Media Mentions

In the wake of Donald Trump's election, several Big Law leaders are calling on the profession to take a more vocal and visible stand to protect the rule of law. "Given the election and its many implications, there has been no moment in recent memory when it has been more important for lawyers to fulfill their professional responsibilities," says William Lee, former co-chairman of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. "As a profession, we must ensure that the rule of law that is our fundamental core value is our highest priority and applicable and available to everyone."...Two years ago, Wilmer's Lee and two other prominent lawyers made a clarion call in an article entitled "Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens." Lee and the two other authors—former General Electric Corp. general counsel Benjamin Heineman Jr. and Harvard Law School professor David Wilkins—argued that law firms should play a bigger role defending the rule of law. The article, published by the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, called for the emergence a new generation of leaders in the mold of Robert Fiske of Davis Polk & Wardwell and the late Lloyd Cutler of Wilmer.

An article by Zalman Rothschild `18. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-93) has long been considered the spiritual and intellectual leader of American Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century. His extensive command of the Talmud, Jewish codes and Jewish philosophy, coupled with a doctorate from the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin), made him the natural figurehead of a movement that identifies with the currents of both modernity and tradition. Soloveitchik’s concurrent loyalty to Jewish orthodoxy on the one hand, and rigorous modern philosophic thinking on the other, has spurred much debate regarding where his “true” allegiances lay.

An article by David E. White Jr `17. Sean Rayford, a freelance photojournalist and commercial photographer based in Columbia, South Carolina, captured this photograph of a woman smearing blood on a police riot shield during a protest in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina at about 9:00pm on September 21, 2016. Citizens were protesting the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man, who was shot and killed by the police the previous day. Married for more than twenty years, and a father of seven children, Scott was forty-three years old and had worked as a security guard at a local mall. Mindful that photographs must be “composed to be readable” by his audience, Rayford often relies on his subjects’ faces to capture the emotion of a moment...This photograph of a bloody hand on the police shield underscores that black citizens have yet to attain full American citizenship in that blacks still suffer an equal protection deficit.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No matter the outcome, this Election Day marks a signal moment in the history of women’s suffrage. The Founding Fathers had a bad conscience about slavery, but no such qualms about women’s rights. The movement for women’s suffrage didn’t begin until the 1840s. And after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment was proposed to give blacks the vote, women’s groups splintered over whether the denial of voting rights to women was a reason to oppose the amendment. Today, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a moderate, centrist reformer, is the political descendant of the women’s suffrage movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s all about the Constitution now. Republicans will control the White House and both chambers of Congress. They will be able to pass -- or repeal -- their preferred laws, because that’s democracy. But to the Donald Trump opponents worried about what his presidency will bring, know this: There will still be limits to congressional or executive action, limits dictated by the Constitution and enforceable by the courts. The Constitution is designed to resist the tyranny of the majority. James Madison’s machine of constitutional protection is about to kick into gear.

Stop checking fivethirtyeight.com. Sign off of Twitter. Say goodbye and good riddance to those vitriolic political ads. The presidential election is over. But four years can pass quickly, and if colleges can’t lead productive discussions of sensitive topics in their classrooms, can we expect the discourse in future elections to be any better? At Harvard Law School, where admission is a veritable pass to a life of leadership, longtime professor Charles Nesson says the Internet has been “crippling” for classroom discussions. “Even when laptops are closed, you still feel the danger of being in a completely connected environment,” he observes. “People are cautious on issues that engage real diversity and real difference. I think it’s tremendously challenging to law teachers, to socratic teachers. A lot of faculty are feeling that we weren’t trained for this.” Nesson recently started experimenting with an approach he hopes will help.

...Here are some snapshots from the day...Megan Fitzgerald, J.D. ’18, said she had mailed her ballot to Louisiana, where she’s registered to vote. Fitzgerald said she found this tumultuous election “unprecedented.”...At Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall, Tracey Daley, the School’s student activities coordinator, wanted to ensure that the night brought the community together, whatever the electoral outcome...Students among the crowd of about 30 who gathered to watch early returns said they learned a lot about the country during the campaign, and not all of it good. “It has been helpful to see the core values of the American electorate,” said law student Emanuel Powell.

Our social lives are conducted on the Internet, along with purchases, entertainment and cab hailing. So why are we still using paper ballots to vote for elected officials? ...Online voting “makes it hard to forestall vote-selling, because people could much more easily prove for whom they've voted,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor. “ Countries unlike the United States that do not emphasize ballot secrecy might be better able to embrace Internet voting.”

The health law prohibits insurers from discriminating against people with serious illnesses, but some marketplace plans sidestep that taboo by making the drugs that people with HIV need unavailable or unaffordable, complaints filed recently with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights allege. The effect may be to discourage people with HIV from buying a particular plan or getting the treatment they need, according to the complaint. The complaints, brought by Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, charge that plans offered by seven insurers in eight states are discriminatory because they don’t cover drugs that are essential to the treatment of HIV or require high out-of-pocket spending by patients for covered drugs.

A classroom in Hauser Hall was filled to capacity Monday afternoon as Tom Hardin, a white collar felon and subsequent FBI informant, recounted his experiences with insider trading and federal investigations to about 100 Harvard Law Students. The Harvard Association for Law and Business hosted Hardin after he approached the organization about his desire to speak at the Law School. Hardin is currently visiting elite institutions across the country to share his “cautionary tale” about insider trading and white collar crimes, event coordinator David Kafafian ’18 said. “Tom actually reached out to us and was quite frank in his introduction around who he was, that he was a convicted white collar felon, and what he did,” Kafafian said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  It’s hard to imagine much work getting done in most offices on Tuesday -- except at the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear cases, pretending to be blithely oblivious to the history being made in voting booths across the country. As it turns out, one of those cases is actually pretty important. It concerns whether the city of Miami can bring claims against Wells Fargo and Bank of America for racially discriminatory predatory lending under the Fair Housing Act -- or whether the law only allows suits by individuals directly affected by discrimination. The justices may split, 4-4. And the issue is exactly the kind that will be affected by the election results.

This year, new death sentences across the U.S. are set to hit their lowest levels since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. Support for the death penalty in the U.S. is still high, but the option of life in prison and flawed prosecutions — which have resulted in more than 150 death-row exonerations— have caused district-attorney candidates to campaign on platforms of restraint, according to a report from Reuters. ... A Harvard Law School study, The Fair Punishment Project, recently named Harris and Dallas counties as "outlier" counties, where prosecutors imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015.

The court battle between the cellphone industry and Berkeley, Calif., which wants notices posted at the point of sale, exposes flaws in the U.S. legal system. The battle was covered in an extensive article in Newsweek Nov. 3 by Ronnie Cohen. ...Lawrence Lessig, attorney for Berkeley, says it is a matter of "free speech" and companies are discouraging governments from imposing regulations by filing First Amendment lawsuits that are prohibitively expensive to defend.

As M&A transactions have increased in size over the years so have their contracts. The average merger agreement has more than doubled in length over the past 20 years, according to new research from John Coates, a Harvard law professor. Contracts have gone from about 17,000 words in 1994 to nearly 45,000 in 2014. Some of the added heft is a response to new regulations, Mr. Coates found.

For an Election Day broadcast, we go back to our country's founding with a recent book on Thomas Jefferson that challenges some of the cliches about our third president.  We talk with Annette Gordon-Reed, co-author of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" about Jefferson's life at Monticello, his sojourn in Paris, and his views on slavery and race.  GUEST:  Annette Gordon-Reed, co-author with Peter S. Onuf, of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs".  Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School.  Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for "The Hemingses of Monticello."

A Northeastern University student has sued the school and several administrators, alleging they failed to prevent her rape on campus by another student, and that the school failed to protect her rights. ... Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen said Title IX can cut both ways, as it’s been used around the country in the last year both by alleged victims and by those accused of sexual assault.

For two years, Harvard’s admissions policies have been at the center of an ongoing lawsuit alleging race-based discrimination against Asian American applicants. The case was put on hold in advance of a Supreme Court ruling on the affirmative action case Fisher vs. The University of Texas at Austin. Now that the Court upheld that admissions policy over the summer, Harvard’s case is again moving forward. ,,,Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow also filed an amicus brief in conjunction with her legal counsel and Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post ’69 last November in support of UT Austin. They wrote that a ruling against using race as one factor in a “holistic” admissions process would have “devastating” effects.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Lots of people who don’t otherwise care for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton say they’re going to vote Tuesday based on which presidential candidate will be best for the U.S. Supreme Court. With the hours ticking away, it’s worth running through the three most plausible scenarios to see what the election outcome will mean for the court. Most desirable for liberals will be if Clinton wins the White House and gets a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. If that happens, the lame-duck Republican Senate might or might not confirm the relatively moderate Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat.

The list is long and shameful. The Wachovia Bank helped launder hundreds of millions for Mexican drug cartels. Wells Fargo illegally created nearly two million fake accounts and then charged customers service fees for them. ...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor who specializes in the study of corruption and had a quixotic run for the 2016 Democratic presidential candidacy, said in an interview with the Star, “This is business as usual. It is deeply corrupt, but it’s not criminal. This is why the system needs to change.” The regulation of the American financial system is a series of shifting parts that includes the Federal Reserve, Treasury and several other agencies. The Senate is supposed to oversee this complicated machinery through the 22-member banking committee. “The American system is made deliberately to have a number of overlapping veto points,” Lessig said. “So all (the banks) have to do is capture one of those veto points and they can make sure that nothing gets into legislation. In fact, control over a veto point gives tremendous power over questions of staffing and personnel as well.”

As far as the Rev. Terry Jones knows, they were his ideas first. “We are asking for the immediate halting of all Muslim immigration and the removal of all illegal aliens from the United States,” the controversial Florida pastor told a Detroit radio station back in 2011. “We are asking for the monitoring of all the mosques in America.” ... Sharia is not a codified document like the U.S. Constitution, say religious and legal scholars, but rather a broad and variably interpreted set of ideas and principles for how to live life as a Muslim. It offers an array of guidance, including on prayer practices, marriage, diet and finances. It also draws on tens of thousands of texts and scholarly interpretations, meaning that there is no universally approved body of Islamic law, said Intisar A. Rabb, an Islamic legal scholar at Harvard University.

... Across the United States, 49 new death sentences were handed down in 2015, a drop from a recent peak of 315 in 1996, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. ... According to a Harvard University Law School study this year, three people sentenced to death in Harris County have been exonerated and there have been dozens of instances of prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty cases.