Media Mentions

The Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago has agreed to hear a lawsuit on Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for president — virtually ensuring that the issue dominates the news in the run-up to the South Carolina primary. ... One of the constitutional scholars who used to think that the definition of "natural born" ought to include Ted Cruz is Laurence Tribe, who was Cruz's law professor at Harvard. But Tribe is now the leading scholar raising questions about Cruz's eligibility.

A major backer of Harvard Law School has stopped sponsoring student events after its donation helped pay for a discussion supporting an independent Palestine. In 2012, the international law firm Milbank promised Harvard $1 million over five years to pay for scholarly conferences organized by law students. But after the money was used to support an event hosted by the student group Justice for Palestine, the law firm asked Harvard Law School to use the money for other purposes. ... Harvard says Milbank wanted to "avoid creating any misimpressions that the firm endorses the viewpoints expressed by any particular student organization or journal," according to the statement, provided by law school spokesman Robb London.

... In a newly unearthed 2012 interview on C-SPAN, Scalia revealed his preferred successor: Judge Frank Easterbrook, of the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. ... Easterbook delivered the inaugural “Scalia Lecture” at Harvard Law on Nov. 17, 2014, lauding his pal as a fellow originalist, who relies on the intent of founding documents.

An op-ed Noah Feldman: A Houston man, Paul Aker, was arrested last week by U.S. marshals and hauled into federal court on charges that stemmed from his failure to pay a $1,500 student loan. How could this happen in a free country? We’re used to thinking that what makes a civil case different from a criminal one is that you can’t go to jail. But that isn’t exactly true. If you fail to show up in court after you’ve been ordered to do so, the judge can issue a warrant for your arrest on contempt of court -- which is a crime. In the light of Aker’s case and the viral attention it received, it’s worth asking both why an arrest doesn’t happen more often and whether the system ought to be changed so that it can’t.

A Los Angeles hospital has become the latest high-profile victim of a ransomware attack. Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center announced that it had paid $17,000 to hackers to regain control of its computer system. The hospital had been operating without it for 10 days. ... "Ransomware is basically an encryption program," said Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard's Berkman Center. "It breaks into your computer. It encrypts your files. And then it doesn't let you at them."

... Adding to the irony, the blocked lecture, which explains aspects of copyright law as it applies to music and licensing, is taught by William “Terry” Fisher, a noted copyright expert who is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School. “This was an annoyance last week for my Harvard Law School students and the 400 students from around the world taking the online class,” said Fisher. “But it’s also having a global impact because students enrolled in affiliated courses at universities and cultural institutions in other countries that use the same lectures and readings and are on a different academic schedule now are finding they can’t get access.”

Apple Inc.’s refusal to help the FBI retrieve information from an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., has thrust the tug-of-war on the issue of privacy vs. security back into the spotlight. As the legal wrangling to untangle the case widens, the Gazette spoke separately with George Bemis Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain and cyber-security expert Michael Sulmeyer about the inherent tensions in the case, in which two important principles of American life are at odds.  ... ZITTRAIN: There are surely instances where a company should weigh the ethics of its decisions, and taken only on its own terms, this would appear to be such a case — especially because there’s no legal barrier to Apple helping out. But the circumstances here give rise to additional ethical and policy considerations. What are the second-order effects of Apple’s actively writing software to defeat its own security, and what might such practices do to the overall technology ecosystem? In other words, we need to stay focused on not just the urgent, but the important.

The late justice Antonin Scalia boasted that his United States Constitution was definitively “dead.” But in a mixed-up political season, what if our founding document wants a new lease on life? And what if we brought it, as a flawed and fungible 200-year-old wonder, back into the conventional conversation again? ...With that in mind, we’ve convened a panel of our favorite lawyers: Lawrence Lessig, a former Scalia clerk and an advocate-turned-candidate against money in politics; Jedediah Purdy, of Duke, a philosopher of modernity and democracy along with a professor of law; and Katharine Young of Boston College, in the business of comparing the world’s constitutions with an eye toward improving them.

An article by Josephine Wolff, an assistant professor of public policy and computing security at Rochester Institute of Technology and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society: The electronic medical record was supposed to change everything. Human mistakes would be eliminated by the pharmacy’s ability to automatically check for dangerous drug interactions; hospitals would be able to retrieve data instantly and find out whether they were following best practices; the mysteries of medical handwriting would be replaced by clear, definite printed information. As we all now know, it didn’t quite work out that way. Patients complain that their doctors are looking at the screen instead of at them, doctors complain that life has become an endless series of boxes to click, and medical error hardly seems to have disappeared. There are still some bugs in the system—or, in the case of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, one really big, particularly virulent bug: a ransomware program that shut down the entire hospital’s computer systems for more than a week until the hospital finally agreed to pay its attackers 40 bitcoins (currently worth about $17,000) this week.

Over 2,000 people, including Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo, are signing up for Democracy Spring, a coalition of 90 groups that's planning an April sit-in at the Capitol. The group is demanding an end to big money in politics and wants reforms to better protect the right to vote and fair and free elections. ...In addition to Ruffalo, Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who briefly ran for the 2016 Democratic nomination, and Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who unsuccessfully challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, are also signing on. Both Teachout and Lessig made campaign finance reform a centerpiece of their bids.

In response to requests by Congressional leaders to increase the degree of federal oversight for large university endowments, Harvard has indicated it will work with Congress to provide more clarity and information regarding the use of its endowment resources. ...Harvard Law School professor Thomas J. Brennan, a taxation expert, said that Congress has the power to reclassify these large universities as private foundations instead of public charities. This reclassification, according to Brennan, would enable Congress to enforce expenditure requirements, which are applied to private non-profit organizations like the Gates Foundation. Public charities are not required to use a particular amount of their funds each year. “Expanding taxation to private university endowments could lead to dangerous slippery slope. If endowments can be taxed, what about pension funds?” Brennan said.

The takedown happened on YouTube last week, based on the presence of several clips of “Little Wing” to illustrate points on compulsory music licensing. The…

The FBI wants Apple to help unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook. A federal judge has ordered Apple to comply. But, Apple says it will not comply. Now, we have the world’s most famous tech company pushing back against the government as it tries to investigate the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. Once again, we’re at that complex nexus between privacy and security.  Guests: Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis professor of international law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, vice dean for library and information resources at the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

When a publishing company asked Cass Sunstein if he’d like to forge ahead with his plan to write a book that mixed discussions of economic policy and Supreme Court decisions with story lines from the “Star Wars” franchise, he didn’t hesitate to say yes. “I was faster than the Millennium Falcon,” he said. “And I have never had as much fun writing anything.”

Republicans on the campaign trail aren’t exactly shy about their desire to roll back President Obama’s bank regulations. Donald Trump has called Dodd-Frank a "terrible" "disaster," Ted Cruz has introduced legislation to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and Marco Rubio has claimed, incorrectly, that more than 40 percent of small and midsize banks were wiped out by the financial reform law. ... To understand why this is a bad idea, it’s helpful to work through an example. This is what Harvard law professor John Coates, a leading critic of extending cost-benefit analysis to financial regulations, does in a recent paper. His case studies show that cost-benefit analysis will result in "guesstimation" at best. As Coates told me, "Back in 2014, I asked proponents of cost-benefit analysis in financial regulation for a nontrivial rule that benefited from a quantified CBA that you could achieve consensus on. To this day, nobody has been able to give me one."

Students at Harvard Law School are vowing to occupy a student lounge indefinitely, citing concerns about diversity on campus. The students claim Harvard’s administration has not met a series of demands made last semester to help fight against what they say are issues of systemic racism. WBUR’s Fred Thys reports for Morning Edition about the students’ goals to create a better environment for students of color they believe are being marginalized by the school.

It seems Big Brother never gets old — and he’s still watching us. That’s according to a new stage adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” that just opened at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. ... To that common response to the location request, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain says, “Well and that choice, I think, is too often fairly illusory.” Zittrain founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It has the quality of somebody telling their child, ‘When you go to bed at 8 p.m. tonight, do you want to wear your yellow pajamas or your blue pajamas?’ ” the law professor continued. “It’s a fake choice in that you’re still going to bed at the time I say.”  

Renee Montagne talks to [Harvard Law Lecturer on Law] Matthew Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about the battle with Apple over accessing the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers.

A group of Harvard Law students have occupied one of the school’s halls, saying there is no space for marginalized students and staff on campus. The occupation, which began Monday night, is an effort to create such an environment, according to a statement from the students. ... “Our recent efforts are intellectually descended from the numerous student movements that have arisen time and again at HLS, because of a long-true reality: Harvard Law School is not an inclusive institution,” a statement from the group said.

A major private sponsor to Harvard Law School student organizations discontinued its funding for student events after receiving complaints about a discussion hosted by the group Justice for Palestine, forcing the Dean of Students Office to compensate and leaving some questioning the influence of corporate donors at the school. ...“The Law School is able to fund student conferences with other resources, and the Law School has continued to maintain the same level of funding to support student activities,” [Robb] London wrote the statement. ...“I think as an organization we’re very concerned about free speech on campus, and on the role of corporate law firms in directing student speech and what kind of events we can have,” [Brian] Klosterboer said.

A student group at Harvard Law School claimed this week that its stance on free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drove Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to withdraw generous annual funding for student-run activities at the school. Harvard said that Milbank had not rescinded its $1 million-dollar gift—$200,000 a year spread over five years—but the funds would now be administered differently. The student group, HLS Justice for Palestine, said Milbank decided to pull its funding after $500 in firm-donated money was used to buy pizza for an event advocating free speech for pro-Palestine advocates. Milbank was recognized as a sponsor of the event, sparking a “flood of angry phone calls and emails” from “Milbank executives” and others, according to the group.