Media Mentions

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.

An op-ed by Tommy Tobin '16. Paul Ryan walked into his new role as speaker of the House with an ambitious agenda to fix a broken institution...Taking action on simple bills with broad bipartisan support can score the Wisconsin Republican easy legislative victories as he begins his new role. One such bill - The Summer Meals Act, H.R. 1728 - is a straightforward proposal that would support millions of American children in getting access to affordable, nutritious food over the summer months. Legislative action is needed now in order to prepare students, sponsors and state administrators for the summer of 2016.

An op-ed by Bianca Tylek `16. On Friday, only two days after the Boston Globe released my op-ed to share one student's perspective on racism at Harvard Law School, Professor Randall Kennedy used the power of his professorial platform to excuse it. Despite admitting that he was so removed from campus that he was unaware of what minority students were facing (as further demonstrated by his need to poll students on their grievances), he nevertheless released his opinion to the New York Times. And, in doing so, he gave the country what it wanted to hear: today's racism shouldn't faze us. Professor Kennedy began by slyly referring to the almost two-inch wide black tape used to deface black faculty portraits as mere "slivers," immediately looking to diminish their much more important implication. He then continued by questioning the motives behind the action, feeding into the palms of all those who want to doubt racism exists at Harvard Law School. And I begin my analysis of his opinion here.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. This past week an unknown perpetrator vandalized the portraits of Harvard Law School’s black faculty members, mine included. Many students, colleagues, and friends responded to the defacement by expressing gratitude for the contributions that my colleagues and I make to the law school. I cherished these reactions for what they conveyed about my relationships with students, friends, and colleagues. But the vandalism had not wounded me. Coming of age in the Deep South two decades after Brown v. Board of Education, I encountered and contested many varieties of racism: the occasional epithet, intermittent harassment, social isolation, the flattening-out of my personhood into a single attribute—skin color—and the economic disadvantages imposed by Jim Crow. As a result of these experiences, I developed a thick skin and other attributes vital to a happy and productive life...Students of the current generation are drilling down on the qualitative aspects of diversity. Their critique of campus life poses a profound challenge to those who have never seriously contemplated how inclusion might or should change institutional practices inside the classroom and outside of it. Judging from the concerns expressed by groups on many different campuses, I gather that students hope to achieve four major components of qualitative diversity: representation, voice, community, and accountability.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow wants a special committee of faculty and students to gather views on whether the school’s seal, which features imagery from the family crest of a slaveholder benefactor, should be changed...On Monday, [Randall] Kennedy said in an interview that he supports Minow’s decision to foster a dialogue centered around questions about whether the Royall imagery should remain on the law school’s seal.“It seems like precisely the right posture for an institution of higher learning to take,” Kennedy said. “I think it’s a perfectly intelligent response.”“Let’s learn. Let’s think. Let's debate.”

Facing a group of expectant students in a campus lecture hall on Monday, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow did her best to mollify students who have called on her to improve campus race relations, demands that intensified after a racially-charged incident shook the school two weeks ago...“This is a time for serious challenge and serious action,” Minow said in prepared remarks. “It’s a time when we need your talents and commitments more than ever. I called this meeting to discuss efforts underway at Harvard Law School for changes inside the school and work to tackle the challenges in the world.” Those include reconsidering the use of the school’s seal, which some students criticize because of its connection to a family that once owned slaves; changing it, according to Minow, would require the approval of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body. Minow said the school also hopes to increase faculty diversity, while Marcia L. Sells, the Law School’s new dean of students, said she plans to hire a staff member to focus on diversity and inclusion, another demand common among student activists.

As college students across the country press their institutions to confront the experiences of campus minorities, law schools and their students and alumni are increasingly being drawn into the debates. On Monday, Harvard Law School announced the formation of a committee to consider whether the school should continue to use as its seal a shield that was once the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slave owner who endowed Harvard’s first professorship of law. A group of Harvard Law School faculty will determine “whether the Royall crest should be discarded from our shield,” said the school’s dean, Martha Minow, in a statement. “Through that process, we will gain a better sense of what course of action should be recommended and pursued, and we will discuss and understand important aspects of our history and what defines us today and tomorrow as a community dedicated to justice, diversity, equality, and inclusion.”

Harvard Law School students are demanding a revision of the school's seal which features the family crest of founder Isaac Royall, who was a slave owner. Student Derecka Purnell [`17] joins to discuss.

Even as President Barack Obama tries to make a hard case for overhauling sentences, rehabilitating prisoners and confronting racial bias in policing, he has been less clear about the death penalty. Obama has hinted that his support for capital punishment is eroding, but he has refused to discuss what he might call for...Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who taught the president, said: “Though not definitive, the idea that the president’s views are evolving gives me hope that he — like an increasing number of prosecutors, jurors, judges, governors and state legislators — recognizes that the death penalty in America is too broken to fix.”

Harvard professor Cass Sunstein is a prolific writer, but his books tend to be a bit wonkish. With titles like “After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State,” “Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict,” and “The Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle,” Sunstein’s collected works aren’t likely to be at our bedside. But that may be changing. According to the trade mag Publishers Weekly, Sunstein, whose wife is Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has inked a deal to write about pop culture. Well, sort of. Called “The World According to Star Wars,” the book will explore the George Lucas film franchise as it relates to the arc of history, rebellions, politics, law, economics, fatherhood, and culture. The new “Star Wars” movie, called “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” opens next month.

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, TrueAllele Casework, a computer program that extracts genetic profiles from DNA samples, would seem to mark an advance in criminal justice technology. But defense lawyers say it shouldn’t be allowed in court, because Cybergenetics Corp., the firm that owns the program, won’t reveal the software’s source code, which it considers a trade secret. The resulting conflict, which is presently playing out in a Pennsylvania murder trial, poses fascinating and important questions: Do we need to know exactly how a given technique works to consider it scientifically reliable and admissible in court? And is it democratically right to convict, and possibly execute, someone based on a secret process the defendant isn’t allowed to know?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What are the legal prospects for the California girls who want to join the Boy Scouts of America? Five girls, ages 10 to 13, have asked the local council to be admitted as full-fledged Boy Scouts. Should they eventually take their case to court, they won’t be able to rely on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions, because Congress wrote in an exemption for the Boy Scouts. Structurally, the exemption resembles the one that Congress gave Major League Baseball from antitrust laws: It doesn't really have a principled basis, but reflects some combination of tradition and lobbying power.

When Lawrence Lessig ended his issue-oriented quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he vowed to continue his campaign to reform election finance practices and reduce the influence of money in politics. “The fight is not over,” said Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, during a conversation with his colleague Jonathan Zittrain about the lessons learned while campaigning for election finance reform...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lessig. “They [in Congress] focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle, 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy, that’s not an American democracy.”