Media Mentions

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.

Early this week, James Clapper, the head of U.S. intelligence, complained to journalists that Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing (my word, not Clapper’s) had sped up wider use of encryption by seven years. That’s great. Now let’s speed it up even more. ...Given these potential problems, it’s tempting to be sympathetic with the law enforcement position on encryption—but history is clear that we can’t trust the government in this arena. As Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler wrote recently, our law enforcement and national security institutions have routinely—and with the impunity so routinely assumed by the rich and powerful—lied, broken laws, and thwarted oversight. “Without commitment by the federal government to be transparent and accountable under institutions that function effectively, users will escape to technology,” he wrote, and as a result we are learning to depend on technology.

These are interesting times for the founding fathers. We’re amid a wholesale rethink of their legacies as they relate to slavery, especially on American campuses. It’s true, of course, of Jefferson: author of the Declaration of Independence and slave-owner. As Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf write, “It is impossible to understand 18th and 19th century America, and the country the United States has become, without grappling with him and his legacy.” They do so in their new book, “Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”

IOSCO and PIFS-HLS jointly developed a two-phase program aimed at offering IOSCO members an executive education program that is tailored to, and exclusively for, regulators of securities markets. The first phase will cover the fundamentals and intricacies of securities regulation and compliance while the second phase will examine current and future regulatory challenges and emerging issues. This new program is part of IOSCO´s ongoing capacity building efforts and is in response to the needs and growing demands for enhanced education and training of regulators of securities markets globally. ...Prof. Hal S. Scott, Nomura Professor and Director of the Program on Financial Systems at Harvard Law School, said, “We are excited to work for the first time together with a global standard setter in shaping the securities regulators of tomorrow and increasing and enhancing their regulatory skills in protecting investors and ensuring the integrity of the capital markets and strengthening financial stability.”

Was a Harvard Law School student’s remark to a “smelly” visiting Israeli dignitary anti-Semitic—or simply bizarre?  ...“I think what he said was clearly offensive, and he has no right to make a statement in public and have his name remain confidential,” Charles Fried, Beneficial Professor of Law at HLS, told The Daily Beast. “But I’m glad he’s not being disciplined because that would make us look like Erdogan,” he added, referring to the former Prime Minister of Turkey, where speech is not protected under law. 

Years before the government shutdown he helped engineer, and way before he became the most unpopular man in the Senate, Ted Cruz stood among friends during a visit to Harvard Law School. ... Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor and faculty adviser to the Federalist Society who had served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, said the society “made students who didn’t have some standard set of [liberal] beliefs feel less beleaguered.” “If you put down on your CV that you were a member or an officer of the Federalist Society, that’s a signal where your political heart beats,” Fried said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The U.S. government claims the right to eavesdrop at-will on your e-mail when you're writing to someone who lives abroad. Now it wants to be able to use those e-mails to convict you of a crime. That's what's happening to Aws Mohammed Younis al-Jayab -- and he’s not the only one. The legal basis is the 2008 Amendment Act to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which says the government may monitor communications from within the U.S. to foreigners abroad, or vice versa, without first obtaining a warrant to authorize the surveillance.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Dr. James Tracy is certainly a crank and also seems to be a terrible person. But Florida Atlantic University violated his academic freedom when it fired him from his tenured professorship in January, and he should win the lawsuit he’s just brought against the school. Academic freedom isn’t absolute, but it certainly extends to a professor’s outside writing on topics of national importance. The stakes of his case are therefore high -- and not just for professors who (ahem) write about politics while still performing their day jobs as teachers and researchers.

A decade ago, if a politician had argued before the Supreme Court that he had a First Amendment right to trade political favors for a Rolex watch, his lawyers may have feared for their professional reputations. But that argument is one basis for ex-Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s appeal of his eleven-count corruption conviction in McDonnell v. United States, which the Court hears in oral arguments on Wednesday...McDonnell’s free-speech argument shows how thoroughly the First Amendment has been reinterpreted in recent years. In the mid-20th century, the amendment often protected dissidents and religious minorities from government persecution. Now, it’s frequently invoked by business interests to accomplish goals such as establishing the right of corporations to spend unlimited amounts in elections, or preventing the government from requiring graphic warning labels on cigarette packaging. Indeed, a 2015 paper by Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that “corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment.”

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Jack Corrigan. The Globe reported Sunday that Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh wouldn’t say whether he had been a grand jury witness in a federal investigation into the tactics of Boston Building Trades unions. Since then, many have chided him for not being more forthright. But that misses a critical point: Grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret. Government agents are bound by strict confidentiality rules. They may not disclose who has been called, when they testified, or what the subject was; they are barred from releasing information about wiretaps or other evidence they have assembled. While witnesses may speak about their testimony, they do receive a letter from the government with their subpoena that strongly urges them not to do so to protect the integrity of the grand jury investigative process. And that “suggestion” is particularly important in this probe and one that Walsh was right to heed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Congratulations! At long last, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the government can’t punish you for exercising free-speech rights without speaking. In a decision that should count as a blow for constitutional common sense, the court held that the government’s motive in attempting to suppress free speech is what matters, not whether a "speaker" actually said anything.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When is a jury trial over? That's a mildly metaphysical question that the Supreme Court will consider on Tuesday in a case where the judge dismissed the jury and then changed his mind. He caught the jurors before they left the building and called them back to consider their verdict again. On the surface, the question may seem trivial. But it's actually profound -- because the answer reveals whether you think a trial is a magic, quasi-divine roll of the dice, as our ancestors believed, or a pragmatic method to resolve disputes, the modern view.