Media Mentions

On Monday, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the high stakes legal battle over President Obama’s executive actions on deportations, which could impact the fates of millions of immigrants and has set in motion one of the defining political fights over the proper extent of executive power of the Obama era. The Obama administration submitted its final argument this week, and a decision is expected in June. But for all the noise that will attend all of these legal proceedings, they may not end up mattering that much in practice...“If Hillary Clinton is elected president, she will nominate a justice, and then once that justice is confirmed, she will seek a do-over before the Supreme Court, at which she will probably prevail, and the program would then go forward,” Harvard law professor Noah Feldman tells me. “In this scenario, the election will resolve it ultimately, but it might take a long time.”

Mayor Marty Walsh announced Tuesday that Verizon will spend more than $300 million to bring its advanced fiber optic network to all corners of the city. The high speed Internet and cable television service has long-been available in many other Massachusetts communities. By connecting Boston, Verizon will now close a major gap in its service in the region...But some observers are skeptical. Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor and director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said it’s unclear whether Fios will actually result in lower prices and better service because of the increased competition with Comcast. “It will take a lot of acts and enforcement activity by the Walsh administration to ensure that landlords allow Verizon to show up to ensure that two companies actually compete with each other, but kudos to them for taking this first step,” Crawford said. “The [Michael] Bloomberg administration took a very similar step a few years ago and it hasn’t led to complete coverage in New York City of competing high speed Internet access services. It may be that Boston will be able to do a better job.”

In October 2015, Harvard Law School students demanded the removal of the law school's shield because of its ties to a slave owner — Isaac Royall Jr. — who is also credited with helping form the Harvard Law School. Annette Gordon-Reed, law school professor and Thomas Jefferson historian, was one of the only people on a 12-person committee who wanted to keep the school's shield. That committee ultimately voted to retire the shield from the law school in March. We talked to Gordon-Reed about why she thought the school should've kept the shield and why she believes many people weren't receptive to her suggestion.

Law School affiliates discovered additional physical evidence of illegal audio recording activity over the weekend and on Monday, heightening activists’ concerns about surveillance of private conversations...Reclaim Harvard Law members publicly aired concerns about what they perceive as collaboration between administrators and HUPD during the investigation in a press release Tuesday. “We find it hard to trust the Harvard University Police Department charged with the investigation given their close relationship with the administration,” second-year Law student Simratpal Kaur wrote in the statement. Administrators initially offered to assist in the HUPD sweep of the student lounge on Monday. Law School spokesperson Robb London said administrators who were present only offered to lift furniture and were not sent to intervene in the sweep.

Police arrested several members of the student activist group Divest Harvard after they staged a sit-in within the lobby of the Boston Federal Reserve Tuesday afternoon, protesting Harvard Management Company’s investment in the fossil fuel industry...The four students had been sitting for about one to two hours before being escorted out of the building, according to Harvard Law School student Joseph “Ted” E. Hamilton, a plaintiff in a case against the University some members of the group filed in 2014...Harvard Law School student Kelsey C. Skaggs, a Divest Harvard member in attendance, said only four members of the group actually protested inside the lobby in order to avoid blocking normal access to the building, which also houses the Consulates General of Italy and Japan.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What good is winning a reprieve from life without parole if the court just turns around and resentences you to 59 years in prison? For juvenile offenders, that question was partially answered Monday when an appeals court reversed the new sentence given by a lower court to a defendant convicted of committing rape and murder when he was 16. Kids grow up, and the appeals court said the sentencing judge should have considered how much the defendant might have matured in the decade between his crime and resentencing.

When Deborah Alejandra Popowski, J.D.’08, was just beginning her studies at Harvard Law School (HLS), she learned a powerful lesson about the value and import of the law. An American attorney representing a Guantanamo detainee spoke at an HLS event. The lawyer told of her client, a Saudi citizen in his early 20s, and of the regimen of inhuman treatment that he endured at the hands of U.S. military forces. For Popowski, the lawyer’s testimony brought home the human dimension of torture. “Everybody in law school was talking about concepts and the rule of law regarding torture,” Popowski said. “That was the first time that I had ever heard somebody talking about people.” Ever since, she has tried to follow that example and tend the people. Since 2009, when Popowski began working as a fellow at the HLS International Human Rights Clinic, she has advocated for torture survivors as part of a movement to seek accountability for U.S. torture through both state and international courts.

...The anaerobic digester pilot along with a mandate that certain large food waste producers keep that waste out of the trash stem from legislation passed in 2011. But five years later not a single one of five proposed anaerobic digesters has started construction and food waste is increasing. A lot...DEEP has gone looking for help to figure it all out. And that meant heading across the border to Massachusetts, which is much further ahead on food waste reduction. Two organizations there, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Center for Eco-Technology, recently began working with Connecticut. Harvard’s senior clinical fellow, Ona Balkus, said even with cities like San Francisco, Seattle and New York far into food waste recycling, including pickup, Connecticut actually is ahead of the game. Most states and cities are just starting to look at the issue and the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture only last September announced a first-ever national food waste reduction goal – 50 percent by 2030.

If you’ve crammed for the SATs, agonized over creative essay topics, or pestered teachers for recommendations, then you know something about our college admissions process. Namely, that it is very stressful and very complicated. But there are critics who say it’s more than just stressful. It’s totally wrong, and it’s hurting America. Lani Guinier is one of those critics - and she wants a complete redesign: “It has its benefits, but it also has stakes that eliminate the option, or the opportunity, for many working class whites, low-income blacks, to even consider going to these higher education schools.” Guinier is the author of The Tyranny of the Meritocracy and a professor at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we’ve come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it’s big. A new essay by Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn offers by far the most comprehensive and illuminating discussion to date of that gap. They find that for every dollar earned by a man working full time, women working full time earn about 79 cents. More alarming, the gap hasn’t closed much since 1990. Sex discrimination is probably a big part of the explanation.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Google just scored a win by losing a Mississippi case. On the surface, a Friday ruling by a federal appeals court appears to support a campaign by that state’s attorney general to hold the Internet titan accountable for copyright infringement. Look again. On a close reading, the court’s opinion is promising for Google and doesn’t bode well for Attorney General James Hood III’s aggressive enforcement actions. The company had initially lucked into a very sympathetic federal district court judge who issued an injunction to block the attorney general. Now, by ruling against Google and reversing the injunction, the more cautiously sympathetic U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has set the lower court right.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision on the rights of campus dissidents, a U.S. appeals court has held that free speech protections won’t excuse acts of harassment. But it also held that a student who has been disciplined can sue the university if the punishment was for expressing political views. The two parts of the ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cut in opposite directions. The first will encourage administrators; the second will hearten student activists. But the more important win is for the activists, who can get a day in court after being disciplined under university procedures that are often opaque.

As “Hamilton” fever has swept America, historians have hardly been immune....But even among historians who love the musical and its multiethnic cast, a question has also quietly simmered: does “Hamilton” really get Hamilton right?...Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” put it more bluntly. “One of the most interesting things about the ‘Hamilton’ phenomenon,” she wrote last week on the blog of the National Council on Public History, “is just how little serious criticism the play has received.”...Ms. Gordon-Reed — who is credited with breaking down the resistance among historians to the claim that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings — wrote in her response that she shared some of Ms. Monteiro’s qualms, even as she loved the musical and listened to the cast album every day. “Imagine ‘Hamilton’ with white actors,” she wrote. “Would the rosy view of the founding era grate?”

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, is only years away, experts say. A new report called Monday for a ban on such "killer robots."..."Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used," said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. "Now there is a real threat that humans would relinquish their control and delegate life-and-death decisions to machines."

Planned changes that President Barack Obama says are aimed at ensuring American companies do not avoid tax by shifting their headquarters overseas could also force foreign companies to adopt more conservative U.S. tax-planning strategies..."It, without doubt, significantly changes the rules of the game," said Stephen Shay, professor of law at Harvard University. "In the old days you bought and then you levered up as much as you can and that is not going to happen in the same way, but how much of a constraint that becomes is unclear," he added.

Two international arms control groups on Monday issued a report that called for maintaining human control over a new generation of weapons that are increasingly capable of targeting and attacking without the involvement of people. The report, which came from Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic at the opening of a weeklong United Nations meeting on autonomous weapons in Geneva, potentially challenges an emerging United States military strategy that will count on technology advantages and increasingly depend on weapons systems that blend humans and machines...The ability to recall a weapon may be a crucial point in any ban on autonomous weapons, said Bonnie Docherty, the author of the report and a lecturer on law and senior clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. Weapons specialists said the exact capabilities of systems like L.R.A.S.M. are often protected as classified information. “We urge states to provide more information on specific technology so the international community can better judge what type and level of control should be required,” Ms. Docherty said.

“Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true,” thunders Angelo (Brian A. Cami ’19), deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in one of the many moments of “Measure for Measure” that remains darkly pertinent centuries after the Shakespeare play was first performed. In Hyperion Shakespeare Company’s production, running April 8 to 16 at the Loeb Experimental Theater, Angelo wears a business suit; the target of his sinister sexual advances, Isabella (Eliza B. Mantz ’18), dons a similarly contemporary costume; and their meeting takes place in a modern office, lit like a film noir...Critics usually classify “Measure for Measure” as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” Its tone veers wildly from political drama to slapstick farce, sometimes in the same scene, as it follows one of the Bard’s most convoluted plots. Put simply, after years of not enforcing Vienna’s vice laws, Duke Vincentio (Patrick J. Witt, a second-year Harvard Law student) leaves the government in Angelo’s hands, believing he will be better able to crack down on the city’s debauchery, and goes undercover as a friar.

Twenty years ago, Larry Day learned two dangerous viruses were circulating in his body, HIV and hepatitis C. Both infections came from needles shared during his years as an injecting drug user. Only one caused him big problems: hepatitis C. That virus destroyed his kidneys, an uncommon complication. Over time, he knew, hepatitis C could lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. So when drugs came on the market promising to cure him, Day — by then free of illicit drugs — was eager to give them a try. But his Medicaid insurance plan said no. He could get the drugs only if his liver was damaged, and his liver was still in good shape...Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, in February led a class-action lawsuit against the state of Washington, asserting its Medicaid program was illegally rationing hepatitis C drugs. In Massachusetts, he has written MassHealth officials asking to collaborate on ways to make the drugs more available. But state officials have rebuffed him, because, he said, they don’t want to admit “that it’s all about costs....They know that’s not a legitimate grounds on which to deny people treatment.” Greenwald called the state’s approach baffling. The state, he said, pays $10,000 a year to keep a person with HIV healthy for decades, but balks at a one-time $40,000 payment to cure someone of hepatitis C.

An op-ed by Ramon Gonzalez `18. Boston has some of the best summer programs in the country, but that is still not enough to ensure that all students have access to them. At the Boston Summer Learning Summit on March 22, Rahn Dorsey, Boston’s chief of education, called for every student to have access to opportunities that let them pursue their passions over the summer. That is an urgent, important goal. But we can’t accomplish it until Boston starts learning where and why so many of its students miss out and fall behind over the summer. It’s surprising that one of the country’s premier urban school systems does not know where and why so many students lose out on summer opportunities. At the summit, Boston public schools superintendent Tommy Chang acknowledged that we “don’t have a good way to do this yet,” and said we need to be “crystal clear” about where in our city students lack access to great summer opportunities.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If I tell you a California judge struck down the addition of a Christian cross to the Los Angeles County seal, that probably sounds like a good example of the separation of church and state. If I tell you that the cross was going to be added to an image of the San Gabriel mission to reflect the real-life, cross-topped church, the same decision begins to sound like judicial overreach. When it comes to religion, framing is everything -- at least under current law.

...If the current debate over how to regulate services like Uber and Airbnb reveals anything, it's hypocrisy on all sides of this issue. Industries that have profited handsomely from a market monopoly for decades are suddenly pleading for support from the people they've fleeced. Homeowners with dollar signs in their eyes are appalled at the prospect of being taxed for turning their suites into hotel rooms...Harvard Law School author and researcher Yochai Benkler was one of the first to look at the potential for information technology to allow forms of networking that might transform the economy and society. He wrote 10 years ago in glowing terms about the revolutionary power of "loosely or tightly woven collaborations" to change fields ranging from software development to investigative reporting. But lately, Benkler has been warning against what he calls the "Uber-ification" of services; he argues that what's emerging is not "sharing" but an "on-demand" economy for everything ranging from dog walking to grocery buying. In the process, he says, regular folks are using their homes and cars to take the places of "the people formerly known as 'employees.'" And affordable rental housing becomes someone else's problem.