Media Mentions

Pittsburgh’s Lauren Wallace is willing to go the extra mile to make sure she’s getting the freshest milk possible at the grocery store. She regularly inspects the sell-by dates on the cartons and even digs to the back of the cooler to get the best ones. And when the milk in her fridge hangs around beyond the expiration date, she doesn’t even give the milk a chance to make a case that it’s still viable. ... According to Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, 90 percent of us throw food away — either always, most of the time or occasionally — when that sell-by date arrives. But what many consumers don’t realize is that those dates aren’t intended to be hard and fast deadlines; they’re just a guess by manufacturers about how long food will stay fresh.

Bloomberg Law Brief with June Grasso. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg View Contributor, and Steven Vladeck, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law, discuss a Texas abortion case that was heard in the supreme court on Wednesday. The case could have wide-ranging effect on women’s healthcare across the country, but after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, there is the chance that the case could end in a 4-4 tie. They spoke with Bloomberg Law Hosts Michael Best and June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law".

The decision by Harvard to use the term "faculty deans" to describe the lead advisors of student dormitories, instead of "house masters", is to do with the word's reminiscence of slavery in the US. Harvard is not the only Ivy League school to dispense with "master" in some academic titles. Yale and Princeton have discontinued its use, andMassachusetts Institute of Technology is considering a similar change. ... "There's just something to the stories we choose to tell," says Rathna Ramamurthi, a second year law student and member of Reclaim Harvard Law. "[The Royalls were] a particularly brutal slave owning family, a family that violently oppressed slaves, made all of their money off the backs of slaves."

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to state efforts to collect health data when it ruled 6-2 that Vermont's all-payer claims database is preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to the extent it seeks data from employer-sponsored health plans....Carmel Shachar, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation who filed a pro-database amicus brief, told Bloomberg BNA March 1 that the decision was “a very broad application of ERISA, as well as the preemption clause.” On that point, Shachar said the justices found ERISA's preemptive powers to apply, even though the Vermont program in question concerned areas “very different” from those regulated by ERISA—specifically, health-care spending and financing.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the Supreme Court’s most ardent protector of abortion rights, outspoken enough about their importance to become an icon to young feminists and a source of outrage among her detractors. With her valedictory on the court undetermined but within sight, Ginsburg, 82, may have only one more chance to leave a mark on reproductive rights. It comes in the most consequential abortion case during her time on the court...“Although she cares deeply about abortion rights, I would guess that she may have had less of an impact in this area than she might have wished,” said Richard Fallon, a Harvard law professor who studies the court.

An op-ed by Einer Elhauge. Like many people, I have been wondering: What on Earth explains Donald Trump’s remarkable appeal to voters? I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer is fairly simple. The message of his Republican opponents has effectively been: We are more faithful to conservative principles. Trump’s message has been entirely different. He essentially says: I will protect you. I’m conservative, but if protecting you requires jettisoning conservative ideology, I will do so. Protecting you is the prime directive. This message has powerful resonance, especially for voters who feel the Republican Party has failed to protect their interests.

Justice Clarence Thomas paid tribute on Tuesday to “Brother Nino” at a memorial service for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Mayflower Hotel attended by all eight remaining members of the Supreme Court...Prof. John F. Manning, a former law clerk who now teaches law at Harvard, said Justice Scalia welcomed debate and disagreement in his chambers, to a point. “When one of us got a little overinvested, he had to say, ‘Hey, remember, it’s my name that has to go on the opinion,’” Professor Manning said. “And especially with me, for some reason, this was often followed by the further observation, ‘And I am not a nut.’”

Is the FBI violating Apple employees' First Amendment rights in its efforts to extract data from a terrorist's iPhone?...Vivek Krishnamurthy of Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic said some forms of expression can be ordered. "It's pretty clear there are certain types of speech you can't compel," Krishnamurthy said. "[The government] can't compel you to voice support of Republicans or Democrats or some other type of belief. But you can compel a private company to put a warning label on a product. So it can be constitutionally permissible in some circumstances."

Ten research projects driven by faculty collaborators across six Harvard Schools will share over $1 million in the second round of grants awarded by the Climate Change Solutions Fund, an initiative launched last year by President Drew Faust to encourage multidisciplinary research around climate change...This year’s winners are:...Wendy Jacobs and Alma Cohen, Harvard Law School. Jacobs and Cohen will work with existing community organizations to encourage behavior changes that meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build social and political support for policies to mitigate climate change...Katherine Konschnik and Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School. Konschnik and Freeman’s project, called Power Shift, will help policymakers, regulators, and stakeholders design a modern legal infrastructure to support 21st-century electricity by creating and supporting a new network of expert communities.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The problem of presidential nominees who can’t get a vote from the U.S. Senate isn’t restricted to Supreme Court justices. It’s a recurring, structural issue that’s affecting executive officials of all kinds, including ambassadors. One partial solution to unfilled executive appointments, adopted by Barack Obama’s administration and by previous presidents, is to make someone the acting head of a department, then nominate that same person to fill the job permanently. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a decision that makes this fix essentially impossible. Now the Obama administration has said it will ask the Supreme Court to reverse that decision.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should laws be understood based on the way people speak? Or should they be interpreted according to technical rules of statutory construction, so that law becomes a specialized language game all its own? In a decision issued Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court voted, 6-2, for the second option. The case, Lockhart v. U.S., promises to be a classic. The court’s breakdown was about jurisprudence, not partisan ideology. And the issue was, remarkably enough, dangling modifiers.

Justice Clarence Thomas choked up. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got lost in her notes. Law clerks recalled stern admonitions with affection. Sons and daughters recounted family dinners, Sunday religious services and "the tickle monster." Justice Antonin Scalia was remembered Tuesday as a man whose brilliance and jurisprudence hid a softer side that included baseball, opera, red wine and pizza with anchovies, singing in his chambers and a sonorous laugh that reverberated through the courtroom...Two former law clerks regaled the audience with tales of how those opinions came together, often in raucous free-for-alls inside Scalia's chambers. "The whole thing was unforgettable," recalled Harvard Law School professor John Manning, who clerked for Scalia during the 1988 term. "His openness, his enthusiasm, his clarity, his playfulness, his common sense, his commitment to principle — all of this made even the blandest legal issue seem vivid and human and consequential."

A recent Harvard Law Record op-ed questioned if the shield conversation really has two sides. This week, we polled members of the HLS community to find out...We received 517 individual responses. In addition, nearly 100 responses included expanded comments. Some of these comments are highlighted in this article, and all are published below the poll results. We appreciate all of those who took the time to thoughtfully respond and to share their feelings on the shield, Reclaim HLS, Belinda Hall and more.

A California law that allows the state to seize unclaimed property after three years without making much of an attempt to contact the owners will not be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, but Justice Samuel Alito warned that such laws could face a serious constitutional challenge in the future. ...  In a brief penned by lawyers including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School, challengers urged the Supreme Court to grant certiorari because “the UPL is a recipe for abuse.”

The annual Gittler Prize, which honors contributions to racial, ethnic or religious relations, was awarded to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow at Brandeis Thursday. “It’s…

Two U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday sent strong signals to property rights advocates that they are prepared to examine the constitutionality of state unclaimed-property laws and so-called inclusionary housing ordinances. Although Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. agreed with the high court’s denial of review in Taylor v. Yee and California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose, they wrote separately—Alito in Yee and Thomas in San Jose—to raise due process and takings concerns. In Yee, Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, representing Chris Taylor, challenged on due process grounds California’s Unclaimed Property Law, which permits the state to confiscate forgotten security deposits, uncashed money orders, unused insurance benefits and other funds if the assets lie dormant for three years.

The mostly but perhaps not entirely dismissible case against Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president will begin to unfold on Tuesday in front of New York State Supreme Court Justice David Weinstein. He'll be hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by two New Yorkers who claim that the junior senator from Texas, born in Calgary to an American mother and Cuban father, is not a “natural-born U.S. citizen,” and thus is constitutionally disallowed from becoming president of the United States. ... Most legal scholars have said that Cruz's mother's citizenship settles the question; there have been a few dissenters, though, notably Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe has argued that Cruz is now arguing against his own strict reading of the Constitution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Remember when Justice Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself from a case involving then-Vice President Dick Cheney, even though they’d just been on a duck-hunting trip together? That episode yielded a priceless Scalia memorandum-opinion in which he declared, among other things, that he’d never been in the same blind with Cheney on the trip. But the main take-away from the episode was that Scalia -- and no one else -- got to decide whether he should be recused. On such matters, the justices’ own decisions are final.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it domestic violence if you didn’t mean to hurt your partner but recklessly did so anyway? Ordinarily, the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t weigh in on such a question, because the misdemeanor crime of domestic violence is determined state-by-state, not by federal law. But Monday the justices heard arguments on exactly that question, in a case involving a federal law that prohibits people convicted of domestic violence from having guns.

Harvard jointly filed an amicus brief to the National Labor Relations Board on Monday arguing against the unionization of graduate students, joining six other Ivy League universities, Stanford, and MIT in a call for the board to uphold existing rulings that define the relationship between private universities and graduate students as strictly academic....John T. Trumpbour, research director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said he thought the University’s move was not surprising. “I think that the private universities really feel that they are at a turning point, so a lot of them really want to do as much as they can to stop these victories now, and this they see as a very crucial decision,” Trumpbour said. He added that if a Democrat is elected the next U.S. President in 2016 and the NLRB rules in favor of graduate students, it could be difficult for a future board to reverse that decision.

As Iowa caucus winner Ted Cruz makes last-minute appeals for votes during Tuesday’s 11-state Republican primary bonanza, his legal team will quietly urge an Illinois judge to kill a lawsuit that claims he's ineligible to be president. The lawsuit is being heard in a state court system that grants ordinary voters standing to challenge a candidate’s ballot access, a soft target for opponents of the Canada-born Texas senator...“I do think a state court path is the most promising for challengers to Ted Cruz's eligibility at this pre-nomination stage,” says Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. His GOP rivals are “the only plausible federal plaintiffs, but even their status would be a bit tenuous on ripeness grounds," he says. Tribe, a nationally prominent legal expert who taught Cruz constitutional law, said earlier this year it’s unclear if Cruz meets the Constitution’s undefined “natural born citizen” requirement, giving intellectual heft to Cruz critics.