Media Mentions

An op-ed by Conor Ahern ’15 and Lawrence DiCara: The Blizzard of 1888 left Boston gridlocked, and over 1,000 people died in its wake. Tragic as the storm was, there was a substantial silver lining. This catastrophe is often cited as the impetus for the construction of the nation’s first underground subway system, a transportation network that would be shielded from the elements of our occasionally harsh New England climate. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the regional transit system that developed from that late 19th century innovation has been brought to its knees by the winter battering we have taken. The fundamental wisdom of a subterranean transit system, however, has not been challenged by the snowy onslaught, as it is the above-ground portions of the MBTA subway system, along with the regional commuter rail, that have been laid low. That system has become, in many ways, the engine of our regional economy. The delays and frustrations felt by hundreds of thousands of Bostonians – and millions of dollars in adverse economic impacts — have underscored the degree to which the entire eastern Massachusetts region depends on a healthy, well-functioning transit system.

When facing public disinterest, the cold shoulder from the news media, legions of incumbent politicians, a series of unfavorable Supreme Court decisions and more than $6 billion in entrenched interests; walking 150 miles through northern New Hampshire in temperatures as low as negative 20 degrees is the least of your problems. None of which dissuaded the 400 members of the New Hampshire Rebellion. On January 21, on the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court decision, the New Hampshire Rebellion, led by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, descended on Concord, New Hampshire, to protest the corrupting influence of money in politics.

A new article in the Harvard Law Review argues the university's new sexual assault policy makes it too easy to believe victims and automatically discredit those who are accused of sexual misconduct. In an article called "Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement," Harvard law professor Janet Halley identifies scenarios that could potentially lead to biased hearings against accused students. As awareness of rape on campus has grown, many schools have changed their rules so there's a lower burden of proof needed to find students "responsible" for sexual assault.

An op-ed by Richard Lazarus. The President’s decision to open up the Atlantic coast to offshore drilling exploration is a clear expression of his “all-of-the-above" energy strategy. It is also a clear exercise of political horse-trading. No doubt the President hoped to take the sting out of his decision to eliminate drilling off of parts of Alaska by offering parts of the Mid- and South-Atlantic, which have been closed since 1990, in return. In April 2010, in a similar political gambit, the President courted conservative support for his then-pending climate bill by proposing to open the Atlantic coast for drilling. Anticipating environmental opposition, the President confidently asserted that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.” It proved an unfortunate choice of words.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The expansion of Islamic State’s franchise into parts of Libya is horrifying, as the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic laborers shows. It’s also frightening for a different reason. The essence of the Islamic State brand is the assertion of sovereign control over territory. Until now, Libya’s post-revolutionary problem has been fragmentation. The emergence of Islamic State there suggests that over time, Libya's problem could become the opposite: Islamic State might create a unifying umbrella that would subject large parts of the country to its dangerous brand of control.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The decision by a federal judge in Texas on Monday to strike down President Barack Obama’s immigration reform initiative runs to a whopping 123 pages. But the crucial ruling is fairly narrow: In adopting a plan to allow unlawful immigrants to apply for “deferred action,” Judge Andrew S. Hanen said, the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully because it did not allow the public to comment in advance. With this conclusion, Hanen almost certainly overreached.

As Harvard Law School moves to depart from Harvard’s newly centralized procedures for investigating cases of alleged sexual misconduct, a group of Law professors continue to criticize the University-wide policy that defines sexual harassment, claiming that it offers lackluster protections of academic freedom...Calling the policy’s statement on academic freedom “unhelpful,” Janet E. Halley, a Law School professor, argued that “speech [in an academic context] can be a form of sexual conduct under the policy, and if it’s unwanted, speech acts could become the basis for charges of sexual harassment.”

Climate change activists at Harvard University told The Huffington Post this week that they feel optimistic heading into a court hearing Friday on a lawsuit that aims to get the school to divest from fossil fuel companies. Seven students at the university filed the suit in 2014 in an effort to get the nation's richest college to stop what they see as inherent support for an industry that contributes to global warming. The suit claims the Ivy League school's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, is violating its duties as a nonprofit public charity by investing in gas, coal and oil companies. It also says that Harvard has breached its duties by putting profit ahead of the serious and immediate threat of climate change -- which Ted Hamilton [`16], one of the plaintiffs in the suit, notes is "causing grave harm to future generations." "Regardless of the final decision in our case, presenting our claims in a legal arena forces the Harvard Corporation to defend its actions in furtherance of climate change," added Hamilton.

One hundred years ago, in the first two months of 1915, what was then called the Great War — puzzled over by experts gathered at a Harvard conference on Friday ― established its most enduring historical signatures...Moderated by Dean Martha Minow of the Law School, the title of the first panel, “The Transnational Theater of War,” was a reminder, Minow said, of the unprecedented global nature of the conflict. ..In the same panel, Samuel Moyn, a Harvard professor of law and history, was to talk about “Aggression and Atrocity: From the Great War to the Forever War.”

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives...Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. “Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “They don’t have any right of their own.”

Harvard Law School has received comment from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on its new procedures for handling cases of alleged sexual harassment and will implement those procedures “as soon as possible,” according to Robb London, a Law School spokesperson.

An op-ed by Kayleigh McEnany [`16]. In an astonishing display of disrespect, police protesters defiled a fallen officer memorial in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, covering it in fake blood. As if this bloody, distasteful symbol was not enough, one protester knelt down and shot a bird in front of the memorial, an image the activist group “Anonymous” opted to tweet out to it’s 1.45 million followers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you were about to lose your kids to a legal guardian who wasn't you, what rights would you have? You’d think this would be a question of pressing national importance. But when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court guaranteed parents the right to a lawyer in a guardianship proceeding this week, only a local paper noticed. I wouldn't have known about this fascinating case except that it was brought, argued and won by a particularly brilliant former student of mine at New York University School of Law who has devoted her career to representing the indigent. The case is crucially important because it deals with a fundamental problem in child welfare law: who gets to take guardianship of children in troubled situations, and why.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. President Obama’s free community college proposal and college ratings initiatives promise to further the historic expansion of college access begun in 1965, when Congress created the Pell Grant Program, which pried open the doors of higher education to deserving but poor students. But the administration’s chosen means to the praiseworthy end of further expanding college access do not fundamentally challenge inequality in higher education; instead, they reinforce our two-tiered and unequal system. Federal policy instead should encourage academically qualified, lower-income students to matriculate to selective, four-year colleges. A monetary rewards system (a Race to the Top for higher education) or statutory mandates could advance that objective.

An op-ed by Nimra Azmi [`15]. The slayings of Razan Abu-Salha, Yusor Abu-Salha and Deah Barakat has convulsed the Muslim-American community as no other event has since September 11, 2001. It is not simply that we see ourselves reflected back in those three beautiful young people. We see our ugliest fears about the United States reflected back—that our college educations and professional degrees cannot keep us safe, that someday, someone will hate us for our faith or our skin color and no amount of American Dream will safeguard us.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal district judge in Alabama has struck back against state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. The latest development in the conflict between state and federal authority over gay marriage is an order Thursday by federal Judge Callie Granade requiring one particular state probate judge not to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as he had been doing on the basis of an order from Moore. Yet the struggle may not be over. The federal judge's order seems definitive with respect to that one probate judge, Don Davis, in Mobile County. But if the logic of Moore's position were to be followed, that judge could appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals. And other probate judges, who aren't named in the order, could claim that the order doesn't bind them.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does President Barack Obama's proposed authorization for the war against Islamic State go too far or not far enough? This should be a simple question, but it isn't. Legally, the proposal has the effect of mildly extending presidential power to fight Islamic State, not limiting it. Politically, however, it imposes some real-world constraints that weren't there before. The proposal therefore has something for everyone -- but it also gives everyone something to criticize.

An op-ed by Anna Joseph [`16] and Kerry Richards [`17]. Alan Dershowitz--famed defense attorney and former professor at Harvard Law School--has been accused of being one of the individuals who were provided with an underage "sex slave" by Jeffrey Epstein, Dershowitz's friend and client. Dershowitz has not been charged with a crime and is not a party to the lawsuit in which the accusing affidavit was filed. Though neither Dershowitz's liberty nor his property are at stake, he has responded with public and aggressive victim-blaming.

The trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was supposed to have started three weeks ago. But now it's anybody's guess when this highly anticipated trial will begin. ...Why is it taking so long? Is this the longest jury selection ever? Nobody seems to keep track of such things, said Teresa Saint-Amour, a researcher at the Harvard law library. She couldn't find a single database and steered me to a study of the state courts. An analyst for the organization that conducted the study said it likely was outdated.

The youngest to die was a 4-day-old girl, the oldest a 92-year-old man. They were among at least 844 Palestinians killed as a result of airstrikes on homes during Israel's summer war with the Islamic militant group, Hamas...On its own, a high civilian death toll does not constitute evidence of war crimes, and each strike has to be investigated separately, according to interna[tiona]l law experts, including Alex Whiting of Harvard. But it "certainly raises a red flag and suggests that further investigation is warranted," said Whiting, a former top official at the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands.

Twenty Harvard Law School professors who had publicly spoken out against Harvard’s University-wide sexual harassment policy submitted a memo last fall requesting that the Law School investigate its own sexual harassment cases, rather than go through Harvard’s central investigation office...The document, parts of which signatory and Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet shared with The Crimson this week, sheds light on the process that led to the adoption of the local procedures that, if implemented, in many respects will circumvent Harvard’s newly centralized approach to handling sexual misconduct...Law School professor John Coates, who chaired the committee that wrote the school’s new procedures, confirmed in an email that the committee considered the memo’s principles when it drafted the procedures.