Media Mentions

Who’s up for government regulation of the Internet? Yes, my skin is crawling at the thought, just like yours. Still, some kind of government action seems inevitable. Online vandals, thieves, and spies are running wild on the global network. Tougher, smarter laws may offer our only hope of fending them off...Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that only a similar response by the government will bring the Internet under control. “The market can’t do this,” Schneier said. “What we have here is a market failure.” Schneier wants mandatory security standards for all IoT devices sold in the United States. For instance, a manufacturer could not sell an Internet router that didn’t require the user to set up a strong password. It’s hardly a foolproof cure. Passwords can still be beaten. But today, many devices don’t require passwords at all, making them open gateways for criminals.

In the back of the Apple Store in Berkeley, California, at the end of the bar where those “geniuses” repair iPhones and MacBooks, is a placard with this warning: “If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation.” Read the safety instructions in the manual, it tells consumers. Or else. The Apple Store posted the notice to comply with a Berkeley city ordinance—the first in the nation—requiring retailers to alert consumers to the federal guidelines for safe cellphone use...Berkeley is represented by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and cyberlaw expert who last year ran for president as a Democrat to push for an overhaul of campaign finance. The two are now jousting over the Berkeley ordinance in federal court. Lessig, who helped craft the Berkeley ordinance in a way that he hoped would withstand a cellphone industry lawsuit, is not charging the city for his services. He volunteered because he believes corporations discourage governments from imposing regulations by filing First Amendment lawsuits that are prohibitively expensive to defend, he tells Newsweek. “I’m a constitutional scholar, and I am very concerned,” he says.

Harvard students excited for the possibility of legalized marijuana in Massachusetts may find it sobering that, if Harvard follows the paths of other universities, the drug will likely remain banned on campus even if Massachusetts Ballot Question 4 passes...Legalizing marijuana on a campus that receives federal funds could potentially jeopardize those funds, according to Harvard Law School professor Charles R. Nesson. Nesson recently lectured at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston on Question 4. “The operative question I think is whether this acts as an in terrorem effect,” Nesson said, referring to Harvard’s federal funding as a deterrent to permitting cannabis. “I just can’t imagine Harvard taking any step but the most conservative one: go the slowest, stay the closest to the ground.”

...In one way or another, Harvard Law professors helped shape Obama’s legacy. But the relationship between the Law School and the next president has yet to be defined. A trove of emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, leaked by Wikileaks in October, show that a few Law professors have caught the campaign’s attention. And Clinton’s campaign has contacted at least one about serving in her administration if she wins next Tuesday. There is no indication that Trump’s campaign has contacted any Law professors. “I think law is about policy choices so by definition we are always involved in policy choices,” Law professor Christine A. Desan said, referring to her fellow faculty members...fewer Law School faculty members are actively and openly advising either candidate in this election—a noticeable shift from previous elections, said Law Professor and former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried.

...“The Massachusetts ballot measure is poised to be the single most progressive piece of farmed animal protection legislation ever passed in the United States,” said Christopher Green, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Program. “Having this happen in our backyard as our program gets off the ground has allowed us to analyze the process in the classroom and given our students the opportunity to gain invaluable experience working directly on the campaign.” Thomas has found a welcome partner in the HLS program. With his recent gift of $1 million and a subsequent matching gift of $500,000 to support individual donations of up to $50,000 through December, he is hoping to make farm animals central to animal cruelty prevention. It’s a shared concern...The program’s work reaches well beyond U.S. borders. Its faculty director, Kristen Stilt, is collaborating with Harvard’s South Asia Institute to examine animal agriculture from the Middle East to Asia.

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.