Media Mentions

An op-ed by Stuart Brotman. The Federal Communication Commission's recent Open Internet Order is intended to develop an enforceable regulatory scheme to ensure that net neutrality would be achieved. One of its rationales is that unless such government intervention is put in place, the United States is likely to slip into the category of Internet also-rans, hurting innovation and our economy as a whole as Internet "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" thwart competition and impede consumer demand. But how accurate is this perception? The Internet, after all, is not just a network of networks, but rather a complex ecosystem comprised of applications and content, devices and networks. The interdependency of these three pillars creates the rich experience of the Internet, not just in the United States, but all around the world.

Researchers who have spent the past few months analyzing the town’s political environment plan to present their findings early next month. Students Seanan Fong and Jiayun Ho from the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program will also release a written report, the program announced this week.

...As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the nation seems more ready to accept it than many imagined even a year ago. But divisions remain, and while more than half of Americans now endorse the idea, about one-third say they oppose it, according to survey data from 2014...“As more couples marry, more people will know people who are married,” said Michael J. Klarman, a legal historian at the Harvard Law School and author of a 2012 book on earlier same-sex marriage rulings. “And those who oppose it will find out that the sky doesn’t fall.”

Citing a rise in wrongful-conviction claims by inmates, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is launching a unit of veteran prosecutors to review the integrity of past convictions, joining a small but growing number of prosecutorial agencies around the country devoting resources to identify innocent prisoners...Forgoing an antagonistic view toward the defense has worked well for prosecutors in Brooklyn’s conviction review unit, said Ron Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who designed and implemented the unit, which has helped exonerate 13 people since it began in 2014...A big part of putting the unit in place, Sullivan said, was creating a new ethos in the office and reinforcing the “notion of prosecutors doing justice instead of trying to get convictions.”

A frequent contributor to Fox News and the Wall Street Journal has injected an oft-missing issue in the #blacklivesmatter movement: facts. The contributor, Jason Riley, faced off with Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor of criminal law and the regulation of race relations, in a civil but intense debate Tuesday evening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Most of the debate, “Liberal Policies make it harder for black Americans to succeed,” centered around affirmative action and social welfare policies, but the rhetorical combatants did address the politically thorny issue of black crime.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 197 new members. They include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, and artists, and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. Those elected from Harvard are...Noah R. Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Philadelphia's Police Department, like many others around the country, is in the midst of a plans to invest in body cameras. The department will purchase 450 of the devices for officers next year with plans to outfit the city's entire force with them by 2019. WHYY talked to Katie McCarthy, a third-year Harvard law student who works at the school's law clinic representing low-income defendants. McCarthy recently wrote "Considering Police Body Cameras" for the Harvard Law Review, a piece on research she's done into the implications of police departments adopting the technology.

“In the face of so much hate let’s show how deeply we love,” said the Harvard Law Women’s Law Association President Kenyon D. Colli [`16] at a vigil for Africans Wednesday evening. Here, students light each other’s candles before singing “Amazing Grace.” The Harvard African Law Association hosted the event in response to recent killings across the continent.

More than two months after receiving initial feedback on its Title IX procedures from the federal Office for Civil Rights, Harvard Law School has still not received final sign-off from OCR on its updated draft of those procedures, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London.

Three filmmakers, operating two cameras and a boom mic, hurry through Pattee Creek Market on a recent Friday afternoon. They are frantically tracking the seemingly mundane action of a store employee transferring milk cartons from one side of the market to a sink on the other side. There, he will pour the contents of the cartons down the drain in compliance with a state law that forbids the sale of milk more than 12 days after it's pasteurized. Led by director and Harvard Law School lecturer Rebecca Richman Cohen, the filmmakers are working with Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Emily Deddens [`15], a Harvard law student, on a short documentary about how confusing dating on food products leads to waste throughout the United States. According to Leib, Montana's policy regarding milk dating is the nation's strictest—and therefore the most glaring example of what's wrong nationwide.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it better to follow the strict letter of the law or to adjust it where appropriate to produce a more equitable result? This is one of the oldest questions in legal thought, one that can be traced back at least to Aristotle -- and on Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, 5-4, on the side of equity, with Justice Anthony Kennedy providing the deciding vote. Ordinarily, a decision like this one, involving the interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act would be of interest only to practitioners who are specialists in statutory interpretation. But this isn’t an ordinary spring. In June, the Supreme Court will hand down its most important statutory interpretation case in a generation, essentially deciding whether the Affordable Care Act will survive or fall.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are nonhuman animals about to become legal persons? You might think so upon hearing about an order issued Tuesday by a New York trial judge that requires officials from the State University of New York at Stony Brook to appear and show cause why two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, should not be released from the facility where they are kept into the custody of Save the Chimps. After all, this order parallels a standard habeas corpus order, which normally requires a jailer to appear and show cause why someone who is detained should not be released under the law. At the top of the order, big as life, is a caption reading “Order to Show Cause and Habeas Corpus.” And the order says that the chimps should be released if there’s a finding that they’re “unlawfully detained.” Not so fast. What’s probably happening is a good deal more modest -- and more legally important than the never-ending debate about the ways chimps or other animals are like humans.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are the past year’s examples of racially charged police abuses from Ferguson to Staten Island to North Charleston affecting the U.S. Supreme Court? In a subtle way, the answer may well be yes. In the first evidence of an effect, the Supreme Court held Tuesday that a traffic stop can't be prolonged beyond the time that the police need to perform their basic functions. In a 6-3 opinion, the court said that the police can't perform a canine drug-sniff after a ticket has been issued -- even though, a decade ago, it held that a drug sniff that occurs during a lawful stop is perfectly constitutional.

The Senate labor committee chairman, Republican Lamar Alexander, condemned federal labor board officials Tuesday, saying they were moving against state right-to-work laws. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) called for legal briefs examining state right-to-work laws and whether unions should have the ability to extract dues payments from nonmembers. The policy, which has passed in 25 states, outlaws mandatory union membership or dues as a condition of employment...“The problem with the board’s rule is that it allows workers, in right-to-work states, to demand individual representation from the union (for example in grievance proceedings) while refusing to pay anything for that representation,” Harvard Law Professor Benjamin Sachs wrote for the blog OnLabor.org. “There is no seeming rationale for this inequity, and nothing in the federal labor law nor in state right-to-work laws requires it.”

...[LeBron] James’s appointment presented a possible turning point: a chance for the most beleaguered of the four major sports unions to strengthen its position, and a victory for Michele A. Roberts, the Players Association’s new firebrand boss....Roberts was fiercely ambitious during those early years. “She committed to it,” Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and, for a time, Roberts’s boss at the Public Defender Service, told me. “She’d get in at 6 in the morning and stay till 11 at night, seven days a week.” But what set Roberts apart from the other young lawyers was her ability to turn off all that naked ambition once she got inside the courtroom. In the poor, mostly black Washington, D.C., of the 1980s, “she used her race and gender to her benefit,” Ogletree said. “She had a really folksy way of getting along with people who were total strangers. She was like the 13th juror.”

They may not know it, and they most certainly will not be in attendance, but Hercules and Leo will have their day in court. A judge in Manhattan has ordered a hearing that will touch upon the continuing debate over whether caged chimpanzees can be considered “legal persons,” in the eyes of the law, and thus sue, with human help, for their freedom...Some legal experts, however, seemed to offer support for the idea that animals could file suit for their freedom. Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard Law School scholar, said he believed habeas corpus ought to be available to test the treatment and confinement of “other beings whose capacities are limited but who are potentially capable of bearing rights,” a category he contended ought to eventually include chimps like Hercules and Leo. Mr. Tribe added that Justice Jaffe’s decision was “a legally sound and suitably cautious step forward in the struggle to extend legal protections,” regardless of “whether or not we are yet ready to crown those others with the title of ‘human person.’ ”

Newsmax is out with its list of the top 100 Christian leaders in America who make a real impact on modern lives in 2015...23. Mary Ann Glendon, a bioethics scholar and professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

When Reuben Loewy took up his first teaching gig in 2012, he had a major revelation: The digital revolution has dramatically transformed the way that kids perceive reality....And just a few days ago, the Harvard Internet-law professor Jonathan Zittrain posted a video message on YouTube that coincidentally sounded a lot like Loewy’s elevator pitch for the unit titled "Wikipedia and Open-Source Knowledge." Highlighting the success of the site and lamenting the ineffectiveness of American public education, Zittrain—who authored the 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It—suggested that schools integrate Wikipedia into their curricula, asking kids to edit articles and make the case for their edits. He continued: "To me, if I think of an advanced civics class, it’s great to learn that there are three branches of government and X vote overrides a veto. But having the civics of a collective hallucination like Wikipedia also a part of the curriculum, I think, would be valuable."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next week on the question of whether the Constitution allows states to ban same-sex marriages. Whatever it decides, there seems little doubt that the U.S. is moving rapidly toward allowing such marriages, and with remarkably little public controversy. Contrast this with the issue of abortion, which has split the nation for 40 years (and counting). Why the difference? There are three standard answers.

The same federal jury that convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for bombing the 2013 Boston Marathon must now decide his sentence: life without parole or death by lethal injection...."He's going to be on death row for decades," says Prof. Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School. "There will be multiple appeals. Looking at it realistically, he's going to die in prison one way or the other."

Steven Donziger, a lawyer who was charged with fabricating evidence, promising bribes and even ghostwriting critical court documents in order to win a $19 billion judgment against Chevron for polluting Ecuador's rainforests, is now on the college speaking circuit and touring many of America's most prestigious universities...Kyle Pietari [`16], another organizer for the Harvard event went one step further: "This story is not about Mr. Donzinger. It is about the indigenous villagers of Ecuador who have been suffering from an environmental catastrophe for over two decades and still have not been compensated for their losses," Mr. Pietari said. "Any efforts by Chevron or the media to put the spotlight on Mr. Donzinger are public distractions from what matters most: that a grave injustice has been done, and our legal systems have tragically failed to help the people who were wronged."