Media Mentions

Race relations in America have improved, but they aren't always good. This assessment was provided by Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, who spoke Thursday at the University at Buffalo. Ogletree was the 40th Annual Martin Luther King Commemoration Speaker and also participated in a conversation with students, faculty and university friends.

What are the secrets for long-lasting love? Lean closer to find out. — Keep curiosity alive. — Never assume anything about each other. — And, last but not least, open a joint bank account. With Valentine’s Day near, experts in negotiation, mediation, and lasting marriage shared that advice to a rapt audience at a panel called “Negotiating Love: Interpersonal Negotiation and Romantic Relationships,” held today at Harvard Law School (HLS). The session was organized by the Harvard Law School Negotiators, a student group, to spread the word that effective techniques in interpersonal negotiation apply not only to the vagaries of international trade agreements and mergers and acquisitions but also to people’s everyday lives and to relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners.

To help starry-eyed lovers celebrate Valentine’s Day, here are five romantic sites to visit in the Boston area...A white marble bench at Harvard Law School is inscribed in all capital letters: “On January 17, 1985, not far from this spot, two people met and fell in love.” Presumably, they met and later fell in love. The letters are carved into the vertical edge of the otherwise simple bench.The bench is outside the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center, also called Lewis Hall. The two people who fell in love later married and donated the bench, confirmed a spokesman for Harvard Law School, Steven Oliveira. The man was a law student, the woman was not, and they met outdoors. The man is “very very anonymous,” said Oliveira.

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib. My father used to keep food in the refrigerator for days, even weeks after the “best by” date, so long as it looked and smelled OK. My mom, by contrast, went out to buy a new carton of milk as soon as the date passed. Often there would be two containers of milk in our refrigerator: the half-empty one my dad was committed to finishing, and the new one my mom had purchased, out of fear that she might get sick if she drank my dad's past-date milk.

OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook: The Supreme Court hits the brakes on the heart of President Obama’s push to fight global warming. We’ll dig in. Guests: Jody Freeman, founding director of the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy program.

James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, told lawmakers Tuesday that governments across the globe are likely to employ the Internet of Things as a spy tool, which will add to global instability already being caused by infectious disease, hunger, climate change, and artificial intelligence. ...Clapper's remarks on the Internet of Things are remarkable because they come from the nation's top spy chief, and they likely mean that US spy agencies are trying to exploit it. Two weeks ago, a Berkman Center for Internet & Society report from Harvard University concluded that "If the Internet of Things has as much impact as is predicted, the future will be even more laden with sensors that can be commandeered for law enforcement surveillance; and this is a world far apart from one in which opportunities for surveillance have gone dark. It is vital to appreciate these trends and to make thoughtful decisions about how pervasively open to surveillance we think our built environments should be—by home and foreign governments, and by the companies who offer the products that are transforming our personal spaces."

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says he hopes to deal with domestic violence rulings in three high-profile cases by opening day. In a Q&A with Harvard Law Today, Manfred discussed the league’s new domestic violence policy and how the league is dealing with the cases of Aroldis Chapman (Yankees), Jose Reyes (Rockies) and Yasiel Puig (Dodgers) after their respective off-season incidents.

Another departure at the Supreme Judicial Court means Gov. Baker could reshape the state’s highest court. Justice Fernande Duffly is planning to retire this summer. It’s the third retirement announced in the past week — joining Justices Francis Spina and Robert Cordy. Two other justices will reach retirement age before Baker’s term ends, which means that the governor would appoint five justices to the seven-member panel. Guest: Nancy Gertner, Harvard law professor and retired federal judge.

If you thought there was a problem with inversions — deals that allow American companies to relocate their headquarters to lower their tax bills — wait until you hear about the real secret to avoiding corporate taxes. It’s called earnings stripping, and it is a technique that the Obama administration has so far failed to stop. ...Still, an influential article by Stephen Shay, a Harvard law professor, has argued that the I.R.S. could act by adopting regulations that would term this type of debt equity. Under the tax rules, this would mean that the payments from the American subsidiary would now be nondeductible dividends rather than interest payments, ending this type of earnings stripping. The I.R.S. has said it was considering adopting earnings stripping rules in the near future, and this could be it.

However worrying Tuesday was for the success of xenophobic politics in America, it might have been more worrying for the planet’s climate. In the early evening, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations which would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector. ...The idea wasn’t for naught. Coal stocks tanked over the last year, and many of the largest American coal companies have filed for bankruptcy. In fact, opponents of the plan cited this exact effect in their brief: The “EPA hopes that, by the time the judiciary adjudicates the legality of the Power Plan, the judicial action will come too late to make much if any practical difference,” said one brief from the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. He called the plan a “targeted attack on the coal industry.”

U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers will introduce bipartisan legislation on Wednesday that would prohibit states from requiring tech companies to build encryption weaknesses into their products. ... But technology companies, privacy advocates and cryptographers say any mandated vulnerability would expose data to hackers and jeopardize the overall integrity of the Internet. A study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University released last month, citing some current and former intelligence officials, concluded that fears about encryption are overstated in part because new technologies have given investigators unprecedented means to track suspects.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  There’s no mistaking the message of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to stay the Barack Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan regulation while it’s being challenged before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before Tuesday, the court had never granted a regulatory stay in such circumstances, where the lower court hasn’t ruled and has itself declined to block the regulation while it’s considering the case. It’s understandable that environmental advocates are upset. What’s less obvious is why the Supreme Court hasn’t done this sort of thing before, and what’s wrong with them doing it now, if anything. Evaluating the competing values at stake should help us understand whether the court got it right -- and whether we should expect more such stays in the future.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The civilians fleeing Aleppo don’t prove definitively that, with Russian backing, President Bashar al-Assad will win the Syrian civil war. But it’s certainly time to game out that scenario and ask: What would victory look like to Assad? And what will happen to the other regional actors engaged in this fight? The decisive element to consider is whether Assad needs to defeat Islamic State to be a winner. If the answer is yes -- and if Assad could do it -- the world would probably breathe a sigh of relief, and accept Assad’s victory, despite its extraordinary human costs and egregious violations of human rights.

The Supreme Court’s decision to delay implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has dealt a serious blow to American efforts to fight climate change, leaving an air of uncertainty—both in the U.S. and abroad with international partners—around a plan Obama once heralded as “the biggest, most important step” ever taken to combat global warming. ..“At least five of them think there’s a serious issue with the validity of the Clean Power Plan,” says Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School. “If the Court thought there was nothing to the claims, they wouldn’t have granted the stay.”

For the better part of a year, Facebook Inc’s global ambitions have bumped up against this question: Is some Internet better than none? This week, India delivered a bruising answer. India’s telecommunications regulator on Monday banned programs that offer access to a limited set of websites and apps, including Facebook’s Free Basics service...That approach has defenders. Facebook’s service “may be a worthy experiment” in a world where Internet access can be too expensive for some people, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has struck down Maryland’s law regulating assault weapons, creating a split with the 2nd Circuit, which upheld similar laws in New York and Connecticut. That split could, and probably should, lead the U.S. Supreme Court to take up and decide the issue. It’s time therefore to ask: How should the justices treat the question? In particular, what does the right to bear arms, created to preserve a “well-regulated militia,” say about assault weapons today?

In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. The brief order was not the last word on the case, which is most likely to return to the Supreme Court after an appeals court considers an expedited challenge from 29 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups. But the high court’s willingness to issue a stay while the case proceeds was an early hint that the program could face a skeptical reception from the justices...“It’s a stunning development,” Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former environmental legal counsel to the Obama administration, said in an email. She added that “the order certainly indicates a high degree of initial judicial skepticism from five justices on the court,” and that the ruling would raise serious questions from nations that signed on to the landmark Paris climate change pact in December.

The letter arrived right on time—and for Wilson Ausmer Jr., that turned out to be a very bad thing. It was 2011, and Ausmer, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, was in Afghanistan, serving his third tour of duty overseas. The decorated soldier had already paid a personal price to serve his country: he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to his time on the battlefield, and had incurred a significant foot injury as well. The letter, mailed to his home in Missouri, contained invaluable information on how he could file an appeal for disability compensation. It also stated that he had to respond within 120 days of receipt. Ausmer wouldn’t return home for another five months. By the time he read the letter, he’d lost his one chance to appeal his benefits case. The Veterans Benefits Administration wasn’t going to help him—but a trio of Harvard Law School (HLS) students did. Bradley Hinshelwood, J.D. ’14, Juan Arguello, J.D. ’15, and Christopher Melendez, J.D ’15, took up Ausmer’s case, arguing, among other things, that the clock on an appeals claim should start only after a veteran has returned home, rather than when a letter arrives in his or her hometown mailbox. The student lawyers became involved in Ausmer’s case in 2013, while interning at the HLS Veterans Law and Disability Benefits Clinic, within the school’s WilmerHale Legal Services Center (LSC). Each year since 2012, when the clinic was established in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, dozens of students have assisted veterans with legal cases, winning verdicts of local and national importance.

An op-ed by Derecka Purnell `17. If activists decide to run for political office, the Black Lives Matter Movement will endure. One person or organization did not build this movement. Political candidacy will not break it. Agendas by groups like BYP100, Campaign Zero, Organization for Black Struggle and the Movement for Black Lives to eliminate state violence, achieve economic justice, improve black health and build black futures challenge the critique that the movement is leaderless and without goals. But it's also difficult to appeal to elected officials who are already aware of state violence, poisoned water and unequal wages, and have done little to address it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Phoenix City Council has voted to no longer to begin its meetings with a public prayer. Sounds like a victory for the separation of church and state, right? Maybe even the influence of Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the Town of Greece case, in which the court’s majority allowed such prayers to continue? Think again. The Phoenix City Council is banning prayer so that self-described Satanists won’t have a chance to give one. The decision isn’t about tolerance but intolerance. In the end, that’s a good thing, a sign of the establishment clause working -- and of James Madison’s First Amendment logic in action.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent years, American progressivism has been torn between two competing approaches to reducing inequality. The first focuses on the top 1 percent; the second emphasizes the bottom 10 percent. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have been operating within the terms set by Top 1 Percent progressivism. For both the Democratic Party and the country, that’s the wrong focus.