Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. “Happy Birthday” has been freed from its copyright shackles: Rejoice! But don’t rejoice too much. The federal district court in California that invalidated Warner/Chappell Music’s claim to own the lyrics didn’t rely on the logic you might imagine, namely that the words are as much a part of the public domain as, well, the phrase “Happy Birthday.” The court’s narrow decision, released last week, resulted from an incredibly detailed, legally arcane analysis of whether the alleged owner before Warner actually acquired rights to the lyrics alongside the rights to the music, which have since lapsed. The court seems to have reached the right result, but it hasn’t struck a blow for the freedom of song.

Can colleges provide due process for defendants accused of rape, and adequate justice for the victims? Or do these cases belong in the criminal courts? An Intelligence Squared debate featuring law professors from Harvard, Yale, CUNY and NYU. Motion: Courts, not campuses, should decide sexual assault cases. FOR: Jed Rubenfeld of Yale and Jeannie Suk of Harvard. AGAINST: Michelle Anderson of CUNY and Stephen Schulholfer of NYU.

A panel of legal and medical scholars and practitioners agreed in a panel discussion on Monday night that the American criminal justice system does not give adequate consideration to the cognitive underdevelopment of adolescents...A standing-room-only crowd of about 100 people packed the Wasserstein Hall classroom at Harvard Law School for the discussion entitled “From Troubled Teens to Tsarnaev: Promises and Perils of Adolescent Neuroscience and Law.” The event, hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, was the center’s first of the year. “Our country is going through a profound movement toward the punitive,” said Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at the Law School.

John McGinnis has an excellent post over at Library of Law and Liberty... highlighting the rigid liberal orthodoxy of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). AALS has just sent around the notice of its 2016 annual meeting, highlighting its “Speakers of Note.” As Prof. McGinnis points out: “Of the thirteen announced, none is associated predominantly with Republican party, but eleven are associated with the Democratic Party. Many are prominent liberals. None is a conservative or libertarian.” McGinnis argues that the conference would profit from including some other perspectives. As it happens, one of the 13 “Speakers of Note,” Martha Minow, the dean of Harvard Law School, has written eloquently about the importance of intellectual diversity in the legal academy.

Do Washington's net neutrality rules run roughshod over the First Amendment? That's what some opponents have been arguing -- claiming that the government's regulations infringe on Internet providers' right to free expression. Now, in a flurry of responses to that charge, defenders of the rules appear eager for the biggest showdown over the meaning of corporate speech since the Citizens United case...Others are challenging the idea that Internet providers are even capable of speech. As pipes that carry consumers' Web traffic to and fro, Internet providers are just a "conduit" for people's speech, according to a group of academics including Harvard's Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, and Stanford's Barbara van Schewick. "It follows that when the Open Internet Rules require providers to carry others’ speech, they do not require the providers themselves to speak," they argue in their own brief.

Senator Elizabeth Warren embraced the Black Lives Matter protest movement in a forceful speech in Boston on Sunday, calling on police departments to train their officers in the de-escalation of violence and to outfit them with body cameras...Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School who has written about Black Lives Matter, said he is not surprised Warren embraced the movement. But he said her rhetoric stands out. “Politicians have shied away from acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement,” he said, noting that the same was true of the civil rights movement.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is what you tell the rabbi’s wife a secret that she can’t be required to reveal in court? The Haredi Jewish newspaper Yated Ne’eman has reported on a fascinating decision by a judge in Portland, Oregon, holding that the answer is yes. The twist is that the women who successfully asserted the privilege were members of a branch of Orthodox Judaism known as “yeshivish,” which staunchly denies that women can be rabbis or even rabbinic advisers. Their argument was that the rabbi’s wife is, practically speaking, a kind of adjunct clergywoman in whom female members of the community confide in the expectation of privacy.

In 1965, Ralph Nader wrote "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile." The exposé made one reputation (his) and destroyed another, that of the Chevrolet Corvair, now considered one of the most dangerous cars ever made. Fifty years later, Nader is proud to own a shiny red 1963 Chevrolet Corvair. Nader isn't driving the classic car. He's making an example of it. It is the centerpiece exhibit in a museum that Nader is opening to the public Sunday in his hometown of Winsted. At the American Museum of Tort Law, the Corvair will be beside exhibits about that notorious cup of McDonald's coffee and other important civil tort cases. The museum was dedicated Saturday at ceremonies attended by Nader, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Alexa Shabecoff of Harvard Law School and rock star Patti Smith, among other notables.

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC). The 236-page report highlights the prosecution of an American physician who offered to work as an “on-call” doctor for wounded members of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. The report also details the prosecution of a Peruvian doctor who cared for members of the Shining Path guerrillas, and of a physician who provided medical and surgical services to insurgents in Colombia...safeguards have been around since the establishment of the Red Cross in 1863, said Gabriella Blum, one of the report’s authors and the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School. But the new report’s authors contend that the law has been weakened by the war on terror and the United Nations Security Council’s antiterrorist directives...Blum, who is also the PILAC faculty director, co-authored the report with Dustin Lewis, program senior researcher, and Naz K. Modirzadeh, program director and lecturer on law.

..How should U.S. officials interpret and respond to Xi’s promise? Can he be taken at his word? We asked five experts to weigh in. Here is what they said...Bruce Schneier, fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World”. I think it’s posturing. It’s basically the same thing that the U.S. says, and the U.S. hacks foreign government and corporate networks all the time. The problem is that there aren’t any laws that protect foreign networks, and there aren’t any relevant international treaties that limit commercial espionage. So I wouldn’t expect China to be any less aggressive on the Internet than the U.S. is.

Sure, it’s annoying when you click on a link and get that “404” message or an automatic redirect to the homepage. But when it comes to legal research, dead links aren’t just annoying; they can undermine the entire premise of an opinion, article or treatise. Hoping to end this type of “link rot,” Harvard University Law School came up with Perma.cc—an archival tool that allows users to submit their links to Harvard’s library in order to be permanently preserved. The idea was the brainchild of Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law who became director of the Harvard Law Library two years ago...In 2013 the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, under the directorship of Kim Dulin, launched Perma based on Zittrain’s proposal...According to project manager Adam Ziegler, Perma is primarily designed as a voluntary service for opinion or article writers to create a preserved record of their work.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, the two world leaders making high-profile visits to the U.S. this week have little in common, except that each stands at the head of more than 1 billion followers. But although Xi Jinping runs a global economic and military power while Pope Francis is a spiritual guide who, as Stalin observed, has no divisions, they do in fact share a common challenge. Each man is in the midst of a historic struggle to defeat an entrenched bureaucracy that has constrained his predecessors. And in each case, the success of the leader's chosen mission will depend on how that struggle turns out.

Long ago, Larry Lessig relished the private world of an academic. That was another life, though, before a cartoon version of his face—grey hair, tiny round glasses—cropped up all over the internet, before he discussed his books and joked around on TV shows like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." That was before he decided to run for President of the United States...“It was almost like he was another professor in the classroom,” remembers Alex Whiting, now a professor of the practice at Harvard Law School who attended Yale with Lessig. “You had the professor in the front of the classroom, the professor in the back,” he adds, cracking a grin...“He is, in many ways, an elegant man,” says Charles R. Nesson, a Law School professor who helped recruit Lessig for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society during his first stint at Harvard. “Elegant in the forcefulness of his ideas and mode of his presentation.”

Two former Republican governors joined an impressive array of law professors, education scholars, teachers of the year, civil rights advocates and state and civic leaders submitting briefs on both sides of the appeal of the Vergara lawsuit. Last week was the deadline for experts supporting or opposing the lawsuit to submit friend of the court briefs, called amicus curiae, to the judges of the Second District of the California Court of Appeal. The court will review the landmark ruling of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu, who struck down five state teacher protection statutes affecting tenure and the processes for teacher dismissal and layoffs based on seniority...Law professors supporting the ruling: Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, Rachel Moran of UCLA Law School and Dawinder Sindhu of University of New Mexico School of Law submitted the brief. (Full brief here.)...Law professors opposing the ruling: Dean Irwin Chemerinsky and Catherine Fisk of UC Irvine Law School, Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School, and Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School submitted the brief. (Full brief here.)

The busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere is ever so slightly less busy. Staff at a major Los Angeles warehouse serving Amazon and other big retailers went on strike Tuesday, protesting unpaid wages and overtime, dangerous conditions, a lack of breaks and water during hot summer months, and retaliation by management against their organizing efforts...“The law is certainly becoming more friendly to claims of joint employer status, even in cases where there is no direct or immediate supervision by the putative joint employer,” wrote Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, in an email to BuzzFeed News. “The NLRB’s decision in Browning-Ferris Industries is the leading case in this evolution.”

Kevin B. Moody, an administrator at Emory’s school of law, will serve as Harvard Law School's next assistant dean and chief human resources officer. Moody, who will assume his role at Harvard on Oct. 19, has served as the senior director of administration and chief human resources officer at Emory Law since 2007. Before his career in human resources, Moody was a captain in the Marine Corps.

Martin Shkreli is the Internet’s villain of the week. After buying and then immediately jacking up the price of a drug that treats a potentially deadly parasite, he’s become a sneering meme in social media, a think-piece punching bag, and a policy springboard for presidential candidates. He gives a bad name to former hedge fund pharmaceutical CEOs everywhere...Even drugs that fail early can cost companies millions. “There’s a saying, that it costs a billion to produce the first pill, and 10 cents to produce the second,” says Rachel Sachs, a fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Republican presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush has just released a plan for regulatory reform. Though there are a few clunkers, many of his ideas are excellent...Here’s a good one: A formal process for “spring cleaning” of regulations on the books. Bush proposes that every eight years, OIRA should review the costs and benefits of major regulations. More ambitiously, he wants to create an independent commission, focused on the cumulative costs of rules and identifying those that need to be modified or repealed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What is Vladimir Putin’s true Syria game? Russia has now ensconced a meaningful mini-air force of fighters, bombers and helicopters in an airfield near Latakia, where its sole plausible purpose is to prop up President Bashar Assad's regime. But keeping Assad’s government alive and prolonging the Syrian civil war isn’t an end in itself for Putin, who naturally wants to enhance Russia’s presence in the region. It's much more likely that the Russian president's true objective is to broker a solution to the Syrian quagmire, one involving a rump Syrian state in which the Alawite minority would be transformed into a majority.

Prominent Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed, originally from Pakistan, was laid to rest last Saturday morning at the Mt Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his adopted home...“Shahab was one of a kind, and we will be learning from his work for years to come”, said Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard Law School who was among the dozens of prominent scholars and students at the funeral.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Tuesday touted the endorsements of three former American ambassadors to the Vatican amid Pope Francis' visit to the U.S. Former ambassadors to the Holy See James Nicholson, Francis Rooney and Mary Ann Glendon have endorsed the former Florida governor's White House bid and will serve as national co-chairs of Catholics for Jeb, according to his campaign...Glendon, a law professor at Harvard, said she admired "the way Jeb holds together the two halves of the divided soul of the American project — his staunch defense of freedom and his sense of responsibility for the most vulnerable members of the human community."