Media Mentions

Shortly before Lady Gaga took to the stage to inaugurate Super Bowl 50, in balmy Santa Clara, California, Marco Rubio was standing on a turf field within the Ultimate Sports Academy in frigid Manchester, New Hampshire. Before him was an amalgam of supporters, hangers-on, the media, and New Hampshirites who view their state’s quadrennial primary contest as a sort of Mardi Gras, or Art Basel Miami Beach, for strong-willed and thick-accented Yankees...Rubio needed the help. Unspoken in Ultimate Sports Academy, but certainly undeniable, was his vexing performance at the previous night’s Republican debate...“There’s no correlation between being a good debater and being a good president,” said Harvard Law student Nick Mayne [`18]. “It’s been shown.”

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said decades ago during another period of pronounced inequality in America. Echoing the concern of the Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate, over the past 30 years myriad forces have battered the United States’ legendary reputation as the world’s “land of opportunity.” The 2008 global economic meltdown that eventually bailed out Wall Street financiers but left ordinary citizens to fend for themselves trained a spotlight on the unfairness of fiscal inequality. The issue gained traction during the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in 2011 and during the successful U.S. Senate campaign of former HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren in 2012...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at HLS. In Congress, he said, “They focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle [as of October], 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy; that’s not an American democracy.”...Though labor rights have been eroding for decades, Benjamin Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at HLS, still thinks that unions could provide an unusual way to help equalize political power nationally...To restore some balance, Sachs suggests “unbundling” unions’ political and economic activities, allowing them to serve as political organizing vehicles for low- and middle-income Americans, even those whom a union may not represent for collective bargaining purposes.

Last week, The Crimson reported that a committee made up of graduate students, undergraduates, and professors had been created to review the University’s Title IX policies and to recommend potential changes. The committee—whose exact mandate remains unclear—is chaired by former interim Dean of the College Donald H. Pfister. Harvard announced its first University-wide sexual assault policies in July 2014 when both Harvard College and Harvard Law School were under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for repeatedly mishandling sexual assault cases. Harvard’s subsequent reforms were then hailed as a step in the right direction on an urgent and previously under-discussed issue. However, it soon became clear that the new policies had been assembled too hastily: For example, not a single Law School professor was consulted in their drafting. The results of this failure of consultation were clear.

...Perhaps the loudest point that Democrats have made, especially Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is about the way the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowed money from unknown sources to pour into elections. On the question of whether corporations and labor unions should be able to spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates and issues, many Republicans see it as a question of free speech protected by the First Amendment – as did the Supreme Court. But the court couldn’t have understood the current reality, in which money to be used influencing politics is funneled through nonprofits that aren’t required to disclose their donors, said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and campaign finance reformer. “The Supreme Court didn’t even realize there was the dark money loophole. The court explicitly said all this stuff would be disclosed. That means it either was lying or it didn’t understand the way (501(c)4s) interacted with super PACs,” Lessig said.

Bloomberg Law hosts June Grasso and Michael Best discuss a human rights lawsuit against Yusuf Abdi Ali, a former colonel in the Somali National Army, who is accused of presiding over the deaths of hundreds of people in northern Somalia in 1984. They speak with Noah Feldman, a law professor at the Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can a payday lender’s contract require all borrowers’ disputes be subject to an arbitration process in which decisions are exempt from federal law? In a decision announced this week with potential consequences for millions of contracts signed every day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has said no. The decision shines a light on a particularly disreputable instance of the generally worrisome phenomenon of payday loans. Its importance, however, touches on broader issues, including the sovereignty of Indian tribes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an astonishing report, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has accused Sweden and the U.K. of arbitrarily detaining Wikileaks founder Julian Assange because of a sexual-assault investigation against him in Sweden. To be sure, it’s unknown whether he’s guilty of the charges. Likewise, it’s impossible to know whether Assange criminally conspired with U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley) to steal classified material, or whether Assange and Wikileaks simply published that material in a manner that should be protected by the First Amendment. But what seems highly likely is that Assange’s detention is anything but arbitrary -- it’s because of the investigation of serious crimes.

...Hydraulic fracturing involves injecting a cocktail of fluid, typically about 99 percent water, down a wellbore and into tight rock formations to help release oil and gas. The practice has revolutionized the American energy industry, but some environmentalists and public health officials have expressed concern about potential public exposure. A provision in Texas law requires the disclosure of chemicals listed as trade secrets to emergency personnel, but not to toxicologists or academics. That has left researchers like Hildenbrand frustrated with FracFocus, the Internet clearinghouse used by Texas and at least 20 other states for public disclosure of ingredients in fracking fluid...A recent Harvard University analysis of FracFocus records found companies are withholding the identities of more chemicals now than they were three years ago...Kate Konschnik, a coauthor of the study and the director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, noted improvements in the quality of data in FracFocus, including fewer clerical errors. But, she said, "there were lower rates of disclosure across the board."

Comparative constitutional law, which involves the study of constitutional jurisprudence and its relative application to political institutions in different countries, has in recent times emerged as an important field of examination. But much of the academia involved in these comparative studies has focused its attention on the constitutions of Western democracies. Even when constitutions of developing countries are considered, the comparison often features their structures qua those contained in the constitutions of supposedly more sophisticated societies. As a result, what we have is a highly lopsided compendium — for instance, existing studies partake very little of the challenges faced by constitutional democracies in South Asia. This imbalance is sought to be corrected by a new, and admirable, anthology of academic essays, Unstable Constitutionalism: Law and Politics in South Asia, edited by Mark Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and Madhav Khosla, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Student-nominated speakers from across Harvard presented TED-talk style mini-lectures at the sixth annual “Lectures that Last” in front of a packed Memorial Church audience Saturday evening. With topics ranging from bilingualism to successful marriages, and from racial inclusion to economic development, the professors and deans on the stage challenged the audience to think differently about events in their everyday lives. The event was targeted for graduate students across the Harvard...In a speech that touched on recent race-related controversies at Harvard Law School, Law professor Kenneth W. Mack delved into the definition of inclusion. Some Law school students “have called for things that constitute a fundamental challenge to the rules that govern a University,” he said. “I think that those kinds of questions and those kinds of problems are entirely worthy of our attention.”

Second-year Law student Michael L. Zuckerman ’10 will take the helm of the influential Harvard Law Review after being elected its 130th president last week, set to replace outgoing president Jonathan S. Gould.

With his surprising victory in the Iowa caucuses last Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz solidified his status near the top of the GOP field. But in the background, the controversy over his birthplace and his eligibility for the nation’s highest office simmered on. At the forum “Is Ted Cruz Eligible to Be President?” held Friday at Wasserstein Hall in Harvard Law School (HLS), two constitutional scholars debated whether Cruz’s birth in Calgary, Alberta, to a Cuban father and an American mother disqualifies him to serve as president. Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, who teaches at HLS, argued that Cruz is ineligible to hold the presidency, using what he called Cruz’s own strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Two legal scholars squared off in a public debate on Friday to settle whether Republican Ted Cruz is eligible to become president. Spoiler alert: They didn't settle it. But the debate at Harvard Law School underscored that conflicting interpretations of the U.S. Constitution can produce different answers. The question has been in the national spotlight since Republican rival Donald Trump suggested that Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother, isn't legally qualified to be president. Much of the debate weighed whether Cruz is a natural born citizen, a requirement under the Constitution to become president that the document never defines. Harvard professor Larry Tribe argued that, based on legal principles from the country's early history, only those born on U.S. soil can be considered natural born citizens. Granting that status to Cruz, then, "is at odds with the text, the structure and the founding history of the Constitution," said Tribe, who once taught Cruz as a Harvard law student.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In her recently released book, Dark Money, Jane Mayer painstakingly traces the startlingly successful efforts by Charles and David Koch and their conservative allies to use their billions to shape American policies. Mayer’s work pays special attention to state-level politics, and for good reason: For years, groups like ALEC, the State Policy Network, and (more recently) the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity have been focused on nullifying any progressive national policymaking through state legislation...Whether or not you agree with the overall policy goals of the Koch brothers, we have a democracy problem: At the same time that state legislative activity has gained in importance, the number of traditional news reporters covering statehouses has plummeted...The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state.

European central bankers this week began testing how a bank default would pressure certain trade-plumbing firms, the latest sign of concern over the clearinghouses that aim to limit markets’ vulnerability to the damaging fire sales that characterized the 2008 crisis...Hal Scott, Nomura professor of international financial systems at Harvard Law School, said when comparing all last-resort lending powers across Europe, the U.K., Japan and the U.S., the Fed has “the weakest of the four,” in part because of new restrictions placed in the postcrisis Dodd-Frank law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Tesla Motors has taken the first step toward challenging a year-old Michigan law that bars direct-to-consumer auto sales in the state. I trust you’ll agree with me that the law is a blatant piece of protectionism, designed to help car dealers at the expense of consumers. But that still leaves an important -- and interesting -- question: Is the law not merely dumb, but unconstitutional, too?

After a lull in activism over race relations at Harvard Law School, about 100 affiliates gathered at a “community meeting” Thursday afternoon to discuss the school’s controversial seal, which is currently under review...Alexander J. Clayborne, a Law student affiliated with Royall Must Fall, said he was pleased at the turnout of faculty and staff at Thursday’s meeting. While he called the conversations that took place “robust,” he expressed disappointment at what he called a one-sided approach in favor of changing the seal. He said he had hoped Law School affiliates with opposing views would attend and debate the merits of the seal change with the activists. “Student activists are accused of stifling free speech on campus, but whenever there is an opportunity to engage with people who disagree, the people who disagree don’t show up,” Clayborne said. “That’s a level of intellectual cowardice that needs to be called out.”

An op-ed by Fady Khoury, S.J.D. candidate. What does Israel’s new stop-and-frisk law mean? What should you do about it? Prior to the new law, which was passed in the Knesset on Tuesday, police were authorized to search anyone without a warrant if they had reasonable suspicion (probable cause) that the person was carrying a weapon illegally (on their person or in their car), or was planning to commit a crime with a weapon. One can question what constitutes reasonable suspicion within that framework, but in short, at least there existed an objective element the officer needed to seek: a weapon. The suspicion that someone is carrying a weapon can’t just be made up, although we know there has always been an element of arbitrariness — after all, we are talking about the Israeli Police.

Aging media mogul Sumner Redstone stepped down as executive chairman of Viacom on Thursday and was replaced by CEO Philippe Dauman, a move that immediately disappointed investors. Although the decision mimicked a similar move at sister company CBS, Thursday's action has the potential to set off a future board fight...Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor and director of its program on corporate governance, said the board conflict highlights the problems of companies with two classes of stock — one set that holds voting power, and another that does not. He said in an email that Viacom's corporate structure is now "highly problematic and fraught with risks for public investors." "The company's CEO is unaccountable to public investors and accountable only to a person whose health prevents him from actively monitoring the affairs of the company," Bebchuk said.

Commissioner Rob Manfred was at Harvard Law School on Tuesday for a brief but informative talk, one that covered new ground on several key issues. The conversation began with a half hour of questions from Professor Michael Klarman and was followed by 20 minutes of questions from students in the audience...Manfred was a graduate of Harvard Law in the class of 1983, after which he worked at a large law firm called Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius, where he specialized in labor and employment law. It was that practice that led him to baseball, as the firm was hired by the league around the time of the 1990 lockout. Manfred would continue to work with MLB as outside counsel through the 90s, a period which included several highly contentious labor struggles, including the 1994 strike.

The Illinois Board of Elections rules Ted Cruz is a “natural born citizen” because his mother was a U.S. citizen and eligible to be on the ballot. Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe explains why “the Illinois Board of Elections doesn’t know what it's talking about.