Media Mentions

After Harvard issued new restrictions on students who join single-sex social groups, opponents raised the possibility of challenging the university in court on the grounds that Harvard violated the right to free association...But experts said a legal challenge against Harvard would have to clear a high hurdle: Harvard University is a private institution. Therefore, the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment protections, such as the freedom of association, don’t apply. “I’m not really sure what the basis of a legal challenge would be because Harvard is a private university,” said Erica Goldberg, the Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. “I don’t see any way around it.”

Deciding between a law school with a generous scholarship and a school with a well-known loan assistance plan, 30-year-old Michael Kaercher made his choice based on the loan assistance plan provided after graduation. "I thought that if I ended up at a firm, then I wouldn't miss the $100,000 in scholarships," says Kaercher, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2010 and works as an attorney adviser at the IRS. "But if ended up going into the public sector and went to Harvard, then I'd qualify for this program."..."Harvard has one of the most generous programs that I've seen based on their formula," says the fifth-year attorney, who receives $8,849 in loan assistance every six months from Harvard to pay his $220,000 law school debt. "You don't have to work for a 501(c)(3) or anything like that in order to be eligible. You just have to not make that much money."..."LIPP functions very much like a backend scholarship – we often describe it that way to students – because LIPP benefits can potentially be as generous as many up-front merit scholarships," says Kenneth Lafler, assistant dean for student financial services at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. North Carolina and the federal government are suing each other over whether the state’s new transgender bathroom regulation violates federal civil rights laws. The cultural stakes are clear: the two governments have sharply different ideas about the acceptance of transgender people. But what about the legal stakes? The legal problem in the case is whether the North Carolina law, which bars transgender people from restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms, violates the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. That question may sound simple, but it’s actually profound. It will require a court to decide whether gender is the same thing as sex, and if so, for what purposes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Laws that ban street begging often are challenged as a violation of First Amendment free speech rights. Appellate courts are divided on the question, and the Supreme Court has never answered it definitively. But in the last year, courts across the country have begun striking down laws against panhandling on the ground that they prohibit certain speech on the basis of its content. The reason is a major Supreme Court decision from last year that barred an Arizona town from using content to distinguish between different types of temporary signs erected on public property.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore ordered his state’s probate judges in January to ignore a Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage, he put himself in jeopardy of losing his job – for the second time. Now Alabama’s Judicial Inquiry Commission has filed formal charges against him for his defiance. Moore should lose his job. But as he’s shown before, that’s a setback he can overcome. Last time he was removed from office, he ran for governor before settling for reelection as chief justice. Who knows? This time he might even win the governorship.

Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias. The outcry was set off by a report on Monday morning by the website Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users...“The agenda-setting power of a handful of companies like Facebook and Twitter should not be underestimated,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of computer science and law at Harvard University. “These services will be at their best when they are explicitly committed to serving the interests of their users rather than simply offering a service whose boundaries for influence are unknown and ever-changing.”

Who owns the most U.S. Treasury bonds? China? Japan? Saudi Arabia? The answer: None of the above. It’s us. We Americans own almost $5 trillion in Treasury bonds, all told. That’s more than twice as much as China, Japan and all the oil exporting countries put together...A President Trump just winging it in public is going to cause chaos in the Treasury and currency markets. Legal experts aren’t sure what a default crisis would entail. The U.S. Constitution says government debt can’t be questioned. But it’s never been tested. “No one knows what happens if it is,” Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman tells me.

Last summer, shortly after Donald Trump launched his angry missile of a campaign with that memorable remark about Mexicans and rapists, Kayleigh McEnany [`16] sounded like pretty much every other talking head on cable news. “I think he said something very unartful, very inappropriate,” she told Don Lemon during a June 29 segment on “CNN Tonight.”...Today, McEnany sounds very different — both from her earlier self and from better-known conservative commentators such as Karl Rove and S.E. Cupp, who remain highly critical of the presumptive GOP nominee for president. McEnany is now a staunch Trump supporter, a turnaround that has helped make the newly minted Harvard Law School graduate a rising star on CNN, which increasingly relies on her to furnish a perspective that is hard to find among the usual roster of right-leaning pundits.

A law degree from Harvard is generally a ticket to everything from the presidency of United States (think President Obama) to the Supreme Court (think Ginsburg, Scalia, Breyer, Kennedy, Roberts and Kagan) and major law firms. In other words, Harvard Law doesn’t immediately conjure images of influential environmental activists. But Ted Hamilton, a current Harvard Law student and one of the leaders of the student divestment movement, may be helping to change that perception. “Being in a place like Harvard and Harvard Law School gives you a really special opportunity to rock the boat,” Hamilton says. “People listen to you — maybe unfairly. There’s unfair attention shined upon the Harvard campus. Even though we're students, we have this unearned power to influence conversation and to make a difference for the climate movement.” Hamilton says that, like a lot of other divestment campaigns, one of the primary goals of the student movement is to shine a light on the “moral urgency” underlying the issue.

An op-ed by Adrian Vermeule. I admire the spirit of Philip Wallach’s essay. Excepting his rather defensive one-liners about the professors of administrative law, he tries to put a range of views about the administrative state in their best light, mining truth from wherever it lies and proposing a middle way of incrementalist legislation to discipline the bureaucracy. It therefore feels almost churlish to argue, as I will, that there is no need for even a moderate solution because there is no demonstrated problem to begin with. Although the spirit of the essay is admirable, the substance is weak. Three concepts are indispensable to any discussion of a putative “legitimacy crisis” in the administrative state: delegation, the presidency, and welfare, in the sense of well-being.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. When we talk about political corruption, what often comes to mind is what the law calls “quid pro quo”: I give a politician money and in exchange he or she gets me a government contract or votes in my favor. But there is a continuum of quid pro quo exchanges, some plainly illegal, some not and some ambiguous. In the case of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is constitutional to prosecute a public official for conduct on that continuum, conduct never before determined to be at the illegal end. The issue is not whether we should regulate gifts to public officials; the issue is whether the criminal law can be used as a bludgeon when we have not done so. I think not. As a matter of due process, criminal prosecutions can be brought only when we have clearly defined what is legal and what is not.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should female African-American cadets at West Point be punished for posing for a photograph with their fists raised? Most discussion so far has focused on the contemporary meaning of the gesture and whether it’s a political statement of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. But there’s a further free-speech question that must also be answered: How much leeway should members of the uniformed, active-duty military have to express themselves -- photographically, politically, or otherwise? The best answer, grounded in military regulations and the First Amendment, indicates that the cadets have not violated the letter or spirit of the law and should not be subject to sanction.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. U.S. Rep. David Jolly, a Republican from Indian Shores, has generated enormous enthusiasm for his Stop Act — a proposal to ban members of Congress from personally asking people for money. "60 Minutes" did a special segment about the idea. That followed an incredibly powerful piece by comedian John Oliver describing with perfect clarity just how absurd the system has become. From my own survey of research, we know that members of Congress can spend anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of their time raising money. Even at the low end of that estimate, this should astonish anyone. Critics are wrong to call this a "do-nothing Congress." To the contrary, it does an incredible amount — of fundraising. That life of fundraising changes the members of Congress. How could it be otherwise? If you spent half of your time sucking up to powerful and wealthy people, you'd be changed, too.

This report from the Berkman Center's Berklett Cybersecurity Project offers a new perspective on the "going dark" debate from the discussion, debate, and analyses of an unprecedentedly diverse group of security and policy experts from academia, civil society, and the U.S. intelligence community.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Spend a million of your Super PAC dollars to elect a governor, and you can expect him to take your calls and set up meetings with state officials. Courtesy of the Supreme Court and its 2010 Citizens United decision, it’s all protected by the First Amendment. But give the same governor a Rolex before asking for the meetings – and both of you might be convicted of bribery. Is there a meaningful difference? That’s the question in McDonnell v. U.S., which the court is currently considering. The bribery conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell follows the second pattern – complete with the Rolex.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. My 10-year old put it best: “First you said Trump wouldn’t win any primaries. Then you said he wouldn’t win the nomination. So why exactly are you so sure he won’t become president?” Given this reasonable question, it’s time to start asking: Is the Constitution in danger from a Donald Trump presidency? How far can he push the envelope of our constitutional structure and traditions?

An op-ed by Tommy Tobin `16. North Carolina is home to the nation’s longest-running federal court vacancy. Recently, Patricia Timmons-Goodson was nominated to fill the post that’s been unfilled for over a decade. Sen. Richard Burr reacted to this news by vowing to block this former state supreme court justice from the federal bench. Federal judicial vacancies occur all over the country. Right now, 60 nominees are awaiting confirmation. Judicial vacancies have consequences. A forthcoming paper by Professor Crystal S. Yang in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found significant real-world effects on criminal justice outcomes during judicial vacancies.

As Harvard Law School admissions officers finalize next year’s class, they do so with an eye toward a group of fields that deviate from the traditional path to legal studies: STEM. Law School chief admissions officer Jessica L. Soban said the percentage of admitted students with backgrounds in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—will remain in the double digits for the second year in a row, reflecting a deliberate effort by Law School admissions officers in recent years to increase the number of students with such backgrounds...Law School clinical professor Christopher T. Bavitz said he thinks students with STEM backgrounds possess skills well-suited to the law. “There are a lot of reasons why people with tech backgrounds can do well in the law,” he said. “A lot of law practice is explaining complicated concepts to people...and people with science and tech backgrounds do that well. I think they’re great analytical thinkers in ways that kind of map on to the thinking lawyers do.” The Law School has pioneered programs bridging science and the law. The school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics—which was established a decade ago—was the first of its kind among law schools, according Faculty Director and Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, putting Harvard ahead of peer institutions.

...Though offerings in Native American studies at Harvard are few and far between, a small number of committed students and faculty are dedicated to maximizing the resources available to them, and hope to see more opportunities in the future...Native American studies at Harvard Law School has a larger presence compared to other schools at the University. Lowe cited the establishment of the Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law position as an example of a positive development towards increasing Native American studies faculty. The visiting position, endowed by the Oneida Nation, a federally recognized tribe headquartered in New York, is currently filled by Robert T. Anderson, who is serving two consecutive five-year appointments as the Oneida Chair. Anderson said he thinks there is enough student interest in American Indian Law to fill more classes than are currently offered in the field. “Students are very interested [in American Indian Law] because it’s a very high-level student body as you would expect at Harvard, and many of the students are going on to prestigious federal and state clerkships where they’re encountering these issues,” he said. In addition to the Oneida professorship, professor Joseph W. Singer has developed an American Indian Law problem for a mandatory “Problem Solving Workshop” required for every first-year Law student. He also leads a reading group on American Indian Law. Additionally, the Law School runs a Native Amicus Briefing Project, which recruits students partly to keep track of cases of federal Indian law and ultimately provide amicus briefs to the cases.

A letter by Delcianna J. Winders, fellow. If the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium is truly concerned about elephants and elephant-born tuberculosis, why is it supporting cruel, outmoded elephant-back safaris?

There’s a new, deeply troubling, report about misconduct at a state drug testing lab. The report by Attorney General Maura Healey alleges that Amherst chemist Sonja Farak got high off of drugs she took from the lab nearly every day for eight years...Guests...Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge, Harvard Law School professor.