Media Mentions

A federal appeals court's ruling siding with tobacco companies on Wednesday could be devastating to Florida smokers' tort lawsuits, says a Miami law professor following the cases. This week's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit tossed a verdict won against tobacco companies by the estate of a Florida smoker. A three-judge panel held that the practice of using jury findings from an earlier tobacco class action conflicted with federal law on cigarettes...So the Eleventh Circuit's ruling, that federal law doesn't allow the use of those findings, "is almost like a neutron bomb for the Engle-type cases," said Sergio Campos, a law professor at the University of Miami who is not involved in the cases but has been following them closely. Campos, who is visiting at Harvard Law School right now, allowed that the Eleventh Circuit decision says plaintiffs may proceed on their claims as long as they do not rely on the class jury's findings. "But," he predicted, "a lot of cases are going to just disappear."

Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter spoke with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow on April 6 about the R-word...Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter returned to Harvard Law School—where he earned his J.D. in 1990—on April 6 to talk to students and faculty about racial slurs promulgated by the names of mascots and sports teams in today’s America. The Oneida Nation and the National Congress of American Indians launched the Change the Mascot campaign two years ago to pressure the National Football League’s Washington “Redskins” team to change its name.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 charges in the Boston Marathon bombing trial and may now face the death penalty. Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan offers analysis.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The first phase of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was supposed to be about liability. In reality, it felt like a penalty hearing, albeit in slow motion. Now that Tsarnaev has been found guilty for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the jury will deal directly with the only critical question — should Tsarnaev get life in prison or the death penalty? But, even at this late stage, the real question is: Why was this trial necessary? Why did the US attorney general insist on the death penalty here, while calling for its moratorium elsewhere? Why did the US government press for the death penalty when the defendant would have pled to life without parole? That was, after all, the defense message from the outset with the opening statement of Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev’s lawyer — “it was him.” “We will not sidestep Tsarnaev’s responsibility for his actions,” she said, actions which were “incomprehensible” and “inexcusable.”

In 2009, 40 percent of Harvard Law School’s entering class, according to data provided the school’s Admissions Office, arrived directly from their senior year of college, maybe even still sporting the odd T-shirt from last year’s big rivalry football game. It was the continuation of a years-long trend: From 2005 to 2009, between 39 and 45 percent of each incoming class were just recently undergraduates, with the remainder having spent at least one year working or studying elsewhere. But the next year, in 2010, the young students matriculating straight from undergrad only constituted 28 percent of the entering Law School class. More than two-thirds had post-graduate experience...“When I became dean, I directed our admissions team to give extra weight to applicants with experience since college,” [Martha] Minow wrote in an email. Now, since after 2009, roughly three-fourths of each incoming class of Harvard Law students comes to campus having spent some time beyond their college campuses. It’s a change Minow and Jessica L. Soban ’02, chief admissions officer at the Law School, broadcast as a way to enhance the Harvard Law School experience for students, allowing them to cultivate a better sense of their interests and bring a more experienced perspective to the classroom.

Fully autonomous weapons, already denounced as “killer robots”, should be banned by international treaty before they can be developed, a new report urges the United Nations. Under existing laws, computer programmers, manufacturers and military commanders would all escape liability for deaths caused by such machines, according to the study published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and [the International Human Rights Clinic at] Harvard Law School. Nor is there likely to be any clear legal framework in future that would establish the responsibility of those involved in producing or operating advanced weapons systems, say the authors of Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots. The report is released ahead of an international meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems at the UN in Geneva starting on 13 April.

...On Wednesday, Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 counts against him..."It will give some sense of closure for people," said Ronald Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law professor and director of the school's criminal justice institute. "Healing is a more difficult concept."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was sleeting hard in Boston on Wednesday afternoon as the jury returned a guilty verdict on all 30 counts against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed an 8-year-old and two women and wounded at least 260 people. Somehow the weather seems appropriate, even though it’s after Easter. Throughout this intensely cold, snowy winter in Boston, the specter of the Tsarnaev trial has been a constant and unwelcome reminder that for all its liberalism and toleration, this city isn’t immune from the troubles that plague the rest of the world.

The Harvard Food Law Society and the Food Literacy Project hosted the “Just Food? Forum on Justice in the Food System” at Harvard Law School recently. Margiana Petersen-Rockney, director of the Food Literacy Project, and Alexandra Jordan, a second-year student at HLS, organized the forum under Harvard’s yearlong Food Better initiative, which was created to discuss issues surrounding what we eat...“Justice requires that there be a possible vision of food quality and availability,” said HLS Dean Martha Minow, who is also the Morgan and Helen Chu Professor of Law, in her welcoming address. “We are all here because we want to see a more inclusive food movement. We are all consumers, we all have a say, and we challenge you to be an active participant.”

Starting in May 2013, in Syria’s war-torn cities of Aleppo and Idlib, specially trained operatives moved from door to door with a singular purpose. Seeking willing participants, they were armed, but only with questions. Months of canvassing resulted in hundreds of survey respondents. After three waves of interviews along the front lines of battle, patterns of the psyche started to emerge. Gathered within a 47-page compilation of data are the collective thoughts of four demographic groups: Syrian civilians, Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters, Islamic militants, and ex-fighters. Vera Mironova, a graduate research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, was one of the lead authors of the “Voices of Syria” project, which covered topics such as current living situations, safety concerns, the future role of religion — among other key issues in Syria’s government.

A federal judge on Tuesday said lawyers representing alleged underage sex-abuse victims of Florida financier Jeffrey Epstein improperly aired accusations against Prince Andrew and retired Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra of Florida struck from the record claims against the British royal and the American lawyer that surfaced in a civil lawsuit over the government’s handling of the Epstein sex-abuse scandal.

A judge has dropped Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School emeritus professor, from the legal proceedings in Florida in which a woman named him as one of several men with whom she had sex as a minor. Dershowitz has vehemently denied the allegations, calling them “categorically false.” Despite the judge’s decision, he has vowed to pursue a defamation lawsuit he brought against the woman’s lawyers for filing the allegations in court. “This is great news because it means I am legally vindicated,” Dershowitz said by phone on Tuesday, after the ruling was released. “I will be factually vindicated in the defamation lawsuit.” In his 10-page ruling, US District Court Judge Kenneth A. Marra described the allegations as “lurid” and “immaterial and impertinent” to the underlying lawsuit. He ordered them stricken from the case.

The Harvard-run New England Primate Medical Research Center has come under additional scrutiny following allegations that between 1999 and 2011, a dozen monkeys were found dead in their cages or euthanized at the center...However, critics of the center question Flier’s justification for the closure. Alicia M. Rodriguez [`15], president of the Harvard Law School Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, said she did not think it was a “coincidence” that the closure of the center was announced in the midst of scrutiny surrounding the monkey deaths. “[With] multiple violations, it doesn’t seem to me that it was feasible for them to continue running the lab,” Rodriguez said. “I think the legacy was already a negative one, and the new documents that have come out have added to the negative press and the negative reputation the primate center has.”

Corporations with religious objections have already been granted relief from Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, but religious colleges and charities are still fighting the administration in court, saying that, as of right now, they’re getting even worse treatment. Two Baptist colleges take their case to a federal appeals court in Houston on Tuesday, and another appeals court in Denver is expected to rule any day now on an appeal from the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns that also objects to the mandate...“I do not think that nonprofits can look to Hobby Lobby and say we should be exempt too, like for-profits, because for-profits are only temporarily exempt,” said Holly Lynch, a health and ethics expert at Harvard Law School. “The question is whether the accommodation that has been offered to nonprofits, and soon to certain for-profits, can withstand an RFRA challenge.”

Laurence Tribe's days as a liberal icon are over for green groups and many environmental law professors. One of the country's best-known constitutional scholars, the Harvard law professor has made headlines for his two-fisted attack on President Obama's proposed greenhouse gas standards for power plants, a pillar of the administration's effort to combat climate change...In an email exchange about the outrage his recent comments have generated, Tribe said "strong criticism comes with the territory if you don't let your lawyering follow the political winds or be influenced by how it might affect your image. I've always done what I thought was right and let the chips fall where they may," he added. "I've never let the fact that my opinions might prove unpopular with many, including with some people who are my allies in many a political and legal fight, deter me from speaking my mind. As long as I (and those who know me best) don't doubt my integrity or my motives, I'm okay with the situation."

Laurence H. Tribe, the highly regarded liberal scholar of constitutional law, still speaks of President Obama as a proud teacher would of a star student. “He was one of the most amazing research assistants I’ve ever had,” Mr. Tribe said in a recent interview. Mr. Obama worked for him at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Tribe has taught for four decades...Which is why so many in the Obama administration and at Harvard are bewildered and angry that Mr. Tribe, who argued on behalf of Al Gore in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, has emerged as the leading legal opponent of Mr. Obama’s ambitious efforts to fight global warming...“The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website.

Twelve jurors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will soon face one of the most profound decisions related to civic duty, yet their task next week seems remarkably simple: Vote on the guilt of a defendant who has virtually admitted he committed the crimes. A verdict seems possible within minutes. But legal specialists say that such a swift verdict in the first part of a two-stage death penalty trial related to the Boston Marathon bombing is unlikely...Harvard Law professor Carol Steiker, who has done extensive research on capital cases, also said that even though the jury is supposed to consider only Tsarnaev’s guilt at this phase, many jurors may use some time this week to consciously — or unconsciously — process their thoughts about the next phase, when jurors will decide whether Tsarnaev should be executed for his crimes. “I’m sure they’ll be thinking about it, even if the judge says not to do it,” she said.

Late last year, ambassadors from the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council shuffled into the Council's chamber to vote on the future of Palestine. After months of negotiations, the Arab states threw caution to the wind when Jordan introduced a text that called for Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory within three years. The resolution fell one vote short of passing, and Palestinian ambitions were squashed yet again. Three months later, much has changed...Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who worked for the court from 2010 to 2013, told VICE News that Palestinian leaders may still choose to refer a case in the future, despite the political repercussions — even if the Bensouda is already studying the issue they want to raise. "If they do make the referral, that will add some pressure on the prosecution to open an investigation," Whiting said. "It's not that the referral removes an impediment to getting the investigation started, but it creates an atmosphere of some expectation and pressure and signals to the prosecution that Palestine is really willing to cooperate with a future investigation."

They were searching for a way to help thousands of students nationwide who had been mired in debt by predatory for-profit colleges. And a group of Democratic senators found the solution buried deep in a federal promissory note signed by every student who takes out government loans: the “defense to repayment” provision, a little-known clause that has become a rallying point for lawmakers and activists in the wake of the shutdown of the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges...“Of course there’s always secret passageways and back doors, but they’re usually not within federal law,” said Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “It was really surprising that this exists.”

The value of a clear understanding of your country’s objectives and the power of personal relationships — along with the wisdom of not drinking too much lemonade — were among the insights former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shared with a Harvard audience Thursday. “Personal relationships do ease things a lot,” said Albright, who served as secretary of state during President Bill Clinton’s second term from 1997 to 2001. “But you can’t let that personal relationship get in the way.” Albright was a guest of the American Secretaries of State Project, a joint effort by the Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Future of Diplomacy Project and the Program on Negotiation. She was joined on stage by the project’s three faculty directors: Nicholas Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics at HKS; Robert Mnookin, Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS); and James Sebenius, Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS). The three faculty members co-teach the “Great Negotiators, Effective Diplomacy, and Intractable Conflicts” class, and their students were in the audience and able to press Albright further on key points.

In a speech on climate change delivered during her visit to China last month, Harvard President Drew Faust described the problem as “a struggle, not with nature, but with ourselves.” During Climate Week April 6-10, Harvard will take a long look at the ongoing struggle to find man-made solutions to this man-made problem...At Harvard Law School, faculty members are debating President Barack Obama’s proposed power plant rules, which aim to reduce greatly the carbon dioxide emissions from existing facilities. Two of the nation’s top environmental lawyers, Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and director of the School’s Environmental Law Program, and Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, have posted online rebuttals to constitutional scholar and Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe’s contention that the proposed rules are unconstitutional.