Media Mentions

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The idea that financial markets are too focused on the short term is gaining ground in the media and among academics. And now it is attracting political attention in the United States. Investors’ obsession with short-term returns, according to the new conventional wisdom, compels corporate boards of directors and managers to seek impressive quarterly earnings at the expense of strong long-term investments. Research and development suffers, as does long-term investment in plant and equipment. Similarly, short-term thinking leads major companies to buy back their stock, thereby sapping them of the cash they need for future investments. None of this is good news for the economy – at least, it wouldn’t be, if it were real. Upon closer inspection, the supposed negative consequences of investor short-termism appear not to be happening at all.

The year is 2050. A fighter jet roars across the sky, zeroing in on targets in enemy territory somewhere in the Middle East. But the targets are really a group of farmers holding hoes and rakes, which the jet identifies as guns. Within minutes, it fires a series of rockets, killing all of them. The jet is pilotless, and the aircraft is not being directed from a base. It registers its operation as successful. The prospect of such scenarios has led some activists and human rights groups to call for a complete ban on so-called "killer robots" — advanced artificial intelligence weaponry that they believe could one day blanket battlefields and make life and death decisions independent of human direction...Michael Schmitt, a fellow at Harvard Law School's program on international law and armed conflict, agreed that a ban was "unrealistic." Regulation, he said, would be more likely to succeed. "Since autonomous weapons have the potential to be a game changer in modern warfare, some states will wish to develop them either to extend their technological edge on the battlefield or to offset their weakness," he suggested, adding that from a humanitarian perspective, solutions "must be practical and realistic about what states are likely to accept and move in that direction."

The H-1B guest worker visa program has been coming under scrutiny lately. The program is important to colleges both in terms of their ability to hire postdocs and other researchers from abroad and, more indirectly, in providing a pathway for the international students they recruit to work in the U.S. after graduation...“The only reason it would be a good idea from a national interest perspective is if indeed there were a shortage of such people, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of that except in some small fields, or fast-growing fields,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Teitelbaum is the author of Falling Behind: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, in which he argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence of a generalized shortage of STEM workers in the U.S.

What happens when you try to fit an evolving electric grid into an 80-year-old statute? Lawsuits wind their way to the Supreme Court. In a move that surprised energy experts, the high court has decided to hear at least two cases this year that deal with how to regulate evolving electricity markets...Ari Peskoe, an energy fellow at Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, said it's surprising the court decided to take back-to-back FERC cases. "Hopefully, these two decisions combined will give a lot of clarity in an area that I think really needs it," he said. "This section of the Federal Power Act was written 80 years ago, and it hasn't changed, but the industry has."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, Monday's decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upholding most of the assault weapons bans passed by New York and Connecticut is a win for gun-control advocates. But down in the weeds, the unanimous decision by a panel of three Democratic appointees nevertheless points to potential trouble for similar laws should they ever be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court held that assault weapons do in general fall within the core protections of the Second Amendment. But the judges applied a lenient standard to uphold the laws -- and a more aggressive Supreme Court might well apply a tougher standard and strike them down.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Scientists say they hope to avoid government regulation of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, by using a variant on a powerful new method to knock out some plant genes. This thinking is worrisome -- not so much for scientific reasons as for legal ones. When research is aimed at achieving a regulatory goal rather than a scientific one, it's a sign that something is wrong with the regulations, and that they need to be changed sooner rather than later.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. So far as I know, no neurosurgeon has ever written a book about the U.S. Constitution. But then again, no neurosurgeon has ever made a serious run for the presidency. Combining personal graciousness and plain exposition with some wild right-wing clichés, Ben Carson’s slim volume tells us a lot about the sources of his appeal. Like the man himself, the book is not what you might expect.

Robert P. George is not a political consultant. “I’m not Karl Rove or David—what’s his name?—Axelrod.” In fact, he says, “Any candidate who’d ask me for campaign advice should drop out immediately, because he’s too stupid to be running for president.” Yet few advisers are having more influence on conservative thinking this presidential campaign cycle...“What he brings to the debate is even more method than ideas,” says his friend Mary Ann Glendon, of Harvard Law School. That method being his commitment to the proposition that, as he explains it to students, “when two people who are well disposed engage in debate, despite their differences they are bound together as a little community integrated around a common good. What is that good? Getting at the truth.”

An expert in animal law has flown to the defense of Delta Air Lines after a group of safari hunters sued the airline over its ban on transporting exotic animal hunting trophies...Earlier this year, a petition on Change.org asked Delta, the only U.S. airline serving South Africa directly, to stop transporting exotic animal hunting trophies. The petition was filed by Chris Green, a Delta Diamond Medallion frequent flier who has since become the executive director of the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School. This week, Green responded to the lawsuit in a letter on the Change.org petition page, writing that public response to the lawsuit “will confirm to Delta Air Lines that it did exactly the right thing by listening to the majority of its customers,” adding that “Delta should be commended for sticking to its principled stance.” The post generated hundreds of comments in support in less than 24 hours.

...The distressing features of this much larger part of the higher-education industry have spawned a critical, even dire, literature that merits attention for its own sake—and because the issues echo in the elite stratum, too. And for those seeking entry to the top-tier institutions, the ever more frenzied admissions lottery has begun to provoke overdue skepticism. Herewith, an overview of some recent books with heft....Lani Guinier looks beyond Bruni’s personal narratives and advice to the societal consequences of college admissions as the ultimate funneling device. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy (Beacon, $24.95), the Boskey professor of law advances a broad argument about the definition of merit as social benefit rather than as individual accomplishment, and the role of inclusiveness in strengthening the civic fabric and better addressing human problems.

The first time Smart professor of law Jon Hanson lived on wheels, he was managing a restaurant and sharing a trailer with his high-school sweetheart, Kathleen. The newlyweds had bought the trailer cheap and persuaded their shop teacher to let them fix it up during class senior year. Neither planned to attend college. That changed after Hanson’s father died, when something jumped out among his father’s few possessions: his books. Applying to Rice on Kathleen’s suggestion, Hanson got in and soared, earning a fellowship for research in Europe. (They traveled in a camper van there, later taking their three kids across America in an RV.) Then on to Yale—he to the law school, and Kathleen to the college. By Hanson’s “2L” year, he’d coauthored his first law-review article, and was off to the scholarly races. At Harvard, Hanson stands out for connecting law to the mind sciences and for his approach to legal education.

It was quietly posted on the website of the Title IX Office last week. Though billed as “Frequently Asked Questions” on the university’s newly created sexual assault policies, the 10-page document reads like much more than that: a backdoor revision to the existing procedures that appears to contradict or significantly alter the meaning of some policy provisions...Many of the questions posed and answered seem to be direct responses to the concerns of Harvard Law School professors, who broke away and established their own, significantly better sexual assault policy last year.

Activist hedge funds can count on a number of supporters in academia and in the media rising up in defense of their actions. No doubt activist hedge funds have found their most persistent academic supporters in Professor Lucian Bebchuk of the Harvard Law School and his co-authors. In several papers, but most particularly in the Bebchuk, Brav and Jiang (2013) paper, the authors make several claims, which are summarized in Bebchuk’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal: “Our comprehensive analysis examines a universe of about 2,000 hedge fund interventions during the period of 1994-2007 and tracks companies for five years following an activist’s arrival...Basically, Bebchuk et al’s argue that their vast base of empirical data does not support the claims made by opponents of activist hedge funds.

In this society of economic haves and have nots there is another divide that is worrisome: the digital divide. High speed access to the Internet is becoming a necessity. Google Fiber is trying to shake things up by bringing it to Charlotte and other providers are stepping up to the challenge but some see this not as the responsibility of commerce but of cities. We hear about how cities can make all the difference and about what Charlotte is doing to that end. Guests: Susan Crawford - professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

A man who paid $350,000 to shoot a black rhino is now suing an airline for refusing to ship his trophy. Corey Knowlton, who won a permit for the hunt from the Dallas Safari Club back in 2014 and made the trip in May 2015, made headlines when CNN decided to go along with him on his hunt for an endangered black rhino in Namibia..."Other than Walter Palmer himself, I cannot think of a less sympathetic plaintiff to challenge Delta's common-sense policy than Corey Knowlton — the Texan who paid to kill one of Africa's rarest black Rhinos," Chris Green, of Harvard Law School, told The Dodo. "No rational airline ever would want to be associated with transporting this endangered animal's butchered body out of Africa just to go hang on some rich American's wall."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Feel the chill in the air? Winter is coming to the Arab world, with no end in prospect. The meaningless Egyptian parliamentary elections that began Sunday set the scene perfectly. With the only credible opposition banned and its leaders jailed, the election is structurally identical to the sorry affairs in dictatorships before the Arab Spring. The point of the vote is simply to show that the government can engage in the charade of democracy. The public gets it, and any bump to the regime's legitimacy will come only from its confidence that it can produce a result it wants, not from any genuine belief that the people have a say in government.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. My tribe — the technophiles, the Internet enthusiasts, the conference-speakers — is thrilled about Uber. I’m not. I know I’m swimming against the tide here, but I’m going to say it: I don’t think Uber is a good idea for American cities. Before I drown under a flood of angry responses from around the Internets, hear me out: This fight is about public values. When it comes to city-wide transport and communications networks, serving everyone at a high basic level fairly — including drivers — is more important than permitting a single company to make enormous profits from a substitute basic private service.

When the Berklee Performance Center hosted the Internet Cat Video Festival for the first time last year, people were clawing to get in so they could watch a 70-minute reel of cat footage from the Web. Thankfully, for those who didn’t make it inside, there’s now a second chance to enjoy the feline film phenomenon. On Oct. 29, Berklee is hosting the festival for the second time...To top it all off, Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain will emcee the event. Zittrain is an expert in all things Internet and the faculty director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But don’t expect him to talk about the legalities of sharing cat videos — his mind will be focused on entertainment.

Should a landlord’s mistake handling a security deposit give a tenant a defense against eviction? That is the question the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) will decide after hearing oral arguments on Thursday, Nov. 5, a decision that could have major ramifications for landlord-tenant law and rents in Massachusetts. On Tuesday, the court received an amicus brief from Amherst attorney Peter Vickery on behalf of the statewide group MassLandlords.net...The question came up in the case of Meikle v. Nurse, where the landlord had not followed all the rules regarding security deposits. The judge allowed the tenant’s security-deposit counterclaim, but — because the dollar value of the counterclaim was outweighed by the rent the tenant owed — the judge granted the landlord possession. The tenant, represented by the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, appealed, and the SJC opted to take it up from the Appeals Court’s docket.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One of the most striking features of the terrible cycle of violence in Israel right now is a recurring disagreement about the facts. From the Israeli perspective, Palestinians are randomly stabbing Israelis, after which Israeli police or bystanders shoot the assailants to prevent further violence. From the Palestinian perspective, the shootings by Israelis are either unprovoked or disproportionate to the threats and therefore amount to extrajudicial killings...But Americans might be able to glean some insight into the otherwise foreign disputes by comparing them to a phenomenon we know better: racially based disagreement about the shootings of blacks by white police officers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Everything came from Egypt, according to the ancient Athenians -- and apparently that includes “Big Pimpin’,” one of Jay Z’s early hit singles. The beat under the rap was laid down by Timbaland, who was on his way to becoming the superproducer he is now, and it relied on a sample from an Egyptian song from the 1950s. On Wednesday, in federal court in Los Angeles, where he's being sued for copyright infringement, Jay Z acknowledged the borrowing but said he’d credited the song’s author, Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi. The real story is more complicated -- and more interesting.