Media Mentions

MIT and Boston University are bolstering their partnership that gives legal advice to entrepreneurs and high-tech researchers. First Amendment and technology law expert Andy Sellars has been hired to direct BU’s new Technology and Cyberlaw Clinic. Sellars previously worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The new clinic is part of a broader effort to link BU’s law program with projects and businesses that emerge from students at MIT and BU. Last year, the two schools established an Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Clinic to help student entrepreneurs deal with legal trouble or work through common legal questions, such as how to incorporate a business and protect their intellectual property. The new Technology and Cyberlaw Clinic will help students tackle regulatory and legal hurdles that might trip up their cutting-edge research projects — something that MIT students in particular have run into before.

In December, the US Supreme Court reheard oral arguments in an affirmative action case called Fisher v. University of Texas. The highly anticipated case could have a far-reaching impact on the ability of US universities to consider race in admissions as part of their efforts to create a diverse campus. Indeed, proponents of affirmative action cite diversity as one of its main goals. However, one prominent higher education expert thinks conversations about diversity distract people from the original goal of affirmative action: reparative justice for people who have traditionally been oppressed. "Because affirmative action now rests on the diversity rationale, people who embrace affirmative action have to make all sorts of claims for diversity," Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy said at a New York University-sponsored event focused on race-based admissions at colleges. "Some of the claims that are made in favor of diversity are very questionable," he continued.

The symbol of Harvard Law School is already changing after the Harvard Corporation voted Monday to accept a committee’s recommendation to remove the shield used for 80 years because it does not reflect the values of the school. It was a powerful symbolic decision from one of the world’s most elite universities at a time when campuses across the United States and overseas are debating whether historic symbols, statues and names should be removed because of their ties to racism, or whether that would amount to erasing the past...“I was pleased that the corporation got to the matter as quickly as it did,” said Bruce H. Mann, chair of the committee and Carl F. Schipper Jr. professor of law. “No one ever has any idea when the corporation meets, so when you send off a recommendation to them, you really never know when you might hear back. I think that in this case, the quickness with which they addressed the issue was a measure of how seriously they took all the effort we had put into trying to resolve the matter.”

As a Harvard Law School committee was issuing its recommendation March 3 to do away with the institution’s controversial seal, the man who helped bring the issue to light was preparing to give a lecture -- appropriately enough -- on inflammatory symbols of the past. “How’s that for a coincidence?” asked Daniel Coquillette. A former dean of the Boston College Law School and current Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, the bespectacled Coquillette might not be the most public force behind the recent movement to examine the school’s racial climate. But as co-author of the 2015 book, “On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century” -- which outlines the often unflattering racial history of the prestigious institution -- he has been widely credited with helping to jump-start it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. North Carolina offers drivers a license plate with the slogan “Choose Life,” but for years has refused to offer a pro-choice plate. If you think that sounds like the state is unlawfully choosing between the two viewpoints, you’re not alone. In 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state had to play fair under the First Amendment and allow both. Last week, the appeals court reversed itself -- and not by choice. It was following orders, by applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that upheld a Texas license-plate program in which the state refused to allow a plate featuring a Confederate battle flag.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The melee at the Donald Trump rally Friday night in Chicago raises a fundamental First Amendment question: When a speaker, such as the Republican presidential candidate, is confronting angry protesters, whose speech rights come first: the speaker’s or the protesters’? The U.S. Supreme Court’s answer to this question has evolved over the years. At one time, the court was ambivalent, sometimes favoring the speaker and sometimes willing to shut down the speaker to avoid public disorder. Today, however, the norm is clear: Protesters who disrupt a rally can be removed by police so that they don’t exercise what’s called a heckler’s veto over the rally’s organizer.

Apple Inc. is objecting to a request from federal prosecutors in Boston that it help unlock the iPhone of an alleged member of one of the city’s most notorious gangs, according to court records — a case that echoes the government’s high-profile fight with Apple in the San Bernardino terrorism case...Bruce Schneier, a security technologist at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a critic of the government’s request, said the Apple case raises a keen national question: “Do we want security or surveillance?” “The danger is not whether the FBI submits one request or a thousand, it’s forcing Apple to create the tool,” Schneier said. “Once the tool exists, they’ll use it a million times, and we’ll all be vulnerable.”

The Harvard Corporation on Monday approved a recommendation to retire the Harvard Law School shield, which came under fire amid student protests last fall because of its ties to the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slaveholder who helped to establish the School through a bequest from his estate. In a letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, President Drew Faust and Corporation senior fellow William F. Lee said the School “should feel free to discontinue use of the shield.” With that response, the Harvard Corporation affirmed the recommendation of a committee appointed by Minow that the controversial shield be replaced. “If the Law School is to have an official symbol, it must closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not,” the committee wrote earlier this month. In an email to the HLS community Monday afternoon, Minow thanked the president and the Corporation, as well as the members of the committee whose recommendation the Corporation approved. She acknowledged that retiring the shield “will take some time, but the work has begun.”

The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, agreed Monday to allow Harvard Law School to remove and replace its seal, which features the crest of a slaveholding family...Student activists were unsurprised but pleased with the Corporation’s decision. “I think that this represents the culmination of a lot of activism by students all across Harvard Law School, and I’m thankful that the Corporation has finally done the right thing,” Alexander J. Clayborne, a member of Royall Must Fall, said. Clayborne said activists will continue to push the Law School to meet their other demands, including reforming the school’s curriculum and hiring more minority faculty members.

The image of three sheaves of golden wheat arranged inside a blue-and-crimson shield has stood as the symbol of Harvard Law School and its graduates for nearly 80 years. But sometime next year, the shield, which uses elements of a former slave-holding family’s coat of arms, will be scrubbed from Harvard’s campus. In its place will be a new emblem, officials said Monday — one that better reflects the law school’s values and its mission. The Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s governing boards, has accepted the law school’s request to change the controversial symbol in time for its bicentennial in 2017.

As Apple tries to fend off government demands for access to iPhone content, the company is leaning on free speech arguments as a key part of its defense in a California courtroom...About half of the successful First Amendment appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court today focus on corporate rights — a big change from previous decades, according to a survey of a half-century of court decisions by Harvard Law professor John Coates.

The Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia highlights a growing rift between the country and the nation’s highest court on questions of economic power and support for big business. And that gap, legal experts say, is unlikely to be significantly narrowed by the kind of justice President Obama — or the next president, Democrat or Republican — is expected to nominate...Mark Tushnet, a left-of-center professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the author of “In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court,” says that while big businesses frequently lose individual cases before the court, these are “in some sense discrete problems.” By contrast, the arbitration and class-action decisions “end up regulating a large swath of litigation,” he said. “Lots of lawsuits are affected by the outcome and they are affected in a pro-business way.”

The stock market isn’t convinced that the biggest tax inversion merger on the horizon — Pfizer’s pending blockbuster deal with Allergan — will be concluded without major problems...Whether Pfizer would have more flexibility in using its overseas cash after the merger is an important question for the markets, but the answer is not yet clear. The Treasury is expected to issue further rules within the next several weeks. Stephen E. Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the Treasury “has the prerogative to make a more muscular application of its administrative authority than they have already” regarding taxation of stranded cash controlled by a company like Pfizer.

Fee fights among plaintiffs attorneys in multidistrict litigation have forced more federal judges in recent cases to wade into the disputes — with practically no case law to guide them..."There are huge issues about the governance of MDLs that no Supreme Court has addressed in any satisfying way," said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School who has testified as an expert for those challenging MDL fees. "The fee aspects are one of a subset of questions of how they're governed that have yet to attract good appellate law. The district court judges are struggling with these issues."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The circumstances of the birth of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz put constitutional citizenship into the headlines. Also in the news: A federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled last week that the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision doesn’t follow the flag to the island. What would happen if you mashed the two issues together, mixing birthright citizenship with the Constitution’s applicability to U.S. territories? The answer to this otherwise random-seeming question is in fact before the Supreme Court right now. At issue is whether it’s constitutional for Congress to deny birthright citizenship to people born in American Samoa, which has been a U.S. territory since 1900.

‘Everyone in Minnesota will be able to use convenient, affordable world-class broadband networks that enable us to survive and thrive in our communities and across the globe.” This vision for universal broadband access for Minnesota was forged by nearly 200 community leaders from across the state last November. It struck a chord. ...“Minnesota should be looking at the rest of the country in its rearview mirror,” said Harvard Law School Prof. Susan Crawford during our Border to Border Broadband conference in November. Crawford could see that Minnesota has many broadband heroes and that funding programs and public will are building, but we can and must do better, faster.

For 80 years, Harvard Law School has been represented by a shield that features Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”) and three sheaves of wheat. But it turns out that the traditional-looking logo isn’t so innocent: Its design was based on the coat of arms of a slaveholder known for treating his slaves with brutal cruelty. Now, reports Arun Rath for NPR, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, has endorsed changing the school's official shield—but questions about slavery’s legacy on campus remain. ... They seem to have prevailed: On March 4, Dean Martha Minow announced that she would endorse the recommendation from a committee of Harvard Law School faculty, students, alumni and staff assembled in November to revise the school’s shield. “Its association with slavery does not represent the values and aspirations of Harvard Law School...it has become a source of division rather than commonality in our community.”

On Friday, the committee tasked with considering the future of Harvard Law School’s seal, which some have criticized for its connection to the slaveholding Royall family, recommended that the school change its emblem. While we disagree with the substance of this decision, we respect the process by which HLS reached it. As the committee's report makes clear, this debate is far more nuanced than a simple case of right versus wrong or racial justice versus injustice. The committee explained that faculty, staff, students, and alumni of diverse races, genders, and ages fell on both sides of the issue. Indeed, one of America’s foremost scholars on slavery’s history dissented from the committee’s recommendations.

How do you decide if your milk is fresh enough to drink? You might be one of the many Americans who relies on sell-by dates to determine when to throw it out. But it turns out we could be dumping perfectly good milk...“Basically, around 90% of people throw food away when that date arrives, either always, or most of the time, or occasionally,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. Leib says what most people don’t know is those sell-by dates have no standard meaning. They vary by state and even by company.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you think that Donald Trump would be a terrible presidential nominee and an even worse president, and you want to convince his supporters that you are right. What should you do? Behavioral science reveals why there’s no easy answer -- yet it also offers some clues about what might work. The most important findings involve the risk of “backfiring corrections.” A growing body of research demonstrates that when people’s convictions are firm, attempts to correct those views, with evidence, can make them firmer still. That should be a red flag for anyone who seeks to turn Republican voters against Trump.

Beyond the limestone facade of a grand building with arching entranceways, dozens of students have occupied a space at Harvard Law School for the past three weeks. They’ve re-named the room “Belinda Hall,” in honor of a woman who was a slave of law school founder Isaac Royall...“The institution sent a bunch of black and brown people to deal with a group of black and brown people,” said Bianca Tylek, a 29-year-old Latina student with long, wavy brown hair, in her final year of law school, who told me she has been mistaken for janitorial staff before...Keaton Allen-Gessesse, a 28-year-old from Chicago in her final year of law school, told me, “There’s really no place in the classroom for understanding issues of racial inequality or white supremacy...The dean of student affairs, Marcia Sells, said the school has improved the environment for minority students over the past several decades. “I understand what the students are asking for but some of it is, I think, we also have to do more in helping them understand that this is a little bit how the pedagogy works, this is also how it’s changed,” she told me, adding that she thinks the school needs to do a better job of pointing out to students where they’re already teaching historical context at the school, rather than having a separate dedicated critical race theory program.