Media Mentions

An article by Samuel Moyn. On the death of Sigmund Freud, W.H. Auden memorably observed that he was “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.” And this was 1939—he had seen nothing yet of Freud’s influence. Across the North Atlantic, Freud’s new science of psychoanalysis transformed common sense and was itself transformed in a host of new applications. In the humanistic disciplines, and especially in literary study, engagement with psychoanalysis became almost obligatory. The general public was equally enthralled by Freud’s ideas. His books circulated widely, on college campuses especially, and his thought traversed popular culture from fiction to film... In light of such wide influence, it is rather shocking how swiftly, if just beyond conscious notice, Freud’s relevance has waned in the past two decades.

...The Glaxo case, which resulted in record penalties of nearly $500 million and a string of guilty pleas by executives, upended the power dynamic in China, unveiling an increasingly assertive government determined to tighten its grip over multinationals. In the three years since the arrests, the Chinese government, under President Xi Jinping, has unleashed the full force of the country’s authoritarian system, as part of a broader agenda of economic nationalism....“The executive so accused has an obvious conflict of interest in overseeing such an investigation,” said John Coates, a Harvard Law School professor. “Even if the executive were entirely innocent of the whistle-blower’s charge, giving that same executive the role of investigating the whistle-blower smacks of retaliation.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Pope Francis is continuing along his remarkably liberal path, most recently by praising Martin Luther at a ceremony in Sweden beginning a yearlong 500th anniversary commemoration of the Reformation. Yet despite the pope’s openness, and the corresponding good faith of the Lutherans, the two sides were unable to effect a reconciliation. The episode raises two questions: Why try? And how is it that, in this post-theological age, not even Christian believers can get past their own wars of religion?

...Over the past 12 years, inter-country adoption in America has dropped off by a staggering 75 percent, with last year’s total of 5,647 the lowest since 1981. Other major receiving countries have experienced the same sharp decline—driven not a by global decrease in orphans, but by the changing politics of adoption...Child welfare advocates like Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet go even further, arguing that children have a fundamental human right to a permanent family, and that countries denying international adoption while keeping children in state care are guilty of violating human rights.

Nina Paley’s breakout came when her animated rendition of the classic Indian epic Ramayana, called Sita Sings the Blues, racked up nearly a million views on YouTube. Roger Ebert, the famed film critic, gave the “whimsical” film a resounding four stars, while others dubbed the movie a cultural “tour de force” and the “Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.” Yet rather than collecting her bounty of advertising revenue and relishing her overnight fame, Paley waived all copyrights to her masterpiece — and instead copylefted, all wrongs reserved. “The law is an ass I don’t want to ride,” says Paley. Apparently neither do a growing number of other artists...Meanwhile, the costs of copyright are hidden but steep, argues Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law professor and co-founder of Creative Commons. The regime quashes inspiration in a world where no one can build off another’s work without paying them an arm and a leg in licensing fees.

The Department of Labor’s fiduciary duty rule “is already changing the dynamics of defined contribution investing and will change the dynamics of IRA investing,” but the Securities and Exchange Commission should have been “the first in line” to issue a fiduciary rule, Vanguard founder John Bogle said Tuesday...Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s program on corporate governance, another author of the book, said that in the U.S., there are “16 different intermediary levels between our money, which extracts money from us.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Why do companies merge? Presumably, in order to get ahead in a competitive marketplace. So here’s the unavoidable truth about the AT&T/Time Warner (TWX) megadeal: First, it’s not aimed at strengthening AT&T’s ability to compete in its current business — because the company faces no real competition. It’s quite happy in its current situation. Second, by entering into the business of originating as well as distributing content, AT&T’s incentive to favor that content over internet sources is hugely increased. The deal doesn’t make sense unless AT&T messes with video coming across its wires and wireless connections that might compete with the pay TV offerings (HBO and other TWX channels) and other high-capacity services that AT&T wants to sell.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the case of a transgender teen who seeks to use the boys’ room at his high school during his senior year. Given that the appeals court had ruled in his favor, it’s unfortunate that the court took up the case. It’s too soon, in cultural terms, for the court to rule definitively on the subtle issue of transgender rights, which poses powerful equality claims against society’s deeply ingrained male-female gender binaries. Transgender rights could benefit from a longer lead time for the lower courts to explore the different aspects of the question -- and for the American people to develop a consensus.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson on Monday defended his investment in an Irish company that distributes products made by the plastic manufacturer he used to own before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010...Not enough is known about what Johnson did to draw conclusions about whether he was dodging taxes, said Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer on law with a specialty on international taxation at Harvard Law School. "On the face of it, there is evident tax planning but not an apparent a clear tax issue," Shay told the AP. "The whole question is what's not on the face of it. ... We don't have the whole picture."

Eleven days before the election, the FBI stepped back into the realm of presidential politics Friday, with FBI Director James Comey saying agents had found emails that might be of relevance to an earlier investigation of Hillary Clinton. Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders was short. It was vague. And it was political dynamite. Donald Trump seized on it. Clinton decried it. The timing is unprecedented. This hour On Point, October surprise. The FBI and this wild campaign. Guests...Larry Tribe, professor of constitutional law at the Harvard University Law School.

Until this past weekend, it was easy to construe FBI Director James Comey’s extraordinary intrusions into the presidential campaign this year as consistent with a career defined by bureaucratic turf protection, and defensiveness of the institutions he’s served. These aren’t always the most high-minded or important principles, but they’ve helped distinguish him from scores of unprincipled opportunists who’ve held and hold positions of high power in our government...As his former Justice Department colleague Jack Goldsmith explains, Comey hasn’t really “reopened” the Clinton email investigation. “[T]he language Comey used in his letter suggests something less than a full reinvigoration of the investigation…something more like a preliminary inquiry to figure out what, if any, aspects of the earlier investigative conclusions might require revisiting.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Federal prosecutors in Colorado have found a way to use a serious tool against fraud to persecute some fringe political dissenters. The protesters, who deny the legitimacy of the U.S. government, take bills they owe, add notes to the effect of “Thank you for paying this debt,” and send them to government agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The government doesn’t pay the debts -- it throws the notices in the trash. Yet prosecutors are outrageously charging the protesters under the False Claims Act with the felony of submitting fraudulent financial claims on the government. This serious abuse of power violates the First Amendment -- and verges on prosecutorial misconduct.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Under securities law, a publicly disclosed half-truth is worse than no truth at all, according to an appeals court opinion filed this week involving Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. The decision has an intuitive moral appeal. But it’s not at all clear that it makes sense from the standpoint of investors, who might be misled just as thoroughly by failure to disclose material information as they would be by partial disclosure.

New York's financial regulator had sights set on becoming a global hub for innovations like bitcoin when it adopted trailblazing virtual currency rules last year. But the state lost that momentum when the agency's chief left, putting a licensing process in limbo and allowing rivals to catch up..."By putting the regulations together and having key staff members leaving almost thereafter, they really put the industry behind the eight-ball in terms of competing with traditional service providers," said Patrick Murck, a lawyer and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Most companies that were operating in New York when the regulations took effect can still do business there while waiting for a license. However, start-ups may face trouble raising money or expanding their business, Murck said.

A Harvard law professor who experienced a dramatic conversion to Catholicism has suggested there is no middle way between atheism and the Church. In an interview with Christina Dearduff, Dr Adrian Vermeule said that the logic behind his Catholic beliefs is inspired by Blessed John Henry Newman. He said: “Raised a Protestant, despite all my thrashing and twisting, I eventually couldn’t help but believe that the apostolic succession through Peter as the designated leader and primus inter pares is in some logical or theological sense prior to everything else – including even Scripture, whose formation was guided and completed by the apostles and their successors, themselves inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

Chapman & Cutler took a bruising during a City Council committee meeting last month for the racial uniformity among its lawyers. It was a public display of what some companies tell their law firms in private: Improve diversity within your ranks or lose our business..."If you talk to general counsels, they'll say things like, 'Diversity is the most important thing when we hire people; if a law firm isn't diverse enough, we kick them to the curb,' " says David Wilkins, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. "If that were true, (law firms) would look a lot different." Wilkins, a Hyde Park native, wrote two seminal studies in the 1990s that examined the dearth of black partners in large law firms, with Chicago as his main laboratory. The two typical explanations for the underrepresentation of minorities, particularly African-Americans, in Big Law are implicit bias and a shallow pool of qualified lawyers. Both explanations have merit, he says, and neither goes far enough.

An op-ed by Fellow Delcianna Winders. The recent attack of former Ringling exhibitor Vicenta Pages by her tiger Gandhi in front of dozens of schoolchildren reminds us, yet again, why banning wild animal acts is the right thing to do, not just for animals but for humans as well. Video footage of the incident shows Pages and her husband repeatedly beating Gandhi until he finally releases Pages, who was taken to the hospital for surgery. This is hardly the only incident of its kind. Just earlier this year, a Florida zookeeper was fatally attacked by a tiger. On average, captive big cats kill about one person every year in the United States and injure many more.

When the treaty creating the International Criminal Court was opened for signatories in 1998, Egyptian-born legal scholar Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni called it “a triumph for all peoples of the world.” Fast-forward 18 years, and the lofty ideal of establishing a court that would end impunity for atrocities and deliver justice to victims is reeling from the announced departures of three African member states: Burundi, South Africa and Gambia...But Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and former ICC prosecution coordinator, said the court shouldn’t be blamed for the Africa focus. In six cases, the African countries themselves asked the ICC to investigate, and two others were referred to the court by the U.N. Security Council. “Could the ICC really have declined to move on these cases?” Whiting said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Three years ago, the Guardian published the first story based on the huge archive of documents Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency while working as an NSA contractor. Then–attorney general Eric Holder’s Justice Department quickly charged Snowden with felonies for theft of government property and mishandling classified information. This May, however, Holder praised Snowden. “I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder said. This seems like an improbable claim. Snowden compromised scores of surveillance techniques, representing billions of dollars of investments over many years. U.S. firms that secretly cooperated with government intelligence agencies stopped doing so to the extent they could, and public defiance became the business-compelled norm.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms -- the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault. Immediately after the election, one of the most pressing questions will be how to restore them. To answer that question, let’s assume what philosophers call a “veil of ignorance.” If we didn’t know whether the president would be Democratic or Republican -- if it could turn out to be Clinton or Trump -- what are the minimal norms on which we might agree? Here are four suggestions.

Massachusetts child welfare officials are warning that a provision buried deep in the ballot measure to legalize marijuana could effectively tie the hands of social workers entrusted with protecting the state’s most vulnerable children. The little-noticed provision states that parents’ marijuana use, possession, and cultivation can’t be the primary basis for taking away custody — or other parental rights like visitation — unless there is “clear, convincing and articulable evidence that the person’s actions related to marijuana have created an unreasonable danger to the safety” of a child...Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor, said she believes the section of the proposed law is comparable to the current standard in child welfare and she said she has no concerns about it. Still, said Bartholet, a child welfare expert, “it does reduce the likelihood that use and even abuse of marijuana would count in and of itself as grounds for state intervention to protect children.”