Media Mentions

Today’s interview is a guest post by Liah Love Caravalho, a program specialist in the Office of Legislative and External Relations of the Law Library of Congress. Below, Liah provides an interview with Kenneth W. Mack, inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard University. Prof. Mack was a speaker at the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival, where he discussed his book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer. He is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed–and What Has Not–with Race in America. Please share your educational and academic background and specifically what made you decide that law was your true vocation? I started my professional life as an electrical engineer, designing computer chips at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s after my graduation from Drexel University. I went to law school because I wanted to try something different. I liked technology, but I didn’t feel as though it was my life’s passion. This was, of course, before the development of the World Wide Web, social media, bio-engineering and other fields that now make technology seem like the place to be. I thought that law was my true calling almost from the day I started Harvard Law School. We seemed to be grappling with problems of inequality, politics, economics, policy and history–although we were doing it using lawyers’ tools. It was one of the most exciting periods in my life, and it just seemed completely different than engineering.

Malware linked with the National Security Agency that has been used to spy on computers around the world​​​​​​​​​​ threatens to ma​​​ke the Internet less safe by spreading sophisticated infections that are increasingly difficult to remove. ... The Equation group's malware has infected a broad range of targets, including government and military organizations, telecom and energy businesses, banks, nuclear researchers, the media and Islamic activists, according to Kaspersky. Malware has targeted most of these groups in Iran, along with Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria, the cybersecurity firm reports. The U.S. may not be on that list, but the malware is a threat to the entire Internet because “everything depends on everything else” in our interconnected digital world, according to a blog post by Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We need to figure out how to maintain security in the face of these sorts of attacks, because we're all going to be subjected to the criminal versions of them in three to five years,” Schneier said.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: Imagine that when you plugged something into an electrical outlet, the outlet queried the device and demanded identification. Was it a Sony TV or Panasonic? Was it a Dell or an Apple? And then based on that identification, different levels of quality or reliability of electricity were served at different prices. No doubt such a regime would benefit utility companies. I've not yet met anyone who thinks it would benefit innovation. Thus, it would be something possibly good for network providers, but plainly bad for the market generally. As I've watched the amazing progress that proponents of "network neutrality" have made, I've been astonished both by their success, and by how long this debate has been going on. I first drew the analogy to the electrical grid in testimony before John McCain's subcommittee more than a dozen years ago. Mark Lemley and I tried to lay the issue out, as it applied to the then-raging battle over "open access," almost 15 years ago. ... Defenders of the status quo are now frantically filling the tubes with FUD about the FCC's decision. But as you work through this FUD, keep one basic fact clear. Relative to practically every other comparable nation, America's broadband sucks. Seriously, sucks. Even France beats us in cost and quality. And as the genius Yochai Benkler established in the monumental report by the Berkman Center commissioned by the FCC after Obama was elected, the single most important reason our broadband sucks is the sell-out regulatory strategy of the prior decade at least.

An op-ed by Charles Ogletree and Rob Smith: Governor Kitzhaber has given 35 years of steadfast service to the people of Oregon. His tirelessness and courage have helped to forge a State that is the envy of the nation -- a community as strong and prosperous as it is just and fair. But the job is not yet done. In his last few hours in the Capitol Building, Governor Kitzhaber has the opportunity to undertake perhaps the most courageous act of his career, one that would create his most enduring legacy -- the Governor can commute the death sentences of the 34 men and one woman on Oregon's death row. A decision to commute the death sentences would align with contemporary standards of decency in Oregon, and increasing it aligns with the norms of the nation. A recent poll in the Oregonian showed that 74 percent of respondents would support a Kitzhaber decision to commute all existing death sentences. This same sense of decreasing support for capital punishment resonates throughout the country.

From a stuffy attic in this former industrial city, Tiffiniy Cheng and her friends hatched plans to save the Internet. Fight for the Future, the name they later bestowed on their group of 30-something idealists, stirred an online advocacy movement that swayed President Obama, influenced the Federal Communications Commission, and helped defeat the telecommunications industry, one of the mightiest lobbying powers in Washington. ...  A report released last week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society concluded the “networked public space played a central, arguably decisive, role in turning around the Federal Communications Commission policy on net neutrality.” It cited BattleFor-TheNet.com as one of the most influential forces.  

Lawyers for Harvard University will appear in court on Friday afternoon to fight off attempts to force the world’s richest university to dump coal, oil and gas companies from its $36bn (£23bn) endowment. A lawsuit filed late last year by seven law students and undergraduates argues the university has a duty to fight climate change by pulling out of fossil fuel companies. ... “This is important to us because climate change is supposed to be a huge problem and so far our existing institutions have been unable to address it in a way that is commensurate with the problem,” said Alice Cherry, a second year law student and one of the seven bringing the suit. “We think it is past time for our legal system to have something to say about it.”

An op-ed by Conor Ahern ’15 and Lawrence DiCara: The Blizzard of 1888 left Boston gridlocked, and over 1,000 people died in its wake. Tragic as the storm was, there was a substantial silver lining. This catastrophe is often cited as the impetus for the construction of the nation’s first underground subway system, a transportation network that would be shielded from the elements of our occasionally harsh New England climate. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the regional transit system that developed from that late 19th century innovation has been brought to its knees by the winter battering we have taken. The fundamental wisdom of a subterranean transit system, however, has not been challenged by the snowy onslaught, as it is the above-ground portions of the MBTA subway system, along with the regional commuter rail, that have been laid low. That system has become, in many ways, the engine of our regional economy. The delays and frustrations felt by hundreds of thousands of Bostonians – and millions of dollars in adverse economic impacts — have underscored the degree to which the entire eastern Massachusetts region depends on a healthy, well-functioning transit system.

When facing public disinterest, the cold shoulder from the news media, legions of incumbent politicians, a series of unfavorable Supreme Court decisions and more than $6 billion in entrenched interests; walking 150 miles through northern New Hampshire in temperatures as low as negative 20 degrees is the least of your problems. None of which dissuaded the 400 members of the New Hampshire Rebellion. On January 21, on the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court decision, the New Hampshire Rebellion, led by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, descended on Concord, New Hampshire, to protest the corrupting influence of money in politics.

A new article in the Harvard Law Review argues the university's new sexual assault policy makes it too easy to believe victims and automatically discredit those who are accused of sexual misconduct. In an article called "Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement," Harvard law professor Janet Halley identifies scenarios that could potentially lead to biased hearings against accused students. As awareness of rape on campus has grown, many schools have changed their rules so there's a lower burden of proof needed to find students "responsible" for sexual assault.

An op-ed by Richard Lazarus. The President’s decision to open up the Atlantic coast to offshore drilling exploration is a clear expression of his “all-of-the-above" energy strategy. It is also a clear exercise of political horse-trading. No doubt the President hoped to take the sting out of his decision to eliminate drilling off of parts of Alaska by offering parts of the Mid- and South-Atlantic, which have been closed since 1990, in return. In April 2010, in a similar political gambit, the President courted conservative support for his then-pending climate bill by proposing to open the Atlantic coast for drilling. Anticipating environmental opposition, the President confidently asserted that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.” It proved an unfortunate choice of words.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The expansion of Islamic State’s franchise into parts of Libya is horrifying, as the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic laborers shows. It’s also frightening for a different reason. The essence of the Islamic State brand is the assertion of sovereign control over territory. Until now, Libya’s post-revolutionary problem has been fragmentation. The emergence of Islamic State there suggests that over time, Libya's problem could become the opposite: Islamic State might create a unifying umbrella that would subject large parts of the country to its dangerous brand of control.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The decision by a federal judge in Texas on Monday to strike down President Barack Obama’s immigration reform initiative runs to a whopping 123 pages. But the crucial ruling is fairly narrow: In adopting a plan to allow unlawful immigrants to apply for “deferred action,” Judge Andrew S. Hanen said, the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully because it did not allow the public to comment in advance. With this conclusion, Hanen almost certainly overreached.

As Harvard Law School moves to depart from Harvard’s newly centralized procedures for investigating cases of alleged sexual misconduct, a group of Law professors continue to criticize the University-wide policy that defines sexual harassment, claiming that it offers lackluster protections of academic freedom...Calling the policy’s statement on academic freedom “unhelpful,” Janet E. Halley, a Law School professor, argued that “speech [in an academic context] can be a form of sexual conduct under the policy, and if it’s unwanted, speech acts could become the basis for charges of sexual harassment.”

Climate change activists at Harvard University told The Huffington Post this week that they feel optimistic heading into a court hearing Friday on a lawsuit that aims to get the school to divest from fossil fuel companies. Seven students at the university filed the suit in 2014 in an effort to get the nation's richest college to stop what they see as inherent support for an industry that contributes to global warming. The suit claims the Ivy League school's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, is violating its duties as a nonprofit public charity by investing in gas, coal and oil companies. It also says that Harvard has breached its duties by putting profit ahead of the serious and immediate threat of climate change -- which Ted Hamilton [`16], one of the plaintiffs in the suit, notes is "causing grave harm to future generations." "Regardless of the final decision in our case, presenting our claims in a legal arena forces the Harvard Corporation to defend its actions in furtherance of climate change," added Hamilton.

One hundred years ago, in the first two months of 1915, what was then called the Great War — puzzled over by experts gathered at a Harvard conference on Friday ― established its most enduring historical signatures...Moderated by Dean Martha Minow of the Law School, the title of the first panel, “The Transnational Theater of War,” was a reminder, Minow said, of the unprecedented global nature of the conflict. ..In the same panel, Samuel Moyn, a Harvard professor of law and history, was to talk about “Aggression and Atrocity: From the Great War to the Forever War.”

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives...Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. “Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “They don’t have any right of their own.”

Harvard Law School has received comment from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on its new procedures for handling cases of alleged sexual harassment and will implement those procedures “as soon as possible,” according to Robb London, a Law School spokesperson.

An op-ed by Kayleigh McEnany [`16]. In an astonishing display of disrespect, police protesters defiled a fallen officer memorial in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, covering it in fake blood. As if this bloody, distasteful symbol was not enough, one protester knelt down and shot a bird in front of the memorial, an image the activist group “Anonymous” opted to tweet out to it’s 1.45 million followers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you were about to lose your kids to a legal guardian who wasn't you, what rights would you have? You’d think this would be a question of pressing national importance. But when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court guaranteed parents the right to a lawyer in a guardianship proceeding this week, only a local paper noticed. I wouldn't have known about this fascinating case except that it was brought, argued and won by a particularly brilliant former student of mine at New York University School of Law who has devoted her career to representing the indigent. The case is crucially important because it deals with a fundamental problem in child welfare law: who gets to take guardianship of children in troubled situations, and why.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. President Obama’s free community college proposal and college ratings initiatives promise to further the historic expansion of college access begun in 1965, when Congress created the Pell Grant Program, which pried open the doors of higher education to deserving but poor students. But the administration’s chosen means to the praiseworthy end of further expanding college access do not fundamentally challenge inequality in higher education; instead, they reinforce our two-tiered and unequal system. Federal policy instead should encourage academically qualified, lower-income students to matriculate to selective, four-year colleges. A monetary rewards system (a Race to the Top for higher education) or statutory mandates could advance that objective.

An op-ed by Nimra Azmi [`15]. The slayings of Razan Abu-Salha, Yusor Abu-Salha and Deah Barakat has convulsed the Muslim-American community as no other event has since September 11, 2001. It is not simply that we see ourselves reflected back in those three beautiful young people. We see our ugliest fears about the United States reflected back—that our college educations and professional degrees cannot keep us safe, that someday, someone will hate us for our faith or our skin color and no amount of American Dream will safeguard us.