Media Mentions

He is a luminary in the world of cyberlaw, a star Harvard professor with a résumé a hundred pages thick, and a sensation on the thought leader circuit. But even though he has raised more than $1 million for his presidential bid, Lawrence Lessig, who is mounting a quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination, is struggling to get noticed...“Larry’s a terrific guy, but I don’t think that because you have a very important project, that therefore you should be in charge of all the millions of things the president is in charge of, including foreign policy,” said Charles Fried, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who gave Mr. Lessig $100 anyway. Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law professor who was best man at Mr. Lessig’s wedding, was surprised last summer when they sat on a boat in New Hampshire and his old friend revealed his plans to run for president. While highly intelligent, he said, Mr. Lessig does not have the chatty demeanor of a regular politician, and Mr. Whiting said he worried about the toll the campaign could take. “I think it’s been frustrating for him,” Mr. Whiting said. “He’s brilliant and offers new ways of thinking about familiar problems, but ideas don’t always carry the day.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can an American detained and allegedly tortured by the FBI at black sites outside the U.S. sue for damages? A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said no last week, on the ground that the violations of the citizen’s rights took place abroad. The distinction is mistaken, and the decision is wrong. The Constitution should protect the rights of U.S. citizens against the illegal actions of U.S. government no matter where they happen to be.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: At least in theory, one of the best ways for Congress to protect consumers and investors is by requiring companies to disclose information. Credit card providers must inform you about potential late fees; new cars are sold with fuel-economy stickers; calorie labels are being required at chain restaurants. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau even has a slogan, which orients much of its work: Know Before You Owe. Last August, an unreasonably aggressive ruling from a three-judge panel of a federal court of appeals cast doubt on the constitutionality of such disclosure requirements. The full court is now deciding whether to review the panel’s decision. If it refuses to do so, the Supreme Court should intervene.  

United Auto Workers has ratified a new contract with Fiat-Chrysler. It was settled across a conference table, in a time-frame agreeable to both parties. But, it hasn't always been that way. ... GOLDSTEIN: The main thing the strikers wanted was for the company to negotiate with them on things like seniority and benefits, what we think of today as basic union stuff. A few weeks after the governor called in the guard, the company agreed. The strike was over. The Flint strike set off this huge wave. Over the next few years, industry after industry was unionized. This big swath of the economy was transformed. Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard, says this is the way union growth tends to happen in the U.S. and around the world. RICHARD FREEMAN: When unions go up, they go up in a really sharp, you know, boom, bang.

An op-ed by Berkman Center Faculty Associate Josephine Wolff: This was among the head-scratchers to emerge from the news this week that teenage hackers had gained access toCIA director John Brennan’s unfashionable email account, yielding more than 2,500 email and instant message addresses for high-ranking government officials. But the more important question is why the boundaries between personal and work email accounts appear to be so porous in the upper echelons of the government.There are plenty of reasons to care when government officials use their personal email accounts for work-related activities, particularly when it comes to transparency and accountability. Journalists may not be able to gain access to emails sent from personal accounts under the Freedom of Information Act, and communications meant to be public record can stay under wraps.

...Now, a cache of 55,000 photos smuggled out of Syria last year provides a glimpse into the apparent systematic torture and death of 11,000 civilians between 2011 and 2013 inside two military police facilities in Damascus, one of which is less than a mile from the presidential palace. It’s estimated that 300,000 other prisoners remain in Assad-controlled jails. Thirty of the images are on exhibit in Lewis 202 at Harvard Law School (HLS) through Nov. 4. It’s only the third time the photos have been displayed in the United States, following showings at the United Nations headquarters and in Congress. ...The panel was moderated by Professor Susan Farbstein, co-director of the International Human Rights Clinic at HLS, and sponsored by the Human Rights Program, the Office of Public Interest Advising, and HLS Advocates for Human Rights.

President Obama calls the death penalty "deeply troubling," but he still has not changed his position in favor of using it for particularly heinous crimes. In an interview Thursday with the Marshall Project, Obama said, "At a time when we’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to make the system more fair, more just, that we have to include an examination of the death penalty in that.” ... Charles J. Ogletree Jr. — a prominent death penalty opponent who was a law professor of the president and first lady Michelle Obama when both were students at Harvard Law School — has also urged Obama to alter his position. "He's not there yet, but he's close, and needs some help," Ogletree said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.

Forget about trying to get any work done on Thursday: the Internet Cat Video Festival is returning to Boston. The festival comes to the Berklee Performance Center for the second straight year to showcase a collection of amusing and adorable cat clips. ... The event is produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This year’s videos were curated by Will Braden, creator of the popular Henri le Chat Noir videos on YouTube. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain will serve as the event’s emcee. “Why did I agree to do this? Because it’s a fun thing,” says Zittrain, an admitted dog owner who specializes in cyber law and policy. “Whatever we’re worried about, there are always cat videos to watch. And I’m grateful for that.”

Harvard Law School raised $241 million of its $305 million of its goal during the quiet phase of its capital campaign, which launched with fanfare on Friday evening. Titled the “Campaign for the Third Century,” the fundraising effort will focus on clinical education and financial aid for students. The Law School recently finished a capital campaign in 2008, when it raised $476 million, surpassing its $400 million goal. Because of the proximity to its last fundraising drive, the Law School is the last of Harvard’s schools to launch its part of the University-wide Harvard Campaign, which kicked off publicly in 2013 and seeks to raise $6.5 billion.    

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an unusual, head-snapping reversal, Amazon.com has convinced a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to retract an opinion on its search results technique and replace it with a decision in its favor. To make the result even weirder, the single judge who flipped isn't a member of the 9th Circuit all. He’s a 78-year-old partly retired judge from the Western District of Michigan sitting by designation with the appellate court whose megacircuit covers the half-moon from Arizona to Montana. What gives?

Harvard is fertilizing a new crop of ideas to combat climate change. The Climate Change Solutions Fund will award grants of up to $150,000 each to stoke ideas for creative climate-related work in business, design, policy, public health, and the sciences. It was launched last year with $1 million from the office of President Drew Faust, who challenged alumni and friends to assist in raising $20 million for the fund as one pillar of a broader campaign to support the energy and environment...“This funding was a total game-changer for us,” said Emily Broad Leib, assistant clinical professor of law and deputy director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, who was awarded a grant to reduce food waste. Leib has been able to make time for efforts to raise awareness of the issue through media appearances and by working with her students to make a short documentary about state expiration-date policies and the need for change at the federal level.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe” will stay at the Yale University Art Gallery, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled this week, even though the Bolsheviks stole it from a private collector in 1918. The court said it has no authority to consider the validity of a foreign government’s act confiscating private property. So how come confiscated Nazi art, like the Gustav Klimt painting in the film “Woman in Gold,” can end up returned to its rightful heirs, while Soviet-confiscated art can’t? The legal answer turns out to be surprisingly convoluted. In essence, it’s this: The Nazis are different.

Without mincing words, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy disparaged the American criminal justice system on Thursday for the three prison scourges of long sentences, solitary confinement, and overcrowding. “It’s an ongoing injustice of great proportions,” said Kennedy during a conversation with Harvard Law School (HLS) Dean Martha Minow at Wasserstein Hall, in a room packed mostly with students...Kennedy, LL.B. ’61, whose views on the court reflect a preoccupation with liberty and dignity, has often been described as the high court’s swing vote on major issues. But during his talk with Minow, he said he hated to be depicted that way. “Cases swing. I don’t,” he quipped, as the room erupted in laughter.

In an hour long question and answer session at Harvard Law School on Thursday, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy discussed a breadth of topics ranging from his time on the Court, concepts of dignity and freedom, and his own time as a student at the Law School...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow, who moderated the discussion, eventually opened up the event to questions from members of the packed crowd in Milstein Hall; Kennedy answered questions on campaign finance laws and recommended reading material, including Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” When Minow asked him what he had learned as a Law School student, Kennedy again turned to humor to describe his studious days as a student. “I remember a lot of the cases I had in Law School better than cases I’ve worked with,” Kennedy said to laughs.

U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus highlighted his efforts to reduce the incidence of sexual assault in the military to students, government officials, and veterans gathered to hear him speak at Harvard Law School on Thursday...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow praised Mabus and the Disabled American Veterans group for their efforts in helping veterans across the country and for their participation in events like Thursday’s. “Their commitment to raising awareness about the needs of veterans inspires us all,” Minow said.

When Harvard Law School publicly launches its capital campaign on Friday, kicking off an effort that aims to raise several hundred million dollars, it will continue a years-long attempt to rebrand itself. Instead of evoking the halcyon days of the donors’ student experiences as a way to entice them to open their wallets, according to Steven Oliveira, dean of development and alumni relations, the Law School will share another message: The school is very different now...The launch will also showcase the work of professors in new disciplines of law that may not have even existed when some of the donors were students. At a 90-minute panel discussion titled “HLS Thinks Big,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow will moderate a panel of experts from fields like bioethics and internet law. I. Glenn Cohen, one of the professors who will speak on Friday, wrote in an email that he will discuss bioethics and health law. “As part of the campaign I do whatever I can to connect with alumni interested in these areas (health law, bioethics, food and drug law, biotechnology) and explain why this is such an exciting time for our students and our law school to be involved in these issues,” Cohen wrote.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The idea that financial markets are too focused on the short term is gaining ground in the media and among academics. And now it is attracting political attention in the United States. Investors’ obsession with short-term returns, according to the new conventional wisdom, compels corporate boards of directors and managers to seek impressive quarterly earnings at the expense of strong long-term investments. Research and development suffers, as does long-term investment in plant and equipment. Similarly, short-term thinking leads major companies to buy back their stock, thereby sapping them of the cash they need for future investments. None of this is good news for the economy – at least, it wouldn’t be, if it were real. Upon closer inspection, the supposed negative consequences of investor short-termism appear not to be happening at all.

The year is 2050. A fighter jet roars across the sky, zeroing in on targets in enemy territory somewhere in the Middle East. But the targets are really a group of farmers holding hoes and rakes, which the jet identifies as guns. Within minutes, it fires a series of rockets, killing all of them. The jet is pilotless, and the aircraft is not being directed from a base. It registers its operation as successful. The prospect of such scenarios has led some activists and human rights groups to call for a complete ban on so-called "killer robots" — advanced artificial intelligence weaponry that they believe could one day blanket battlefields and make life and death decisions independent of human direction...Michael Schmitt, a fellow at Harvard Law School's program on international law and armed conflict, agreed that a ban was "unrealistic." Regulation, he said, would be more likely to succeed. "Since autonomous weapons have the potential to be a game changer in modern warfare, some states will wish to develop them either to extend their technological edge on the battlefield or to offset their weakness," he suggested, adding that from a humanitarian perspective, solutions "must be practical and realistic about what states are likely to accept and move in that direction."

The H-1B guest worker visa program has been coming under scrutiny lately. The program is important to colleges both in terms of their ability to hire postdocs and other researchers from abroad and, more indirectly, in providing a pathway for the international students they recruit to work in the U.S. after graduation...“The only reason it would be a good idea from a national interest perspective is if indeed there were a shortage of such people, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of that except in some small fields, or fast-growing fields,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Teitelbaum is the author of Falling Behind: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, in which he argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence of a generalized shortage of STEM workers in the U.S.

What happens when you try to fit an evolving electric grid into an 80-year-old statute? Lawsuits wind their way to the Supreme Court. In a move that surprised energy experts, the high court has decided to hear at least two cases this year that deal with how to regulate evolving electricity markets...Ari Peskoe, an energy fellow at Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, said it's surprising the court decided to take back-to-back FERC cases. "Hopefully, these two decisions combined will give a lot of clarity in an area that I think really needs it," he said. "This section of the Federal Power Act was written 80 years ago, and it hasn't changed, but the industry has."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, Monday's decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upholding most of the assault weapons bans passed by New York and Connecticut is a win for gun-control advocates. But down in the weeds, the unanimous decision by a panel of three Democratic appointees nevertheless points to potential trouble for similar laws should they ever be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court held that assault weapons do in general fall within the core protections of the Second Amendment. But the judges applied a lenient standard to uphold the laws -- and a more aggressive Supreme Court might well apply a tougher standard and strike them down.