Media Mentions

The Supreme Court today heard arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, a case which is likely to go down in the history books alongside other landmark civil rights cases. This one centers on two questions: first, whether there is a constitutional right to gay marriage, and second, if not, whether states that have bans on gay marriage have to recognize gay marriages performed in other states where it’s legal. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman about the significance of Obergefell v. Hodges and where it fits in with other landmark Supreme Court cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade.

It was the early 1980s, and Mary Bonauto was a college student in upstate New York, struggling to come out as gay. She turned to a priest for help but left convinced her church would not accept her. Unsure where to turn, she felt her life might “be over.” “The law was one way of making sure my life wouldn’t be over,” she recently recalled. “I could either just suffer from the system or change the system. I decided to opt on the change-the-system side.” ...“Mary Bonauto’s contributions to the gay rights movement are analogous to those of Thurgood Marshall to the civil rights movement and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the women’s rights movement,” Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, said in an e-mail.

A service that enables courts and researchers to make permanent links to research found on the Web has won a Webby Award for best legal site of 2015. Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Law School Library and supported by a network of more than 60 law libraries, takes on the widespread problem of broken or defunct Web links, also known as “link rot,” which can that can undermine research by scholars and courts. The problem was explained in a 2013 paper by Harvard Law professors Lawrence Lessig, Kendra Albert and Jonathan Zittrain. Their research detailed in, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” revealed that 50% of URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the originally cited material. Perma.cc has developed a process to preserve and “vest” links used in research.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Predicting exactly what the justices will say at oral argument is a tricky business -- but predicting the reaction is more tractable. After the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in the gay-marriage cases Tuesday, you can expect a moment of serious anxiety among those who hope that the court is about to declare a fundamental constitutional right to marry the partner of one’s choice. The reason is simple: Justice Anthony Kennedy isn't going to declare from the bench how he’s going to rule. At least some questions from some justices are likely to raise the question of whether the court should decide the issue now or wait for some unspecified time. The result will be a feeling of letdown and nervousness among gay-marriage supporters. Because expectations are so high right now, anything short of a Supreme Court lovefest is going to produce a feeling of vertigo -- and the worry that perhaps, after all, Kennedy might not be ready to do the right thing.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The same-sex marriage cases, which will be argued Tuesday, may well rank among the most important constitutional disputes in American history. The best analogy is Brown v. Board of Education, the iconic 1954 decision in which the Supreme Court struck down school segregation. The parallel is very close, and it clarifies what the same-sex marriage cases are really about. Almost everyone now celebrates Brown as self-evidently correct. But beware of hindsight. It obscures the intense disagreements that preceded that decision, and the firestorms that followed it. At the time, eminently sensible people insisted that the court had overreached, not least because racial segregation was entrenched in many states, and because it was not at all obvious that the Constitution stood in its way.

Columbia University is one of the many schools to be accused of failing to protect the rights of sexual assault victims. This week, it became one of the first to be singled out for failing to protect the rights of the accused. On Wednesday, Paul Nungesser, the male student who was the target of the now-famous “Carry That Weight” campaign filed a federal complaint against Columbia University, its board of trustees, and President Lee C. Bollinger...These cases beg the question: will students accused of sexual assault be headed to court en masse? Legal experts interviewed for this article say that may, in fact, be the next phase in national campus sexual assault reform—and they say the federal government is to blame. “I think the next wave will be students suing the universities. I think there will be an escalating wave,” said Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet...“When you get things like the federal government pressuring universities to create a sexual assault process that lacks adequate due process for those accused, you’re going to get students trying to protect themselves,” said Bartholet. Under current campus policy, she believes “there’s the risk we will find a lot of people responsible for sexual assault when they shouldn’t be. That will lead to some of them fighting back with the help of lawyers against the university and the government. I think that’s a good and healthy thing because what the federal government has done is outrageous,” she said.

Relatives of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are under federal government protection in a Revere hotel, officials said Friday, and are widely expected to assist the defense team as it prepares to present its case next week that Tsarnaev should be spared the death penalty....“So far Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a cardboard figure for the jury,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “Anything that humanizes him is a good thing for the defense.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Every weapons system, from the bow and arrow to the intercontinental ballistic missile, sometimes kills the wrong people. So why has the revelation that a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed two al-Qaeda hostages ­-- a U.S. citizen and an Italian aid worker -- created such a storm of drone “rethinking”? Part of the answer is that liberal critics of drone strikes, who’ve questioned their legality, are using the opportunity to repeat and reframe their criticisms. I’ve joined in some of that criticism in the past and stand by it. But the deeper reason for the renewed discussion is a pernicious myth: the fantasy that drones are uniquely precise.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein. DNA testing and videotaping of police-citizen encounters may have more in common than you might think. Both show not what arguably happened but what is true (or as close to true as we can get). DNA exonerations have enabled us to examine the behavior of lawyers, judges and prosecutors in order to understand how a wrongful conviction happened. Videotaping of police-citizen encounters could well do the same for policing and civil rights challenges to police misconduct.

Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said....But her friends and relatives say she has never viewed her job in government as one of a civil rights advocate. “She’s not an ideologue,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and longtime friend, said recently. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

When it was announced a little more than a year ago, it felt to many like a sure thing. After all, government regulators had approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011...The president may have been speaking about net neutrality, but the implications for the merger were clear. “That was just huge,” said Susan Crawford, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “It signaled that the cable industry was no longer calling the shots.”

An op-ed by David Medine and Eliza Sweren-Becker [`15]. Today we learned that in January, a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan inadvertently killed an American and an Italian held as hostages by al Qaeda. The strike also killed a U.S. citizen who was a prominent member of al Qaeda. A separate operation in January killed an American-born al Qaeda spokesman. The deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Portois are tragic and the Obama administration has pledged to conduct an independent review to understand how to prevent this type of grievous mistake. The apparently unintentional killings of two American al Qaeda operatives raise an additional question that President Obama did not address in his televised statement today: under what circumstances may the United States intentionally use targeted lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad?

Virginia is one of many states that have proposed new legislation tackling sexual misconduct on college campuses. However, some people believe this new wave of enforcement is an overreaction to problems at hand. Harvard University law professor Janet Halley was one of more than a dozen professors who wrote an op-ed published in The Boston Globe arguing that Harvard Law School’s new policy designed to crack down on sexual assault was unfair.Halley spoke at Roanoke College on Thursday about the problems she sees with Harvard’s policy and similar policies that have been adopted at schools across the country in response to the attention that sexual assault on campus has received in recent years...Halley, a self-described feminist and progressive, said the policies at Harvard, which were designed to be tough on campus sexual assault, had several problems including giving victims more rights than the accused, a lack of due process and teaching women that they are weak and in need of protection.

An op-ed by Stuart Brotman. The Federal Communication Commission's recent Open Internet Order is intended to develop an enforceable regulatory scheme to ensure that net neutrality would be achieved. One of its rationales is that unless such government intervention is put in place, the United States is likely to slip into the category of Internet also-rans, hurting innovation and our economy as a whole as Internet "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" thwart competition and impede consumer demand. But how accurate is this perception? The Internet, after all, is not just a network of networks, but rather a complex ecosystem comprised of applications and content, devices and networks. The interdependency of these three pillars creates the rich experience of the Internet, not just in the United States, but all around the world.

Researchers who have spent the past few months analyzing the town’s political environment plan to present their findings early next month. Students Seanan Fong and Jiayun Ho from the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program will also release a written report, the program announced this week.

...As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the nation seems more ready to accept it than many imagined even a year ago. But divisions remain, and while more than half of Americans now endorse the idea, about one-third say they oppose it, according to survey data from 2014...“As more couples marry, more people will know people who are married,” said Michael J. Klarman, a legal historian at the Harvard Law School and author of a 2012 book on earlier same-sex marriage rulings. “And those who oppose it will find out that the sky doesn’t fall.”

Citing a rise in wrongful-conviction claims by inmates, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is launching a unit of veteran prosecutors to review the integrity of past convictions, joining a small but growing number of prosecutorial agencies around the country devoting resources to identify innocent prisoners...Forgoing an antagonistic view toward the defense has worked well for prosecutors in Brooklyn’s conviction review unit, said Ron Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who designed and implemented the unit, which has helped exonerate 13 people since it began in 2014...A big part of putting the unit in place, Sullivan said, was creating a new ethos in the office and reinforcing the “notion of prosecutors doing justice instead of trying to get convictions.”

A frequent contributor to Fox News and the Wall Street Journal has injected an oft-missing issue in the #blacklivesmatter movement: facts. The contributor, Jason Riley, faced off with Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor of criminal law and the regulation of race relations, in a civil but intense debate Tuesday evening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Most of the debate, “Liberal Policies make it harder for black Americans to succeed,” centered around affirmative action and social welfare policies, but the rhetorical combatants did address the politically thorny issue of black crime.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 197 new members. They include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, and artists, and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. Those elected from Harvard are...Noah R. Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Philadelphia's Police Department, like many others around the country, is in the midst of a plans to invest in body cameras. The department will purchase 450 of the devices for officers next year with plans to outfit the city's entire force with them by 2019. WHYY talked to Katie McCarthy, a third-year Harvard law student who works at the school's law clinic representing low-income defendants. McCarthy recently wrote "Considering Police Body Cameras" for the Harvard Law Review, a piece on research she's done into the implications of police departments adopting the technology.

“In the face of so much hate let’s show how deeply we love,” said the Harvard Law Women’s Law Association President Kenyon D. Colli [`16] at a vigil for Africans Wednesday evening. Here, students light each other’s candles before singing “Amazing Grace.” The Harvard African Law Association hosted the event in response to recent killings across the continent.