Media Mentions

While Russia and Western states square off over Syria, Ukraine and Crimea, the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into alleged war crimes in Georgia in 2008 also risks being caught up in a new Cold War. And even though ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was praised for finally removing what appeared to be her office’s Africa-only blinders, those who know the strategy discussions as they run deep in The Hague’s dunes, believe she has ventured into the Caucasus with extreme reluctance. “After seven years [Bensouda] had to make a decision about moving forward,” Alex Whiting, a former member of her inner circle and now professor at Harvard Law School, told IJT.

The scale of the destruction in Timbuktu has led to the International Criminal Court in the Hague taking on a case of war crimes against cultural and religious heritage. To discuss the importance of this case, our guests are Tim Insoll, Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology, University of Manchester and Alex Whiting, Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Justice Antonin Scalia's untimely passing has deprived us of a great legal mind. But the justice leaves behind a remarkable legacy—even if not quite the one he might have sought. He once said, only partly in jest, that he preferred a “dead” to a “living” Constitution: for him, the whole purpose of a Constitution was to nail things down so they would last—to “curtail judicial caprice” by preventing judges, himself included, from having their way with the law rather than doing the people’s bidding as expressed in binding rules. Yet Scalia managed, sometimes despite himself, to bring our Constitution—and the project of interpreting it—to life more deeply than have many whose overt ambition was to espouse a “living” Constitution.

Student activists began to occupy Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall Monday evening in an effort to create a space on campus they say has been denied to minorities at the school. Calling the student lounge “Belinda Hall” after a former slave of prominent Law School benefactors, the group of activists led by Reclaim Harvard Law said they plan to remain there indefinitely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: How will the death of Justice Antonin Scalia affect the major cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, all of which are expected to be decided by the end of June? The answer doesn’t depend entirely on how Scalia would’ve voted. It also depends on a necessary rule of procedure: When the Supreme Court is divided equally, it upholds the decision below.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Suffice it to say that in spite of our disagreements, I invariably found Justice Scalia’s thinking and prodding to be brilliantly generative of important insights into the way law and legal interpretation ought to proceed. Even though I debated the justice repeatedly – both in academic settings, like my response to his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University (resulting in his 1997 book, A Matter of Interpretation), and in oral arguments at the Supreme Court, where I appeared before him and his colleagues dozens of times over the course of his 30-year tenure – I never ceased to enjoy the encounters immensely and never failed to benefit hugely from them, even when his inherent advantage left a bittersweet aftertaste. He was, after all, a U.S. Supreme Court justice and wielded a vote on that august tribunal and great influence within it, while I was a mere scholar and advocate.

In 2004, Mark Tushnet, a [Harvard University] law professor, wrote an article about “constitutional hardball,” which he defines as legal and political moves that are “within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D - Ct., and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe join Chris Matthews to talk about the GOP's vow to block an Obama SCOTUS pick.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: There is something obviously preposterous about Anat Berko’s suggestion on the floor of Israel’s Knesset that Palestine can’t exist because the Arabic language doesn’t have the “P” sound. But the use of amateur linguistics in politics isn’t restricted to arguments denying opponents’ legitimacy -- it can also be used for salutary purposes. Barack Obama, for example, visiting a U.S. mosque for the first time in his presidency, recently said that “the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam -- peace.”From a technical standpoint, both Berko and Obama are wrong.

An op-ed by Richard Lazarus: Justice Antonin Scalia joined the bench 30 years ago, this coming September. From his first days on the bench on that first Monday of October to his final days just a few weeks ago, Scalia changed the Supreme Court and its rulings. But his influence was far more profound and transformative than the many significant individual rulings he authored and those that he joined. Justice Scalia did no less than change the nature of legal argument before the Court and opinion writing by the Court.

The first time Ian Binnie met Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court justice was at his acerbic, gregarious best. It was in Auckland in 1999, and Justice Scalia, fresh from an Australian vacation, extended his hand. ...Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard, said that if originalism is understood to exclude other interpretive approaches, its influence on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions has been limited.

Third in a series on what Harvard scholars are doing to identify and understand inequality, in seeking solutions to one of America’s most vexing problems....Trauma also subverts achievement, whether through family turbulence, street violence, bullying, sexual abuse, or intermittent homelessness. Such factors can lead to behaviors in school that reflect a pervasive form of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder. At Harvard Law School, both the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative and the Education Law Clinic marshal legal aid resources for parents and children struggling with trauma-induced school expulsions and discipline issues. ...With help from faculty co-chair and Jesse Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree, the Achievement Gap Initiative is analyzing the factors that make educational inequality such a complex puzzle: home and family life, school environments, teacher quality, neighborhood conditions, peer interaction, and the fate of “all those wholesome things,” said Ferguson.

Another hallmark was the annual hiring of a liberal clerk, several of whom spoke to the Guardian about their personal fondness for Scalia despite glaring ideological differences.“You read his opinions and especially his dissents, and you’d think he’d be the Ted Cruz of the supreme court, completely acerbic. Yet he was loved by his colleagues,” Scalia’s former clerk and noted Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig told the Guardian. “I asked him about it once, and he said: ‘Because I’m consistently so outspoken and extreme in my writing, no one is offended. If Justice [Lewis] Powell didn’t smile at you one day, you’d think he was furious at you.’”

A Christian college in Pennsylvania could be forced to provide contraceptive health care coverage to its employees or else pay massive fines, but a school in Iowa would be shielded from Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate if the Supreme Court deadlocks, 4-4, in one of the major cases pending this term....“States do things differently all the time,” said Holly Lynch, a bioethics analyst at Harvard Law School who closely tracks the contraception mandate debate. On the other hand, she said, stakeholders usually expect federal law to be applied evenly across the nation.

The legal profession is perhaps more associated with bulging files of papers, odd clothing and arcane procedures than with technological innovation. But several start-ups are trying to give this most conservative - and sometimes vexing - of professions a digital makeover. ... Harvard Law School is attempting to address this by scanning reams of court documents dating back centuries and making them available to the public.

“Nino was memorably smart, gregarious, funny, playful — a good pal — as well as plainly serious about his studies,” recalled Frank Michelman, the Robert Walmsley University Professor emeritus at Harvard, whose friendship with Scalia began in 1957 when they entered HLS together. The two shared an office while working on the Law Review. “We talked about everything that came along, and I had no inkling then of differences between us over matters legal or political that developed or became apparent later.

Harvard Law School affiliates remembered alumnus and Supreme Court Justice Antonin G. Scalia, who died Saturday at age 79, for his vibrant, fiery personality and his substantial contributions to United States law. “Justice Scalia will be remembered as one of the most influential jurists in American history,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow wrote in a statement. ...  Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who knew Scalia personally, often found himself squaring off against the justice. Dershowitz said. “I disagree with almost all of his opinions, but I found him to be a formidable intellectual adversary.”....Law professor Charles Fried, who has written extensively on Scalia’s judicial stances, wrote in an email, “I knew him in so many ways over so many years. I am very sad about this great man's death.”...Law professor Richard Lazarus penned an op-ed in the Harvard Law Record extolling Scalia’s contributions to the art of oral argument. In a Bloomberg View piece, columnist and Law professor Noah R. Feldman wrote, “Antonin Scalia will go down as one of the greatest justices in U.S. Supreme Court history -- and one of the worst.” Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe commented in Politico Magazine, “To say that Scalia will be missed is an understatement.”

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death will complicate the work of the Supreme Court’s eight remaining justices for the rest of the court’s term, probably change the outcomes of some major cases and, for the most part, amplify the power of its four-member liberal wing. ...“Justice Scalia’s sad and untimely death will cast a pall over the entire term and a shadow over the court as a whole at least until a successor is nominated and confirmed,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. ...“No less than the viability of the historic climate change agreement reached in Paris may well be in peril,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard. “And without Justice Scalia’s vote, that stay would have been denied.”

A stunning development for the U.S. Supreme Court this weekend, with news that Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead in his room at a luxury hunting resort near the Mexican border in Texas.He was 79. Natural causes, says a local judge. Scalia was the fiery leader of the conservative wing of the court, where frequent 5-4 decisions make any change of membership hugely consequential.President Obama says he will nominate a successor. Republicans say, “Don’t.”  This hour On Point, after Scalia. ... Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Author, with Joshua Matz, of the book “Uncertain Justice,” among many others.

On Saturday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at the age of 79. Harvard Law Emeritus Professor Alan Dershowitz, who knew Justice Antonin Scalia for many years, joined WBUR’s Weekend Edition Sunday to talk about Scalia’s innovative opinions and legacy.

In addition to his fiery rhetoric, his originalism, and his profound impact on his fellow Supreme Court justices and the court itself, Antonin Scalia was famous for another thing: his surprising support of criminal defendants in many cases. “I ought to be the darling of the criminal defense bar,” Scalia once pleaded. “I have defended criminal defendants’ rights—because they’re there in the original Constitution—to a greater degree than most judges have.” ... Still, Scalia’s opinions for the court—and, as ferociously, his dissents—have shaped the landscape of protections afforded to criminal defendants. Charles Ogletree, a famed public defender, adviser to President Obama, and Harvard Law School professor, said of Scalia, a brilliant, colorful, towering giant of the legal community who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, “We are from different worlds, but we both appreciate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”