Media Mentions

President Obama has put a face on the epic election-year Supreme Court battle: Merrick Garland...."Garland has earned a well-deserved reputation as a jurist who is a complete straight-shooter, who comes to his cases, including environmental law cases, without a preconception of preferred outcome," said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus. "He has proven repeatedly that he is open to giving all claims a meaningful hearing," Lazarus said. "Given that the justice he would be replacing, Antonin Scalia, was known for his heightened skepticism of environmental protection laws and their citizen suit enforcement, a Justice Garland would clearly make a difference for environmental law cases before the Supreme Court."

An op-ed by Mark Tushnet. Several weeks have passed, and with the President having nominated Merrick Garland as Justice Scalia’s replacement, it might be easier to offer a somewhat more detached view of Justice Scalia’s likely place in Supreme Court history than was possible immediately after his unexpected death. Comments from his colleagues make it clear that, on the level of personal interaction, Justice Scalia was a genial man, easy to get along with (although the documentary record does show that he and retired Justice O’Connor set each other’s teeth on edge on a regular basis). From the point of view of those of us outside the Court (I should mention that I met Justice Scalia only once, so far as I can recall, and even then had quite limited contact with him), this raises questions about how we should think about the relation between personal qualities and contributions to the law and to the institution of the Supreme Court. Those questions are pertinent because, in my view, along several dimensions Justice Scalia’s contributions were negative, so to speak. That is, overall, his work as a Justice over an extended period made the nation worse off than it might have been.

Harvard Law School is acting swiftly in the wake of its decision Monday to retire the school’s official symbol, adopted in 1936, because of its ties to a slave-owning benefactor...“It was very important that the committee showed a substantial will to deepen our engagement with the Isaac Royall legacy and contemporary issues of racial justice,” Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law, told The Daily Beast. Halley stressed that while the symbol will be expunged, the Royall family legacy will not.

Perhaps no one in the Boston area was watching as President Obama announced his Supreme Court nominee with more anticipation than the people at Harvard Law School...Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, remembers him in his days in private practice in Washington and says Garland has served as her informal advisor. Minow joined WBUR’s All Things Considered to discuss the nomination.

President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, is expected to meet with several U.S. senators on Capitol Hill Thursday, where Republicans have promised to block any confirmation hearing. Garland, who is currently chief justice of the Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, has maintained a strong bond with Harvard — where he attended both undergrad and law school. If confirmed, Merrick Garland would be the 20th Harvard Law School graduate on the nation’s highest court. That number is twice as many as Yale, which has had 10 graduates on the court. Professor Richard Lazarus was in his office at Harvard Law School watching on his computer as the president of the United States nominated his friend, Garland, for a seat on the Supreme Court...“He was also a leader when he was here as a student,” said Lazarus...Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law, said Garland “makes even hard conversations better.” “He is someone who cuts to the heart of the matter, but listens very hard to all points of view,” she continued. “And in addition, he has a great sense of humor.”

President Obama has selected moderate federal appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by last month’s sudden passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, the White House has confirmed, setting up an epic battle with Republicans who have vowed not to hold a vote on any nominee. ..."Judge Garland is a brilliant jurist whom I've admired ever since he was my constitutional law student," Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe, a foremost scholar on constitutional law who had Garland as a student, told the Herald in an email this morning. "His modesty, humility, and moderation make him a particularly suitable choice for these divided times."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Every once in a while, President Obama removes his Law Professor in Chief hat and puts on his I Get Terrifying Briefings Every Day hat. Last week at SXSW, as he delivered general remarks about the encryption debate, he tried to sound reasonable and professorial: “We recognize that just like our other rights — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, et cetera — that there are going to be some constraints that we impose in order to make sure that we are safe, secure, and, uh, living in a civilized society,” he said, repeatedly making an embracing gesture with his palms. Symbolically keeping us safe, encircling us with his hands, the father of Malia and Sasha blinked a bit rapidly as he said this. The president must have known that the FBI was on shaky legal ground when he spoke in Austin this past week. But he had clearly decided well before getting on stage that he would side with the people telling him that the world is an increasingly terrifying place. Law would have to give way.

Gearing up for what will likely be a major political battle, on Wednesday President Obama, J.D. ’91, nominated Merrick B. Garland ’74, J.D. ’77, to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of influential Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, L.L.B. ’60, last month....Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, discussed the nomination with the Gazette via email, along with the upcoming clash between the Obama administration and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee, many of whose members want the next president to fill the court seat...TRIBE: Merrick Garland is a brilliant jurist whom I’ve known well and admired greatly ever since he was my student in advanced constitutional law in 1975-76.

An article by Jody Freeman (registration required): In February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court made an extraordinary decision. It temporarily suspended the implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the Clean Power Plan—which requires coal- and gas-fired power plants, the largest source of U.S. carbon pollution, to cut their emissions for the first time. At the Paris climate talks just two months prior, nearly 200 nations pledged to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions using a variety of domestic policies. Obama’s plan had become a crucial part of the United States’ strategy for meeting its own commitment in Paris: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005 levels.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Russian President Vladimir Putin had his “mission accomplished” moment Monday, announcing that Russia would withdraw its main forces from Syria after they turned the tide in President Bashar al-Assad’s struggle against Syrian rebels. The announcement partly explains why Putin has been supporting a cease-fire and truce talks over the last month: His goal is to consolidate the gains he and Assad made together. From a purely cynical perspective, the operation has been a fairly impressive success for Putin: Bomb intensely to create a humanitarian crisis while your troops advance, then negotiate peace to look like a good guy while assuring that the other side can’t fight back without violating the truce. And accomplish all this while strengthening your bargaining position vis-à-vis the U.S. and Europe.

MIT and Boston University are bolstering their partnership that gives legal advice to entrepreneurs and high-tech researchers. First Amendment and technology law expert Andy Sellars has been hired to direct BU’s new Technology and Cyberlaw Clinic. Sellars previously worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The new clinic is part of a broader effort to link BU’s law program with projects and businesses that emerge from students at MIT and BU. Last year, the two schools established an Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Clinic to help student entrepreneurs deal with legal trouble or work through common legal questions, such as how to incorporate a business and protect their intellectual property. The new Technology and Cyberlaw Clinic will help students tackle regulatory and legal hurdles that might trip up their cutting-edge research projects — something that MIT students in particular have run into before.

In December, the US Supreme Court reheard oral arguments in an affirmative action case called Fisher v. University of Texas. The highly anticipated case could have a far-reaching impact on the ability of US universities to consider race in admissions as part of their efforts to create a diverse campus. Indeed, proponents of affirmative action cite diversity as one of its main goals. However, one prominent higher education expert thinks conversations about diversity distract people from the original goal of affirmative action: reparative justice for people who have traditionally been oppressed. "Because affirmative action now rests on the diversity rationale, people who embrace affirmative action have to make all sorts of claims for diversity," Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy said at a New York University-sponsored event focused on race-based admissions at colleges. "Some of the claims that are made in favor of diversity are very questionable," he continued.

The symbol of Harvard Law School is already changing after the Harvard Corporation voted Monday to accept a committee’s recommendation to remove the shield used for 80 years because it does not reflect the values of the school. It was a powerful symbolic decision from one of the world’s most elite universities at a time when campuses across the United States and overseas are debating whether historic symbols, statues and names should be removed because of their ties to racism, or whether that would amount to erasing the past...“I was pleased that the corporation got to the matter as quickly as it did,” said Bruce H. Mann, chair of the committee and Carl F. Schipper Jr. professor of law. “No one ever has any idea when the corporation meets, so when you send off a recommendation to them, you really never know when you might hear back. I think that in this case, the quickness with which they addressed the issue was a measure of how seriously they took all the effort we had put into trying to resolve the matter.”

As a Harvard Law School committee was issuing its recommendation March 3 to do away with the institution’s controversial seal, the man who helped bring the issue to light was preparing to give a lecture -- appropriately enough -- on inflammatory symbols of the past. “How’s that for a coincidence?” asked Daniel Coquillette. A former dean of the Boston College Law School and current Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, the bespectacled Coquillette might not be the most public force behind the recent movement to examine the school’s racial climate. But as co-author of the 2015 book, “On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century” -- which outlines the often unflattering racial history of the prestigious institution -- he has been widely credited with helping to jump-start it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. North Carolina offers drivers a license plate with the slogan “Choose Life,” but for years has refused to offer a pro-choice plate. If you think that sounds like the state is unlawfully choosing between the two viewpoints, you’re not alone. In 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state had to play fair under the First Amendment and allow both. Last week, the appeals court reversed itself -- and not by choice. It was following orders, by applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that upheld a Texas license-plate program in which the state refused to allow a plate featuring a Confederate battle flag.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The melee at the Donald Trump rally Friday night in Chicago raises a fundamental First Amendment question: When a speaker, such as the Republican presidential candidate, is confronting angry protesters, whose speech rights come first: the speaker’s or the protesters’? The U.S. Supreme Court’s answer to this question has evolved over the years. At one time, the court was ambivalent, sometimes favoring the speaker and sometimes willing to shut down the speaker to avoid public disorder. Today, however, the norm is clear: Protesters who disrupt a rally can be removed by police so that they don’t exercise what’s called a heckler’s veto over the rally’s organizer.

Apple Inc. is objecting to a request from federal prosecutors in Boston that it help unlock the iPhone of an alleged member of one of the city’s most notorious gangs, according to court records — a case that echoes the government’s high-profile fight with Apple in the San Bernardino terrorism case...Bruce Schneier, a security technologist at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a critic of the government’s request, said the Apple case raises a keen national question: “Do we want security or surveillance?” “The danger is not whether the FBI submits one request or a thousand, it’s forcing Apple to create the tool,” Schneier said. “Once the tool exists, they’ll use it a million times, and we’ll all be vulnerable.”

The Harvard Corporation on Monday approved a recommendation to retire the Harvard Law School shield, which came under fire amid student protests last fall because of its ties to the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slaveholder who helped to establish the School through a bequest from his estate. In a letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, President Drew Faust and Corporation senior fellow William F. Lee said the School “should feel free to discontinue use of the shield.” With that response, the Harvard Corporation affirmed the recommendation of a committee appointed by Minow that the controversial shield be replaced. “If the Law School is to have an official symbol, it must closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not,” the committee wrote earlier this month. In an email to the HLS community Monday afternoon, Minow thanked the president and the Corporation, as well as the members of the committee whose recommendation the Corporation approved. She acknowledged that retiring the shield “will take some time, but the work has begun.”

The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, agreed Monday to allow Harvard Law School to remove and replace its seal, which features the crest of a slaveholding family...Student activists were unsurprised but pleased with the Corporation’s decision. “I think that this represents the culmination of a lot of activism by students all across Harvard Law School, and I’m thankful that the Corporation has finally done the right thing,” Alexander J. Clayborne, a member of Royall Must Fall, said. Clayborne said activists will continue to push the Law School to meet their other demands, including reforming the school’s curriculum and hiring more minority faculty members.

The image of three sheaves of golden wheat arranged inside a blue-and-crimson shield has stood as the symbol of Harvard Law School and its graduates for nearly 80 years. But sometime next year, the shield, which uses elements of a former slave-holding family’s coat of arms, will be scrubbed from Harvard’s campus. In its place will be a new emblem, officials said Monday — one that better reflects the law school’s values and its mission. The Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s governing boards, has accepted the law school’s request to change the controversial symbol in time for its bicentennial in 2017.

As Apple tries to fend off government demands for access to iPhone content, the company is leaning on free speech arguments as a key part of its defense in a California courtroom...About half of the successful First Amendment appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court today focus on corporate rights — a big change from previous decades, according to a survey of a half-century of court decisions by Harvard Law professor John Coates.