Media Mentions

President Obama on Friday announced his support for opening the market for cable set-top boxes, singling out the devices in millions of homes as a clunky and outdated symbol of corporate power over consumers, as he introduced a broad federal effort to increase competition...“An industry that had previously been considered untouchable — the cable guys — is now subject to criticism from the president,” said Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor who is a former aide to Mr. Obama. “This is like weighing in against Big Tobacco or Big Pharma.”

Kenya risks being isolated among other nations if it fails to co-operate with the ICC, lawyers have warned in criticism of President Uhuru Kenyatta. International law experts yesterday told the Star Kenya remains a State Party to the Rome Statute and failure to co-operate with the International Criminal Court would be a violation of Kenya’s own constitution...Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard University in the United States, said Uhuru is now openly saying he will not abide by the law. “Kenya signed and ratified the Rome Statute, and therefore it has a legal obligation to co-operate with the court,” Whiting told the Star. He said the international community will also have to take a position on Kenya.

Thomas Jefferson repeatedly insisted that the private lives of America’s founders should be off limits to historians. In 1817, when a writer asked him about his family, the author of the Declaration of Independence coughed up little information, noting that personal matters “would produce fatigue and disgust to . . . readers.” For generations, scholars agreed and most studies of our third president and his contemporaries focused largely on their political careers. But that taboo started to crumble about a half century ago. And thanks to the pioneering work of Harvard Law School professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello’’ (2008), we can now readily understand why Jefferson lived in such mortal fear of biographers...In “ ‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,’’ Gordon-Reed and her coauthor, Peter S. Onuf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, seek to reassess Jefferson’s legacy, given all the recent discoveries about his long-buried private life.

It’s not just Supreme Court vacancies that are going unfilled; vacancies have become an acute problem throughout the federal judiciary. A recent study by a professor at Harvard Law School finds that these vacancies are causing prosecutors to drop more cases and offer lighter plea deals than they would otherwise, which has “led to approximately 1,000 fewer federal prisoners per fiscal year . . . largely from drug offenses.” While this may be letting some criminals off easy, the professor suggests that “judicial vacancies may have had an unintended benefit of reducing the prison population toward the optimal level of incarceration...[Crystal] Yang...“Resource Constraints and the Criminal Justice System: Evidence from Judicial Vacancies,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (forthcoming).

Police arrested hundreds of people protesting the influence of money in politics this week in Washington, D.C., but peaceful tangles with the officers were one of the group's main goals. U.S. Capitol Police arrested more than 900 protesters through Saturday afternoon. The mass demonstrations called "Democracy Spring" began Monday...Harvard Law School professor and former Democratic presidential candidate Larry Lessig was arrested Friday — for the first time ever. "I'm a law professor," he said Saturday. "I don't get arrested." But he made an exception for the issue that he based his short-lived campaign on: Campaign finance reform. "I’m so incredibly excited with the kind of passion and the mix of people that were there," said Lessig, noting it's spread beyond the usual "law geeks and intellectuals" who rally around campaign finance reform.

Yelena Sablina was stunned when she came across the forensic record of her late 19-year-old daughter, who died days after a speeding car hit her at a Moscow pedestrian crossing. Going through the file she discovered that her daughter Alina's heart, kidneys and a number of other organs had been removed -- without her family's knowledge or consent. Since making the grim discovery in February 2014, one month after Alina's death, Sablina has made it her mission to challenge a Russian law that allows doctors to remove the organs of dead people without needing permission...Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen said that concerns over such laws usually focus on “the cost and infrastructure as well as pragmatic political considerations”.

An op-ed by Richard Freeman, faculty co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program. "Robots And Computers Could Take Half Our Jobs Within the Next 20 Years”…“Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045”…“White House Predicts Robots May Take Over Many Jobs That Pay $20 Per Hour”…“Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour”…“Why the Highest-Paid Doctors Are the Most Vulnerable to Automation”…“Robot Receptionist in Tokyo Department Store.” These headlines have the flavor of yellow journalism. But they are based on the predictions of researchers across many disciplines and on technological advances developed by firms large and small...xBut whether robotization will be good or bad for society isn’t a foregone conclusion—it will depend crucially on how public policy and private firms respond.

The New York State Attorney General has already taken some steps to find out why insurers are limiting coverage of pricey hep C meds to the sickest patients but has stopped short of suing companies for their decisions. Now, he’s stepping up his fight..."When an insurer limits coverage only to its sickest members, it amounts to an irrational and short-sighted rationing of care. From the perspective of an individual living with HCV who is excluded from the cure, that care is the very definition of 'medically necessary,'" Kevin Costello, litigation director at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said in a February release.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded a major grant to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab to further develop its Perma.cc tool to combat link rot. The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that a U.S. appeals court has declined to strike down Utah’s bigamy laws, it’s reasonable to ask: What does the Constitution, properly interpreted, have to say about the topic? Legally speaking, the issue can be split in two. The first question is whether a state may criminalize marriage to more than one person. The second is whether, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year to require states to recognize same-sex marriage, there now exists a fundamental right to marry more than one person -- and to make states treat plural marriages on equal terms with marriages between two people.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The briefs are in -- and the Supreme Court’s extraordinary effort to bring about a compromise in a contraceptive care case looks like a bust. Instead of finding a mutually agreeable solution, religious groups and the federal government appear to have only hardened their positions. In simultaneous filings late Tuesday night, each side took the opportunity to strengthen their arguments over how religious organizations go about seeking an exemption to the mandate for providing employees contraceptive care under the Affordable Care Act.

The world’s largest law library has an enemy in its crosshairs: link rot. The library’s mission of providing a comprehensive collection of U.S. law has led to a process for fighting the fleeting nature of internet hyperlinks, according to a blog post. Charlotte Stichter, the Law Library of Congress’ managing editor, recently described the library’s new process for addressing “link rot,” or citations to hyperlinks that stop working. The Harvard Law Review estimates that 36 percent of hyperlinks cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1996-2012, for instance, no longer work. Discovering the extent of the problem in legal citations led the library to Perma.cc, Stichter said. The service built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab helps the legal community create links to documents cited in their writing that never break.

Current and post-graduate students in the Law School’s S.J.D. program heard presentations on topics ranging from the promotion of religious freedom abroad, to the limits of territorial jurisdiction at the annual International Legal History Day on Thursday. The Harvard S.J.D. Association, a group that provides support for students studying for the Law School’s “most advanced law degree,” established International Legal History Day in 2011 as a way of enabling students to discuss research with peers and share their studies. “International Legal History Day was started to promote the work both of current S.J.D. candidates and of graduates of the S.J.D. program, and to contribute broadly to the intellectual life of the Harvard community,” said S.J.D. candidate Priyasha Saksena, one of the event’s organizers.

An op-ed by Bonnie Docherty. Dozens of countries are holding a multilateral disarmament conference at the United Nations in Geneva today to discuss a new and disturbing threat to humanity. Military powers from across the world are developing technology that could lead to the creation of fully autonomous weapons—that is, weapons that would select targets and fire without “meaningful human control.” The diplomats in Geneva need to decide how to deal with these “killer robots” in international law before it is too late.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. After the Supreme Court’s landmark gay marriage decision, can a constitutional right to plural marriage be far behind? It seemed that way in 2013, when a federal district court in Utah followed the Supreme Court ruling by striking down part of the state’s bigamy law in a case involving the family featured in the television show “Sister Wives.” But on Monday a federal appeals court reversed the decision. It said that the case was moot because Utah prosecutors had shelved prosecution of the Sister Wives family and announced a new policy to prosecute polygamists only if they were also suspected of fraud or abuse.

Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast went on strike Wednesday to protest an eight-month impasse with the company over their contracts....“I think what they’re fighting for is really the type of labor market that Americans believe should exist,” says Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, “a labor market where there’s some commitment by a company to its workers, to a community, and to being a good corporate citizen.”

Chanting, "Money ain't speech, corporations aren't people!" and "We are the 99 percent!" around 425 protesters were arrested Monday in a mass sit-in on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and more have returned to face arrest Tuesday. The demonstration, called Democracy Spring, is advocating a set of reforms the organizers have dubbed the "democracy movement," demanding Congress amend campaign finance laws and restore the Voting Rights Act, among other actions...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and a frequent activist in campaign finance who briefly ran for president this year on the issue, largely agrees. "What excites me about this movement is that it's talking about things that Congress can do tomorrow," Lessig says..."The clever idea here is that each day there's the same type of action, ultimately culminating in the same arrest," says Lessig. "The question is, what will the police do when they realize there's a pattern here, and whether they're going to take other steps."

The University of Massachusetts’ Judaic and Near Eastern Studies department and College of Humanities and Fine Arts welcomed author Noah Feldman and Felix Frankfurter, professor of law at Harvard Law School, for a discussion titled “Violence, Politics and Religion: Can Israel Remain Jewish and Democratic?” on Wednesday at Goodell Hall. An audience of over 50 students and community members gathered for the event, which focused on solutions for democracy in the Middle East, specifically in respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “A lot of people think they know what the morally correct answer is,” Feldman said, “but that is radically different from knowing an answer that will satisfy you morally, while simultaneously working in practice.” Feldman gave two main proposals to developing democracy in Israel that he concluded as both unlikely, but not impossible. These proposals included both a one and two state solution. The one state solution Feldman offered varied depending on the ideals of the state. Within Palestine an egalitarian secular democracy was envisioned, whereas Israel envisioned a democracy that would be fixed to remain nationally Jewish. Feldman believed these conflicting views of democracy inhibit the creation of a singular state between Israel and Palestine. “I don’t think it would be very easy to pull off, but do I think it is impossible? No,” Feldman stated.

How do you justify withholding a wonder drug from patients infected with a liver-killing virus until the disease starts to ravage their bodies? Why, in other words, do they have to become seriously ill before receiving help? Although biomedical advances have given rise to a new class of drugs that can cure hepatitis C, which is often fatal, a basic socioeconomic problem remains to be solved: Because of the high cost of the medicine, many public and private health insurers restrict access to treatment until the onset of liver damage. It’s a short-sighted approach that causes suffering and is at odds with a basic tenet of modern medicine — early intervention...“If there was a cure for Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis and we restricted treatment, there would be a huge outcry,” says Robert Greenwald, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School.

Four members of the student activist group Divest Harvard were arraigned and charged with trespassing after staging a sit-in in the lobby of the Boston Federal Reserve, home to the offices of the Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard’s $37.6 billion endowment...According to Franta and Harvard Law School student Kelsey C. Skaggs, a Divest Harvard member who attended the protest, the four activists were charged with trespassing. The charges were filed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Skaggs said.

On Wednesday at Harvard Law School, experts in forensic psychology, law, and juvenile justice policy discussed the Supreme Court’s decision to retroactively apply a recent ruling to ban mandatory life without possibility of parole for some 2,000 incarcerated juvenile homicides. The event, which drew a large audience, was held as a part of the Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and the Law School...“When the Supreme Court eliminated mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicides, it was unquestionably an earth shattering decision,” Judge Nancy Gertner, the moderator of the discussion and a lecturer at the Law School, said. “Given the plasticity of the juvenile brain, they ought to be sentenced to something that enables a right to hope.”...Panelist Robert T. Kinscherff, senior fellow in law and neuroscience at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Law School, said that high rates of juvenile homicides in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the rise of a perception by the public of the teenage “super-predator,” which influenced opinions around juvenile sentencing. “The fear of the future was that these teen super-predators were remorseless, heartless, highly violent, and were going to somehow attack us at our castle walls and bring us all down,” Kinscherff said. “It was heard in the legislature, and elsewhere, that if you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time.”