Media Mentions

For centuries Magna Carta, or “The Great Charter,” has been held up as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy...Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’97, J.D. ’07, sees merit in both arguments. “When it was first issued in 1215, Magna Carta was really about the 1 percent, to put it in modern parlance,” said Kamali, a scholar of medieval law who will join Harvard Law School in July as an assistant professor. The document largely addressed property rights for “very elite individuals,” she said. One had to dig to find the clauses “we now associate with due process and the things that we value.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Civil disobedience is an honorable American tradition. The Boston Tea Party helped spark the Revolutionary War, and during the 1960s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated civil disobedience as “expressing the highest respect for law.” Invoking King’s idea (if not his name), prominent conservatives are now calling for new forms of disobedience. Some of their arguments are hard to accept, but they have a kind of internal logic, and they are resonating in influential circles. Consider Charles Murray’s spirited new book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” which is rooted in an extraordinary claim: “America is no longer the land of the free.” The source of this unfreedom is not NSA surveillance, police misconduct or mass incarceration. It is the rise of the modern regulatory state, from the New Deal to the present, which has subordinated our founding commitment to freedom.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the wake of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upholding a Texas law that would close many of the state’s abortion clinics because they don’t comply with new regulations, you might be thinking that the conservative court’s decision can’t possibly survive Supreme Court review. Think again.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Ohio law being used by community leaders in Cleveland to seek prosecution of police officers involved in the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice is highly unusual: It allows any citizen to petition a magistrate or judge to initiate prosecution, instead of relying on the usual process where the decision is up to a professional, in this case the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. Although very few states have such laws, they may be useful in situations where the prosecutors are compromised -- for example, by an ongoing relationship with the police force. But the Ohio law is also, in a way, a throwback to a time before prosecutors -- and before police.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So it turns out voters don’t like it when you build a $600 million presidential palace. The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lost its majority in Sunday's Turkish elections for the first time in 12 years. A new pro-Kurdish opposition party, the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, crossed the 10 percent threshold necessary to get into parliament. But it’s too soon for Erdogan’s enemies to start celebrating his downfall -- or for democracy lovers anywhere to be entirely sanguine at this result.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Remember the days of the George W. Bush administration, when conservatives liked executive power and liberals criticized it? Those days are gone. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's liberals powered a 6-3 decision giving President Barack Obama exclusive executive power to decide how to label the birthplace of Jerusalem on U.S. passports. The much-anticipated case, Zivotofsky v. Kerry, will become a landmark in the constitutional law of the separation of powers. But the weird politics of its lineup will confound students for generations, unless they take account of both changes in the party in the White House and the gravitational pull of U.S. Middle East policy.

U.S. school cafeterias are starved for funds, lack facilities, and are staffed by workers who often know more about wielding “box cutters and can crushers” than chefs’ knives, according to Ann Cooper, a onetime celebrity chef turned Colorado lunch lady and school food reformer....Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, said that Congress is now considering reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which expires in September. Among other things, the act provides nutritional guidelines for school lunches, and must be reauthorized every five years. The last reauthorization, in 2010, took significant steps toward improving the nutritional quality of school lunches, Leib said. Possible changes this time include increasing the amount of federal reimbursement for meals, taking steps to increase student participation in the program, and providing grants for kitchen equipment and staff training.

The Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva was quick to cut its losses yesterday after U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan of Pittsburgh recommended a preliminary injunction barring Kirkland & Ellis from continuing to advise Teva in its hostile bid for Mylan, an occasional Kirkland client since 2013. Kirkland announced that it will file an objection to Judge Lenihan’s recommendation, which will be reviewed by U.S. Chief District Judge Joy Conti, but in the meantime, Teva hired Sullivan & Cromwell to replace the firm in the Mylan takeover battle....In an expert report for Mylan that Judge Lenihan ultimately considered very persuasive, Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that virtually all previous litigation could be considered related to an unsolicited bid because so many factors shape the hostile takeover process.

As President Obama took the stage at a hotel ballroom on Tuesday to deliver his latest defense of the Affordable Care Act, you had to wonder who exactly he was trying to reach. Was it the members of the Catholic Health Association—the supportive audience in front of him? Republicans in Congress? The divided public at large? Or perhaps, was it just the two particular Catholics—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy—who at this moment hold the fate of Obama’s healthcare law in their hands?...Yet there’s less evidence that even the most persuasive use of the bully pulpit can sway the justices. “Would it help or hurt? I can’t imagine it’ll make any difference, and I can’t imagine he thinks it’ll make any difference,” said Charles Fried, the Harvard law professor who argued cases before the court as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. (Fried has weighed in on the Obama administration’s side in King v. Burwell.)

...Uber, with a head-spinning valuation of $50 billion, has become a dominant force in the passenger transportation industry in large part by luring more drivers to its platform than anyone else. In an effort to maintain that edge and expand its pool of self-employed drivers beyond those who already own a car, the company has been steering potential drivers with bad credit to subprime lenders whose leases lock borrowers into years of weekly payments at sky-high interest rates...Roger Bertling, an attorney and Harvard Law School instructor who specializes in predatory lending, says these terms are bad even compared with those generally used with subprime borrowing. “That [lease] is as bad as any I’ve seen on the predatory lending level for autos,” he says of the Santander agreement. While borrowers with poor credit always face high interest rates, Bertling cites the automatic weekly payment deductions and restrictions against personal use of the vehicle as being unique in the subprime auto loan industry.

The cell-phone industry, leery of any attempt to link its products to radiation, sued Berkeley on Monday over a new ordinance requiring consumers to be warned that carrying a switched-on phone in their pockets or bra might exceed federal safety standards....Berkeley officials said they were confident the ordinance would be upheld. Councilman Max Anderson, the measure’s lead sponsor, said the warning language was taken directly from manufacturers’ statements in product manuals. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, helped to draft the ordinance and has agreed to defend it without charge. “I believe Berkeley has a right to assure its residents know of the existing safety recommendations,” Lessig said by e-mail.

Immediately after the police and the F.B.I. on Tuesday shot and killed a black Muslim man who had been under surveillance for possible terrorism, law enforcement officials moved quickly to share information with civic and religious leaders, hoping to quell any potential unrest....At a news conference on Thursday afternoon, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor, said he was representing the Rahim family. He said he was concerned that the police appeared to have had no surveillance warrants. But he said the family was grateful for the chance to see the video before it became public, which they did Thursday evening.

Edward Snowden is claiming victory this week, after President Obama signed legislation that significantly curbs federal surveillance powers for the first time in a generation. But the world’s most famous American leaker is still stuck in Russia, with the U.S. having revoked his passport and indicted him on espionage charges that would likely lead to a lengthy prison sentence, should he step back on American soil...“In the context of laws that are very broad, the power to selectively prosecute those that expose things that are critical of the administration’s behavior, while not prosecuting — or prosecuting for a very limited offense — those who leak in a way that supports the administration ... is an abuse of power itself,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The fact that Snowden remains a fugitive after spurring changes in the law “says more about us and our system than about him,” Benkler added. It’s “a profoundly distorted view of American democracy,” he said.

...But Bobby Jindal, the Ivy League educated Rhodes Scholar who once pilloried his fellow Republicans by demanding they no longer be the “stupid party,” may also have a trick up his sleeve, a legitimate reason to think that he could, at the very least, quickly but quietly build a competitive campaign. That reason’s name is Timmy Teepell, and he is almost certain to be the man behind the curtain of Jindal’s anticipated presidential campaign...“First we have contract soldiers, now we have contract government officials,” Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor and author of the book “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It,” tells me. “It’s a beautiful way to evade the law — and increasingly common.” To be sure, as Lessig implies, evading the law is not the same as breaking the law.

It’s not often that the talk after a film is the highlight of the night. But judging by audience reaction, that was the case Thursday as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig stepped onto the stage at Seattle’s Town Hall. The audience roared and lept to its collective feet as Lessig placed his Mac on the lectern. The evening’s first course may have been the awarding-winning documentary, Killswitch, but for many in this audience, Lessig was the real attraction.

The recent documentary The Hunting Ground asserts that young women are in grave danger of sexual assault as soon as they arrive on college campuses...The film has two major themes. One, stated by producer Amy Ziering during an appearance on The Daily Show, is that campus sexual assaults are not “just a date gone bad, or a bad hook-up, or, you know, miscommunication.” Instead, the filmmakers argue, campus rape is “a highly calculated, premeditated crime,” one typically committed by serial predators...The second theme is that even when school administrators are informed of harm done to female students by these repeat offenders, schools typically do nothing in response...One of the four key stories told in the film illustrates both of these points. It is the harrowing account of Kamilah Willingham, who describes what happened during the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2011, while she was a student at Harvard Law School. ..What the evidence...shows is often dramatically at odds with the account presented in the film.

The family of the man killed by investigators in a Roslindale parking lot as he allegedly wielded a knife called on Thursday for a “complete and transparent investigation,” including asking whether officers exceeded their authority in stopping him. Harvard law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., speaking on behalf of Usaama Rahim’s relatives, said family members had seen no behavior to suggest that the 26-year-old had embraced extremism. Sullivan said Rahim’s family, who stood in the parking lot where Rahim died, had reached no conclusions about what happened Tuesday and pledged to “enter into a joint relationship with investigators to get to the truth.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did the Department of Justice go too far in 2012 when it apparently expanded the National Security Agency’s authority for warrantless searches of Internet traffic to search domestic data for signs of foreign hacking? The text of the secret Justice memos isn’t part of the latest batch of material revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. But a reading of the leaked materials doesn’t (yet) reveal a smoking gun that would obviously exceed the Constitution or legal authority. The searches were expanded -- but legal safeguards were also put in place.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Barack Obama administration has said it won’t reconsider the long-standing rule against paying ransoms in its review of policy concerning U.S. citizens kidnapped by terrorists abroad. That’s a mistake -- morally, politically and legally. In theory, it’s great to say that the U.S. government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. In practice, we negotiate with terrorists all the time. And it’s outrageous that family members of kidnapping victims would be threatened with criminal prosecution for trying to save their loved ones' lives. The hostage-policy review should air these issues. If it doesn’t, then it will be seriously flawed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk of President Barack Obama’s immigration initiative has slowed now that the program is stalled in court, and may not be implemented until the end of his term, if at all. But this week, the Supreme Court decided an immigration case, Mellouli v. Lynch, that has meaningful implications for potential deportees convicted of crimes. The case made few headlines, because its consequences weren’t obvious to nonspecialists. Nevertheless, on close reading, the case matters -- and it raises important questions about how the U.S. decides whom to deport.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The proposed USA Freedom Act passed by the House is far from perfect -- but it does make some potentially meaningful improvements to move the U.S. away from a system of secret legal decisions made by a court that only hears the government’s side of the argument. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have proposed two amendments that would gut the act’s reforms to the existing bad system. It’s worth taking note of both, because both go to the very essence of what it means to be governed under the rule of law.