Media Mentions

Two plaintiffs’ lawyers admitted Friday that they made “a mistake” when they accused famed attorney Alan Dershowitz of having sex with their client when she was a minor. The admission came in a joint statement released by the lawyers, Paul G. Cassell and Bradley J. Edwards, and Dershowitz to settle defamation suits the two sides filed against one another in state court in Florida. “Edwards and Cassell acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz,” the statement said. “[A]nd the sexual misconduct accusations made in all public filings ... are hereby withdrawn. Dershowitz also withdraws his accusations that Edwards and Cassell acted unethically.”

A group of Harvard Law School students who have been occupying a room on campus to host conversations about inequality and racial diversity say they discovered a recording device this week secretly attached to the bottom of a table. Activists from the group Reclaim Harvard Law School said Friday that they fear the device, which can be voice-activated, was being used to pick up sensitive conversations about sexual assault and race that was held between students who thought they were in a “safe space.”...“That space has been very personal, and people have come into that space being very candid,” said Titilayo Rasaki, a second-year law student and one of the group’s members. “The fact that it was being illegally recorded was a violation of our movement and what we expect in the space.”...Law school officials said Friday that they have referred the matter to the Harvard University Police Department. The incident is under investigation. “Our mission as an institution of higher learning depends on protecting and promoting the free exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. We deeply prize those values,” said law school spokesman Robb London in a prepared statement. “The Law School administration is troubled by an allegation that anyone in our community would attempt to surreptitiously record anyone else’s conversation.” London said the school only learned about the allegations Friday, after the Reclaim Harvard Law School group sent out a press release.

Harvard police are investigating allegations that an audio recording device illegally documented sensitive conversations Harvard Law School activists held in a hall they are occupying. Several students with the activist group Reclaim Harvard Law School said they found a recording device on Tuesday that was taped under a table in the Caspersen Student Center Lounge and contained recordings of their conversations and events since last Saturday. According to a press release Reclaim Harvard Law published Friday, the recorder captured discussion that included personal conversations between students, a sexual assault bystander training at which victims recounted their assaults, and Boston-area residents sharing stories of eviction from their homes. “It was just really scary,” second-year Law student and Reclaim Harvard Law member Simratpal Kaur said. “We were really surprised that anyone who maybe disagreed with our movement would go to this length.”

Pfizer plans to abandon its $152 billion merger with Allergan — the largest deal yet aimed at helping an American company shed its United States corporate citizenship for a lower tax bill — just days after the Obama administration introduced new tax rules, a person briefed on the matter said late Tuesday...Though Pfizer and Allergan’s deal was less affected by earnings stripping, the potential consequences of the new Treasury rules could go well beyond corporate inversions, according to tax experts. “To me, the earnings stripping part of this is quite clearly the most significant of the changes they’ve put out,” said Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and former deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs in the Treasury Department.

Stamping out stigma and broader inequality remains a vexing challenge that requires the tools of both researchers and activists, according to panelists at Harvard University. Three experts at a panel on comparative inequality cited mixed progress in the effort to advance fairness and social inclusion, touching on discrimination against the Roma people and the disabled, and the rise of inequality in an era of support for human rights. “It’s a long battle. It’s one that will take many years, but we see progress and we’re quite excited and enthused about it,” Michael Stein, visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said of the global effort to end discrimination against people with disabilities. But Stein, executive director of the Law School’s Project on Disability, said it is still painful to see how much work remains to be done. “The hardest part of my job is going into places where people are suffering … and who are not happy with the glacial movement of change,” he said.

Donald J. Trump wants to build a bricks-and-mortar wall to keep immigrants out of the United States. President Obama wants to build a virtual wall to keep companies from leaving. Neither is likely to work. On Monday, the Treasury Department issued new regulations in an attempt to limit “inversions” — in which American companies are acquired by foreign companies, legally lowering the tax burden of American companies...the I.R.S. could declare some or all of Pfizer’s debt to be equity, so the interest payments would be dividends and no longer deductible. It’s important to note that the new earnings-stripping regulations apply not just for inversions, but for a vast array of multinationals’ transactions involving American businesses. This approach was proposed by the Harvard Law School professor Stephen E. Shay in 2014. Writing in Tax Notes, he argued that the Treasury secretary has “direct and powerful regulatory authority to reclassify debt as equity and thereby transform a deductible interest payment into a nondeductible dividend.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A U.S. appeals court says that the federal law protecting religious liberty doesn't shield a Hawaiian church that uses cannabis in its rituals. That's pretty outrageous. The decision’s perverse logic relies on a cartoonishly rigid idea of religious obligation. And it suggests that the religious-freedom law only protects mainstream religious groups like the Catholic Church, not smaller denominations.

The more scientists study the issue of food waste — and its worrying implications for both the environment and global food security — the clearer it becomes how much of a problem it is. Now, new research is giving us a few more reasons to clean our plates. A study just out in the journal Environmental Science and Technology concludes that we’re already producing way more food than the world actually needs — but a lot of the excess is being wasted, instead of used to feed people who need it...“So much of poverty and famine aren’t about a lack of resources overall — they’re just distributional [problems],” said Emily Broad Leib, an assistant clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “It’s not surprising to see that, and both across countries and within countries this challenge of the food markets really being attainable for certain segments of the population and not for others.”

An op-ed by Duncan Kennedy. Contrary to many colleagues, I do think there is a possible principled defense of Reclaim’s actions with respect to posters in Belinda Hall, one ­which I find persuasive, though with some reservations. The defense applies even to what many of the faculty seems to see as the “red line” of taking down antagonistic posters in the occupied space, and a fortiori to moving them to another space. I don’t think it is coherent to frame the issue as whether (in one colleague’s phrase) “acceptance of this situation by us, in what I take it we still regard as a public space of the law school, could be explained consistently with free-speech and common-membership principles for our school and university to which I’d assume we are all committed.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The administration of President Barack Obama just won a big legal victory for its decision to let some children of illegal immigrants remain in the country. On the surface, that might seem to augur well for the administration's efforts to ease other immigration restrictions in the face of Congressional opposition. Don't count on it. The federal court decision that backed Obama was based on precarious legal reasoning that's vulnerable to reversal by the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The prosecutor offers a deal. The defendant agrees. What right does a judge have to object? It's a salient question on Wall Street in recent years, as a number of federal judges have rejected plea deals and settlements, saying prosecutors and regulators were being too lenient on the corporate defendants. One such judge, Jed Rakoff, has even waged a parallel critical campaign in the media, pressuring the Securities and Exchange Commission to be tougher on corporate defendants. On Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit weighed in -- on the other side from Rakoff. In an opinion by Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was seen as a contender for the Supreme Court, the court said that federal judges can’t reject deferred prosecution agreements, a standard plea bargain technique. The opinion reflects a highly passive version of the judicial role, which is good news for defendants, but bad news for the public.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Last week the State Department’s top lawyer, Brian Egan, gave an important but underreported speech that marked the final stage of the Obama administration’s normalization of once-controversial Bush-era doctrines about the conduct of war. Before a gathering of geeky international law-loving lawyers in Washington, D.C., Egan announced the Obama administration’s official embrace of the same preemption doctrine that justified the invasion of Iraq. Egan’s speech marks the culmination of a continuity project that began, to many people’s surprise, at the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term. Since 2009, Obama has adopted the notion of a global war against al-Qaeda and associates; he expanded the legal basis of that war to include ISIS; he embraced military detention without trial, military commissions, state secrets and large-scale secret surveillance; and he ramped up drone strikes, deployment of Special Forces and cyberattacks.

Harvard students, faculty, and fellows are training new high-tech instruments on Boston’s skies, searching for one well-known troublemaker and one escapee among the atmosphere’s invisible gases. The old troublemaker is carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas released by burning fossil fuels that long has been known as the main cause of climate change. The escapee is methane, an even more powerful emission that is the main component of the natural gas burned in home furnaces and in the electricity-generating power plants that are shouldering aside coal-fired plants across the country...The project is being conducted in collaboration with Hutyra and Wendy Jacobs, clinical professor of law and director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. Jacobs said the interdisciplinary nature of the project is key, and the goal is not just to use science to illuminate the problem of methane and carbon dioxide emissions in the city, but to design laws and regulations to address the problem. “Laws, regulations, and public policy will not be effective unless informed by reliable science and data. Reliable science and data can effectively be deployed to solve a problem when integrated into new technologies, laws, regulations, and public policies,” Jacobs said. “The collaboration of our distinct disciplines is more powerful than either discipline alone.”

It has recently come to light that U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, along with the presidents of the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, sent a letter last fall to their member corporations urging them to resist efforts aimed at encouraging corporations to make their political, or lobbying and election spending (including donations to trade associations like the Chamber), more transparent. ...But beyond mere rank hypocrisy, there is ample evidence to suggest that the Chamber's opposition to corporate political spending transparency is also bad for its corporate members. Harvard professor John Coates shows that companies that engage in lobbying and campaign spending have less robust corporate governance practices (like shareholder engagement with the board and proxy access) which may impact shareholder value, than do companies that don't play in politics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Law and tradition say that a jury verdict shouldn't be overturned on the basis of something jurors say in their deliberations, no matter how ignorant or offensive. But what if there’s strong evidence that the jury deliberations were racially biased? Does the defendant’s right to a fair trial supersede the tradition of letting the verdict stand? The Supreme Court has agreed to hear this fascinating question in a sexual assault case where one juror, a former cop, told the others that Mexican men "do whatever they want" with women.

An op-ed by Tyra J. Walker ’18: In response to the thoughtful and candid article posted by Michael Shammas, I would like to contribute to a debate which I have been hesitant to partake in for fear that I might be wrong—and that someone, somewhere was bound to disagree with me. I’ve found myself in an interesting place as a black, female, first-generation law student in the middle of the so-called “Postergate” controversy. There’s much that I am still processing in regards to the flurry of activity from the last few days, but there are a few things I know, and wish to share:  

An op-ed co-written by Professor Bruce Hay and Harvard University Researcher Mischa Haider:  Bathroom predators stalking our wives. Cross-dressing perverts out for our daughters. Shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. The absurd, mendacious claims made by proponents of legal segregation of transgender peo.ple, most recently in the vicious laws enacted in North Carolina and Mississippi, bring to mind the Walrus — the Lewis Carroll character who wished to talk of many things, such as whether pigs have wings. With his nonsensical words, theatrically uttered as he sets the table, he distracts his attentive audience of oysters from their impending doom on his plate.

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting earlier this week published an article detailing the many instances in which Massachusetts prosecutors “have violated defendants’ rights to a fair trial regularly and without punishment.” These violations, according to NECIR, range from prosecutors failing to turn over important evidence to defense lawyers or to disclose information bearing negatively on witness credibility, to prosecutors misrepresenting evidence in their closing statements to the court. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and a professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email that prosecutors can be held responsible for misconduct in-house through “demotion, suspension, censure." They can also be held accountable from the “outside, i.e. through the ethical rules governing counsel.”

Housing rights advocates interrupted an event featuring Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Melvin Watt at the Law School Monday evening to protest Watt’s housing finance policies, prematurely ending the event and prompting questions about security protocol at the school. The event, organized by Law School professor Hal S. Scott, was intended to be a “fire-side chat” about federal housing policy. Scott said he heard beforehand that activists might protest, and as a result, Harvard University Police Department assigned two plainclothes officers to the event at the request of Law School administrators.

Thomas Jefferson has long been a lightning rod, but the past year has been tougher on him than usual. Protesters on college campuses have plastered Jefferson statues with Post-it notes reading “racist” and “rapist.” And on Broadway, the musical “Hamilton” has deliciously skewered him as a flamboyantly scheming hypocrite. Still, on a recent afternoon, there was America’s third president, standing serenely on his pedestal in front of the Columbia School of Journalism, flanked by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, the authors of the latest book to plumb the mysteries of his character. ... Ms. Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Hemingses of Monticello,”seconded the point. “People read history the way we watch movies, where you have a good guy and a bad guy,” she said. “What’s the point of even going to the library to do research if you already know what you think?"

Emily Broad Leib is the co-founder and director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. The clinic pairs Harvard law students with nonprofits and government agencies working to increase access to healthy food and assist farmers engaged in sustainable agriculture.Emily’s work began in Mississippi, which has one of the highest rates of poverty and obesity in the country. While a fellow in the Mississippi Delta, Emily worked on simplifying and clarifying laws that prevented small-scale farmers from selling their produce in farmers’ markets and helped start the Mississippi Food Policy Council. I spoke with her about food-policy councils, small farmers, food waste, and using food as a lens for understanding a community’s wider health problems.