States among western democracies in retaining the death penalty) is rising. Carol Steiker (a professor of law at Harvard University) and Jordan Steiker (a professor of law at the University of Texas) believe that the death penalty deserves to die. In Courting Death, the authors trace the judicial history of capital punishment, starting with the Supreme Court’s declaration that the death penalty is capricious and arbitrary in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, and its decision to lift its de facto moratorium four years later in Gregg v. Georgia. And the Steikers deliver an extraordinarily well-documented, forceful and ferocious assault on state and federal administration of capital punishment since then. Courting Death is, almost certainly, the best book on this subject.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. Under the Trump Administration we can expect that there will be many changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission. One important area that has gone largely ignored and is ripe for reform is the system of “unelected directors” for public companies. The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation—a policy group with executives from across the financial sector and leading academics—recently studied how boards of directors of public companies respond to unfavorable votes by their shareholders. The Committee’s startling discovery is that, in 85% of cases where a director does not receive a majority of shareholder votes, the director will continue to serve on the board for at least two more years.