Media Mentions

Ted Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother. Does the Constitution bar him from the presidency? Donald Trump has raised the issue in their campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. ...  The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on the meaning of the phrase. But Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is among many scholars who say the better view is that a “natural born citizen” is anyone who was a U.S. citizen at birth and doesn’t need to be naturalized. Former solicitors general Neal Katyal and Paul Clement agreed with Tribe’s view in a March 2015 article for Harvard Law Review Forum.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Gun-rights advocates are already suggesting that they’ll go to court to challenge President Barack Obama’s newly announced executive action on background checks. But what exactly, is the challenge going to be? And will it work? The highlight of Obama’s action is to “clarify” the law that says checks are only necessary for sales by people “engaged in the business of selling guns.” As many as 40 percent of gun sales are currently unregulated because they’re in theory not made by dealers engaged in the business. The most likely path for the Second Amendment activists will be to argue that the administration’s clarified definition is too narrow, interfering with nonbusiness sales. Such a claim won’t be simple to get before the courts. And when it does get there, it will be difficult for it to succeed -- but not impossible.

Ankle bracelets could soon track the movements of suspected domestic abusers before they are even convicted of a crime, if lawmakers vote to expand use of the technology. A proposal to expand the use of GPS tracking devices will allow judges to order their use when issuing protective orders that require suspected abusers not to contact or approach their victims. Advocates of the measure, filed at the request of prosecutors, say the technology will give victims a chance to escape abusers who ignore restraining orders. Diane Rosenfeld, director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, said the technology is effective. In parts of Massachusetts where devices are used as part of comprehensive safety plans for victims, there have been no domestic-violence related homicides. "It's a highly effective tool for crime prevention," Rosenfeld said.

In the latest development of a heated publicity battle, filmmakers of a popular documentary that criticizes Harvard Law School’s handling of a sexual assault case penned an op-ed for the Huffington Post sharply rebuking Law professors who have challenged the film...Law professors who have publicly challenged the film similarly took issue with the premise and title of the filmmakers’ op-ed. Janet E. Halley, one of the 19 professors who criticized the documentary in November, denied that she and the other professors were retaliating against or targeting Willingham and said the professors’ statements were critical of the film itself, not any individual student. “The reason I participated in the Law professors’ press release is not that a student came forward and complained about sexual assault, nor that she complained in the criminal process,” Halley said. “It is that ‘The Hunting Ground’ has profoundly misled the public about the ensuing processes which came out decisively against those claims.” Jeannie C. Suk, another professor who signed the public release, said her criticism of the film stemmed from concerns about fair sexual assault grievance processes, not retaliating against individual complainants. “There is this idea that we have to stand by and support or be silent about a film that does a very poor job of moving forward fair and effective policy or else be considered deniers of the problem,” Suk said. “That’s just a proposition that I don’t accept.”

In a resolution passed last month, Cambridge’s City Council publicly denounced the right-wing media organization Breitbart.com for spreading what it called “anti-Muslim libel” after the outlet published an article asserting that a City councillor has ties to the Islamic militant group Hamas...Mark V. Tushnet ’67, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in constitutional law, wrote in an email that he “doubt[s] that the city council's resolution could be fairly called even an affront to First Amendment values.”

An op-ed by Charles Fried. The 1970s saw a changed Supreme Court. The Warren Court had dismantled legal segregation, announced a right to counsel in all criminal cases, given us the Miranda warnings and the Mapp rule on searches and seizures, forever changed the political map with the "one man, one vote" decision, almost done away with defamation in political cases, invented a right to sexual privacy, and much more. But then it became the Burger Court. Republican presidents, making good on campaign rhetoric, had replaced Black with Powell, Fortas with Blackmun, Douglas with Stevens, Harlan with Rehnquist. Though it may not have changed direction, the Court certainly changed speed...All-in-all, we have a pretty decent system, but there are purists left and right who would dismantle it. Because it is imperfect and jury-rigged, it is vulnerable to their jibes.

Donald Trump says questions about whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be President of the United States could become a “big problem” for the Canadian-born Republican candidate. But among legal scholars, there’s a consensus: He’s eligible to occupy the Oval Office...Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told ABC News that Trump's alternative definition would mean that only citizens born in the United States would be eligible. “My own view as a constitutional scholar is that the better view -- the one most consistent with the entire Constitution -- is the broader definition, according to which Cruz would be eligible,” he said, including anyone who is a U.S. citizen at birth and doesn’t need to be naturalized.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether California should do more to find the rightful owners of $8 billion in “unclaimed” bank, investment and retirement funds before seizing the accounts and pocketing the money. For 15 years, Sacramento attorney William W. Palmer has been fighting to force changes in California’s Unclaimed Property Law, which last year contributed nearly $450 million to state coffers. Palmer won several legal rounds early on, but in March, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed his latest challenge. With the help of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, Palmer appealed to the high court, calling the California program “a recipe for abuse.”

...The hype’s been building for decades now: The robots will be like legions of outsourced Indian workers — smarter than you, cheaper and with kickass work ethics too. An Oxford University study in 2013 suggested that the automation of more and more work, from accounting clerks to the C-suite, could wreak havoc on nearly half of all American jobs in the coming decades...Nobody yet knows the contours of the looming labor upheaval. Experts debate how long it will take for automation to hit its stride and really start kicking us all in the nuts, the scope of its impact, even how many jobs will be lost and how many might be gained. But some among them argue that it’s not too early to think about what exactly the world will need to do when the great hiccup does come around. “There are a host of policy responses” that could address the looming transition, says Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor law at Harvard Law School, “none of which are easy — or modest.”

Are you still licking the wounds of rejection from your first choice law school? Well, here's the dirty little secret of how you might still sneak through the back door: Apply again—as a transfer student...The news flash in all this? Harvard took in more transfer than ever before, even though the overall number of transfers nationally has been falling in the last two years. HLS's admissions dean, Jessica Soban, says the size of this year's transfer group jumped 20 percent because "the applicant pool had exceptional academic and professional strength."

mail, ughhhh. ...Over the course of about half a century, email went from being obscure and specialized, to mega-popular and beloved, to derided and barely tolerated....And though email may be despised, it is still a cornerstone of the open web. “Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in an episode of the podcast Codebreaker in November, “and by unowned, I mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Earlier Tuesday, in a deeply moving speech that brought many, including the President himself, to tears, President Obama unveiled several executive actions intended to curtail the prevalence of gun violence in our nation. Beyond the concrete actions he described, he may have hoped to educate and persuade the public, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about the "fierce urgency of now." Most Americans will recognize the common-sense steps announced today cannot prevent all gun abuse but will still welcome them as ways of reducing the continuing scourge of gun violence in this country. Most but not all...But if we take the time to examine exactly what President Obama is proposing, a crucial step that these critics seem to have skipped, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the measures he has outlined are well within his legal authority.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The rapidly escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, sparked by the execution of a Saudi Shiite activist, may seem like the natural outgrowth of a decade’s Sunni-Shiite tensions. But more than denominational differences, what’s driving the open conflict is the Saudis’ deepening fear that the U.S. is shifting its loyalties in the Persian Gulf region from its traditional Saudi ally to a gradually moderating Iran. And in a sense, they’re right: Although the U.S. is a long way from becoming an instinctive Iranian ally, the nuclear deal has led Washington to start broadening its base in the Gulf, working with Iran where the two sides have overlapping interests. Of which there are many these days.

...This rather intuitive pitch belies something more complex: a potentially rich philosophical conversation about ethics that’s brewing over our daily, seemingly mundane clicks and views...A next-generation consumer advocacy battle, one in which a victory depends not on class action lawsuits or government oversight but on popular awareness and education. The ultimate goal would be getting consumers to “vote with their feet,” says Vivek Krishnamurthy, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. He cites the digital civil liberties groups’ attempts to create a “nutrition label” for privacy.

...After decades of being treated as boorish gate-crashers, activist investors are infiltrating the boardrooms of large companies like never before. This year activists launched more campaigns in the U.S.—360 through Dec. 17—than any other year on record, according to FactSet...At the same time, changes in corporate governance were making it easier for activists to win board seats. Between 2011 to 2014, a group at Harvard University led by professor Lucian Bebchuk campaigned to get more than 100 major companies to put their entire boards up for annual election, instead of staggering directors in multiyear terms.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Remember Fallujah? For the Barack Obama administration, the Iraqi retaking of Ramadi -- with substantial U.S. help -- is a welcome New Year’s gift. But before anyone gets too excited about moving on to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, it would be wise to remember that at least two further obstacles remain before that battle can be mounted. The Iraqis need to hold Ramadi and establish supply lines in the territory leading to Mosul, and they must break Islamic State’s hold on Fallujah, to the rear of Ramadi and perilously close to Baghdad.

...That’s why Cervantes and seven other students and teachers are suing Compton Unified School District (CUSD) in a case that could transform how schools respond to trauma and violence. They argue that CUSD’s failure to provide adequate training and resources for coping with trauma is denying students equal access to education. ...Only a few schools and school districts have stepped up to meet this challenge, but their experiences offer hope for the plaintiffs in Compton. Brockton Public Schools, a largely working-class school district south of Boston, began implementing “trauma-sensitive” reforms more than five years ago in partnership with the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI), a collaboration between Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School. This meant training staff on how complex trauma affects learning and behavior, as wel las modifying disciplinary practices to focus on deescalation instead of punishment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Not every democracy needs a supreme court with the power to block legislation it deems unconstitutional. But Poland’s reforms of its Constitutional Tribunal, enacted by a right-wing majority and signed into law by a conservative president, are worrisome signs for the country's prospects of democratic government. The political timing -- and the nature of the changes -- provides a valuable guide to what judicial review is good for, and why so many countries have adopted it since World War II.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Here’s the issue in a real free-speech case just decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit: Can someone be refused a teaching certification because of his otherwise protected social or political views? The answer sounds like it should be no, doesn’t it?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Starting in the new year, judges in Florida can wear robes in any color they want -- so long as that color is black. The state Supreme Court seems to have adopted the new rule -- which also prohibits any robe embellishment -- because of a judge who wore a camouflage robe, which some litigants thought signaled his identity as a good ol’ boy, thereby undercutting public confidence in the judiciary.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. At long last, Korea's “comfort women” are getting a real apology from Japan's government for being forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during World War II. But the moment is bittersweet, and not just because it’s taken 70 years. The apology comes not out of a change in Japanese sentiment, but from a change in geopolitics -- namely, the rise of China and the increasing need for Japan and South Korea to cooperate on mutual defense. And it comes at the price of a promise by the South Korean government not to criticize Japan over the issue again -- a trade of moral claims for compensation and finality.