Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 1960, the great theater critic Martin Esslin argued that the work of several avant-garde European playwrights -- including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Arthur Adamov -- could be unified under the category of "theater of the absurd." Their plays, Esslin explained, “confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on.” The theater of the absurd is characterized, he said, “by the open abandonment of rational devices.”...The stalled nomination of Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next attorney general, has started to look like something straight from Beckett's play.

An op-ed by by Nancy Gertner and Harvey Silverglate. According to the claims of the US Attorney’s office in Boston, the goal behind the continuing grand jury investigation into the Probation Department scandal is to get at the truth. Truth? First, let’s be honest about the grand jury. Despite its well-intentioned origins, the grand jury has become an instrument of the prosecutor, not an independent fact finder. To put “the truth” in the same sentence as “grand jury investigation” should surely raise some eyebrows, particularly after recent grand jury proceedings against police officers, some of which left much to be desired in terms of independence.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright spoke about her experience in international negotiations and interpersonal diplomacy as part of a panel hosted at the Harvard Business School on Thursday...Albright was invited as part of the American Secretaries of State Project, organized by the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. The program, which plans to interview all former Secretaries of State, has previously welcomed former Secretaries George P. Schultz, James A. Baker III, and Henry A. Kissinger. The event featured a panel discussion between Albright and a trio of Harvard professors—Harvard Kennedy School professor R. Nicholas Burns, HLS professor Robert H. Mnookin and HBS professor James K. Sebenius—who also facilitated an audience question and answer session.

The story of how state Senator Eric Lesser `15 will celebrate Passover in the White House with President Obama Friday begins where few grand tales do: in a dim basement room of a Sheraton in Harrisburg, Pa. During the Pennsylvania primary, one of the toughest patches of the 2008 presidential contest, Lesser and other Obama campaign aides organized an impromptu Passover Seder there and were joined by a surprise guest. In the years since, the President, who is Christian, has not only brought the yearly ceremony to the White House, but makes a point of participating and including Lesser and other members of the original crew. So Lesser, after doing the mundane work of a backbench legislator this week — huddling with staff about the closure of a small bridge, talking with a constituent about arts programs, fielding budget queries — will head to Washington and is set to break bread, matzo, with the commander-in-chief in another chapter of an unlikely story.

Nearly 800 former research subjects and their families filed a billion-dollar lawsuit Wednesday against the Johns Hopkins University, blaming the institution for its role in 1940s government experiments in Guatemala that infected hundreds with syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases...Legal experts said the lawsuit's arguments could be a stretch. Today, professors who frequently serve on a volunteer basis with the National Institutes of Health, for example, are generally considered to be acting independently and not in their capacity as university faculty, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard University Law School.

Massive union-backed protests, an improving economy and regulatory action undertaken by the Obama administration all contributed to McDonald’s’s decision Wednesday to raise workers’ wages. But the move won’t likely be enough to take the heat off the fast food giant...“It’s almost implausible to claim that there’s no relationship between Fight For $15 and this wage increase,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard. “It’s good news. It’s not good enough news.”

The Standard Indian Legal Citation (SILC) standard has been recognised by Harvard Law School as one of six citation standards and the only citation manual from Asia. The style which had been accepted by around 32 law schools in 2014 shortly after its launch, as reported by Legally India at the time, has seen an adoption and been downloaded by more than 100 colleges...In a press release, Professor David B Wilkins, Harvard Law School’s vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, said: “In 1926, Erwin Griswold and his student colleagues at the Harvard Law Review published the first edition of “A Uniform System of Citation,” today commonly referred to as “The Blue Book.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’d never heard the acronym AIIB until this week, don’t blame yourself. Strictly speaking, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank doesn't even exist yet. But the Chinese-created alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is turning out to be extremely important. More than 40 countries have applied to join, almost all of them close U.S. allies -- and they've applied despite aggressive American efforts to discourage them. The upstart bank is already emerging as a major foreign policy victory for China, one all the sweeter because it's a direct diplomatic win over the U.S. It raises a very basic question: What's going on here? How can nations that depend on the American superpower for their security -- including protection against China -- so cavalierly ignore U.S. interests in favor of the only global state that can credibly challenge U.S. superpower status?

Four years after pro-democratic protests and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, known as the Arab Spring, offered hope of a new era of calm and stability across the region, much of it has plummeted into chaos, and at a quickening pace. Bloody conflicts and civil wars bedevil Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen; diplomatic ties have frayed between the United States and Israel over Iran and the Occupied Territories; and the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS, is proving durable in its brutal campaign to create a caliphate in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. It is a time of historic political, social, and military transformation in the region and one that is likely to continue, Harvard analysts say...Noah Feldman ’92, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS), said, “The violence now, much of it is centering around locations where the breakdown of sovereignty is near complete. And that’s historically unprecedented.

As Harvard Law School moves to break from the University’s central approach to handling cases of alleged sexual harassment, Law professors are questioning the relationship between their school and Harvard’s central administration and faculty governance structures more broadly. Two Law School professors, Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin, penned an op-ed last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the “cadre of administrators” at Harvard and called for the creation of a faculty senate as a mechanism to ensure faculty participation in major University decisions...In an interview this week, Mnookin said he had been thinking about University centralization issues over the past couple of years, but “it’s certain the importance of it was underscored by the process by which both the decisions on Title IX and with regard to our health policies were adapted.”

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow has appointed a Title IX committee to begin implementing the school’s new set of procedures for responding to cases of alleged sexual harassment, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London...After a group of 28 professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe that criticized Harvard’s policy in October, Minow appointed a committee, chaired by Law School professor John Coates, to draft a new set of school-specific procedures.

When the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that POM Wonderful was overstating pomegranate juice's health benefits in its advertisements, a press release from the FTC, which was challenging POM in court, called the decision “a victory for consumers.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, describing it as “a notable win.” In a sense, it was: The company was banned from trumpeting its juice as an elixir that could help prevent heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction if there wasn't sufficient research done to back up those claims. But in another sense, the decision wasn’t a victory at all. Buried in the FTC’s press release was the reluctant acknowledgement that the Circuit Court denied the FTC the ability to require that POM base its advertising on at least two randomized, well-controlled clinical trials... To arrive at this decision, the Court wasn’t relying on some obscure bit of corporate law; it was relying on the First Amendment. How problematic is it that a company selling at least $100 million worth of juice every year based on sketchy empiricism could defend its preposterous advertising claims in court on free-speech grounds, and still be humored? That’s one question that John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former corporate lawyer, explores in a recent survey of what he calls “the corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” According to Coates, companies are now the beneficiaries of cases involving the First Amendment just as often as individuals, and the frequency of those cases has been rising since the mid-70s.

Liberal Harvard professor Laurence Tribe doesn’t think of himself as aligned with Senate leader Mitch McConnell, but the two men agree that the regulations proposed by the EPA to control greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired plants is an abuse of executive power. Both are tossing hand grenades into President Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change, and although they’ve never talked and don’t know each other, they are a formidable team. Tribe mentored the young Obama and taught him constitutional law at Harvard, so it was a shock to hear him testify last month at a hearing of the House Energy and Power committee that Obama’s plan to gradually reduce pollution from coal-burning plants was the equivalent of “burning the Constitution.” In the same hearing, Tribe tried to distance himself from McConnell, calling the GOP leader’s “just say no” strategy on climate change “reckless” and “irresponsible.” In a lengthy email, Tribe says he had misgivings about the EPA regs when he first became aware of them late last year.

Four of the teams that took part in a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab last weekend will go on to present their practical solutions for reducing institutional corruption to a conference at Harvard Law School later this spring...Scholars, researchers, news reporters, and activists have contributed to the Safra Center’s five-year project under the direction of Lawrence Lessig, studying, mapping, and looking for solutions to the institutional corruption that takes place in all corners of the globe. The project will culminate with a two-day conference, “Ending Institutional Corruption,” at Harvard Law School in May. Judges initially planned to let top three teams present their proposals at the conference, but the ideas were so strong that the organizers decided to let all four teams give at least an abbreviated report.

A recent study claims that "corporations have begun to displace individuals as direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment." Its author [John Coates] joins HuffPost Live to discuss his findings and explain what they mean for free speech.

An article by Jeremy Schwarz `15. They expected him to fail. But 50 years later, while we remember the man Harry Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed Singapore from a British colonial outpost into a prosperous, global city-state, we must not overlook some of his key lessons in leadership. After separation from Malaysia, the future of Singapore looked bleak. Mr Lee inherited a toxic mix of racial unrest, an unemployment rate of 30 per cent, domestic instability and economic uncertainty. Singapore could have followed the path of some of its neighbours: increasing nationalist rhetoric, racial division, economic instability, communist insurgency and continued unrest. Mr Lee could have followed the path of Mr Sukarno, Mr Ferdinand Marcos or even Mr Ngo Dinh Diem. Mr Lee concluded otherwise.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When your state breaks federal law in a way that affects you, can you sue in federal court to make it do the right thing? On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court made doing so substantially harder. In a case involving private health-care providers in Idaho, the justices held that the health workers can’t sue Idaho -- even though the state was paying them less than required under federal Medicaid law. If this sounds weird to you, the fault isn’t yours. The problem lies with the version of federalism that underlies the 5-4 decision. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court’s controlling opinion, bent over backward to say that the Constitution shouldn’t be read to provide an automatic right to sue your state when it violates federal law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Expanding the Rhodes scholarships to China is a great idea -- and not because China under President Xi Jinping is on its way to becoming a constitutional democracy. Since Cecil Rhodes created the scholarship (of which I was a recipient) in his will, its grand aspiration -- which some might find overblown -- has always been to reconcile countries that might otherwise be in conflict.

In what Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow described as a “very unusual event,” University President Drew G. Faust and visiting Law School professor Leon Wieseltier discussed the status of intellectualism and the humanities Tuesday night. The discussion, held in a question and answer format between Faust and Wieseltier as well as members of the crowd at Wasserstein Hall on the Law School campus, revolved around the potentially corruptive influence of technology on public thought. “What we really have to think about is the impact of this technology on cognition and on consciousness and on culture,” said Wieseltier, who is also a fellow at the Brookings Institute, a think tank. Wieseltier tied “the tyranny of the devices” and the rise of “snackable” reading to what he described as the decline of the humanities.

Closing arguments will be heard Monday in the Marathon Bombing trial. Today, the defense rested after calling just four witnesses. Adam Reilly was in the courtroom again today. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, Rev. Jeffrey Brown, of Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church, and Boston Public Radio co-host Margery Eagan discuss.

The Palestinians formally joined the International Criminal Court on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to put international pressure on Israel and exact a higher price for its occupation of lands sought for a Palestinian state...Palestine's court membership could help shift focus to settlements as a legal and not just a political issue, said Alex Whiting, a former official in the international prosecutor's office.