Media Mentions

An op-ed by Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro. Congress is in an intense debate over trade bills that will shape the course of the US economy for decades. Much of this debate has been characterized as a fight over whether international trade itself creates or destroys American jobs. There is, however, another major concern — that modern “trade” agreements are often less about trade and more about giant multinational corporations finding new ways to rig the economic system to benefit themselves...Economist Joe Stiglitz, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, and others recently noted that “the threat and expense of ISDS proceedings have forced nations to abandon important public policies” and that “laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input.”

It’s another town reaching its breaking point as the Gray family lays their 25 year old son Freddie to rest. Upon a mysterious death following an arrest, the City of Baltimore is crying out for justice; some lashing out with violence. Attorney and President of the NAACP’s Boston Branch Michael Curry joins law professor and director of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute Ronald Sullivan. Together, they hash out the root causes of many of the recent backlashes, plus the systemic change necessary to bring peace.

Hunched over burgers and chili cheese dogs at a Boston-area pub, a group of friends digested Monday's news of punishment in the "Deflategate" scandal for the New England Patriots and star quarterback Tom Brady..."Even as a Patriots fan, I feel like it's not as harsh as it should be," said Derecka Purnell [`17], a 25-year-old Harvard law student, as she and husband Grandon Purnell strolled with their baby in Cambridge. "NCAA titles are stripped away for much lesser things," she said, referring to the college sports governing body. "But Boston would be in riots if the Patriots lost the Super Bowl title."

The Obama administration on Monday ordered all insurers to provide IUDs, the contraceptive patch and other birth control free of out-of-pocket charge to all women, thereby rewriting the rules after reports that some insurance carriers were refusing to cover all types of contraceptives...Pro-choice groups and others had said insurers were using so-called "medical management" to either skirt the rules or plead ignorance. For example, an inquiry by the New York attorney general found one plan told a patient she couldn't get the NuvaRing — for which there is no generic on the market — without cost-sharing because she could use birth control pills with the same chemical formulation. Holly Lynch, a bioethics experts at Harvard Law School who closely tracks Obamacare's contraception rules, said that was exactly the type of problem that HHS wanted to erase. "Just because a pill would be available for free doesn't mean that an insurer could refuse to make the ring available for free," she said.

The idiom “bargaining with the devil” sets up well the attitudes of both Tehran and Washington toward each other in their current negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities...“Bargaining with the Devil” is also the title of one of my favorite books, by Harvard’s Robert Mnookin, the subtitle of which is “when to negotiate and when to fight.” Mnookin takes up several case studies to answer this question, ranging from divorce, to sibling rivalry, to business quarrels, on through Winston Churchill’s decision not to bargain with Hitler during the darkest days of Word War II, and Nelson Mendela’s decision to bargain with his devil, the apartheid government of South Africa. Mnookin’s book was written in 2009, long before the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia decided to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. But the book’s conclusions have relevance today.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Immigration is one of the great themes of the 2015 Venice Biennale -- which makes a lot of sense for the signature European art fair in an era when immigration is Europe’s most pressing political issue. But the most thought-provoking piece on the subject that I saw here in three days wasn’t actually in the festival. It was a temporary performance staged Wednesday morning near the entrance to the beautiful gardens where the national pavilions display their works. And it consisted of a single woman standing silently, staring ahead without moving -- a bit in the manner of the silent human statues you can see in New York's Central Park or London's Trafalgar Square, which for the most part don’t seem like good art at all. What made the woman extraordinary was her outfit. She was dressed in a full niqab -- not only a headscarf or cloak but both, her face covered except for a slit for each eye. And her niqab clearly wasn’t the ordinary niqab of a very observant Muslim woman. It was made out of yellow reflective cloth, with four bright reflective silver stripes, like those you’d see on a first-responder.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell supports renewing the Patriot Act as is, but a appeals federal court ruling striking down the routine government sweep of U-S phone records adds pressure for reform. Please join us for debate over the limits of government surveillance. Guests...Benjamin Wittes senior fellow in governance studies, Brookings Institution; editor in chief at Lawfare. He is co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.

Panelists raised concerns about the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. at Harvard Law School’s annual conference on law, religion, and health on Thursday...Law School Dean Martha L. Minow noted that the litigants in the case had given evidence that they would leave the U.S. if they lost...CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article miscontextualized a quote from Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow. In fact, Minow noted that the litigants in the case had given evidence that they would leave the U.S. if they lost; she did not suggest that she could imagine herself leaving the country over her religious beliefs or that others should.

With his time in office waning, President Barack Obama is speaking out on race and poverty in increasingly blunt terms as violent protests in U.S. cities highlight the unrealized promise of his election....“I must confess to having shared that great optimism, especially because I had been so impressed personally with Barack Obama when he was my student and research assistant,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University."

An op-ed by Robert J. Smith and Charles J. Ogletree Jr: Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a death penalty case, Glossip v. Gross, challenging the use of midazolam — a drug intended to induce an anesthetic and unresponsive state — in executions. The court must consider whether midazolam’s use violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and specifically whether there is an intolerable risk that the drug, which has been tied to at least three botched executions, will cause gratuitous suffering. Doctors have referred to the use of midazolam as “a failed experiment.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) labeled a botched execution in Arizona “torture.” And Justice Elena Kagan observed during oral arguments that regaining consciousness during an execution by lethal injection is “like being burned alive.”

Panelists raised concerns about the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. at Harvard Law School’s annual conference on law, religion, and health on Thursday. ... Law School professor Charles Fried provided context for the issue Dionne raised, pointing to a different interpretation of the protection of religious freedom under the First Amendment, which he said was not always used to challenge laws. “It was assumed that the First Amendment had to do with beliefs and persecution of people for their beliefs,” Fried said. “[It] had nothing to do with granting exemption from what have come to be called laws of general applicability.” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow recognized the difficulty of this topic and empathized with the personal nature of religion in many people’s lives. In cases where individuals cannot find a way to reconcile this issue, Minow proposed an extreme solution. “There will be some issues where the values of this country will run in conflict with some people’s religious views, and if they can’t live with it they should leave,” she said. Minow herself could imagine choosing to leave the country over renouncing her religion, she said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has almost certainly made its decision about the right to marry for same-sex couples. The justices met in private conference Friday, May 1, and took a vote. They have until June 30 to issue their decision. ... Roberts' seeming willingness to recognize sex discrimination in the context of bans on same-sex marriage stood in stark contrast to his equally blunt comment to same-sex couples' attorney Mary Bonauto. "My question is you're not seeking to join the institution, you're seeking to change what the institution is. The fundamental core of the institution is the opposite-sex relationship and you want to introduce into it a same-sex relationship." To that remark, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried said he would have replied, "So what?" "At one time, people thought women were inferior to men intellectually and physically, and Aristotle thought women made no contribution to the genetic component." said Fried, a U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan and a former member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. "They were wrong then, and we think we've got it right now. If I had been arguing ... I'd have said, 'Maybe that was the definition back then, but it's the wrong definition of the concept we're talking about now.'"

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In a major vindication for Edward Snowden -- and a blow for the national security policy pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike -- the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program is unlawful. This is the most serious blow to date for the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11. The central question depended on the meaning of the word "relevant": Was the government's collection relevant to an investigation when it collects all the metadata for any phone call made to or from anywhere in the U.S.? The court said no. That was the right decision -- not so much because it protects privacy, as because it broke the bad precedent of secret law created by the NSA and endorsed by the secret national security court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Reports of German spying on European corporate targets at the behest of the U.S. have led to calls that Chancellor Angela Merkel was hypocritical for complaining about U.S. spying on Germany. Well, yes -- but the hypocrisy of politicians hardly comes as a shock. What’s more striking about the recent revelations is their targets -- and what they say about U.S. government claims that it doesn’t spy on behalf of private U.S. corporations. Start with a rather obvious question: Why would the U.S. government rely on Germany to spy on European corporations? Why not just do the spying directly? It’s not as if the U.S. lacks the intelligence capacity to do it. After all, the U.S. spied directly on Merkel in the episode that made her object so strongly and publicly and hypocritically.

Where is the legal star power on this year’s law school commencement circuit? It seems the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will sit out the 2015 graduation grind. ... Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, seems the 2015 law school graduation MVP. He is slated to deliver remarks during the University of California, Berkeley School of Law’s May 15 ceremony, followed by graduations at Pace Law School on May 17 and New York University School of Law on May 21. Bharara is a veteran on the law commencement scene—he earned rave reviews along with actress Mindy Kaling when they spoke together during Harvard Law School’s class day in 2014. For this year’s class day event, Harvard law students will hear from former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. The couple has advocated gun control since Giffords was wounded in a 2011 mass shooting. ... At least three Harvard law professors will address students at other schools: Cass Sunstein at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Charles Fried at Columbia Law School; and David Wilkins at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Facebook has published new research that claims the social network is not an "echo chamber" that keeps people from being exposed to political opinions that are different from their own. The study published Thursday in Science magazine explored the question of whether Facebook creates "filter bubbles." ... Christian Sandvig says only 9% of Facebook users identify their "ideological affiliation" in a way that was "interpretable." Of those that report an affiliation, only 46% reported an affiliation that was "interpretable," said Sandvig, who is an associate professor at the University of Michigan and a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

On a daily basis, you probably type dozens of URLs into your browser to get the websites where you read the news, check your email, access your bank records, and shop online. But chances are you don’t know much about the complex, decentralized naming and numbering system that makes it all work behind the scenes—or the worldwide discussion about who should be responsible for overseeing this system when the U.S. government gives up that role at the end of 2015. ...It was Postel, for example, who assigned two-letter country codes to every nation of the world, which is how Tuvalu and Micronesia fortuitously ended up in control of such profitable TLDs. To make it sound more official, Postel was referred to as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, because, as Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain put it, “As the Internet’s protocols were written up it seemed a little informal to say with a technical document, ‘Well, a guy named Jon performs this function.’ ”

Comcast Corp. and Home Box Office Inc. were sued by pay-per-view customers who claim they were ripped off by a failure to disclose boxer Manny Pacquiao had a shoulder injury going into his May 2 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. ... They're trying to force the companies that televised the fight, the boxers and their management companies to forfeit the estimated $300 million they made from the event. A class-action defense lawyer not involved in the case said it may face an early knock-out attempt. "If I were representing any of the defendants, I would relish making a motion to dismiss," said Andra Greene of Irell & Manella LLP in Newport Beach, California. "There's no specificity as to who knew what when."... Harvard University law professor William Rubenstein echoed the California litigator. "If the claims are based on state law and the law is different in every state, than it would be hard to have a nationwide class action," he said.

Columbia law professor Tim Wu smarmily insinuates on the New Yorker’s website today that if colleagues like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe are going to speak on behalf of huge corporations like Peabody Energy in its lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, instead of defending “underrepresented” clients whose views otherwise “would not be heard,” then universities ought to rethink their longstanding policy of letting faculty lawyers work for private clients. It is deliciously self-satirical that Wu also directs a Columbia Journalism School First Amendment center as well, for the real purpose of his piece seems less a complaint about the wealth of Tribe’s client than an effort, however anemic, to silence Tribe’s defense of constitutional views that Wu dislikes. Free speech, indeed.

The Office of Attorney General Maura Healey will on Thursday defend the constitutionality of a state statute that makes it a crime to knowingly lie in political campaign material — opposing civil liberties advocates, newspaper publishers, and a trend in judicial rulings that concludes such laws can have a chilling effect on free speech....Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, noted that while an attorney general may decline to defend a law, “in sufficiently extreme cases,” or when directed by the president as Holder was, Tribe said “an independently elected state AG like AG Healey might be regarded as having less discretion to take such a stance.”

Boston leaders and community activists have long called for more and better ways to handle civilian complaints of police misconduct. The news that the Boston Police Department is developing a third-party mediation program in conjunction with Harvard Law School shows that the department is serious about building better bridges with the community...But other details of the program are still being tweaked...For example, the police department says it won’t force any officer to attend a mediation session. Rachel Viscomi, who is assistant director at the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program and who worked with the Boston police to develop the initiative, agrees. “Mediation should always be voluntary."