Media Mentions

An interview with Sam Moyn: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed a set of rights for all humankind, belonging to each of us simply by virtue of being human. Universalism - that they belong to everyone, everywhere - is the key idea that grounds human rights, it gives them meaning, application and authority. Talking to legal philosophers, historians, sceptics and advocates, Helena Kennedy QC explores the philosophical and historical foundations of human rights. Are they really universal or is this just moral posturing on a grand scale, a legal fiction, a philosophical sleight of hand?

...With the election two days away, younger and urban Americans are terrified. Some are arranging ways for their Muslim friends to leave the country. That’s the atmosphere in which two senior Facebook engineers approach Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, and tell him that this whole mess can be stopped right now.... Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard Universitywho has previously written about Facebook’s electoral power, told me it was good that Facebook was now on the record about not tampering with the vote. He confirmed that no legal mechanism would prevent them from trying it. “Facebook is not an originator of content so much, it is a funnel for it. And because it is a social network, it’s got quite natural market dominance,” he said. With that power came a need for public concern and awareness.

Police arrested Harvard Law professor and former presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig last week during protests focused on campaign finance reform in Washington, D.C. Organized by the nonpartisan group Democracy Spring, a movement dedicated to campaign finance reform and supporting disadvantaged voters, the week-long sit-in protest in the nation’s capital came in the midst of this election cycle's primary season. ...“We have not embraced the fundamental fact that we need to change the way campaigns are funded,” Lessig said in an interview with the Young Turks posted over the weekend. “We need to spend public money on campaigns because whoever funds campaigns gets to call the tune.”

Patients infected with hepatitis C are finding that having private health insurance doesn’t always mean they can get the drugs likely to cure them. ...The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School analyzed plans sold on the Massachusetts Health Connector, the state agency for people who buy insurance on their own, most of whom have moderate to low incomes. The center found that in nearly half the plans, patients had to pay a higher percentage of the cost for hepatitis C drugs than for most other drugs. Some insurers require patients to pay half the cost.

A year ago two former Harvard classmates built three 160-square-foot houses, hauled them to rural locations outside Boston, and made them available for nightly stays with an odd proviso: Guests would plunk down $99 to book a night in a tiny house, but they wouldn’t find exactly where the house was until the day before. It's not a literal blindfold, but the intent was close enough—forcing guests to unplug from their busy, overplanned lives and engender a stripped-down adventure. It worked: Getaway, as the company is called, is currently booked through July at its three Boston-area houses...The company recently completed a fundraising round—it has raised $1.1 million total—and is using the capital to build 10 new tiny houses in the New York City area, where it plans to start operating in June. “I like to call it the anti-vacation,” said Chief Executive Officer Jon Staff, who launched Getaway with his friend Pete Davis, a first-year student at Harvard Law School...Asked for a little more detail on the locations of the company’s new New York-centric locations, Davis, 26, responded by cryptic e-mail: “Nobody's leaving the Empire State, all houses are relatively choo-choo accessible, and a quaint town will not be far from reach (though, of course, the point is not to be anywhere, but rather just be ...!).”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s a religion? The question is fundamental to the legal analysis of religious freedom, yet courts avoid addressing it. The Supreme Court has never given a concrete answer. The result: Courts don’t claim to be able to define religion, but think they know it when they see it. The consequences can be surprising. Ten days ago I wrote about a case in which an appeals court expressed skepticism about whether a religion based on the use of traditional Native American hallucinatory substances was really a religion. And just last week a federal district court rejected a prisoner’s religious-liberty claim on the ground that his faith, Pastafarianism, is a parody of religion rather than religion itself.

What should the regulations for animal confinement be? Voters in Massachusetts are poised to decide in a November ballot question whether the state should ban the sale of whole eggs, pork products, or veal from animals that can’t turn around or stretch their limbs within their cages. The prohibition would apply to producers both in and outside the commonwealth, with one of the biggest changes being that eggs sold in the state be “cage-free” when the law goes into effect in 2022, if voters agree to the proposal...“I think especially when you’re dealing with major producers I can’t really see folks taking the risk. The industry is definitely moving on in terms of all the major corporate announcements,” said Chris Green, the executive director of the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School. But if the Massachusetts ballot initiative is taken up, it’ll be the voters who decide.

Thomas Jefferson is one of America's founders and, even after centuries, a mystery. Annette Gordon-Reed talks about the book she co-wrote with Peter Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Many conservatives contend that federal regulators have been running wild, especially under President Barack Obama. Objecting to “job-killing regulations,” they offer concrete proposals for reform: more cost-benefit analysis, elimination of unjustified mandates, and explicit congressional approval of expensive rules...By contrast, progressives have been pretty quiet. That changed recently, when Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered an important but widely overlooked speech last month, one offering an unmistakably progressive vision of regulatory reform. Warren sees the problem as one of capture by regulated interests, not overreach by regulation-happy bureaucrats.

An op-ed by Colin Taylor Ross `16. Last month, citizens seeking police accountability in two U.S. cities won remarkable victories at the ballot box. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy McGinty was ousted by Democratic primary voters outraged by the failure to bring charges against the officer who shot and killed 12-year-old African American boy Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park. In Cook County, Ill., State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez lost her bid for the Democratic nomination for a third term over her handling of the police shooting death of teenager Laquan McDonald. As the United States faces a crisis of faith in the criminal justice system’s ability to hold police officers accountable under the law, attention has turned to the role of prosecutors. These two electoral expulsions have been hailed as milestones in the struggle to inject accountability into the United States’ local law-enforcement infrastructure. It is unfortunate, then, that some activists seem intent on making those hard-fought victories irrelevant.

President Obama on Friday announced his support for opening the market for cable set-top boxes, singling out the devices in millions of homes as a clunky and outdated symbol of corporate power over consumers, as he introduced a broad federal effort to increase competition...“An industry that had previously been considered untouchable — the cable guys — is now subject to criticism from the president,” said Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor who is a former aide to Mr. Obama. “This is like weighing in against Big Tobacco or Big Pharma.”

Kenya risks being isolated among other nations if it fails to co-operate with the ICC, lawyers have warned in criticism of President Uhuru Kenyatta. International law experts yesterday told the Star Kenya remains a State Party to the Rome Statute and failure to co-operate with the International Criminal Court would be a violation of Kenya’s own constitution...Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard University in the United States, said Uhuru is now openly saying he will not abide by the law. “Kenya signed and ratified the Rome Statute, and therefore it has a legal obligation to co-operate with the court,” Whiting told the Star. He said the international community will also have to take a position on Kenya.

Thomas Jefferson repeatedly insisted that the private lives of America’s founders should be off limits to historians. In 1817, when a writer asked him about his family, the author of the Declaration of Independence coughed up little information, noting that personal matters “would produce fatigue and disgust to . . . readers.” For generations, scholars agreed and most studies of our third president and his contemporaries focused largely on their political careers. But that taboo started to crumble about a half century ago. And thanks to the pioneering work of Harvard Law School professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello’’ (2008), we can now readily understand why Jefferson lived in such mortal fear of biographers...In “ ‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,’’ Gordon-Reed and her coauthor, Peter S. Onuf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, seek to reassess Jefferson’s legacy, given all the recent discoveries about his long-buried private life.

It’s not just Supreme Court vacancies that are going unfilled; vacancies have become an acute problem throughout the federal judiciary. A recent study by a professor at Harvard Law School finds that these vacancies are causing prosecutors to drop more cases and offer lighter plea deals than they would otherwise, which has “led to approximately 1,000 fewer federal prisoners per fiscal year . . . largely from drug offenses.” While this may be letting some criminals off easy, the professor suggests that “judicial vacancies may have had an unintended benefit of reducing the prison population toward the optimal level of incarceration...[Crystal] Yang...“Resource Constraints and the Criminal Justice System: Evidence from Judicial Vacancies,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (forthcoming).

Police arrested hundreds of people protesting the influence of money in politics this week in Washington, D.C., but peaceful tangles with the officers were one of the group's main goals. U.S. Capitol Police arrested more than 900 protesters through Saturday afternoon. The mass demonstrations called "Democracy Spring" began Monday...Harvard Law School professor and former Democratic presidential candidate Larry Lessig was arrested Friday — for the first time ever. "I'm a law professor," he said Saturday. "I don't get arrested." But he made an exception for the issue that he based his short-lived campaign on: Campaign finance reform. "I’m so incredibly excited with the kind of passion and the mix of people that were there," said Lessig, noting it's spread beyond the usual "law geeks and intellectuals" who rally around campaign finance reform.

Yelena Sablina was stunned when she came across the forensic record of her late 19-year-old daughter, who died days after a speeding car hit her at a Moscow pedestrian crossing. Going through the file she discovered that her daughter Alina's heart, kidneys and a number of other organs had been removed -- without her family's knowledge or consent. Since making the grim discovery in February 2014, one month after Alina's death, Sablina has made it her mission to challenge a Russian law that allows doctors to remove the organs of dead people without needing permission...Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen said that concerns over such laws usually focus on “the cost and infrastructure as well as pragmatic political considerations”.

An op-ed by Richard Freeman, faculty co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program. "Robots And Computers Could Take Half Our Jobs Within the Next 20 Years”…“Robots Could Put Humans Out of Work by 2045”…“White House Predicts Robots May Take Over Many Jobs That Pay $20 Per Hour”…“Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour”…“Why the Highest-Paid Doctors Are the Most Vulnerable to Automation”…“Robot Receptionist in Tokyo Department Store.” These headlines have the flavor of yellow journalism. But they are based on the predictions of researchers across many disciplines and on technological advances developed by firms large and small...xBut whether robotization will be good or bad for society isn’t a foregone conclusion—it will depend crucially on how public policy and private firms respond.

The New York State Attorney General has already taken some steps to find out why insurers are limiting coverage of pricey hep C meds to the sickest patients but has stopped short of suing companies for their decisions. Now, he’s stepping up his fight..."When an insurer limits coverage only to its sickest members, it amounts to an irrational and short-sighted rationing of care. From the perspective of an individual living with HCV who is excluded from the cure, that care is the very definition of 'medically necessary,'" Kevin Costello, litigation director at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said in a February release.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded a major grant to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab to further develop its Perma.cc tool to combat link rot. The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that a U.S. appeals court has declined to strike down Utah’s bigamy laws, it’s reasonable to ask: What does the Constitution, properly interpreted, have to say about the topic? Legally speaking, the issue can be split in two. The first question is whether a state may criminalize marriage to more than one person. The second is whether, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year to require states to recognize same-sex marriage, there now exists a fundamental right to marry more than one person -- and to make states treat plural marriages on equal terms with marriages between two people.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The briefs are in -- and the Supreme Court’s extraordinary effort to bring about a compromise in a contraceptive care case looks like a bust. Instead of finding a mutually agreeable solution, religious groups and the federal government appear to have only hardened their positions. In simultaneous filings late Tuesday night, each side took the opportunity to strengthen their arguments over how religious organizations go about seeking an exemption to the mandate for providing employees contraceptive care under the Affordable Care Act.