Media Mentions

Harvard University Professor Hal Scott doesn't think financial markets are safer eight years after the 2008 financial crisis. He said the government has a limited ability to bail out banks, something that saved the financial system from further turmoil in 2008. He also comments on the effectiveness of the extra capital banks are required to hold.

An op-ed by Hal Scott and John Gulliver. The stress tests that big American banks face each year are about to get more stressful. The Fed is planning to substantially increase—by an average of 57%, we calculate—the regulatory capital that the eight largest banks in the U.S. need to pass the annual tests. Had these expected higher capital levels been in effect this year, it is likely that the country’s four largest banks ( J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup ) all would have failed the test. As a consequence, they would have been barred from remitting more profits to their shareholders. The higher capital requirements will diminish these banks’ ability to lend, potentially affecting economic growth. That isn’t all: The Fed’s secretive process for designing stress tests might well be illegal. It likely violates the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, requiring government agencies to be transparent and publicly accountable.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. A “pardon Snowden” campaign was launched Wednesday in conjunction with the Snowden film. Snowden himself made the “moral case” for why he should be pardoned, and Tim Edgar made a much more powerful case. I remain unconvinced. I don’t think the president will, or should, pardon Snowden...But to say that the intelligence community benefited from the Snowden leaks is not to say that the president should pardon Snowden, for the price of the benefits was enormously high in terms of lost intelligence and lost investments in intelligence mechanisms and operations, among other things. Many Snowden supporters pretend that these costs are zero because the government, understandably, has not documented them. But it is naïve or disingenuous to think that the damage to US intelligence operations was anything but enormous.

Cass R. Sunstein, the Harvard Law polymath who annoyed business and activists in his three-year ride as Obama's White House regulatory chief and the author of The World According to Star Wars and heavier-thinking books, is a prescient student of our digital way of talking. As I noted in my 2004 book Comcasted, while Web evangelists were still idealizing online as the place to tie our world into one big friendly village, Sunstein worried it was ghettoizing into "echo chambers" where we avoid people we disagree with, sharpen prejudices, and abandon standards of evidence. Now, the professor (whose Philadelphia ancestors make him a cousin of Comcast boss Brian Roberts) is asking the question: Do we really want to read our leaders' emails?

When Bishop C. Holifield was a student at Harvard Law School in 1967 at the apex of the civil rights movement, the fledgling organization he had founded—the Harvard Black Law Students Association—had just two members: himself and co-founder Reginald E. Gilliam. Nearly 50 years and six deans later, BLSA has a membership of around 150 students, the Law School has seen a marked increase in the numbers of black students and faculty, and several waves of race-related activism have swept its campus...The Celebration of Black Alumni was started by alumnus and Law professor David B. Wilkins in 2000 to showcase the accomplishments of black Law School graduates and entice them back to campus. He said he had observed that many black alumni previously avoided general class reunions, because of their troubled relationship with the Law School. “For many of the black alumni, it was a difficult experience for a variety of reasons and one of them was they didn’t feel welcomed or included in the school in many ways,” Wilkins said. “[CBA] was a kind of transformative experience for people, and it gave them an opportunity to work through some of the pain that they had associated with the school, and to reconcile with themselves that the school had actually done wonderful things for them over the years.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Judges aren't history teachers. Or are they? That question lies at the heart of a deep left-right split over voting-rights laws. One side says that changes in state voting requirements should be assessed in the context of the American civil rights struggle. The other side says that history is irrelevant to the legality of modern voting practices. It's an emotional issue, exposed last week in an unusual dissent by a 94-year-old African-American federal appeals court judge in Ohio. The judge, Damon Keith, gave readers a history lesson complete with photographs and biographies of 36 men and women killed in pursuit of civil rights between 1955 and 1968.

This week, the International Criminal Court announced that it would give special consideration to pursuing crimes involving environmental destruction and land grabs. The announcement, made in a policy document released by the ICC's prosecutor on Thursday, appeared to show a deliberate expansion in focus for The Hague-based court..."They aren't changing the definitions of crimes or expanding the law or creating new crimes or anything like that," said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School. "They are paying particular attention to crimes that are committed by use of environmental impact or have consequences of environmental impact."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Federal law is supposed to protect the privacy of your Social Security number from government inquiries -- but apparently that doesn’t extend to a check on whether you’ve paid back taxes and child support. In a decision with worrying implications for those who oppose a single national identification number, a divided federal appeals court has rejected a lawyer’s refusal to submit his Social Security number along with his renewal of Maryland bar membership.

A letter by Eileen Connor, director of litigation for the Project on Predatory Student Lending. The editorial board’s defense of ITT Technical Institutes and attack on the Obama administration’s regulatory enforcement actions were premised on a claim that “not a single allegation of wrongdoing has been proven against” ITT. This is a hollow claim in light of the fact that ITT used one-sided contracts of adhesion to bind students and employees to secret and confidential arbitration as a means of suppressing claims against it. Not only did ITT require students to arbitrate claims, but also it mandated that students who seek justice in court pay the cost of ITT’s lawyers.

A new report out Thursday by a top group of executives at some of the country’s largest financial institutions finds the Federal Reserve may be engaging in illegal activity as it tries to regulate the banking sector. The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which includes executives from J.P. Morgan (JPM), Citigroup (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS), explains that it is the Fed’s "stress tests" on big banks that may be against the law...“This law makes clear that if an agency wants to do something that affects a large number of institutions, they must tell you [and] put it up for comment,” says Hal Scott, director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation and professor at Harvard Law School.

This September is a big month for the coal industry. Early in the month, the US Environmental Protection Agency released its final version of a modified Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that seeks to cut emissions from power plants tied to smog. And, at the end of the month, a federal circuit court will begin hearing arguments over the Clean Power Plan that aims to cut carbon emissions...Harvard Law Professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus explain that EPA’s rule gives states several alternative options to comply, such as replacing their coal-fired generation with plants that run on cleaner natural gas, or with green energies. States with a lot of coal, for instance, have less stringent requirements. With that, Freeman and Lazarus point out that coal plants in this country are on average 42-years-old and pollute a lot more than newer plants. Still, coal is expected to supply 30 percent of the nation’s energy mix by 2030, which negates the argument that the plan is nothing more than a “power grab.”

Following a year of of tension and discussion related to diversity at Harvard Law School, administrators unveiled a total overhaul of first-year orientation this year to acclimate students from varying backgrounds...Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells oversaw the restructuring process—a year-long project in which she consulted students and faculty to re-envision a “holistic approach” to orientation. “We really looked at the whole shape of orientation, from the key vantage point that it’s about how do we provide an opportunity for students to feel like they are acclimated to HLS and their surroundings and what the whole law school experience is about,” she said....As early as last September, first-year students dissatisfied with their orientation experiences brought the issue to Sells’s attention. One of these students was now-second-year Charlie Fletcher, who felt the Law School’s orientation fell short compared to the program at the Kennedy School, where he was a joint-degree student...Fletcher and Cameron Clark, who is now a second-year Law student and member of the student government’s Diversity and Inclusion committee and several affinity groups, also felt there weren't many affinity groups contacting incoming students at the start of the semester, leaving students feeling lost.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What good is the establishment clause if you can never use it? That’s the takeaway from a federal appeals court that refused to entertain a claim by parents in a New York town who allege that the Hasidic majority of the school board is illegally diverting money to religious institutions. The court relied on a narrow interpretation of the doctrine of standing, holding that the parents’ case couldn’t continue because they hadn’t been directly harmed by exposure to an unwanted religious law or message. This would be a shock to the Founding Fathers, who staunchly opposed spending tax dollars on religious causes -- but weren’t much troubled by government endorsement of religion. The appeals court’s decision stands the Framers’ establishment-clause values on their head.

Syrian refugees, while unable to seek asylum in Jordan, have been hosted with remarkable hospitality. However, their legal status and future security are contingent upon a broad array of identity documents that are not always accessible...“Over time, it’s become harder to get the documentation necessary to access services: you now can’t go to a public hospital without an MOI card, and you can’t get an MOI card unless you have an asylum seeker’s certificate,” explained Anna Crowe of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, who collaboratively researched identity documentation and registration issues among urban-dwelling Syrian refugees with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

Today, 13 years after he became the the first defendant ever sentenced to death in federal court in Massachusetts, Gary Lee Sampson returned to court for a new sentencing trial. Back in 2003, Sampson pleaded guilty to the stabbing murders of two men in the course of two separate carjackings in 2001, and jurors in the case unanimously chose the death penalty as his sentence. But in 2011, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf overturned that sentence, because one of the jurors lied during jury selection. So now the court will seat a new jury, tasked with deciding Sampson's fate once again. Guest: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

A group that represents executives from some of the largest U.S. banks concluded in a paper that the Federal Reserve likely acted illegally in adopting central parts of its annual stress tests, the latest evidence that some in the banking industry are contemplating a potential lawsuit. The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, a nonprofit organization of academics and financial executives, was set to release the paper Thursday, and The Wall Street Journal reviewed a copy. The groups’ members include senior executives at big banks J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., and State Street Corp...The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation is funded by its members. Hal Scott, director of the committee and a Harvard Law School professor and director of the school’s Program on International Financial Systems, said he wrote the paper along with the committee’s staff. Mr. Scott said in an interview that work on the paper began about six months ago after discussions with members of the group, and that the group approved it. He said the paper has “absolutely no connection” to industry discussions about potential litigation against the Fed, and that he was unaware of those discussions before the Journal reported them.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith & Stephen I. Vladeck. President Obama has said he will veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a bill that purports to make it easier for 9/11 victims and their families to sue Saudi Arabia in US federal court for its alleged role in indirectly financing the attacks. He would be absolutely right to do so. Reasonable people can disagree over whether giving the 9/11 victims their day in court justifies the diplomatic and foreign relations problems this law would provoke. (In fact, the two of us have disagreed on this issue in the past.) What should be clear to everyone, though, is that the bill Congress actually enacted last week provides virtually no benefits to justify its substantial costs.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Affirmative action in government contracting is alive -- barely. Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a Small Business Administration program that gives advantages to people who have suffered racial discrimination, reasoning that the law as written doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, because anyone can be the target of racial bias. The decision, which is based on paper-thin legal logic, is an attempt to keep remediation-based affirmative action from disappearing altogether. It may be too little, too late.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Senate panel has called the online advertising site Backpage.com a clearinghouse for sex trafficking in minors, and has subpoenaed its policies and records. The company says it’s a canary in the coal mine for government intrusion into the editorial decisions of journalists -- and has asked the Supreme Court to block the subpoena. Chief Justice John Roberts has stayed the subpoena to read briefs from the opposing parties. When he digs into the details, he may find that both sides are at least partly right.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. By now, very few Americans remain who have not at least heard of the Broadway smash hit Hamilton, which tells the story of America’s first secretary of the Treasury. The vast multitudes who have been unable to score a ticket to see the play have gotten to know it from the chart-topping cast album. Lyrics from the songs have become catchphrases — the determined Hamilton insisting, "I’m not throwing away my shot"; a gleeful Jefferson crowing, after Hamilton did throw away his "shot" (his political career) by publicly confessing to adultery, "Nevah’ gon’ be president now!" That last one was perfect for the 2016 primary season, with candidates falling left and right before the Trump juggernaut...The robust debates about Hamilton will continue as well. Despite the truly astonishing amount of good press the play has received, it has been the subject of a few strong critiques — which have been met with forceful responses. These debates, though informative, seem to me curiously and unfortunately polarized. Defenders of the play often appear to believe that critical discussion of the work must inevitably diminish Miranda’s accomplishment. That is simply not the case.

Marcia Sells, BC ’81 and the dean of students at Harvard Law School, emphasized the importance of self-discovery in her keynote speech at Barnard’s 127th convocation on Tuesday. Sells, who served as the dean of students at Columbia Law School before arriving at Harvard, was also the vice president for employee and organizational development at Reuters America and the assistant district attorney for the Kings County district attorney’s office. In an elaborate “The Wizard of Oz” metaphor, Sells described the many parallels she saw between Dorothy’s journey through Oz and a Barnard student’s experience at the college.