Media Mentions

When Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions. Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond...Perhaps we’ll also see a shifting of social norms. If everyone’s embarrassing behavior is accessible in perpetuity, we may become inured to employees’ college benders and even to senators’ sexts. Will paranoia reduce misbehavior, or will humans be humans and maintain our blithe and blundering ways? “It’s hard to change our daily habits,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “I don’t know if that’s a reason for optimism, because it means we’re not going to be chilled, or pessimism, because we appear to be resigned to losing our privacy without thinking it through first.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It takes a lot to turn a publisher of sex ads into a First Amendment hero. But the attorney general of California has managed the feat. By charging Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com, with pimping and sex trafficking in minors, Kamala Harris has seriously breached the constitutional wall meant to protect the free press. Ferrer -- and the two controlling shareholders of the online classified marketplace Backpage -- aren’t charged with actually arranging sex for pay. They’ve been criminally charged based on a claim that Backpage is designed to, and does, publish third-party ads for sex trafficking. On this theory, essentially any publication that sells ads could be outlawed -- and that’s almost any publication on earth.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump’s threat in Sunday night’s presidential debate to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server is legally empty -- but it’s genuinely dangerous nevertheless. Federal regulations give the appointment power to the attorney general, not the president, precisely to protect us against a president who uses the special prosecutor as a political tool. What separates functioning democracies from weak or failed ones is that political parties alternate in power without jailing the opponents they beat in elections. That sometimes means giving a pass to potentially criminal conduct, but that’s a worthwhile sacrifice for making republican government work.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as “the other side.” If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

Not long after he was elected district attorney for Brooklyn, New York, in 2013, Kenneth Thompson cold-called a Harvard law professor and former public defender to ask for help digging through old cases for people who had been wrongly convicted. At first, the professor thought Thompson had made a mistake: Why would a prosecutor want to hire someone who made a living exposing the justice system's flaws? But Professor Ronald Sullivan quickly realized that Thompson was not a typical DA. He wanted his Conviction Review Unit to find true justice, even if it meant unraveling old guilty verdicts, or exposing wrongdoing. That meant having an outsider run it. "It's the right thing to do, and I'm committed to doing it the right way," Sullivan recalled Thompson telling him before he took the job.Sullivan recalled that conversation Monday as a sort of requiem. The night before, Thompson had died of cancer, five days after announcing he was ill.

An op-ed by Winston Shi `19...Rightly or not, though, Stanford gets the nation’s lowest undergrad admission rate, which tends to swell people’s heads. And isn’t our little war of admission rates at the heart of why this column matters? At the end of the day, you’re reading this because Stanford gets the (highly annoying) subtitle in American pop culture as “that plucky little school in Palo Alto that’s challenging Harvard to become number one.” All of this excruciating drama even though by Week 5 it is clear that your admission to any of these schools owes far more to luck than it ever could have to fate. Getting into Harvard/Stanford/[insert school here] is not a sign that you are God’s gift to mankind: it is your first lesson that the forces of destiny are blind.

An op-ed by Larry Schwartztol and Abby Shafroth...Silva’s experience highlights an increasingly fundamental fact about encounters with the criminal justice system: long after a formal sentence ends, the punishment continues. As his story shows, a criminal sentence is no longer a singular penalty pronounced by a judge as a proportionate response to a criminal conviction. These convictions often spark a cascade of economic consequences that persist for years after the formal sentence is over and threaten a person’s ability to successfully and self-sufficiently re-enter society. These debts force individuals to navigate a maze of onerous systems and actors—criminal courts and prisons, but also private debt collectors, DMVs, credit reporting companies, and bankruptcy courts.

In a presidential campaign featuring many firsts, one of the most startling came Sunday night when Republican nominee Donald Trump, to scattered cheers from the audience, pledged to have the Democratic nominee investigated criminally, should he prevail in November...some prominent lawyers and legal scholars took umbrage at the threat and expressed alarm. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Fortune that even threatening such a thing was “incompatible with the survival of a stable constitutional republic,” while carrying out such a threat would constitute an “impeachable offense.”

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed would like to make clear that she likes “Hamilton,” the Broadway hip-hop musical phenomenon about Alexander Hamilton, which audiences and critics have adored and some scholars and writers have scorned. But she would like to make clearer that she found the show problematic in its portrayals of Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Fathers, and the issue of slavery...“A Broadway show is not a documentary,” said Gordon-Reed, a history professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who also holds the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Facebook has been in talks for months with U.S. government officials and wireless carriers with an eye toward unveiling an American version of an app that has caused controversy abroad, according to multiple people familiar with the matter...U.S. Internet advocates have called on the Federal Communications Commission to regulate zero-rating under its net neutrality rules. The practice, they argue, risks tilting the online marketplace to benefit large, established firms, or the corporate partners of those firms. “Zero-rating is pernicious, unfair and unnecessary,” said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard who has advocated for strong regulation of the broadband industry. Permitting the practice would simply enable “the gameplaying of companies who have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It may not seem that significant to a civilian. But a rule-change that will lower the maximum length of appellate briefs from 14,000 words to 13,000 words , effective Dec. 1, is getting plenty of pushback from the lawyers who specialize in federal appeals. To the readers, a 7 percent reduction in legalese is definitely good news. Yet to the writers, it could mean a 7 percent reduction in billable hours -- and in revenue. That’s no small matter. The economics of appellate law are already pretty tenuous from the standpoint of managing partners who employ appellate specialists, often against their will.

The first Monday in October is “like a holiday” for “real Supreme Court nerd[s],” according to Harvard law’s Ian Samuel in the fabulous new SCOTUS podcast, First Mondays.

A hearing was held on the EPA's Clean Power Plan last month at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Mike Edgerly spoke with the director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program, Jody Freeman, about what happened at the hearing, and what that means for the plan and future climate regulation.

All it took was the threat of a $14 billion fine against Deutsche Bank for the word “contagion” to rear its ugly head. Global markets have been shaken up in recent weeks over fears that Deutsche Bank, a symbol of German financial might and Europe’s fourth-largest biggest bank by assets, cannot absorb a fine of that magnitude. The German government said flatly that it would not bail out the bank, leading to what some called market “panic” that Deutsche Bank could face a messy Lehman Brothers-style collapse and set off a global financial crisis...Those fears seem wildly overblown. “The bottom line is, I think the Deutsche Bank issues will be resolved and there won’t be any contagion episode,” said Hal S. Scott, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of the recent book “Connectedness and Contagion.” “But it’s a wake-up call. Are we prepared if this ever happens again? The answer is ‘no.’” Professor Scott defines “contagion” as “an indiscriminate run by short-term creditors of financial institutions that can render otherwise solvent institutions insolvent because of the fire sale of assets that are necessary to fund withdrawals and the resulting decline in asset prices triggered by such sales.” He calls such contagion “the most virulent and systemic risk still facing the financial system today.”

On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down a decision on parental rights that broadens the legal definition of a family. In the case, Partanen v. Gallagher, the state extended parental rights to people in same-sex relationships who never married, and who don't have a biological connection to a child, if they can show that they have been actively involved with the child's upbringing. We'll also talk about the case of Duane Buck, a convicted Texas murderer whose case is now before the Supreme Court. The court is examining the role of race in sentencing after a psychologist testified that Buck was more likely to be a future danger to society because he was black. Guest: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

Healthy buildings and clean air keep people healthy. That simple premise is driving a series of studies being conducted by Harvard researchers, some of which have gathered insights from University dorms and office buildings...This partnership and another involving faculty and students working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being hailed as models for the type of collaborative work that the University wants to stimulate as it launches a reinvigorated “campus as a living laboratory” initiative...Wendy Jacobs, clinical professor and director of Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, will lead the Living Lab Course and Research Project, which is designed to bring together students from across the University in interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative approaches for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at Harvard and beyond...“I am really excited about this course — its purpose is to unleash the incredible creative energy of students and faculty from across the University to identify innovative and practical ways for Harvard to reduce its own climate impact,” said Jacobs. “We will focus our attention on solutions that have demonstrable environmental and public health benefits and, ideally, also include an educational component that extends beyond the course itself.”

At the Graduate School of Education Thursday Pulitzer-winning journalist Ron Suskind discussed his experience raising his son, who has autism, and the creation of an app to help children with autism communicate. Suskind, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, chronicled his journey raising and connecting with his son, interspersing his narrative with clips from the movie "Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism," which is adapted from his eponymous book.

An op-ed by senior fellow Stephen Davis. John G. Stumpf, chairman and chief executive officer, Wells Fargo & Co., had some surprising, hidden and unwitting enablers in the fake accounts scandal — participants in defined contribution plans. How? Every year for more than a decade, large institutional investors have voted at the Wells Fargo annual meeting on a critical issue: whether to install an independent chair rather than allow the CEO to keep that job himself, effectively serving as his own boss. The right chair could have added muscle to board oversight. A separate chair is an approach used by 46.5% of 256 medium to large U.S. banks, according to MSCI Inc. The structure provides an extra measure of assurance against the risk of misfires by a chief executive.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The connection between the law of insider trading and the nature of the sibling relationship may not be immediately obvious -- but the U.S. Supreme Court will consider it Wednesday in what may be one of the most interesting cases of a term that the justices have designed to be boring. Salman v. U.S. turns on whether one brother derives “personal benefit” from providing insider information to another brother who trades on it. Regardless of which answer it chooses, the court will essentially have to offer an analysis of brotherly love -- and what it does for the siblings.

The smart money is on the Environmental Protection Agency to prevail as the D.C. Circuit Court reviews its landmark Clean Power Plan, according to experts. But it may not be due to the legal arguments alone...“The petitioners are really focusing on the word ‘source’ and hanging their argument on that word for the most part,” Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School, told Utility Dive...For Peskoe, attributing the judges’ questioning too much to personal opinion is fraught with peril — it's too much about “trying to get in the heads of the judges,” he said — but he agreed that the fact this case is about climate and carbon, and not another pollutant, could have an impact.

With today marking the first day of arguments for the Supreme Court, most would think that the justices’ work from the previous term is over. But in fact, the justices spend years reworking their opinions after they are initially released, purging them of grammatical, spelling, stylistic, and even factual errors. The court’s decisions take effect immediately, but the opinions—the written rationales behind the decisions— don’t become official until they are published in United States Reports, the official publication of Supreme Court rulings...The court’s “commitment to getting things absolutely right is commendable,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor. But the practice of quietly tinkering with opinions after the fact, and then being nontransparent about what changes were made, is “fairly indefensible,” said Lazarus, the first legal scholar to document the process.