Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should Bill and Denise Richard, who lost their 8-year-old son Martin in the Boston Marathon bombing, have a special say in whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gets the death penalt? The question goes beyond the family’s tragedy or even the problem of terrorism. It gets to the heart of why we punish criminals -- and why we sometimes execute murderers. The answer we give will tell us something important about how we want the law itself to work. Begin with a striking fact: In many traditional legal systems, the decision whether to execute a murderer lay exclusively with the victim’s family.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. More than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama has seen his signature programs blocked or impeded by the courts. In the latest episode, a federal appeals court in New Orleans heard arguments Friday about what to do about his executive action on immigration, which has been blocked by a single district judge in Texas. Similar judicial roadblocks have profoundly affected Obama's efforts in health care, environmental protection and Internet regulation. So it's worth asking: What's going on? Why has the judiciary taken such a big role in opposing the president’s efforts to make policy? To find another president whose efforts have been so affected by the courts, you have to go back more than 80 years, to the first New Deal.

How could constitutional scholar and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe's involvement in last week's U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hearing on the Clean Power Plan affect the future of the rule? During today's OnPoint, Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, professors at Harvard Law, explain why they believe the government came out ahead during last week's federal court hearing. They also rebut Tribe's arguments against the constitutionality of the Power Plan.

An op-ed by Gabriella Blum and Benjamin Wittes. You walk into your shower and see a spider. You don’t know whether it is venomous—or whether it is even a real spider. It could be a personal surveillance mini-drone set loose by your nosy next-door neighbor, who may be monitoring the tiny octopod robot from her iPhone 12. A more menacing possibility: Your business competitor has sent a robotic attack spider, bought from a bankrupt military contractor, to take you out. Your assassin, who is vacationing in Provence, will direct the spider to shoot an infinitesimal needle containing a lethal dose of poison into your left leg—and then self-destruct...These scenarios may sound fantastical, but they are neither especially improbable nor particularly futuristic. Insect-size drones are busily being developed throughout the defense establishment, in academic facilities and by private firms. Slightly larger drones are widely available for purchase on the open market, some already rigged with cameras. Making such drones lethal is just the next step, and it isn’t that complicated.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you value freedom of choice. Are you committed to the mere opportunity to choose, or will you also insist that people actually exercise that opportunity? Is it enough if the government, or a private institution, gives people the option of going their own way? Or is it particularly important to get people to say precisely what they want? In coming decades, these seemingly abstract questions will grow in importance, because they will decide central features of our lives. Here’s an example. Until last month, all 50 states had a simple policy for voter registration: If you want to become a voter, you have the opportunity to register. Oregon is now the first state to adopt a radically different approach: If the relevant state officials know that you live in Oregon and are 18 or older, you’re automatically registered as a voter. If you don’t want to be one, you have the opportunity to opt out.

Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, once railed against the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorism suspects, including deriding legal rationales laid out by a former student, John Yoo. After Yoo left the Bush team to return to teach at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school, he found himself a pariah, with many students unsuccessfully urging the school to drop him for policies they said justified torture. Now, Koh is the one finding himself under pressure at an academic institution for his legal reasoning on how to deal with terrorism suspects, in particular the rationales he laid out to justify the use of drone strikes while working for the Obama administration...The letter in support of Koh has more than 400 signatures, including those of several of Koh’s colleagues at Yale and other prominent names — conservative and liberal — from across the country, such as Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School and former U.S. solicitor general Ted Olson.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does the new version of the bill giving Congress a vote on the Iran nuclear agreement -- a bill which President Barack Obama has agreed to sign -- shift the constitutional balance of power when it comes to foreign agreements? At first glance, it looks as if it might: Obama initially declared that he could make an executive agreement with Iran that evaded Congress. Now he has agreed to sign a law that gives Congress the chance to review the deal before it goes into effect and block it if there are enough votes to override a presidential veto. This looks like a restraint on the president's untrammeled executive power in foreign affairs. On second glance, however, the bill seems to be more symbolic than practical.

An op-ed by Tommy Tobin [`16]. For many students, the prospect of summer is exciting, but for students in low-income homes the long break often increases the likelihood of food insecurity. For these students and their families, already-tight food budgets grow even more constrained over the summer. When at school, low-income students across North Carolina are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. With 1 in 4 of North Carolina’s children struggling with food insecurity, this USDA school lunch program addresses a much-needed nutritional gap for many of the state’s youth. For students near the poverty line who qualify, this national program wards off the risk of hunger. While approximately 80 percent of eligible young people receive school meals nationwide, summer means no school and, consequently, less access to healthy and nutritious food.

Montana has the strictest law in the nation governing the “sell by” date for milk, forcing grocers to dump untold thousands of gallons of perfectly good food every week. That’s why a documentary film crew from Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic was in town on Friday to interview Pattee Creek Market owner Jim Edwards. "This has been part of a long-running interest of ours that’s around how we’re wasting so much of the food we produce in the U.S. We’re looking at how these laws – like the law we’re looking at in Montana – are the cause of that waste,” said clinic director Emily Broad Leib.

One Harvard law student along with her director, traveled all the way from Boston to Missoula to film a documentary on milk expiration. They say that Montana's law on expiration dates for milk is strict and they want to shed more light on it. On Friday, they were at Missoula's local Pattee Creek Market. "People bring milk home and end up throwing it out because they don't know that the date has nothing to do with food safety which is perfectly reasonable," said Harvard Law School Student Emily Deddens [`15].

President Obama’s law school mentor has emerged as a leading critic of the administration’s landmark climate change regulations. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has quickly become a darling among the president’s Republican rivals, who increasingly tout the legal scholar as a star liberal lawyer who had the good sense to see when his protege has gone astray. Tribe, whose expertise in constitutional law, has fought the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) attempts to set carbon dioxide emissions limits from the power sector in all three branches of government, frequently turning to vivid, colorful, attention-grabbing rhetoric and metaphors. “The EPA (is) coloring outside the lines, attempting to do something the statute clearly forbids and coming up with every imaginable rationale to defend it,” Tribe, arguing on behalf of Peabody Energy Inc., the largest coal mining company in the world, told the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Thursday.

When it comes to food waste the expression "crying over spilled milk" actually does apply. A study from Harvard prompted a film crew to come to Missoula and document how Montana's milk date process leads to mass amounts of waste each year. A film crew was on hand Friday afternoon at Pattee Creek Market to inquire about confusing expiration dates that can lead to food waste. "We wanted to take a new angle on this issue. It is a huge problem. It is 160 billion pounds of food that is wasted every year,"Harvard law student Emily Deddens [`15] said. "We are kind of thinking of a way to show that and it seemed like focusing on this one example of this law with milk that it would really demonstrate that perfectly good wholesome food is being thrown for no reason except that there is a law with an arbitrary date..."Most people are really surprised to know that they are not regulated at the federal level. So many of the labels on our food products people think that they come from the FDA or the USDA, but these labels are not really federally regulated with the exception of infant formula," said Harvard Law School Law and Policy Clinic Director Emily Broad Leib. Emmy nominated film maker Rebecca Richman Cohen has teamed with the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic to create a short documentary.

Ukraine wants the International Criminal Court to investigate all alleged war crimes in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said in an interview, broadening an existing probe...Alex Whiting, a former senior ICC prosecutor, said a new referral could force an investigation of the wider conflict. "Here (Crimea and eastern Ukraine) there have been widespread allegations of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, so it will be much harder to ignore," he said.

[Lani] Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, became famous when her nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights was derailed by the raging culture wars of the early 1990s. Her book does not advocate the kind of mechanically redistributive race-based policies she was then accused (not always fairly) of promoting. Instead, she denounces the “testocracy,” in which students are sorted into elite colleges based on the narrow, individualistic measures assessed by the SAT. This, she argues, has the effect of both reinforcing inherited privilege and convincing the “testocratic” victors that their spoils are well deserved.

A panel of federal judges appeared inclined on Thursday to dismiss the first legal challenge to President Obama’s most far-reaching regulation to slow climate change...Among the lawyers arguing on behalf of the coal companies was Laurence H. Tribe, a well-known Harvard scholar of constitutional law who was a mentor to Mr. Obama when he attended law school. Republicans who oppose the rule have cheered Mr. Tribe’s role in the case. In court on Thursday, Mr. Tribe laid out a broad, sweeping argument against the rule as unconstitutional, echoing spirited arguments that he has been making for months in legal briefs, congressional testimony and an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal.

An op-ed by Shakeer Rahman '15: The day after video surfaced of a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back, the town’s mayor announced plans to outfit all its police officers with body cameras. The New York Police Department has started to put cameras on officers, and the White House has announced a $263 million program to supply 50,000 body cameras to local police.