Media Mentions

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.”

An op-ed by Adam Ziegler, Harvard Law School, Library Innovation Lab. Ever so gradually, some of our state bars are embracing a duty of technology competence, which requires lawyers to “keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” That thin obligation may be fine as an ethical floor. But if we’re a profession committed to what’s best for our clients, can’t we do better than mere competence? Let’s strive for technology excellence.

As President Obama approaches his final year in power, a political impasse over the Guantánamo prison appears increasingly likely to force him to choose between two politically unsavory options: Invoke executive power to relocate the remaining detainees in defiance of a statute, or allow history to say he never fulfilled his promise to shutter the prison....Against that backdrop, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Obama was heading toward a dilemma at the end of his term. “Not closing Gitmo eight years after he pledged to do so would be a failure for his legacy, plus whatever continuing costs it has to national security in his eyes,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “But the only way to close it is to use an extraordinarily aggressive interpretation of executive power to act against the will of Congress and not obviously in a way that the American people support, just as he is walking out the door.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In July, a house in the Palestinian village of Duma was firebombed. A family of four was inside: Saad Dawabsheh, his wife and two children, ages 4 and 18 months. Only the 4-year-old survived. The leading suspects for the attack are Jewish, part of a loose network known in Israel as “hilltop youth,” teenagers who grew up in small and often unsanctioned settlements in the West Bank, especially in the region they call Samaria...Although small, this movement represents a troubling new fusion of messianism, legalism and violence. Its aim is to create a sovereign territory under God’s law. For these reasons, it is worthy of serious analysis and consideration.

...Over the last 10 years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops — have used arbitration to create an alternate system of justice. There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients, The Times found...Elizabeth Bartholet, an arbitrator in Boston who has handled more than 100 cases, agreed that many arbitrators had good intentions, but she said that the system made it challenging to remain unbiased. Ms. Bartholet recalled that after a company complained that she had scheduled an extra hearing for a plaintiff, the arbitration firm she was working with canceled it behind her back. A year later, she said, she was at an industry conference when she overheard two people talking about how an arbitrator in Boston had almost cost that firm a big client. “It was a conference on ethics, if you can believe it,” said Ms. Bartholet, a law professor at Harvard.

The phrase is often used but what we call “war crimes” are hardly ever prosecuted. Monocle’s Steve Bloomfield chairs a powerful discussion on what is a war crime and why the outrage rarely leads to an investigation. Featuring Kevin Jon Heller, Alex Whiting and Gary D Solis.

By mid-2017, Harvard Law School’s entire collection of United States case law will be available for public search through a new online legal platform, Ravel Law, which will provide the contents of its database for bulk access for free over the next eight years. While case law documents are nominally within the public realm, actually accessing them often requires paying an intermediary like LexisNexis or Westlaw. “What comes from a judge's quill should be freely available to all,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, the director of the Law School library, wrote in an email. “This project is a step along an overdue path towards making the law worldwide freely available and searchable through as many means as there are games in an app store.”

A new student movement at Harvard Law School is organizing to change the seal at the school, which the students argue represents and endorses a slaveholding legacy. The seal is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder who endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. Dubbed “Royall Must Fall,” the movement styles itself after a student activist movement in South Africa that lobbied to remove imagery of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist, from the University of Cape Town’s campus. At Harvard, activists formally began their effort for change with a rally of about 25 people on the Law School campus on Oct. 23. They have launched a Facebook page and are now in the process of further organizing. They are drafting a letter to send to the Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow with their positions, according to Mawuse H. Vormawor, a Law School student and organizer of the effort...Vormawor pointed to the research and scholarship of visiting Law School professor Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently published a book about the first century of Harvard Law School, as inspiration for the movement. In the book, Coquillette details the relationship between the Royall family’s slaveholding and the endowment of the Law School.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 2009, prominent Republicans, skeptical of requiring people to buy health insurance under the legislation that became Obamacare, proposed an alternative approach: making large employers automatically sign employees up for health insurance, while also allowing them to opt out. A version of this idea made its way into the Affordable Care Act. But as a result of this week’s budget deal, it is now out -- and Republicans are celebrating. How come? The answers shed new light on some thorny issues in behavioral economics, and also on contemporary politics.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s something inescapably charming about the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the U.K. Parliament with 817 active members. But the usually discreet charm of the aristocracy is under attack this week after the Lords used its power to delay tax-credit cuts passed by the Conservative majority in the House of Commons. The prospect of a Tory government complaining about tradition is deliciously ironic, but it does raise two serious questions: Is there a place for an unelected chamber in a modern democracy? And what benefits, if any, stem from its slowing or delaying the operation of the elected government?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The most important document in the most important Supreme Court case of the year is the University of Texas’ brief arguing that it needs to use affirmative action to achieve diversity in its undergraduate class. That brief, submitted Monday for the court’s consideration in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, says that the university can’t achieve its educational goals by admitting on numbers alone. Rather, achieving the magic of campus diversity requires a “holistic” effort to treat applicants as unique individuals with distinctive features. Think of the admissions process as a 10-gallon Texas version of the Hogwarts sorting hat, and you get the idea. Is Texas right? And, equally important, can it persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy not to end affirmative action as we know it in college admissions?

Harvard Law School announced today that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection. The “Free the Law” initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history. “Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow...“Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public,” said Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and vice dean for library and information resources.

Earlier this year, the Newseum Institute asked 1,000 Americans to name their rights under the First Amendment. A clear majority listed freedom of speech first -- before freedom of religion, assembly, and other core civil liberties. And that makes sense. Protecting free speech is essential to the health of any functioning democracy...We owe this Orwellian shift in thinking to a growing number of court decisions, among them Citizens United, that define corporations as people and their business practices as speech. Harvard Law School's John C. Coates documented this change in a study released last February, noting that "corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment." This trend, Coates writes, isn't just "bad law and bad politics." It's also "increasingly bad for business and society."

So much for congressional gridlock. On Tuesday, the US Senate voted on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill to help protect our digital data. It passed 74 to 21 — not even close....But security maven Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said data sharing could pay off in the long run. “It might help prevent the next attack,” Schneier said. “It’s all about learning from the present to protect the future.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I realize no American much cares whether the U.S. acted lawfully in planning to shoot Osama bin Laden on sight during the 2011 raid on his Pakistan compound. But new details of the legal game plan to get him, excerpted in the New York Times from reporter Charlie Savage’s forthcoming book, are nevertheless troubling. According to Savage's reporting, senior government lawyers specifically detailed the reasons it would be lawful to kill an unarmed Bin Laden, even if he was in the act of surrendering. This is problematic not so much because of its doubtful legality but for the precedent it sets for lawyers essentially directing shoot-to-kill military operations before the fact.

Last year, Electronic Arts announced that it was ending online support for 50 of its games...If a publisher no longer supports a game, sometime the only way to keep it running is by bypassing its digital rights management (DRM), or hacking a game console, which was illegal until today..."I'm really excited that the Copyright Office chose to grant part of the exemption and definitely cleared up some of the legal uncertainty around removing authentication mechanisms, but it's too bad that office chose to only support this for single-player play," Kenda Albert [`16], a Harvard Law School student who helped the EFF seek the exemptions, told Motherboard. "The multiplayer component was really, really important to a lot of people who wrote in and provided testimony."