Media Mentions

There is a delicate balance between preserving individual rights and protecting public health when it comes to vaccines, experts argued at a panel discussion at Harvard Law School on Wednesday. In the wake of the recent outbreak of measles in California, the panel emphasized the need for Americans to be more informed in their decisions for or against vaccination. While allowing an opt-out option to remain in place, the panel proposed making the opt-out process for vaccines more difficult...Panel event organizer Holly F. Lynch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Law School, said the prevailing culture of maintaining polite conversation can complicate the push for vaccination. “I’m wondering if there’s a way that we can get past this politeness and really get down to brass tax of what people are doing when they refuse to vaccinate their kids,” Lynch said. “There’s this challenge between respecting people’s decisions, but calling them on it when their decisions may be underinformed in some way.”

For more than 14 years a group of South African nationals have been fighting it out in court with the US-based corporations IBM and Ford, using a once-obscure American law from the 18th century to file a lawsuit claiming the companies aided and abetted human rights abuses carried out by the government of South Africa during apartheid rule. In a class action filing known as In re South African Apartheid, dozens of plaintiffs accuse IBM of knowingly creating a plan for, and providing technology to, the South African government — as early as the 1950s — that was used in the apartheid regime's campaign to denationalize black citizens. ..."IBM in the US basically formed and executed a plan for the South African government to denationalize black south Africans," Susan Farbstein, at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Clinic, which is currently a co-counsel on the case, told VICE News. Farbstein added that "Ford [in the US] was making key decisions" about operations in the country, which maintained apartheid from 1948 to 1994 and was placed under international sanctions in 1986.

The FCC is expected to vote Thursday to change the way the Internet is regulated in the United States and begin enforcing so called "net neutrality." Its a move that has caused ripples from the halls of Congress to the garages of Silicon Valley. But what exactly is "net neutrality," and what does the FCC's vote mean for Internet users?...Here’s how Rob Faris, research director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, breaks it down. "The basic idea is that all bits are treated equally as they’re passed on to computers," Faris said. Online, everything’s made of bits — every email, high-resolution photo, or YouTube video. In a world of net neutrality, whether those bits add up to The New York Times home page or your cousin’s cat blog, they are treated equally and delivered at the same speed. Faris says it’s that level playing field that has made the Internet the Internet.

A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state’s century-old ban on corporate contributions to political candidates, and injecting new life into a long-running debate over the influence of special interests in Massachusetts politics...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said “the law is moving inexorably in the direction of invalidating almost all campaign finance limits.” Properly designed limits on direct corporate contributions to candidates may be one of the few restrictions that survive, he said. However, Tribe also suggested the Massachusetts law, as enforced, is not likely to meet court muster.

After the National Association of the Deaf filed lawsuits against Harvard and MIT alleging that the universities’ online content discriminates against the deaf and hard of hearing, some legal experts said they believe the suit has merit...Harvard Law School professor Martha A. Field said she disagreed with Stafford, and argued that in either case the university is required to caption the materials. “It’s not a gray area,” she said. “It’s explicit in the ADA act that universities are covered.”...Although some disability law experts said that the plaintiff's case is strong, Field said that she believes Harvard will put up captioning before the suit makes it to court. “The university has to start captioning,” she said. “They’ll be silly if they litigate it all the way [to court].”

...Columbia Law School retained its place as the top provider of law graduates hired by those big firms, and the University of Pennsylvania jumped from fifth to second place on The National Law Journal's annual Go-To Law Schools list..."I think things are better," said Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School. "You can feel it. There is a healthy sense of cautious optimism, and that wasn't always the case."..."Harvard also saw a small increase in the percentage of graduates hired by large firms in 2014, Weber said. "I don't think we're back to the days of the early 2000s, but it's a much healthier picture than before," he said. "We're very fortunate that employers come to Harvard and hire our students, and they are hiring even more now."

Remember when UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that he wanted to pass a law that would compel messaging apps to provide a backdoor for security agencies? That would, in effect, ban encrypted software that has no key. President Barack Obama agreed with him. In response to that proposal, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard University, wrote an open letter to Cameron, explaining why he thinks it’s a “very bad idea.” It’s one thing to try and regulate WhastApp, says Zittrain, because the government knows where Facebook “lives,” and the Silicon Valley company has assets that could be seized. But what happens when someone produces the next wildly popular messaging app? What if that someone happens to be, as Zittrain wrote in his letter, “two caffeine-fueled university sophomores?” They would be pretty hard to regulate, or even find, according to him. “You’re kind of stuck, which means you have to go double or nothing,” says Zittrain. “You now have to try to regulate the entire app ecosystem.”

Ever since Buju Banton, one of Jamaica's most talented and controversial reggae singers, was convicted of cocaine trafficking and gun charges in 2011, there have been signs his trial was not on the up-and-up...So is there a wider probe into potential misconduct that could move Banton a step closer to freedom? "I hope," says defense attorney Charles Ogletree, who heads Harvard Law School's Institute for Race and Justice. He has been representing Banton (real name Mark Myrie) for the past year. "Here we have a wildcat juror, somebody who's going way beyond their authority and doing things that were completely inappropriate. This undermined the search for truth, which resulted, I think, in the conviction of [Banton]."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. has a pressing need to increase the number of well-educated graduates in science, technology, engineering and math, pretty much everyone agrees...But why, exactly, aren’t more girls focusing on math and science?...A new study...indicates that much of the problem lies with biased primary school teachers, who have major and enduring influences on female achievement. That’s really hard to prove, but Victor Lavy of the University of Warwick and Edith Sand of Tel Aviv University found a way by studying children in Israel.

After University President Drew G. Faust referred the discussion of news that researchers had photographed thousands of students last year without their knowledge to an electronic oversight committee, that body is discussing the broad implications related to privacy and expects to report back to her by the end of the term...“The committee has not been charged with investigating or reporting on the attendance study,” the chair of the group, Harvard Law School professor John C. P. Goldberg, wrote in an email last month. He added that the “study served as a springboard for general discussions among committee members about privacy interests that may be at stake when classrooms are observed.”

As colleges grapple with the recent publicity over campus sexual assaults and violence, so, too, are lawyers dealing with the complicated legal issues involved in filing and investigating grievances. The problem, some lawyers say, is that due process has been abandoned in campus disciplinary procedures that address student-on-student sexual misconduct claims...There’s a sense among some law school faculty that Harvard should have pushed back on the OCR finding, particularly regarding due process rights for the accused, says professor Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the signers. “There are many university leaders who have a problem with the policy. Harvard could have provided an important leadership role in terms of challenging the government. I think [universities] are very nervous and are acting incredibly timidly,” says Bartholet, who serves as faculty director of the law school’s Child Advocacy Program.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can New York City bar religious worship in its school buildings? This very basic question about the First Amendment has been hotly contested in the courts for years -- and the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to announce Monday whether it will take the case. If it does, as I expect it will, the case will probably be a landmark in constitutional law. It poses perfectly the tension between the free exercise of religion on the one hand and the nonestablishment of religion on the other. Getting it right won't be easy for the court, because there's no one right answer.

Will the Black Lives Matter movement succeed? The entire country waits with bated breath to hear that question answered. And although pundits and protestors alike have compared Black Lives Matter to the civil rights movement generally in order to evaluate and predict the future of the contemporary demonstrations, a specific branch of that earlier campaign deserves additional attention...Bradley sees some promise in smaller reforms that have been made in Ferguson’s municipal government, as well as in the few policy goals—like putting cameras on police officers—that have begun to emerge. McKenzie Morris [`15], president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, expressed hope to the HPR that these policies would take hold. “The police cameras, in my opinion, are the first tangible step through which people are trying to get to the main goal, which is accountability,” she said. “That is the main policy goal out of all of this: a true checks and balances system that does not currently exist.”

A border county in Texas with two U.S. Border Patrol highway checkpoints is refusing to prosecute drug cases previously sent to it from those checkpoints. The county—and all four states bordering Mexico—wants funding from Washington, D.C. to handle cases that federal prosecutors decide to send to state courts...Jennifer Chacón at the University of California Irvine School of Law said the Texas case isn’t unfolding in a vacuum. “What we are seeing is part of a broader set of developments that have been caused by Congressional choices about funding law enforcement, particularly along the southern border,” she said...“It is telling that we see this in Hudspeth County, in the state of Texas, a state that has drug laws aligned with the federal government’s zero tolerance approach,” she said from Cambridge, Mass., where she is a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.

Wielding the weapon of his pen, President Obama this week is expected to formally reject a Republican attempt to force construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But in stopping the transit of petroleum from the forests of Alberta to the Gulf Coast, Mr. Obama will be opening the veto era of his presidency...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to the president, said there was no doubt that Mr. Obama would veto such an effort if Republicans got it through Congress.

Natural gas power company Calpine Corp. and a group of Harvard University law professors on Thursday told the D.C. Circuit that the EPA must be allowed to finalize its greenhouse gas reduction plan for existing power plants before any legal challenges may be decided. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan has been challenged by coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., along with a variety of states and other industry groups. They have alleged the agency lacks the authority to issue the rule and that the rule would harm their economic health. But in separate amici briefs, Calpine and Harvard law professors Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman said the EPA is on firm ground.

A group of professors from the University of Pennsylvania Law School have added their voices to the debate about how best to ensure fairness as universities strive to respond to sexual violence. The open letter by 16 professors acknowledges that sexual assault is a serious concern, but criticizes revised procedures adopted by the university Feb. 1...“More and more people are seeing that there are competing interests and values … that need to be brought into the discussion,” says Janet Halley, a Harvard Law professor who was among those who signed a similar letter in October objecting to revised policies at Harvard University.

A Massachusetts Superior Court judge on Friday did not issue a final decision on motions by Harvard and the state Attorney General’s office to dismiss a lawsuit suing the University to divest from fossil fuels...The student complainants, for their part, said they were optimistic for their case. “I feel like we definitely presented the case in the way we intended,” plaintiff and Harvard Law School student Joseph E. Hamilton [`16] said after the hearing. “We are optimistic [the judge] will rule in our favor.”

Intimate, often painful allegations in lawsuits — intended for the scrutiny of judges and juries — are increasingly drawing in mass online audiences far from the courthouses where they are filed...“It’s not clear that lighting a match and dropping it in the public sphere is going to be a reliable way to bring closure,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law who compared the practice to the old campus tactic of scrawling the names of alleged rapists on women’s bathroom walls.

An op-ed by Josephine Wolff, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society: oted nerdy songwriter and mathematician Tom Lehrer has written dozens of popular comedic scientific ditties, including that staple of high school chemistry classes: the periodic table of elements set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song.” (You may also be familiar with “New Math” and “Who’s Next,” an ode to nuclear proliferation). Among his lesser works is a satirical homage to the former Atomic Energy Commission (“where the scenery’s attractive, and the air is radioactive”). But writing theme songs for secretive government agencies isn’t the exclusive domain of parodists, as we learned last week when the Cyberspace Administration of China released its earnest musical number, “Cyberspace Spirit.” According to the Wall Street Journal’s English translation of the Chinese lyrics, the administration’s well-rehearsed chorus, costumed in tuxedoes and matching red dresses and arranged in orderly rows at the center of a brightly lit stage, trumpets the “clarity and brightness” of the Chinese Internet as a “beam of incorruptible sunlight,” reminding listeners that “the Web is where glorious dreams are!” To reiterate: This is not a parody.

As a high school student, Lani Guinier wrote a letter to the College Board over a math question on the SAT that she found problematic. When she got to Harvard's Radcliffe College, her roommate announced that she was worried about something: With her perfect SAT score she'd have trouble finding someone to marry. "Her bragging ... and my nagging," were two sparks of a lifelong interest in what Guinier calls "the testocracy." Now a professor at Harvard Law School, she has written a book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, that calls for a rethinking of who gains admission to schools like Harvard. You talk in the book about the correlations between SAT scores and family incomes. But some people argue that the SAT is more meritocratic than the networks of influence that it replaced. Most of the students admitted to competitive colleges are not poor or working class. There may be a few but it's very few.Part of the reason that upper middle and upper class students are more likely to get admitted is because they're more likely to do well on the SAT.