Media Mentions

...Indeed, less than 20% of the provisions relate to trade – the rest are economic and political issues. Obama's law mentor, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe together with other very senior US law experts agree that this is not a trade agreement. "It's about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When Texans, including Governor Greg Abbott, give credence to the possibility that the U.S. military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise is a pretext to occupy Texas and confiscate the people's guns, it's easy to dismiss them as paranoid fantasists. And certainly, those concerns are demonstrably paranoid. But it's paranoia that reflects a quintessentially American concern about the risks of a standing army -- one that goes back to James Madison, and is tied to the origins of the Second Amendment.

...“I think she really made the government angry because of her human rights work,” said Teng Biao, one of China’s best-known civil rights lawyers and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. “These lawyers are well organized and they are well connected. They can mobilize people through social media.”

...Readers have been shocked, dismayed, disillusioned and disoriented. But one thing they perhaps should not be, according to Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, is surprised.

...While circuit courts aren’t bound by each other’s rulings and the cases are not identical, the 10th Circuit’s narrow view of the Commerce Clause is sure to be raised in Minnesota’s appeal, said Ari Peskoe, energy fellow at Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative, which tracks energy litigation.

An article by Ted Hamilton '16. The video is no less horrifying for being familiar: a young black man surrounded by about 20 police officers, nearly all of them white, being beaten while offering no resistance. Tyree Carroll had been biking to his grandmother’s home in northwest Philadelphia late one April night when officers stopped him on suspicion of narcotics possession. What happened appears to be a textbook case of police brutality, at least according to the cellphone video of the incident released this month: a chokehold, repeated blows to the face and body, and hurled epithets. A bruised Carroll, the Philadelphia Police Department later said in a statement, was “transported to the hospital after intentionally striking his own head against the protective shield located in the police vehicle.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Japan’s Diet has begun the process of passing legislation that would authorize the country’s self-defense forces to fight in foreign conflicts, in apparent violation of the country’s pacifist constitution. And that’s a good thing, despite the apparent danger it poses to the rule of law. Behold the power -- and the danger -- of a living constitution.

Joining me is Congressman Bobby Scott, Democrat from Virginia, who is pushing a major criminal reform bill through Congress and Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree... One of the things that we`ve been doing...for race and justice at Harvard, we`ve been talking about how important it is to deal with mass incarceration, to deal with the fact that too many people are in jail, and we like this idea the president is thinking about people need to be treated and helped and given a second chance like we talked about decades ago. And I think that`s what is going to be very important.

Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth Mack weighs in on President Obama's unprecedented remarks about rape allegations surrounding Bill Cosby.

An article by Cass Sunstein. When Americans think about Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell. Does it make a plausible argument for continuing to display the Confederate flag? Not even close. But it does raise a host of questions—about winners’ narratives, about honor and humiliation, about memory, about innocence and guilt, about men and women, about what’s taken for granted, about the particularity of human lives, and about parallel worlds.

Last month, the California Labor Commission ruled that an individual Uber driver was an employee. Today, the Department of Labor has issued a set of guidelines that suggests that all of them might be. ...Harvard labor law professor Benjamin Sachs told BuzzFeed News that the memo “clarifies the DOL’s view of what it means to be an employee for purposes of minimum wage, overtime, and family leave. Courts that defer to this interpretation are likely to conclude that Uber and Lyft drivers — and most other on-demand workers — fit the bill. After all, according to the labor department, you can be an ‘employee’ even if you set your own schedule and even if your work is never directly supervised.” But, Sachs added, while the guidelines do make a statement, it would be “not that radical” for a court to come to a decision that was not in alignment with the DOL’s new guidelines.

[Randall] Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, is the author of "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." In this book, subtitled "Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law," Kennedy offers a firm argument explaining why he sees affirmative action as a necessity in this country. Looking back on his own academic history as a student at St. Albans School for Boys, Princeton University and Yale Law School from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Kennedy explains, "An affirmative action ethos played a role in my admittance and flourishing at each of these selective, expensive, and powerful institutions. This ethos consists of a desire to make amends for past injustices, a commitment to counter present but hidden prejudices, a wish to forestall social disruption, and an intuition that racial integration will enrich institutions from which marginalized groups have largely been absent."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. An executive order from President Barack Obama requires that the Environmental Protection Agency analyze the costs and benefits of its regulations. But how exactly can it measure the economic benefits of the coming restrictions on greenhouse gases? For both policy and law (including the inevitable court challenges), it's a crucial question. This month, the administration provided a big part of the answer with a new report from its Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, which is intended to capture in dollar terms the damage from 1 ton of carbon emissions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump's anti-immigrant views have done a good deal for his presidential polling numbers. There's also reason think he's done the country a favor, by forcing politicians on the right to repudiate that anti-immigrant sentiment. In Europe when such rhetoric rises, it's bad news. Anti-immigrant politics are usually there to stay, and the xenophobia pushes the whole political scene rightward. Denmark is a textbook case. But in the U.S., the opposite seems to be happening. Sure, the anti-immigrant sentiment is playing well in polls for now. But instead of following Trump, or copying him, the right-leaning candidates with more political experience are staking out pro-immigrant territory or at least anti-anti-immigrant positions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The European political project is looking rather shaky in the wake of the will-they-or-won't-they Greek bailout. But you’d never know it from the Iran deal announced Tuesday. In its fine print, the nuclear pact gives the European Union the immediate power to make the treaty into an offer the U.S. can’t refuse. And, going forward, it gives the EU the crucial vote in determining whether Iran is complying with its promise not to make a nuclear weapon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Today is the worst day of the George W. Bush administration. The deal U.S. President Barack Obama has struck with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program amounts to a pragmatic recognition that Iran has joined the U.S. as a crucial regional player not just in the Persian Gulf but also in the whole Middle East. Iran's rise wouldn't have been possible -- and the deal wouldn't have been necessary -- had the U.S. not unleashed Iran from the regional power that did the most to contain it: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The Twitter takeover hoax this week is indicative of an overvalued stock market...One study by Laura Frieder of Purdue University and Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University, found that the stocks mentioned in those otherwise annoying emails experienced a huge price increase, as well as a big jump in volume, after the messages were sent. Clearly, investors’ skepticism is being trumped by an eagerness to believe. As Zittrain told me: “Greed all too easily colors our objectivity,” and this is true for all types of investors.

A book review by Randall Kennedy. In 1992, a law professor named Monroe Freedman published an article in Legal Times, a magazine for practitioners. He asserted that Atticus Finch, the iconic hero of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys...Dismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman’s impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself. The most dramatic feature of her “new” novel, “Go Set a Watchman” — written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” but published 55 years afterward — is the revelation that Atticus, the supposed paragon of probity, courage and wisdom, was a white supremacist.

It began as a typical college hookup: two students at UC San Diego met at a party last year, began drinking and ended up in bed. The encounter snowballed into a sexual assault complaint, university investigation and a finding that the male student should be suspended. But the accused student fought back in court and won — marking what is believed to be the first judicial ruling in recent years that a university failed to provide a fair trial in a sexual misconduct case. Some legal experts said Tuesday that the finding could have a broad national impact...Last fall, 28 Harvard Law School faculty members wrote an article criticizing their campus procedures on sexual assault cases as lacking "the most basic elements of fairness and due process" and "overwhelmingly stacked against the accused." They forged an agreement with Harvard to develop their own process for law school cases, including the right to appointed counsel, stronger procedures for cross-examination and selection of independent investigators without university ties, according to Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor.

A letter by Tommy Tobin `16. While many young people are enjoying the sun this summer, more than 250,000 are at risk of hunger. When school’s out for the summer, low-income students and their families face the challenge of making their limited food dollars go even further. South Carolina’s summer nutrition programs provide much-needed assistance for low-income children and their families over the summer, when free or reduced-price lunches at school are less available. They fed more than 67,000 children last summer.

An op-ed by Michael Klarman. The Supreme Court reflects shifting social mores at least as much as it influences them. Rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell were inconceivable until enormous changes in the surrounding social and political context had first occurred. Before Brown, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the first black general in American history, President Harry S Truman issued executive orders desegregating the federal military and the civil service, and Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball. Even in the South, black voter registration increased from 3 percent in 1940 to 20 percent in 1950, and blacks began serving on juries and in local political offices for the first time since Reconstruction. Justice Sherman Minton noted “a different world today” with regard to race, during the Brown deliberations, and Felix Frankfurter remarked upon “the great changes in the relations between white and [black] people.”