Media Mentions

A bit of last-minute skullduggery in Congress blocking efforts to make companies disclose political contributions may fall short of its goal. Buried in the 2,000 pages of the $1.1 trillion spending bill passed into law this month was one of those nasty little riders that has nothing to do with funding the government but are slipped into a must-pass bill at the last minute...The legal opinion written by Harvard Law Professor John Coates argues that this wording does not in the meantime restrict the preparatory tasks of issuing a rule — internal discussion, planning, investigation, analysis, evaluation and development of possible proposals. "These steps often take years and consume significant agency funds and other resources," Coates wrote in his Dec. 17 opinion.

The latest chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s career ended in November, when the Harvard Law School professor concluded his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That effort centered on his campaign to reform Congressional politics. Prior to that, Prof. Lessig’s scholarship, teaching and activism focused on technology policy and the Internet. He has argued for greater sharing of creative content, the easing of restrictions in areas such as copyright, and the concept of Net Neutrality. Prof. Lessig, who founded the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, is the author of numerous books on technology, including “Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and “The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.” CIO Journal asked Prof. Lessig for his thoughts on how technology policy, which is at multiple critical junctures around the world, can and should evolve. Privacy, surveillance, and international governance of the Internet and telecommunications networks will approach milestones in 2016, with implications for business and beyond.

After researching the devastating humanitarian effects of the deadly cluster munitions used in Afghanistan in 2002, Bonnie Docherty joined a worldwide campaign to eliminate them. Six years after she started her probe, cluster bombs were banned. Her investigation on the use of cluster munitions in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq and Lebanon, was highly influential in a 2008 treaty signed by 117 countries banning these weapons. For Docherty, a lecturer on law and a senior instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, the battle to protect civilians from unnecessary harm continues. Last month, Docherty traveled to Geneva to advocate for stronger regulations on incendiary devices, which she calls “exceptionally cruel weapons” that have been used in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Middle Easterners sometimes observe wryly that although the West causes some of their region’s problems, Westerners don’t have to suffer the consequences. In 2015, that observation ceased to be valid, at least with respect to Europe. The world’s collective failure to solve the multidirectional Syrian civil war led to a refugee crisis that affected Europe profoundly. The open European borders promised by the Schengen treaty are in the process of being sealed, and immigration is now widely acknowledged to threaten the future of the European Union itself. What’s noteworthy in historical terms about this blowback isn’t just that it shows how small the world is, or how vulnerable the EU is to external shocks. It’s that Europe hasn’t reacted by trying to solve the Syrian crisis in a serious way, by trying to change the actors’ incentives or the strategic calculus.

Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been widely derided as discriminatory, hateful and unworkable - never mind illegal. Many legal experts have said it's almost certainly unconstitutional. According to several scholars surveyed by MSNBC, while foreign citizens do enjoy fewer rights than Americans, it is still illegal for the government to use a religious test on foreigners. The Constitution's "bar against declaring an official religion" would apply to discrimination against non-citizens, argues Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

When he was in school on Long Island, N.Y., Yaseen Eldik `16 was just another kid. Then 9/11’s hijacked jets crashed into the twin towers, and life changed for the American-born Muslim. “I was called a terrorist and asked if my parents belonged to al-Qaida,” Eldik said. “Because of that experience — of feeling almost like an enemy of my community — I began to feel isolated.” In the wake of the November Paris attacks, the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., and an incessant anti-Muslim drumbeat from some U.S. presidential contenders, Eldik and other members of the Harvard Islamic community described what it’s like to live under the current wave of “Islamophobia” in America, one that Harvard Islamic Chaplain Taymullah Abdur-Rahman said has reversed years of healing since the 2001 calamities...Eldik recalls his own response to the hostility and fear he encountered after 9/11: He withdrew, something that today he thinks was a mistake. That’s why he and three other Muslim law students got together earlier this month and made a video, released online last week by the Harvard Muslim Law Students Association. The video urges Muslim youth not to hide if they encounter anti-Islamic sentiment, but to engage, share their experiences, and speak out.

During a speech to a conservative crowd in Iowa this month, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz leveled a heavy charge against his colleagues across the aisle in the U.S. Senate. Democrats, he said, attempted to eliminate Americans’ right to free speech with a proposed constitutional amendment last fall...“I have read the amendment carefully. It’s about raising and spending money in political campaigns — nothing more,” Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe told us in an email. “It has no effect at all on freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or peaceful protest. It does not allow the government to punish people for speaking their minds.” Tribe also noted that he had Cruz, a Harvard Law graduate, in class. “Ted Cruz earned an A in my constitutional law course at Harvard, and I am a tough grader!” Tribe said. “I’m confident Ted knows his statement is false. No lawyer or student who can read English believes what Ted Cruz claimed to believe.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is free to continue planning rules requiring corporate disclosure of political spending despite passage of Republican-backed budget language prohibiting the agency from using 2016 dollars to finalize, issue or implement such a policy, a Harvard scholar's Tuesday legal opinion says. The opinion, offered by Harvard Law School professor John C. Coates IV, differentiates between planning for such a rule and finalizing, issuing or implementing it.

A Waltham law firm used unfair and deceptive practices to collect debts from hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts consumers in recent years, in one instance taking out a civil arrest warrant against a 90-year-old woman, Attorney General Maura Healey alleged in a complaint filed this week in Suffolk Superior Court. The firm, Lustig, Glaser & Wilson PC, has filed 100,000 lawsuits against Massachusetts residents and collected more than $110 million from them since 2011, preying on some of the state’s poorest people, Healey alleged in court documents...Roger Bertling, director of the Consumer Protection Clinic at Harvard Law School, said that the practices alleged by Healey and the consumer protection agency are fairly common. “Debt-collection work is still the wild, wild West,” he said. “The system is built on volume and getting in and getting out very quickly.”

An op-ed by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Robert J. Jackson Jr. The omnibus budget agreement adopted by Congress includes a provision that prevents the Securities and Exchange Commission from issuing a rule next year that would require public companies to disclose their political spending. This unusual Congressional intervention in S.E.C. rule-making is a troubling development both for investors and for the agency.

The FDA is easing its restrictions on gay and bisexual men who want to make a blood donation. But there's a catch -- the lifetime ban is being replaced with a new policy that requires gay and bisexual men to abstain from sex for a year before being able to donate. Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen joins CBSN with more on the legal issues that could result.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Reviewing the year at the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no question that the outstanding historic moment was June’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the court recognized -- or, if you prefer, invented -- a right to gay marriage. There was nothing substantively surprising about the decision itself. Justice Anthony Kennedy had been preparing the way for 20 years, melding the principles of equality and due process into a jurisprudence of “equal dignity.” What’s surprising is the lack of sustained national opposition to the decision. In the contentious, circuslike Republican primary campaign, there has thus far been astonishingly little discussion of Obergefell and how to combat it or roll it back.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In Boston, September 1 is known as “Moving Day,” and it can be hell on wheels. On that day each year, more than half of the city’s leases turn over and students return to campus, disgorging thousands of moving vans into the streets at once. It’s an annual nightmare for residents and local officials charged with keeping the city running smoothly. But this year, something remarkable happened that not only took out much of the pain — it also showcased how technology can be successfully harnessed to address deceptively complex government customer service problems. The hero was Boston’s IT department, rising from its traditional roots to do what smart, connected corporations do all the time — employing cutting-edge tech to solve problems.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God, as Pope Francis and suspended Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins affirm? Or are Allah and the Christian deity two different things, as the Wheaton administration believes? The debate is a throwback to the days when evangelical Protestants and Catholics were deeply at odds on a range of theological questions. It only seems surprising because Roe v. Wade began a process of political rapprochement between American evangelicals and Catholics that makes them appear closer than they really are. But the debate is also a major issue for Jewish-Christian relations. If Christians and Muslims don’t worship the same God, then neither do Christians and Jews.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the First Amendment protect what doctors can say to their patients in the privacy of the examining room? Weighing state prohibitions on gay conversion therapy, liberals have tended to think the state should be able to regulate medical treatment without worrying about free speech. Now the shoe’s on the other foot: Florida’s ban on physicians asking patients about gun ownership puts liberals in the position of wanting to protect the doctor-patient relationship. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the Florida “docs vs. Glocks” law this week on the ground that the state’s interest in protecting gun ownership outweighs physicians’ free-speech interests -- a result sure to trouble liberals.

Boston-area universities are closely watching a Supreme Court case that could derail the use of race in admissions, a practice that several universities, including Harvard and MIT, say is fundamental to creating a diverse student body....a strong ruling one way or the other would create a “powerful atmospheric and cultural impact” on private schools, said Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe. “Then the impact on privates would be indirect but massive,” Tribe said, but he explained that a ruling striking down race-based affirmative action is unlikely. Another legal analyst said a ruling against affirmative action would be a “body blow” to the many recent efforts to increase diversity. “The events of the past two or three years have made it clear that we have to be proactive about addressing equal opportunity and addressing racial attitudes,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

The news making waves in law libraries lately has been the announcement of Harvard Law School Library’s “Free the Law” initiative (also reported in the The New York Times). By digitizing their comprehensive collections of printed law reports, Harvard will make publicly available free, open and wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time. The Harvard Law School Library is to be lauded for this initiative, another in a series of projects from their Library Innovation Lab, including The Nuremberg Project to digitize their collections of source materials on the Nuremberg Trials; the H2O project to build a platform to create, share and remix open course materials (casebooks); and the Perma.cc service to address the problem of link-rot and help journals, scholars, courts and others create web citation links that will never break.

It took Harvard Law School (HLS) nearly 200 years, since its founding in 1817, to amass its collection of United States case law reporters—one of the world’s largest collections of legal materials. It will take the HLS Library about three years to scan and digitize that collection and, in partnership with legal technology startup Ravel Law, make it freely available to the public online. If all goes according to plan, by early to mid–2017, the “Free the Law” project will have digitized the “official print versions of all historical U.S. court decisions,” according to the HLS Library blog...According to Adam Ziegler, manager of special projects at the Innovation Lab, the collaboration between Harvard and Ravel came about because HLS had “the vision and the content”—in the form of printed case law—to make the law digitally available, but not the financial and technological means to make this a reality. Ravel is responsible for designing and managing the online output. The raw case law material digitized by HLS and Innodata will be added to the Ravel platform, which allows users to view case connections and use data visualization tools to pinpoint influential cases on a given issue. As Steve Chapman, Manager of Digital Strategy for Collections at Harvard Law School, described it, “anybody who chooses to access Ravel has a means to engage with the law.”

Congress has avoided authorizing the war against the self-described Islamic State for nearly a year and a half, but it had no problem voting Friday to spend billions more on it. Wait -- did lawmakers also just vote to authorize it? Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who previously served in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, says that because lawmakers voted for a $1.1 trillion government spending bill that clearly appropriates money for the fight against the Islamic State, they also voted to approve the war itself. Goldsmith explained his reasoning in a Thursday post on the legal blog Lawfare: A 2000 Justice Department opinion states that Congress can "authorize hostilities through its use of the appropriations power" if a spending bill is directly focused on a specific military action. The year-end spending bill that lawmakers passed Friday includes $58.6 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations for military activities. House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) has specifically said some of those funds will be used to "combat the real-world threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)." That means that, at least for the period of time covered by the funding bill -- it goes through Sept. 30, 2016 -- lawmakers just voted to authorize the war against the Islamic State, Goldsmith said.

An op-ed by Bonnie Docherty: Incendiary weapons inflict almost unrivaled cruelty on their victims. Photos taken after an incendiary weapon attack on a Syrian school show the charred bodies of children, who must have experienced unimaginable agony. The weapons cause excruciatingly painful burns, and treatment for survivors requires sloughing off dead skin, which has been likened to being flayed alive. While individuals often react to accounts of such suffering with horror, government efforts to minimize the harm from these weapons by strengthening international law have been unacceptably slow. ...Over the past two years Human Rights Watch has documented new use of incendiary weapons in Syria and Ukraine, and it is investigating allegations of use in Libya and Yemen in 2015. A report [PDF] recently released by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic provides evidence of these attacks, along with a five-year review of developments on the issue and recommendations for next steps.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Five years ago today, the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit sellerMohamed Bouazizi sparked the Arab Spring. At this distance, it's possible to ask a difficult question: Has the Arab Spring been good for the Arabic-speaking world? Are most people better off than they were five years ago? It's also possible to give a disturbing answer, one born of deep respect and admiration for those who bravely protested and in many cases gave their lives for dignity, justice and democracy.With the exception of Bouazizi’s home country of Tunisia, the uprisings associated with the Arab Spring have either been thwarted by dictators and monarchs or led to civil war and anarchy. Extraordinary as it was, the Arab Spring wasn't enough to lift the citizens of the countries involved out of political subjugation and into collective self-government.