Media Mentions

As a co-founder of Creative Commons, law professor Lawrence Lessig helped transform intellectual property laws for the digital age. Now he's focusing on reforming campaign finance, which he calls "the moral question of our age." Last year, Lessig created his own crowd-funded super PAC and helped lead a 185-mile march through New Hampshire to raise awareness of big money in politics. We'll talk to him about his career and latest crusade.

It’s been a little over two weeks since the U.S. government blamed North Korea for the cyber-attack against Sony Pictures, and Cybersecurity firms and hackers have continued to express doubts as to the legitimacy of these claims. Two cyber security firms, Norse Corporation and Cloud Flare, conducted independent investigations into the hack. Their results are in stark contrast to the FBI’s claim that Pyongyang carried out the hack....After examining the malware used to infiltrate the studio, the FBI said it found similarities between that software and software used in previous cyber-attacks carried out by North Korea. But Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law Professor, who serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, is unconvinced.

An Op-Ed by Noah Feldman. A sitting member of the Securities and Exchange Commission co-writes an article accusing Harvard University of violating securities laws -- because, the article claims, a professor’s biased research has been used to argue for eliminating staggered corporate board terms....And for the moment, let’s leave aside the content of their argument, namely that the Shareholder Rights Project, led by my Harvard Law School colleague Lucian A. Bebchuk....

It’s been a bumpy ride for stocks in the first full week of 2015. And if you’re one of the many investors who vowed to be smarter with your investments in the New Year, you might be a little rattled...Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies behavioral economics, has some advice: Be informed but don’t follow the pack.

The Obama administration's extraordinary decision to point fingers at North Korea over the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. could lead to a courtroom spectacle if charges are ultimately filed against someone without ties to the isolated country, such as a disgruntled employee or an unrelated hacker...."The temptation to engage in the kind of global politics surrounding this rogue nation is probably just too great to resist," Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said.

The U.N. has accepted a request by observer state Palestine to join the International Criminal Court, clearing the way for possible war crimes complaints against Israel. Palestinians hope the tribunal will give them more leverage in a lopsided conflict and keep a distracted world focused on their statehood claims....Cases can take years, from an initial review to launching an investigation and possibly filing charges, said Alex Whiting, a senior official in the ICC prosecutor's office from 2010-2013 and now a Harvard law professor. War crimes allegedly committed during combat are among the most difficult to prove, said Whiting, suggesting a Gaza war complaint would face stiff challenges.

The fight over greater regulation of abortion is swinging once again to the federal courts, where challenges to recent state laws are producing a patchwork of contradictory rulings that may eventually reach the Supreme Court...“I think the fate of the undue burden standard is really being debated and discussed in the courts right before our eyes and seems ripe for a Supreme Court review,” said Gretchen Borchelt, state policy director for the National Women’s Law Center. [Glenn] Cohen, co-director of Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, concurs. “The notion of when something becomes an undue burden is extremely vague,” he said.

Depending on whom you talk to these days, Harvard University’s policies to prevent sexual assault either are woefully inadequate or risk trampling on the rights of men following tipsy, consensual hookups....According to the law professors, Harvard’s universitywide policy would put students at serious risk of being found guilty of rape if the students involved were "impaired" by alcohol or drugs, rather than "incapacitated," said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor who signed the letter...."This means that students who engage in sexual touching or sexual intercourse while having a few drinks are all at risk of being held guilty of the very serious charges of sexual assault and rape," she wrote in an email to The Chronicle, "regardless of their understanding at the time that they mutually consented to such activity."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I was a small boy when I first heard the name Ben Ammi Carter, more properly Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, the leader and prophet of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, known as the Black Hebrews. Ben Ammi, who died Dec. 27, never had as many followers as William Miller, Joseph Smith or Elijah Muhammad, who respectively led the Seventh-day Adventists, the Mormons and the Black Muslims. But his American religious genius was akin to theirs.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Why were the offices of Charlie Hebdo targeted this morning in Paris? It's too soon to know for sure, but if it's correct that the gunmen told bystanders they were from al-Qaeda in Yemen, as some newspapers are reporting, then a possible hypothesis emerges: This is an old-style, al-Qaeda jihadi attack against a Western capital designed to create global attention -- and its major aim is to compete with the new style of sovereignty-creating jihadism that has been so successful for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Cass Sunstein discusses his new book, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Palestine’s bid to join the International Criminal Court is unlikely to lead to actual charges being brought against Israel, for reasons legal, political and institutional. So why is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas willing to pay a high price in lost revenue and U.S. anger to make the effort? And why is Israel so concerned about the Palestinian move? The answer is a matter of framing -- and it sheds light on the trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more than 20 years after the Oslo accords.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Yesterday I wrote a column about the change of venue requested by accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I argued that the Framers were concerned about keeping trials local to protect the accused. That much was correct. But I also offered a brief history of the rise of the change of venue in the U.S., tracing the modern doctrine to the English Central Criminal Court Act of 1856. That history was incomplete, and I now think I got the causality partly wrong. The English law of 1856 codified and developed a doctrine with older roots in the common law. The change of venue developed gradually in the U.S. from those earlier English common law origins -- not from the act of Parliament.

Two decades ago, Lani Guinier became a liberal icon when President Bill Clinton proposed—and then withdrew, under conservative pressure—her nomination to head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division...Her latest book is The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. As the subtitle suggests, Guinier turns Clinton’s unfair characterization of her writings on its head, advocating more democracy, not less, in American universities and life. And far from endorsing racial quotas, she suggests that affirmative action is a poor substitute for rethinking our admissions process from top to bottom.

In a growing battle of “he said, she said,” Yale University Professor Jonathan Macey defends Harvard University, calling allegations from Securities and Exchange Commissioner (SEC) Dan Gallagher and Stanford Professor Joseph Grundfest “flip-flops.” Macey took to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance to publicly flog Gallagher in particular, while defending the Harvard Shareholder Rights Program (SRP), which advocates to eliminate staggered board of director terms that impede acquisitions. A staggered election makes it difficult for an acquiring company to elect enough new board members to immediately force change.

...The Conviction Review Unit has been the most profound reform that Thompson has implemented in his year as district attorney...In January, 2014, Thompson began the process of recruiting Ron Sullivan to assist in designing his new unit...When I asked Sullivan to explain what it means to “do justice”—a phrase several people in the C.R.U. use—he said, “The person who’s the best advocate can prevail with a conviction even if the evidence doesn’t warrant it. Under a justice regime, the notion here is that we’re looking for the correct result, the right result. That’s what prosecutors are duty-bound to do in the first instance.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, get a fair trial in the Hub? It’s a profound question that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit was asked to decide by today, when jury selection begins. But it’s also a question the Framers would have found incomprehensible. Far from providing for a change of venue in high-profile cases, they guaranteed that the accused deserved a trial “by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” So what is the origin of the modern idea that the accused can seek to be tried elsewhere? The answer lies in England, and particularly in the lurid murder trial of William Palmer, the so-called prince of poisoners, which took place in 1855, fully 66 years after the Sixth Amendment was ratified.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Does your vote depend on which news channel you watch? If you are a regular viewer of Fox News, will you become more likely to vote Republican? Until recently, it has been impossible to answer that question empirically. Sure, Republicans tend to favor Fox News and Democrats tend to prefer MSNBC. But if Fox viewers are more likely to vote Republican, it might well be because of the conservative views that led them to Fox in the first place. An ingenious new study, by Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu of Stanford University, explores whether people’s voting behavior really is influenced by what they see on cable news.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. When you’re attacked by a missile, you can follow its trajectory back to where it was launched from. When you’re attacked in cyberspace, figuring out who did it is much harder. The reality of international aggression in cyberspace will change how we approach defense. Many of us in the computer-security field are skeptical of the U.S. government’s claim that it has positively identified North Korea as the perpetrator of the massive Sony hack in November 2014. The FBI’s evidence is circumstantial and not very convincing. The attackers never mentioned the movie that became the centerpiece of the hack until the press did. More likely, the culprits are random hackers who have loved to hate Sony for over a decade, or possibly a disgruntled insider.

...All this seems to help explain the putative difference between America and its European peers. But does this difference really exist? According to a study by Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School and Eric B. Rasmusen at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, "Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts". Indeed, the country's approach to most legal cases is unexceptional, the paper's authors argue. But occasionally there are cases in which someone or a group of people are awarded an unholy sum, and this is where the country and its courts get its grim reputation. These cases may be surprisingly rare, but the very threat of them spurs all sorts of meddlesome and unproductive efforts at protection.

A normally academic question about corporate governance has erupted into a nasty, often personal battle among elite professors, regulators and white-shoe lawyers that has raised the suggestion of securities fraud on one side and abuse of authority on the other. At the heart of the dispute is an academic paper written last month by Daniel M. Gallagher, a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Joseph A. Grundfest, a professor at Stanford Law School and himself a former S.E.C. commissioner, that was titled “Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law? The Campaign Against Classified Boards of Directors.” The paper took aim at Lucian A. Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor who has long researched corporate governance issues and has been an outspoken advocate for increased democracy in corporate America’s boardrooms...“The paper’s spurious allegations are unworthy of a sitting S.E.C. commissioner and a former commissioner,” Mr. Bebchuk, who learned about the paper the night before it was published, said in an email. “I was also surprised that the authors chose not give me an opportunity to correct the paper’s reckless factual and legal errors.”