Media Mentions

Issues of race and inclusion swept across Harvard late last week, with a College report on efforts to create a more diverse and inclusive campus, a demonstration and march in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, an incident at Harvard Law School that spurred outrage and national attention, demands from students of Latin-American origin, and statements of support from University administrators. On Thursday morning, portraits of black professors on the walls of Wasserstein Hall at Harvard Law School had black tape across their faces. The incident prompted an ongoing police investigation and set off a wave of concern among students and University officials amid a growing movement for racial justice that is unfolding in colleges across the country. “It was an act of blatant racism,’ said Leland Shelton, JD’16, president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association. “I was taken aback that somebody had the audacity to do this.”

Carrying scales and wearing a blindfold, the image of justice has long symbolized judgment delivered without bias or prejudice. That was not the case for Victor Rosario. “The blindfold meant something different for me: that sometimes justice closes her eyes to the truth,” said Rosario, who served 32 years in prison for a crime he said he didn’t commit. Now 58 years old, Rosario was 24 when he was charged with homicide by arson in a Lowell fire that killed three adults and five children...The Law School hosted Rosario on Nov. 13 for a talk before students titled “Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction: Why Did Victor Rosario Serve 32 Years in Prison for a Crime He Didn’t Commit?” His lawyers, Lisa Kavanaugh and Andrea Petersen, accompanied him to the event, which was sponsored by the Criminal Justice Program of Study, Research & Advocacy.

An op-ed by Antuan Johnson [`16], Alexander Clayborne [`16], and Sean Cuddihy [`16]. The Harvard Law School crest is a glorification of and a memorial to one of the largest and most brutal slave owners in Massachusetts. But Isaac Royall, Jr., was more than simply a slave owner; he was complicit in torture and in a gruesome conflagration wherein 77 black human beings were burned alive. This fact and others were absent from The Crimson’s recent editorial, “Recognizing History”—an erasure of history that shows precisely why the seal must be changed. Now that the Law School has been subject to an act of racism, we feel that it is more important than ever to bring this history to light. As the students of Royall Must Fall, we call on the Law School to confront and address this history, not to sanitize and ignore it.

When someone placed strips of black tape over the faces of black professors’ portraits at Harvard Law School on Thursday, many people were appalled. But Derecka Purnell, a black law student, said she wasn’t surprised. Purnell and other students of color said racism — intentional or otherwise — occurs frequently on campus. But unfortunately, they said, it often takes something as egregious as the tape incident for others to notice. “What’s happens is, it’s not public and ... it typically stays among the group that’s impacted,” Purcell, a second-year student from St. Louis...Law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., whose portrait was among those defaced, said that in his 25 years as a student at the law school and now a professor and a housemaster, he could not recall any act that was as “boorish” as this. “To say that there is unfair treatment is not to say that these places were absolutely horrible and the experiences of black students were always intolerable,” Sullivan said in a telephone interview. “It is to say, however, that with all the progress we’ve seen, there are still areas that need to be addressed.”

On Sunday night, CNN will air The Hunting Ground—a work of activist propaganda disguised as a documentary about sexual assault on American college campuses....Nineteen Harvard University law professors have denounced the film for (among other faults) misrepresenting the case of Harvard law student Brandon Winston, whose life was put on hold after a night of drunken, drug-fueled sexual contact resulted in his expulsion from the university and criminal charges. “What our student did is not the kind of violent, repeat sexual assault that the movie claims is both the nature of the problem nationwide and that each of the people in the film are an example of that,” said Elizabeth Batholet, one of the Harvard law professors speaking out about The Hunting Ground’s errors, in an interview with Reason. “That’s an amazing lie at the heart of a movie claiming to be a documentary.”...“Three good years of his life have gone solely to this,” said Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley, who also rejects The Hunting Ground’s narrative, in an interview with Reason. “It’s not right for the filmmakers to extend it out to yet another trial in the court of public opinion, when the underlying claims have been so conclusively rejected. It’s bad for the overall effort for justice, and it’s bad for this young man.”...“We who have spoken out at Harvard are completely committed to addressing sexual assault,” said Bartholet. “It’s horrible that this film is coming out that is now misrepresenting the nature of the problem and diverting attention away from how we can address it.”

Derecka Purnell was one of the first Harvard law students to see the black tape placed over about six portraits of Harvard Law School’s tenured black faculty Wednesday morning. “I was surprised to see it ...” Purnell said, before reconsidering: “Actually, I wasn’t surprised at all.”...At Harvard, the tape that was pasted across the faces of black professors appears to have been taken from an “art-action” in which student activists placed black gaffer tape over the law school seal in several locations of the school’s main hub, Wasserstein hall. The action was carried out by members of the campus group Royall Must Fall (RMF) and was intended to draw attention to the seal’s history as the family crest of the wealthy and ruthless slaveholder Isaac Royall Jr....Alexander Clayborne, a spokesperson for RMF, told the Guardian that the art-action was meant to be educational. “It was purely meant to call attention to the fact that the Harvard seal is the seal of a slaver and should be removed.”He called the response of taking that tape and placing it on the faces of black professors “an act of blatant racial intimidation”...Ronald Sullivan, one of the black professors whose face was vandalized by the tape, said: “I’ve learned more about the crest than I’ve known in 25 years of association with Harvard,” citing the efforts of the student protesters.

When Harvard Law student Michele Hall went to class today, she found that the portraits of every black law professors had been covered with tape. She joins to discuss the act of vandalism and racial tension on campus.

A letter by Charles Fried. Instead of dignifying with inflated philosophical bloviation the grim nastiness of the anonymous vandal(s) who pasted strips of black tape on the portraits of African-American professors, Harvard Law students responded with wit and human warmth: They put along the frames of those same portraits hundreds of colored Post-it notes bearing messages of affection and gratitude. These young men and women teach us all a valuable lesson.

As you’ve likely heard, a group of Harvard students have been holding protests for the past few weeks, both in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri, and to make their own demands. Among them, they want the law school seal changed because the current image is derived from the family crest of an 18th-century slaveholder, Isaac Royall, Jr., whose estate funded the first professorship there. Now, Harvard is looking into what appears to be an incident of racially motivated vandalism overnight. Black tape was placed over the faces of the portraits of some of the law school’s black faculty. Among the defaced portraits was that of Harvard Law professor Ron Sullivan, also the director of the school’s criminal justice institute.

The Rastafari Rootzfest, launched on October 27, 2015 at the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, brought together reggae music and ganja in a groundbreaking event on the Caribbean island that has led the way in decriminalising marijuana. It was described as “the first international wellness festival which celebrates Jamaica's indigenous peoples and their cultural heritage.” ... Charles Nesson, the William F. Weld professor of law at Harvard Law School and founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, called it nothing short of amazing that the small farmers of Westmoreland can “finally reach out to connect with and feel support from small farmers everywhere.”

It was with tragic timeliness that Professor Patrick Weil discussed “After the Paris Attacks: What Is the Future for French Society?” on Wednesday at Harvard Law School. The French sociologist, historian, and legal scholar, who is currently a visiting professor at Yale Law School, had been invited several months ago to speak on the roots and repercussions of the shootings at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket in Paris in January. After the city was again torn by terrorist violence on Friday, his topic was even more current.

Payments made to officers, directors and other “insiders” in control of a distressed corporate debtor are closely scrutinized by other stakeholders as well as the media in larger chapter 11 cases. Bankruptcy rules require companies to disclose insider payments during the 12-month period leading up to a bankruptcy filing. ...Whatever the merits of the disclosure debate may be, the debate is swept up in the larger controversy surrounding executive pay faced by healthy and distressed businesses alike. For example, in their controversial treatise on the unfulfilled promise of executive compensation, Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried weave a detailed account of how structural flaws in corporate governance have enabled managers to influence their own pay and have produced widespread distortions in pay arrangements. They believe that directors must focus on shareholder interests and operate independently from the executives whose compensation they set by making directors more directly accountable to shareholders. In rebuttal, critics point to executive compensation practices of distressed businesses to demonstrate that reducing “agency costs”—the problem created by the separation of ownership and control in larger public companies which is mitigated in distressed situations through the consolidation of ownership interests and assertion of control by sophisticated investors—doesn’t lead to material changes in executive compensation arrangements.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Louis Brandeis, the father of market regulation in the U.S., famously called sunlight “the best of disinfectants.” The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Wednesday that it would apply his dictum to dark pools, the electronic alternative trading systems where the size and price of orders are hidden from other market participants. The proposed SEC rules, now open for 60 days of public comment, are aimed at revealing potential conflicts of interest between the trading systems and those who use them, and clarifying some aspects of order routing in the dark pools. The proposed rules raise an intriguing question: Do we need more regulation for markets that are used overwhelmingly by extremely sophisticated traders, and that are themselves in competition with one another? Put another way, shouldn't the market for alternative trading systems (the market for markets, if you will) be sufficient to ensure that they operate fairly and efficiently?

President Barack Obama repeatedly promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba after he took office in 2009, but that hasn't worked out so well. Now, as he approaches his final year in office in the wake of last week's terror attacks in Paris, his pledge seems as doomed as ever — but he insists he's undeterred...In testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that she is unaware of any effort by Obama to act unilaterally on Guantanamo. In response, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal guidance to the president, wrote on the blog Lawfare, "Nothing in Lynch's remarks would preclude the President from later concluding that the transfer restrictions are unconstitutional."

A new program at Harvard Law School (HLS) aims to help reform the nation’s criminal justice system, with assistance from Harvard students and faculty. The program’s executive director is Larry Schwartztol, who has been a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. Schwartztol has worked on issues including racial justice, policing in schools, educational equality, and economic justice concerns involving the home foreclosure crisis and discriminatory lending practices. When he decided to attend Yale Law School Schwartztol said, “I wanted to find ways to use the law as a vehicle for social justice.”...Our mission is to help advance criminal justice reform by bringing rigorous and creative legal thinking to bear on hard, cutting-edge policy problems. The program builds on an incredible infrastructure already at the Law School. I work with the two faculty directors, Carol Steiker and Alex Whiting, and we are excited about bringing together our own mix of backgrounds in doing this type of work.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday issued new rules aimed at discouraging American companies from moving their headquarters abroad in search of lower tax rates. Increasingly, American companies have been trying to reduce their tax liabilities through a tactic known as a corporate inversion — buying smaller foreign competitors and using those purchases to move their headquarters to countries with more favorable tax rates than the United States’. ...Reaction to the rules, which were released late in the afternoon, was muted. Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said they were weaker than many people expected. “It’s not going to do anything to affect in any meaningful way the largest deal that is in front of them,” he said.

...That's the story of one woman among at least 130 who were raped by security guards at Barrick Gold Corporation's open pit mine in Porgera, Papua New Guinea, one of the countries with the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. And according to women who shared their stories with VICE News, guards at the mine continue to commit rape today. The company disputes that, saying no rapes have been reported since 2010, and that there are now confidential ways women can report sexual assaults by mine employees.... These rapes are undisputed by the mining company. The only matter in dispute is whether the women received justice. And a new joint report by the human rights clinics at the Harvard and Columbia law schools says they did not.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, is launching the first graduate level financial technology course in the United States. The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the Finance Group at MIT Sloan School of Management are joining forces with both MIT’s department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Harvard Law School to make the course possible. The new course has been dubbed FinTech Ventures and will cover financial technology applications at the graduate level.

Black slashes of tape appeared across the portraits of some African-American professors at Harvard Law School on Thursday morning, outraging students and faculty members and touching off a day of discussion about racial injustice at the school. In a statement, the school’s dean, Martha Minow, said that the portraits, which appeared on walls inside the building, had been “defaced” and that the Harvard University Police Department was investigating the incident as a hate crime. “This is my portrait at Harvard Law School,” wrote Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., on his Twitter account, along with a photograph of his portrait, with a wide piece of gaffer’s tape placed diagonally across his face...“I woke up to a bunch of texts,” said Kyle Strickland, the president of the law school’s student body. “As a black student, it was extremely offensive. And I know the investigation’s ongoing; we’ll see what happened, but to me it seemed like a pretty clear act of intolerance, racism.”

Harvard University police are investigating a possible hate crime at the law school after someone covered portraits of black faculty members in tape, according to university officials. Some photographs, housed in Wasserstein Hall on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, were defaced with strips of black tape and discovered Thursday morning...Harvard Law School students quickly rallied in solidarity with their professors. A.J. Clayborne, who will graduate in 2016, told CNN that the response on campus was "fairly overwhelming" and that students "are shocked." He said that students met to organize in light of the incident..."There has been an outpouring of warm wishes for the affected faculty from Harvard Law students, some of whom posted signed messages of support," said Dr. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor of constitutional law at the school, in a statement to CNN. "I am so proud of the students for reacting with love and kindness, for showing leadership, and for valuing inclusion."..."I was shocked to see portraits of black faculty members defaced today in an apparent response to the peaceful protest organized by Harvard's black students on yesterday," said Dr. Ronald Sullivan Jr., who is the director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute. "My shock and dismay, however, were replaced with joy and admiration when I saw the lovely notes of affirmation and appreciation that Harvard law students placed on our portraits."

When students and faculty arrived at Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall Thursday morning, they found a disturbing sight. On a wall of portraits of the law school’s tenured faculty, black tape had been placed over each of the African American faculty members. A second-year student called the tape “a hate crime” in a widely shared Blavitypost that included pictures of the portraits. Dean Martha Minow said that racism is a “serious problem” at the school. Police say they are investigating.