Media Mentions

As President Obama took the stage at a hotel ballroom on Tuesday to deliver his latest defense of the Affordable Care Act, you had to wonder who exactly he was trying to reach. Was it the members of the Catholic Health Association—the supportive audience in front of him? Republicans in Congress? The divided public at large? Or perhaps, was it just the two particular Catholics—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy—who at this moment hold the fate of Obama’s healthcare law in their hands?...Yet there’s less evidence that even the most persuasive use of the bully pulpit can sway the justices. “Would it help or hurt? I can’t imagine it’ll make any difference, and I can’t imagine he thinks it’ll make any difference,” said Charles Fried, the Harvard law professor who argued cases before the court as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. (Fried has weighed in on the Obama administration’s side in King v. Burwell.)

...Uber, with a head-spinning valuation of $50 billion, has become a dominant force in the passenger transportation industry in large part by luring more drivers to its platform than anyone else. In an effort to maintain that edge and expand its pool of self-employed drivers beyond those who already own a car, the company has been steering potential drivers with bad credit to subprime lenders whose leases lock borrowers into years of weekly payments at sky-high interest rates...Roger Bertling, an attorney and Harvard Law School instructor who specializes in predatory lending, says these terms are bad even compared with those generally used with subprime borrowing. “That [lease] is as bad as any I’ve seen on the predatory lending level for autos,” he says of the Santander agreement. While borrowers with poor credit always face high interest rates, Bertling cites the automatic weekly payment deductions and restrictions against personal use of the vehicle as being unique in the subprime auto loan industry.

The cell-phone industry, leery of any attempt to link its products to radiation, sued Berkeley on Monday over a new ordinance requiring consumers to be warned that carrying a switched-on phone in their pockets or bra might exceed federal safety standards....Berkeley officials said they were confident the ordinance would be upheld. Councilman Max Anderson, the measure’s lead sponsor, said the warning language was taken directly from manufacturers’ statements in product manuals. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, helped to draft the ordinance and has agreed to defend it without charge. “I believe Berkeley has a right to assure its residents know of the existing safety recommendations,” Lessig said by e-mail.

Immediately after the police and the F.B.I. on Tuesday shot and killed a black Muslim man who had been under surveillance for possible terrorism, law enforcement officials moved quickly to share information with civic and religious leaders, hoping to quell any potential unrest....At a news conference on Thursday afternoon, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor, said he was representing the Rahim family. He said he was concerned that the police appeared to have had no surveillance warrants. But he said the family was grateful for the chance to see the video before it became public, which they did Thursday evening.

Edward Snowden is claiming victory this week, after President Obama signed legislation that significantly curbs federal surveillance powers for the first time in a generation. But the world’s most famous American leaker is still stuck in Russia, with the U.S. having revoked his passport and indicted him on espionage charges that would likely lead to a lengthy prison sentence, should he step back on American soil...“In the context of laws that are very broad, the power to selectively prosecute those that expose things that are critical of the administration’s behavior, while not prosecuting — or prosecuting for a very limited offense — those who leak in a way that supports the administration ... is an abuse of power itself,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The fact that Snowden remains a fugitive after spurring changes in the law “says more about us and our system than about him,” Benkler added. It’s “a profoundly distorted view of American democracy,” he said.

...But Bobby Jindal, the Ivy League educated Rhodes Scholar who once pilloried his fellow Republicans by demanding they no longer be the “stupid party,” may also have a trick up his sleeve, a legitimate reason to think that he could, at the very least, quickly but quietly build a competitive campaign. That reason’s name is Timmy Teepell, and he is almost certain to be the man behind the curtain of Jindal’s anticipated presidential campaign...“First we have contract soldiers, now we have contract government officials,” Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law professor and author of the book “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It,” tells me. “It’s a beautiful way to evade the law — and increasingly common.” To be sure, as Lessig implies, evading the law is not the same as breaking the law.

It’s not often that the talk after a film is the highlight of the night. But judging by audience reaction, that was the case Thursday as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig stepped onto the stage at Seattle’s Town Hall. The audience roared and lept to its collective feet as Lessig placed his Mac on the lectern. The evening’s first course may have been the awarding-winning documentary, Killswitch, but for many in this audience, Lessig was the real attraction.

The recent documentary The Hunting Ground asserts that young women are in grave danger of sexual assault as soon as they arrive on college campuses...The film has two major themes. One, stated by producer Amy Ziering during an appearance on The Daily Show, is that campus sexual assaults are not “just a date gone bad, or a bad hook-up, or, you know, miscommunication.” Instead, the filmmakers argue, campus rape is “a highly calculated, premeditated crime,” one typically committed by serial predators...The second theme is that even when school administrators are informed of harm done to female students by these repeat offenders, schools typically do nothing in response...One of the four key stories told in the film illustrates both of these points. It is the harrowing account of Kamilah Willingham, who describes what happened during the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2011, while she was a student at Harvard Law School. ..What the evidence...shows is often dramatically at odds with the account presented in the film.

The family of the man killed by investigators in a Roslindale parking lot as he allegedly wielded a knife called on Thursday for a “complete and transparent investigation,” including asking whether officers exceeded their authority in stopping him. Harvard law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., speaking on behalf of Usaama Rahim’s relatives, said family members had seen no behavior to suggest that the 26-year-old had embraced extremism. Sullivan said Rahim’s family, who stood in the parking lot where Rahim died, had reached no conclusions about what happened Tuesday and pledged to “enter into a joint relationship with investigators to get to the truth.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did the Department of Justice go too far in 2012 when it apparently expanded the National Security Agency’s authority for warrantless searches of Internet traffic to search domestic data for signs of foreign hacking? The text of the secret Justice memos isn’t part of the latest batch of material revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. But a reading of the leaked materials doesn’t (yet) reveal a smoking gun that would obviously exceed the Constitution or legal authority. The searches were expanded -- but legal safeguards were also put in place.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Barack Obama administration has said it won’t reconsider the long-standing rule against paying ransoms in its review of policy concerning U.S. citizens kidnapped by terrorists abroad. That’s a mistake -- morally, politically and legally. In theory, it’s great to say that the U.S. government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. In practice, we negotiate with terrorists all the time. And it’s outrageous that family members of kidnapping victims would be threatened with criminal prosecution for trying to save their loved ones' lives. The hostage-policy review should air these issues. If it doesn’t, then it will be seriously flawed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk of President Barack Obama’s immigration initiative has slowed now that the program is stalled in court, and may not be implemented until the end of his term, if at all. But this week, the Supreme Court decided an immigration case, Mellouli v. Lynch, that has meaningful implications for potential deportees convicted of crimes. The case made few headlines, because its consequences weren’t obvious to nonspecialists. Nevertheless, on close reading, the case matters -- and it raises important questions about how the U.S. decides whom to deport.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The proposed USA Freedom Act passed by the House is far from perfect -- but it does make some potentially meaningful improvements to move the U.S. away from a system of secret legal decisions made by a court that only hears the government’s side of the argument. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have proposed two amendments that would gut the act’s reforms to the existing bad system. It’s worth taking note of both, because both go to the very essence of what it means to be governed under the rule of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the U.S. be the international sheriff, enforcing its laws aggressively across borders to assure fairness and fight corruption? The prosecution of FIFA, the world's soccer governing body, has been met with mostly positive reaction (apart from the cynical Vladimir Putin) -- which supports a broad use of this power. The U.S. Supreme Court now has the chance to decide whether it will consider an analogous issue in the context of an antitrust suit brought by Motorola Mobility: Do U.S. laws authorizing private antitrust lawsuits extend to cartels that sell to subsidiaries of U.S. companies?

Foreclosure lawyers, take note: A massive foreclosure prevention workshop held at Gillette Stadium in 2008 may not qualify as a face-to-face meeting between lenders and borrowers...Julie E. Devanthéry of Harvard Law School's Legal Services Center represents the borrowers. She says Wells Fargo tried to argue that the HUD regulation merely requires that a lender representative have a meeting in the same room with borrowers, while she countered that the regulation contemplates "something much more nuanced and personalized."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The universal voter registration system that Hillary Clinton is calling for is a terrific idea. Free speech and freedom of religion are every American's right; no paperwork is required to get them. To be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures or to enjoy a right to a jury trial, there is no need to register with the authorities. The right to vote should be treated the same way.

An op-ed by David Harris and Johanna Wald. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall spoke to a crowd of 15,000 at Harvard University’s commencement...“The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle,” stated George Marshall in the speech. Indeed. We propose to create a new Houston/Marshall Plan (named after civil rights giants Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall), focused on helping communities restore themselves after decades of intentional disinvestment. This new Houston/Marshall Plan will advance strategies, innovations, and solutions designed by those living and working in these neighborhoods. It is their voices that have been routinely ignored or silenced in public policy discussions.

When deciding how much to pay their senior executives, the directors at Jarden Corp.—the owner of brands including Yankee Candle, Rawlings sports equipment, and Bicycle playing cards—use what might seem to be an unlikely measuring stick: the top managers at Oracle Corp., the world’s largest data-base maker. Oracle is one of 14 companies Jarden identified in 2011 as a “peer”to help it gauge the going rate for executive pay—a common practice among boards when setting compensation for top managers...Jarden isn't alone in picking bigger companies, or aspirational peers, for its group. The practice can be a way for corporations to signal the quality of their executives to investors, says Craig Ferrere [`17], a former University of Delaware fellow who co-authored a 2012 paper on peer groups with finance professor Charles Elson...The idea to survey pay at companies of comparable size was hatched in the 1950s by Milton Rock, then a compensation consultant at Hay Group, says Ferrere. As businesses began operating globally, the managerial skills needed to run them were largely the same. Rock argued executives had become participants in a “global exchange of talent,” Ferrere wrote.

As a student at Harvard Law School, native St. Louisan and former tennis pro Blake Strode would often spend his weekends in Boston knocking on the doors of recently foreclosed homeowners. Sometimes the families wouldn’t even know their houses were in foreclosure, said Strode, who graduated with honors in May...Strode has decided to return to St. Louis to work with the Arch City Defenders, the nonprofit that has pushed for systematic reform of municipal courts in Missouri. Strode said there’s a lot of energy focused on building a more equitable region in his hometown, and he wants to be part of “harnessing” that energy towards helping marginalized residents.

...Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig (@lessig) talks about money corrupting politics and how to fix it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Striking a blow not only for religious liberty, but also for diverse standards of beauty, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday that Abercrombie & Fitch could not deny employment to a young woman because she wears a headscarf for religious reasons. The court also clarified that the job applicant, Samantha Elauf, didn't have to tell her interviewer that she needed a religious accommodation. If the company chose not to hire her because it didn't want to make an accommodation by allowing her to wear the headscarf, that amounted to prohibited religious discrimination.