Media Mentions

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. When Baltimore’s state attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges last week against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray and proclaimed to the city that “I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace,’” it’s possible that her decisions were based, at least in part, on the understandable goal of preventing further riots. This goal is commendable, but the mean selected to achieve it — hearing the call of demonstrators — raises fundamental questions regarding the due process right of those charged with serious crimes. No decision on charges should ever be made on the basis of satisfying the demands of demonstrators or under the threat of violent demonstrations. Crowd control is not a proper component of prosecutorial discretion and is inconsistent with due process. Prosecutorial discretion should be exercised on the basis of an objective application of the law to the facts and not on the basis of the impact it may have on the crowd.

In an upcoming initiative, the Harvard Mediation Program at Harvard Law School would help mediate complaints levied by civilians against Boston Police Department officers, according to Rachel A. Viscomi, the assistant director of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program at the Law School...“Mediation provides an opportunity to engage and potentially repair individual instances of hurt and misunderstanding, helping to strengthen connection and understanding between police officers and the communities they serve,” Viscomi wrote in an email.

Jasleen Kohli estimates that she’s attended more than 100 protests, but until 2013 she couldn’t get arrested in this town. As a lawyer, she often was called on to witness demonstrations and spring her fellow activists from jail...These days, as director of UCLA law school’s Critical Race Studies program, Kohli trains students to scrutinize the role of race in the justice system...Mentored by Lani Guinier, Bill Clinton’s short-lived nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, Kohli gravitated toward economic justice issues. “Think about jobs, housing, education — a lot of it comes down to different access to resources. The way those resources are allocated comes from a history of racism and institutional privilege.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was morally wrong for two men to attack an anti-Islam installation last weekend in Garland, Texas, and no one should mourn the death of these terrorists. But what about deliberately provoking the assault by staging a competition for the most insulting caricature of the Prophet Muhammad? Was that morally wrong? Or was it just a reasonable exercise of the right to free speech? It’s easy to be distracted by the condemnation of the crime, which should be absolute. No verbal provocation can justify killing. But it’s also easy to be distracted by the First Amendment.

Tom Colicchio and a panel of experts, which includes author Jonathan Bloom, Emily Broad Leib of Harvard University's Food and Policy Clinic and Mike Curtin of DC Central Kitchen, discuss the larger issues highlighted by the film “Just Eat It.”

Mylan’s recent reincorporation in the Netherlands was part of the generic drugmaker’s strategy to reduce its global tax bill. But the shift, accomplished while keeping its operational headquarters in Cecil, came with another benefit: a European-style poison pill that could help Mylan thwart a hostile, $43 billion takeover bid from Israeli drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries....Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk opposes the use of the Dutch poison pill. “The shareholders of a company should be able to decide whether to sell the company, and giving the board of a Dutch foundation effective veto power over an acquisition is detrimental to the interests of shareholders,” he said in an email.

The U.S. Supreme Court has almost certainly made its decision about the right to marry for same-sex couples...Most legal observers who watched or listened to the oral arguments from April 28 in Obergefell v. Hodges, an appeal seeking to strike down bans on same-sex marriages in four states, predict Justice Anthony Kennedy will vote with the court's four liberal wing and find the bans unconstitutional...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 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'."

For many of the startups among Beacon Press’s neighbors in Fort Point Channel’s Innovation District, the hire of a couple additional telecommuters would be a development hardly worth noting. But for a 161-year-old, mission-driven, nonprofit book publisher to add two remote acquisitions editors — that, in light of an anxious decade in publishing that has included both a recession and massive technological disruption, is striking news. ...For some authors, including ones who otherwise might be published by commercial or academic presses, Beacon’s values are part of its appeal. Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier’s most recent book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,” was published by Beacon in January. “The commitment is to social justice and to sharing information that helps people rather than harms them,” Guinier said. She believes the publisher promotes “a reading conversation — meaning not just people in a bully pulpit.”

Lani Guinier, the first black woman to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, is perhaps most famous to the general public for a job she didn’t get. In 1993, Bill Clinton nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, but some of her views became sufficiently controversial to convince Clinton to withdraw the nomination before it came to a vote. She has professed (or does one mean professored?) on at Harvard, written several books and continued to opine in the areas of both voting rights and civil rights. On Friday, she was in town to speak at a luncheon of the Minnesota Black Women Lawyers Network. I had a short interview with her and between that conversation and her talk to the MBWLN, Guinier said...The U.S. system of democracy needs updating and it could benefit by looking around the world at other democracies that do things differently.

A letter by Vivek Krishnamurthy. Re “Dan Conley warns Congress over Apple, Google encryption” (April 29): Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley’s call for a ban on digital devices with encryption that law enforcement can’t break is dangerously misguided. Just as with physical locks, weak digital locks put us at risk because online predators can pick them just as easily as the police. If Apple and Google weaken their encryption for law enforcement, they’d be undermining the protections that keep foreign governments from spying on a Cabinet member’s smartphone, or cybercriminals from stealing health records from a doctor’s iPad.

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.