Media Mentions

The stock market isn’t convinced that the biggest tax inversion merger on the horizon — Pfizer’s pending blockbuster deal with Allergan — will be concluded without major problems...Whether Pfizer would have more flexibility in using its overseas cash after the merger is an important question for the markets, but the answer is not yet clear. The Treasury is expected to issue further rules within the next several weeks. Stephen E. Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the Treasury “has the prerogative to make a more muscular application of its administrative authority than they have already” regarding taxation of stranded cash controlled by a company like Pfizer.

Fee fights among plaintiffs attorneys in multidistrict litigation have forced more federal judges in recent cases to wade into the disputes — with practically no case law to guide them..."There are huge issues about the governance of MDLs that no Supreme Court has addressed in any satisfying way," said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School who has testified as an expert for those challenging MDL fees. "The fee aspects are one of a subset of questions of how they're governed that have yet to attract good appellate law. The district court judges are struggling with these issues."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The circumstances of the birth of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz put constitutional citizenship into the headlines. Also in the news: A federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled last week that the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision doesn’t follow the flag to the island. What would happen if you mashed the two issues together, mixing birthright citizenship with the Constitution’s applicability to U.S. territories? The answer to this otherwise random-seeming question is in fact before the Supreme Court right now. At issue is whether it’s constitutional for Congress to deny birthright citizenship to people born in American Samoa, which has been a U.S. territory since 1900.

‘Everyone in Minnesota will be able to use convenient, affordable world-class broadband networks that enable us to survive and thrive in our communities and across the globe.” This vision for universal broadband access for Minnesota was forged by nearly 200 community leaders from across the state last November. It struck a chord. ...“Minnesota should be looking at the rest of the country in its rearview mirror,” said Harvard Law School Prof. Susan Crawford during our Border to Border Broadband conference in November. Crawford could see that Minnesota has many broadband heroes and that funding programs and public will are building, but we can and must do better, faster.

For 80 years, Harvard Law School has been represented by a shield that features Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”) and three sheaves of wheat. But it turns out that the traditional-looking logo isn’t so innocent: Its design was based on the coat of arms of a slaveholder known for treating his slaves with brutal cruelty. Now, reports Arun Rath for NPR, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, has endorsed changing the school's official shield—but questions about slavery’s legacy on campus remain. ... They seem to have prevailed: On March 4, Dean Martha Minow announced that she would endorse the recommendation from a committee of Harvard Law School faculty, students, alumni and staff assembled in November to revise the school’s shield. “Its association with slavery does not represent the values and aspirations of Harvard Law School...it has become a source of division rather than commonality in our community.”

On Friday, the committee tasked with considering the future of Harvard Law School’s seal, which some have criticized for its connection to the slaveholding Royall family, recommended that the school change its emblem. While we disagree with the substance of this decision, we respect the process by which HLS reached it. As the committee's report makes clear, this debate is far more nuanced than a simple case of right versus wrong or racial justice versus injustice. The committee explained that faculty, staff, students, and alumni of diverse races, genders, and ages fell on both sides of the issue. Indeed, one of America’s foremost scholars on slavery’s history dissented from the committee’s recommendations.

How do you decide if your milk is fresh enough to drink? You might be one of the many Americans who relies on sell-by dates to determine when to throw it out. But it turns out we could be dumping perfectly good milk...“Basically, around 90% of people throw food away when that date arrives, either always, or most of the time, or occasionally,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. Leib says what most people don’t know is those sell-by dates have no standard meaning. They vary by state and even by company.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you think that Donald Trump would be a terrible presidential nominee and an even worse president, and you want to convince his supporters that you are right. What should you do? Behavioral science reveals why there’s no easy answer -- yet it also offers some clues about what might work. The most important findings involve the risk of “backfiring corrections.” A growing body of research demonstrates that when people’s convictions are firm, attempts to correct those views, with evidence, can make them firmer still. That should be a red flag for anyone who seeks to turn Republican voters against Trump.

Beyond the limestone facade of a grand building with arching entranceways, dozens of students have occupied a space at Harvard Law School for the past three weeks. They’ve re-named the room “Belinda Hall,” in honor of a woman who was a slave of law school founder Isaac Royall...“The institution sent a bunch of black and brown people to deal with a group of black and brown people,” said Bianca Tylek, a 29-year-old Latina student with long, wavy brown hair, in her final year of law school, who told me she has been mistaken for janitorial staff before...Keaton Allen-Gessesse, a 28-year-old from Chicago in her final year of law school, told me, “There’s really no place in the classroom for understanding issues of racial inequality or white supremacy...The dean of student affairs, Marcia Sells, said the school has improved the environment for minority students over the past several decades. “I understand what the students are asking for but some of it is, I think, we also have to do more in helping them understand that this is a little bit how the pedagogy works, this is also how it’s changed,” she told me, adding that she thinks the school needs to do a better job of pointing out to students where they’re already teaching historical context at the school, rather than having a separate dedicated critical race theory program.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled Tuesday that the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of gay marriage doesn't apply on the island, which is a commonwealth with a unique constitutional status. The ruling will eventually be reversed on appeal. But its effect is meaningful nonetheless, because it functions as a double protest: against the high court's support for gay marriage and against the unresolved constitutional status of the island.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Filing a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court sounds like an act of spontaneous intellectual generosity meant to help the justices see all sides of a case. Or maybe an exercise in lobbying by interest groups. Actually, it's neither. A new article by two law professors shows that an organized business they dub the “amicus machine” generates hundreds of amicus curiae briefs, planned and coordinated by the specialized guild of lawyers who argue before the court. Surprisingly, the authors think the machine is a good thing.

This week, The National Law Journal released its 2016 list of law schools that send the most graduates to the 100 largest firms, and Columbia led the pack. With 220 of its 2015 graduates becoming first year BigLaw associates, this is the third straight year the New York Ivy Leaguer won the title...The 2015 list does not include graduates who went on to complete judicial clerkships. This could explain Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and Harvard Law School’s lower rankings on the list. Mark Weber, assistant dean of career services at Harvard Law, said that the school produces a large amount of judicial clerks who later move into big law firms. He maintains that law firm recruiting is up at Harvard Law.

If you have so much as tiptoed into the arena of personal finance over the past few decades, you will have heard about the virtues of passive investing. ...In a discussion paper written last year, Einer Elhauge, a law professor at Harvard University, found that index-fund ownership was having a similar effect in the airline industry, where nearly eighty per cent of all stocks are owned by a handful of investors. Elhauge argues that institutional investors with an emphasis on index funds, such as Vanguard and Fidelity, are playing an outsized role in the sector, and that their rapid adoption is accelerating ownership concentration, resulting in higher prices for travellers. “Alone, index funds are not enough, but they are growing like gangbusters,” he explained in an interview.

I had expected fireworks—or at least strong disagreements—when Internet privacy advocate Jonathan Zittrain and former CIA director John Deutsch debated the impasse between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Instead, the two men offered nuance and a rough if imperfect consensus over how much access we should have to technologies that allow us to encrypt our personal data in ways that place it beyond the government’s reach. “Many other paths to data are available. We are exuding data all over the place,” said Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. “The FBI has chosen this case … in large part, I think, because there is so little privacy interest on the other side.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Europe can’t build a wall to keep out Syrian refugees. But today European Union leaders did the next best thing from their perspective, announcing an agreement with Turkey to repel and return all those trying to come illegally into Greece by boat from Turkey. The plan represents a major shift for the EU in dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis. In place of a generous legal approach that rejected mass returns of asylum seekers, Europe is now adopting a much more hard-line attitude that distinguishes sharply between migrants seeking illegal entry and refugees who’ve already been processed within Turkey and may be granted legal settlement rights and asylum.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Senate committee report has charged that U.S. President Barack Obama “bowled over” the independent Federal Communications Commission when he urged it to regulate net neutrality last year. An influential commentator went so far as to say that the White House “broke the law.” But a clear understanding of executive power and the relevant law indicates that these claims are misguided. It’s perfectly appropriate for the president to try to influence an executive agency, even one that’s independent in the sense that its leadership can only be removed for good cause. Nothing in the Senate report even vaguely suggests that Obama or his aides broke any law.

Be wary of any promises from Republican presidential candidates to abolish federal entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, legal scholars told Bloomberg BNA, because they will not come true...“This is just red meat to their supporters, of course, and cannot be unilaterally accomplished,” Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA. “Presidents can ask Congress for skeletal agency budgets, try to stymie or slow agency work or control them and weaken regulation through centralized White House review, but they cannot eliminate agencies or zero out budgets by fiat, which is what these candidates are promising.” ...Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor and legal scholar, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail that the agency's origins are “legally irrelevant” to whether it could now be abolished. “The fact that an executive order by President Nixon preceded the Acts of Congress constituting the current EPA, delegating regulatory powers to that agency, authorizing its expenditures and appropriating the funds in its budget doesn't make it vulnerable to unilateral presidential abolition,” Tribe said.

An op-ed by clinical instructor Robert E. Proctor. As Housing Day approaches and we celebrate “randomization” as a mechanism to diversify the House system, Harvard still struggles to make House staff more diverse. According to House lore, in the early 1990’s there was a top ranked law student, and later president of the Harvard Law Review, who applied to be a tutor in each Harvard College House. Without so much of an interview, every House outright rejected him—save one that rejected him after his interview. This law student went on to become the 44th President of the United States.

Three weeks into their occupation of the lounge in the Law School’s Caspersen Student Center, student activists said they will remain in the hall, despite the concerns of other students and administrators...“I think when we first started, we didn’t quite imagine exactly what it is we’re doing now,” Alexander J. Clayborne, a member of Reclaim Harvard Law and the group Royall Must Fall, said. “We’ve basically transformed the space into a school within a school.” Some students, however, questioned the activists’ approach. One student critical of the occupation wrote an anonymous editorial in the Harvard Law Record, equating the activists to “bullies.”

A group of more than 350 legal scholars on Monday called upon Senators to fulfill their constitutional obligation to consider a U.S. Supreme Court nominee submitted by President Obama. In a letter sent to Senate leaders, 356 professors and scholars said that leaving an eight-justice court in place would have dire consequences. They asserted that allowing Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat to remain unfilled until after the presidential election could cripple the court and set bad precedent...Law scholars from more than 100 law schools signed on, including Harvard Law School professors Charles Ogletree and Laurence Tribe; University of California, Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky; University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Herma Kay; Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode; and New York University School of Law professor Kenji Yoshino.

An article by I. Glenn Cohen and Eli Y. Adashi...Mitochondrial replacement therapies (MRTs) constitute a family of technologies that seek to prevent the transmission of mutant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from carrier mothers to their children. The embryos so created comprise nuclear DNA from the intended mother and nonpathogenic mtDNA from another woman (the 'mitochondrial donor')2. As such, MRTs allow a woman at risk to be the 'genetic mother' of the resulting child (at least in terms of her nuclear DNA) without passing on the pathogenic mtDNA.