Media Mentions

California’s revised eligibility rules for hepatitis C drugs appear to be easing Medi-Cal patients’ access to the highly effective medications, according to state data. Yet even with the relaxed guidelines, the vast majority of those on Medi-Cal with hepatitis C still aren't getting the costly drugs, state health officials say..."A really large state took a bold move and really reduced the restrictions, and that was a great first step toward sending the message that, 'we understand how important it is to provide treatment access to people living with [hepatitis C],'" says Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.

An op-ed by Andrew Manuel Crespo. First he called Latinos “rapists.” After that, Donald Trump forcibly ejected the country’s leading Latino journalist from a press conference, swiped at Jeb Bush for being married to a Latina, praised supporters who assaulted a Latino man, and sharply criticized the country’s only Latina governor — a fellow Republican. In terms of denigrating Latinos, that’s a hard list to top. But Trump’s most recent attack, this time against federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, is among his very worst. Unanimously confirmed by the Senate, Judge Curiel is presiding over a lawsuit that accuses Trump of swindling students at the unaccredited Trump “University,” which Trump’s own employees have described as a fraud. At a recent rally, Trump said that Judge Curiel should step off the case, and then told the crowd, who had previously chanted “build that wall,” that Judge Curiel, born in Indiana, “happens to be Mexican.” That comment was widely criticized as coded racism. A week later, however, Trump doubled down, telling a reporter that Judge Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” disqualifies him from the case because, in Trump’s words, “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” Being Latino, that is. Only numbness to Trump’s streaming insults could spare this latest slur from becoming a campaign ender.

An op-ed by Marc Mauer, Nancy Gertner, and Jonathan Simon. Despite growing national discussion on criminal justice reform, Weldon Angelos sits in a federal prison serving out his 55-year prison term. Angelos was convicted in 2004 for three marijuana sales to an undercover agent totaling about $1,000 within a 72-hour period. During the course of these transactions he possessed a gun, which he did not use nor threaten to do so. But because of federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the sentencing judge was obligated to impose this draconian prison term because he had committed a repeat drug offense with a firearm, all the while acknowledging that the sentence was excessive. While President Obama has stepped up the pace of granting clemencies in drug cases, his total since taking office is only 306. With 85,000 drug offenders in federal prisons, many deserving of consideration, the pace of commutations to date is encouraging but still quite modest. With only months to go in this administration there is growing concern that the clemency initiative announced by the Department of Justice in 2014 will fall far short of expectations.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are teachers entitled to free speech in the classroom? As a teacher of free-speech law, I've got a particular interest in this broadly important question. Yesterday a federal appeals court said the answer was no -- at least at public schools below the university level. The decision makes some sense in light of existing precedent. But the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue. When it does, it should consider the possibility that the whole law of public workplace free speech has gone awry -- and that teachers as well as other public employees should be given greater latitude to express their opinions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I've been generally sympathetic to the military prosecutors seeking to convict the 9/11 planners in Guantanamo. My take has been that they are honorable people trying to accomplish a task that may be impossible, namely making the tribunal into something more than a show trial. But now the prosecutors have made a serious misstep in the form of a foray into public relations. They’re asking the court to allow public testimony by ten elderly, sick relatives of 9/11 victims this October -- before the guilt-or-innocence phase of the trial has begun. Such testimony is legally unnecessary before the sentencing phase, when it's potentially plausible to allow victim-impact statements.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One Louisiana county accounts for half the state’s death sentences – even though it has just 5 percent of the state’s population and 5 percent of its homicides. On Tuesday, Justice Stephen Breyer cited this fact about Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in a dissenting U.S. Supreme Court opinion arguing that the death penalty is unconstitutional. The “arbitrary” factor of geography, Breyer proposed, is a reason to think that the death sentence is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Is Breyer right?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Thirty-nine years ago, on May 25, 1977, a movie was released with a somewhat ridiculous name: "Star Wars." (It’s now called "Episode IV: A New Hope.") Almost no one thought that it would do well, and nobody could have predicted it would become the defining saga of our era. How did it manage to do that? One answer is that like a great novel or poem, Star Wars doesn’t tell you what to think. You can understand it in different, even contradictory ways. Here are six of those ways.

Law school wasn’t originally in Nino Monea’s [`17] plans. The Livonia Franklin High School alumnus attended Eastern Michigan University, not going in thinking he’d be interested in law. After participating in several organizations, such as mock trial and moot court, and taking constitutional law classes, the law began to appeal to him. Now, going into his third year of law school at Harvard, he’s been named the law school’s student government president, a position he can almost guarantee hasn’t been held by a Livonia native before...Monea recently wrapped up finals and is in Washington, D.C., for the summer, interning at the Department of Justice in its Antitrust Division before returning to school in the fall. There, he hopes to help shape the role of the student government leadership, which he said recently changed in its position on campus to be more active.

We know that resentment is driving much of Donald Trump’s success — resentment of elites, of the political class, of illegal immigrants, of protesters, of the media — and perhaps most particularly of changes in the demographic makeup of the country that Trump and his followers find unwelcome....Simon Hedlin [`19], a public policy researcher, noted that since reactance is driven by perceptions rather than by facts, this works well in Trump’s favor, considering his often cavalier relationship with the truth. Perhaps more significantly, Hedlin noted that he and Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor and former top aide in the Obama administration, conducted research that shows that some people will reject a policy or action that is to their advantage when they feel pushed or forced into making the “correct” decision.

Looking at the totals on your credit card bill, you might wonder, how did I get in this situation? If you intended to only use your card for emergencies but ended up using it for life’s little extras, does that make you irresponsible, immature, or reckless? Behavioral economics says it just makes you human...“We get the money now, when we take a loan, and we pay it back some time in the future. This temporal component triggers a host of behavioral psychological effects,” says Oren Bar-Gill, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in law and economics. “One of them is basic myopia. We think more about the present and less about the future, and so we’re more likely to take on debt, because we don’t put enough weight in our decision-making process on the future paybacks.”

Were laws protecting animals violated in the shooting of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo? [Fellow] Delcianna Winders of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program joins Sue O'Connell to discuss.

It was very hot last Tuesday night in the SoHo apartment of Jenna Lyons and Courtney Crangi, and not just because it was about 80 degrees outside and the air-conditioning unit was not up to the job. It was hot in the metaphorical sense, with the living room filled with members of the old guard more famous for their actual names than their social media handles. Tina Brown, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, George Soros: people like that...The occasion was the publication of “The World According to Star Wars” (Dey Street Books), by Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration official. It brings together themes from the “Star Wars” saga and the story of how it came to be, using that as a lens to look at the world. It’s “Freakonomics” meets the Death Star, if you will, with meditations on the bonds of fathers and sons.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Joshua Matz. With 24 cases still to decide this term and only eight justices to decide them, the Supreme Court has mustered all its resources to find (or manufacture) consensus. Many rulings — even those with lopsided majorities — hint strongly of compromise. So far, the justices have mostly decided not to decide, drafting narrow opinions that leave big questions unanswered. It is in vogue to treat this term as a one-off, yet another result of madhouse election-year politics. On that view, the court just needs to tread water a while longer. In the meantime, each of us can hope that justices who share our particular vision will end up with a majority. But when “exceptional” circumstances endure long enough, advance powerful political interests and are tolerated by the public, they can easily become the new normal.

An op-ed by lecturer Thomas Rubin. Facebook ran head-on into the First Amendment last week, and the result wasn’t pretty. It started with the company sending Sen. John Thune a lengthy explanation of its editorial process in the trending news section of the service, in response to a demand following allegations of political bias. It ended with the revelation that tech legend Peter Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. The Facebook angle there: Thiel was an early investor and sits on its board...There’s no precedent for a media company to account to Congress, instead of to its customers, about its editorial process. And it’s a safe bet that no media company has allowed the surreptitious funder of a libel suit against a corporate partner to serve on its board, given the conflict with its mission and duty.

ISPs wired and wireless have submitted a paper to the FCC by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe that says the commission's broadband privacy proposal threatens speech rights. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, CTIA and USTelecom commissioned the paper, which they submitted Friday, the deadline for initial comments in the proceeding. "The FCC’s proposed rules would violate the First Amendment," Tribe concluded. "At minimum, they raise a host of grave constitutional questions and should not be adopted." The FCC is proposing to require ISPs to get affirmative (opt in) permission from subs to share information with third parties in most instances, a requirement not placed on edge providers like Google and Facebook for their own data collection and monetizing. Tribe is a voice of experience on the CPNI (customer proprietary network information) issue, the groups point out, having successfully challenged the voice CPNI order in US West Communications, Inc. v. FCC. He says the FCC proposal clearly triggers First Amendment scrutiny and clearly does not fare well in that examination. "The proposal runs afoul of fundamental First Amendment limits on the FCC’s authority to regulate customer information," he said.

War poses special threats to democracy, but the most pernicious challenges often come from within. History reveals that nothing has more power to undermine democratic institutions than the boundless fear of a foreign enemy. Rogue Justice is Karen Greenberg’s splendid new book about all the ways liberty was assaulted in America in the decade after the cataclysm of 11 September 2001. In these years, she writes, America came “perilously close” to “losing the protections of the bill of rights”...After Ashcroft made Jack Goldsmith the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Goldsmith concluded that Yoos’s memo seemed “designed to confer immunity for bad acts” and made arguments “wildly broader than was necessary to support what was actually being done”.

Becoming ambassadors of higher education and searching for solutions to issues confronting academia today are important missions for University graduates, said legal scholar Randall Kennedy ’77 at the 269th Baccalaureate ceremony on Sunday...However, Kennedy pointed out, there are several issues and problems facing institutions of higher education these days. “Inefficiencies in the system of higher education do not stay put. They are infectious, posing dangers to the system as a whole. Colleges and universities face a rising loss in confidence regarding their worthiness,” Kennedy said. This “worthiness” is typically defined by the marketability of the college’s merits. Furthermore, he pointed to the increasing burdens of government regulation and mounting costs of tuition. Kennedy further critiqued the increasing desire among colleges to achieve popularity, as evidenced by the frequent hiring of Hollywood celebrities to provide commencement addresses.

An op-ed by Jesse Fried and Steven Davidoff Solomon. The American Anthropological Association has been voting this entire month on a resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Today marks the final day for members to cast their votes. Should the resolution pass, the anthropologists will be the largest US academic association to support an Israel boycott, joining a handful of smaller organizations such as the African Literature Association and the American Studies Association. These anti-Israel resolutions are being pushed by BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction) activists eager to demonize, demoralize and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. Academic BDS is widely and appropriately viewed as morally perverse. As the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities and many of the country’s leading scholars have stressed, any academic boycott interferes with the commitment to the free exchange of ideas that is still shared by most academics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a major development for the history of democracy in the Muslim world, Tunisia’s successful Islamic democratic party separated its political wing from its social-religious movement last week. This isn’t a move to secularism, exactly. But it is a move in the direction of dividing the world into two spheres, one of politics, the other of faith.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Your credit card company can make you agree to arbitrate disputes as a condition of getting the card. But can an employer require workers to arbitrate rather than suing collectively as a condition of employment? In recent years, all the federal courts of appeals to address the question have said there’s no difference between your credit card issuer and your employer: Both can make you give up legal remedies. This week that changed, when for the first time an appeals court said an employer can’t require employees to waive collective legal action. By creating a circuit split, this important opinion will almost certainly push the Supreme Court to consider the issue, and soon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the police detain and search you on the suspicion that your car might be parked illegally? A federal appeals court has said yes, upholding a felon-in-possession conviction for a man who was searched after Milwaukee police surrounded the parked car he was sitting in and handcuffed its four occupants -- because the car was parked within 15 feet of a crosswalk. The outraged dissenting judge said that the defendant had been stopped for “parking while black,” and insisted that the holding went beyond anything the Supreme Court ever authorized.