Media Mentions

Medford Police Detective Stephen LeBert will face a disciplinary hearing Oct. 15 to determine a course of punishment after he was caught on video threatening to “blow a hole” in a driver’s head July 26, an incident that became national news overnight....According to the hearing notice, Coates, the 26-year-old Malden driver involved in the incident, will testify at the hearing. Coates’ attorneys, Kristin Muniz and Dehlia Umunna of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, would not say whether Coates planned to file charges against LeBert. “We will not comment at this time regarding other legal action against Police Office LeBert other than to say that all options are being considered,” Umunna wrote in an email response. “Our main focus at this point is to await the results of the disciplinary hearing.”

Supreme Court commentators have found many different ways to analyze and describe the Court and the Justices, from labeling ideology and methodology to counting laugh lines at oral argument and evaluating opinion-writing reliance on the rhetoric in briefs. It is not easy to add interesting, new analysis to the mix. But Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein offers a fresh way of thinking about the Court in a new book, Constitutional Personae: Heroes, Soldiers, Minimalists and Mutes. As the title suggests, Sunstein divides Justices (and other federal judges) into four groups that transcend politics and ideology and that span Supreme Court history. The four personae that Sunstein describes are the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute.

The Nudge is back at the White House. President Obama signed an executive order Tuesday directing federal agencies to incorporate behavioral and social science into their policies, giving federal employees and citizens a "nudge" to make better decisions by simplifying forms, sending reminders, or re-framing their choices...The White House policy borrows from a line of recent behavioral science research popularized by such books as Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Sunstein's argument — that people often make irrational choices because of unconscious biases that can be overcome by reframing the choices — was particularly influential early in Obama's presidency. Obama tapped Sunstein to oversee White House regulatory policy in Obama's first term, and was influential in shaping health care and other regulations.

Corporate executives and board members regularly make market-beating returns from buying and selling their companies’ stock in the days before disclosing a significant event, according to a study that says it has found a link between insider knowledge and investment profits...“To leave open a gap like that is an invitation to insider trading,” said Robert Jackson, a Columbia Law School professor who co-wrote the study with his colleague Joshua Mitts and Alma Cohen of Harvard.

An op-ed by Michael Teitelbaum. As the world watches wave after wave of migrants and refugees pour into and across Europe, what was once shocking now seems routine. There can be no doubt that a major crisis, both humanitarian and political, is under way...As they consider responses to these challenges, European government, advocacy, and media leaders need to keep in mind two important concepts: tragic choices and moral hazards.

Shareholders are hitting a wall with some major companies in their effort to persuade them to disclose how they spend corporate money to support political candidates. According to the Center for Political Accountability, at least one in 10 big publicly traded companies doesn’t reveal details of its donations to electoral candidates, parties or causes on its website, where investors could easily find it...Many investors want to know how and where companies put corporate funds to work, said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Without disclosure and accountability, companies may well spend funds on political causes that insiders favor but shareholders do not.”

A bill being considered in the House that would prohibit colleges from punishing students accused of sexual assault without first notifying law enforcement officials has provoked the first major wave of protests from student activists and advocacy groups since the school year began...But Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, argues that these campus sexual assault cases should be tried on campus. “I think there’s an overlapping jurisdiction—when you’re talking about a campus in a small community, you can talk about behavior that is beyond the pale in that small community for those four years,” she said. “Whether you follow that through in the larger, non-campus community with consequences is a different issue.”

Stock markets today move by the microsecond. Fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye. Yet public companies are still allowed to wait four business days before announcing a major merger, bankruptcy, layoff or a new CEO. That kind of news can send share prices soaring or crashing. And a potential 96-hour delay in revealing those events translates into an eon by the clock that runs modern markets...It’s called “trading the gap.” And in the last six years, corporate insiders have earned $105 million in above-market profits by doing it, researchers found. It’s not illegal. But the findings raise questions about whether this was the intended effect of financial regulations, write study authors Alma Cohen of Harvard Law and Robert J. Jackson, Jr. and Joshua R. Mitts at Columbia Law.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Digital-era humans are constantly optimizing — sometimes it feels as if we’re all engaged in an endless game of Frogger, continually navigating past a continual stream of obstacles, seeking the home of a thriving life. Nowhere is this practice as visible as in cities, where densely-packed populations weave past one another and new technology could provide opportunities to make life better. As mayors become more responsive to their citizens, how could adding the magic of public-enabled digital information to structures and streets help out? And what’s the role of the private sector in this transformation? One possible answer is emerging in The Big Orange, Los Angeles.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Iran nuclear deal is all but an accomplished fact, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually agree on something: Both have made it clear that they don’t want any more engagement between the U.S. and Iran. Iranian and Israeli hardliners alike want the nuclear deal to be a one-off that doesn’t change the basic structure of regional opposition between Iran and its Shiite proxies on the one hand, and the U.S. and its alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. But moderates in the U.S. and Iran -- and possibly even Israel -- will see things differently. Many of them perceive large areas of overlapping American and Iranian interests, most notably the defeat of Islamic State and a solution to the generational humanitarian and policy debacle that is Syria.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did George Washington add the words “so help me God” to the constitutionally prescribed oath of office when he was sworn in as president on April 30, 1789? I’ve always thought so, and when discussing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s misinterpretation of her oath of office last week, I wrote that the U.S. Constitution doesn't include the words but that Washington “famously added them.” Immediately I received an e-mail citing an essay that claims this widely held view was in fact a myth, unsubstantiated by contemporary historical evidence and derived from a doubtful childhood memory by Washington Irving. I read the essay, and then found counterarguments on the web and in a good old-fashioned book. So what's the truth? And why should we care, other than historical accuracy, which is always desirable and never perfectly attainable?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How much should you know before your baby is entered into a medical study? That complicated and heartbreaking question has been at the center of a controversy about a clinical trial that tested the effects of different oxygen levels on premature infants with extremely low birth weights. A federal judge in Alabama rejected last month the legal claims of parents whose children suffered adverse effects after participating. The court's decision was correct -- but not because the consent form given to parents was adequate for them to understand the risks, which as an ethical matter it probably wasn't.

This year, the obscure tech-politics debate over whether and how we pay to use the Internet leaped into the mainstream, attracting the voices of Silicon Valley’s top brass, a late-night comedian, millions of disgruntled broadband service consumers and the president. But net neutrality’s big moment was a long time coming, with a varied group of cyber law scholars each making a push for an open Internet...[Susan] Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been tackling the broader problem of lack of competition among telecom giants, comparing them to the railroad barons of the late 19th century. In the book she published last fall, Captive Audience, she argued the fight over net neutrality is a symptom of a defective market in which companies have undue influence in deciding regulations. Instead, she is pushing communities to maintain their own fiber networks separate from major Internet providers.

Seven years after the United Nations Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities was signed by countries around the world, there is still a long way to go, according to Michael Stein, Executive Director, Harvard Law School, Harvard Law School Project on Disability. “While it would be wonderful if there was a huge change, slow progress is to be expected,” he said, explaining that the treaty was introduced to countries with decades, and even hundreds of years of legal exclusion. “It also came in the wake of millennia of stereotyping the disabled,” he said.

In addition to predictable changes that come with every new school year—new classes, perhaps a new place to live—Harvard Law School students are also adjusting to a major policy change that rolled out over the summer: the new process their school is using to investigate and hear sexual harassment cases. The procedures, which differ significantly from the approach in place at other Harvard schools, are the product of months of debate among faculty members who pushed for the Law School to adopt the unique model after they raised concerns about Harvard’s protection of the due process rights of the accused...“At this point, I guess, the procedures themselves were mostly the brainchild of the faculty,” Robert K. Fountain, a Law School student and organizer for student group Harvard Talks Title IX, said last semester...Leland S. Shelton, also a third-year Law student, said that he does not know many specifics about the new procedures, but he is hopeful that they will help address the problem of campus sexual assault. “I still haven’t really formed an opinion on those rules. What I do hope is that the new sexual assault policy will curb the sexual assaults that happen on Harvard’s campus, including the Law School’s,” he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Larry Lessig, the law professor now running for president, seems to be trying to produce a real-life Frank Capra movie. He hopes to tap into a deep strain in American culture -- the one that defined Capra's work...Capra's best movies focus on the power of goodness and purity. His central opposition is between greed and corruption on the one hand and simple human decency on the other.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal judge who released Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk, from jail wasn't following the usual protocol: He was trying to effect a compromise on gay marriage. Ordinarily, someone jailed for disobeying a direct judicial order wouldn’t be freed unless she agreed to comply with it. Davis didn’t.

Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment...But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad...Halley’s critique has reverberated — as the latest salvo in a long-running war, with deep intellectual roots, over how to grapple with rape and sex as a feminist. In the late 1970s, when Janet Halley was writing a dissertation on 17th-century poets like Donne and Milton, a young lawyer and political scholar named Catharine MacKinnon opened new possibilities for the women’s movement by conceiving the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

First, he started a crowd-sourced campaign to elect members of Congress willing to change the way campaigns are financed. Now, he’s decided to run for office himself, but not just any old office – the presidency. Harvard Law School professor, author, and activist Lawrence Lessig, who now can add Democratic presidential candidate to his resume, is crowd-sourcing his campaign. If it seems familiar, it’s because it is. Lessig adopted a similar formula when he helped start Mayday PAC, billed as the super PAC to end all super PACs.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Stock buybacks are big and controversial. Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the US Democratic presidential nomination, says they undercut the American economy at the expense of needed investment. Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, wrote that buybacks “deliver immediate returns to shareholders” while their companies are “underinvesting in innovation, skilled workforces or essential capital expenditures”. High-end publications pronounce stock buybacks to be killing the American economy and, as buybacks spread in Europe and Asia, they have become more controversial there too. Fine companies, the idea runs, sacrifice their future to satisfy cash-hungry hedge funds. Buybacks are indeed up, amounting to about a half-trillion dollars annually. But is that bad? Is American business really liquidating itself, destroying businesses with buybacks? No.

Chief executives love to declare that “people are our greatest asset.” It is rarely clear what they mean, but a group of investors managing approximately $2.5 trillion is seeking to find out...One of the key reports reviewed by the group so far is a meta-analysis of 92 studies examining the relationship between human-capital policies and financial performance, released this spring by the Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School and funded by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute. Of the 92 studies, 67 found a positive correlation between investments in training and HR policies and outcomes like profitability, stock price and sales growth.