Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision with immense consequences for data storage services and law enforcement, a federal appeals court has quashed a warrant for e-mails that Microsoft was storing on a server in Ireland. Unless Congress changes the relevant law, this ruling creates the incentive for criminals -- or anyone else who wants privacy protection from government surveillance -- to make sure their data is held outside the borders of the U.S. The reasoning of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan arguably followed from Supreme Court precedent -- but it was probably a mistake nonetheless, and it isn’t really a win for privacy rights.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Doesn’t everyone have an outspoken Jewish grandmother? That was my thought on reading the indignant commentary on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unflattering assessment of Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. To put the point more seriously, there’s nothing wrong with a sitting Supreme Court justice expressing her personal political views when they don’t implicate any case that’s currently before the court.

In a rather confusing and seemingly contradictory statement, FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday that the agency would not recommend bringing charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state..."There are lots of statutes that deal with the mishandling of classified information, but what they all have in common is that it's intentionally or knowingly reckless, not careless," Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School lecturer who specializes in criminal law, told Business Insider. "If carelessness were sufficient, we would have indicted half the government."

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law school professor and Bloomberg view columnist, and Steven Sanders, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, discuss the escalating feud between presumptive republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The conflict has escalated over the last week as Ginsburg doubled down on her anti-Trump views in three interviews, with CNN, the AP and the New York Times, and is leaving legal experts divided on the political place of the Supreme Court. They speak with Bloomberg Law hosts June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law."

Mitt Romney is sitting out the 2016 election cycle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean his campaign isn’t running ads. Or, more accurately, that his campaign ads aren’t being run. Kelli Ward, a former Arizona state senator challenging Sen. John McCain, apparently ripped a 2008 Romney campaign ad to use in her Republican primary campaign this year...Harvard Law School professor and copyright law expert Larry Lessig told Boston.com that many campaigns make video footage freely available online as a work around to allow super PACs, which are prohibited from coordinating with campaigns, to legally use the material. However, he said that did not appear to be the case here, in which the Ward campaign used nearly an exact duplicate of an ad the Romney campaign pushed online itself in 2008. “I don’t think it’s fair use,” Lessig said, reiterating the view of the Romney camp.

Passcode’s group of digital security and privacy experts say the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – meant to prevent illicit trespassing on computer systems – is written far too broadly and often results in punishments that are too harsh for the infractions. ...The broad legal boundaries of the CFAA have also allowed prosecutions of computer crimes to proceed if hackers are found to have violated a website’s terms-of-service agreement, some Influencers say. “That overreading should be soundly rejected,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School.

When Ronald S. Sullivan starts teaching his class at Harvard Law School each semester, he asks his students how many of them have been spread eagle over a police car. Every year, it's the same answer: Two or three black students and maybe one other person of color raises their hand. "These are the kids who made it to Harvard Law at the top of their class," Sullivan said. "The common denominator is color." Many of the high-profile killings of black men at the hands of police, including Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have involved minor infractions like driving with a broken taillight or selling loose cigarettes. Most of these men have also been poor or working class. But high-earning professional black men say, they too, face challenges when dealing with police -- though sometimes the slights are less violent and more subtle. Wealth "helps, but its not a complete insulator," Sullivan said. "Race is still seen as a proxy for criminality."

At a memorial service in Dallas Tuesday for five police officers killed last week, President Obama called for Americans to participate in honest dialogue about race. The president said such conversations are the antidote to the violence and despair set off by the killings of two black men last week by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, incidents that proceeded what followed in Dallas. Those seven deaths last week, far from Boston, remain the source of confusion and frustration for many families in Greater Boston. Parents are trying to figure out what to say to children, especially black children, about justice, safety and progress. Three parents discussed these concerns on Morning Edition...David Harris...is African-American and managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.

President Obama is fondly voicing support for his close friend and mentor, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who has announced he has Alzheimer’s disease. Obama has spoken of Ogletree as a constant source of inspiration to him, particularly during difficult times. In a statement to the Globe, the president said Tuesday that he and his wife, Michelle, are saddened to hear of the diagnosis. Michelle Obama is a 1988 Harvard Law School graduate. “Professor Charles Ogletree has been a dear friend and mentor to Michelle and me since we met him as law students more than two decades ago,” Obama said. “But we are just two of the many people he has helped, supported, taught, advised and encouraged throughout his life. “We were saddened to hear of his recent diagnosis, but we were also so inspired by Charles’s courageous response,” the president continued.

After decades of fighting for justice, civil rights, and equality, the man whose friends call him “Tree” is now ready for a new battle. “You have to fight it; you have to address it,” Charles J. Ogletree Jr. says of his recently announced diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Despite revealing that he has the disease, the Harvard Law School professor, activist, and author said Monday that he has no plans to retire or clear his busy schedule. Instead, he feels called to spread awareness, especially among other people of color, who are disproportionately likely to develop the neurological disorder.

The shooting deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota at the hands of police last week, captured on social media, followed by the killing of five Dallas officers by a retaliating sniper, shocked the nation and left many Americans feeling like the country is unraveling. Police supporters and critics of the Black Lives Matter movement complain that citizen protests and inflammatory rhetoric are inciting violence against law enforcement. Movement supporters and protestors seeking reforms say that unpunished police violence against black people is fanning community anger. Professor Ronald S. Sullivan is a legal theorist in areas including criminal law, criminal procedure, and race theory, and serves as faculty director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. In a Q&A session, Sullivan spoke with the Gazette about the shootings and the longstanding tensions between police and African-Americans.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Given the horror of the murder of the five police officers in Dallas last Thursday, it may seem absurd or distasteful to ask whether it was a good idea to kill the sniper with a bomb mounted on a robot. Surely anything that stopped the carnage was justified in the moment, and the police seem to have had no clear shot at the sniper. But the issue is more complicated, and it deserves to be considered carefully. There’s a legal difference between targeting a crime suspect and targeting a wartime enemy. There’s also a difference between using a weapon that can be aimed and using one that puts bystanders at greater risk. And a precedent set under emergency conditions can easily expand in future cases. The step from the robot bomb to a drone strike is barely even incremental: morally and technologically, they’re basically the same.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A group of high-profile legal minds wants the Supreme Court to eliminate super-PACs, the advocacy groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to praise and attack political candidates. But instead of asking the court to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court case that lifted many restraints on political spending, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, they plan to ask the justices to overturn a lower court decision that interpreted Citizens United to open the door to the super-PACs. The strategy is worth pursuing...Why attack SpeechNow instead of challenging Citizens United directly? The answer is subtle, and it reflects the legal expertise of the group, which includes my senior Harvard Law School colleague Laurence Tribe, the unquestioned master of the dark arts of shaping doctrine through litigation.

Nearly two dozen countries have spent the last three years wrangling over a trade deal that will set the rules governing trade in services for much of the world for decades to come. Yet you’ve likely never heard of it. Other mammoth trade deals have triggered demonstrations across the EU and the U.S. while the so-called Trade in Services Agreement’s technicalities are being worked out largely without political pushback. In fact, it seems to have made it to the homestretch...“It has been more than 20 years since the conclusion of a major trade agreement on services has been made,” said Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in international trade law.

An op-ed by Derecka Purnell `17. Today, social media introduced me to Alton Sterling during his brutal, involuntary final moments with Baton Rouge police officers. More times than I can count since Trayvon Martin’s murder, friends, family, and colleagues have reached out to me through a helpless, angry, inspirational, curious, loving, or hopeless “what can I do?” message or phone call. Hours after watching Sterling’s death, I read a law school friend’s post on how we can process police and vigilante killings that are widely publicized. He inspired me to pull this list together. This list is in no way comprehensive or exhaustive, but rather entry steps to further connect people to each other in tangible ways.

How can the U.S. fight the spread of Islamic State propaganda? The militant group’s infamous videos of beheadings, violence and torture have a dangerous allure for would-be radicals, and they proliferate over social media in a way that can make containment seem hopeless. But fighting extremist content online need not be very complicated, according to Dr. Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College...Farid is referring to a technique called “hashing,” which he pioneered nearly a decade ago while battling a different but equally vile online scourge: child pornography. Hashing involves scanning the unique digital fingerprint, or “hash,” of a video or photo, making it easy to find instances of that content and remove it...“There’s a valid concern about overreach,” Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, told HuffPost. “Just because a video is flagged, it doesn’t mean there are no conditions under which it should circulate, like as part of a news report, or a parody.” “Plus, as with other algorithms, the question is, is the tech working correctly?” he went on. “We don’t know enough about how these technologies [like hashing] really work.” Still, Krishnamurthy acknowledged that the government is in a tough position. Militant propaganda is a genuine national security concern, and it can’t be ignored.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The legal troubles of the father and son executives of an Iowan egg farm could have repercussions for businesses everywhere: In a case involving a 2010 salmonella outbreak, an appeals court has decided that you can get prison time for violating federal regulations, even if you didn’t know you were breaking the rules. It's a unique decision, and one that the Supreme Court should examine.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Germany changed several laws this week in direct reaction to the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne by a disorganized group of young Muslim men. One change, implementing “no means no” in German rape law, was long overdue. A second, taking criminal history into account in immigration decisions, was probably inevitable and isn’t out of step with other countries. But a third, which creates criminal liability for being part of an amorphous group and tacitly allowing an assault perpetrated by someone else, is more worrisome. It smacks of collective punishment, deviates from European criminal law norms, and threatens the right of assembly.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The Supreme Court’s decision in the corruption case against former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell will complicate the already complex investigation of union influence in the Walsh administration. The court found that it was not a crime to receive money from a constituent in exchange for introducing him to officials who might be interested in his business and even hosting him at the governor’s mansion. What was illegal was taking money in exchange for a decision on a pending matter, like the award of a specific government contract or a vote for bill. The decision was unanimous and followed other Supreme Court decisions rejecting the government’s novel interpretation of federal criminal statutes.

America still lags behind other developed countries in internet service and availability. As of this year, according to the Federal Communications Commission, roughly 34 million Americans lack access to high speed internet, which the agency describes as having download speeds of at least 25 Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3 Mbps. But that number only tells part of the story. The vast number of those Americans lacking access live in small towns or rural communities, about 23 million people. That’s 39 percent of all rural residents in the country...Susan Crawford of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society says that large corporations don’t see it in their financial interests to connect smaller areas. “They are responding rationally to Wall Street, and Wall Street wants them to keep their profits up very high,” she said. “And for them, it’s not as profitable to run a wire to a remote, isolated area with a few houses in it.”

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib, Sally Greenberg, and Roni Neff. The July 4 weekend marks our nation’s birthday and the time when Americans celebrate — not only with fireworks, but with picnics, backyard BBQs, pool parties. Sadly, one byproduct of these celebrations are the many tons of food that we will inevitably waste after these family gatherings. Today, 40 percent of food produced in the United States is thrown away each year (over two-thirds of that by consumers). Ketchup with a date label that says it has expired.” Salad dressings that are past their “use by” dates, chips and cheese with passed expiration dates. As a result of confusing date labeling policies, consumers regularly toss out foods that are perfectly safe, wholesome, and still taste good.