Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal judge who released Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk, from jail wasn't following the usual protocol: He was trying to effect a compromise on gay marriage. Ordinarily, someone jailed for disobeying a direct judicial order wouldn’t be freed unless she agreed to comply with it. Davis didn’t.

Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment...But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad...Halley’s critique has reverberated — as the latest salvo in a long-running war, with deep intellectual roots, over how to grapple with rape and sex as a feminist. In the late 1970s, when Janet Halley was writing a dissertation on 17th-century poets like Donne and Milton, a young lawyer and political scholar named Catharine MacKinnon opened new possibilities for the women’s movement by conceiving the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

First, he started a crowd-sourced campaign to elect members of Congress willing to change the way campaigns are financed. Now, he’s decided to run for office himself, but not just any old office – the presidency. Harvard Law School professor, author, and activist Lawrence Lessig, who now can add Democratic presidential candidate to his resume, is crowd-sourcing his campaign. If it seems familiar, it’s because it is. Lessig adopted a similar formula when he helped start Mayday PAC, billed as the super PAC to end all super PACs.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Stock buybacks are big and controversial. Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the US Democratic presidential nomination, says they undercut the American economy at the expense of needed investment. Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, wrote that buybacks “deliver immediate returns to shareholders” while their companies are “underinvesting in innovation, skilled workforces or essential capital expenditures”. High-end publications pronounce stock buybacks to be killing the American economy and, as buybacks spread in Europe and Asia, they have become more controversial there too. Fine companies, the idea runs, sacrifice their future to satisfy cash-hungry hedge funds. Buybacks are indeed up, amounting to about a half-trillion dollars annually. But is that bad? Is American business really liquidating itself, destroying businesses with buybacks? No.

Chief executives love to declare that “people are our greatest asset.” It is rarely clear what they mean, but a group of investors managing approximately $2.5 trillion is seeking to find out...One of the key reports reviewed by the group so far is a meta-analysis of 92 studies examining the relationship between human-capital policies and financial performance, released this spring by the Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School and funded by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute. Of the 92 studies, 67 found a positive correlation between investments in training and HR policies and outcomes like profitability, stock price and sales growth.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused a federal judge's direct order to issue marriage licenses, was freed from jail Tuesday. But some conservatives have questioned why she was there in the first place, comparing her stand with that of President Barack Obama, who says he won’t deport some immigrants in the U.S. without legal authority; with the noncooperation of "sanctuary city" mayors with federal immigration authorities; and with the refusal of California Governor Jerry Brown to defend Proposition 8 when it was challenged in federal court. These public officials, the conservatives point out, refused to follow the law. Yet they are not only free, but also lauded by liberals. This charge of hypocrisy requires a serious response.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk about mixed signals. Last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a 300,000-man reduction in the size of the People’s Liberation Army -- a decision at least partly calculated to look like China has no aggressive intentions toward the rest of the world. Yet at almost the same time, he sent five Chinese ships into the Bering Sea near Alaska, in an unprecedented maneuver timed to coincide with the last day of President Barack Obama’s visit to the state. This sort of symbolism is pretty close to the textbook definition of muscle-flexing aggression.

Next week, Apple is expected to make a long-awaited update to its Apple TV set-top box, which hasn't been refreshed since 2012...Security experts, however, believe this could cause trouble. There are a lot of unanswered questions around these "always listening" devices that have yet to be answered, such as how they can use the data, who they can share it with, and whether or not they're using the data for alternative purposes. "[The license agreements] have an extraordinarily wide latitude," Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law, said to Business Insider. "And that's a huge worry."

...The organization that Adam and Don work for, Food for Free, is one of a few in Boston seeking to solve two of America’s major problems at once: We have a lot of unwanted food that goes to waste, and a lot of people who go hungry...This law seems like it should be a fantastic opportunity for food rescue operations like Food for Free. But it might not work out that way. “I think the one weakness is the laws don’t really incentivize you donating the food as opposed to, say, composting it or sending it to the anaerobic digester,” says Emily Broad Leib, an assistant professor of law at Harvard who directs the university’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. While composting food is a better option than throwing it out, it too has a significant carbon footprint.

Work is becoming a much less pleasant place. From Uber drivers without job security to salesmen whose every move is electronically tracked to accountants expected to answer e-mails at all hours of the day and night, the nature of work is evolving — often in worker- unfriendly ways...“We’re living in an era of real uncertainty and dislocation when it comes to the world of work,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School professor who studies labor issues. “It’s a moment where we need to think carefully and reevaluate the policies we have governing the labor market.”

Following a months-long search to replace Ellen M. Cosgrove as Harvard Law School's dean of students, Marcia Sells, an administrator at Columbia, will assume the post on Sept. 21...Students from affinity groups and student government played a role in formulating a job description for the position, and they helped interview finalists, according to students involved in the process and Jeffrey C. McNaught, the acting dean of students. Faye E. Maison, a student leader of Students for Inclusion—a student group at the Law School that focuses on the common concerns of different affinity groups—said questions focused on issues of mental health and diversity...Students from affinity groups said they are optimistic about the administrative change. Leland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, said he hopes Sells will help change the environment at the Law School. “In an ideal world a new dean of students would look to address issue of intersectionality and microaggression both at the Law School and at the classroom and helping minority students acclimate to the Law School environment and helping them feel comfortable,” Shelton said.

Does the Constitution protect people who feel that the law requires them to act contrary to their beliefs? NPR's Linda Wertheimer speaks with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman about the Kentucky case.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig met his self-imposed goal of crowd-funding $1 million by Labor Day, and Sunday on ABC announced he's running for the Democratic nomination for President. Lessig, an activist with a grassroots following among some progressives, says he's running on a singular platform — the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. It would expand voting access, ban gerrymandering and institute campaign finance reform. "I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room," Lessig said Sunday on ABC. "This stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work. And we have to find a way to elevate the debate to focus on the changes that would actually get us a government that could work again, that is not captured by the tiniest fraction of the one percent who fund campaigns."

Students who claim they were defrauded by for-profit schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc. into taking out federal student loans will have to wait several more months before the Obama administration decides whether to cancel their debts, the Department of Education said Thursday...The department has a conflict of interest in deciding whether to cancel borrowers' debts because of its role in making the loans and overseeing schools, said Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. Its surveillance of Corinthian represents "a massive failure in terms of oversight of federal funds and programs funded by [taxpayers]," she said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that began in 2013, focuses on violence against African-Americans -- perpetrated not only by the police but also by private vigilantes. Its central goals are to prevent such violence and to hold people accountable when it occurs. Its supporters proclaim that this is something new, “not your grandmamma’s civil rights movement.” Maybe so. But it may well be your grandmamma’s grandmamma’s civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter taps into an often forgotten, but nevertheless defining, element of our constitutional heritage.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Tom Brady is, of course, the greatest quarterback who ever lived. Anyone who questions that, or accuses him of the slightest wrongdoing, is biased and untrustworthy. OK, I'm a New England Patriots fan, and inclined to celebrate Thursday's ruling by Judge Richard Berman, which vacated NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's decision to suspend Brady for four games. But football aside, the decision offers a general lesson that even Brady-haters should celebrate. It involves the rule of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s in an oath? That fascinating question arose as part of a crusade by Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis to seek a religious exemption from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Before the U.S. Supreme Court put the kibosh on her claim, Davis in her legal brief argued that she understood her oath of office “to mean that, in upholding the federal and state constitutions and laws, she would not act in contradiction to the moral law of God.” Why? Because her oath included the words, “So help me God.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Think affirmative action is controversial in the U.S.? The American debate is nothing compared with the fight over caste-based preferences in India, where police smashed heads in the aftermath of last week's 500,000 strong anti-preference rally in Gujarat.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s so special about religion? When it comes to exemptions from general laws, whether regulating gay marriage or contraception, no question is more important -- or more complicated. The federal district court in Washington answered that question Monday by saying religion is nothing special. The court held that the Department of Health and Human Services is obligated to give the same exemption to a nonreligious group that has a principled reason to deny its employees contraceptive health-care coverage that the department already gave to religious groups with analogous views. This conclusion was almost certainly correct as a matter of moral logic. But it’s far from clear that it was correct as a matter of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s no free speech in front of the U.S. Supreme Court -- or so says the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which on Friday upheld a 1949 law that says you can’t assemble or display signs on the plaza in front of the courthouse. The decision contradicted a 2002 ruling by the same court that allowed free speech on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, just across the street from the court. It rested on a combination of architectural analysis and insistence that judges and courts should be more insulated from the public than politicians and legislators. With all due respect to the D.C. Circuit, architecture is beside the point.

As Harvard moves into the new academic year, it faces mounting scrutiny into an aspect of its admission process that administrators have long held is central to fostering diversity in its student body—race-based affirmative action...“What Harvard stands to lose...is the most efficient and direct route to achieving racial diversity,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor at Harvard Law School and expert in education law and policy. Other methods universities can use to foster campus diversity, such as ramping up recruiting efforts to high schools with many minority applicants, are much less time- and cost-effective, she said.