Media Mentions

A letter by Delcianna J. Winders, Animal Law & Policy Program. Ringling’s retired elephants likely won’t spend the bulk of their days “roam(ing) ... and play(ing)”...Ringling only lets the elephants off chains into small corrals for about eight hours a day, according to 2007 testimony by Gary Jacobson, general manager of Ringling’s conservation center. Sometimes they are chained for 22.5 hours a day or even longer. It’s no surprise that Ringling’s elephants suffer painful foot diseases. Some wild elephants can roam more than 30 miles every day. Ringling’s claim that chaining is necessary to “make sure they don’t disturb each other or steal each other’s food” is laughable.

Balloons and roughly 100 people filled the student lounge at Harvard Law School to commemorate graduating student activists and a year of contnued race-related activism at the school in an informal commencement ceremony Tuesday evening...Second-year Law student and Reclaim Harvard Law member Aparna Gokhale said group members came up with the idea for a commencement ceremony several weeks ago during what they called a low point in their activism efforts...Third-year Law student and Reclaim Harvard Law member Rena T. Karefa-Johnson spoke about the support system she found among activists and the lessons in “radical love and resistance” she learned from the movement. Johnson recalled that during her first year at the Law School, she found that people were hesitant to speak publicly about race. “To see what this room looks like right now is so crazy to me,” she said, looking around the crowded lounge.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s investigation into fetal-tissue sales has run into a large obstacle: a federal judge’s preliminary injunction protecting the National Abortion Federation. The injunction, issued Feb. 5, bans the pro-life Center for Medical Progress from releasing video taken at two NAF conferences. But the order is creating headaches for Mr. Brnovich and 13 other attorneys general...Those in the center’s corner include 11 legal scholars from nine U.S. universities, including Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon and Stanford Law School professor Michael W. McConnell. The professors “do not agree with one another on all aspects of the controversial issue of abortion,” said their amicus brief. “But [they] are united in insisting that all Americans — no matter what their views on abortion — have an unfettered right in our society to have access to important information about controversial matters, including abortion,” the brief said.

An op-ed by Bruce Hay. Against her better judgment, my beloved was reading the comments section of an article about the bathroom bills sweeping the country. A man calling himself rcp196935 had commented that the laws were necessary to keep women safe from predators. Having heard this refrain once too often, my beloved decided to respond. She is a trans woman, she explained, and poses no danger to anyone, and like any other woman should be allowed to use the public restrooms in peace. She signed it in her own name. Mr. rcp196935 had a reply for her.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Supreme Court has decided a Baltimore Police Department extortion case straight out of "The Wire" on the basis of common sense. It held that the federal bribery statute allows a conviction for conspiracy to commit bribery even when the co-conspirator was also the victim. That's the nature of a kickback, after all: The party that's being extorted is also one of the beneficiaries of the scheme. This holding required the court to go beyond the literal words of the statute and ascertain its true purpose. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who hated such purpose-driven statutory interpretation, is harrumphing somewhere as his textualism was rejected. You'd expect Justice Clarence Thomas to have dissented, and he did. But in a noteworthy twist, the other dissent in the 5-3 decision was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor -- and her opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. Both, it appears, disfavor the extension of conspiracy law, although perhaps for different reasons.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The most dramatic moment of my legal education came when Professor Owen Fiss of Yale Law School threw his paperback copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 25 feet across a classroom into a waiting trash can. It wasn’t just the eminent scholar’s aim that impressed me, but his point: that the federal rules of procedure are basically unconstitutional because of the way they’re adopted. Instead of being enacted by Congress and signed by the president like ordinary laws, procedural rules are written by the unelected Supreme Court, which transmits them to Congress, after which they ordinarily go into effect without change.

It is different this time for best-selling author Michael Pollan, and not just because his subject has changed. The people are different too. They’re not farming or fermenting or cooking. This time they’re dying. Pollan’s books about food, diet, and industrial agriculture — he is perhaps best known for 2006’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” — have made him an influential voice in America’s food fight over obesity, nutrition, and diabetes, and have made him revered by those who believe that something is fundamentally wrong with how we mass produce and prepare our meals...Assistant Clinical Professor of Law Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, hosted Pollan in a private meeting with clinic students and in one of her classes afterward. Pollan answered questions and asked students about their own food-related projects. Broad Leib credited Pollan with helping awaken the country to problems with the food system by explaining potentially dry topics like the intricacies of the U.S. farm bill in an easy-to-understand, engaging way. It’s telling, she said, that roughly three-fourths of student applicants to a Harvard food law summit last fall cited Pollan’s writing as influential.

On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump has promised to do quite a few things that are beyond the powers of an American president, like billing Mexico for a border wall. But when it comes to foreign trade, his powers as president would come closer to his expansive ambitions....International trade laws limit the type of help governments can provide to companies, but the role of the Chinese government is particularly opaque, said Mark Wu, a professor of law at Harvard and a former United States trade negotiator in the administration of President George W. Bush. “China’s economy is its own beast, and it has a form that was not envisioned at the time these rules were created 20 years ago,” Mr. Wu said. “W.T.O. rules are not necessarily equipped to address all of the problematic aspects of that China Inc. system as far as American exporters are concerned.”

IndonesiaX, a massive open online course platform, has launched an online course in which materials are developed by HarvardX. The course, titled “Contract law: From trust to promise to contract”, is delivered in video format by Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. Professor Fried is one of the world’s renowned experts in the field of contractual law and has been teaching in the Harvard Law School for nearly 50 years, and has also written a lot of studies about contracts. Professor Fried uses a storytelling approach to deliver his material, which gives his students a unique and interesting experience. The course videos are presented in English, however to ensure that every IndonesiaX course participants gets the same opportunity to learn, the platform provides an Indonesian translation.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. In remarkably unusual public statements, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has aggressively criticized U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer’s legal decision to invalidate the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s designation of MetLife as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI). Mr. Lew asserts that Judge Collyer overturned FSOC’s conclusion that MetLife is a SIFI and that her decision contradicted key policy lessons from the financial crisis. He’s wrong. Judge Collyer makes no specific determination as to whether MetLife is a SIFI and certainly does not base her judicial decision on the policy lessons of the financial crisis.

A letter by Delcianna J. Winders, Animal Law & Policy Fellow. With Senate Bill 1062, the California legislature has an important opportunity to help elephants. The bill, which recently passed the Senate and is now before the Assembly, would ban the use of bullhooks — devices with sharp hooks on the end that resemble fireplace pokers and that are used to hurt and punish elephants. Bullhooks are used on the most sensitive parts of elephants’ bodies, where their skin is paper-thin, including behind the ears, inside the ears, and around the mouth. The Oakland Zoo stopped using these cruel weapons nearly a quarter of a century ago, and most zoos with elephants no longer use them.

When dozens of residents were asked Thursday evening if they supported body cameras for Boston police officers most raised their hands, but many wondered how the initiative would improve accountability in policing...Several residents wondered how officers would be selected for the pilot program and whether it would include officers throughout the city. “What will be done to ensure these 100 officers come from a variety of levels of seniority and not just model officers?” said Jillian Simons [`18], 32. Simons also questioned how the program’s success would be measured. “Is it that we catch a citizen or an officer doing something on camera, that’s successful? After six months what will be the measure of success?” she asked.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Do investors suffer from behavioral biases? New research demonstrates that they do: They think that a crash is far more likely than it actually is. After you read the newspaper, you might well overreact to bad news about the market -- and lose money as a result. The best explanation is that investors suffer from what behavioral scientists call the “availability heuristic,” which distorts people’s decisions in many domains. In their pathbreaking work on human behavior, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman found that people make judgments about probability by asking about which events come most readily to mind (and hence are cognitively “available”).

An op-ed by Peter R. Orszag & Cass R. Sunstein. The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we’re not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter. So it's encouraging to see many states now moving to expunge or seal the records of nonviolent crimes that aren't repeated. The stigma from a drug or other offense, even one committed in young adulthood, can linger for decades. In one recent experiment, job applicants randomly assigned a criminal record were half as likely as other applicants to get an offer of employment or even an interview request.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. New York’s Legislature is considering a proposal to give police officers “textalyzers,” gizmos that would enable roadside checks of drivers suspected of using mobile phones behind the wheel. Given the dangers of texting while driving, the technology may be a good idea. But is it constitutional? The answer requires looking at two issues. One is the constitutional status of smartphones. The Supreme Court unanimously held in 2014 that the police need a warrant to search a phone. That implies that using a textalyzer without a warrant would be unconstitutional. The second issue is the comparison between the textalyzer and the Breathalyzer.

A MassBay Community College professor is threatening legal action against a student who organized a protest last week in response to the school's handling of abuse allegations. Bruce Jackson, Chair of the Department of Biotechnology and Forensic DNA Science at MassBay, has provided Patch with a letter of intent to sue Greg Gregory for defamation following statements made on a flyer advertising the protest...John Goldberg, a Harvard Law School professor who teaches about defamation cases, said that if the case were to move forward much scrutiny would be placed on Jackson's status as a public or private figure, as MassBay is a publicly funded community college. "The main question is whether or not the professor counts as a public figure by being employed by a state institution," Goldberg said. "If you're a public figure and defamed, you have to prove that the person who defamed you said something about you that was false and knew at the time that they were uttering a falsehood, which is a hard standard to meet."

...Xenophobes and xenophiles share a belief in the fecundity of newcomers...The fertile immigrant is partly an illusion. Women tend not to move country with babies in tow, explains Gunnar Andersson of Stockholm University: they travel first and then have a child quickly. That makes them seem keener on babies than they really are. Partly, too, the countries that send migrants to the rich world have changed, points out Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at Harvard Law School. Fertility rates have plunged in both Mexico and Turkey, from more than six children per woman in 1960 to less than three today.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein and Simon Hedlin. Consumers judge environmentally friendly goods and services on the basis of stereotypes, which often turn out to be wrong. As one might expect, green stereotypes are frequently positive, and lead people to perceive green goods as better than they actually are — but sometimes green stereotypes are negative, which producers and public officials ought to keep in mind as they try to nudge the market in a more sustainable direction.

...It doesn't take much imagination to conjure a future in which a swarm of those robots are used on a battlefield. And if that sounds like science fiction, it's not...Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic added to the urgency of the meeting by issuing a report calling for a complete ban on autonomous killer robots. Bonnie Docherty, who teaches at Harvard Law School and was the lead author of the report, says the technology must be stopped before humanity crosses what she calls a "moral threshold." "[Lethal autonomous robots] have been called the third revolution of warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons," she says. "They would completely alter the way wars are fought in ways we probably can't even imagine."

Students and faculty at Occidental College are protesting the school’s choice of Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy as their commencement speaker for his controversial statements on race-related activism and the film “The Hunting Ground.”...The vocal opposition prompted Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch to respond in a message to school affiliates defending his choice and emphasizing the importance of listening to a range of viewpoints. “Randall Kennedy was chosen because he is a thoughtful and nuanced commentator on race in America,” Veitch wrote...Kennedy said in an interview that he is not surprised some Occidental affiliates disagree with his views, as race and sexual assault are controversial subjects. Diverging opinions, however, should not bar institutions from inviting speakers, he said. “Universities, above all places in American life, should be places where debate and free exchange are facilitated and expected,” Kennedy said. “The idea that because a group of people disagrees with somebody, that in it of itself simply cannot or should not be the basis for excluding someone.”

Cameras, for pictures or video, aren’t allowed in federal courtrooms – even in high-profile cases like those of terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and mobster James “Whitey” Bulger. Retired Massachusetts federal court judge Nancy Gertner wants the restriction to be lifted. Speaking Thursday morning at a breakfast of the Worcester County Bar Association, Ms. Gertner referred to her years as a trial lawyer in state courts, where cameras are allowed. She said a camera never interfered with proceedings.