Media Mentions

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether California should do more to find the rightful owners of $8 billion in “unclaimed” bank, investment and retirement funds before seizing the accounts and pocketing the money. For 15 years, Sacramento attorney William W. Palmer has been fighting to force changes in California’s Unclaimed Property Law, which last year contributed nearly $450 million to state coffers. Palmer won several legal rounds early on, but in March, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed his latest challenge. With the help of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, Palmer appealed to the high court, calling the California program “a recipe for abuse.”

...The hype’s been building for decades now: The robots will be like legions of outsourced Indian workers — smarter than you, cheaper and with kickass work ethics too. An Oxford University study in 2013 suggested that the automation of more and more work, from accounting clerks to the C-suite, could wreak havoc on nearly half of all American jobs in the coming decades...Nobody yet knows the contours of the looming labor upheaval. Experts debate how long it will take for automation to hit its stride and really start kicking us all in the nuts, the scope of its impact, even how many jobs will be lost and how many might be gained. But some among them argue that it’s not too early to think about what exactly the world will need to do when the great hiccup does come around. “There are a host of policy responses” that could address the looming transition, says Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor law at Harvard Law School, “none of which are easy — or modest.”

Are you still licking the wounds of rejection from your first choice law school? Well, here's the dirty little secret of how you might still sneak through the back door: Apply again—as a transfer student...The news flash in all this? Harvard took in more transfer than ever before, even though the overall number of transfers nationally has been falling in the last two years. HLS's admissions dean, Jessica Soban, says the size of this year's transfer group jumped 20 percent because "the applicant pool had exceptional academic and professional strength."

mail, ughhhh. ...Over the course of about half a century, email went from being obscure and specialized, to mega-popular and beloved, to derided and barely tolerated....And though email may be despised, it is still a cornerstone of the open web. “Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in an episode of the podcast Codebreaker in November, “and by unowned, I mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Earlier Tuesday, in a deeply moving speech that brought many, including the President himself, to tears, President Obama unveiled several executive actions intended to curtail the prevalence of gun violence in our nation. Beyond the concrete actions he described, he may have hoped to educate and persuade the public, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about the "fierce urgency of now." Most Americans will recognize the common-sense steps announced today cannot prevent all gun abuse but will still welcome them as ways of reducing the continuing scourge of gun violence in this country. Most but not all...But if we take the time to examine exactly what President Obama is proposing, a crucial step that these critics seem to have skipped, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the measures he has outlined are well within his legal authority.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The rapidly escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, sparked by the execution of a Saudi Shiite activist, may seem like the natural outgrowth of a decade’s Sunni-Shiite tensions. But more than denominational differences, what’s driving the open conflict is the Saudis’ deepening fear that the U.S. is shifting its loyalties in the Persian Gulf region from its traditional Saudi ally to a gradually moderating Iran. And in a sense, they’re right: Although the U.S. is a long way from becoming an instinctive Iranian ally, the nuclear deal has led Washington to start broadening its base in the Gulf, working with Iran where the two sides have overlapping interests. Of which there are many these days.

...This rather intuitive pitch belies something more complex: a potentially rich philosophical conversation about ethics that’s brewing over our daily, seemingly mundane clicks and views...A next-generation consumer advocacy battle, one in which a victory depends not on class action lawsuits or government oversight but on popular awareness and education. The ultimate goal would be getting consumers to “vote with their feet,” says Vivek Krishnamurthy, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. He cites the digital civil liberties groups’ attempts to create a “nutrition label” for privacy.

...After decades of being treated as boorish gate-crashers, activist investors are infiltrating the boardrooms of large companies like never before. This year activists launched more campaigns in the U.S.—360 through Dec. 17—than any other year on record, according to FactSet...At the same time, changes in corporate governance were making it easier for activists to win board seats. Between 2011 to 2014, a group at Harvard University led by professor Lucian Bebchuk campaigned to get more than 100 major companies to put their entire boards up for annual election, instead of staggering directors in multiyear terms.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Remember Fallujah? For the Barack Obama administration, the Iraqi retaking of Ramadi -- with substantial U.S. help -- is a welcome New Year’s gift. But before anyone gets too excited about moving on to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, it would be wise to remember that at least two further obstacles remain before that battle can be mounted. The Iraqis need to hold Ramadi and establish supply lines in the territory leading to Mosul, and they must break Islamic State’s hold on Fallujah, to the rear of Ramadi and perilously close to Baghdad.

...That’s why Cervantes and seven other students and teachers are suing Compton Unified School District (CUSD) in a case that could transform how schools respond to trauma and violence. They argue that CUSD’s failure to provide adequate training and resources for coping with trauma is denying students equal access to education. ...Only a few schools and school districts have stepped up to meet this challenge, but their experiences offer hope for the plaintiffs in Compton. Brockton Public Schools, a largely working-class school district south of Boston, began implementing “trauma-sensitive” reforms more than five years ago in partnership with the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI), a collaboration between Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School. This meant training staff on how complex trauma affects learning and behavior, as wel las modifying disciplinary practices to focus on deescalation instead of punishment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Not every democracy needs a supreme court with the power to block legislation it deems unconstitutional. But Poland’s reforms of its Constitutional Tribunal, enacted by a right-wing majority and signed into law by a conservative president, are worrisome signs for the country's prospects of democratic government. The political timing -- and the nature of the changes -- provides a valuable guide to what judicial review is good for, and why so many countries have adopted it since World War II.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Here’s the issue in a real free-speech case just decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit: Can someone be refused a teaching certification because of his otherwise protected social or political views? The answer sounds like it should be no, doesn’t it?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Starting in the new year, judges in Florida can wear robes in any color they want -- so long as that color is black. The state Supreme Court seems to have adopted the new rule -- which also prohibits any robe embellishment -- because of a judge who wore a camouflage robe, which some litigants thought signaled his identity as a good ol’ boy, thereby undercutting public confidence in the judiciary.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. At long last, Korea's “comfort women” are getting a real apology from Japan's government for being forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II. But the moment is bittersweet, and not just because it’s taken 70 years. The apology comes not out of a change in Japanese sentiment, but from a change in geopolitics -- namely, the rise of China and the increasing need for Japan and South Korea to cooperate on mutual defense. And it comes at the price of a promise by the South Korean government not to criticize Japan over the issue again -- a trade of moral claims for compensation and finality.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. 2015 was supposed to be the year President Barack Obama would use unilateral executive action to accomplish major goals of his administration that had been blocked by Congress: relaxing deportations, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and restricting access to guns. But all three goals stalled.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Over the last 15 years, Americans have become accustomed to distinguishing domestic mass shootings from Islamic terrorism -- the difference between Columbine and the Sept. 11 attacks, if you will. In 2015, that conceptual division broke down with the massacre in San Bernardino, California. It wasn’t the first domestic act of terrorism inspired by Islam -- Army Major Nidal Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon bombing both featured American Muslim terrorists. But San Bernardino was the first time the two paradigms were literally indistinguishable. It’s as if the terrorists finally said, “Who needs airplanes when assault weapons are readily available?”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Among Republicans, it has become politically correct to be politically incorrect. Actually that’s the most politically correct thing that you can possibly be. As soon as you announce that you’re politically incorrect, you’re guaranteed smiles and laughter, and probably thunderous applause. Proudly proclaiming your bravery, you’re pandering to the crowd. A math-filled new paper, by economists Chia-Hui Chen at Kyoto University and Junichiro Ishida at Osaka University, helps to explain what’s going on. With a careful analysis of incentive structures, they show that if self-interested people want to show that they are independent, their best strategy is to be politically incorrect, and to proclaim loudly that’s what they are being. The trick is that this strategy has nothing at all to do with genuine independence; it’s just a matter of salesmanship, a way to get more popular.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In just four years, the Behavioral Economics Oscars, widely known as the Becons, have become the most eagerly awaited of the year-end movie awards (even if the highly influential awards committee consists of just one person). Finally, the wait is over. A standing (and fully rational) ovation for the Becon winners of 2015:

...Coal needs all the friends it can get. The industry is under siege from federal regulation, most recently Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which went into effect on Oct. 23 and seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030. Consumers and activists, meanwhile, are persuading utilities to close aging coal-fired power plants. With funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has helped shut down more than 220 coal facilities over the past five years...Whitfield’s star witness was the well-known law professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who’s been retained by Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, to advocate against the EPA proposal. Arguing that the Obama administration was infringing on state authority, Tribe compared the Clean Power Plan to “burning the Constitution.” “If I thought the case was a close one, I wouldn’t have taken it on,” Tribe says. “If I’m proven right on the law, then lots of time, money, and jobs will have been lost pursuing an important goal in an unlawful way.”

For close to a century “The Bluebook” has reigned as the “bible of legal citation“*, the guide that practicing lawyers, judges and law students turn to when they need to know the proper way to reference a case, a statute, book or article. Now, a copyright clash is heating up between the Ivy League publishers of The Bluebook and legal activists who are preparing to post online what they describe as a simpler, free alternative to the manual’s punctilious precepts...Here’s an excerpt from the letter by IP litigator Peter M. Brody of Ropes & Gray LLP, who represents Harvard Law Review Association, Columbia Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Yale Law Journal: [M]y client has been and remains concerned that the publication and promotion of such a work may infringe the Reviews’ copyright rights in The Bluebook and The Bluebook Online, and may cause substantial, irreparable harm to the Reviews and their rights and interests in those works.

What have been 2015’s most important developments in legal technology?...the biggest legal technology story of the year was the joint announcement by Harvard Law School and Ravel Law of their Free the Law project to digitize and make available to the public for free Harvard’s entire collection of U.S. case law – said to be the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere outside the Library of Congress. As someone who has covered legal and information technology for more than two decades, this was a day I’d long hoped would arrive. Harvard’s vice dean for library and information resources, Jonathan Zittrain, summed up the significance better than I could when he said: “Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public.”