Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One Louisiana county accounts for half the state’s death sentences – even though it has just 5 percent of the state’s population and 5 percent of its homicides. On Tuesday, Justice Stephen Breyer cited this fact about Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in a dissenting U.S. Supreme Court opinion arguing that the death penalty is unconstitutional. The “arbitrary” factor of geography, Breyer proposed, is a reason to think that the death sentence is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Is Breyer right?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Thirty-nine years ago, on May 25, 1977, a movie was released with a somewhat ridiculous name: "Star Wars." (It’s now called "Episode IV: A New Hope.") Almost no one thought that it would do well, and nobody could have predicted it would become the defining saga of our era. How did it manage to do that? One answer is that like a great novel or poem, Star Wars doesn’t tell you what to think. You can understand it in different, even contradictory ways. Here are six of those ways.

Law school wasn’t originally in Nino Monea’s [`17] plans. The Livonia Franklin High School alumnus attended Eastern Michigan University, not going in thinking he’d be interested in law. After participating in several organizations, such as mock trial and moot court, and taking constitutional law classes, the law began to appeal to him. Now, going into his third year of law school at Harvard, he’s been named the law school’s student government president, a position he can almost guarantee hasn’t been held by a Livonia native before...Monea recently wrapped up finals and is in Washington, D.C., for the summer, interning at the Department of Justice in its Antitrust Division before returning to school in the fall. There, he hopes to help shape the role of the student government leadership, which he said recently changed in its position on campus to be more active.

We know that resentment is driving much of Donald Trump’s success — resentment of elites, of the political class, of illegal immigrants, of protesters, of the media — and perhaps most particularly of changes in the demographic makeup of the country that Trump and his followers find unwelcome....Simon Hedlin [`19], a public policy researcher, noted that since reactance is driven by perceptions rather than by facts, this works well in Trump’s favor, considering his often cavalier relationship with the truth. Perhaps more significantly, Hedlin noted that he and Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor and former top aide in the Obama administration, conducted research that shows that some people will reject a policy or action that is to their advantage when they feel pushed or forced into making the “correct” decision.

Looking at the totals on your credit card bill, you might wonder, how did I get in this situation? If you intended to only use your card for emergencies but ended up using it for life’s little extras, does that make you irresponsible, immature, or reckless? Behavioral economics says it just makes you human...“We get the money now, when we take a loan, and we pay it back some time in the future. This temporal component triggers a host of behavioral psychological effects,” says Oren Bar-Gill, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in law and economics. “One of them is basic myopia. We think more about the present and less about the future, and so we’re more likely to take on debt, because we don’t put enough weight in our decision-making process on the future paybacks.”

Were laws protecting animals violated in the shooting of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo? [Fellow] Delcianna Winders of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program joins Sue O'Connell to discuss.

It was very hot last Tuesday night in the SoHo apartment of Jenna Lyons and Courtney Crangi, and not just because it was about 80 degrees outside and the air-conditioning unit was not up to the job. It was hot in the metaphorical sense, with the living room filled with members of the old guard more famous for their actual names than their social media handles. Tina Brown, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, George Soros: people like that...The occasion was the publication of “The World According to Star Wars” (Dey Street Books), by Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration official. It brings together themes from the “Star Wars” saga and the story of how it came to be, using that as a lens to look at the world. It’s “Freakonomics” meets the Death Star, if you will, with meditations on the bonds of fathers and sons.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Joshua Matz. With 24 cases still to decide this term and only eight justices to decide them, the Supreme Court has mustered all its resources to find (or manufacture) consensus. Many rulings — even those with lopsided majorities — hint strongly of compromise. So far, the justices have mostly decided not to decide, drafting narrow opinions that leave big questions unanswered. It is in vogue to treat this term as a one-off, yet another result of madhouse election-year politics. On that view, the court just needs to tread water a while longer. In the meantime, each of us can hope that justices who share our particular vision will end up with a majority. But when “exceptional” circumstances endure long enough, advance powerful political interests and are tolerated by the public, they can easily become the new normal.

An op-ed by lecturer Thomas Rubin. Facebook ran head-on into the First Amendment last week, and the result wasn’t pretty. It started with the company sending Sen. John Thune a lengthy explanation of its editorial process in the trending news section of the service, in response to a demand following allegations of political bias. It ended with the revelation that tech legend Peter Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. The Facebook angle there: Thiel was an early investor and sits on its board...There’s no precedent for a media company to account to Congress, instead of to its customers, about its editorial process. And it’s a safe bet that no media company has allowed the surreptitious funder of a libel suit against a corporate partner to serve on its board, given the conflict with its mission and duty.

ISPs wired and wireless have submitted a paper to the FCC by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe that says the commission's broadband privacy proposal threatens speech rights. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, CTIA and USTelecom commissioned the paper, which they submitted Friday, the deadline for initial comments in the proceeding. "The FCC’s proposed rules would violate the First Amendment," Tribe concluded. "At minimum, they raise a host of grave constitutional questions and should not be adopted." The FCC is proposing to require ISPs to get affirmative (opt in) permission from subs to share information with third parties in most instances, a requirement not placed on edge providers like Google and Facebook for their own data collection and monetizing. Tribe is a voice of experience on the CPNI (customer proprietary network information) issue, the groups point out, having successfully challenged the voice CPNI order in US West Communications, Inc. v. FCC. He says the FCC proposal clearly triggers First Amendment scrutiny and clearly does not fare well in that examination. "The proposal runs afoul of fundamental First Amendment limits on the FCC’s authority to regulate customer information," he said.

War poses special threats to democracy, but the most pernicious challenges often come from within. History reveals that nothing has more power to undermine democratic institutions than the boundless fear of a foreign enemy. Rogue Justice is Karen Greenberg’s splendid new book about all the ways liberty was assaulted in America in the decade after the cataclysm of 11 September 2001. In these years, she writes, America came “perilously close” to “losing the protections of the bill of rights”...After Ashcroft made Jack Goldsmith the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Goldsmith concluded that Yoos’s memo seemed “designed to confer immunity for bad acts” and made arguments “wildly broader than was necessary to support what was actually being done”.

Becoming ambassadors of higher education and searching for solutions to issues confronting academia today are important missions for University graduates, said legal scholar Randall Kennedy ’77 at the 269th Baccalaureate ceremony on Sunday...However, Kennedy pointed out, there are several issues and problems facing institutions of higher education these days. “Inefficiencies in the system of higher education do not stay put. They are infectious, posing dangers to the system as a whole. Colleges and universities face a rising loss in confidence regarding their worthiness,” Kennedy said. This “worthiness” is typically defined by the marketability of the college’s merits. Furthermore, he pointed to the increasing burdens of government regulation and mounting costs of tuition. Kennedy further critiqued the increasing desire among colleges to achieve popularity, as evidenced by the frequent hiring of Hollywood celebrities to provide commencement addresses.

An op-ed by Jesse Fried and Steven Davidoff Solomon. The American Anthropological Association has been voting this entire month on a resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Today marks the final day for members to cast their votes. Should the resolution pass, the anthropologists will be the largest US academic association to support an Israel boycott, joining a handful of smaller organizations such as the African Literature Association and the American Studies Association. These anti-Israel resolutions are being pushed by BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction) activists eager to demonize, demoralize and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. Academic BDS is widely and appropriately viewed as morally perverse. As the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities and many of the country’s leading scholars have stressed, any academic boycott interferes with the commitment to the free exchange of ideas that is still shared by most academics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a major development for the history of democracy in the Muslim world, Tunisia’s successful Islamic democratic party separated its political wing from its social-religious movement last week. This isn’t a move to secularism, exactly. But it is a move in the direction of dividing the world into two spheres, one of politics, the other of faith.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Your credit card company can make you agree to arbitrate disputes as a condition of getting the card. But can an employer require workers to arbitrate rather than suing collectively as a condition of employment? In recent years, all the federal courts of appeals to address the question have said there’s no difference between your credit card issuer and your employer: Both can make you give up legal remedies. This week that changed, when for the first time an appeals court said an employer can’t require employees to waive collective legal action. By creating a circuit split, this important opinion will almost certainly push the Supreme Court to consider the issue, and soon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the police detain and search you on the suspicion that your car might be parked illegally? A federal appeals court has said yes, upholding a felon-in-possession conviction for a man who was searched after Milwaukee police surrounded the parked car he was sitting in and handcuffed its four occupants -- because the car was parked within 15 feet of a crosswalk. The outraged dissenting judge said that the defendant had been stopped for “parking while black,” and insisted that the holding went beyond anything the Supreme Court ever authorized.

The Pew Research Center reported this week that 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, including 18 percent who do so often – that's up sharply from just four years ago when the figure was 49 percent...Suppose Facebook decided that it would be a good idea to help demographic groups which turn out in numbers that are lower than their share of the population, like, say, Latinos. Such targeted voter motivation, dubbed "digital gerrymandering" by Harvard Law School's Jonathan Zittrain, would have the salutary effect – if you're a Clinton supporter (and in case you're wondering, Facebook officials have given far more money to Clinton than anyone else this cycle) – of turning out more strongly Democratic voters.

The excruciating wait times at Chicago's O'Hare and Midway airports the past couple of weeks have travelers fuming and some city officials looking for other options. Chicago Alderman Ed Burke is calling on the city to do airport security the way it's done in Kansas City, San Francisco and several smaller airports around the country. He wants to hire a private company to staff the screening checkpoints..."Privatization doesn't actually solve any of the problems we have," says Bruce Schneier, a security expert with Harvard University's Berkman Center. "The problem with the TSA right now is there aren't enough people for the demand and that's a function of budget. It is not a function of who signs the paychecks of agents — it's how many agents there are."

Earlier this month, when Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, the world’s largest chimpanzee research facility, announced it was moving all 220 of its chimps to a sanctuary in Georgia, it’s a safe bet the news made attorney Steven Wise the happiest man on the planet. That’s because two of the chimps, Hercules and Leo, had been the subjects in an ongoing legal battle about the rights of chimps, a legal case brought by Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, and the subject of D.A. Pennebaker a Chris Hegedus’s Unlocking the Cage, a documentary out now in New York, followed by a national rollout and an HBO broadcast early next year...“It’s a very novel approach and [Wise] is pushing the envelope,” says Chris Green, Executive Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program. “As far as acceptance goes, the jury is still out. And there is concern that the animal protection community might get too far in front of itself that if they find a judge who is too far ahead of public sentiment, there might be some sort of backlash.”

Doaa Abu Elyounes believes that law can change people’s lives. After all, it was the law that changed hers. A blind Israeli of Arab descent, she attended a Jewish school. Israeli law mandates that schools accommodate students with disabilities, regardless of their origin. Now, set to graduate with an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School (HLS), Abu Elyounes plans to become a public service lawyer to ensure that everybody has access to the law.

A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that companies cannot force their employees to sign away their right to band together in legal actions, delivering a major victory for American workers and opening an opportunity for the Supreme Court to weigh in. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago struck down an arbitration clause that banned employees from joining together as a class and required workers to battle the employer one by one outside of court...“The increasing use of mandatory arbitration agreements and the prohibition on workers proceeding as a class has been one of the most major developments in employment the last decade,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School. “Most of the court decisions have facilitated this development. This is a major move in the opposite direction.”