Media Mentions

With around 250 in attendance, the event room at Civic Hall is packed. I’m actually part of the overflow, watching Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on massive closed-circuit TVs in the foyer, in merciful proximity to the hors d’oeuvres and wine... The breathless cadence of a TED Talk is unmistakable, and Lessig’s impassioned case for Elizabeth Warren is fraught with urgency. There is no mention of electoral strategy or political details, but the presentation is highly visual, with a powerpoint on the monitors behind him that opens with a clear blue sky and rolling clouds. It looks a desktop wallpaper for Windows 98. Words and phrases flash on the monitors behind him for emphasis–”standup,” “most powerful” and “brand,” to name a few, while Lessig expounds on inequality, money in politics and the forgettable neologism, “Tweedism,” a reference to Boss Tweed’s manipulation of politics. To his credit, his jokes get laughs. Lessig’s emphatic-but-never-antagonistic oratory stylings were in fact forged in the fires of TED, an origin betrayed by an overly-earnest tone, an unchallenging vocabulary and an anti-elitist denunciation of “wonks.” “It is a moral challenge, not a nerd’s challenge,” he proclaims–a strange sentiment at an event in celebration of Elizabeth Warren, a brilliantly wonky nerd herself.

Senator Ted Cruz, who wants to be the Republican Party's lead crusader against gay marriage, ducked the opportunity to play a critical role in turning back the movement in its infancy. In 2003, the year Cruz became Texas's top government litigator, the state lost a crucial case as the U.S. Supreme Court decided that state laws banning homosexual sex as illegal sodomy were unconstitutional. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas paved the way for the court's consideration of gay marriage...Cruz has consistently opposed gay rights and defended religious liberty laws, dating to his days as a Harvard University law student. One of his professors, Laurence Tribe, had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of overturning a Georgia law deeming gay sex as illegal sodomy and lost. Tribe used the 1986 case as a discussion point in his class, encouraging students to voice their opinions on the ruling. Most, he said, "seemed to share the hope" that it would eventually be overruled. Cruz was a notable exception. "I can't truthfully say I recall any specific comment Ted made about why sexual intimacies in private between consenting adults should be subject to government regulation," Tribe said. "But that was quite clearly his view."

...Defense attorneys began their case by telling jurors no punishment could ever equal the pain that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev caused to others. But, they said, a quick death might well be letting Tsarnaev off easier than making him spend decades locked away, forgotten and thinking about what he did. They showed jurors a picture of the supermax prison where Tsarnaev would serve a life sentence. Ron Sullivan: This was a very aggressive start by the defense to say, this is a serious, scary place, and to many, it's even worse than death. [Tovia] Smith: Harvard Law professor Ron Sullivan says Tsarnaev's lawyers were especially shrewd, suggesting to jurors that Tsarnaev himself may prefer to be a martyr, even though all signs suggest he's fully cooperating with his attorney's efforts to save his life.

Emily Rooney and Adam Reilly of WGBH News have the latest in the ongoing Tsarnaev trial. Lawyer and professor at Harvard Law, Carol Steiker, who has argued death row cases before the Supreme Court; criminal defense attorney, Robert Sheketoff, who represented Gary Lee Sampson; and former U.S. Attorney, Michael Sullivan share their first hand experience and insight on the death penalty.

In an ever-changing legal market, more than 96 percent of Harvard Law School’s class of 2014 is employed, continuing a years-long trend that, Mark A. Weber, the assistant dean for career services at the Law School, said he thinks will persist when the class of 2015 crosses the stage in May. Employment numbers, published on the Law School’s website, for the class of 2014 track employment 9 months after graduation, and are mostly consistent with figures for the classes of 2013 and 2012. Once again, the total employment rate hovered around 96 percent and the majority—60.92 percent—of Law School graduates moved on to work at law firms, earning a median salary of $160,000.

Dozens of students gathered on the steps of Langdell Hall on Tuesday night for a brief vigil commemorating the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Md. The vigil, organized by the Black Law Students Association and the Harvard Ferguson Action Coalition, consisted of two speakers and spanned from 9:45 to 10 p.m. in order to coincide with the 10 p.m. city-wide curfew announced by the mayor of Baltimore following the governor of Maryland’s declaration of a state of emergency. “We’ve gathered here today just to ask for peace,” said Leland S. Shelton [`16] in the opening remarks of the vigil. Shelton is a Law School student, member of BLSA, and resident of Baltimore who helped organize the event. “Peace is what we ask our police officers, those who have sworn to serve and protect, those who we have sworn to keep the peace,” said Shelton. “It’s ironic because those same people are the ones who have been harassing and brutalizing us.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No one really believes that Tuesday's oral argument in the gay-marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, is an occasion for the justices to make up their minds about how they're going to vote. Rather, it's an exercise in making certain points, not so much to their colleagues as to the public. According to reports from the first section of the questioning, the justices had some messages they want you to hear. The first and most important came from Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote and the man who has written the jurisprudence of gay rights for the past 20 years. Kennedy wanted to talk about time -- specifically, whether enough time has passed for gay marriage to become a fundamental right.

A New York clean energy developer is suing Connecticut over its renewable energy subsidy program, claiming the state’s policy violates constitutional rules about regulating business across state lines...Legal experts say the challenge to Connecticut’s renewable incentives is unique for many reasons. While the dormant Commerce Clause has been cited in cases regarding clean energy policies, it has not been used against a state that limits its renewable energy to the region, rather than the individual state. “It’s an issue that has been discussed in academic circles, but nobody had filed the challenge,” said Ari Peskoe, an energy fellow at Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative, which tracks litigation. He said the case is also unique in that the plaintiff is a clean energy developer. Peskoe said Connecticut has good arguments for its renewable subsidies, but if the case is heard on its merits, its effects could ripple through the country. “A lot of states have a similar regional deliverability requirements, and a judgment that went for Allco in this case could be broadly applicable,” Peskoe said.

The Supreme Court today heard arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, a case which is likely to go down in the history books alongside other landmark civil rights cases. This one centers on two questions: first, whether there is a constitutional right to gay marriage, and second, if not, whether states that have bans on gay marriage have to recognize gay marriages performed in other states where it’s legal. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman about the significance of Obergefell v. Hodges and where it fits in with other landmark Supreme Court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade.

It was the early 1980s, and Mary Bonauto was a college student in upstate New York, struggling to come out as gay. She turned to a priest for help but left convinced her church would not accept her. Unsure where to turn, she felt her life might “be over.” “The law was one way of making sure my life wouldn’t be over,” she recently recalled. “I could either just suffer from the system or change the system. I decided to opt on the change-the-system side.” ...“Mary Bonauto’s contributions to the gay rights movement are analogous to those of Thurgood Marshall to the civil rights movement and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the women’s rights movement,” Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, said in an e-mail.

A service that enables courts and researchers to make permanent links to research found on the Web has won a Webby Award for best legal site of 2015. Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Law School Library and supported by a network of more than 60 law libraries, takes on the widespread problem of broken or defunct Web links, also known as “link rot,” which can that can undermine research by scholars and courts. The problem was explained in a 2013 paper by Harvard Law professors Lawrence Lessig, Kendra Albert and Jonathan Zittrain. Their research detailed in, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” revealed that 50% of URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the originally cited material. Perma.cc has developed a process to preserve and “vest” links used in research.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Predicting exactly what the justices will say at oral argument is a tricky business -- but predicting the reaction is more tractable. After the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in the gay-marriage cases Tuesday, you can expect a moment of serious anxiety among those who hope that the court is about to declare a fundamental constitutional right to marry the partner of one’s choice. The reason is simple: Justice Anthony Kennedy isn't going to declare from the bench how he’s going to rule. At least some questions from some justices are likely to raise the question of whether the court should decide the issue now or wait for some unspecified time. The result will be a feeling of letdown and nervousness among gay-marriage supporters. Because expectations are so high right now, anything short of a Supreme Court lovefest is going to produce a feeling of vertigo -- and the worry that perhaps, after all, Kennedy might not be ready to do the right thing.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The same-sex marriage cases, which will be argued Tuesday, may well rank among the most important constitutional disputes in American history. The best analogy is Brown v. Board of Education, the iconic 1954 decision in which the Supreme Court struck down school segregation. The parallel is very close, and it clarifies what the same-sex marriage cases are really about. Almost everyone now celebrates Brown as self-evidently correct. But beware of hindsight. It obscures the intense disagreements that preceded that decision, and the firestorms that followed it. At the time, eminently sensible people insisted that the court had overreached, not least because racial segregation was entrenched in many states, and because it was not at all obvious that the Constitution stood in its way.

Columbia University is one of the many schools to be accused of failing to protect the rights of sexual assault victims. This week, it became one of the first to be singled out for failing to protect the rights of the accused. On Wednesday, Paul Nungesser, the male student who was the target of the now-famous “Carry That Weight” campaign filed a federal complaint against Columbia University, its board of trustees, and President Lee C. Bollinger...These cases beg the question: will students accused of sexual assault be headed to court en masse? Legal experts interviewed for this article say that may, in fact, be the next phase in national campus sexual assault reform—and they say the federal government is to blame. “I think the next wave will be students suing the universities. I think there will be an escalating wave,” said Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet...“When you get things like the federal government pressuring universities to create a sexual assault process that lacks adequate due process for those accused, you’re going to get students trying to protect themselves,” said Bartholet. Under current campus policy, she believes “there’s the risk we will find a lot of people responsible for sexual assault when they shouldn’t be. That will lead to some of them fighting back with the help of lawyers against the university and the government. I think that’s a good and healthy thing because what the federal government has done is outrageous,” she said.

Relatives of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are under federal government protection in a Revere hotel, officials said Friday, and are widely expected to assist the defense team as it prepares to present its case next week that Tsarnaev should be spared the death penalty....“So far Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a cardboard figure for the jury,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “Anything that humanizes him is a good thing for the defense.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Every weapons system, from the bow and arrow to the intercontinental ballistic missile, sometimes kills the wrong people. So why has the revelation that a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed two al-Qaeda hostages ­-- a U.S. citizen and an Italian aid worker -- created such a storm of drone “rethinking”? Part of the answer is that liberal critics of drone strikes, who’ve questioned their legality, are using the opportunity to repeat and reframe their criticisms. I’ve joined in some of that criticism in the past and stand by it. But the deeper reason for the renewed discussion is a pernicious myth: the fantasy that drones are uniquely precise.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein. DNA testing and videotaping of police-citizen encounters may have more in common than you might think. Both show not what arguably happened but what is true (or as close to true as we can get). DNA exonerations have enabled us to examine the behavior of lawyers, judges and prosecutors in order to understand how a wrongful conviction happened. Videotaping of police-citizen encounters could well do the same for policing and civil rights challenges to police misconduct.

Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said....But her friends and relatives say she has never viewed her job in government as one of a civil rights advocate. “She’s not an ideologue,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and longtime friend, said recently. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

When it was announced a little more than a year ago, it felt to many like a sure thing. After all, government regulators had approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011...The president may have been speaking about net neutrality, but the implications for the merger were clear. “That was just huge,” said Susan Crawford, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “It signaled that the cable industry was no longer calling the shots.”

An op-ed by David Medine and Eliza Sweren-Becker [`15]. Today we learned that in January, a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan inadvertently killed an American and an Italian held as hostages by al Qaeda. The strike also killed a U.S. citizen who was a prominent member of al Qaeda. A separate operation in January killed an American-born al Qaeda spokesman. The deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Portois are tragic and the Obama administration has pledged to conduct an independent review to understand how to prevent this type of grievous mistake. The apparently unintentional killings of two American al Qaeda operatives raise an additional question that President Obama did not address in his televised statement today: under what circumstances may the United States intentionally use targeted lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad?

Virginia is one of many states that have proposed new legislation tackling sexual misconduct on college campuses. However, some people believe this new wave of enforcement is an overreaction to problems at hand. Harvard University law professor Janet Halley was one of more than a dozen professors who wrote an op-ed published in The Boston Globe arguing that Harvard Law School’s new policy designed to crack down on sexual assault was unfair.Halley spoke at Roanoke College on Thursday about the problems she sees with Harvard’s policy and similar policies that have been adopted at schools across the country in response to the attention that sexual assault on campus has received in recent years...Halley, a self-described feminist and progressive, said the policies at Harvard, which were designed to be tough on campus sexual assault, had several problems including giving victims more rights than the accused, a lack of due process and teaching women that they are weak and in need of protection.