Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. One of the less-noticed provisions of the Affordable Care Act requires calorie labels at all chain restaurants and similar retail food establishments, following similar efforts in New York City and elsewhere. A new study raises doubts about whether those labels will make much difference to public health. The right response isn't to abandon the effort, but to improve it, and consider new approaches.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How would you feel if your 10-year prison sentence depended on a dangling modifier? That's the situation for Avondale Lockhart, whose case was heard Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lockhart was caught in a federal sting and pleaded guilty to one count of possessing child pornography. He had a previous state conviction for attempted rape, a form of sexual abuse. According to federal law, Lockhart gets a mandatory 10-year minimum sentence for the child pornography if he had a prior state conviction “relating to aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, or abusive sexual conduct involving a minor.” The crucial words here are “involving a minor.” Lockhart says they apply to the whole sentence. Because his prior conviction was for attempted rape of a woman, not a minor, the law doesn't apply to him. The government says “involving a minor” just refers to the last part of the sentence, “abusive sexual conduct,” not to what came before.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. An eighteen-year-old male student’s sexual encounter with a fifteen-year-old female student at St. Paul’s School has led to his being sentenced to one year in jail, followed by five years of probation, and registered for life as a sex offender. Both feel their lives are destroyed. Our fascination with the secret sex rites of the New Hampshire prep school put Owen Labrie’s bespectacled face in all the papers. But the deeper pity and fear the case inspired revolved around a basic question we increasingly project onto the bodies of our young: What makes sex rape?...We are in the midst of a significant cultural shift, in which we are redescribing sex that we vehemently dislike as rape, and sexual attitudes that we strongly disapprove of as examples of rape culture.

Some students at Harvard Law School are demanding that the institution’s official seal be scrubbed of references to the slaveholder credited with its founding. The seal of the prestigious law school displays three sheaves of wheat, depicting the family crest of plantation owner Isaac Royall Jr., who bequeathed land to Harvard that funded a professorship in law and led to the school’s founding in 1817...The school, which adopted the seal in 1936, has long wrestled with how to handle its history. Harvard professor Janet Halley, a family law scholar who occupies the Royall Chair of Law, delved into the history in remarks she gave in 2006 at the time of her appointment, citing research by her colleague, Daniel R. Coquillette...“As the holder of the Royall Chair, I think it’s extremely important that we own the Royall legacy,” she said. “We ought to be responsible bearers of this legacy, and that means knowing about it first,” Ms. Halley told Law Blog. Mr. Coquillette, a legal historian who co-wrote a new book examining the school’s early history, agreed with her. “I understand why the students are upset, but this is just a fact of the school,” he said. “If we started renaming things and taking down monuments of people linked to slavery, you would start with Washington. You don’t want to hide your history. A great institution can tell the truth about itself.”

In the long legal struggle against the death penalty, the future has in some ways never looked brighter. In a passionate dissent in June, Justice Stephen G. Breyer invited a major challenge to the constitutionality of capital punishment. This fall, Justice Antonin Scalia all but predicted that the court’s more liberal justices would strike down the death penalty. But lawyers and activists opposed to the death penalty, acutely conscious of what is at stake, are bitterly divided about how to proceed...“If you don’t go now, there’s a real possibility you have blood on your hands,” said Robert J. Smith, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute. His scholarship was cited in Justice Breyer’s dissent from a decision upholding the use of an execution drug that three death row inmates argued risked causing excruciating pain.

Lawyer, academic, and political commentator Professor Alan Dershowitz won over a packed debate on BDS at the Oxford Union, with the motion ‘Is the BDS movement against Israel wrong?’ being carried with 137 votes to 101. The lively event on Sunday night pitted Dershowitz against British human rights activist Peter Tatchell, who has campaigned on various issues and notably attempted to commit a citizen’s arrest on Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 2001.

More than seven years after Georgia’s war with Russia, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague has asked judges to authorise an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the conflict....Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor, previously worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC and also acted as an external expert for the August Ruins report. He explained to IWPR why the ICC prosecutor was taking action now. “I think that the ICC could have demonstrated earlier that there would be no domestic prosecutions and that therefore the investigation would be admissible at the ICC, but two factors made the court take its time. First, the court is extremely busy and stretched for resources, so there is a backlog of cases to be investigated. Second, it was clear that neither Russia nor Georgia was eager to have an investigation – although Georgia is a state party to the Rome Statute, it never asked the ICC to investigate crimes from the war – and therefore the Court knew that the investigation would be difficult and the chances of success diminished,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can you sue a company in federal court for publishing false information that might affect your credit score? Congress says yes. But the Supreme Court seriously considered the possibility Monday that Congress lacks the authority to create that right to sue if you haven't suffered a concrete injury. The issue has far-reaching consequences for your rights and expectations of accuracy in the information economy. Everyone from Experian to eBay has weighed in with friend-of-the-court briefs. There's also a right answer -- but no guarantee the court will reach it.

Harvard Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus says environmental cases often are treated with disdain by U.S. Supreme Court justices. Convincing the court to review environmental cases is “really hard,” Lazarus said while speaking to the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy and Resources fall conference Oct. 30 in Chicago. Last term, the justices decided 66 cases on the merits, out of approximately 8,500 cert petitions submitted to the court—a little less than 1 percent—Lazarus said, noting the “steady, downward trend” of merits review...Your chances of Supreme Court review are even worse if you’re an environmental case because the justices don’t like them, Lazarus said. “Everyone in this room, we share something in common that the justices don’t share,” Lazarus told the ABA audience. “We like the Clean Air Act, we like the Clean Water Act, we like RCRA, we like CERCLA. It makes our hearts go pitter-patter. The justices don’t.”

According to the latest edition of Freedom House's annual Internet Freedom Report released this week, digital civil liberties have been curtailed across the globe for the fifth year in a row. There are now more countries with a heavily censored Internet than there are ones with a completely free Internet....But America isn’t first, second, or third on Freedom House’s list. Rather, the US takes the fifth spot after Iceland, Estonia, Canada, and Germany. “The US is not quite first on the list, but we’re very high up, and we are among the countries treated as ‘Free’ by Freedom House,” says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The important thing the report is telling us is that for many countries in the world — 32 of them they point to — freedom has been constrained over the last year when it comes to the global interoperable Internet.”

Today, the Campaign Legal Center filed an amici brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission on behalf of former Justice Department attorneys in support of the Commission and its redistricting plan. The brief emphasizes that the state commission was fully justified in drawing districts, with minor population deviations, that complied with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act...Former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried, a CLC Board member, and Mark Posner, a former DOJ official, co-authored the brief.

Describing something as the Harvard of its field is usually a compliment. But that wasn’t quite Donald Trump’s intent when he called Iraq the “Harvard of terrorism” during a recent appearance on CNN...Harvard Law Professor and terrorism expert Jack Goldsmith – perhaps the person best equipped to respond to the presidential candidate’s analogy – said he had no words for the analogy. “It is a silly comment,” he wrote by email.

Harvard Law School Professor Ron Sullivan, Former Middlesex Assistant DA Brad Bailey and Former Massachusetts Bar Association President Marsha Kazarosian talk the war on drugs and prison releases.

Harvard law professor Larry Lessig said Monday he is ending his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lessig blamed the demise of his nearly three-month campaign on the Democratic Party, which he says leaves him ‘‘just shut out’’ of the primary debates. He struggled to hit 1 percent in national polls, the necessary marker to qualify for the primary matchups. ‘‘I may be known in tiny corners of the tubes of the Internet, but I am not well-known to the American public generally,’’ he said in an online video released Monday.

Thanks to a generous gift from Mitchell R. Julis, one of America’s most successful hedge fund managers, Harvard Law School announced today the launch of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program in Jewish and Israeli Law. The new initiative will fund visiting scholars and fellows, hold classes devoted to traditional Jewish legal texts, host an annual conference, and organize events related to “the impact and study of Jewish law in Israel, in the United States, and across the world.”...The Harvard program’s director will be Noah Feldman, the Harvard law professor and public intellectual best known for helping to write the Iraqi constitution in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “Jewish law and Israeli law are distinct and different,” Feldman said, explaining the rationale for the new center, “yet they also interact and make claims on each other. It makes sense to study them both in the same program, even as we study them independently.” The Julis gift, he added, “gives us a broad ambit to bring in a wide range of voices to explore these fascinating and rich topics from all sides.”

Ten U.S. Supreme Court law clerks from last term have joined Jones Day as associates, the firm announced Monday, topping its record-breaking number of seven clerk hires last year...“Ten Supreme Court clerks from one term going to a single law firm is unquestionably a stunningly large number,” Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus told The National Law Journal. Lazarus, who has written extensively about modern Supreme Court practice, said “when the numbers get so high—in terms of the bonus itself and the numbers of hires going to one firm—it unavoidably raises concerns about what is being purchased and the meaning of public service.”

An op-ed by Adam Ziegler, Harvard Law School, Library Innovation Lab. Ever so gradually, some of our state bars are embracing a duty of technology competence, which requires lawyers to “keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” That thin obligation may be fine as an ethical floor. But if we’re a profession committed to what’s best for our clients, can’t we do better than mere competence? Let’s strive for technology excellence.

As President Obama approaches his final year in power, a political impasse over the Guantánamo prison appears increasingly likely to force him to choose between two politically unsavory options: Invoke executive power to relocate the remaining detainees in defiance of a statute, or allow history to say he never fulfilled his promise to shutter the prison....Against that backdrop, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Obama was heading toward a dilemma at the end of his term. “Not closing Gitmo eight years after he pledged to do so would be a failure for his legacy, plus whatever continuing costs it has to national security in his eyes,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “But the only way to close it is to use an extraordinarily aggressive interpretation of executive power to act against the will of Congress and not obviously in a way that the American people support, just as he is walking out the door.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In July, a house in the Palestinian village of Duma was firebombed. A family of four was inside: Saad Dawabsheh, his wife and two children, ages 4 and 18 months. Only the 4-year-old survived. The leading suspects for the attack are Jewish, part of a loose network known in Israel as “hilltop youth,” teenagers who grew up in small and often unsanctioned settlements in the West Bank, especially in the region they call Samaria...Although small, this movement represents a troubling new fusion of messianism, legalism and violence. Its aim is to create a sovereign territory under God’s law. For these reasons, it is worthy of serious analysis and consideration.

...Over the last 10 years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops — have used arbitration to create an alternate system of justice. There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients, The Times found...Elizabeth Bartholet, an arbitrator in Boston who has handled more than 100 cases, agreed that many arbitrators had good intentions, but she said that the system made it challenging to remain unbiased. Ms. Bartholet recalled that after a company complained that she had scheduled an extra hearing for a plaintiff, the arbitration firm she was working with canceled it behind her back. A year later, she said, she was at an industry conference when she overheard two people talking about how an arbitrator in Boston had almost cost that firm a big client. “It was a conference on ethics, if you can believe it,” said Ms. Bartholet, a law professor at Harvard.

The phrase is often used but what we call “war crimes” are hardly ever prosecuted. Monocle’s Steve Bloomfield chairs a powerful discussion on what is a war crime and why the outrage rarely leads to an investigation. Featuring Kevin Jon Heller, Alex Whiting and Gary D Solis.