Media Mentions

What should have been a routine meeting last spring to choose the next chairman of the Sudbury Board of Selectmen devolved into a heated debate of personal attacks that left many residents shaking their heads in disgust...Recently, a group of local clergy members stepped in, enlisting the help of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School to propose ways to move toward more civil discourse. The results of the “Sudbury Listening Project” will be presented at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Grange Hall in Sudbury...Harvard law students Seanan Fong and Jiayun Ho spent two months interviewing members of the community, holding focus groups, and conducting an online survey that was completed by 191 people. “The whole purpose was to listen, not to come in and say, ‘This is what’s wrong with your town,’ but to understand what people are seeing and hearing and feeling,” said Rachel Viscomi, assistant director of the program, which connects students from the law school with organizations that would benefit from strategic negotiation and conflict management advice.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman.Why is China announcing joint naval exercises with Russia in the Mediterranean, so far from home? There’s a global answer connected to the new cool war and China’s interest in responding to U.S. initiatives in the Pacific. But there’s also a more revealing local answer arriving from the nature of China’s growing involvement in the Middle East and North Africa. The global geopolitical explanation for the exercises, expected this month, is certainly interesting and distinctive. China’s military and security aims are primarily focused on the Pacific, and it can’t reasonably hope to compete with the U.S. or European powers in their own backyards. Yet China gains symbolic value from presenting itself as an increasingly global power.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is there a guerrilla war under way against the death penalty? Justice Samuel Alito proposed the idea Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the use of the drug midazolam while administering lethal injections. The answer, to put it bluntly, is yes: Death-penalty abolitionists, unable to persuade either the public or the courts to prohibit the death penalty absolutely, rely on all the legal means available to them. Their arguments before the court are politics by other means -- Clausewitz’s famous description of war.

Attempting to usher in the apocalypse in the 1990’s, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo managed to procure VX nerve gas and a military helicopter. Fortunately a botched chemical weapons deployment limited the casualties to only a few thousand injured and about a dozen killed. Despite having a doctorate in molecular biology, Aum Shinrikyo's Seiichi Endo couldn’t access any truly catastrophic bioweapons—in 1995 nation-states were still by and large the only entities that could realistically kill millions. How long this limitation will hold is still an open question...We’re entering an era in which smaller and smaller groups can project violence in unprecedented ways, even rivaling the destructive capacity of states. This shift in power dynamics is the topic of The Future of Violence, a new book by Benjamin Wittes at the Brookings Institution and Gabriella Blum at Harvard Law School. The book addresses one of the most fundamental challenges of our century—how can we structure our society so that these newfound technological powers don’t end in catastrophe?

The presidential hopefuls haven't spent much time so far with voters. Instead, they've committed many days to courting the millionaires and billionaires who can fuel a White House bid. And at the same time, activists on the left and right are seeking to redefine political corruption, which they believe this is. ...Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, founded of Mayday PAC, a superPAC intended to fight unlimited money in superPACs. He and Teachout agree on the idea that corruption is a system problem. Lessig presents the issue as one not of equal political speech, but of equal rights. "We are talking about equal rights as citizens, equal right to participate in the political process," he says. "That's precisely the equality which has been destroyed by the way we've allowed campaigns to be funded."

Last week, one of the country’s biggest career college chains completed its collapse. Corinthian Colleges once ran 107 campuses of Everest Institute, WyoTech and Heald Colleges that served more than 100,000 students. It was a darling of Wall Street for its lucrative model of offering degrees to low-income students who borrowed heavily from the government to pay their tuition...“It is supremely unfair for the government to hold students feet to the fire on loans that were made to finance what the government should have known were valueless products,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School.

After years of false starts, the Boston Police Department is nearing a deal with its three unions and Harvard Law School to set up a simpler, speedier system for resolving many of the civilian complaints lodged against officers, police and Harvard officials say. Under the system, mediators from the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School would handle dozens of the more moderate disputes that clog up the department’s Internal Affairs Division, to the frustration of plaintiffs...Rachel A. Viscomi, the Harvard program’s assistant director, said she expected to complete an agreement once police unions approve the policy. She said mediators would be drawn from a pool of Harvard Law School students and local residents trained in dispute resolution and provided by the program at no charge. “It doesn’t always mean they’ll agree or want to resolve it right there,” she said, “but the opportunity for greater connection is very important.”

Two Harvard Law student-researchers urged residents of Sudbury, a town rife with political and social conflict, to voice their opinions and to more thoroughly consider opposing viewpoints during a Sunday afternoon forum in the town center. The residents convened at Grange Hall, where Seanan Fong and Jiayun Ho [`15] presented findings from “The Sudbury Listening Project,” a first-of-its-kind diagnostic report overseen by the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. Fong and Ho compiled the report over two months, interviewing and meeting with Sudbury residents to evaluate the sources of townwide tension...Fong and Ho told the audience that many of the people they interviewed said they felt threatened and hurt by hostility within the town government.

For a moment last year, it looked as if the Obama administration was moving toward a history-making end to the federal death penalty. ...“It was a step in the right direction, but not enough of a step,” said Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard professor and a death penalty opponent who met with administration officials as part of the review. The Justice Department, he added, has been refusing to say what he thinks senior officials there believe: “We’ve had too many executions that didn’t work and killing somebody’s not the answer.”

A Massachusetts man imprisoned for 30 years for a crime he says he didn't commit is asking for a new trial after the FBI admitted making serious mistakes with one of the few pieces of physical evidence in the case. ...Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, who has written about faulty forensic science, called the FBI's review of old hair analysis cases "extraordinary." She credited the FBI for launching the nationwide review. "We're not talking about a minor mistake. We're taking about a mistake that implicated a man's liberty," Gertner told 5 Investigates' Karen Anderson. "Before DNA we didn't know what the truth was."

Focusing on health and life sciences, cultural entrepreneurship, the food system, and innovation in sports, five student-led teams were named winners in the third annual Deans’ Challenges. Each of the four Deans’ Challenges awarded $55,000 to the winning teams and runners-up, for a total of $220,000...“I saw firsthand through our Food System Challenge this year how the challenge process ignites imagination, collaboration, and focused excellence, along with excitement and fun,” said Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School.

Harvard Law School’s Perma.cc — a website dedicated to keeping internet URLs operable — has won the Webby Award for best legal site of 2015. Perma.cc, a website for organizations in the “forever” business, is an online preservation site that tackles the problem of inoperable links, a phenomena known as “link rot,” which can undermine research by scholars and courts. It was developed by Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with university law libraries nationwide. Project Manager Adam Ziegler explained that link rot is “hugely damaging” to legal scholarship, noting that prior to Perma.cc’s 2013 launch, Harvard researchers determined that half of the links in all U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer worked and more than 70 percent of law journal links were defunct...Over the last 20 months Perma.cc has enabled the creation of nearly 100,000 permanent links, Harvard Library Innovation Lab director Kim Dulin told Big Law Business, and garnered participation by 91 law libraries and nearly 300 legal journals.

HBX Credential of Readiness (CORe)—the online business fundamentals program launched by Harvard Business School (HBS) last year to provide a strong foundation in the language and tools of business—will now be offered to entering students at Harvard Law School (HLS). Starting in June, CORe will be available on a first-come, first-served basis to applicants admitted to Harvard Law School’s Class of 2018 and to current students on a pilot basis. HLS will subsidize the $1,800 enrollment cost so that the program is available to its students for $250...“To assist clients or even to launch entrepreneurial ventures of their own, lawyers need to understand and use the tools and skills involved in growing and running a business,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “We know from recent studies and surveys that law firms, businesses, and also public sector and non-profit employers increasingly value these skills. In the past several years we have added new curricular opportunities for students to develop business skills, and I am especially delighted that Harvard Business School’s innovative CORe program will now be available for Harvard Law School students.”

With current Harvard Law School Dean of Students Ellen M. Cosgrove set to depart for Yale Law School this summer, members of Law School student groups—including affinity groups and the Board of Student Advisers—are working with the school’s human resources office and an outside consulting firm to formulate the qualifications for Cosgrove’s replacement...“That’s something we really think is important, is finding a new dean of students who will make sure the diversity and inclusion issues that Harvard Law students have been expressing are a priority to them,” said Leland S. Shelton [`16], the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association. Student leaders from groups that are not part the affinity coalition, including Isabel J. Broer [`16], the president of the Board of Student Advisers, also said issues of diversity and inclusion are primary concerns in the search process...But just how to ensure that student concerns convert into an ideal dean of students remains to be determined. “That’s the million dollar question,” said Rena T. Karefa-Johnson [`16], a co-president of Students for Inclusion, a student group at the Law School that focuses on the common concerns of different affinity groups.

Eighty-four percent of campaign contributions made by a group of 614 Harvard faculty, instructors, and researchers between 2011 and the third quarter of 2014 went to federal Democratic campaigns and political action committees, according to a Crimson analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. During the three years, the Harvard affiliates represented in analyzed public filings gave nearly $3 million to federal campaigns and candidates. Each of Harvard’s schools leaned to the left in the contributions made by their affiliates, many by wide margins. Ninety-six percent of donations in the data set from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes Harvard College, supported Democratic efforts. That figure was even higher—nearly 98 percent—at Harvard Law School. Harvard Business School was the most Republican, with 37 percent of its contributions supporting Republicans and 62 percent going to Democrats.

The relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Party’s most likely Presidential nominee, goes back to the second half of the Clinton Administration. Warren told me recently that the most dramatic policy fight of her life was one in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were intimately involved. She recalls it as the “ten-year war.” Between 1995 and 2005, Warren, a professor who had established herself as one of the country’s foremost experts on bankruptcy law, managed to turn an arcane issue of financial regulation into a major political issue...In 1987, Warren moved on to a job at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, teaching contract law and bankruptcy; in 1995, she went to Harvard. “She broke the news about what the actual practices and effects of the bankruptcy law were,” Martha Minow, the dean of Harvard Law School, told me. “That put her on the map and made a lot of people interested.”

When Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig was named director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics in 2008, he said he would create a limited-time project to research the problem of institutional corruption in the United States. He launched that project, the Edmund J. Safra Research Lab, in 2010, as a five-year effort to study the issue and come up with tools to understand it and respond to it better. On Friday and Saturday, a two-day conference called “Ending Institutional Corruption” will mark the end of that project, with dozens of speakers from academia, law, government, media, mind sciences, and citizen groups discussing the topic...Harvard Law Today spoke with Lessig recently about the lab and his future plans.

An article by Cass Sunstein. Pop quiz: When you hear the term “PSA,” what comes to mind? Many people will answer: Public Service Announcement. For men of a certain age, another likely response is more ominous (prostate-specific antigen, to be precise). Only a select few will say “Professional Squash Association,” which refers to the organization that oversees squash, a fiercely competitive racquet sport played in an indoor court with a squishy little black ball that goes up to 170 miles per hour. In the United States, squash remains pretty obscure, but it has a realistic chance of becoming an Olympic sport, and the PSA sponsors a tour, organizing more than 200 tournaments annually all over the world. Last week, the tour found its way to Charlotte, North Carolina. In an act of extraordinary generosity, the promoters invited me to participate as a wild-card entry.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s pretty unusual for oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court to be interrupted by a protester -- but that happened Tuesday during the gay-marriage case. As Solicitor General Donald Verrilli got up to make a pro-gay-marriage argument on behalf of the U.S., a protester called out, “If you support gay marriage, you will burn in hell!” Then he said, “It’s an abomination!” at which point he was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The official transcript records the protester's words only as “interruption,” but reporters in the room relayed the content. After the incident, Chief Justice John Roberts graciously asked Verrilli, “General, would you like to take a moment?” (The solicitor general is addressed as “General,” at the Supreme Court, if nowhere else.) Verrilli said he would, then said he was ready to proceed if the court was. Roberts replied, “Well, we’re ready. OK.” Justice Antonin Scalia then piped up: “It was rather refreshing, actually.” The official transcript records “laughter” in the room.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Chief Justice John Roberts isn't a politician -- and he wants you to know it. That's the message of a surprising 5-4 decision issued Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court in which Roberts provided the deciding vote. The court held that Florida may prohibit judges running for office from directly soliciting money from contributors. Ordinarily, as in the Citizens United decision, campaign-finance cases in the Roberts court go 5-4 the other way, and the court strikes down legal restrictions as violating free-speech. The other eight justices all voted consistently with their usual views. Only Roberts flipped in the judicial elections case -- and therein hangs an important tale about Roberts himself and the legacy he hopes to produce.

With around 250 in attendance, the event room at Civic Hall is packed. I’m actually part of the overflow, watching Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on massive closed-circuit TVs in the foyer, in merciful proximity to the hors d’oeuvres and wine... The breathless cadence of a TED Talk is unmistakable, and Lessig’s impassioned case for Elizabeth Warren is fraught with urgency. There is no mention of electoral strategy or political details, but the presentation is highly visual, with a powerpoint on the monitors behind him that opens with a clear blue sky and rolling clouds. It looks a desktop wallpaper for Windows 98. Words and phrases flash on the monitors behind him for emphasis–”standup,” “most powerful” and “brand,” to name a few, while Lessig expounds on inequality, money in politics and the forgettable neologism, “Tweedism,” a reference to Boss Tweed’s manipulation of politics. To his credit, his jokes get laughs. Lessig’s emphatic-but-never-antagonistic oratory stylings were in fact forged in the fires of TED, an origin betrayed by an overly-earnest tone, an unchallenging vocabulary and an anti-elitist denunciation of “wonks.” “It is a moral challenge, not a nerd’s challenge,” he proclaims–a strange sentiment at an event in celebration of Elizabeth Warren, a brilliantly wonky nerd herself.