Media Mentions

In response to students’ calls for more coursework on the topic of rape law, next semester Yale Law School will introduce a new seminar dedicated exclusively to the study of gender-based violence. Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor who teaches criminal law and procedure, said she has seen an increase in interest in rape law coursework in the last few years, adding that she is not aware of any criminal law professor at Harvard who does not include rape law in his or her course. Students seem very interested in learning the criminal laws governing rape, and particularly how they differ from the policies about campus sexual misconduct to which they are consistently exposed, Suk said.

...Rojas is one of an estimated 3.2 million Americans with hepatitis C, an infection that attacks the liver. In the United States, hepatitis C kills more people every year than HIV. Drugs like Harvoni promise to cure more than 90 percent of patients, yet many insurance providers only authorize treatment if a patient has extensive liver damage, or a “fibrosis score” of three or four...Some of these policies are on shaky legal ground, according to Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Cambridge, Massachusetts. For example, Greenwald believes some state Medicaid programs are violating federal Medicaid law with excessive hepatitis C prior-authorization rules. In addition, private insurance companies are violating their own contracts, which promise to provide “medically necessary” services to covered patients. “They are completely abrogating their obligation to provide these services in hepatitis C solely based on cost,” Greenwald said.

From the day he took up residence at Shawna Payne’s Brookline apartment eight years ago, Dino had problems...“This bird has an extraordinarily annoying screech,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. She said she first hoped to trap Dino and return him to Payne, but would now be satisfied with chasing him off for good...Some neighbors, she said, are worried that Dino, a Goffin’s cockatoo, native to Indonesia, won’t survive the winter outside. “Candidly, we are no longer concerned about that,” Gertner said.

In light of the Volkswagen scandal, the US should revise copyright laws so that people can legally tinker with automotive software, a majority of Passcode Influencers said....“‘Tinker’ is a tricky word -- automobiles are kinetic creatures, and no one wants to have even well-intentioned hackers applying patches that would lead to safety issues. But there’s not much security through obscurity, and it’s important and helpful for technically-inclined people to be able to review and understand the code on which their cars run, just as they’re entitled to try to take apart the physical pieces. In the longer term, we can devise ways to allow tinkerers to modify the code on their automobiles while being accountable should something go terribly awry.” – Jonathan Zittrain

Students accused of violating Harvard’s sexual harassment policy may turn to attorneys as their personal advisers, and if they successfully appeal investigators’ decision in their case, a body of faculty and senior administrators will rehear it, according to a new document clarifying Harvard’s handling of complaints. On Monday, following heavy scrutiny, administrators with Harvard’s central Title IX office released a 10-page Frequently Asked Questions document offering more details about the University’s policy and procedures governing its response to sexual assault on campus...According to Jeannie C. Suk, a Law School professor and vocal critic of Harvard’s central Title IX framework, representatives from Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel in fall 2014 had indicated plans to release an FAQ document about the policies. Officials also consulted Law faculty members when crafting them, according to Karvonides. The guidance document released Monday seems responsive to many of Suk and her colleagues’ criticisms. “These FAQs show that the University can listen to reason on this sensitive and controversial topic,” said Janet E. Halley, a Law School professor who has led an effort at Harvard and across the country challenging what she argues is the federal government’s overzealous approach to Title IX compliance...“I think they have actually addressed the worst problems on the substantive policy side,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, one of 28 Law School faculty members who signed a letter slamming the policy last year in The Boston Globe. In particular, Bartholet praised the document’s clarification of the difference between “incapacitation” and “intoxication,” as well as its affirmation of protections for academic freedom.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When I clerked on the D.C. Circuit in the 1990s, my friends and I dreaded getting “FERC-ed,” which was what we called being assigned a case involving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The very word FERC can still give me a nightmare in which I’m chased through an endless pipeline by relentless administrative lawyers. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court was FERC-ed, in a case that asks whether the agency is allowed to pursue a plan to pay consumers not to use electricity at peak hours. Although the topic the justices discussed is technical and complex, the bottom line isn’t: The case is a conflict about federalism, in the guise of a fight about the meaning of a federal law.

An op-ed by Johanna Wald. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently proposed to redirect $15 billion from correctional facilities toward increasing teachers' salaries in high poverty schools. Unfortunately, because his suggestion came just days before he announced his resignation, this proposal risks being dismissed as some kind of a Hail Mary; an attempt to be provocative on his way out the door. He even suggested as much, when he stated "I want to lay out an idea today that will strike some as improbable or impractical." Actually, his idea is neither. It is both practical and eminently plausible. With the right kind of leadership and advocacy, it might even become probable.

Amid a nationwide debate over tough criminal sentences and overcrowded prisons, the Supreme Court heard appeals Tuesday over harsh punishments that two convicts contend violate the Constitution....Raising the vote count required to impose the death penalty could have significant implications, according to data the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School published last week.

A leaked portion of text from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could have serious consequences not only on the average citizen, but also tech specialists who help ensure product safety. According to an Oct. 9 release by WikiLeaks, the intellectual property chapter of the TPP includes language that seems to indicate judges may be allowed to order the confiscation and destruction of devices belonging to citizens...Vivek Krishnamurthy, a Harvard cyberlaw instructor, also told Motherboard that in addition to the effect the treaty will have on the usage of purchased technology by the average citizen, it could could also impact the work of security researchers. Security researchers, also known as white hats, are “ethical hackers” that use their skills to look for weaknesses or flaws in a product in an effort to warn consumers and manufactures of potential problems.

When Harvard publicly launched its capital campaign in 2013, it set out for the record books. The first fundraising drive to take place at every school across the University simultaneously, it aimed to raise $6.5 billion, more money than any previous effort not only at Harvard, but in the history of higher education...Except at Harvard Law School. Fundraisers there are preparing to launch the public phase of its segment of the University’s larger fundraising drive on Oct. 23, making it the last of Harvard’s schools to do so. For Steven Oliveira, the Law School’s dean for development and alumni relations tasked with coordinating the effort, this fundraising drive is “awkward.” The school just finished a $476 million capital campaign in 2008, funding major construction, and administrators there are weary of over-soliciting their donors.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Giving juveniles mandatory life sentences without the opportunity for parole is an unjust punishment, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. But that's not enough to get young offenders already sentenced to mandatory life resentenced or released. For the court’s 2011 decision to apply retroactively, the justices would have to deem it a new substantive rule of law. On Tuesday, the justices heard arguments on that question. If they follow the technical logic of their retroactivity rule, things don’t look good for the people incarcerated under a principle that the court now says is cruel and unusual.

...Across Harvard, faculty members, students, and researchers are examining those questions, engaging the world’s latest information revolution, the one in “big data.”...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, believes that big data — and the algorithms developed to make sense of it — are both exciting and potentially worrisome at the same time, and that thought should be given to who uses it and how...Zittrain, who is also director and faculty chair of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and is a professor of computer science at the Harvard Paulson School, said the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and our always-on world has created interesting moral, ethical, and potentially legal issues. And he believes that the relatively neutral ground of universities is a good place to sort that out.

As New Delhi gears up for its biggest ever diplomatic jamboree with African nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor has said that India should “contribute” towards the goal of accountability for the “world’s worst crimes” by arresting the visiting Sudanese President, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, who has been indicted for 10 counts as a 'war criminal...Harvard Law School's Professor Alex Whiting, who had been attorney in ICC Prosecutor's office from 2010 to 2013, agreed that India "does not have legal obligation" to enforce warrant for Al Bashir as UNSC resolution 1593 "does not obligate non-State parties to cooperate with the ICC but only urges them to do so". "However, India is a signatory to the Genocide Convention which states that "that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which [the contracting parties] undertake to prevent and to punish," Whiting told Express. India became a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention in 1959. Whiting felt that "this obligation would cause India to think twice about hosting someone who has been charged by an international tribunal with genocide".

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you download a free app to your phone or tablet and watch videos without registering, can the service share your viewing preferences with a third party? The answer is now yes in the 11th Circuit, which covers Alabama, Florida and Georgia. The appeals court held last week that the Video Privacy Protection Act doesn’t cover viewers who aren't registered, because they aren't “subscribers” under the meaning of the law. The decision is doubtful as a matter of logic, but it’s also now the law, so watch at your own risk.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held last week that Bikram yoga can't be copyrighted. The decision covers California -- yoga’s American heartland -- and it'll probably influence courts elsewhere. Although the ideal of yoga being free to all is appealing, the court got this one wrong. The stylized, precise sequence of poses arranged by Bikram Choudhury, and performed in a 105 degree room, should’ve been treated as choreography, entitled to copyright protection, not as an abstract expression of medical ideas.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The quartet of Tunisian civil society leaders who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday played an important part in the country’s thus-far successful democratic, constitutional revolution. But their role was no more decisive than that of the leaders who shepherded the country from the Arab Spring protests to the election of the constituent assembly, or of the elected assembly members who produced, negotiated and ratified a liberal democratic constitution. The best way to think about it is that the Nobel committee wanted to reward the Tunisian people for being the only Arab state to have achieved democracy since the regional upheaval in 2011, and they picked the civil society leaders as the stand-in. The Peace Prize is being given to the Tunisian exception.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Presidential candidates from both parties are focusing, as usual, on the middle class. But what’s that? And why, exactly, does it deserve such attention? Princeton’s Angus Deaton, who on Monday was announced as the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics, has offered some intriguing answers. The most important is this: If you care about how people actually experience their lives, you should be concerned about people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Above that amount, Deaton’s evidence suggests that more money may not particularly matter.

The tension is right there in the agency’s name — the Department of Children and Families — and in its mission statement, which charges it with both protecting children from abuse and holding together unstable families...Now, Governor Charlie Baker has made it clear that he believes the balance has tilted too far in one direction....Still, it remains to be seen if the governor will fundamentally shift the agency’s mission, said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor who argued that such a change would require an overhaul of the policy that separates high-risk and low-risk cases. “Simply saying safety is our priority is what everybody always says,” Bartholet said. “Without specifics, DCF is never going to do that on its own.”

A bill aimed at increasing legal protections for people who buy foreclosed homes is working its way through the state legislature, but faces criticism from opponents who say it would disproportionately harm minorities....Several minority leaders, including NAACP New England president Juan Cofield, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and city councilors Jass Stewart of Brockton and Dana Rebeiro of New Bedford, wrote a letter to Senate leaders opposing the bill. They claimed it would have disproportionate negative impacts in minority communities ravaged by subprime mortgages. They also argued the bill strips victims of illegal foreclosures of their rights. “These homeowners, from communities of color and more broadly, must retain their rights,” the letter stated. “They must have access to adequate legal redress. Denying them the ability to sue to regain title to their illegally foreclosed home is not justice.”

Sheriff's Deputy Charles Hurt was on truant patrol when he came across a teenager in a Baton Rouge park on a cool fall morning. The teenager pulled a gun from his jacket, panicked, he said, and shot Hurt dead. That tragic sequence took place more than a half-century ago, nine days before the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The teenager, Henry Montgomery, is now 69 years old and has been behind bars almost ever since, serving a life sentence. He wants the Supreme Court to give him a chance to get out of prison before he dies...Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree is calling on the justices to consider banning life-without-parole sentences altogether for people who commit even the most heinous crimes before their 18th birthdays. Ogletree said the court should take note of the rapid change in sentencing laws to rule out life terms for the young.

Students from the environmental activist group Divest Harvard have appealed the dismissal of their lawsuit filed against the University last November, which asks the court to compel Harvard to divest its $37.6 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry...Though the plaintiffs may not introduce new arguments at the appeals stage, according to plaintiff and Harvard Law School student Alice M. Cherry, the brief seeks to argue why the dismissal was unwarranted so that the case can proceed in a lower court...“It’s amazing to have the City of Cambridge, Harvard’s own hometown, throw its support behind our lawsuit,” said Joseph “Ted” E. Hamilton, a Law School student, in a press release. “This shows that many people support us and that Harvard owes it to the public to divest from fossil fuels.”