Media Mentions

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and liberal activist, and Antonin Scalia, the late conservative and originalist Supreme Court justice, would not be described as political allies. But Lessig had nothing but praise for Scalia, who died Saturday at the age of 79, when it came to the man’s principles in a USA Today op-ed Wednesday. ... “Whether perfectly or not, what was most striking to me was to watch someone of great power constrain his power, not for favors or public approval, but because he thought it right,” Lessig wrote, crediting Scalia’s “acts of integrity” for some of his own development as a lawyer.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: What does the U.S. Constitution really have to say about whether the Senate must put a president’s Supreme Court nominee to a vote? President Barack Obama says the Constitution “is pretty clear on what happens next”: He nominates, and the Senate says yes or no in a timely fashion. Republicans think the Constitution gives the Senate the right, not just the power, to give the president’s nominee a hearing or to refuse to do so. ... They’re both wrong. Here’s what the Constitution says about filling Supreme Court vacancies: nothing.

Commentary by Mark Roe: That claims trading is good overall doesn’t mean it lacks downsides. Funds sometimes buy up claims to create a blocking position in the creditor negotiations, slowing down what would otherwise be a quicker consensual restructuing. Claims trading can lead to conflicts of interest. A senior claimant could buy junior claims or vice versa, or a competitor of the debtor could buy claims on the debtor.

Oh, the irony. First pointed out by Mathias Schindler, it appears that a copyright lecture about music copyright done by famed copyright expert and Harvard Law professor William Fisher has been taken down due to a copyright claim by Sony Music. ... Let's be clear here: this is unquestionably fair use. It's not entirely clear to me if this was an explicit takedown or merely a YouTube ContentID match, but either way there is no reason for YouTube to have allowed this to be blocked.

....“Justice Scalia took no prisoners,” said Harvard University law professor Richard Lazarus. “When you prepared for oral argument, you tended to focus tremendously on him because he could transform an argument.” Mr. Lazarus, who served in the U.S. solicitor general’s office when Justice Scalia joined the court in 1986, said he and other government lawyers watched as the justice on his first day peppered question after demanding question at Justice Department attorney Edwin Kneedler, a former Scalia colleague, in a case about Indian lands. Justice Lewis Powell during the session turned to colleague Thurgood Marshall and quietly said, “Do you think he knows that the rest of us are here?” according to a Powell biography.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t invent originalism. The credit for that on the modern Supreme Court goes to Justice Hugo Black, who developed the approach to constitutional interpretation as a liberal tool to make the states comply with the Bill of Rights. But Scalia did more to bring originalism into the conservative mainstream than any other Supreme Court justice. In fact, his role as the godfather of the conservative constitutional rebirth of the 1980s and ’90s derived from his originalist advocacy. But will Scalia’s originalist legacy last? Can the philosophy outlive the man? There is reason to doubt it -- because Scalia is literally irreplaceable, and because the younger conservative justices aren’t originalists of the same stripe.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly Feb. 13 while on vacation at a West Texas resort, authored nearly two dozen majority opinions and a dozen dissents in environmental law cases during his 30 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. ... Richard J. Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA that Scalia “was probably environmental law’s greatest skeptic,” but not “because he was against environmentalism.” ... Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA that “you could largely predict where Scalia would come out on those cases. He was very consistent that the burden on the larger public to get standing was always going to be greater than for directly regulated entities.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig:  Justice Antonin Scalia was an “originalist” committed to interpreting  the Constitution in the way it would have been understood at the time it was adopted. He was also a conservative who was, as any of us are regardless of our politics, committed to particular outcomes that he hoped the law would support. Sometimes that originalism would conflict with conservatism. As a clerk for Scalia in the early 1990s, and the only liberal clerk in the chamber, I watched him struggle with that conflict. In every case that I knew in my time as a clerk, however reluctantly, in the end Scalia followed originalism, whether the result was conservative or not.

It’s hard to imagine a public official with more toys than Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, who spent $300 million on Ferraris, a Gulfstream jet, a California mansion and even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” jacket. The buying spree is all the more remarkable since this scion of the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea, one of Africa’s smallest countries, bought all this while on an official salary of $100,000 a year. ... “This is not like a murder, where you have a body,” said Matthew C. Stephenson, a professor at Harvard Law School and editor of the Global Anticorruption blog. “Financial crimes are much more complicated.”

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.