Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. “Mad Men” may be over, but no one told Xi Jinping. China’s decision to put multiple warheads into its intercontinental ballistic missiles, an approach traditionally associated with a first-strike threat, is projecting China’s stance back into a Cold War mindset. The development is symbolically significant, because China has had multiple warhead technology, known as MIRV, for years, but has never before chosen to deploy it. The decision puts the U.S. on notice that China won’t react passively to increasing containment efforts in the Pacific. And it also tells a domestic audience that President Xi’s vision of the “Chinese dream” isn't simply economic but also deeply nationalistic and even militaristic.

...During his speech against the Patriot Act, [Rand] Paul leaned heavily on the information that Snowden brought to light. That’s because Snowden has transformed the debate in this country—and in the world—over surveillance. Given that fact, it’s more than a little strange that the most famous whistleblower in recent U.S. history shouldn’t be here to speak up as we consider the results of his handiwork. Which is why it is time to bring Edward Snowden home to America and let him make the case for his freedom in front of a jury of his peers...The courts can settle this matter, but only if they are allowed to consider the legality of the secrets Snowden disclosed. USC-Berkeley Journalism Dean Edward Wasserman and Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler believe there should be a public interest defense to protect whistleblowers in cases like Snowden’s.

Doug Hughes, the Florida postal worker who landed a gyrocopter on the U.S. Capitol grounds last month and set off alarms about airspace security, made a lower-key return to the nation's capital Wednesday. He arrived by car, wearing a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet that transmits his every move to federal authorities. He's no less passionate, however, about the cause that could cost him his job and freedom — overhauling the nation's campaign-finance system and ending what he sees as the rampant corruption on Capitol Hill...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and a leading voice on campaign reform, emailed Hughes after his arrest and "thanked him for his service," Lessig told USA Today. Sometimes, Lessig said, "you need outrageous behavior to draw attention to the outrageousness of the existing system."

Americans have missed out on investment gains, discouraged by an uneven playing field created by Wall Street. U.S. stocks have more than tripled since bottoming out in March 2009 during the Great Recession, rising in value by a staggering $12.8 trillion. But the average American household has been left behind. Most of the gains went to the wealthy and institutional investors including investment banks and hedge funds. Fewer than half of U.S. households own stocks either directly or indirectly, down from a peak of more than 53% in 2007...A paper by Harvard Law School professor Lucian Bebchuk found that CEOs who earn more than the average “pay slice” of 35% of a firm’s total compensation for its top five executives significantly underperform their peers. That is because such companies make poor acquisition decisions, reward their CEOs for “luck” when industry conditions improve, fail to hold CEOs accountable for poor performance, and grant options that are timed “opportunistically,” Bebchuk found.

Airing on Monday, May 18, 2015: First up on today's show, Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, joins to to talk about giving people the choice to opt out of being recorded in public on livestreaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope.

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen and Eli Y. Adashi. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration released highly anticipated draft recommendations that would allow gay men to donate blood after one year of celibacy. While an improvement from the current, highly criticized lifetime ban, the new policy, which was announced in December, still caters to fear and stigma rather than science. It should be reconsidered.

An op-ed by Christopher Crawford `16. In 2010 Shubham Khandelwal in Chennai was trying to get himself and his father a new set of ID cards from the local government agency. Standing between him and his identification, however, was a corrupt official demanding a bribe of 2,000 rupees (£20). Shubham refused for three days but finally gave in. This type of everyday corruption is common across India: from a man and wife reporting that they were forced to bribe officials 3,000 rupees to get their marriage finalised last month in Bangalore, to a student in Chennai this month being asked to pay 75,000 rupees to be admitted into an engineering college. All of these people found an outlet for their frustration by telling their stories on I Paid a Bribe, and they are not alone: tens of thousands of Indian citizens have used this crowdsourcing platform. Their stories add a touch of humanity to what economists and development professionals have known for decades: corruption, even on a small scale, is a major drag on economic and societal growth.

Hand your passport to police or it will be canceled, read the notice to all 4.4 million residents of far-northwestern China's Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. The demand would now seem outrageous to most Chinese, who more than a decade since passport restrictions were eased have become increasingly accustomed to traveling abroad for tourism, study or work. Yet the story is vastly different for groups targeted by the ruling Communist Party, which has long denied passports to dissidents who might embarrass the party overseas...While passport denials can theoretically be appealed, it's unclear whether any have ever been successful, although some have managed to receive passports when reapplying later for reasons that remain a mystery.Human rights lawyer Teng Biao had his passport confiscated at the airport in 2008 when he was trying to go to an overseas conference. Four years later, he reapplied, saying his passport had been lost. A new one was promptly issued. "They said nothing when giving me the new one," said Teng, now a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The fall of the Iraq city of Ramadi to Islamic State is significant -- but not because of the strategic importance of the capital of the Anbar province. Rather, the failure of Iraq's official security forces emphasizes a fundamental quandary facing the anti-Islamic State coalition. If Islamic State is to be defeated, there must be effective ground troops. Right now, the only effective ground troops outside of Iraqi Kurdistan seem to be Shiite militias with close ties to Iran.

For Bitcoin, 2014 was not a good year. The virtual currency's value slumped as scandal after scandal struck, resulting in many people losing significant amounts of money. Over recent months the "cryptocurrency" has stabilised, however it is still worth less than a quarter of its peak value against the dollar. But while Bitcoin's long-term prospects may remain in doubt, some are suggesting that its underlying technology - the Blockchain - has a bright future...But when it comes to putting all this into practice, one Harvard internet law professor thinks he has spotted a flaw. "Why would we assume that now and forever no one entity could command more than half of the computing power of the people mining a Blockchain?" asks Prof Jonathan Zittrain. "I haven't really heard a satisfying answer to that."

Texas’ latest proposal to restrict abortion rights is likely to land the state back in court, constitutional law experts say. A bill offered by Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, would require all women to show government identification to get an abortion and add restrictions to the legal process minors use to get an abortion without parental consent. The ID provision in particular is unprecedented and could be seen as an undue barrier to the procedure, legal experts say...“Describing the proposed bill … as a loophole-closing measure is like describing a hangman’s noose as a loophole-closing device,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email Tuesday. “No objective court could deny that the bill’s obvious purpose and effect are to get around the Supreme Court’s protections of reproductive liberty.”

Former Judge for the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts Nancy Gertner and former U.S. Attorneys for the District of Massachusetts Donald Stern and Michael Sullivan form our legal caucus and discuss the aftermath of the death sentence for Tsarnaev in Boston.

An article by Andy Sellars. In an important victory for free speech online, a federal appeals court today ruled that an actor couldn’t block people from seeing one of the more controversial videos of recent memory because she didn’t have a copyright interest in her performance on film. The case concerns the infamous video Innocence of Muslims, which was the source of international protests in September 2012. As the case today describes, the original name of the film was Desert Warrior, and was supposed to be a war epic set in ancient Arabia. After the film was shot, however, the director Nakoula Basseley Nakoula re-dubbed the voices of the actors with profoundly disparaging remarks about the Prophet Mohammed, and then uploaded the film to YouTube.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court was mostly in cleanup mode on Monday, disposing of six cases, four of them unanimously and a fifth almost unanimously. In the sixth case, the court decided that Maryland can't double tax certain income earned by its residents out-of-state -- and that opinion drew one of the strangest 5-4 lineups I've ever seen. The majority in Comptroller v. Wynne was written by Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan, while Justice Clarence Thomas dissented separately and joined in a separate concurrence by Scalia. If you're counting at home, that means three conservatives and two liberals on one side, with two liberals and two conservatives on the other. What, exactly, was going on here?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would get the death penalty. He's a self-acknowledged terrorist who killed and maimed adults and children in the middle of a major American city, which happens to be my own. The jury that sentenced him was limited to citizens who apparently believed that capital punishment was justified under at least some circumstances. If he's not going to be sentenced to death, who is? Yet I confess that, despite this ironclad logic, I still feel surprised and unsettled by the verdict -- because here in Massachusetts, where I was born and have lived most of my life, the death penalty has over the last several generations come to seem distant, foreign and unfamiliar.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. We all chose death for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Make no mistake about it. The death penalty law was passed in our name. Attorney General Holder and US Attorney Carmen Ortiz are employed by the government we elected. They sought death for Tsarnaev for the victims, including the Richard family, whose tragedy they highlighted, even though the Richards were opposed to Tsarnaev’s death. The government sought it for Boston — also a victim — even though the majority of the citizens of the city opposed it. The verdict in the United States v. Tsarnaev was literally brought in our name.

In her quarrel with President Barack Obama over trade legislation, Elizabeth Warren has got the law on her side. The Massachusetts senator has warned fellow Democrats that a fast-track trade bill now in Congress could undo U.S. laws such as the Dodd-Frank banking regulations later. A number of constitutional scholars and other legal experts say she’s right...On Warren’s side: One of the nation’s preeminent constitutional law scholars, Laurence Tribe of Harvard University, who counts Obama as a former student. “Any act of Congress or duly ratified treaty overrides any contrary prior federal legislation,” he said in an e-mail.

Who knew that George Lucas and constitutional law had so much in common? Evidently Cass R. Sunstein did. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for President Obama makes such an argument in his forthcoming Michigan Law Review article titled How Star Wars Illuminates Constitutional Law. The paper's abstract (and, trust us, this paper is abstract) sums up Sunstein's thinking on the topic: "Human beings often see coherence and planned design when neither exists. This is so in movies, literature, history, economics, and psychoanalysis—and constitutional law. Contrary to the repeated claims of George Lucas, its principal author, the Star Wars series was hardly planned in advance; it involved a great deal of improvisation and surprise, even to Lucas himself. Serendipity and happenstance, sometimes in the forms of eruptions of new thinking, play a pervasive and overlooked role in the creative imagination, certainly in single-authored works, and even more in multi-authored ones extending over time.

They’re back at it. The super PAC to end all super PACs – Mayday PAC– has started its 2015 grassroots efforts to lobby members of Congress to pass campaign finance reform laws. You might remember that Mayday PAC was started in 2014 by Harvard Law School professor, author, and activist Lawrence Lessig, in part to get candidates elected to Congress who are willing to change the way campaigns are funded. Things didn’t go as planned. Nearly every candidate the group supported in last fall’s elections failed. As the Mayday website says, “… in the campaigns, we didn’t move the ball far enough. So in 2015, we’re doing something different.” The group now wants to help voters connect with the members of Congress it has selected as “potential leaders.” It is asking supporters to sign a letter to the 47 congressional members “who Mayday believes could be the key to unlocking a majority,” according to a PAC statement.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced its fellows for 2015-2016. The more than 50 men and women include creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists, each pursuing “an ambitious individual project within the Institute’s multidisciplinary community.”...Twelve of the new fellows are Harvard faculty members; their names and the titles of their projects appear below....Christine A. Desan, professor of law, whose teaching covers the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism...Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and of history, Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction...Intisar A. Rabb, professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, who studies criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law.

...The impact of trade and trade deals on American workers remains a huge issue, even as President Obama seeks to persuade skeptical Democrats on Capitol Hill to give him the power to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.), a new agreement with eleven other Pacific Rim countries, including Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, and Peru....A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries, including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal system. In a recent letter to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.