Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority no longer considers itself bound by the Oslo Accords signed with Israel in 1993. Although he didn't specify the details, there is a legal theory that would entitle one party to withdraw from a treaty: a material breach by the other side. Whether Israel in fact has breached the Oslo Accords will no doubt be subject to debate. But regardless of whether Abbas has grounds for the withdrawal, he’s making a long-term strategic mistake. Now and in the future, Israelis skeptical of peace will be able to say that Palestinian leadership can't be trusted to make a treaty and stick with it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. We already knew that Pope Francis went out of his way while in the U.S. to visit the Little Sisters of the Poor, who object to filling out a form that would guarantee their organization an exemption from providing contraceptive care under the Affordable Care Act. But we found out Wednesday the pope also met with Kim Davis, in an event that did more than just signal support for Catholic conscientious objectors -- he was, unfortunately, giving succor to the very un-Catholic idea that public officials should break laws they don't like rather than resigning to avoid a conflict between faith and professional obligation.

...Advocates for families caught up in the child-welfare system hope that the national debate sparked by the free-range parenting movement will draw attention to the threats and intrusions that poor and minority parents endure all the time...Among them is Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law professor and faculty director of the school’s Child Advocacy Program. Although Roberts once worked as Bartholet’s research assistant, today they represent opposite poles in the debate. Bartholet, a white woman who formerly worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, calls her opponents “extreme family preservationists” who are “putting kids at risk by insisting that, at almost all costs, they stay at home” with abusive or neglectful parents. She maintains that anecdotes about outrageous CPS intrusions are outliers: “More people need to think about all these issues from the point of view of the child.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Ed Cunningham is the front man and fiddle player for the Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, a band that has been playing every Sunday since 1996 (“except Easter,” he says) at the Comet, a bar in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Thus the name. The All-Stars can be heard, along with Roseanne Cash, on a new album from the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra called “American Originals.” He is also the head of the building code enforcement shop for the City of Cincinnati. That is not necessarily a likely launch pad for a thrilling data initiative that portends a tech renaissance that will shape the future of cities. But I’m here to tell you about Cunningham’s role in a project that does indeed provide that promise. With some help from an amazing program from the University of Chicago.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Courts are striking down and calling into question an important class of contentious bond restructurings that until now have been viable. The barred restructurings are so-called “exit exchange offers,” in which the debtor company offers new bonds for old bonds. Those exchanging old bonds for new ones must first vote to delete some or all of the bonds’ protections. This structure is controversial—and is now being struck down—because it drops nonparticipating bondholders into a “death trap.” Either the bondholder takes the deal (even if they don’t want to) or suffers as its bonds lose protections and value.

Times have been changing for law firms for a while now. They must contend with shrinking revenue streams, due to sophisticated clients with increasingly complicated problems...Dr. Heidi K. Gardner, a Lecturer on Law and Distinguished Fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School studies law firms and how collaboration works in law firms...Her research analyzes and demonstrates the value of collaboration to the modern law firm, and how effectively collaborating--or getting specialists to work together across the boundaries of their expertise-- can help law firms provide more client-focused service and increase their revenue streams in the process.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the military tribunals at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, try civilian offenses? In a landmark decision in June, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said no, restricting the tribunals to international war crimes and short-circuiting most Guantanamo trials except for the Sept. 11-related ones. But the court decided Friday to rehear the case en banc, effectively vacating the panel’s opinion.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. There is unprecedented momentum for a real international agreement at the Paris climate talks in December: The U.S. is on track to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, China has announced a cap-and-trade program and many others have made commitments of their own. The biggest obstacle? Justice -- or at least two ideas about justice. The first involves redistribution.

An op-ed by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and David J. Harris. Raise your hand if you believe that a juror could make this statement and still be considered fair and impartial. “I knew I would vote for the death penalty because that’s what that n----- deserved.” There’s no mistaking that this statement was actually made. The juror himself signed a sworn affidavit admitting he made the statement. On Sept. 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider a request to review whether the injection of the juror’s racial bias violated the rights to an impartial jury and a fair trial of a man sentenced to death in Georgia. We believe that it did.

Elizabeth Bartholet, Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law, discusses Governor Baker's announcement of the DCF overhaul.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. “Happy Birthday” has been freed from its copyright shackles: Rejoice! But don’t rejoice too much. The federal district court in California that invalidated Warner/Chappell Music’s claim to own the lyrics didn’t rely on the logic you might imagine, namely that the words are as much a part of the public domain as, well, the phrase “Happy Birthday.” The court’s narrow decision, released last week, resulted from an incredibly detailed, legally arcane analysis of whether the alleged owner before Warner actually acquired rights to the lyrics alongside the rights to the music, which have since lapsed. The court seems to have reached the right result, but it hasn’t struck a blow for the freedom of song.

Can colleges provide due process for defendants accused of rape, and adequate justice for the victims? Or do these cases belong in the criminal courts? An Intelligence Squared debate featuring law professors from Harvard, Yale, CUNY and NYU. Motion: Courts, not campuses, should decide sexual assault cases. FOR: Jed Rubenfeld of Yale and Jeannie Suk of Harvard. AGAINST: Michelle Anderson of CUNY and Stephen Schulholfer of NYU.

A panel of legal and medical scholars and practitioners agreed in a panel discussion on Monday night that the American criminal justice system does not give adequate consideration to the cognitive underdevelopment of adolescents...A standing-room-only crowd of about 100 people packed the Wasserstein Hall classroom at Harvard Law School for the discussion entitled “From Troubled Teens to Tsarnaev: Promises and Perils of Adolescent Neuroscience and Law.” The event, hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, was the center’s first of the year. “Our country is going through a profound movement toward the punitive,” said Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at the Law School.

John McGinnis has an excellent post over at Library of Law and Liberty... highlighting the rigid liberal orthodoxy of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). AALS has just sent around the notice of its 2016 annual meeting, highlighting its “Speakers of Note.” As Prof. McGinnis points out: “Of the thirteen announced, none is associated predominantly with Republican party, but eleven are associated with the Democratic Party. Many are prominent liberals. None is a conservative or libertarian.” McGinnis argues that the conference would profit from including some other perspectives. As it happens, one of the 13 “Speakers of Note,” Martha Minow, the dean of Harvard Law School, has written eloquently about the importance of intellectual diversity in the legal academy.

Do Washington's net neutrality rules run roughshod over the First Amendment? That's what some opponents have been arguing -- claiming that the government's regulations infringe on Internet providers' right to free expression. Now, in a flurry of responses to that charge, defenders of the rules appear eager for the biggest showdown over the meaning of corporate speech since the Citizens United case...Others are challenging the idea that Internet providers are even capable of speech. As pipes that carry consumers' Web traffic to and fro, Internet providers are just a "conduit" for people's speech, according to a group of academics including Harvard's Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, and Stanford's Barbara van Schewick. "It follows that when the Open Internet Rules require providers to carry others’ speech, they do not require the providers themselves to speak," they argue in their own brief.

Senator Elizabeth Warren embraced the Black Lives Matter protest movement in a forceful speech in Boston on Sunday, calling on police departments to train their officers in the de-escalation of violence and to outfit them with body cameras...Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School who has written about Black Lives Matter, said he is not surprised Warren embraced the movement. But he said her rhetoric stands out. “Politicians have shied away from acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement,” he said, noting that the same was true of the civil rights movement.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is what you tell the rabbi’s wife a secret that she can’t be required to reveal in court? The Haredi Jewish newspaper Yated Ne’eman has reported on a fascinating decision by a judge in Portland, Oregon, holding that the answer is yes. The twist is that the women who successfully asserted the privilege were members of a branch of Orthodox Judaism known as “yeshivish,” which staunchly denies that women can be rabbis or even rabbinic advisers. Their argument was that the rabbi’s wife is, practically speaking, a kind of adjunct clergywoman in whom female members of the community confide in the expectation of privacy.

In 1965, Ralph Nader wrote "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile." The exposé made one reputation (his) and destroyed another, that of the Chevrolet Corvair, now considered one of the most dangerous cars ever made. Fifty years later, Nader is proud to own a shiny red 1963 Chevrolet Corvair. Nader isn't driving the classic car. He's making an example of it. It is the centerpiece exhibit in a museum that Nader is opening to the public Sunday in his hometown of Winsted. At the American Museum of Tort Law, the Corvair will be beside exhibits about that notorious cup of McDonald's coffee and other important civil tort cases. The museum was dedicated Saturday at ceremonies attended by Nader, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Alexa Shabecoff of Harvard Law School and rock star Patti Smith, among other notables.

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC). The 236-page report highlights the prosecution of an American physician who offered to work as an “on-call” doctor for wounded members of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. The report also details the prosecution of a Peruvian doctor who cared for members of the Shining Path guerrillas, and of a physician who provided medical and surgical services to insurgents in Colombia...safeguards have been around since the establishment of the Red Cross in 1863, said Gabriella Blum, one of the report’s authors and the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School. But the new report’s authors contend that the law has been weakened by the war on terror and the United Nations Security Council’s antiterrorist directives...Blum, who is also the PILAC faculty director, co-authored the report with Dustin Lewis, program senior researcher, and Naz K. Modirzadeh, program director and lecturer on law.

..How should U.S. officials interpret and respond to Xi’s promise? Can he be taken at his word? We asked five experts to weigh in. Here is what they said...Bruce Schneier, fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World”. I think it’s posturing. It’s basically the same thing that the U.S. says, and the U.S. hacks foreign government and corporate networks all the time. The problem is that there aren’t any laws that protect foreign networks, and there aren’t any relevant international treaties that limit commercial espionage. So I wouldn’t expect China to be any less aggressive on the Internet than the U.S. is.

Sure, it’s annoying when you click on a link and get that “404” message or an automatic redirect to the homepage. But when it comes to legal research, dead links aren’t just annoying; they can undermine the entire premise of an opinion, article or treatise. Hoping to end this type of “link rot,” Harvard University Law School came up with Perma.cc—an archival tool that allows users to submit their links to Harvard’s library in order to be permanently preserved. The idea was the brainchild of Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law who became director of the Harvard Law Library two years ago...In 2013 the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, under the directorship of Kim Dulin, launched Perma based on Zittrain’s proposal...According to project manager Adam Ziegler, Perma is primarily designed as a voluntary service for opinion or article writers to create a preserved record of their work.