Media Mentions

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, TrueAllele Casework, a computer program that extracts genetic profiles from DNA samples, would seem to mark an advance in criminal justice technology. But defense lawyers say it shouldn’t be allowed in court, because Cybergenetics Corp., the firm that owns the program, won’t reveal the software’s source code, which it considers a trade secret. The resulting conflict, which is presently playing out in a Pennsylvania murder trial, poses fascinating and important questions: Do we need to know exactly how a given technique works to consider it scientifically reliable and admissible in court? And is it democratically right to convict, and possibly execute, someone based on a secret process the defendant isn’t allowed to know?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What are the legal prospects for the California girls who want to join the Boy Scouts of America? Five girls, ages 10 to 13, have asked the local council to be admitted as full-fledged Boy Scouts. Should they eventually take their case to court, they won’t be able to rely on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions, because Congress wrote in an exemption for the Boy Scouts. Structurally, the exemption resembles the one that Congress gave Major League Baseball from antitrust laws: It doesn't really have a principled basis, but reflects some combination of tradition and lobbying power.

When Lawrence Lessig ended his issue-oriented quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he vowed to continue his campaign to reform election finance practices and reduce the influence of money in politics. “The fight is not over,” said Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, during a conversation with his colleague Jonathan Zittrain about the lessons learned while campaigning for election finance reform...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lessig. “They [in Congress] focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle, 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy, that’s not an American democracy.”

An op-ed by Bianca Tylek `16. Three months ago, as the summer before my last year of law school was winding down, I received a call from the administration asking me to speak on behalf of the student body at a gala commemorating the launch of the Campaign for the Third Century. They encouraged me to accept the engagement, explaining that I would have a powerful platform to tell a compelling story. I agreed. Just a few weeks ago, after months of preparation, I delivered my testimonial in front of 600 Harvard Law School alumni...To the extent that my story motivated our alumni to open their wallets, I now ask that they close them and stop donating.

Medical tourism is not only bringing ethical questions home with returning patients, but also higher costs to fix botched procedures or antibiotic resistant infections, says an international expert in the field. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor and author of Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law and Ethics, says North Americans need to take a hard look at the consequences of millions of trips taken outside their countries each year for medical or dental treatment...Most medical tourists seek procedures that are legal in both the patient’s home country and the clinic location — dental treatment, joint replacements or cosmetic surgery — and the decision to travel is based on getting quicker, cheaper services. Even so, there are documented cases of residents in the U.K. and Sweden bringing back bacterial infections that are resistant to medication and can be traced to medical treatment in India, Pakistan and the Balkan states, he notes. Even more troubling for Cohen are people who seek treatments that are illegal or unethical at home such as buying a kidney for transplant or going to a fertility clinic that will implant multiple embryos in an older woman.

A gracious Salem house built for a U.S. Supreme Court justice has a storied past and present. Built in 1811 for Joseph Story, a Supreme Court Justice and ­“father” of Harvard Law School, the Federal-style brick mansion has gotten a $2 million makeover, including restoration of woodwork carved by famous Salem architect and craftsman Samuel McIntire, as well as the addition of a wing with a new kitchen, media room and garage. Listing broker Kathleen Sullivan of ReMax Advantage in Beverly says co-owner Neil Chayet, a lawyer best known for his syndicated CBS radio feature “Looking at the Law,” is a Harvard Law alumnus who “felt it was his legacy to redo the property.”

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy. In a grand corridor of Harvard Law School, framed professors’ photographs hang on a wall. A week ago, someone put slivers of black tape over the faces of most of the African-American professors. I am one of those whose photograph was marked. Last Thursday, on my way to teach contracts, I received an email from a student who alerted me to the defacement. I saw the taped photos, including my own, right before class. Since then I have been asked repeatedly how I feel about having been targeted by what some deem to be a racial hate crime. Questioners often seem to assume that I should feel deeply alarmed and hurt. I don’t.

As the law professor prepared for her class on sexual assault, she opened her emails to find a strange request: could she give assurances that the content of the class would not be included in the end-of-year exam, her students asked? They were concerned there might be victims of sexual assault among their classmates, they said. Anyone in that position could be traumatised at being confronted with such material in the exam hall. Across the United States, lecturers have received similar messages from students demanding that modules of academic study – ranging from legal topics to well-known works of literature – be scrubbed from exams, and sometimes from the syllabus altogether. Jeannie Suk, a professor at Harvard Law School, which numbers President Barack Obama among its many notable alumni, cited an example where a student had asked a colleague “not to use the word 'violate’ – as in 'does this conduct violate the law’ – because the term might trigger distress”.

An op-ed by  Nathan Freitas, a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society: The phrase “the terrorists are going dark” has come back in vogue after the Paris attacks, referring to assertions that encryption is somehow enabling the communication of future attackers to go undetected. But the public is being presented with a false choice: either we allow law enforcement unfettered access to digital communications, or we let the terrorists win. As always, it is not that simple. It is true that much of the world’s communication has shifted away from easy-to-intercept text messages and phone calls, to mobile apps, such as WhatsApp, Apple Messages, and Telegram, which provide free worldwide communications and improved privacy and security. Some apps have even added end-to-end “sealed envelope” encryption, putting message contents out of reach of both law enforcement and the service providers themselves. Even so, there is still a great deal of data available that is not fully encrypted or even encrypted at all—data that allows for the kind of digital detective capabilities that law enforcement seek to catch the bad guys. It is disingenuous on all sides to pretend it does not.

After the terror in Paris, most Democrats and Republicans agree that America should end the Islamic State. Even the socialist Democrat, Bernie Sanders, has called on America to lead a coalition to rid the world of this caliphate. ...So far, Congress has been too divided on exactly what it wants this war to be. When Obama presented his AUMF in February, Congress couldn't agree on key questions like the war's duration, scope and ground troops. But this was largely what Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith has called a "faux debate." Obama never proposed scrapping the 2001 AUMF, which already gave him and his successors broad authorities to wage a war on terror with no temporal or geographic limit. Nor did Obama's AUMF limit his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the military. Goldsmith says the safest course would be to use the 2001 AUMF as a model, but include the Islamic State in addition to al-Qaida.

In a rare public appearance on the evening of November 20th, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, gave a talk at the New York University School of Law. The subject of the chief’s presentation was one of Mr Roberts’s predecessors: Charles Evans Hughes, the white-bearded, aquiline-nosed figure who steered the Supreme Court through the fraught New Deal era in the 1930s. ... Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote recently that Mr Roberts has, “right from the start”, shown “mastery and deft management” in his leadership of the Court. A couple of somewhat intemperate dissents to one side—in the same-sex marriage case last summer, he wrote that “[f]ive lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage, [s]tealing this issue from the people”—Ms Minow’s assessment is just about right.  

Taking a leaf out of the American Civil Rights Movement’s book, Roma rights activists undertook a legal battle in European courts to challenge the pervasive discrimination that has kept them living on the fringes of society...Roma right activists filed a complaint in 1999 before the European Court of Human Rights saying that Roma students were 27 times likelier than non-Roma children to be placed in substandard schools...“It shook the system,” said Adriana Zimova, J.D.’11, a human rights attorney from Slovakia and a Roma rights activist...Zimova spoke last week at Harvard Law School about the challenges of fighting human rights abuses against the Roma.

In an effort to help borrowers struggling to repay student debt, Attorney General Maura Healey on Tuesday announced a new student loan assistance unit and a crackdown on unlawful debt relief companies...Students and advocates who joined Healey in her office for the announcement also praised the new hotline as a means of providing borrowers with information they otherwise may have difficulty obtaining. “Because access to legal advice is so hard to come by, people essentially are unable to enforce their legal rights, so their legal rights disappear,” said attorney Toby Merrill, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Since 2013, energy companies that report their hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the FracFocus website have become less forthcoming, increasingly citing the use of proprietary compounds to limit disclosure, according to a new study from the journal Energy Policy. The paper, written by two Harvard University researchers, is the most comprehensive analysis of FracFocus to date...Corresponding author Kate Konschnik, director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, said she was surprised to find that operators are increasingly unwilling to disclose chemicals. Konschnik said she had expected to find a "growing comfort level" as more states moved toward adopting FracFocus as a regulatory portal.

Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus joined via Skype to talk about Chief Justice John Robert’s approach to opinion writing assignments and other administrative tasks.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin analyzes Brown v. Board of Education in C-Span's Landmark Cases series.

A book excerpt by Lawrence Lessig. Tweedism corrupts representative democracy. Not in a criminal sense, but in a design sense. Tweedism defeats the design weakens the dependency a representative democracy is meant to create. That systemic defeat is “corruption.” This is a particular way to understand the idea of “corruption,” as a way to understand the corruption of Congress. When we ordinarily use the term, “corrupt” is something we say of a person. And when we say it of a person, we of a representative democracy, by introducing an influence that mean something quite nasty. A corrupt person is an evil person, for corruption is a crime. There’s no ambiguity or uncertainty in the term. Like the death penalty or pregnancy, “corrupt” in this sense is binary.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I come not to mock Ben Carson for forgetting that Thomas Jefferson was in France when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted, but to thank him for (unwittingly) raising the topic. My thesis is this: We should be thankful Jefferson was away. Notwithstanding the genius of the Declaration of Independence, its principal draftsman had truly terrible views about what a constitution should be like. If we’d followed them, we wouldn't have the Constitution we revere. In fact, I don't think we’d have much of a constitution at all.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I’ll cheerfully admit that until last weekend I had no idea that Mississippi decides tied elections by drawing straws -- much less that other states flip a coin. The only comparable version of planned randomness I’d heard of was the ancient Greek practice of choosing annual leaders by lottery. My first instinct on hearing about the Mississippi State House election that was resolved Friday in favor of the Democratic candidate was that this arbitrary practice should obviously be changed. On reflection, I’m not so sure.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The intensifying focus on terrorism, and on Islamic State in particular, poses a fresh challenge to the greatest American contribution to the theory and practice of free speech: the clear and present danger test. In both the U.S. and Europe, it’s worth asking whether that test may be ripe for reconsideration.