Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The quartet of Tunisian civil society leaders who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday played an important part in the country’s thus-far successful democratic, constitutional revolution. But their role was no more decisive than that of the leaders who shepherded the country from the Arab Spring protests to the election of the constituent assembly, or of the elected assembly members who produced, negotiated and ratified a liberal democratic constitution. The best way to think about it is that the Nobel committee wanted to reward the Tunisian people for being the only Arab state to have achieved democracy since the regional upheaval in 2011, and they picked the civil society leaders as the stand-in. The Peace Prize is being given to the Tunisian exception.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Presidential candidates from both parties are focusing, as usual, on the middle class. But what’s that? And why, exactly, does it deserve such attention? Princeton’s Angus Deaton, who on Monday was announced as the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics, has offered some intriguing answers. The most important is this: If you care about how people actually experience their lives, you should be concerned about people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Above that amount, Deaton’s evidence suggests that more money may not particularly matter.

The tension is right there in the agency’s name — the Department of Children and Families — and in its mission statement, which charges it with both protecting children from abuse and holding together unstable families...Now, Governor Charlie Baker has made it clear that he believes the balance has tilted too far in one direction....Still, it remains to be seen if the governor will fundamentally shift the agency’s mission, said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor who argued that such a change would require an overhaul of the policy that separates high-risk and low-risk cases. “Simply saying safety is our priority is what everybody always says,” Bartholet said. “Without specifics, DCF is never going to do that on its own.”

A bill aimed at increasing legal protections for people who buy foreclosed homes is working its way through the state legislature, but faces criticism from opponents who say it would disproportionately harm minorities....Several minority leaders, including NAACP New England president Juan Cofield, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and city councilors Jass Stewart of Brockton and Dana Rebeiro of New Bedford, wrote a letter to Senate leaders opposing the bill. They claimed it would have disproportionate negative impacts in minority communities ravaged by subprime mortgages. They also argued the bill strips victims of illegal foreclosures of their rights. “These homeowners, from communities of color and more broadly, must retain their rights,” the letter stated. “They must have access to adequate legal redress. Denying them the ability to sue to regain title to their illegally foreclosed home is not justice.”

Sheriff's Deputy Charles Hurt was on truant patrol when he came across a teenager in a Baton Rouge park on a cool fall morning. The teenager pulled a gun from his jacket, panicked, he said, and shot Hurt dead. That tragic sequence took place more than a half-century ago, nine days before the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The teenager, Henry Montgomery, is now 69 years old and has been behind bars almost ever since, serving a life sentence. He wants the Supreme Court to give him a chance to get out of prison before he dies...Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree is calling on the justices to consider banning life-without-parole sentences altogether for people who commit even the most heinous crimes before their 18th birthdays. Ogletree said the court should take note of the rapid change in sentencing laws to rule out life terms for the young.

Students from the environmental activist group Divest Harvard have appealed the dismissal of their lawsuit filed against the University last November, which asks the court to compel Harvard to divest its $37.6 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry...Though the plaintiffs may not introduce new arguments at the appeals stage, according to plaintiff and Harvard Law School student Alice M. Cherry, the brief seeks to argue why the dismissal was unwarranted so that the case can proceed in a lower court...“It’s amazing to have the City of Cambridge, Harvard’s own hometown, throw its support behind our lawsuit,” said Joseph “Ted” E. Hamilton, a Law School student, in a press release. “This shows that many people support us and that Harvard owes it to the public to divest from fossil fuels.”

Wynn Resorts and supporters of their plan for a casino in Everett are lashing out in their ongoing feud with the city of Boston. About two dozen Supporters of a planned casino project in Everett gathered outside Boston City Hall Wednesday to protest the city’s ongoing legal fight against the casino plan...The protest comes after Wynn filed a libel lawsuit over press leaks. The suit doesn’t actually name a defendant, but Wynn wants to know how the media obtained a city subpoena of Wynn before it was even served. That subpoena alleges Wynn knowingly made illegal deals for the Everett land with a convicted felon. Wynn says that’s untrue, but Harvard University law professor John Goldberg says the case is an uphill battle for Wynn, since the contents of legal proceedings can’t be considered libel. “And then the only question is whether repeating those privileged contents in some other circumstance would get somebody in trouble, and I think that’s very unlikely.”

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy recently wrote a cover story in Harper’s magazine called "In Defense of Respectability." In it, he lauds the peaceful tactics of the civil rights movement, and he has some criticism for the tactics groups like Black Lives Matter have been using lately, criticism that’s not been well received by everyone.

Oklahoma may have used the wrong drug during an execution in January, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging the state’s lethal-injection protocol, officials said Thursday...Opponents of Oklahoma’s death penalty called Thursday for more information about what happened. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School and prominent critic of the death penalty, said the Justice Department should investigate the situation.

June 25, 2012, has stood as a barrier to potential freedom for thousands of youths who were sentenced before then to life in prison, without a chance of release, for murders they had committed. The Supreme Court several times since then has refused to consider appeals asking that those youths, too, get the benefit of a ruling on that day that such sentences should seldom be imposed. The Justices have now taken on that retroactivity issue, in Montgomery v. Louisiana...The most provocative amicus brief is the one filed by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and its Criminal Justice Institute. Taking no position on either issue that the Court will be reviewing, that brief cited “the national turn away from” juvenile life-without-parole sentences (nine states have abandoned it in the past three years and it is “exceedingly rare” everywhere else), and asserted that the Court should take on the basic question of whether to flatly prohibit all such sentences for juveniles under the Eighth Amendment.

In 1931, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the oldest person ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, turned 90. By then the seemingly ageless judge was widely regarded as a national treasure, so CBS marked the occasion with a prime-time birthday tribute in which he spoke briefly from his home in Washington...Three years ago the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’s papers are housed, launched an online “digital suite” (library.law.harvard.edu/suites/owh) that allows anyone with a computer to access its digitized 100,000-document collection of Holmesiana...I got in touch with Harvard a few months ago and suggested that they post the broadcast online, and now they’ve done so at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HLS.LIBR:22508576. (You’ll need to download RealPlayer to play the file.) To read what Holmes said on that long-ago evening is to be stirred to the marrow. But to actually be able to hear it—to listen to the tremulous yet dignified voice of a man who met Abraham Lincoln and was wounded three times in the Civil War, then spent the better part of three decades sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court—is an experience of another order altogether.

An op-ed by Robert C. Pozen and Mark J. Roe. The clamor against so-called corporate short-term thinking has been steadily rising, with a recent focus on eliminating the quarterly earnings report that public firms issue. Quarterly reports are said to push management to forgo attractive long-term projects to meet the expectations of investors and traders who want smooth, rising earnings from quarter to quarter...But while quarterly reporting has drawbacks, the costs of going to semiannual reporting clearly outweigh any claimed benefits.

For some odd reason, data privacy maven Bruce Schneier is an optimist. It’s odd because, according to Schneier, there’s practically no such thing as data privacy. Just about everything we do these days is under some form of electronic surveillance, with governments and corporations eager to record and analyze our every action. But when Schneier holds forth on Friday at Harvard University, as part of the ongoing HUBweek festivities, he’ll reassure his listeners that the cause is not lost, that our online privacy will someday be ensured. Just give it a decade or two. “It is possible to write laws to prohibit behavior we find immoral,” Schneier said. “We do it all the time.” So it’s just a matter of persuading businesses, governments, and voters that the current level of comprehensive digital surveillance crosses an ethical line. Technology isn’t the issue. “It will take an act of moral will,” he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. After yet another gun-related tragedy, the U.S. is in the midst of a flurry of new efforts to control people’s access to firearms. As before, those efforts are running into serious trouble. The major problem is simple: The Second Amendment has come to be seen as a constitutional barrier, and perhaps even more, a political one. Somewhat awkwardly, presidential candidate Ben Carson captured a widespread view: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” No one should take away people’s rights. But with respect to “the right to arm ourselves,” we have lost sight of our own history.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With the long black robes, red velvet curtain and secret conference room, the U.S. Supreme Court can seem like a pretty weird place. But the court is never weirder than when the death penalty is being discussed, as it was in Wednesday's oral arguments. On the surface, the justices must decide whether co-defendants can have their sentences determined in a single hearing, and whether a jury must be told that factors mitigating against a capital sentence don't need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. But underneath these technical legal issues, something more profound is at stake: the immediate, personal involvement of the nine justices in the intentional killing of human beings.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s internal probe of a potential Teamsters-City Hall nexus is likely to zero in on whether any city employees played any criminal roles or broke ethical rules, according to a former federal judge. “They want to get the bottom of whether there was anything criminal” done by city workers, former federal judge Nancy Gertner said. She added: “And if it’s not criminal, it still may not be good government.”

Hillary Clinton seemed to be barely holding back tears at a town hall in New Hampshire on Monday. Speaking in the aftermath of another tragic mass shooting, this time at an Oregon community college, the Democratic presidential candidate pitched her gun control proposals. In the middle of her remarks, she made a big claim: She said that gun-makers and sellers are "the only business in America that is totally free of liability for their behavior."...However, Clinton "is not totally off base," said John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School and specialist in tort law. He said Congress was particularly "aggressive" in granting the gun industry this legal shield. "Congress has rarely acted to bar the adoption by courts of particular theories of liability against a particular class of potential defendants, especially when that form of liability has not yet been recognized by the courts," he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s not often that “The Wire” comes to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Tuesday, in Ocasio v. U.S., a scenario ripped straight from the greatest television show ever made will be considered in the highest court in the land. It involves (of course) the Baltimore Police Department, corruption and wiretapping. And it raises an arcane-sounding legal question: Can you be convicted of conspiracy to commit extortion if your alleged co-conspirator is none other than the victim of your scheme?

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would disclose after-the-fact changes to its opinions, a common practice that had garnered little attention until a law professor at Harvard wrote about it last year...“This is a welcome step by the court to correct a problem that has persisted for more than a century, and which was exacerbated in recent years by modern technology,” Professor [Richard] Lazarus said. “The court deserves praise for its willingness to make transparent its corrections of past mistakes in its slip opinions.” But slip opinions are early versions of the court’s rulings. It is not clear, Professor Lazarus said, whether the court would take additional steps later in the editing process, which can last five years before authoritative hardcover books are produced, to make all changes public.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday a series of policy changes that respond to public complaints about secret changes to the justices’ decisions, hiring "line-standers" for high-profile oral arguments and "link rot" in the court’s rulings...The move appears to be a direct response to a 2014 Harvard Law review article on the "nonfinality" of court opinions. In the article, Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus revealed that changes, some of them substantial, were being made to already issued opinions without notice to the public. Lazarus is a longtime friend of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Lazarus on Monday called the new policy “certainly a very welcome step by the justices to correct a practice that had persisted for far too long...But Lazarus cautioned that the court's new policy "stops short of making transparent the changes made between the slip opinion and the final bound volume of the U.S. Reports. To address that problem, the court needs to make publicly available the changed pages that are used in publishing the final bound version of the court’s opinions."...The court also announced new procedures to confront "link rot," the phenomenon where web-based links that are included in court opinions disappear or become broken, making it difficult for scholars and others to recover materials that were pertinent to court decisions. A 2013 study by Harvard scholars including presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig found that 50 percent of links in Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

AstraZeneca, one of Britain’s largest businesses, is using a multimillion-pound tax avoidance scheme in the Netherlands, set up months after the UK relaxed its tax laws for multinationals in 2013...Stephen Shay, a senior law lecturer at Harvard Law School who has held senior tax roles in the US Treasury and who gave expert testimony in 2013 on Apple’s tax avoidance structures in a Senate investigation, said that it was “hard to say” how the companies in the Dutch structure “have a real commercial purpose other than to achieve the tax outcome”.