Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Events in Tunisia look, on the surface, like a replay of 2011. A frustrated, unemployed man killed himself Jan. 17 in an act of protest that was intended to remind everyone of the self-immolation of a fruit seller that set off the Arab Spring. Protests then spread from city to city. They focused on rampant unemployment, which was one of the concerns of the protesters last time. Eventually, the government had to call a curfew to make the protests die down, which they eventually did. Deeper down, the situation in 2016 is fundamentally different. The reason is democracy.

Is the law school crisis affecting Harvard? Probably not. The school did choose to take 55 transfer students last year, the fourth largest transfer class in the country. In the prior four years the school took between 30 and 34 transfers each year. Its higher than usual acceptance of transfers has fueled speculation that it was compensating for an original applicant pool that wasn’t strong enough. Whether that’s so or not, several indicators that may show a school faces financial duress have each remained steady at HLS between 2011 and 2015...According to Jessica Soban, assistant dean of admissions at Harvard Law School, the school had a stronger pool of transfer applicants this year and the yield from transfer offers exceeded expectations. Dean Soban resisted speculation, but it certainly appears that the Harvard Law transfer class was getting out of dodge. This is a far more tenable explanation than the school needing an extra $1 million from 20 more transfers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. By any measure, Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, is one of the most important scientists in the world today. His science is groundbreaking, his institutional power is enormous, and his ethical reputation is sterling. Yet Lander now finds himself the target of immense criticism as a result of … trying to do history. Lander's essay "The Heroes of Crispr," recently published in the journal Cell, has been attacked for its failure to disclose his research center’s stake in a massive patent fight over the extraordinary genome-editing technology Crispr/Cas9, as well as for downplaying the roles of two female scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who are on the other side of what's been called the biggest patent war in the history of biotech. What went wrong? The lesson of this kerfuffle isn’t only, as some have proposed, that critics are jealous of Lander’s influence or opposed to his big-science ideology and accomplishments. It’s something more subtle and more interesting: There's a huge difference between doing your job and trying to write the history of that job.

A new open source plugin designed to prevent the creation of dead content links online – so called "link rot" – has launched. Amber has been designed by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and it provides what it calls a "persistent route" to information on the internet by automatically taking and retaining a snapshot of every page on a website and storing it on the same website's server.

As Massachusetts nears another presidential primary, thousands of residents interested in voting will have to provide proof of identification, find their polling station, and — most important — register before the government-imposed deadline of 20 days before Election Day. But according to activists with the New Democracy Coalition in Boston, these small actions combine to create a voter registration system that is outdated and favors the wealthy and politically astute. Their solution: a statewide database of eligible voters that effectively ends the need for registration...Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a prominent professor at Harvard Law School and former mentor of President Obama...called the expansion of voter registration a civil rights issue. Because, he said, when voting and voter registration is difficult, the most affected populations are the groups to whom voting has been extended to most recently — women, communities of color, and the poor. “The people voting in this state have to understand that every single vote matters and that they have to reach out to people, and people should be not be denied about their race or gender, or sexual orientation,” Ogletree said. Also, he argued, the creation of a statewide of automatic voter registration system would be an important symbolic step.

The founding director of the Broad Institute has come under fire for publishing an article that critics charge fails to disclose a conflict of interest and understates the contributions of women in developing a biotechnology. The article in question—published in the science magazine Cell and written by famous geneticist Eric Lander—outlines the history of CRISPR, a gene editing technology. Critics allege that Lander did not disclose a conflict of interest in the story: the Broad Institute is currently embroiled in a CRISPR-related patent dispute with the University of California...Lander’s colleagues at Harvard and the Broad Institute— including Law School professor Jeannie C. Suk and longtime Lander advisee Pardis C. Sabeti— characterize the attacks on Lander as baseless. “The kind of dedication that I saw firsthand, that Eric Lander had, to supporting and furthering the career of his mentees who were women—that is utterly inconsistent with some idea that he is erasing women’s role in science,” Suk said. Sapeti characterized Lander as an “extraordinary mentor” who pushed many women to have a strong voice at the Broad Institute, and said that the CRISPR narrative was not an issue of gender.

A federal judge in Massachusetts this week issued a mixed ruling in a case challenging tougher regulations on for-profit colleges enacted by that state’s attorney general. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office, which has been among the more aggressive in cracking down on for-profit colleges, largely prevailed in the case as the judge upheld seven of the nine state regulations the for-profit college association in the state had challenged...Toby Merrill, who directs the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School and advocated for tougher regulations, said that the ruling was “a substantial vindication” of the rules. She pointed out that although two provisions were invalidated by the court, the for-profit college group did not challenge the underlying authority of the state to create the rules in the first place.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For all their differences, the presidential candidates share one defining characteristic: All of them are upbeat about the future (as long as they get elected). In one of the most important books of recent years, Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon offers a radically different view. When it comes to the American economy, Gordon is a pessimist. He thinks that past growth was a historical anomaly, spurred by a series of great inventions in the late 19th Century, above all electricity and the internal-combustion engine.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The University of Missouri won’t fire an assistant professor of communications, school officials say, even though the professor, Melissa Click, has been charged with assault for blocking a student reporter who was trying to take video of protests on the campus. That’s a reasonable policy decision, because everyone’s entitled to the presumption of innocence. At the same time, the university’s acting chancellor, Henry Foley, said something calculated to strike fear in the hearts of untenured professors everywhere: He indicated that university would take account of her actions when she’s being considered for tenure.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Who gets to define the “Jewish” part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state? Maybe the Knesset or Israel’s supreme court? It turns out there’s another major player: the Israel Defense Forces. The military recently announced a change in the Jewish Identity Unit, which teaches draftees a religious version of what Jewishness entails. The change is intended as a blow against nationalist Orthodoxy in the cultural struggle over whether Israel is a secular or a religious state.

An op-ed by Michael Shammas `16. President Obama took a lot of heat recently for criticizing college leftists who are offended by dissenting opinions. But he's absolutely right: Productive discourse is dying, trampled over by closed minds who value comfortable opinion-holding over uncomfortable soul-searching. As dialogue lies flailing and gasping, outrage culture's pulse is stronger than ever. We see the degraded consequence everywhere.

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn. Since the 1970s, "global justice" has surged as a central topic in Anglophone political theory and philosophy. Why? A typical account, for instance from Martha Nussbaum, credits contemporary philosophers with transcending "the frontiers of justice," courageously leaving behind arbitrary limits normally imposed on distributive justice beyond borders. This option - there are now competing positions in the field - frequently labels itself cosmopolitan. The idea is that it took up a philosophical legacy going back to the Greek and Roman Stoics, who first called for "citizenship of the world," before Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant revived their visionary program. I think much work in global justice is genuinely inspiring, but I want to offer two qualifications.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The indictment of anti-abortion activist David Daleiden is a stark reminder that the criminal law is a dangerous animal: Once it’s set free, there’s no telling who will be its target. Yet Daleiden is extremely unlikely to receive anything but symbolic jail time if convicted of the charge of making and using a false California driver’s license in the course of his undercover attempt to discredit Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas. And despite what his supporters might say, the indictment doesn’t pose a threat to First Amendment values or legitimate investigative journalism.

The JIC, or Just In Case, is an iPhone case that can record any phone conversation with the press of a button. It comes equipped with a built-in microphone, a speaker for playback, and a microSD card for storing conversations...While the case might be useful for journalists, spies, and anyone else in dire need of a stored conversation, it also could lead to illegal recordings in 12 states...The natural question, of course, is which state's jurisdiction applies. If the caller is in New York, for example, which has a one-party consent law, but the person being called is in Washington, which requires all-party consent, there isn’t necessarily a clear default. Andy Sellars, a staff attorney and fellow at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, told The Verge that the case’s users should probably err on the more conservative side. Getting consent from all parties is always a safe bet.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Monday's landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to make retroactive its 2012 prohibition on mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders is worthy of celebration. The court clarified its retroactivity jurisprudence, holding for the first time that the Constitution demands that new substantive constitutional rules be applied to people convicted before the rules were announced. And the justices were correct to apply their newly announced principle to the case of mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles. But at the same time, the court’s bold decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, underscores the depth of an anomaly that it left unchanged: When the court announces a new procedural rule mandated by the Constitution, those convicted under the old rule stay in prison and are unaffected by the new judgment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I’ve always loved the title of the 1951 film, “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” maybe because of my ancestral connections to the garment industry (manufacturing on the paternal side, retail on the maternal). Today I get to connect my job to that of my grandparents: The U.S. Supreme Court has decided a case about the power of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the basis of the wholesale-retail distinction. I don’t have anything to sell you, but I will try to explain why the case matters, and what the court said.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld a major Obama administration electricity-markets regulation that encourages big power users like factories to cut consumption at peak times, rejecting a challenge brought by electric utilities. The court, ruling 6-2, reversed a 2014 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to strike down the 2011 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulation...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School's environmental law and policy program, called the ruling a "crucial step" toward the Obama administration's goal to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

Back on campus after a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said the campaign was a learning experience in the challenges affecting democracy in America. In particular, Lessig said restrictive changes to the Democratic National Committee’s debate eligibility requirements excluded him from the stage, limiting the visibility of his electoral reform platform. Lessig said he is now looking for the Republican Party to continue his proposed reforms and sees businessman Donald J. Trump as the candidate with the best chance of enacting the campaign finance reforms he ran on, given his strident criticism of Super PACs.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. In the middle of taking the bar exam at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, in New York City, along with thousands of aspiring lawyers, I had to go to the bathroom. The enormous line for the women’s restroom looked like it would take at least a half hour. There was no line for the men’s restroom. I walked in, passed my male counterparts at a row of urinals, used one of several empty stalls, then returned to my desk. I felt that my decision to forgo the women’s bathroom made a difference to my passing the exam, and that the much longer wait for women than men during an all-important test for entry to the legal profession was obviously unfair. There is now, however, an active debate around what bathrooms we should be able to use. A recently proposed Indiana law would make it a crime for a person to enter a single-sex public restroom that does not match the person’s “biological gender,” defined in terms of chromosomes and sex at birth...But the implications of the controversy go far beyond bathrooms.

The federal government’s broadening interpretations of Title IX, the 1972 anti-sexual discrimination statute that applies to educational institutions, has raised concerns that the freedom of Catholic colleges and universities to teach and govern themselves according to the Church’s teachings on sexuality is at risk. At least five Catholic educational institutions are among a wave of Christian colleges and universities that have applied for Title IX exemptions, in the wake of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ expansion of Title IX’s interpretation to include “discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”...Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, told the Register that the improper application of Title IX does pose a threat to academic freedom on campuses and that “these problems are emerging all over the country.” “There is plenty of evidence that Title IX is being expanded in application, way beyond its proper legal scope,” she said. Halley explained this has happened in several steps. First, the OCR issued “non-binding advice documents” that do not have the status of legal regulation, but “massively expand the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment.” “This creates a lot of confusion about what sexual harassment actually is,” she said.

The Boston Police Department has launched a mediation program aimed at reducing a backlog of routine complaints against officers — an idea first suggested a decade ago. Even though the number of complaints dropped in 2014, the time it takes to resolve the cases has frustrated both citizens and the officers who live in the shadow of possible action pending against them. Police officials hope that the program, which will be managed by the Harvard Mediation Program at Harvard Law School, will help clear less serious complaints quickly...“The goal is to ensure that citizens feel comfortable,” said Rachel A. Viscomi, the Harvard program’s assistant director. “The idea is to level the playing field.”