Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Two important Guantanamo military commission cases are hovering on the edge of review by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the bad news is, both involve claims of legal overreach by government prosecutors. One defendant says he can’t be tried for the USS Cole bombing in 2000, because the U.S. wasn’t at war with al-Qaeda until Sept. 11, 2001. The other says he can’t be convicted of a conspiracy that didn’t come to fruition because international law doesn’t recognize such a crime. So far, neither defendant has prevailed in the lower courts, and it’s hard to say exactly how the Supreme Court would rule if it takes either of the cases. But what’s noteworthy is that, no matter the outcome, these two Guantanamo trials are going to end up tainted in the eyes of future legal scholars and analysts.

An op-ed by Visiting Fellow Lynn Kuok. The U.S. Navy on Friday conducted a freedom of navigation operation (Fonop) near disputed features in the South China Sea, its fourth in the past year. A destroyer, the USS Decatur, sailed “in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands,” close to but not within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limits of land features in the Paracels. In past Fonops, U.S. warships sailed within the 12-nautical-mile zone of land features claimed by China and other countries in the region. Those operations challenged unlawful requirements that a warship seek prior authorization or provide advance notification to exercise innocent passage in territorial waters. The latest operation was different.

The first line of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, The Ethics of Influence, announces: “We live in an age of psychology and behavioral economics—the behavioral sciences.” For Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official, this is as momentous a statement as saying we live in an age of antibiotics, steam engines, or the Internet. But just saying that nudges are here to stay does not make it so. In fact, if their future were not in doubt, why the need for yet another book on the topic—and so soon after his Father’s Day-gift-ready book on Star Wars—arguing that they should be here to stay? Like the president he served, Sunstein is now focused on cementing his legacy.

Charting a path toward becoming an international lawyer can be difficult without strong mentoring, experts say. Marissa Brodney, a second-year student at Harvard Law School with an interest in international law, says students like her need to attend a law school that has a full roster of potential career mentors who can guide students to options they might not have otherwise contemplated. "There's no one way to enter the international law field," she says. The key, Brodney says, is discovering a fulfilling personal path.

The International Criminal Court has begun investigating war crimes in Georgia, is looking into British soldiers accused of torture in Iraq and, in one of its most politically delicate missions yet, sent a team to Israel to discuss crimes in Gaza. But as the court tries to expand into new geography and investigate new types of crimes, it faces the most serious challenge to its existence: Three nations, all from Africa, have announced that they will no longer work with the tribunal, intensifying a longstanding debate over whether it is biased against the continent...Even in Syria, under extremely dangerous conditions, evidence is being collected with an expectation that people suspected of war crimes will one day have their day in court. “We are now at a point of no return on the question of international criminal justice,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and a former lawyer at the international court. “It is because the principle of international criminal justice has been established over these last 20 years that we are now so aware of it not being realized in Syria and elsewhere.”

German doctors killed Anna Weiss as part of a Nazi euthanasia program directed at individuals they classified as disabled. The woman’s so-called disability, as recorded in trial documents: being an “unsympathetic Czech Talmudic Jewess.” “That ‘unsympathetic’ woman deserved to be named,” said Matt Seccombe, who has been the primary analyst for Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project. “In these mass atrocities, the names become numbers. They deserve to have their names recorded and remembered.”...The recently relaunched website allows everyone from scholars and researchers to casual history buffs to access the materials...Stephen Chapman, manager of the project scanning teams, said his sense of responsibility to the project only increased as he spent more time with the documents...Along with Chapman and Seccombe, the small team on the project includes digital archivist Kerri Fleming, web developer Paul Deschner, and curator of modern manuscripts Edwin Moloy.

Its effect can be explosive and painful: Harvard University professor Randall Kennedy has traced the history of the N-word to understand the evolution of the infamous racial slur. Kennedy joins special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault to discuss this history, including reappropriations of the word and the complexities and damages of its usage today.

Twenty-five years after Anita Hill testified during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, the acclaimed attorney and academic denounced a long list of sexual harassment and assault cases, illustrating that the national conversation about such issues continues to evolve. Hill’s comments came during a ceremony Monday night in which she was presented with UC Merced’s Spendlove Prize for social justice, diplomacy and tolerance...Charles Ogletree Jr., a Merced native and the first recipient of the prize, represented Hill during the hearings. He’s now a Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko law professor, among numerous other titles and accomplishments. He said Monday night that Hill is one of the strongest and most courageous people he’s ever met.

The Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights recently selected 13 students to participate in the inaugural Human Rights Studies Working Group, which will expose students to resources at Harvard and beyond that focus on human rights work, according to EMR administrative director Tessa L. Desmond. Of the 13 students, 10 are undergraduates and three are graduate students...Law student and working group member Michael Jung [`18]said he hopes to use his experience at the Law School to help undergraduate members of the group in their human rights studies pursuits and to interact with a broad range of Harvard affiliates. “I wanted to meet groups of students and faculty members from all around Harvard that were interested in human rights,” he said.

NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to Harvard Law Professor Alex Whiting about the future of the International Criminal Court.

When Donald Trump recently asked his supporters in Ohio to keep an eye out for voter fraud on election day, his plea came with a knowing suggestion: “When [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”...Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School agrees that Mr Trump’s “First Amendment defence would no longer be airtight” if his campaign advocated racial harassment at “a rally in close proximity to the time and place where people were waiting to cast their ballots”.

Lawrence talks to Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars and lawyers, about his offer to provide free legal help to any of Donald Trump's accusers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The new South Africa has been a bastion of respect for human rights, and its decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court is a sign that something is terribly wrong with the tribunal. And it’s no secret: Since 2005, when it first issued arrest warrants, the court has indicted 39 people, every one of them African. There are various explanations for this, some of them defensible. But the bottom line is that it was an inexcusable mistake for the court not to pursue other cases. It wouldn’t have been tokenism, because there are, unfortunately, plenty of non-African war criminals. Yet even if it were, the tokenism would have been justified to show that the court is more than the imperialist agent of regime change that many Africans consider it.

An op-ed by Dean Peacock and Emily Nagisa Keehn. For decades, women in rural South Africa have shouldered the burden of caring for mineworkers who return home with silicosis contracted in South Africa’s gold mines. These women do the back-breaking and emotionally taxing work of caring for men who are dying slow and painful deaths, their lungs irreparably scarred by the silica dust they breathe in underground...These conditions are the predictable outcome of deliberate mining policies.

...With the presidential election around the corner, Science asked experts in computer science, business, and law to weigh in on how companies like Google and Facebook, which function as the primary gateway to online information for millions of voters, could influence the outcome...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, has written about Facebook’s unique ability to mobilize voters by placing reminders in their newsfeeds. If it wanted to, Facebook could mobilize users likely to vote in line with the company’s interests (as it tried to do in India) based on their demographic group and geographic location—a sort of digital gerrymandering capable of garnering hundreds of thousands of additional votes.

...At which law schools do the top music lawyers gain that expertise? These 10 stand out as the alma maters of the majority of the music ­industry's most accomplished attorneys...For the past two decades, aspiring attorneys at Harvard Law School have offered pro bono legal advice to young musicians, producers and other music professionals through the student-run Recording Artists Project. RAP has an affiliation with Boston's Berklee College of Music and offers its students guidance on matters from contracts to copyrights. Among those who have benefited is Berklee alumna Esperanza Spalding.

Once a champion of the International Criminal Court (ICC), South Africa dealt a blow to the world tribunal Friday by announcing its intention to withdraw, a move that came on the heels of a similar move by Burundi. Here are five key questions following Pretoria's announcement: Is this the end of the ICC? Not according to Harvard law professor Alex Whiting. "International criminal justice has always had its ups and downs and setbacks in the past. This is another setback, but the court is not going to disappear," he told AFP.

An op-ed by Winston Shi `19. In a year of the unexpected, one thing surprises me more than anything else: Cosmopolitan America is trying to take the white working class seriously. The white working class has spoken. It spoke for Bernie Sanders and it spoke for Donald Trump. And so in the run-up to Election Day, the media’s been churning out feature after feature on “forgotten middle America.” Even Foreign Affairs is getting in on the action! But at Harvard, cosmopolitan America’s most famous training ground, while there are plenty of Sanders voters to be found, there are almost no Trump supporters at all.

In what was supposed to be a major policy speech on his first 100 days as president, Donald Trump’s only new proposal was vowing to sue the women who have accused him of sexual assault. But in response, some prominent First Amendment attorneys are vowing to defend Trump’s accusers pro bono, or free of charge. Ted Boutrous of the law firm Gibson Dunn and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe have thrown their hats into the ring on social media, and Boutrous says there are others willing to follow suit.

Professor Charles Ogletree was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several months ago and he and his family want to stress the importance of education and of early diagnosis. Professor Ogletree has been a professor at Harvard Law School for the past 30 years. He's an advocate for continued education and empowers children to chase their dreams. His work has been recognized all over the world and dozens of schools have been named after him.

Although the death penalty is still considered constitutional by the Supreme Court, Americans’ appetite for this barbaric practice diminishes with each passing year. The signs of capital punishment’s impending demise are all around...Since there were about 14,000 murders around the country last year, it’s easy to imagine that the small number of newly condemned people shows that the justice system is focusing on the “worst of the worst.” But that’s wrong. In fact the crimes of the people sentenced to death are no worse than those of many others who escape that fate. Rather, nearly all of last year’s death sentences came from a tiny fraction of counties with three common features: overzealous prosecutors; inadequate public defenders; and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion. This was the key finding of a two-part report recently issued by the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School.