Media Mentions

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I want to talk about the sledgehammer of usage-based billing. I take no pride in saying that I’ve been talking about it for years. The sledgehammer is not something I welcome, and I would have been happy if my fears about it never materialized. After all, the sledgehammer could cost internet users billions of dollars, enrich monopolists, and defeat the spirit — if not the law — of net neutrality. In a big way, the sledgehammer will also beat down our economic growth. This is one evil sledgehammer. And it sounds so innocent! Usage-based billing. Kind of like paying for what you use, right? Don’t be fooled.

This Sunday morning, the terror attacks in San Bernardino. Did the killers get help? Why did no one see this coming? And can we prevent these kinds of attacks from happening here in the United States? We'll get the latest on the investigation from the very top. Attorney General Loretta Lynch joins us. Plus, the role of Islam. Are we dealing with a perversion of the religion or a strain of it? We'll have a debate. Also, terror and the campaign. Do the attacks help tough-sounding candidates like Donald Trump pull away from the pack?..Joining me this morning for insight and analysis are Rich Lowry of the National Review, Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, and Harvard Law School's Charles Ogletree.

It's probably an understatement to say the cable industry hasn't done a good job winning the hearts and minds of consumers. Now, it may be falling even lower. A cable company in Canada this week started posting the names of delinquent customers to Facebook, including its own Facebook page as well as community pages on the social media service. The list included customers' names as well as their overdue payments, which went as high as $1,406.80, according to the CBC..."This is a huge deal," said Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Security. "You are dealing with this immense power. When someone searches for you, it shows up. How do we deal with that?" He added, "The issue isn't whether people are deadbeats and should pay. The issue is whether the punishment fits the crime." For instance, a potential employer could search for one of those cable customers singled out by the cable company, and decide not to hire the candidate because of the posting. "Now you'll lose your career and your life because you didn't pay your cable bill," Schneier said.

Two former Environmental Protection Agency administrators appointed by Republican presidents have joined litigation over the Clean Power Plan in support of the agency. William D. Ruckelshaus, the agency's first administrator, who was appointed by President Richard Nixon and later served under President Ronald Reagan as well, and William K. Reilly, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Dec. 3 seeking to join litigation over the EPA's carbon dioxide emissions limits for existing power plants as amici curiae...Ruckelshaus and Reilly are represented by Harvard University law professor Richard Lazarus.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The International Monetary Fund’s decision to designate the Chinese renminbi, commonly known as the yuan, as a global reserve currency will, over time, encourage the country’s leadership to make the currency more tradable. But the political implications of global reserve status may be more significant than the economic ones.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There may have been a stranger and more lurid case in the federal appeals courts in 2015 than that of Gilberto Valle, the "cannibal cop." But if there was, I haven’t heard of it -- and it doesn’t carry the same high probability of going to the U.S. Supreme Court. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on Thursday vacated both Valle’s conviction for conspiracy to kidnap and a second conviction for unauthorized use of a computer database to look up a possible victim. Both parts of the decision deserve a close look, for different reasons.

At the third community meeting on race relations at Harvard Law School in as many weeks on Friday, students called on Law School Dean Martha L. Minow to produce a “strategic plan” to implement student demands they say will improve the school’s treatment of minority students by 9 a.m. on Monday...The students are reiterating some previous student demands, such as calling on Harvard to change the Law School’s seal, which students have criticized for its connection to a slaveholding family. They are also asking the school to establish an office devoted to issues of diversity and inclusion, require staff members to go through “cultural competency” training, and lower tuition and expand financial aid to “improve affordability and financial access to HLS for students of color, students from low socio-economic backgrounds, and otherwise marginalized students.”...In an email sent to Law School affiliates on Friday, Minow wrote that she will carefully consider the student demands. “I listened carefully,” Minow wrote. “I will do my best to ensure that we find ways to work together, joining students, staff, and faculty to address proposals and above all to strengthen this School and its possibilities to be better and to make the world better.”

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.