Media Mentions

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.

In Massachusetts, both members of an unmarried couple can now be considered the parents of their children, even though only one is the biological parent. That's the unanimous decision of the state's highest court..."This decision, in the long run, points to the severance of parentage from biological obsession, that is, whether the two people are two men or two women or a man and woman really shouldn't matter in terms of who gets to at least make a case to a court that it's in the best interests of the child that that person have parental rights," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

It’s hard to know how to interpret food date labels. If it smells fine but it’s past the best-by mark, should you pitch it? And what does “sell by” really mean anyway? Professor Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and deputy director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, is on a mission to help decode the mixed messages sent by those puzzling stamps on our food. The professor was recently honored by Food & Wine and Forbes as one of the 20 most innovative women in Food and Drink for her work surrounding food waste.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. “I'd like to buy a new boomerang please. Also, can you tell me how to throw the old one away?” Never mind whether you think that joke is funny. Do you think your best friend would like it? You might think you know the answer; after all, people like each other partly because they make each other laugh. At the very least, you might be confident that a mere machine, equipped with data about how other people react to jokes, couldn't do better than you in answering the question of what your best friend will find funny. If so, think again.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The first Monday in October this year is also the first day of Rosh Hashana -- so oral arguments for the new Supreme Court term will begin instead on a Tuesday. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was reputedly unsympathetic to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s request to turn the court’s Christmas party into a holiday party, must be spinning in his grave. But Rehnquist’s former law clerk, Chief Justice John Roberts, is apparently more ecumenical -- and it’s a different era, with three Jews on the court and a fourth nominated to it. Nevertheless, the Jewish New Year is two days long (or, one long day according to the rabbis). And perhaps it’s appropriate that on the day when, according to tradition, God sits in judgment of his flock, the court will consider one case about crime and one about punishment. The first is about whether it’s federal bank fraud to rip off a customer rather than the bank itself. And the other, more subtle case is about whether double jeopardy allows charges to be retried when the original jury acquittal was logically irrational.

Donald Trump tax documents were published without his permission in The New York Times, but that doesn't necessarily make for a clear-cut criminal case against the newspaper or its source...Yet the Trump tax disclosure also comes at a time when waves of hacks and leaks are inuring people to the idea of invading privacy, notes Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor whose specialties include privacy. It may be one thing when journalists are revealing information about as public a figure as Trump, but if everyone's information and communications come to be seen as fair game, "at some point, this is not, then, a phenomenon that is about public accountability," he said. "It's a phenomenon that could be chilling."

The United States Supreme Court today declined to hear the case of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger. A jury in 2013 convicted Bulger for his role in 11 murders, extortion and drug offenses in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the decision, the 87-year old will continue to serve his life sentence. Guest: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

An op-ed by Jack M. Balkin and Jonathan Zittrain. We tell online services what we like, who we love, what we are doing, and where we live, work, and play. And they in turn provide us with a window to the world, shaping what we see and suggesting what we should do. As we use these services, they learn more and more about us. They see who we are, but we are unable to see into their operations or understand how they use our data. As a result, we have to trust online services, but we have no real guarantees that they will not abuse our trust. Companies share information about us in any number of unexpected and regrettable ways, and the information and advice they provide can be inconspicuously warped by the companies’ own ideologies or by their relationships with those who wish to influence us, whether people with money or governments with agendas. To protect individual privacy rights, we’ve developed the idea of “information fiduciaries.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The last Supreme Court term was strange by accident. Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February left the court with only eight members, and several 4-4 decisions left major issues unresolved. Anticipated decisions on religious liberty, union dues and presidential power over deportation will have to wait for the court to return to nine justices. The big-ticket cases that were decided, on abortion and affirmative action, were products of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s move to the left. The Supreme Court term that starts Monday will be strange by design. The Senate’s refusal to vote or even to hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland means the court enters the term shorthanded.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The fate of the Sept. 11 families’ lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may depend on the Partridge family. The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, enacted by Congress on Thursday over President Barack Obama’s veto, is supposed to let the suit go forward. But for the federal courts to have legal authority, the families will most likely have to show that the Sept. 11 attacks were “effects” of actions taken by the Saudi government. And the leading U.S. Supreme Court case governing what counts as effects involved the actress Shirley Jones, known for her role as Shirley Partridge in the 1970s show “The Partridge Family.” Jones sued a writer and editor for the National Enquirer where she lived in California over a libelous article that was written in Florida.

The New York Times’ publication of part of Donald Trump’s tax returns only revealed a thin slice of the real estate mogul’s finances — not enough to draw conclusions about how much he’s paid in taxes over the years and nothing indicating any illegal nonpayment, experts said...But without seeing his returns from those years, or returns leading up to 1995, there’s no way to determine what he paid, said Stephen Shay, a Harvard Law professor and tax expert. “There still remains a large amount of information that would be needed — not the least of which would be the rest of his tax returns — in order to understand what to make of it,” Shay said.