Media Mentions

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. I often informally ask my students, at Harvard Law School, what their most important ideals are and how they hope to fulfill them in their lives and careers. In the past several years, I’ve been touched to hear a significant plurality of students name a priority that I didn’t hear much when I began teaching, nearly a decade ago: their close relationships with their parents... Particularly in the way things have unfolded at Yale, students’ social-justice activism has been expressed, in part, as the need for care from authority figures. When they experience the hurt that motivates them to political action, they’re deeply disappointed with parental surrogates for not responding adequately or quickly enough to support and nurture them.

Governor Charlie Baker joined more than two dozen other governors Monday who said they did not want Syrian refugees to resettle in their states, citing security concerns after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris....Under federal law, the president, after consulting with Congress, sets the number of refugees admitted every year and the government works with the United Nations and nonprofits to resettle refugees around the United States. “Neither Massachusetts nor any other state can fence Syrian refugees out of the state,” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law scholar. “We are a union and must sink or swim together.”

The arrival in mid-2007 of what we now regard as the smartphone was that rarest of moments in technology, a true, full-on revolution. The center of that revolution was the upper end of the U.S. consumer market. Now, it’s bringing billions of people in the developing world online for the first time, creating some startling challenges and opportunities, a few of which surfaced Monday at Quartz’s Next Billion forum. Here are some highlights....Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination with a campaign based on Congressional reform, reminded the audience that he was branded a “Cassandra” 15 years ago for warning that the Internet could lead to a world in which everyone’s moves were tracked and privacy was compromised. “I am sorry that Cassandra was right about the Internet. But I am hear to tell you today that Cassandra is back,” he said. Paraphrasing Aaron Swartz he said, “The Internet is the best influence and the worst. It is both.”

The president of Florida State University condemned CNN’s upcoming airing of a film that explores sexual assault on college campuses, saying it does not adhere to journalistic standards. As a result, FSU president John Thrasher is refusing to participate in a televised panel discussion on CNN to talk about the film, The Hunting Ground. “It is inexcusable for a network as respected as CNN to pretend that the film is a documentary rather than an advocacy piece,” Thrasher wrote in a statement that was distributed Monday...A group of 19 Harvard Law School professors have come out against the film and its portrayal of a case involving a Harvard student. The professors, in a letter, wrote that the film “provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student.”

Republican fury over illegal immigration and border security took on a new dimension Monday as a growing number of governors, presidential candidates and members of Congress rushed to oppose or even defy President Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees. Twenty-five Republican governors vowed to block the entry of Syrian refugees into their states, arguing that the safety of Americans was at stake after the Paris attacks by terrorists including a man who entered Europe with a Syrian passport and posed as a migrant...Governors can ask the State Department, the primary agency managing the refugee program, not to send Syrians to their states. But some legal scholars were adamant that the governors’ efforts to bar Syrians on their own were unconstitutional. “This is an exclusively federal issue,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “Under our Constitution, we sink or swim together,” he said.

Alex Epstein, president and founder of the for-profit think-tank Center for Industrial Progress and author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” argued for the use of fossil fuels on Monday in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall. Aladdine Joroff, a clinical instructor and staff attorney in the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at the Law School, spoke after Epstein and gave a rebuttal. The event was hosted by the Harvard Federalist Society, a student-run organization for conservatives, moderates, and libertarians....In her rebuttal, Joroff asserted that opponents of fossil fuel usage want to transition to a cleaner energy supply, not remove the existing energy supply.“From a moral perspective, I’d argue that we have an obligation to pursue feasible alternatives now,” she said. Trenton Van Oss [`17], vice president of speakers for the Federalist Society and one of the hosts of the event, said he was pleased with the proceedings.“[T]hat’s part of our mission at the school, to provide students with points of view that they might not get in the classroom or at other events,” he said. “Alex did that, and Professor Joroff offered a great response.”

For all the claims that the $95.5-million settlement, announced on Monday, of a federal false-claims lawsuit against the Education Management Corporation was "historic," "unprecedented," and "a very clear warning to other career colleges out there," the deal actually won’t do a whole lot for the thousands of students who may have been pressured to enroll by the company’s admissions recruiters over the past decade. In fact, some of the biggest financial beneficiaries will be the lawyers for the four sets of whistle-blowers who brought the allegations of "boiler room"-style recruiting to light, beginning in 2007...In exchange for having broken laws, "the company agrees not to break the law going forward? None of this sounds like remedy to me," said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, at Harvard Law School. "The company has taken billions of federal funding and distributed that to its executives and shareholders," but students will see very little of it, Ms. Merrill said.

More than a dozen state governors refused on Monday to accept Syrian refugees after the Paris attacks, part of a mounting Republican backlash against the Obama administration's plan to accept thousands more immigrants from the war-torn country. Leading Republican presidential candidates called on President Barack Obama to suspend the plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming year and some Republican lawmakers began moves in Congress to try to defund the policy..."The federal government has the power over immigration. If they admit Syrian refugees, they're here," said Deborah Anker, a professor of law at Harvard Law School who specializes in immigration issues. "People aren't going to the (state) border. The federal government is going to bring them in."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For Republican presidential contenders challenged by the media, the go-to answer has become a claim of victimhood: You are biased against us. As Marco Rubio put it at the CNBC debate last month, “The Democrats have the ultimate super-PAC. It’s called the mainstream media.” Are media outlets really biased against Republican candidates? One of the most careful studies, by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago, doesn’t find much evidence of that. Its central conclusion is that readers have a strong preference for like-minded news -- and that newspapers tend to show a slant in a direction that is consistent with the preferences of their readers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As if the University of Missouri didn't already have enough problems, State Senator Kurt Schaefer is trying to block a research study by a graduate student in the School of Social Work. The senator, who’s a one-man scourge of Planned Parenthood, is claiming that the study violates a Missouri law that bars spending state funds to encourage abortion. Schaefer’s effort blatantly violates academic freedom. If it succeeds, it might possibly violate the First Amendment.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Friday’s gruesome terrorist attacks by the Islamic State in the heart of Paris mark the latest setback in President Obama’s seven-year effort to end the wars and reverse the counterterrorism policies of his predecessor. Many will claim that the attacks are traceable to the President’s failed policies against the Islamic State, and to his related hesitancy in managing the implosion of Syria. The day before the attacks, the President sanguinely told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the Islamic State had been “contained.” That claim having been repudiated in dramatic fashion, the President immediately faced pressure to ratchet up the fight against the Islamic State.

The rise of Uber has convinced many pundits, economists, and policymakers that freelancing via digital platforms is becoming increasingly important to Americans’ livelihood. It has also promoted the idea that new technology—particularly the explosion of platforms enabling the gig economy—will fundamentally alter the future of work. While Uber and other new companies in the gig economy receive a lot of attention, a look at Uber’s own data about its drivers’ schedules and pay reveals them to be much less consequential than most people assume...The Harvard law professor Ben Sachs has persuasively argued that Uber should be considered an employer and that “workers can choose when and how much to work, and can even work without immediate supervision, and still be employees.” The challenge, then, is to preserve the plainly evident value of Uber’s services while having the company comply with rules that provide adequate consumer, tax, and worker protections.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When French President Francois Hollande said Friday's attacks on Paris were an “act of war,” he was following a script set by George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Rhetorically, invoking the language of war to describe a terrorist attack sends a message of seriousness and outrage. But as U.S.’s post 9/11 wars show, it isn’t always wise to elevate a terrorist group to the level of the sovereign entities that traditionally have the authority to make war. This was a mistake with respect to al-Qaeda, but it’s a greater mistake when it comes to Islamic State, whose primary aspiration is to achieve statehood. By saying that Islamic State is in a war with France, Hollande is unwittingly giving the ragtag group the international stature it seeks.

The veracity of one of this year’s most talked about documentaries, “The Hunting Ground,” has been attacked by 19 Harvard Law School professors, who say the film’s portrayal of rape on college campus is distorted, specifically when it comes to their school’s handling of one particular case...“The documentary has created an important conversation about campus sexual assault,” said Diane L. Rosenfeld, a Harvard law lecturer who also appears in the film and did not sign the letter. “We need to be rolling up our sleeves and really figuring out what kind of preventative education programs to develop which create a culture of sexual respect.” But in their letter, the law professors, who include Laurence H. Tribe, Randall L. Kennedy and Jeannie C. Suk, said the film “provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student,” specifically a male Harvard law student whose case is included in “The Hunting Ground.”...“This is a young human being whose life has been mauled by this process for years, and now he has to walk around campus with people saying, ‘Oh, you’re a repeat sexual offender,’ and he’s not,” said Janet Halley, one of the letter’s authors. “It’s not a documentary. It’s propaganda."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. The principle of “equal dignity in the eyes of the law” articulated by the Supreme Court’s extraordinary same-sex marriage ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges earlier this year — that all individuals are deserving in equal measure of personal autonomy and are entitled not to have the state define their personal identities and social roles — lays the groundwork for an ongoing political and legal dialogue about the meaning of equality and an evolving understanding of the indignities that our Constitution cannot tolerate. In securing these dignitary rights of all people, Obergefell is an important landmark. But it cannot be the last word if Obergefell’s push for equal dignity for LGBTQ individuals is to point a way forward in the unending struggle for equal rights for all. If that doctrine is to signal the beginning of the end for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression – in the workplace, in housing and education, in athletics and public accommodations, in immigration and adoption, and in the construction of families — then the struggle will have to be waged not just in the courts but in regulatory and legislative bodies, as well as in the cultural arena of public discourse.

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a new policy that gives companies a clearer idea of what to expect when self-reporting foreign corruption violations to the government, a move strikingly similar to a corporate-minded approach to criminal liability advocated by law professor Jennifer Arlen at New York University....Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson described the process of calibrating corporate liability as finding a balance of carrots and sticks. But he has warned such a corporate pass policy may encourage companies to push compliance responsibility solely to individuals. Companies might have “much weaker incentives to invest substantial resources in effective training, integrity promotion, or other activities designed to prevent bribe-paying,” Mr. Stephenson wrote recently.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The violence in the Terai plain of Nepal over the last six weeks may not be on your radar screen. But the blockade of the Nepal-India border created by armed groups from the Madhesi ethnic minority actually has global significance. The reason is surprising: On Sept. 20, Nepal ratified a new constitution after a fitful and frustrating eight-year process. You'd think this would be good news, heralding an era of good feelings. Instead, ratification drove the Madhesis into something very like open revolt. Thus, a question of universal relevance: Why do some constitutions work, and others fail? Put another way, what's the essence of a constitutional deal that enables it to succeed?

A majority of Passcode Influencers said that Europeans should be allowed to sue in US courts if their personal data is misused. A new data-sharing agreement is currently in the works between the US and European Union, after the European Court of Justice struck down a the 15-year-old Safe Harbor agreement allowing companies to transfer data across the Atlantic....“If data is indeed being misused, there should be a remedy. What the question doesn’t ask is what should count as misuse. But there’s no reason to offer differing protections here based on the citizenship of the person whose data a company is handling,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “And protection irrespective of country of origin is not only the right thing to do. It also gives US companies an important competitive advantage.”

One of the country's leading scholars on race and justice issues offered simple answers to complex questions during a Wednesday evening talk in Portland. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree Jr., speaking on Veterans Day about the Black Lives Matter movement, mixed personal anecdotes about his upbringing in central California with pointed responses to questions during a moderated discussion at a downtown Portland church. Ogletree's talk came on a day when Oregon made national news with the revelation that the state had conducted surveillance on Oregonians using the Black Lives Matter social media hashtag and, in Virginia, video emerged of a black man dying in police custody after repeated Tasering while shackled. "It has to stop," Ogletree said, citing repeated deaths of black men and women in police custody. "It just keeps happening."

Harvard Law Student Bill Barlow [`16] on free speech, political correctness and the protests on college campuses in the U.S.

Arthur Mitchell walks gingerly now. He once moved gracefully across dance stages around the world...He's been called the Jackie Robinson of Ballet. Mitchell gained renown as the first African American to be a permanent member of a major ballet company when he joined the New York City Ballet in the mid-1950s. But his most influential achievement arguably came in 1969 when he co-founded the Dance Theater of Harlem...Much of his time is now spent going through sixty years of pictures, programs and letters — archives that he's donated to Columbia University, where he was the subject of a symposium and much praise from his former students, like Harvard Law School Dean of Students Marcia Sells. "He gave us a possibility to think and to dream," Sells said. "As he says, you have to have that. It is something I have carried with me."