Media Mentions

In a visit to Harvard Law School, retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shared lessons from his service as a close adviser to three presidents, tips on negotiating with difficult foreign leaders, and his thoughts on strengthening support for families and children in the United States. Powell on Friday took part in the American Secretaries of State Program developed jointly by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School. Law School Dean Martha Minow introduced the afternoon session, which was moderated by HLS Professor Robert H. Mnookin, HBS Professor James Sebenius, and HKS Professor Nicholas Burns.

Harvard Law School has announced that it will be digitizing its vast collection of U.S. case law and making it available free online. Ravel Law, a commercial research and legal analytics company is partnering with Harvard and funding the substantial cost of converting the collection from print to electronic format. The project is called “Free the Law.”...Harvard’s undertaking is evidence of the electronic format’s predominance and the (relative) ease by which vast resources can be shared to advance the public interest. Talk about pro bono! Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School is quoted in The Times piece saying that “Improving access to justice is a priority” and that Harvard feels “an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.” While I suspect Dean Minow would readily concede that access to information is not the panacea for solving the access to justice crisis — affordable access to lawyers is — sharing resources is a great step in the right direction. And her rationale for doing so is laudatory.

An op-ed by Robert J. Smith, senior fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute...Last year marked the lowest number of new death sentences in modern American history. Nationwide, in the five-year period from 2010 through 2014, only 13 counties imposed five or more death sentences. Maricopa County is one of those 13. With 24 new death sentences between 2010 and 2014, Maricopa is the nation’s second highest producer of death sentences, after Los Angeles County, which is twice as populous. One explanation for why counties like Maricopa hang on to capital punishment is that the prosecutors in these places are outliers who continue to pursue death sentences with abandon, mitigating circumstances and flaws in the system be damned. But prisoners sentenced to death in these counties often suffer a double whammy—they get both the deadliest prosecutors in America and some of the country’s worst capital defense lawyers.

The crest of Harvard Law School displays three sheaves of wheat, arranged on a shield. The design is also the coat-of-arms for Isaac Royall Jr., who through his estate helped found the school. Another part of Royall’s legacy, however, is that he was a slaveholder...“These symbols set the tone for the rest of the school and the fact that we hold up the Harvard crest as something to be proud of when it represents something so ugly is a profound disappointment and should be a source of shame for the whole school,” law student Alexander J. Clayborne [`16] told the newspaper. In an interview with The Washington Post, Clayborne said the effort, called Royall Must Fall, came about because some people on campus were looking for ways to support those in South Africa who were calling for the removal of a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes...[Daniel] Coquillette told The Post he felt it was important to understand the history of the institution, including Royall’s background. He’s a historian, he said, and believes in telling the truth about the past. Coquillette doesn’t think changing the seal is the best approach, he said, but he also doesn’t think conversations about Royall should stop.

Ben Carson had a pretty remarkable track record for a job that involved slicing people’s heads open. In his three-decade-long career as a neurosurgeon, Carson, the newly minted leader of the ever-fickle Republican polls, faced a total of eight malpractice claims in the state of Maryland, according to the Maryland Health Care Alternative Dispute Resolution Office...“The key question in a case involving an allegation of a botched neurosurgery is whether the defendant or surgeon used the care and skill that is customary among neurosurgeons,” Harvard Law School professor John Goldberg told The Daily Beast... “In the case you mention, the plaintiff would have been required to prove, first, that Dr. Carson actually did not examine the MRI (a factual issue), and, second, that prevailing standards among surgeons required him to consult the MRI before conducting surgery of the sort that was performed (a legal issue).” He added that the plaintiff would also have to prove that there was a direct link between the perceived error and the problems that occurred thereafter.

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.”