Media Mentions

The phrase is often used but what we call “war crimes” are hardly ever prosecuted. Monocle’s Steve Bloomfield chairs a powerful discussion on what is a war crime and why the outrage rarely leads to an investigation. Featuring Kevin Jon Heller, Alex Whiting and Gary D Solis.

By mid-2017, Harvard Law School’s entire collection of United States case law will be available for public search through a new online legal platform, Ravel Law, which will provide the contents of its database for bulk access for free over the next eight years. While case law documents are nominally within the public realm, actually accessing them often requires paying an intermediary like LexisNexis or Westlaw. “What comes from a judge's quill should be freely available to all,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, the director of the Law School library, wrote in an email. “This project is a step along an overdue path towards making the law worldwide freely available and searchable through as many means as there are games in an app store.”

A new student movement at Harvard Law School is organizing to change the seal at the school, which the students argue represents and endorses a slaveholding legacy. The seal is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder who endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. Dubbed “Royall Must Fall,” the movement styles itself after a student activist movement in South Africa that lobbied to remove imagery of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist, from the University of Cape Town’s campus. At Harvard, activists formally began their effort for change with a rally of about 25 people on the Law School campus on Oct. 23. They have launched a Facebook page and are now in the process of further organizing. They are drafting a letter to send to the Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow with their positions, according to Mawuse H. Vormawor, a Law School student and organizer of the effort...Vormawor pointed to the research and scholarship of visiting Law School professor Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently published a book about the first century of Harvard Law School, as inspiration for the movement. In the book, Coquillette details the relationship between the Royall family’s slaveholding and the endowment of the Law School.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 2009, prominent Republicans, skeptical of requiring people to buy health insurance under the legislation that became Obamacare, proposed an alternative approach: making large employers automatically sign employees up for health insurance, while also allowing them to opt out. A version of this idea made its way into the Affordable Care Act. But as a result of this week’s budget deal, it is now out -- and Republicans are celebrating. How come? The answers shed new light on some thorny issues in behavioral economics, and also on contemporary politics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s something inescapably charming about the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the U.K. Parliament with 817 active members. But the usually discreet charm of the aristocracy is under attack this week after the Lords used its power to delay tax-credit cuts passed by the Conservative majority in the House of Commons. The prospect of a Tory government complaining about tradition is deliciously ironic, but it does raise two serious questions: Is there a place for an unelected chamber in a modern democracy? And what benefits, if any, stem from its slowing or delaying the operation of the elected government?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The most important document in the most important Supreme Court case of the year is the University of Texas’ brief arguing that it needs to use affirmative action to achieve diversity in its undergraduate class. That brief, submitted Monday for the court’s consideration in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, says that the university can’t achieve its educational goals by admitting on numbers alone. Rather, achieving the magic of campus diversity requires a “holistic” effort to treat applicants as unique individuals with distinctive features. Think of the admissions process as a 10-gallon Texas version of the Hogwarts sorting hat, and you get the idea. Is Texas right? And, equally important, can it persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy not to end affirmative action as we know it in college admissions?

Harvard Law School announced today that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection. The “Free the Law” initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history. “Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow...“Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public,” said Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and vice dean for library and information resources.

Earlier this year, the Newseum Institute asked 1,000 Americans to name their rights under the First Amendment. A clear majority listed freedom of speech first -- before freedom of religion, assembly, and other core civil liberties. And that makes sense. Protecting free speech is essential to the health of any functioning democracy...We owe this Orwellian shift in thinking to a growing number of court decisions, among them Citizens United, that define corporations as people and their business practices as speech. Harvard Law School's John C. Coates documented this change in a study released last February, noting that "corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment." This trend, Coates writes, isn't just "bad law and bad politics." It's also "increasingly bad for business and society."

So much for congressional gridlock. On Tuesday, the US Senate voted on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill to help protect our digital data. It passed 74 to 21 — not even close....But security maven Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said data sharing could pay off in the long run. “It might help prevent the next attack,” Schneier said. “It’s all about learning from the present to protect the future.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I realize no American much cares whether the U.S. acted lawfully in planning to shoot Osama bin Laden on sight during the 2011 raid on his Pakistan compound. But new details of the legal game plan to get him, excerpted in the New York Times from reporter Charlie Savage’s forthcoming book, are nevertheless troubling. According to Savage's reporting, senior government lawyers specifically detailed the reasons it would be lawful to kill an unarmed Bin Laden, even if he was in the act of surrendering. This is problematic not so much because of its doubtful legality but for the precedent it sets for lawyers essentially directing shoot-to-kill military operations before the fact.

Last year, Electronic Arts announced that it was ending online support for 50 of its games...If a publisher no longer supports a game, sometime the only way to keep it running is by bypassing its digital rights management (DRM), or hacking a game console, which was illegal until today..."I'm really excited that the Copyright Office chose to grant part of the exemption and definitely cleared up some of the legal uncertainty around removing authentication mechanisms, but it's too bad that office chose to only support this for single-player play," Kenda Albert [`16], a Harvard Law School student who helped the EFF seek the exemptions, told Motherboard. "The multiplayer component was really, really important to a lot of people who wrote in and provided testimony."

The Massachusetts department charged with protecting children from abuse "didn't do enough" to protect the Bella Bond, whose remains were found in a trash bag on Deer Island in June. It took police three months to identify Bella's body...A report issued Wednesday by The Office of the Child Advocate said the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) said that previous allegations of Bella’s neglect and abuse “should have warranted a higher response level.”...Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor and national critic of the two-track program, told NECIR that “especially for children in the lower-risk category, best interest of the child is clearly not the standard.”

...But how close is the Court to actually ruling capital punishment unconstitutional? MPR News' Kerri Miller spoke to David von Drehel, Time Magazine editor-at-large, and Carol S. Streiker, professor of law at Harvard Law School, about the realities of the issue. Drehel is the author of "Among the Lowest of the Dead," a history of the modern death penalty. "I would say within 20 years, absolutely," Streiker said of the end of capital punishment. Drehel and Streiker discussed many of the issues that would contribute to such a ruling.

Speaking to an audience of about 60 at Harvard Law School on Wednesday, the attorney spearheading a major lawsuit against Uber argued that the legal classification of Uber drivers as independent contractors provides the workers with insufficient labor protection. In August 2013, Shannon Liss-Riordan filed a class-action lawsuit of California Uber drivers against the ride share company, arguing that it classifies drivers as contract workers even though they work like regular employees...Ryan M. Matthew, a Law School student in attendance, said he loves Uber “on the surface,” but that the lawsuit highlights important issues.

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction. Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for...“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”...Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor and director of the law library.

A book review by Martha Minow. This is a courageous and imaginative book by the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth (formerly, the British Commonwealth). He develops the notion of "altruistic evil" to refer to violence committed "in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals," and calls it the biggest threat to freedom in our time. Exploring terrible violence committed in the name of religious beliefs, he argues that a particular mindset ("pathological dualism") is to blame, traces its appearance across otherwise diverging religious traditions, and identifies interpretations of religious narratives giving rise to violence between and among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers. Constructively, he draws on interpretive resources within the traditions to point toward solutions.

After four years of false starts and strife over privacy protections, the Senate passed legislation by a vote of 74 to 21 on Tuesday that would help companies battle a daily onslaught of cyberattacks. But there is one problem with the legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA: In the years that Congress was debating it, computer attackers have grown so much more sophisticated — in many cases, backed by state sponsors from Shanghai to Tehran — that the central feature of the legislation, agreements allowing companies and the government to share information, seems almost quaint...“I think the fruits of detecting signatures and patterns of broad attacks are already picked,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “The biggest threats,” he said, are far more customized, “with elements of social engineering or betrayal of an employee with access to data or code.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should law schools admit students who are statistically uncertain to pass the bar on the basis of their standardized test scores? A growing conventional wisdom says no. The worry is that such students will build up large amounts of debt that they won't be able to pay back if they don't become lawyers. This view assumes that it's up to the law schools to make the threshold decision paternalistically, “saving” naive college graduates from pursuing the dream of becoming lawyers when there’s no guarantee that they'll succeed. It treats standardized test scores as destiny and correlation-based studies as gospel.

At a time of substantial change in legal education and the profession—in which the careers of law-school graduates develop in increasingly varied, often global, professional contexts—Harvard Law School (HLS) kicked off its “Campaign for the Third Century” on Friday, October 23, with an afternoon of speeches and panel discussions that hinted at some of these transformations in practice and pedagogy. Later, during a gala evening dinner featuring speeches by Harvard president Drew Faust and HLS dean Martha Minow, campaign co-chair James A. Attwood Jr., J.D.-M.B.A. ’84, announced a campaign goal of $305 million, of which he said $241 million (79 percent) had already been raised in “the silent phase.” Minow announced a campaign-leading $15-million gift from Michael R. Klein, LL.M. ’67; the school will soon add his name to what is now the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Two Harvard Law graduates are taking on the justice system by focusing on local courts and policies that often land the poor in jail. Traveling to Tennessee, they aim to end private probation abuses. [Including interview with intern Mark Verstraete `16.]

For months, supporters and detractors of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan have been debating whether the carbon reductions are too stringent or not tough enough; whether it will compromise reliability; whether it will save struggling nuclear power plants. With Thursday’s publication of the rule in the Federal Register, another question took center stage, one whose answer could make the others academic: Does EPA have the legal authority to do what it did?...Panel moderator Kate Konschnik, director of the Harvard Environmental Policy Initiative, disagreed, saying that EPA has previously issued rules that “caused certain units to shut down.” “In particular, that was squarely at issue in a D.C. Circuit case about the cement kiln industry in the 1970s — that one type of cement plant would cease to exist because of the standards,” she said.