Media Mentions

Apple Inc. is objecting to a request from federal prosecutors in Boston that it help unlock the iPhone of an alleged member of one of the city’s most notorious gangs, according to court records — a case that echoes the government’s high-profile fight with Apple in the San Bernardino terrorism case...Bruce Schneier, a security technologist at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a critic of the government’s request, said the Apple case raises a keen national question: “Do we want security or surveillance?” “The danger is not whether the FBI submits one request or a thousand, it’s forcing Apple to create the tool,” Schneier said. “Once the tool exists, they’ll use it a million times, and we’ll all be vulnerable.”

The Harvard Corporation on Monday approved a recommendation to retire the Harvard Law School shield, which came under fire amid student protests last fall because of its ties to the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slaveholder who helped to establish the School through a bequest from his estate. In a letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, President Drew Faust and Corporation senior fellow William F. Lee said the School “should feel free to discontinue use of the shield.” With that response, the Harvard Corporation affirmed the recommendation of a committee appointed by Minow that the controversial shield be replaced. “If the Law School is to have an official symbol, it must closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not,” the committee wrote earlier this month. In an email to the HLS community Monday afternoon, Minow thanked the president and the Corporation, as well as the members of the committee whose recommendation the Corporation approved. She acknowledged that retiring the shield “will take some time, but the work has begun.”

The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, agreed Monday to allow Harvard Law School to remove and replace its seal, which features the crest of a slaveholding family...Student activists were unsurprised but pleased with the Corporation’s decision. “I think that this represents the culmination of a lot of activism by students all across Harvard Law School, and I’m thankful that the Corporation has finally done the right thing,” Alexander J. Clayborne, a member of Royall Must Fall, said. Clayborne said activists will continue to push the Law School to meet their other demands, including reforming the school’s curriculum and hiring more minority faculty members.

The image of three sheaves of golden wheat arranged inside a blue-and-crimson shield has stood as the symbol of Harvard Law School and its graduates for nearly 80 years. But sometime next year, the shield, which uses elements of a former slave-holding family’s coat of arms, will be scrubbed from Harvard’s campus. In its place will be a new emblem, officials said Monday — one that better reflects the law school’s values and its mission. The Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s governing boards, has accepted the law school’s request to change the controversial symbol in time for its bicentennial in 2017.

As Apple tries to fend off government demands for access to iPhone content, the company is leaning on free speech arguments as a key part of its defense in a California courtroom...About half of the successful First Amendment appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court today focus on corporate rights — a big change from previous decades, according to a survey of a half-century of court decisions by Harvard Law professor John Coates.

The Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia highlights a growing rift between the country and the nation’s highest court on questions of economic power and support for big business. And that gap, legal experts say, is unlikely to be significantly narrowed by the kind of justice President Obama — or the next president, Democrat or Republican — is expected to nominate...Mark Tushnet, a left-of-center professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the author of “In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court,” says that while big businesses frequently lose individual cases before the court, these are “in some sense discrete problems.” By contrast, the arbitration and class-action decisions “end up regulating a large swath of litigation,” he said. “Lots of lawsuits are affected by the outcome and they are affected in a pro-business way.”

The stock market isn’t convinced that the biggest tax inversion merger on the horizon — Pfizer’s pending blockbuster deal with Allergan — will be concluded without major problems...Whether Pfizer would have more flexibility in using its overseas cash after the merger is an important question for the markets, but the answer is not yet clear. The Treasury is expected to issue further rules within the next several weeks. Stephen E. Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the Treasury “has the prerogative to make a more muscular application of its administrative authority than they have already” regarding taxation of stranded cash controlled by a company like Pfizer.

Fee fights among plaintiffs attorneys in multidistrict litigation have forced more federal judges in recent cases to wade into the disputes — with practically no case law to guide them..."There are huge issues about the governance of MDLs that no Supreme Court has addressed in any satisfying way," said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School who has testified as an expert for those challenging MDL fees. "The fee aspects are one of a subset of questions of how they're governed that have yet to attract good appellate law. The district court judges are struggling with these issues."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The circumstances of the birth of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz put constitutional citizenship into the headlines. Also in the news: A federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled last week that the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision doesn’t follow the flag to the island. What would happen if you mashed the two issues together, mixing birthright citizenship with the Constitution’s applicability to U.S. territories? The answer to this otherwise random-seeming question is in fact before the Supreme Court right now. At issue is whether it’s constitutional for Congress to deny birthright citizenship to people born in American Samoa, which has been a U.S. territory since 1900.

‘Everyone in Minnesota will be able to use convenient, affordable world-class broadband networks that enable us to survive and thrive in our communities and across the globe.” This vision for universal broadband access for Minnesota was forged by nearly 200 community leaders from across the state last November. It struck a chord. ...“Minnesota should be looking at the rest of the country in its rearview mirror,” said Harvard Law School Prof. Susan Crawford during our Border to Border Broadband conference in November. Crawford could see that Minnesota has many broadband heroes and that funding programs and public will are building, but we can and must do better, faster.

For 80 years, Harvard Law School has been represented by a shield that features Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”) and three sheaves of wheat. But it turns out that the traditional-looking logo isn’t so innocent: Its design was based on the coat of arms of a slaveholder known for treating his slaves with brutal cruelty. Now, reports Arun Rath for NPR, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, has endorsed changing the school's official shield—but questions about slavery’s legacy on campus remain. ... They seem to have prevailed: On March 4, Dean Martha Minow announced that she would endorse the recommendation from a committee of Harvard Law School faculty, students, alumni and staff assembled in November to revise the school’s shield. “Its association with slavery does not represent the values and aspirations of Harvard Law School...it has become a source of division rather than commonality in our community.”

On Friday, the committee tasked with considering the future of Harvard Law School’s seal, which some have criticized for its connection to the slaveholding Royall family, recommended that the school change its emblem. While we disagree with the substance of this decision, we respect the process by which HLS reached it. As the committee's report makes clear, this debate is far more nuanced than a simple case of right versus wrong or racial justice versus injustice. The committee explained that faculty, staff, students, and alumni of diverse races, genders, and ages fell on both sides of the issue. Indeed, one of America’s foremost scholars on slavery’s history dissented from the committee’s recommendations.

How do you decide if your milk is fresh enough to drink? You might be one of the many Americans who relies on sell-by dates to determine when to throw it out. But it turns out we could be dumping perfectly good milk...“Basically, around 90% of people throw food away when that date arrives, either always, or most of the time, or occasionally,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. Leib says what most people don’t know is those sell-by dates have no standard meaning. They vary by state and even by company.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you think that Donald Trump would be a terrible presidential nominee and an even worse president, and you want to convince his supporters that you are right. What should you do? Behavioral science reveals why there’s no easy answer -- yet it also offers some clues about what might work. The most important findings involve the risk of “backfiring corrections.” A growing body of research demonstrates that when people’s convictions are firm, attempts to correct those views, with evidence, can make them firmer still. That should be a red flag for anyone who seeks to turn Republican voters against Trump.

Beyond the limestone facade of a grand building with arching entranceways, dozens of students have occupied a space at Harvard Law School for the past three weeks. They’ve re-named the room “Belinda Hall,” in honor of a woman who was a slave of law school founder Isaac Royall...“The institution sent a bunch of black and brown people to deal with a group of black and brown people,” said Bianca Tylek, a 29-year-old Latina student with long, wavy brown hair, in her final year of law school, who told me she has been mistaken for janitorial staff before...Keaton Allen-Gessesse, a 28-year-old from Chicago in her final year of law school, told me, “There’s really no place in the classroom for understanding issues of racial inequality or white supremacy...The dean of student affairs, Marcia Sells, said the school has improved the environment for minority students over the past several decades. “I understand what the students are asking for but some of it is, I think, we also have to do more in helping them understand that this is a little bit how the pedagogy works, this is also how it’s changed,” she told me, adding that she thinks the school needs to do a better job of pointing out to students where they’re already teaching historical context at the school, rather than having a separate dedicated critical race theory program.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal judge in Puerto Rico ruled Tuesday that the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of gay marriage doesn't apply on the island, which is a commonwealth with a unique constitutional status. The ruling will eventually be reversed on appeal. But its effect is meaningful nonetheless, because it functions as a double protest: against the high court's support for gay marriage and against the unresolved constitutional status of the island.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Filing a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court sounds like an act of spontaneous intellectual generosity meant to help the justices see all sides of a case. Or maybe an exercise in lobbying by interest groups. Actually, it's neither. A new article by two law professors shows that an organized business they dub the “amicus machine” generates hundreds of amicus curiae briefs, planned and coordinated by the specialized guild of lawyers who argue before the court. Surprisingly, the authors think the machine is a good thing.

This week, The National Law Journal released its 2016 list of law schools that send the most graduates to the 100 largest firms, and Columbia led the pack. With 220 of its 2015 graduates becoming first year BigLaw associates, this is the third straight year the New York Ivy Leaguer won the title...The 2015 list does not include graduates who went on to complete judicial clerkships. This could explain Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and Harvard Law School’s lower rankings on the list. Mark Weber, assistant dean of career services at Harvard Law, said that the school produces a large amount of judicial clerks who later move into big law firms. He maintains that law firm recruiting is up at Harvard Law.

If you have so much as tiptoed into the arena of personal finance over the past few decades, you will have heard about the virtues of passive investing. ...In a discussion paper written last year, Einer Elhauge, a law professor at Harvard University, found that index-fund ownership was having a similar effect in the airline industry, where nearly eighty per cent of all stocks are owned by a handful of investors. Elhauge argues that institutional investors with an emphasis on index funds, such as Vanguard and Fidelity, are playing an outsized role in the sector, and that their rapid adoption is accelerating ownership concentration, resulting in higher prices for travellers. “Alone, index funds are not enough, but they are growing like gangbusters,” he explained in an interview.

I had expected fireworks—or at least strong disagreements—when Internet privacy advocate Jonathan Zittrain and former CIA director John Deutsch debated the impasse between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Instead, the two men offered nuance and a rough if imperfect consensus over how much access we should have to technologies that allow us to encrypt our personal data in ways that place it beyond the government’s reach. “Many other paths to data are available. We are exuding data all over the place,” said Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. “The FBI has chosen this case … in large part, I think, because there is so little privacy interest on the other side.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Europe can’t build a wall to keep out Syrian refugees. But today European Union leaders did the next best thing from their perspective, announcing an agreement with Turkey to repel and return all those trying to come illegally into Greece by boat from Turkey. The plan represents a major shift for the EU in dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis. In place of a generous legal approach that rejected mass returns of asylum seekers, Europe is now adopting a much more hard-line attitude that distinguishes sharply between migrants seeking illegal entry and refugees who’ve already been processed within Turkey and may be granted legal settlement rights and asylum.