Media Mentions

Over 2,000 people, including Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo, are signing up for Democracy Spring, a coalition of 90 groups that's planning an April sit-in at the Capitol. The group is demanding an end to big money in politics and wants reforms to better protect the right to vote and fair and free elections. ...In addition to Ruffalo, Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who briefly ran for the 2016 Democratic nomination, and Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who unsuccessfully challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, are also signing on. Both Teachout and Lessig made campaign finance reform a centerpiece of their bids.

In response to requests by Congressional leaders to increase the degree of federal oversight for large university endowments, Harvard has indicated it will work with Congress to provide more clarity and information regarding the use of its endowment resources. ...Harvard Law School professor Thomas J. Brennan, a taxation expert, said that Congress has the power to reclassify these large universities as private foundations instead of public charities. This reclassification, according to Brennan, would enable Congress to enforce expenditure requirements, which are applied to private non-profit organizations like the Gates Foundation. Public charities are not required to use a particular amount of their funds each year. “Expanding taxation to private university endowments could lead to dangerous slippery slope. If endowments can be taxed, what about pension funds?” Brennan said.

The takedown happened on YouTube last week, based on the presence of several clips of “Little Wing” to illustrate points on compulsory music licensing. The…

The FBI wants Apple to help unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook. A federal judge has ordered Apple to comply. But, Apple says it will not comply. Now, we have the world’s most famous tech company pushing back against the government as it tries to investigate the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. Once again, we’re at that complex nexus between privacy and security.  Guests: Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis professor of international law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, vice dean for library and information resources at the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

When a publishing company asked Cass Sunstein if he’d like to forge ahead with his plan to write a book that mixed discussions of economic policy and Supreme Court decisions with story lines from the “Star Wars” franchise, he didn’t hesitate to say yes. “I was faster than the Millennium Falcon,” he said. “And I have never had as much fun writing anything.”

Republicans on the campaign trail aren’t exactly shy about their desire to roll back President Obama’s bank regulations. Donald Trump has called Dodd-Frank a "terrible" "disaster," Ted Cruz has introduced legislation to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and Marco Rubio has claimed, incorrectly, that more than 40 percent of small and midsize banks were wiped out by the financial reform law. ... To understand why this is a bad idea, it’s helpful to work through an example. This is what Harvard law professor John Coates, a leading critic of extending cost-benefit analysis to financial regulations, does in a recent paper. His case studies show that cost-benefit analysis will result in "guesstimation" at best. As Coates told me, "Back in 2014, I asked proponents of cost-benefit analysis in financial regulation for a nontrivial rule that benefited from a quantified CBA that you could achieve consensus on. To this day, nobody has been able to give me one."

Students at Harvard Law School are vowing to occupy a student lounge indefinitely, citing concerns about diversity on campus. The students claim Harvard’s administration has not met a series of demands made last semester to help fight against what they say are issues of systemic racism. WBUR’s Fred Thys reports for Morning Edition about the students’ goals to create a better environment for students of color they believe are being marginalized by the school.

It seems Big Brother never gets old — and he’s still watching us. That’s according to a new stage adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” that just opened at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. ... To that common response to the location request, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain says, “Well and that choice, I think, is too often fairly illusory.” Zittrain founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It has the quality of somebody telling their child, ‘When you go to bed at 8 p.m. tonight, do you want to wear your yellow pajamas or your blue pajamas?’ ” the law professor continued. “It’s a fake choice in that you’re still going to bed at the time I say.”  

Renee Montagne talks to [Harvard Law Lecturer on Law] Matthew Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about the battle with Apple over accessing the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers.

A group of Harvard Law students have occupied one of the school’s halls, saying there is no space for marginalized students and staff on campus. The occupation, which began Monday night, is an effort to create such an environment, according to a statement from the students. ... “Our recent efforts are intellectually descended from the numerous student movements that have arisen time and again at HLS, because of a long-true reality: Harvard Law School is not an inclusive institution,” a statement from the group said.

A major private sponsor to Harvard Law School student organizations discontinued its funding for student events after receiving complaints about a discussion hosted by the group Justice for Palestine, forcing the Dean of Students Office to compensate and leaving some questioning the influence of corporate donors at the school. ...“The Law School is able to fund student conferences with other resources, and the Law School has continued to maintain the same level of funding to support student activities,” [Robb] London wrote the statement. ...“I think as an organization we’re very concerned about free speech on campus, and on the role of corporate law firms in directing student speech and what kind of events we can have,” [Brian] Klosterboer said.

A student group at Harvard Law School claimed this week that its stance on free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drove Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to withdraw generous annual funding for student-run activities at the school. Harvard said that Milbank had not rescinded its $1 million-dollar gift—$200,000 a year spread over five years—but the funds would now be administered differently. The student group, HLS Justice for Palestine, said Milbank decided to pull its funding after $500 in firm-donated money was used to buy pizza for an event advocating free speech for pro-Palestine advocates. Milbank was recognized as a sponsor of the event, sparking a “flood of angry phone calls and emails” from “Milbank executives” and others, according to the group.

After a federal court ordered Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by an attacker in a December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, penned a passionate letter warning of far-reaching implications beyond the case. ... “The issue is of monumental importance, not only to the government and Apple but to the other technology giants as well,” said Tom Rubin, a former attorney for Microsoft and the United States Department of Justice, who is now a law lecturer at Harvard University. “Those companies are undoubtedly following the case intently, praying that it creates a good precedent and breathing a sigh of relief that it’s not them in the spotlight.”

Apple prides itself on being a standard-bearer on security and encryption and on protecting customers' privacy. That position has put it on a collision course with law enforcement. Last night, a federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the Justice Department break into an iPhone that was used by a suspect in a mass shooting. Apple is fighting the order. ...And there's also the reality that Apple sells most of its phones outside the U.S. Jonathan Zittrain says if Apple says yes to the U.S. government, it will make it harder to say no in countries with very different values. Zittrain is a cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Oh, I would imagine that other countries are watching this dispute with great interest.

Two weeks after suing private insurers for improperly denying costly drugs to patients with hepatitis C infections, Seattle lawyers have expanded the fight to Washington state’s Medicaid provider. ...“It is unlawful to withhold prescription drugs that cure a disease from Medicaid beneficiaries based on the cost of those drugs,” the complaint filed by the firm Sirianni, Youtz, Spoonemore and Hamburger states. Co-filers include Columbia Legal Services and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School.

(Subscription required) One can expect only the finest teachings from Harvard University, but something is brewing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prof. Robert H. Mnookin, the chairman of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, along with other colleagues, has spent the past year-and-ahalf developing video lectures featuring some of the world’s leading experts in negotiation.

You can’t make this stuff up: An online lecture included as part of a course on U.S. copyright law offered by Harvard University in the U.S. and overseas has been taken down by YouTube due to a copyright claim by Sony Music. ... Adding to the irony, the blocked lecture, which explains aspects of copyright law as it applies to music and licensing, is taught by William “Terry” Fisher, a noted copyright expert who is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School. “This was an annoyance last week for my Harvard Law School students and the 400 students from around the world taking the online class,” said Fisher. “But it’s also having a global impact because students enrolled in affiliated courses at universities and cultural institutions in other countries that use the same lectures and readings and are on a different academic schedule now are finding they can’t get access.”  

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: To the public, Justice Antonin Scalia was best known for his hard-line conservatism and his originalist constitutional thought. But to judges and lawyers, not to mention law professors, Scalia was better known for his distinctive philosophy for interpreting statutes, known as textualism. Scalia didn’t invent originalism. But he did invent textualism, at least as practiced by many judges today, and it stands as his most important contribution to legal thought. Scalia’s death at 79 is a good occasion to ask whether textualism is here to stay. My answer is a qualified yes. Although I think Scalia’s originalism is likely to fade, the basic textualist method of interpreting statutes according to the words while eschewing legislative history and purpose has a future -- because it has a past.

Washington and Silicon Valley geared up Wednesday for a high-stakes legal battle over a phone used by one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists, a contest each side views as a must-win in their long fight over security versus privacy....“It’s not really a question of security versus privacy. It’s security versus security,’’ said Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Saying that all of these devices must be insecure so the FBI can have access would be a security disaster for us as a society.”

The potential outcomes of Texas cases currently before the Supreme Court changed Saturday with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But some experts say the fate of several Texas abortion clinics is dependent on a different justice — Anthony Kennedy. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said he believes Kennedy will vote to overturn the 5th Circuit’s decision. “There is no respectable way to treat the challenged Texas regulations as constitutional under the ‘undue burden’ standard,” Tribe said.

The Supreme Court lost one of its most forceful critics of federal wetlands regulations with Justice Antonin Scalia's death, a loss that could shift the balance on how the court approaches some of the most significant water rules of President Barack Obama's tenure, writes Pro Energy’s Annie Snider. Scalia heavily influenced a more critical approach to wetlands rules among his fellow justices, once famously comparing the government to "an enlightened despot" in its implementation of regulations that sought to protect rivers and streams by regulating what individuals and businesses could do on soggy patches of land miles away. "It was Justice Scalia, I think, who woke up that part of the court," Harvard Law Professor Richard Lazarus said. "He brought a very deep skepticism which became infectious for many of the justices on the court."