Media Mentions

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an independent commission, focused on the cumulative costs of rules and identifying those that need to be modified or repealed.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."

Following a school year that brought social justice issues to the forefront of campus dialogue, Harvard Law School students have started formally organizing to discuss their experiences and what they say are the shortcomings of the curriculum. At a Saturday event, titled “Disorientation,” students gathered to attend a series of panel discussions, breakout sessions, and training sessions about social justice issues and their presence, or lack thereof, in the Law School curriculum, particularly during the first year...“It was put together sort of to be a response to orientation and a response to some of the reactions students maybe have when they first get to law school,” said Faye E. Maison, a third-year Law student who helped organize the event. “Just to say there are a bunch of other people have been through this and are having the same thoughts you do.” Both Maison and Mihal R. Ansik, another third-year law student who helped organize the event, said the initial impetus for the event was what they described as the insensitivity of the Law School classroom to social justice perspectives.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I’ve been excited about the Array of Things —  a network of beautifully-designed sensors poised to capture and make public real-time, non-personal data about the livability of a city — ever since it (they?) started following me on Twitter in June 2014. A sensor network with a personality and a public service mission — what more could a responsive city want? I was happy to let it follow me, and followed it back so I could read its tweets. This month, the Array of Things moved several giant steps closer to becoming a crucial general-purpose, worldwide sensor data infrastructure for researchers and policymakers. New money from the National Science Foundation is coming in, new collaborators from around the world are learning about it, and 50 devices will be installed on the streets of Chicago in early 2016, with hundreds more to be added in the years to come.

A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs should be declared the copyright owner of the photos, rather than the nature photographer who positioned the camera, animal-rights activists contend in a novel lawsuit filed Tuesday. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It seeks a court order allowing PETA to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as 6-year-old Naruto, and other crested macaques living in a reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who supports animal rights, expressed misgivings about the litigation. “It trivializes the terrible problems of needless animal slaughter and avoidable animal exploitation worldwide for lawyers to focus so much energy and ingenuity on whether monkeys own the copyright in selfies taken under these contrived circumstances,” he said.

Harvard Child Advocacy Program Faculty Director Elizabeth Bartholet and NECIR Senior Reporter Jenifer McKim talk Baby Bella and the DCF.

Elizabeth Bartholet, Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, discusses the Bella Bond case and the efforts of the DCF.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. In 1989, handgun expert Jeff Cooper invented something called the Color Code to describe what he called the “combat mind-set"...Cooper talked about remaining in Code Yellow over time, but he didn’t write about its psychological toll. It’s significant. Our brains can’t be on that alert level constantly. We need downtime. We need to relax. This is why we have friends around whom we can let our guard down and homes where we can close our doors to outsiders. We only want to visit Yellowland occasionally. Since 9/11, the US has increasingly become Yellowland, a place where we assume danger is imminent. It’s damaging to us individually and as a society.

“Taqiyya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals.”— Dr. Ben Carson, interview with The Hill newspaper, Sept. 20, 2015. Carson, a neurosurgeon seeking the GOP presidential nomination, caused a stir when he declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he could not support a Muslim becoming president...Another expert on Islamic law, Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, agreed that Carson’s comment was “very much oversimplified to the point of misrepresentation.” As Feldman put it, “taqiyya is dissimulation when one is being oppressed or tortured or having one’s views banned, a bit like Jesuit dispensation to lie under oath when your life is in danger.”

The number of Ohioans dying from fatal heroin overdoses has quadrupled since 2008. While addicts have more paths to treatment, state leaders and local prosecutors have begun to go after the epidemic’s source: the drug dealers. Dealers could face lengthy prison terms. But there are legal questions....For Harvard Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan, charging a drug dealer with murder raises concerns. Sullivan said these “drug delivery resulting in death” laws often don’t meet the criminal liability requirements: guilty act, intent and causation. “Is it reasonably foreseeable that everyone who takes or ingests cocaine or heroin, is it reasonably foreseeable that they will die of an overdose? And that’s a question that the fact-finder and the judge in the case will have to wrestle with," Sullivan said.

U.S. antitrust officials investigating whether the nation’s four largest airlines colluded on pricing are looking at executives’ communications -- not only with each other, but also with their biggest shareholders...Another paper on the topic is also getting a close read at the Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the matter. That target, by Harvard Law School professor Einer Elhauge, argues that investor ownership of competitors across an industry can be challenged as anticompetitive even if overt coordination isn’t involved.

Harvard Law School launched last week a mobile application for students with resources related to mental health, sexual harassment, and student life. The app, called “THRIVE@HLS,” is based on a similar app used at Harvard Business School. The app links to the phone numbers and contact information for the Harvard University Police Department, Harvard University Health Resources, and the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response hotline. It also supplies students with contact information for the Law School’s Title IX coordinators, dining hall offerings, and an events schedule. Over the summer, we shared a beta version of the app with a group of HLS students and received their input. The feedback was positive,” Law School spokesperson Robb London wrote in an email.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court term that starts the first Monday in October will mark the 10th anniversary of John Roberts’s introduction as chief justice. He can celebrate by reflecting on the assertion by Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz that Roberts should never have been nominated. Cruz’s repudiation of Roberts, a fellow product of the conservative legal establishment, is just the latest confirmation of an astonishing process: The chief justice, a lifelong conservative who hasn't abandoned his views, is nevertheless being abandoned by conservatives -- without being embraced by liberals.

An op-ed by Samuel Moyn. Pope Francis has been called a great champion for the downtrodden. Yet unlike many progressives throughout the West who admire him, he rarely expresses his concerns about the plight of the poor in terms of human rights. This silence is significant. In the 1930s and ’40s, Popes Pius XI and XII proclaimed human rights as humanity’s highest values. Their defense decisively influenced the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. During his own storied visit to America in 1979, the newly elected Pope John Paul II insisted on the importance of human rights, especially freedom, and was lionized for facing down the communist empire of his Eastern European homeland. No one interested in how human rights became the idea of our time can ignore how Christians learned to champion them. But they changed their meaning in the process. This is changing under Francis, and that might be a good thing.

Last year, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, known for defending high-profile clients such as O.J. Simpson, Michael Milken and Claus von Bulow, won an unusual case: He successfully argued that the biblical Abraham was not guilty of the attempted murder of his son, Isaac. “It got Abraham off,” he jokes. His argument was part of a mock trial at a synagogue in Manhattan, and it inspired him to write his latest book, “Abraham: The World’s First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer.” Coming out Oct. 6, the book offers a history of Jewish lawyers, from Abraham through figures like the French jurist and law professor René Cassin and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. This week, Pope Francis is expected to implore both the U.S. Congress and the UN General Assembly to take aggressive steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. His thinking on this issue is not simple alarm over climate change. It involves an extraordinary combination of passionate environmentalism, concern for the poor, skepticism about economics and apparent hostility to "profits." All this makes for an impressive but occasionally awkward argument.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you're as cynical as I am about Europe's impulse to control migration from Arab lands, you might have the same question I did: Why don't European navies interdict the refugees at sea, and send them back to Libya or Turkey or wherever they're coming from? It might seem cruel, but after all, that's what the U.S. did with Haitian boat people in the 1990s and what Australia still does with asylum-seekers. You might think the answer is that the Europeans are just more softhearted than the Americans or Australians, but it turns out the answer isn't that simple. Behind Europe’s policy of saving refugees at sea and bringing them in for processing and asylum lies a controversial 2012 decision by the European Court of Human Rights.

China and the United States could work together to improve the global financial system in order to achieve a stable and sustainable economic development for the world, officials and experts said at a recent symposium....The US and China have different interests and experiences, so mutual understanding of each other is important, said Hal Scott, director of the program on international financial systems at the Law School of Harvard University. "The cooperation between the US and China over economic issues will affect the world. I think we need to strengthen them by a mechanism for further cooperation," he added.