Media Mentions

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing for a trading and clearing center in the United States for the renminbi, the Chinese currency, but experts say there are many hurdles before the American companies can trade and settle payments onshore...“Having a renminbi clearing hub in the U.S. will be more a symbolic, rather than economically significant, victory for China,” said Mark Wu, a law professor focusing on international trade at Harvard University. “Whether renminbi -denominated financial instruments will grow over time depends on the speed with which China undertakes more market-oriented reforms at home, not where clearing hubs for its currency are located globally,” Wu said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can Native Hawaiians form a government of their own to negotiate with the U.S. government like an Indian tribe? The issue is still before the lower courts, but the U.S. Supreme Court dropped a big hint Wednesday that its eventual answer may be no. The justices voted, 5-4, to continue an injunction that blocks the counting of ballots for delegates to a convention limited to Native Hawaiians. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit could allow the counting to go forward after it rules -- but the issue will then go right back to the Supreme Court.

Meg Kribble, a research librarian and outreach coordinator at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, has been elected as a board member of the American Association of Law Libraries.

Using St. Louis as a framework, a lineup of prominent activists and academics held a panel discussion on Thursday on the history of the black civil rights movement and the current state of the Black Lives Matter movement. Entitled “Generations of Struggle: St. Louis from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter,” the event drew a large crowd in CGIS South Thursday evening as panelists focused on the intergenerational nature of the current movement...Harvard Law School student Derecka M. Purnell, who attended the event, said she was especially interested in the discussion about the intergenerational nature of the movement. “I think the panel dispelled the myth that there is an intergenerational divide within the movement,” Purnell said. “It showed that it’s possible for people of all generations to work along the same sort of set of politics. It just takes collaboration, openness, and a willingness to hold conversations across the table.”

Two Republicans who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are backing the Obama administration’s climate change rule for power plants as it faces a federal court challenge. William Ruckelshaus, who was the first EPA administrator under President Richard Nixon and later served in the same position under President Ronald Reagan; and William Reilly, who served under President George H.W. Bush, want to be able to file amicus briefs in the case. The two men support the climate rule, saying in October that “the rule is needed, and the courts we hope will recognize that it is on the right side of history.”...Ruckelshaus and Reilly are being represented by Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus, two Harvard Law School professors who have written and fought in support of the climate rule.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer dominated U.S. Supreme Court oral argument over state health-care databases, repeatedly asking why the federal government doesn't do more to facilitate these efforts....Carmel Shachar, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation who filed a pro-database amicus brief, said the justices’ line of questioning was colored by recent high-profile decisions involving the Affordable Care Act, such as King v. Burwell. In that ruling in June, the high court upheld the availability of tax subsidies under the ACA to individuals who purchase their health insurance on the federal health-care exchange. In those cases, the justices “were really grappling with, ‘what is the role of the federal government when it comes to health care?’ ” Shachar told Bloomberg BNA. “Certainly Vermont argues that health care is considered a very traditional province of the states, and you see pushback that you may not have seen even a few years ago on whether health care is a classic area of state concern or whether it's more of a federal-state hybrid.”

An op-ed by Robert C. Bordone and Sara E. del Nido Budish. The video’s brevity doesn’t make it easier to watch. A 17-year-old boy walks along a Chicago street when several police cruisers pull up alongside him. He steps away and, seconds later, a single officer fires multiple rounds — 16, we learn later — leaving the boy dead. No officers appear to come to the victim’s aid. From South Carolina to Chicago, deeply disturbing video clips are fast becoming Exhibit A in debates over racial injustice and mistreatment...But the videos do little to address the root causes of the racial tensions underlying our society. It is easy and tempting to believe that seeing what happened will reveal the truth, and that, from there, conflict, resistance and dissension will be resolved. But we fool ourselves if we imagine that by creating a video record, people are more likely to agree about what happened and how to respond.

The thought of returning to law school just a few years after graduation would fill many young lawyers with dread. But for midlevel associates Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, a unique training program at Harvard Law School has become a prized rite of passage...The Milbank@Harvard program is unique in its focus on teaching law firm associates applied business skills, said Scott Westfahl, faculty director of executive education and professor of practice at Harvard Law School. “I don’t know of another program like this,” Westfahl said. It is administered in conjunction with the Harvard Law School Executive Education Program, which was founded by Professors David Wilkins and Ashish Nanda about eight years ago.

Legal counsel for a Harvard Law School student who was accused—but never found guilty in court—of sexually assaulting a fellow student and her friend have launched a website to publicly contest the portrayal of his case in the documentary film “The Hunting Ground.”...Janet E. Halley, one of the 19 Law School professors who denounced the film in the recent public letter, said restrictions from the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act limited Law professors’ involvement in “The Brandon Project” site. “There was very little that we could do because all the things that we know about the Harvard Law proceedings are covered...by FERPA and faculty confidentiality rules,” Halley said. Still, Halley praised the site and argued that viewers of the “The Hunting Ground” can now review allegations against Winston and compare them to court documents. Halley said she also placed the case documents in the Harvard Law School library for others to view. On Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences listed “The Hunting Ground” as one of 15 films shortlisted for nomination in the documentary feature award category.

The faculty members who preside over Harvard University’s 12 undergraduate residential houses have agreed to change their name from house master to something yet to be decided. Harvard students called for the change, arguing that the term is tied to slavery. A group of Harvard Law students called Royall Must Fall, is also taking issue with the law school’s seal, parts of which come from the Royall family crest. Isaac Royall, Jr. was a slaveowner and son of a slavetrader who played a key role in creating Harvard Law School. This comes at a time when conversations and protests about race are taking place on college campuses across the country. Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd visited Harvard’s campus today to speak with students.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is putting a new emphasis on donating food versus trashing food. This November, RecyclingWorks, an organization funded by MassDEP, launched their "Food Donation Guidance for Massachusetts Businesses" page on the RecyclingWorks website. ... The organization partnered with Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic to generate fact sheets on food donation and date labeling to provide to organizations and businesses free of charge on the Food Donation Guidance page. Likewise, the page also provides links and information on local food rescue organizations and food banks, as well as food temperature and storing guidelines.

...The numbers show newly minted PhD students flooding out of the academic pipeline. In 2003, 21,343 science graduate students in the United States received a doctorate. By 2013, this had increased by almost 41% — and the life sciences showed the greatest growth. That trend is mirrored elsewhere. According to a 2014 report looking at the 34 countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the proportion of people who leave tertiary education with a doctorate has doubled from 0.8% to 1.6% over the past 17 years....One reason is that there is little institutional incentive to turn them away. Faculty members rely on cheap PhD students and postdocs because they are trying to get the most science out of stretched grants. Universities, in turn, know that PhD students help faculty members to produce the world-class research on which their reputations rest. “The biomedical research system is structured around a large workforce of graduate students and postdocs,” says Michael Teitelbaum, a labour economist at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Many find it awkward to talk about change.”

The masters of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential Houses have unanimously agreed to change their title, a term that some students criticize as associated with slavery and has come under scrutiny as debates about racism take hold of college campuses nationwide. ... Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., a master of Winthrop House, called the change “the product of many years” of discussion, but said House masters collectively made the decision to change it in the past few weeks. That decision came in response to student requests and recent College and national protests over issues of race on college campuses, he said. “We cannot ignore the fact that the term ‘master’ has a particular salience in our culture given the very real brutal history of slavery,” Sullivan said. “A new term that appreciates the realities of the work we do in the 21st century is much more appropriate.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: When you’re trading securities, you generally think about being regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal law. Should you be worried about state law, too? That question isn't merely theoretical, as shown by the naked short selling case that was argued Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court. The answer has practical consequences for traders of all kinds. The case, Merrill Lynch v. Manning, arises from allegations by individual shareholders in Escala Group Inc., that traders at Merrill Lynch, Knight Equity Markets and UBS Securities, among others, engaged in naked short selling to manipulate the value of the stock. In essence, the original plaintiffs alleged that the traders made short sales without bothering to borrow the securities that would be needed to cover the trade.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a new enemy in Russian President Vladimir Putin after Turkey shot down a Russian jet. But his new friends in the European Union more than make up for the loss. Desperate to stanch the flow of immigration, the EU has promised Turkey 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) to keep Syrian refugees there so they won’t go to Europe. Included in the bargain is the restarting of Turkey’s accession to the EU, stalled until now because of traditional European fears of Turkish economic migrants and worries about the country’s slow slide away from liberal democracy. The ironies are palpable and rich.

When President Obama vetoed the 2016 defense authorization bill five weeks ago — in part because it wouldn’t let him close the military prison at Guantanamo — he did it with broad publicity and a photo op. Last week, he quietly signed the $607 billion bill, along with five others, just before the Thanksgiving holiday. But in his statement accompanying his signature, he signaled the fight’s not over yet. ... Obama might, for example, issue an “at the buzzer” executive order in January 2017. “But can he really do it as he’s walking out the door? I don’t think so,” said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who served in the Bush administration as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, and before that, special counsel to the Defense Department. Goldsmith told Defense One the administration would have to start preparations in “early 2016, if not sooner…You can’t just put people on an airplane on Jan. 18.”

It has long appeared in nearly every corner of the prestigious school. But now Harvard Law School’s official seal is under heavy scrutiny because it includes elements drawn from a slaveholding family’s crest. Following an outcry from students, officials from the school are examining the continued use of the seal, in what is the latest controversy over race and historic injustices on US college campuses in recent weeks. “Symbols are important,” Martha Minow, dean of the law school, said this week. “They become even more important when people care about them and focus on them.”

The force was strong at Harvard Law School on Tuesday during a talk by professor Cass R. Sunstein ’75, who discussed his upcoming book, “The World According to Star Wars.” The talk drew more than 200 people, filling a conference room decorated in honor of “Star Wars.” Sunstein presented from in front of a podium alongside life-sized cardboard cutouts of characters, including General Leia Organa and Finn from the upcoming movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

...Harvard’s resources work to ensure that there are no academic barriers for deaf students. Still, some students say that Harvard needs to offer American Sign Language as a for-credit class—something done at many peer institutions, including Brown and the University of Pennsylvania—to fully welcome Deaf students to the University...Heather S. Artinian, a culturally deaf first-year student at Harvard Law School, has a team of two interpreters who attend all her classes. Several members of Artinian’s family are deaf and identify heavily with Deaf culture, so she grew up using sign language. She was born unable to hear, but when she was 10 years old, she received two cochlear implants, learned how to speak English, and switched from a school for deaf children to a mainstream one. “I’ve kind of been going to school with the hearing world for a long time. And every time I go to a new environment it is always that cultural shock for everyone else,” Artinian said.

An op-ed by Jacob Loup`16. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Professor Randall Kennedy shared his concerns about student responses to the recent taping-over of the portraits of Harvard Law School’s black faculty. As he says, much of the unrest is not about the tape itself but about a conviction that the episode gives us a “revealing glimpse” into the “soul of Harvard Law School.” Professor Kennedy resists this conclusion. In his view, too many students are becoming “unglued,” seizing on “dubious” claims of racism at school, “nurturing an inflated sense of victimization,” and “minimizing” past victories. Professor Kennedy’s op-ed reflects natural anxieties about change. Glue holds things together. Crisis pulls them apart. But glue can also cement centuries-old ideologies, making them hard to tear down even once they’ve been widely repudiated. Harvard Law School is glued together not by the supple bonds of a far-reaching fellowship, but by the hardened amber of a dominant class’s precedents and traditions. We must come unglued.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Temple Mount conflict has made headlines in recent months as a possible cause of a string of Palestinian stabbings and Israeli retaliations. But at the Western Wall, in the literal shadow of the site -- known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary -- another long-ranging controversy has been simmering, one posing its own challenge to Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. The struggle concerns Jewish women who’ve been prohibited from reading the Torah at the Orthodox-dominated Western Wall. On Sunday, a group of them brought the issue to the Israeli Supreme Court, charging the Orthodox rabbi in charge of the holy site with discrimination on the basis of sex.