Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s been 150 years since U.S. law allowed masters to rape enslaved girls and women. Almost all modern Muslim societies banned slavery in the last century. So why is Islamic State turning back the clock, actively embracing and promoting enslavement of Yazidi women, thereby enabling them to be raped under one interpretation of classical Islamic law? Islamic State’s goal isn’t primarily about money or sex, but about sending the message that they are creating an Islamic utopia, following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad. They want to go back in time, to the days of the earliest Muslims and the Prophet’s companions. The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.

An op-ed by Johanna Wald. One could almost hear a collective sigh of relief emanating from the Massachusetts criminal justice reform community at the announcement last week that the state would—finally—begin a long-overdue Justice Reinvestment effort. While more than 20 states have already undergone this data driven process aimed at reducing rates of incarceration, “liberal” Massachusetts had been strangely resistant to the federally-backed initiative. In fact, the Legislature veered off in the opposite direction several years ago, passing a controversial “Three Strikes” law to increase mandatory sentences for some offenses.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Earlier this week I launched a committee to explore the possibility of running in the Democratic Primary to be a very different kind of president. As I explained then, the run would be a referendum around a very simple idea: that if, as Elizabeth Warren puts it, “the system is rigged,” then we need a plan to fix that rigged system. My plan is a referendum. My candidacy would be a referendum. Elected with a single mandate to end this corrupted system, I would serve only as long as it takes to pass fundamental reform. I would then resign, and the vice president would become president. The most common (polite) reaction to this obviously implausible idea was two words: Bernie Sanders.

Lawrence Lessig wants to be president—for a day. The Harvard law professor, who says his top priority is to “unrig this rigged system,” is launching an unconventional bid to be what he calls a “referendum president.” His idea is straightforward: If elected, Mr. Lessig would take action to overhaul campaign-finance laws and end what he describes as voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Then — perhaps even after a single day, though he acknowledges that’s “hopeful”—he would step aside and let his vice president lead. He says he would consider Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—who has repeatedly said she does not plan to run—to join him on the ticket.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It must be good news that Iraq’s parliament passed Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi’s anti-corruption reforms this week -- right? As with most things in Iraq, the answer isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface. In the abstract, it’s a nice idea for Iraq to stop dividing the spoils of government office among its denominational and ethnic factions. But that structure, with all its obvious flaws and faults, was built into the DNA of the Iraqi constitution for a reason: to help quell Sunni Arab fears that the Shiite majority, in collusion with the Kurdish minority, would dominate the Sunnis in perpetuity and refuse to share oil revenue.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s more than a little eerie to hear that authorities have declared a state of emergency in Ferguson, Missouri. The state of emergency, aka the state of siege, casts a long shadow over the history of government attempts to produce and maintain public order. States of emergency are the favored tool of dictators and would-be dictators who want to suspend regular, constitutional procedures. Their invocation often heralds a crackdown on civil liberties. In the case of St. Louis County, the reality is more complicated. The declared state of emergency does in fact give the elected county executive, Steve Stenger, almost absolute authority to declare a curfew and thereby order arrests and end protests.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. What would you think if a presidential candidate -- Republican or Democrat -- proposed a new federal program claiming to reduce poverty, boost employment, improve the health of infants and mothers, and increase the likelihood that people would graduate from college? You’d probably think the candidate was blowing a lot of smoke. Yet the earned income tax credit is doing every one of these things.

When the American Psychological Association (APA) voted 156-1 last week to ban psychologists from participating in national security interrogations, the lone dissenter was retired Colonel Larry James, a former chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. He is also one of the people who inspired the vote in the first place...In 2010, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic filed two ethical complaints against James for his work at the prison facilities, one in each of the two states he’s licensed to practice—Louisiana and Ohio. The complaint alleges that during his tenure at Guantanamo in 2003, “boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.” In 2009, Harvard Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, then a fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described an incident involving James at Guantanamo.

In the 1990’s and accelerating into the 2000’s, a number of major law firms adopted a two-tier partnership structure, mainly for economic reasons, legal experts said...Recently, though, that model has been coming under pressure. “When the market went in the downturn, firms found themselves with a lot of non-equity partners who had very little incentive to actually go out and get business, who were being paid a lot of money,” said David Wilkins, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the legal profession.

Five hundred years ago, cities were both smaller and more autonomous, their citizens happily exempt from the laws and obligations of the feudal countryside. Today, the situation is reversed. Roughly three-quarters of the developed world is urbanized. The bigger, richer, and more numerous that cities have become, the more their power has been absorbed by both nation-states and supranational bodies, like the European Union. ...Or, much like Congress on these issues, they might do nothing at all. Skeptics argue that the GPM threatens to add, not subtract, from the bureaucracy that makes it difficult for civic leaders to do their jobs. Some argue that mayors need more basic authority before lending it to others. Referring to Barber’s book, Harvard law professor Gerald Frug notes, “The more useful title would be ‘If Mayors Ruled Their Cities.’ ”

Senate Republicans announced new legislation Tuesday to bar the government from forcing business to provide insurance for drugs and services that violate their moral beliefs, tapping into renewed debates over religious liberty, abortion and the persistent legal fight over Obamacare’s birth control mandate...Holly Lynch, a bioethics expert at Harvard Law School who closely tracks the debate, said the new bill didn’t balance its focus on rights of conscience with a women’s access to services. “All these senators are doing is focusing on one side of the equation, and that is a serious problem,” she said.

President Obama’s climate-change plan will face a fierce challenge in the courts this fall, when lawyers for at least 15 states join the coal and power industries to block the carbon-reducing rules before they take effect...But other experts in environmental law say the outcome is hard to predict. “EPA will not have smooth sailing,” said Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus, noting the high court’s June ruling against another clean-air rule came as a “dose of cold water” for environmental advocates.

An epic legal battle is about to begin over President Obama's plan to address climate change, in which the Environmental Protection Agency is putting in place new limits on greenhouse gases from power plants. Critics argue the plan is on shaky legal ground, but the administration says it's prepared to defend the regulations in court...Others say the EPA is likely to prevail on that point. Harvard law professor Jody Freeman, a former legal expert on energy and climate change for the Obama administration, says the final version of the regulations is "far more legally defensible than the draft was." For example, Freeman notes that the draft version set emission targets for entire states instead of specific polluters. "Now, what EPA has done is put the regulatory burden directly on the power plants themselves to cut their pollution," she says. "That's just much more direct, and it aligns better with the Clean Air Act."

An op-ed by Charles Ogletree and Kevin C. Peterson. This week Americans recognize the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. But when it comes to protecting one of our most fundamental rights, is this a time of national rejoicing or mourning? Weeping? Or reaping? Two years ago the 1965 Voting Rights Act was effectively eviscerated. The animating legal mechanisms that gave the act its authority — allowing blacks and other groups to steadily gain electoral equity — was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, a decision resulting in an immediate avalanche of anti-voting-rights legislation spanning from Texas to North Dakota, from Pennsylvania to Alabama.

Obama's announcement of a final rule to reduce carbon emissions on Monday (03.08.2015) drew international attention to the United States. The administration appears to have responded to a growing desire for politicians to take the fight against climate change more seriously. The American public has been demanding more government action as severe droughts and forest fires ravage the western US...."It's a transformational moment in the US, both in the business sector and in politics," Jody Freeman, founding director of the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Program, told DW. "The push at the national level is a signal that is going to drive change in the private sector."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What counts as discrimination? In our post-Ferguson era of heightened awareness of disparate racial treatment by police, no domestic question is more pressing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has just addressed it in the context of a Texas voter identification law -- and gave a measured, socially astute answer. The court held that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to say that the law requiring all voters to show an acceptable ID was intentionally racist. But it said the effect of the law nonetheless was racially discriminatory -- because it made it disproportionately harder for blacks and Latinos to vote than for whites.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A goodly portion of the Washington legal establishment has filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the conviction of a securities fraudster. But the court shouldn’t take the bait, or the case. The court doesn’t, and shouldn’t, engage in what it calls error correction, except maybe in death penalty cases. And the Washington lawyers, who know this perfectly well, aren’t on board primarily to establish a principle. They’re engaged in a low-stakes process of mutual benefit that's well-known to legal insiders but, if successful, would amount to a distortion of the court’s processes on behalf of fancy -- and expensive -- former government lawyers.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Thursday's Republican debate will pit System 1 candidates (above all Donald Trump) against System 2 candidates (above all Jeb Bush). Let me explain. Social scientists, most prominently Daniel Kahneman, have distinguished between "fast thinking," undertaken by what they call the mind's System 1, and "slow thinking," which characterizes System 2. System 1 is automatic, intuitive, focused on the present and often emotional. System 2 is deliberative, calculating, focused on the long term and emotion-free.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the 2007 best-seller “Spook Country,” William Gibson foresaw “the locative”: virtual fantasies layered over the real-world grid, visible to anyone with the right geo-aware gear. In the book, the charismatic Bobby Chombo is the only guy around with the technical chops needed to make the locative work. So when an artist wants to, say, digitally re-create the death of River Phoenix on Sunset Strip, he or she needs Chombo’s help. Cities are real-world grids: you can see that instantly on a Google map. But it’s not so easy to see the city as a civic entity. The stuff that counts — the interaction between people and city services — is hidden in plain view, invisible to almost everyone. That may be about to change. The opportunity: make it possible for cities to show their work and engage with citizens in a meaningful way, using the existing idea of 311. And make everyone who’s interested a Bobby Chombo.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus. After releasing the Clean Power Plan this week the Obama administration must shift from offense to defense. The plan, which set the first national limits on carbon pollution from existing coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, faces two significant risks: one legal, the other political. The administration must address them to achieve the plan’s ambitious goal of cutting carbon emissions 32% below 2005 levels in 2030.

More than a year ago, in a decision that stunned many American Internet companies, Europe’s highest court ruled that search engines were required to grant an unusual right — the “right to be forgotten.” Privacy advocates cheered the decision by the European Court of Justice, which seemed to offer citizens some recourse to what had become a growing menace of modern life: The Internet never forgets...Recent developments — including a French regulator’s order that all of Google’s sites, including American versions, should grant the right to be forgotten — suggest the new right may not end with Europe...“France is asking for Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment,” said Jonathan L. Zittrain, who teaches digital law at Harvard Law School. He pointed out that, if enacted, the French regulator’s order would prevent Americans using an American search engine from seeing content that is legal in the United States. “That is extremely worrisome to me.”