Media Mentions

A group of Harvard Law School professors have started a publicity campaign to challenge the depiction of the school’s sexual assault grievance process in "The Hunting Ground," a documentary film about campus sexual assault that CNN is scheduled to air on Nov. 19...Janet E. Halley, one of the Law School professors challenging “The Hunting Ground” and a signatory of the 2014 Globe letter, said the group will launch a website and upload documents about Winston’s case to further challenge the documentary. Halley argued that CNN’s decision to name Winston constituted “an attack” and that she and the other professors felt compelled to come to his defense.

Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us? These are some of the questions that come up in the new technology podcast Codebreaker, the first season of which is fixated on the question, “Is it evil?”...“Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in the first episode of Codebreaker, “and by unowned I mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. At the embattled University of Missouri, where the president and chancellor are stepping down, university police sent students an e-mail Tuesday urging them to call and report if they “witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech.” The e-mail urged witnesses to provide descriptions of the speakers and, if safe, snap pictures of them with their phones. The First Amendment applies at a state university campus, and those who speak hatefully or hurtfully can't be criminally punished. But they can be penalized or expelled if they create an environment that's hostile on the basis of race or sex. There's a serious tension between these interests, and the Missouri e-mail raises a pressing question: Does the use of campus police to enforce anti-discrimination advance the goal of knowledge or detract from it?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the post-Ferguson era, the details of a police shooting that kills a fleeing defendant are all-important -- and you might think we would want juries, not judges, to consider them. But on Monday, eight justices of the U.S. Supreme Court made it harder for police shooting cases to reach a jury. The court held that a Texas state trooper couldn't be sued for using his rifle to shoot the driver of a car that led police on an 18-minute chase. Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who’s emerging as the court’s conscience on race, thought the suit should be able to go forward.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’re arrested and charged with a white-collar crime, can the government freeze the assets you need to pay for a lawyer to prove your innocence? Remarkably, there's no definitive legal answer to this question, which the U.S. Supreme Court will take up Tuesday. It’s established that the government can freeze tainted assets that it traces to your alleged crime, and that you don’t get to challenge that determination. But Tuesday's case will answer the further question of whether the government can freeze any of your assets up to the value of what it says you stole -- not just assets it identifies as tainted proceeds.

Nineteen Harvard Law professors have written a letter condemning "The Hunting Ground," a film purporting to be a documentary about campus sexual assault. The film has been getting some Oscar buzz, and CNN is preparing to air the program next week. In a press package for the film, CNN singled out a story in the film about a sexual assault accusation at Harvard. The press packet named the accused student, even though he was not identified in the film. The 19 professors want to be sure viewers are aware that the film is highly misleading...The 19 professors include feminist icon Nancy Gertner; outspoken critics of campus rape hysteria Elizabeth Bartholet, Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk; as well as President Obama's former mentor Charles Ogletree.

The documentary "The Hunting Ground" provides "a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities" and of a case involving Harvard University students, 19 Harvard law professors said in a statement Wednesday...Along the way, the documentary takes frequent detours to call out a number of other institutions for mishandling or ignoring the issue, including Harvard. That section of the film focuses on an assault allegedly committed by a law student there named Brandon Winston. On Wednesday, a week before the documentary is set to air on CNN, the Harvard professors released a lengthy statement criticizing the the film's portrayal of the accused student's case..."Mr. Winston was finally vindicated by the Law School and by the judicial proceedings, and allowed to continue his career at the Law School and beyond. Propaganda should not be allowed to erase this just outcome." Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard law lecturer who did not sign Wednesday's statement, said that she disagrees with her colleagues and agrees with documentary's findings..."I fully support 'The Hunting Ground' film, which is all about ending the silencing of survivors," she said.

After the GOP debate, a look at the power and limitations of money and super PACs in presidential politics this season...Guests...Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman professor of law and leadership at the Harvard Law School and former Democratic candidate for President.

When BHP Billiton Ltd. and Vale SA started a joint iron-mining venture in rural Brazil nearly 40 years ago, the mining giants created a new corporate entity: a limited-liability company that, in theory, protected its owners from litigation in case of disaster. But in practice, Brazilian authorities and lawyers say, the corporate structure does little to shield its parents from big fines, cleanup and legal costs after two tailings ponds owned by the joint venture—called Samarco Mineracao SA—burst last week. At least six people were killed, 21 are still missing, and farms and villages were destroyed...Such suits have become more difficult to bring in recent years after Supreme Court decisions limited the scope of cases involving foreign parties to serious violations like human-rights abuses, and forced plaintiffs to prove more distinct U.S. connections to bad behavior abroad, said Susan Farbstein, a professor at Harvard Law School who has represented plaintiffs in such cases.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow defended race-based affirmative action for law school admissions in an amici curiae brief filed for the the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin. Minow filed the brief Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post ’69 last week. Harvard has also submitted an amicus brief for the Fisher case offering similar pro-affirmative action argument...In 32-page brief, which was penned by their counsel, Minow and Post contend that law schools should continue to consider race as a factor in a holistic admissions process and that a ruling to the contrary would have “devastating” educational consequences.

Some students at Harvard Law School want it to change its official seal, citing its ties to an 18th-century slaveholder...Third-year law student Brian Klosterboer, who's behind the movement, said the crest is a "reminder of this vicious family." "People say we should remember the history, but I think a lot of people don't even know about it," Klosterboer said...Royall was a brutal slaveholder who was known for killing slaves, burning at least one at the stake, said Dan Coquillette, a visiting professor at Harvard's law school. Royall moved to Massachusetts after operating a plantation with hundreds of slaves in the West Indies, Coquillette said. Still, Coquillette, who explored Royall's history in a recent book, said he doesn't think the school should erase that history...Another third-year law student opposing the seal, Alexander Clayborne, said the effort is only the first part of a broader examination of the law school. "Our larger goals include decolonization of the law school in general," he said, "and decolonization of the law school curriculum."

Scathing commentary about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has tended to focus on the court’s refusal to restrict corporate political spending. As you know, the justices struck down campaign finance reforms as an unconstitutional violation of corporations’ free speech rights, triggering an avalanche of predictions that corporate donors would wield outsized political influence. The other free speech beneficiaries of Citizens United – labor unions also subject to the invalidated campaign finance restrictions – haven’t been the subject of nearly as much fear and loathing. That’s going to change, at least a little, later this term when the Supreme Court hears Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association...The point of the amicus brief, according to law professor John Coates of Harvard, was to highlight the relative rights of union beneficiaries and shareholders, particularly because in this case, the justices are being asked to give non-union members even more control over political expenditures they don’t support. “It seemed like a good opportunity to intervene – even better than a corporate case,” said Coates, who said he wrote the initial draft of the brief and circulated it to likely co-signers. He said he was pleasantly surprised that so many corporate law professors – 19 in all – ended up joining a brief in a case that nominally has nothing to do with corporate law. (Among the amici are Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard...)

A leading human rights body is calling for all governments to step up formal international negotiations in order to pre-emptively ban killer robots, as the annual UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) debates use of autonomous weapons for the third year in a row. Human Rights Watch has published a report urging nations to turn the informal experts meetings that have been held over the past two years at the CCW conference into formal negotiations in order to ban the technology before too much investment is put into it...I think there's a recognition amongst member nations that this is a problem, that these autonomous weapons could be developed in years, not decades. There's also diplomatic pressure as next year there's the fifth year review conference. Every five years this review is held at the CCW, and it is often used to initiate formal negotiations and adopt new protocols," Bonnie Docherty, a senior researcher in the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, told IBTimes UK...The more states invest in this technology, the less likely they will be to give it up," said Docherty, who also lectures in international human rights law at Harvard University.

How big is your house? If you're like most other Americans, it's probably around 2,600 square feet -- the average size of a house according to the 2014 Census. But growing ever-more popular is the tiny house movement -- essentially when people decide, for any number of reasons ranging from financial to environmental choose to drastically downsize their living space...Getaway, a project born out of Harvard's Millennial Housing Lab with the mission of growing the tiny house movement, has built three tiny houses -- just 160 square feet each -- in the woods of southern New Hampshire, about two hours from Boston. The idea, its founders Pete Davis [`18] and Jon Staff, of Harvard Law and Harvard Business Schools, respectively, is to "build tiny houses, place them on beautiful rural land and rent them by the night to city folks looking to escape the digital grind and test-drive tiny house living."

If you aren’t a lawyer, you may be surprised to learn that much of the country’s legal rulings aren’t freely accessible to the public, despite the crucial role many played in the shaping and organization of American society. While the documents are part of the public domain, a byzantine patchwork of outdated government interfaces and expensive paywalls restrict access to them. Now, as part of an ambitious multiyear project, Harvard University is liberating that information. Home to the country’s most comprehensive collection of U.S. case law, second only to the Library of Congress, Harvard is partnering with technology startup Ravel Law to digitize its legal library — more than 200 years’ worth of cases — making it fully and freely searchable...“Not only will the law become accessible, but all sorts of interesting things might be done with it as a database,” Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and director of the law library, told BuzzFeed News. “To me it’s kind of like seeing Google Maps for the first time after having only used MapQuest,” he said, referring to new, possible insights a user might glean from analyzing and visualizing case law.

Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 argued Monday that holding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC primarily responsible for campaign finance issues is “a dangerous oversimplification.” In a large Law School classroom where attendees outnumbered seats, a discussion dubbed “If Citizens United Isn’t the Problem, What’s the Solution?” centered on the 2010 ruling that the government could not restrict independent political expenditures by nonprofit corporations. “The American people are disgusted by the current state of campaign finance,” Tribe said, but he argued that focusing the narrative of American political ills on Citizens United would increase political cynicism and alienation without addressing real issues.

An op-ed by Joseph Singer. Americans are skeptical about regulation. But when we read the news about faulty ignition switches and falsified environmental equipment, we see that the temptation to make short-term profits may blind us to the harms we cause. And it is for that reason, above all, that government needs to do the regulating...We make these choices through law — and that means regulation. Neither free markets nor private property exist without regulation. The question is not whether to regulate. The question is how to regulate.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is a stickler for evenly distributing the workload of the Supreme Court, but he plays favorites among his eight colleagues when assigning the court’s most important decisions. Not surprisingly, Roberts calls his own number more than anyone else’s and assigns the second-highest number to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the pivotal justice on the ideologically divided court, according to a new study by Harvard law professor Richard J. Laz­arus, published in the Harvard Law Review. On the other hand, Roberts has never assigned Justice Sonia Sotomayor the court’s opinion in a major case in her six terms on the court, Lazarus found, an omission that he wrote “could be a bit portentous.” In looking broadly at the chief justice’s 10 years on the job, Laz­arus found that Roberts hesitates in assigning big decisions to the court’s most conservative and liberal members — Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the right, and Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left.

...When things like this happen, questions arise: Who’s responsible? If treatment makes things worse — meaning that a patient needs more care than expected — who pays? It depends...But lawyers who collect only when there’s a settlement or a victory may not take on a case unless it’s exceptionally clear that the doctor or hospital was at fault. That creates a Catch-22, said John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert in tort law. “We’ll never know if something has happened because of malpractice,” he said, “because it’s not financially viable to bring a lawsuit.” That leaves the patient responsible for extra costs.

When the chief justice is in the majority, he gets to decide who will write the Supreme Court’s opinion. This is, Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote, “perhaps the most delicate judgment demanded of the chief justice.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has approached the task with characteristic rigor. In one sense, a new study concluded, he is scrupulously fair: Every justice gets very close to the same number of majority opinions. In another sense, he plays favorites, doling out major assignments and unappealing ones with keen attention to strategy. Chief Justice Roberts finished his 10th term in June. In those years, he was in the majority 86 percent of the time, according to the study, which was prepared by Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, and published in The Harvard Law Review Forum...“One of the easiest ways to reduce the risk of the swing justice swinging the other way is to assign the opinion to that justice, thereby ensuring that the opinion is one he or she will be willing to join, even if the court’s holding may be far narrower as a result,” Professor Lazarus wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Which do the conservative justices hate more: personal-injury lawyers or interpreting a law loosely to expand the power of lower courts? That question will be on the table Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are hearing oral argument in a potentially important case about whether you have to pay back your insurance company for medical bills after you’ve sued and recovered from the person who injured you in the first place. Montanile v. National Elevator Industry Health Benefit Plan has all the marks of a case only lawyers could love. It involves insurance, money, a drunken driver and what may arguably be the most complicated statute in the entire U.S. Code, the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974, known as Erisa.