Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision on the rights of campus dissidents, a U.S. appeals court has held that free speech protections won’t excuse acts of harassment. But it also held that a student who has been disciplined can sue the university if the punishment was for expressing political views. The two parts of the ruling last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cut in opposite directions. The first will encourage administrators; the second will hearten student activists. But the more important win is for the activists, who can get a day in court after being disciplined under university procedures that are often opaque.

As “Hamilton” fever has swept America, historians have hardly been immune....But even among historians who love the musical and its multiethnic cast, a question has also quietly simmered: does “Hamilton” really get Hamilton right?...Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” put it more bluntly. “One of the most interesting things about the ‘Hamilton’ phenomenon,” she wrote last week on the blog of the National Council on Public History, “is just how little serious criticism the play has received.”...Ms. Gordon-Reed — who is credited with breaking down the resistance among historians to the claim that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings — wrote in her response that she shared some of Ms. Monteiro’s qualms, even as she loved the musical and listened to the cast album every day. “Imagine ‘Hamilton’ with white actors,” she wrote. “Would the rosy view of the founding era grate?”

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, is only years away, experts say. A new report called Monday for a ban on such "killer robots."..."Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used," said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. "Now there is a real threat that humans would relinquish their control and delegate life-and-death decisions to machines."

Planned changes that President Barack Obama says are aimed at ensuring American companies do not avoid tax by shifting their headquarters overseas could also force foreign companies to adopt more conservative U.S. tax-planning strategies..."It, without doubt, significantly changes the rules of the game," said Stephen Shay, professor of law at Harvard University. "In the old days you bought and then you levered up as much as you can and that is not going to happen in the same way, but how much of a constraint that becomes is unclear," he added.

Two international arms control groups on Monday issued a report that called for maintaining human control over a new generation of weapons that are increasingly capable of targeting and attacking without the involvement of people. The report, which came from Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic at the opening of a weeklong United Nations meeting on autonomous weapons in Geneva, potentially challenges an emerging United States military strategy that will count on technology advantages and increasingly depend on weapons systems that blend humans and machines...The ability to recall a weapon may be a crucial point in any ban on autonomous weapons, said Bonnie Docherty, the author of the report and a lecturer on law and senior clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. Weapons specialists said the exact capabilities of systems like L.R.A.S.M. are often protected as classified information. “We urge states to provide more information on specific technology so the international community can better judge what type and level of control should be required,” Ms. Docherty said.

“Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true,” thunders Angelo (Brian A. Cami ’19), deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in one of the many moments of “Measure for Measure” that remains darkly pertinent centuries after the Shakespeare play was first performed. In Hyperion Shakespeare Company’s production, running April 8 to 16 at the Loeb Experimental Theater, Angelo wears a business suit; the target of his sinister sexual advances, Isabella (Eliza B. Mantz ’18), dons a similarly contemporary costume; and their meeting takes place in a modern office, lit like a film noir...Critics usually classify “Measure for Measure” as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” Its tone veers wildly from political drama to slapstick farce, sometimes in the same scene, as it follows one of the Bard’s most convoluted plots. Put simply, after years of not enforcing Vienna’s vice laws, Duke Vincentio (Patrick J. Witt, a second-year Harvard Law student) leaves the government in Angelo’s hands, believing he will be better able to crack down on the city’s debauchery, and goes undercover as a friar.

Twenty years ago, Larry Day learned two dangerous viruses were circulating in his body, HIV and hepatitis C. Both infections came from needles shared during his years as an injecting drug user. Only one caused him big problems: hepatitis C. That virus destroyed his kidneys, an uncommon complication. Over time, he knew, hepatitis C could lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. So when drugs came on the market promising to cure him, Day — by then free of illicit drugs — was eager to give them a try. But his Medicaid insurance plan said no. He could get the drugs only if his liver was damaged, and his liver was still in good shape...Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, in February led a class-action lawsuit against the state of Washington, asserting its Medicaid program was illegally rationing hepatitis C drugs. In Massachusetts, he has written MassHealth officials asking to collaborate on ways to make the drugs more available. But state officials have rebuffed him, because, he said, they don’t want to admit “that it’s all about costs....They know that’s not a legitimate grounds on which to deny people treatment.” Greenwald called the state’s approach baffling. The state, he said, pays $10,000 a year to keep a person with HIV healthy for decades, but balks at a one-time $40,000 payment to cure someone of hepatitis C.

An op-ed by Ramon Gonzalez `18. Boston has some of the best summer programs in the country, but that is still not enough to ensure that all students have access to them. At the Boston Summer Learning Summit on March 22, Rahn Dorsey, Boston’s chief of education, called for every student to have access to opportunities that let them pursue their passions over the summer. That is an urgent, important goal. But we can’t accomplish it until Boston starts learning where and why so many of its students miss out and fall behind over the summer. It’s surprising that one of the country’s premier urban school systems does not know where and why so many students lose out on summer opportunities. At the summit, Boston public schools superintendent Tommy Chang acknowledged that we “don’t have a good way to do this yet,” and said we need to be “crystal clear” about where in our city students lack access to great summer opportunities.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If I tell you a California judge struck down the addition of a Christian cross to the Los Angeles County seal, that probably sounds like a good example of the separation of church and state. If I tell you that the cross was going to be added to an image of the San Gabriel mission to reflect the real-life, cross-topped church, the same decision begins to sound like judicial overreach. When it comes to religion, framing is everything -- at least under current law.

...If the current debate over how to regulate services like Uber and Airbnb reveals anything, it's hypocrisy on all sides of this issue. Industries that have profited handsomely from a market monopoly for decades are suddenly pleading for support from the people they've fleeced. Homeowners with dollar signs in their eyes are appalled at the prospect of being taxed for turning their suites into hotel rooms...Harvard Law School author and researcher Yochai Benkler was one of the first to look at the potential for information technology to allow forms of networking that might transform the economy and society. He wrote 10 years ago in glowing terms about the revolutionary power of "loosely or tightly woven collaborations" to change fields ranging from software development to investigative reporting. But lately, Benkler has been warning against what he calls the "Uber-ification" of services; he argues that what's emerging is not "sharing" but an "on-demand" economy for everything ranging from dog walking to grocery buying. In the process, he says, regular folks are using their homes and cars to take the places of "the people formerly known as 'employees.'" And affordable rental housing becomes someone else's problem.

Two plaintiffs’ lawyers admitted Friday that they made “a mistake” when they accused famed attorney Alan Dershowitz of having sex with their client when she was a minor. The admission came in a joint statement released by the lawyers, Paul G. Cassell and Bradley J. Edwards, and Dershowitz to settle defamation suits the two sides filed against one another in state court in Florida. “Edwards and Cassell acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz,” the statement said. “[A]nd the sexual misconduct accusations made in all public filings ... are hereby withdrawn. Dershowitz also withdraws his accusations that Edwards and Cassell acted unethically.”

A group of Harvard Law School students who have been occupying a room on campus to host conversations about inequality and racial diversity say they discovered a recording device this week secretly attached to the bottom of a table. Activists from the group Reclaim Harvard Law School said Friday that they fear the device, which can be voice-activated, was being used to pick up sensitive conversations about sexual assault and race that was held between students who thought they were in a “safe space.”...“That space has been very personal, and people have come into that space being very candid,” said Titilayo Rasaki, a second-year law student and one of the group’s members. “The fact that it was being illegally recorded was a violation of our movement and what we expect in the space.”...Law school officials said Friday that they have referred the matter to the Harvard University Police Department. The incident is under investigation. “Our mission as an institution of higher learning depends on protecting and promoting the free exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. We deeply prize those values,” said law school spokesman Robb London in a prepared statement. “The Law School administration is troubled by an allegation that anyone in our community would attempt to surreptitiously record anyone else’s conversation.” London said the school only learned about the allegations Friday, after the Reclaim Harvard Law School group sent out a press release.

Harvard police are investigating allegations that an audio recording device illegally documented sensitive conversations Harvard Law School activists held in a hall they are occupying. Several students with the activist group Reclaim Harvard Law School said they found a recording device on Tuesday that was taped under a table in the Caspersen Student Center Lounge and contained recordings of their conversations and events since last Saturday. According to a press release Reclaim Harvard Law published Friday, the recorder captured discussion that included personal conversations between students, a sexual assault bystander training at which victims recounted their assaults, and Boston-area residents sharing stories of eviction from their homes. “It was just really scary,” second-year Law student and Reclaim Harvard Law member Simratpal Kaur said. “We were really surprised that anyone who maybe disagreed with our movement would go to this length.”

Pfizer plans to abandon its $152 billion merger with Allergan — the largest deal yet aimed at helping an American company shed its United States corporate citizenship for a lower tax bill — just days after the Obama administration introduced new tax rules, a person briefed on the matter said late Tuesday...Though Pfizer and Allergan’s deal was less affected by earnings stripping, the potential consequences of the new Treasury rules could go well beyond corporate inversions, according to tax experts. “To me, the earnings stripping part of this is quite clearly the most significant of the changes they’ve put out,” said Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and former deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs in the Treasury Department.

Stamping out stigma and broader inequality remains a vexing challenge that requires the tools of both researchers and activists, according to panelists at Harvard University. Three experts at a panel on comparative inequality cited mixed progress in the effort to advance fairness and social inclusion, touching on discrimination against the Roma people and the disabled, and the rise of inequality in an era of support for human rights. “It’s a long battle. It’s one that will take many years, but we see progress and we’re quite excited and enthused about it,” Michael Stein, visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said of the global effort to end discrimination against people with disabilities. But Stein, executive director of the Law School’s Project on Disability, said it is still painful to see how much work remains to be done. “The hardest part of my job is going into places where people are suffering … and who are not happy with the glacial movement of change,” he said.

Donald J. Trump wants to build a bricks-and-mortar wall to keep immigrants out of the United States. President Obama wants to build a virtual wall to keep companies from leaving. Neither is likely to work. On Monday, the Treasury Department issued new regulations in an attempt to limit “inversions” — in which American companies are acquired by foreign companies, legally lowering the tax burden of American companies...the I.R.S. could declare some or all of Pfizer’s debt to be equity, so the interest payments would be dividends and no longer deductible. It’s important to note that the new earnings-stripping regulations apply not just for inversions, but for a vast array of multinationals’ transactions involving American businesses. This approach was proposed by the Harvard Law School professor Stephen E. Shay in 2014. Writing in Tax Notes, he argued that the Treasury secretary has “direct and powerful regulatory authority to reclassify debt as equity and thereby transform a deductible interest payment into a nondeductible dividend.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A U.S. appeals court says that the federal law protecting religious liberty doesn't shield a Hawaiian church that uses cannabis in its rituals. That's pretty outrageous. The decision’s perverse logic relies on a cartoonishly rigid idea of religious obligation. And it suggests that the religious-freedom law only protects mainstream religious groups like the Catholic Church, not smaller denominations.

The more scientists study the issue of food waste — and its worrying implications for both the environment and global food security — the clearer it becomes how much of a problem it is. Now, new research is giving us a few more reasons to clean our plates. A study just out in the journal Environmental Science and Technology concludes that we’re already producing way more food than the world actually needs — but a lot of the excess is being wasted, instead of used to feed people who need it...“So much of poverty and famine aren’t about a lack of resources overall — they’re just distributional [problems],” said Emily Broad Leib, an assistant clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “It’s not surprising to see that, and both across countries and within countries this challenge of the food markets really being attainable for certain segments of the population and not for others.”

An op-ed by Duncan Kennedy. Contrary to many colleagues, I do think there is a possible principled defense of Reclaim’s actions with respect to posters in Belinda Hall, one ­which I find persuasive, though with some reservations. The defense applies even to what many of the faculty seems to see as the “red line” of taking down antagonistic posters in the occupied space, and a fortiori to moving them to another space. I don’t think it is coherent to frame the issue as whether (in one colleague’s phrase) “acceptance of this situation by us, in what I take it we still regard as a public space of the law school, could be explained consistently with free-speech and common-membership principles for our school and university to which I’d assume we are all committed.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The administration of President Barack Obama just won a big legal victory for its decision to let some children of illegal immigrants remain in the country. On the surface, that might seem to augur well for the administration's efforts to ease other immigration restrictions in the face of Congressional opposition. Don't count on it. The federal court decision that backed Obama was based on precarious legal reasoning that's vulnerable to reversal by the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The prosecutor offers a deal. The defendant agrees. What right does a judge have to object? It's a salient question on Wall Street in recent years, as a number of federal judges have rejected plea deals and settlements, saying prosecutors and regulators were being too lenient on the corporate defendants. One such judge, Jed Rakoff, has even waged a parallel critical campaign in the media, pressuring the Securities and Exchange Commission to be tougher on corporate defendants. On Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit weighed in -- on the other side from Rakoff. In an opinion by Judge Sri Srinivasan, who was seen as a contender for the Supreme Court, the court said that federal judges can’t reject deferred prosecution agreements, a standard plea bargain technique. The opinion reflects a highly passive version of the judicial role, which is good news for defendants, but bad news for the public.