Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the government limit nasty political ads on public buses? Great question. Just not one the Supreme Court will be answering this year. On Monday the justices refused to address it in a case arising from ads considered Islamophobic by the Seattle public transit authority. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, dissented from the court's refusal to hear the case. His reasoning -- and the implicit logic behind the denial of certiorari by the court -- sheds light on a truly fascinating and important problem in free-speech law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You’ll be forgiven for chuckling at the story that a former law student is suing her law school because she didn’t get a job she liked after graduation. What could be more measure for measure? The Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego taught Anna Alaburda to sue. Now she’s suing it. Alaburda’s suit essentially alleges false advertising: She says the school misrepresented the employment record of its graduates, inducing her to attend and amass debt.

...The committee’s report sent shockwaves through the legal system, and forensic science is now grinding toward reform. A series of expert working groups, assembled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Justice, has begun to gather and endorse standards for collecting and evaluating different kinds of evidence...Some judges are already pretty savvy about statistics. In the Boston racketeering case, federal district court judge Nancy Gertner found the detective’s conclusion that only one gun on the entire planet could have produced the imprints on the bullet cartridges “preposterous.” She believed the evidence should have been excluded completely. But Gertner—now a professor at Harvard University—feared that an appeals court would reverse that move, so she “reluctantly” ruled that the detective could describe ways in which the bullet casings looked similar, but not conclude that they came from the same pistol. Ultimately, a jury said there was no evidence of a racketeering operation; Gertner cleared the defendants of the more serious federal charges and their cases were moved to state court.

A months-long debate over Harvard Law School's controversial seal came to an uncertain close Friday, when a committee recommend the University replace it. But in the wake of the committee's lofty suggestion to retire the seal, alumni and affiliates responded with range of opinions...“I have found from the responses that I’ve received that many people...respect the care and respect with which the committee conducted itself, and often compliment us on having handled a difficult task in a fair and open and reasoned fashion,” committee chair and Law School professor Bruce H. Mann said. Not all of the feedback Mann has received has been supportive of the change. He said he has received responses on both sides of the issue and called disagreement "inevitable."...For activists, the committee’s recommendation was an unsurprising victory. “It was exactly what I expected all along,” President of the Black Law Students Association Leland S. Shelton said...However, activists said they were disappointed the letter from Minow accompanying the report did not mention their efforts. “It totally elides over all of the tireless hard work that student activists, staff members, faculty members from across the University have been putting in day in and day out to make this happen,” Aparna Gokhale, a member of the group Reclaim Harvard Law, said...While students with dissenting opinions also commended administrators’ open approach, third-year Law student William H. Barlow, who has publicly decried activism at the school, said activists have created an environment that silences opposing voices. “There’s tremendous amounts of social pressure, especially in a university that leans heavily left, to not say anything that could be perceived as offensive or hurtful. A lot of people have chosen to stay out of the debate because they don’t want to be called a racist,” Barlow said...By no means did our charge close the chapter on Isaac Royall and racial inclusion at the Law School,” [Janet] Halley said. “Those discussions need to continue.”

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s board of trustees recently elected historian and scholar Annette Gordon-Reed to the board. Gordon-Reed was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for History with the publication of her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family in 2009. More than a decade earlier, Gordon-Reed broke onto the scene with the publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. That book challenged previous research suggesting Jefferson was not the father of Hemings’ children and came a year ahead of the DNA tests that confirmed a genetic match between Jefferson and Hemings descendants. “Annette’s work illustrates that one scholar’s research can change how we see fundamental individuals and events of that history, and with it our shared American identity,” said Thomas F. Farrell II, chairman of Colonial Williamsburg’s board of trustees and the chairman, president and CEO of Dominion Resources.

Elizabeth Garrett, a lawyer and scholar who was the first woman to be president of Cornell University, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan, only eight months after starting the post. She was 52...She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Oklahoma, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1985, and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1988. After graduating, she was a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She also taught law as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia Law School and Harvard Law School, and in Budapest and Israel.

Even by the standards of an epically polarized Washington, the political talk about President Obama’s effort to close the Guantánamo Bay prison is starkly divorced from facts. On both sides of the debate, many claims collapse under scrutiny....“Both the Republicans and the president are significantly exaggerating the threats and harms posed by the other side’s positions,” said Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, now at Harvard Law School. “The moral and national security arguments on both sides mostly serve other agendas — political advantage for the Republicans, and legacy burnishing for the president.”

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. Removing the incentive for American companies to move their headquarters abroad is a widely recognized goal. To do so, the U.S. will need to join the rest of the G-7 countries and tax business income only once, in the country where it was earned. Notably, this principle—called territoriality—is included in the bipartisan framework for international tax reform developed by Sens. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) in 2015. Unfortunately, recent reform proposals have a serious flaw: a “minimum tax” on foreign business income. This flaw is in President Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget, and Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, has broached a similar idea on the campaign trail.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. On the Supreme Court, both conservatives and liberals admire bold, heroic figures, invoking the Constitution to strike down what they dislike most -- whether it's Obamacare, affirmative action programs, restrictions on abortion, bans on same-sex marriage or executive actions by Democratic or Republican presidents. But the U.S. has had enough of judicial heroism. As the nation debates the future membership and direction of the court, it's a good time for minimalists, who speak softly and carry a small stick.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The “death of fathers,” Claudius tells Hamlet, is nature's “common theme.” That theme played out last week at the U.S. Supreme Court. In the shadow of memorial services for Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas, who is something like Scalia's jurisprudential son, stepped into the light and broke his decade-long silence during an oral argument. He did it in a classic Scalian manner, catching a government lawyer off-guard and badgering her in an intellectually interesting way about gun rights. Then Justice Elena Kagan published a Scalia-style dissent in a statutory interpretation case, the late justice’s area of special expertise.

...At the very least, the process can be made more transparent. Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard University Law School who led US negotiations on intellectual property for several previous trade agreements, says: “There’s a concern by certain members of the public that their views aren’t being heard by the negotiators, but also a concern that they don’t have the necessary information to make informed choices about the trade-offs that affect American interests.” He suggests that the USA publicly releases more details about its negotiating objectives for each section, similar to the European Union; releases information about proposals under consideration as long as its negotiating partners agree; and provides more details about the economic models they review in their decision making.

Harvard Law School is poised to abandon an 80-year-old shield based on the crest of a slaveholding family that helped endow the institution, as campuses across the country debate the use of historic names and symbols that some consider offensive...But it came with a passionate dissent from Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of legal history who is known for her scholarship on Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave. The work of Ms. Gordon-Reed, who had argued that historians had too readily discounted the oral testimony of Hemings’s descendants, was vindicated in 1998 by DNA evidence showing that Jefferson fathered a child by Hemings...In an email Friday, Ms. Gordon-Reed said she had been influenced by her scholarship on Hemings. “This is my life’s work,” she said. “I sincerely believe that we owe it to the enslaved to work through those feelings and think of ways to carry their stories forward. And we should do that in a way that shows the inherently entwined nature of the good and bad of our past, using written text and symbols like the sheaves and, even, buildings like Monticello.”

A committee at Harvard Law School has recommended that the shield that has long been used as a symbol should be retired, because it is the family crest of a slaveholder and does not reflect the values of the school...More than a thousand people contacted the committee with their opinions, which did not fall along predictable lines such as age, race, or political leanings, said Bruce H. Mann, the chair of the committee and Carl F. Schipper Jr. Professor of Law. The conversations they had were extraordinary, he said...Asked if the committee discussed possible alternative symbols for the law school, Mann said, “No, no, no. One problem at a time.”

Yesterday, the dean of Harvard Law School endorsed a recommendation to change the school's official shield because it contains the crest of Isaac Royall, a slave owner whose endowment of land helped establish the school. The recommendation came from a committee appointed by the dean, but it was also one of several demands from a student group calling itself Reclaim Harvard Law, and organization that was part of a wave of protest movements that developed on campuses across the country last fall...Student Cameron Clark tells a joke that's circulated among students of color after the tape incident...Here is Dean Marcia Sells. "The reality is many of them are things that students have been talking about for a while, so we're not, you know, looking at it from the context of we have to respond to demand. But we are looking at here are the things we have been doing."...Sarah Gitlin is a third-year student and a self-described progressive who believes in racial justice. But she thinks Reclaim is going about it the wrong way. "Instead of working with the administration, Reclaim has been fighting them, has been creating a really antagonistic environment."

A committee of Harvard Law School faculty, students, alumni, and staff recommended Friday in a report that the school abandon the shield that has long represented the school, after students decried its links to a slave-holding family. The decision comes after months of discussion and the formation of the special committee tasked with examining whether the shield’s reference to the Isaac Royall family, which owned and brutally abused slaves, was insensitive to the school community. “We believe that if the Law School is to have an official symbol, it must more closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not,” the committee said in its report to the Harvard Corporation.

The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016 inflicted a great loss upon the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal judiciary, and on the American legal profession. ... Historians likely will conclude that Scalia’s appointment to the Supreme Court was not just President Reagan’s best judicial appointment, but one of the best judicial appointments of the twentieth century. As Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow stated upon his death: “Justice Scalia will be remembered as one of the most influential jurists in American history – he changed how the Court approaches statutory interpretation, and in countless areas introduced new ways of thinking about the Constitution and the role of the Court. … He was also one of the most effective writers in the history of the Court, and he had an exceptional gift for the memorable phrase.  He had a terrific sense of humor, which was accompanied by great personal warmth.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Reading Justice Elena Kagan’s breezy, colloquial, witty dissent inLockhart v. U.S., the grammar case handed down Tuesday, wasn’t like reading an ordinary Supreme Court opinion -- because it was breezy, colloquial and witty. Spurred by the competition, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority (which is much harder), tried out a few colloquialisms herself. Something new is afoot at the court, and Kagan is at the forefront of it. In the era of fan-girl books about the court, like “The Notorious RBG,” humor is becoming a permissible mode of judicial expression.

A committee tasked with re-considering Harvard Law School’s seal in light of its ties to slavery recommended Friday that the Harvard Corporation revoke the emblem’s status as the school’s official symbol. The seal bears the crest of the former slave-owning Royall family, whose donation helped establish Harvard’s first law professorship in the late 18th century. The committee sent a report to the Corporation—the University’s highest governing body— summarizing the history of the seal and arguments for and against its removal. Their recommendation was not unanimous; two of the 12 members of the committee argued in a dissenting opinion sent along with the report that the seal should be preserved as an “honest” and conspicuous reminder of the Law School’s connection to “those enslaved at the Royall Plantation.”

An op-ed by Jordan Raymond ’16: Recent protests across university campuses have exposed the dissatisfaction that has long troubled students of color in the United States. For most of our nation’s history, collegiate environments did not tolerate black and brown people. As political scientist Ira Katznelson explained, back then “affirmative action was white.” Only in the last half-century have students of color come to expect consideration when applying to universities, largely thanks to our utility in advancing the “compelling interest” of diversity that underlays the Supreme Court decision in Grutter v. Bollinger.

Bruce Schneier, a preeminent cybersecurity expert and the chief technology officer at a Cambridge-based tech firm that was just acquired by IBM, has come out in support of Apple Inc. in its crusade against the FBI. Schneier signed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court in support of Apple Inc.'s motion to vacate an order compelling the firm to assist FBI agents in searching an Apple iPhone seized from the car belonging to the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shootings.

An op-ed by Matthew Weybrecht 16: In an ancient Greek puzzle known as Zeno's Paradox, a tortoise challenges Achilles to a race, if only Achilles will give him a 10-meter head start. Achilles accepts the challenge, believing he can easily make up that distance. But the tortoise proceeds to explain why Achilles can never win. ... In 2016, Bernie Sanders has created his own version of this paradox. He has convincingly argued that he cannot win the race for the White House. Here's how: Sanders rails against what he sees as the corrupting influence of money in politics, focusing particularly on the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. There, the Court ruled that the First Amendment protects independent expenditures promoting a political position or candidate, even if that money comes from a union or a corporation.