Media Mentions

He may no longer be running for President, but he still has plenty to say about the American political system. Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and author of “Republic Lost, The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It.” He is a former candidate for the 2016 democratic nomination and ran on a platform of eliminating the influence of money in politics.

As the growth of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” transforms more rural landscapes across the heartland into industrial zones, companies are less willing to disclose the chemicals they inject into the ground, Harvard researchers have found...But the amount of information withheld has increased the past three years, according to a study by Kate Konschnik, a lecturer and director of Harvard Environmental Law Policy Initiative, and Archana Dayalu, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences...“A lot of oil and gas activity is happening close to cities, communities, and schools,” said Konschnik. “People are seeing this industrial activity right outside their door, they see trucks come up with chemicals, and that concerns them. They want to know what chemicals are being used in their communities. There is so much we don’t know about this activity.”

The number of death sentences imposed in U.S. courts have dropped precipitously this year, representing the leading edge of a continuing decline in capital punishment nationwide. Only 49 death sentences have been handed down, a 33% drop from the 73 imposed in 2014. Only 28 prisoners were executed, the fewest since 1991 -- and only six states were involved, the fewest since 1988...A separate report out Wednesday claimed that 19 of the 28 prisoners executed suffered from severe mental disabilities or experienced extreme childhood trauma and abuse. The report from Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice said many of the condemned had multiple mental impairments.

With the semester coming to a close, some Harvard Law School students are continuing their push for changes they say will improve the school’s treatment of minority students, about a month after a high-profile racially charged incident shook campus...On Friday, more than a dozen students hosted a “teach-in” in the lobby of the office of Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, on whom students have called to do more to address their concerns. For roughly an hour, students sat in the office and discussed the possibility of creating a critical race theory program at the school, according to Alexander J. Clayborne, one of the students organizing the protests. Clayborne said they spoke with Minow...In an emailed statement, Minow wrote that she has been meeting with students and faculty members to “ensure inclusive and fair consideration of any ideas for change,” adding that she met with students for several hours last week and again Monday. Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells, too, wrote in a statement that she and Minow have been working closely with students to discuss “what processes can work to achieve change at HLS.”...Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe argued in an email that changing the seal of a school is very different from changing a title. “Renaming the position of ‘House Master’ to something less problematic like ‘Dean of the House’ is a lot easier than changing the school’s seal, which isn’t within the control of any dean or even the university president,” Tribe wrote.

A conservative-leaning Harvard Law School student who recently criticized racial protests on his campus and elsewhere for using fascist tactics to silence dissent has become the target of vicious online attacks that do not address his intellectual arguments, but rather his looks. But that has not stopped third-year Harvard Law School student Bill Barlow from speaking out in defense of the First Amendment. Barlow’s recent column in the Harvard Law Record critiqued leftist students for their extreme and totalitarian protest tactics, and Barlow’s subsequent appearance on Fox Business focused on his concerns that free speech is under assault on universities, prompted the barrage of insults. One critic wrote, “this is literally the most punchable face I’ve ever seen. He looks like a political cartoon character of what somebody with those beliefs looks like.”

In the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, California, prominent conservative politicians have again squashed momentum to step up gun regulation, using the Second Amendment to make their case for maintaining the status quo....Mic spoke with several top constitutional lawyers who reject outright the notion that the Second Amendment prohibits increased limitations on access to guns. Instead, they argue that the Constitution actually allows for a number of gun regulations which have been proposed in Congress, including universal background checks and bans on assault weapons..."The right to bear arms was thought to ensure well-regulated state militias," Harvard constitutional law professor Richard J. Fallon told Mic. "Regulation of firearms was permissible as long as it did not interfere with state militias."...Other constitutional lawyers go even further, saying that although conservatives may not want to admit it, Heller actually paved the way for more gun control restrictions. "I believe 'assault weapons' are indeed what the court had in mind when it wrote in Heller about 'dangerous and unusual weapons," Harvard Law professor and renowned legal scholar Laurence Tribe told Mic. "I believe military-style assault weapons will never be protected by the court in the name of the Second Amendment."

Anne Scott entered St. George’s School as a 10th-grader in 1977, just a few years after the prestigious prep school first admitted girls at its campus in Middletown, R.I. She was a good student, and a three-sport athlete, from the suburbs of Wilmington, Del. But a month after she arrived, a field hockey injury brought her into the orbit of the school’s longtime athletic trainer. He molested and raped her, and threatened to come after her if she told anyone. For years, terrified and ashamed, she did not. Finally, in her mid-20s, her life a shambles of diagnoses and hospitalizations, she told her parents, who took her to see Eric MacLeish, an attorney who would later gain renown representing abuse victims of Catholic priests...Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who has known Scott since they were students at Penn, has signed on as co-counsel to MacLeish. Lessig, who was abused by the choir director as a student at the American Boychoir School in Princeton, N.J., said St. George’s needs to make therapy support “immediately available and not filtered through a lawyer.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You might think Donald Trump could use a crash course in Islam, but there's no way to make him take it. A Massachusetts judge, however, faced with a convicted defendant who demonstrated anti-Muslim views, ordered her to take a class on Islam as part of her probation. Now the commonwealth’s Supreme Judicial Court will have to decide whether the sentence was an unconstitutional infringement of religious liberty or a common-sense, measure-for-measure matter of justice. The facts grow out of that most brutal of human interactions, the landlord-tenant dispute.

...The Stanford study is just one example of the many factors that make it difficult to quantify the scope of the sexual violence problem on college campuses. While awareness of the issue rose to the forefront in 2015, the hard work of assessing the true scale of the problem has posed challenges for those looking to prescribe a cure. ...“I don’t see any evidence that campuses are doing a good job or will do a good job at handling these cases,” Jeannie Suk, a professor of criminal law at Harvard University, says. “If you treat sexual crimes differently than other serious crimes, it sends a message that these crimes are not as important. Just as we would for any other serious felony, we should involve the police.” While Suk does not support eliminating universities’ power to investigate and punish sex crimes, she believes campus adjudication systems are significantly less effective than the criminal justice system.

Months of hand wringing about bond market liquidity couldn’t prevent one of U.S. regulators’ worst fears: The freezing up of a $788 million mutual fund that was meant to provide small-time investors with easy access to their cash. While hedge fund liquidations are taken for granted, the failure of the Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund last week and its decision to halt redemptions is the type of situation the Securities and Exchange Commission dreads. By Monday, SEC staff were calling around to mutual funds with similar holdings, while fellow regulators pored over Third Avenue’s books at its offices in New York...“It makes me think of Bear Stearns” in 2007, said Norm Champ, a former director of investment management at the SEC and lecturer at Harvard Law School. “Bear Stearns started falling apart, but that was early and everyone kind of thought we’d get by that. Now we have a fund in trouble when bond default rates are still historically low. What happens when they go up?”

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Congress is poised to retroactively validate hardball restructuring tactics in the bond market that courts have struck down in major reorganization cases like that of Caesars Entertainment. The underlying problem is that since the 1930s, the securities laws has barred basic free contracting among bondholders, via the Trust Indenture Act of 1939. Although the ban is exceedingly poor — one can think of few groups less in need of contractual guidance in the United States than institutional bondholders — the lurking amendment would worsen the plight of the bondholder.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What if the National Rifle Association is right that the no-fly list shouldn’t be used for denying people guns, as President Barack Obama has urged and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy has said he will do? If you’re a liberal, the very idea may seem absurd -- but in fact there’s an important constitutional issue at stake. The problem isn’t that gun-sales restrictions are unlawful in themselves. It’s that the no-fly list is a black box full of errors, featuring limited opportunity for redress. Whether you like it or not, gun possession is a constitutional right under the Second Amendment -- unlike flying. That means we need to decide whether the government can restrict that right based on a determination of dangerousness that occurs with a very unusual form of due process.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the U.S., we tend to say that the cure for hate speech is more speech: If you don’t like what Donald Trump has to say about Muslims, speak out, or vote against him. Other democracies do it differently, and many make it a crime to incite racism and violence. This approach sometimes seems appealing -- but it’s also difficult to apply, as the Israeli Supreme Court showed this week when it declined to order the prosecution of the authors of a Jewish law book that arguably constitutes religious hate speech.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Behavioral science has become the usual term for psychological and economic research on human behavior, often designed to explore people’s biases and blunders. For that research, 2015 has been a banner year, with an unusually large number of important books. Five of them stand out -- and two of these weren’t even written by social scientists.

Last month, demonstrators at Johns Hopkins University interrupted Alan M. Dershowitz as he was giving a fiery speech defending Israel. The disruption normally would not have fazed Mr. Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law School professor who thrives on controversy and relishes taking on opponents in and out of the courtroom. The protesters, however, were not challenging his Middle East politics. Instead, they held up a sign reading, “You Are Rape Culture.” Mr. Dershowitz knew what it meant. A decade ago, he had defended a friend, a money manager named Jeffrey E. Epstein, after authorities in Palm Beach, Fla., found evidence indicating that he was paying underage girls to give him sexual massages. The lawyer led a scorched-earth attack on the girls and, with a team of high-priced lawyers, cut a plea deal for Mr. Epstein that the local police said was too lenient. Over a five-decade career, Mr. Dershowitz has represented some of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, including O. J. Simpson, Leona Helmsley, Mike Tyson and Claus von Bulow. Now, he finds himself on the other side, in a legal battle to clear his own name. At 77, he is struggling to absorb a bitter lesson — that choosing the wrong client can exact its own cost.

An op-ed by Jonathan Hiles `16. If you didn’t known that HLS had a seal, much less one honoring a vicious slaveholder, and reacted by thinking, “That’s messed up, why don’t we change that?” (or words to that effect), then we come from common ground. It has taken me some reflection, aided by the fiery reasoning of Royall Must Fall, to realize this issue’s importance. The omnipresence of racial hierarchy is such that its signs are rarely noticed or rebuked. This has long been the case with the HLS seal. While such neglect is troublesome, it has also meant that the racial subtext of the Royall seal is not an accurate reflection of HLS. However, it would become much more of one if, in spite of the pain and protests it causes, HLS still clung to this valueless symbol.

Bill Barlow, a third year student at Harvard Law School, won’t shy away from challenging student activists who are demanding the school erase any references to its slaveholding founder and insisting that students be forced to take classes taught from the Critical Race perspective. Yet Barlow, who is white and grew up north of Los Angeles, is unique in the sense that he’s the only student to publicly question recent demands by student activists. “A lot of students don’t agree with the protesters,” Barlow said during a recent interview. “But they feel like they can’t speak their minds, and that’s becoming a problem here.”...Barlow’s roommate, fellow third year student Michael Shammas, recently helped launch a new Law Record op-ed series named #HLSUntaped, referring to a Nov. 19 incident in which portraits of black professors in Wasserstein Hall were found taped over with black tape. Campus police are treating the incident as a hate crime. Shammas, who said Wednesday he thinks the movement has sparked a valuable discussion about race and added that he believes there are “entrenched racial problems” on campus, wrote a column defending his decision to publish Barlow’s op-eds.

...The morning brought lectures on fiduciary law given by two prominent law professors from Harvard and Yale...Chatty and colloquial, Harvard professor Robert Sitkoff, touted as the youngest in law school history to win an endowed chair, broke the ice by referring to "fiduciary" as the F-word...The key takeaways from the lectures included Sitkoff's statement that the way to insure that an adviser acts in a client's best interest is via fiduciary law.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. This is a piece on a subject about which I may soon be prevented from publishing, depending on how events unfold. Last month, near the time that CNN broadcast the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which focuses on four women who say their schools neglected their claims of sexual assault, I joined eighteen other Harvard Law School professors in signing a statement that criticized the film’s “unfair and misleading” portrayal of one case from several years ago...But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that “the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.” The words “hostile climate” contain a serious claim.

An op-ed by Amy Woolfson LL.M. `16. Politics in New York City can be grisly: In 1986 Queens Borough President Donald Manes was accused of receiving a $36,000 bribe from a would-be city contractor. Manes was found dead before he could be prosecuted, having apparently stabbed himself in the heart. This, and a host of other scandals, led to calls for reformed campaign finance laws. So in 1988, New York City passed legislation establishing the New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB)...The CFB was founded out of an honorable intention – to tackle corruption in one of the world’s greatest cities. But after 27 years it could be argued that it has simply replaced one form of corruption with others.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The last time affirmative action was before the Supreme Court, in 2013, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s swing vote, didn't want to decide the case, and the court sent it back to the court of appeals. Now, with campuses across the country roiled by racial debate and protest, the timing for a decision on the controversial issue is worse. And sure enough, at oral argument Wednesday, Kennedy strongly hinted that he'd like to send the case back -- this time to the trial court to develop the record and find more facts.