Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of Anthony Elonis, the would-be rapper who threatened to kill his wife, an FBI agent and others in a series of poetic Facebook postings. The decision managed to avoid ruling on the ambiguity of poetic threats, and Elonis is almost certain to be retried. Yet because the court left open exactly what will have to be proved at his retrial, Elonis’s case may drag on.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. This month, as the Supreme Court finalizes some unusually momentous decisions, it’s a good time to ask: Which of the justices' opinions have been the greatest of all time? To qualify as great, an opinion must be foundational, in the sense that it helps orient large areas of the law. It also has to have extraordinary analytic power or sheer eloquence. Here's my short list, in ascending order:

An article by Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Scholar, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. True rainmakers don’t need to be convinced to collaborate: referring work to colleagues and developing a loyal team capable of extraordinary client service is the only way they can build an enormous portfolio. But for many of today’s law firm partners, the link between collaboration and professional success is ambiguous. Is collaboration the source of success, or is it a mere byproduct of rainmakers’ triumphs? When faced with definite rewards for boosting their own billables, does it make sense to hand off work to others? Why should they risk precious control over a client by getting more partners involved?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Dennis Hastert has a secret -- one he was willing to pay $3.5 million to keep quiet, and which the U.S. government is also now hiding. Federal prosecutors have indicted Hastert on charges of structuring cash withdrawals to avoid bank reporting and then lying to them about it. Yet even as the indictment paints an implicit picture of blackmail, the government has apparently agreed with Hastert’s lawyers to suppress whatever was so embarrassing that Hastert was willing to break the law to hush it up. There's something very worrisome about the government secrecy here -- particularly in conjunction with the criminal prosecution on the morally mild charge of withdrawal structuring. I’d sum up the secrecy problem this way: Either Hastert did something terrible, in which case the government shouldn't be suppressing it, or Hastert was being unjustifiably blackmailed, in which case the government shouldn't be prosecuting him for breaking the withdrawal laws to avoid ruin.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is Thursday's $1.2 billion antitrust settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries a victory for consumers? Or is it a sign of government enforcement run amok? The answer to that question, it turns out, goes back to a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case, FTC v. Actavis, in which five justices allowed the FTC to pursue a new kind of antitrust litigation. And the issue at the heart of that case was fascinating: What happens when the good kind of monopoly created by a patent runs headlong into the bad kind of monopoly created by collusion between merchants?

To honor the life work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, L ’59, LL.D. ’11, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) convened a panel discussion of the Roberts Court on Radcliffe Day, traditionally held on the Friday after Commencement...The panel, she said, would discuss some of these calls, moderated by Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and senior research fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. “I cannot think of a better umpire,” Cohen said of Marshall, who received the Radcliffe Medal in 2012 (she is also a director of Harvard Magazine Inc.). The panelists were Linda Greenhouse ’68, former Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, now a journalist in residence and lecturer at Yale Law School; Michael Klarman, Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, the author of the Harvard Magazine feature “How Same-Sex Marriage Came to Be”; Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D. ’05, an assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law; and John Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, Bromley professor of law at HLS.

Each year when Harvard Law School students decided which professor’s section to seek for a course that goes by the shorthand name “federal courts,” many chose Daniel J. Meltzer because of his reputation for running a demanding class. “They wanted him. They wanted the rigor,” said Richard Fallon, a Harvard Law professor and longtime friend. “They knew that if they could somehow pass muster under the Meltzer standard they were going to be better lawyers than they would be otherwise.”...Mr. Meltzer, whose caring nature drew as much praise from colleagues as his legal brilliance, died of cancer last Sunday in Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was 63 and lived in Cambridge.

The Notorious RBG was in town Friday. That’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yes, the Supreme Court justice, honored at Harvard University for her work as a pioneer in gender equality, is having a cultural moment...Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told stories of Ginsburg’s long push for gender equity in her professional — and personal — life. At one point during her time as a professor, Supreme Court litigator, and speaker in demand across the country, said Klarman, she received a series of calls about her son James acting up in class. “Finally, exasperated at the repeated phone calls, Ginsburg responded to one of them as follows: ‘This child has two parents. I suggest from now on you alternate between them when you need to speak to someone about James,’ ” said Klarman, who once clerked for the justice. “Ginsburg reports that even though James’s behavior did not materially improve, the phone calls ceased because the school would not dream of bothering a busy male tax attorney.”

An op-ed by Bonnie Docherty. What would happen if countries took a step beyond remote-controlled drones and used weapons that targeted and killed people on their own, without any human intervention? Who would be responsible if one of these weapons made a fatal mistake, and who could be punished? The answer is no one. Such fully autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” are under development in several countries. But the robots’ use of force would undermine the fundamental legal and moral principle that people should be held responsible for their wrongdoing.

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Were it not for Harvard Law School professor Janet E. Halley, the national debate surrounding sexual assault on college campuses may well be in a markedly different place...Halley’s reaction to Harvard’s new sexual misconduct policy was not just disapproval; to the legal and feminist scholar, the issue at hand was more than just disgruntling bureaucratic decision making. Harvard’s—and the government’s—approach to adjudicating campus sexual harassment, Halley believes, represented an inconsolable breach from the principles of due process and an alarming example of some feminist principles taken too far.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. The current code word being tossed around to protect political correctness from competition in the marketplace of ideas is “unsafe.” “I feel unsafe” has become the argument stopper on many university campuses. Efforts have been made to shut down controversial events or speakers, some of which have succeeded, at MIT, the University of Michigan, Northeastern University, Oxford, Hampshire College, Smith College, and other great universities on the grounds that students would feel “unsafe.” Students must, of course, be and feel physically safe in their dorms, classrooms, and campuses. That’s what university and city police are for: to protect against physical assaults and threats. But no one on a university campus should be or feel safe or protected when it comes to the never-ending war of ideas.

An op-ed by Eric Lesser `15. One of many special things about Harvard is that its students come from all fifty states and every region on earth. It’s part of what makes our time in Cambridge so unique and enriching. But something happens to this diverse group over four years. While students enter from all over the country and the world, only about one quarter return to their home state. After Commencement, nearly two-thirds of Harvard graduates move to just four places: New York City, Washington, DC, Boston or California. These are all nice locations, of course, filled with exciting opportunities and interesting things to do. I’ve spent a lot of time in each place. But if you’re still looking for a way to make an impact, consider another option: go home.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. In 1924, Clarence Darrow represented Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, men accused of a senseless, thrill killing of a young man. The defendants were well off, raised in comfort; Leopold was about to enter Harvard Law School. They were 19 and 18, respectively, at the time of the homicide. The victim was Robert “Bobby” Franks, just 14 years old. Given the publicity, which was unheard of for the time, Darrow counselled his clients to plead guilty and throw themselves on the mercy of the judge, rather than have a jury decide their fate. He conceded that he did this because he was afraid to submit the case to a jury. (Each received a sentence of life imprisonment plus 99 years.) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not have that option. The federal death penalty statute that was reinstated in 1988 (and expanded in 1994) required a jury to decide the aggravating and mitigating factors that determine the death penalty. A defendant can waive the death penalty jury and go before a judge, as Darrow’s clients did, but only with the prosecutor’s agreement. The prosecutors in Tsarnaev’s case would not agree.

Last July, Harvard could seemingly breathe a sigh of relief. The University had just unveiled a new policy and set of procedures intended to centralize and revamp its approach to handling sexual harassment and to ensure compliance with the anti-sex discrimination law Title IX...But within days, the sense of ease faded, once again, into months-long controversy, criticism, and debate....Elizabeth Bartholet, a Law School professor who signed the Globe letter, said she wishes Harvard had taken more of a leadership role against the federal government, which she claims is pressuring universities to lead investigation processes that deny due process rights to the accused...Janet E. Halley, one of the Law professors who signed the Globe letter and has played a leadership role in pushing for changes to the Law School’s Title IX procedures, also argued that engaging students is crucial. “We really need to be walking towards the students and saying, 'What is this really about?'” Halley said.

Daniel Meltzer, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a top legal adviser to President Obama, died May 24 at a hospital in Boston. He was 63.

More than a year after the fight for legal personhood for the research chimpanzees Hercules and Leo, the apes and their lawyers got their day in court. At a hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday, a judge heard arguments in the landmark lawsuit against Stony Brook University, with a decision expected later this summer. At stake: the question of whether only human beings deserve human rights. ...In the other appeals court decision, judges declared that chimps are not legal persons because they can’t fulfill duties to human society. But that rationale arguably denies personhood to young children and mentally incapacitated individuals, as several high-profile legal scholars, including Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe, pointed out. He filed a brief on behalf of the Nonhuman Rights Project, saying the court “reached its conclusion on the basis of a fundamentally flawed definition of legal personhood.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does the Constitution guarantee one person, one vote? Or is it one citizen, one vote? This deceptively simple question is actually profound -- and the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide it in the term that will begin in October. The answer will define the nature of American democracy for generations to come.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It wasn't exactly extraordinary rendition. But when Swiss police arrested seven officials of FIFA, the international football federation, for extradition to the U.S., there were some echoes of the secret terrorism arrests. Soccer is a global game, and it matters more to almost everyone than to Americans. So why is the U.S. acting as the international sheriff and grabbing up non-U.S. citizens to try them domestically for corrupting the sport worldwide? And more to the point, why is this legal? It turns out the legal basis for the FIFA prosecutions isn't all that simple or straightforward -- and therein lies a tale of politics and sports. The prosecutions are being brought under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, which was designed to prosecute crime syndicates that had taken over otherwise lawful organizations.

In 2013, Jennifer Chung was working as a software engineer in Seattle when she decided to take CopyrightX, an online legal course offered through Harvard’s edX collaboration with other universities. Now she’s a second-year student at Harvard Law School...CopyrightX is offered to different student populations in different ways. For instance, the in-person version of the course is offered in a traditional classroom to HLS students. The online version, which is taught in parallel with the campus course, has been offered since edX began in 2012. The third, hybrid version of the course began almost by accident, according to William Fisher, the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law, the course’s main instructor. That first year, he said, a former student asked if she could use the CopyrightX material to teach a parallel course to her students in Jamaica. Fisher agreed. During the course’s second year, instructors at 10 institutions around the world offered it, combining their own in-class instruction with CopyrightX’s online lectures and reading materials. This year, the number of affiliated courses grew to 18, at institutions from Australia to Africa to the Middle East to Europe to the Caribbean to South America.

“We present the Radcliffe Medal to an individual who has been a powerful and impressive force for change, someone who takes risks and forges ahead. These are hallmarks of Radcliffe.” Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, made this statement in announcing that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, is this year’s Radcliffe Medal recipient...Moderated by Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, a former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, a senior research fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and the 2012 Radcliffe Medalist, “A Decade of Decisions and Dissents” will feature the following panelists: Linda Greenhouse ’68, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School, and former Supreme Court correspondent, The New York Times; Michael Klarman, Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Harvard Law School; Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D. ’05, assistant professor of law, Georgia State University College of Law; John Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, Bruce Bromley Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.