Media Mentions

More than two months after receiving initial feedback on its Title IX procedures from the federal Office for Civil Rights, Harvard Law School has still not received final sign-off from OCR on its updated draft of those procedures, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London.

Three filmmakers, operating two cameras and a boom mic, hurry through Pattee Creek Market on a recent Friday afternoon. They are frantically tracking the seemingly mundane action of a store employee transferring milk cartons from one side of the market to a sink on the other side. There, he will pour the contents of the cartons down the drain in compliance with a state law that forbids the sale of milk more than 12 days after it's pasteurized. Led by director and Harvard Law School lecturer Rebecca Richman Cohen, the filmmakers are working with Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Emily Deddens [`15], a Harvard law student, on a short documentary about how confusing dating on food products leads to waste throughout the United States. According to Leib, Montana's policy regarding milk dating is the nation's strictest—and therefore the most glaring example of what's wrong nationwide.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it better to follow the strict letter of the law or to adjust it where appropriate to produce a more equitable result? This is one of the oldest questions in legal thought, one that can be traced back at least to Aristotle -- and on Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, 5-4, on the side of equity, with Justice Anthony Kennedy providing the deciding vote. Ordinarily, a decision like this one, involving the interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act would be of interest only to practitioners who are specialists in statutory interpretation. But this isn’t an ordinary spring. In June, the Supreme Court will hand down its most important statutory interpretation case in a generation, essentially deciding whether the Affordable Care Act will survive or fall.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are nonhuman animals about to become legal persons? You might think so upon hearing about an order issued Tuesday by a New York trial judge that requires officials from the State University of New York at Stony Brook to appear and show cause why two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, should not be released from the facility where they are kept into the custody of Save the Chimps. After all, this order parallels a standard habeas corpus order, which normally requires a jailer to appear and show cause why someone who is detained should not be released under the law. At the top of the order, big as life, is a caption reading “Order to Show Cause and Habeas Corpus.” And the order says that the chimps should be released if there’s a finding that they’re “unlawfully detained.” Not so fast. What’s probably happening is a good deal more modest -- and more legally important than the never-ending debate about the ways chimps or other animals are like humans.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are the past year’s examples of racially charged police abuses from Ferguson to Staten Island to North Charleston affecting the U.S. Supreme Court? In a subtle way, the answer may well be yes. In the first evidence of an effect, the Supreme Court held Tuesday that a traffic stop can't be prolonged beyond the time that the police need to perform their basic functions. In a 6-3 opinion, the court said that the police can't perform a canine drug-sniff after a ticket has been issued -- even though, a decade ago, it held that a drug sniff that occurs during a lawful stop is perfectly constitutional.

The Senate labor committee chairman, Republican Lamar Alexander, condemned federal labor board officials Tuesday, saying they were moving against state right-to-work laws. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) called for legal briefs examining state right-to-work laws and whether unions should have the ability to extract dues payments from nonmembers. The policy, which has passed in 25 states, outlaws mandatory union membership or dues as a condition of employment...“The problem with the board’s rule is that it allows workers, in right-to-work states, to demand individual representation from the union (for example in grievance proceedings) while refusing to pay anything for that representation,” Harvard Law Professor Benjamin Sachs wrote for the blog OnLabor.org. “There is no seeming rationale for this inequity, and nothing in the federal labor law nor in state right-to-work laws requires it.”

...[LeBron] James’s appointment presented a possible turning point: a chance for the most beleaguered of the four major sports unions to strengthen its position, and a victory for Michele A. Roberts, the Players Association’s new firebrand boss....Roberts was fiercely ambitious during those early years. “She committed to it,” Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and, for a time, Roberts’s boss at the Public Defender Service, told me. “She’d get in at 6 in the morning and stay till 11 at night, seven days a week.” But what set Roberts apart from the other young lawyers was her ability to turn off all that naked ambition once she got inside the courtroom. In the poor, mostly black Washington, D.C., of the 1980s, “she used her race and gender to her benefit,” Ogletree said. “She had a really folksy way of getting along with people who were total strangers. She was like the 13th juror.”

They may not know it, and they most certainly will not be in attendance, but Hercules and Leo will have their day in court. A judge in Manhattan has ordered a hearing that will touch upon the continuing debate over whether caged chimpanzees can be considered “legal persons,” in the eyes of the law, and thus sue, with human help, for their freedom...Some legal experts, however, seemed to offer support for the idea that animals could file suit for their freedom. Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard Law School scholar, said he believed habeas corpus ought to be available to test the treatment and confinement of “other beings whose capacities are limited but who are potentially capable of bearing rights,” a category he contended ought to eventually include chimps like Hercules and Leo. Mr. Tribe added that Justice Jaffe’s decision was “a legally sound and suitably cautious step forward in the struggle to extend legal protections,” regardless of “whether or not we are yet ready to crown those others with the title of ‘human person.’ ”

Newsmax is out with its list of the top 100 Christian leaders in America who make a real impact on modern lives in 2015...23. Mary Ann Glendon, a bioethics scholar and professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

When Reuben Loewy took up his first teaching gig in 2012, he had a major revelation: The digital revolution has dramatically transformed the way that kids perceive reality....And just a few days ago, the Harvard Internet-law professor Jonathan Zittrain posted a video message on YouTube that coincidentally sounded a lot like Loewy’s elevator pitch for the unit titled "Wikipedia and Open-Source Knowledge." Highlighting the success of the site and lamenting the ineffectiveness of American public education, Zittrain—who authored the 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It—suggested that schools integrate Wikipedia into their curricula, asking kids to edit articles and make the case for their edits. He continued: "To me, if I think of an advanced civics class, it’s great to learn that there are three branches of government and X vote overrides a veto. But having the civics of a collective hallucination like Wikipedia also a part of the curriculum, I think, would be valuable."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next week on the question of whether the Constitution allows states to ban same-sex marriages. Whatever it decides, there seems little doubt that the U.S. is moving rapidly toward allowing such marriages, and with remarkably little public controversy. Contrast this with the issue of abortion, which has split the nation for 40 years (and counting). Why the difference? There are three standard answers.

The same federal jury that convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for bombing the 2013 Boston Marathon must now decide his sentence: life without parole or death by lethal injection...."He's going to be on death row for decades," says Prof. Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School. "There will be multiple appeals. Looking at it realistically, he's going to die in prison one way or the other."

Steven Donziger, a lawyer who was charged with fabricating evidence, promising bribes and even ghostwriting critical court documents in order to win a $19 billion judgment against Chevron for polluting Ecuador's rainforests, is now on the college speaking circuit and touring many of America's most prestigious universities...Kyle Pietari [`16], another organizer for the Harvard event went one step further: "This story is not about Mr. Donzinger. It is about the indigenous villagers of Ecuador who have been suffering from an environmental catastrophe for over two decades and still have not been compensated for their losses," Mr. Pietari said. "Any efforts by Chevron or the media to put the spotlight on Mr. Donzinger are public distractions from what matters most: that a grave injustice has been done, and our legal systems have tragically failed to help the people who were wronged."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should Bill and Denise Richard, who lost their 8-year-old son Martin in the Boston Marathon bombing, have a special say in whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gets the death penalt? The question goes beyond the family’s tragedy or even the problem of terrorism. It gets to the heart of why we punish criminals -- and why we sometimes execute murderers. The answer we give will tell us something important about how we want the law itself to work. Begin with a striking fact: In many traditional legal systems, the decision whether to execute a murderer lay exclusively with the victim’s family.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. More than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama has seen his signature programs blocked or impeded by the courts. In the latest episode, a federal appeals court in New Orleans heard arguments Friday about what to do about his executive action on immigration, which has been blocked by a single district judge in Texas. Similar judicial roadblocks have profoundly affected Obama's efforts in health care, environmental protection and Internet regulation. So it's worth asking: What's going on? Why has the judiciary taken such a big role in opposing the president’s efforts to make policy? To find another president whose efforts have been so affected by the courts, you have to go back more than 80 years, to the first New Deal.

How could constitutional scholar and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe's involvement in last week's U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hearing on the Clean Power Plan affect the future of the rule? During today's OnPoint, Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, professors at Harvard Law, explain why they believe the government came out ahead during last week's federal court hearing. They also rebut Tribe's arguments against the constitutionality of the Power Plan.

An op-ed by Gabriella Blum and Benjamin Wittes. You walk into your shower and see a spider. You don’t know whether it is venomous—or whether it is even a real spider. It could be a personal surveillance mini-drone set loose by your nosy next-door neighbor, who may be monitoring the tiny octopod robot from her iPhone 12. A more menacing possibility: Your business competitor has sent a robotic attack spider, bought from a bankrupt military contractor, to take you out. Your assassin, who is vacationing in Provence, will direct the spider to shoot an infinitesimal needle containing a lethal dose of poison into your left leg—and then self-destruct...These scenarios may sound fantastical, but they are neither especially improbable nor particularly futuristic. Insect-size drones are busily being developed throughout the defense establishment, in academic facilities and by private firms. Slightly larger drones are widely available for purchase on the open market, some already rigged with cameras. Making such drones lethal is just the next step, and it isn’t that complicated.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose that you value freedom of choice. Are you committed to the mere opportunity to choose, or will you also insist that people actually exercise that opportunity? Is it enough if the government, or a private institution, gives people the option of going their own way? Or is it particularly important to get people to say precisely what they want? In coming decades, these seemingly abstract questions will grow in importance, because they will decide central features of our lives. Here’s an example. Until last month, all 50 states had a simple policy for voter registration: If you want to become a voter, you have the opportunity to register. Oregon is now the first state to adopt a radically different approach: If the relevant state officials know that you live in Oregon and are 18 or older, you’re automatically registered as a voter. If you don’t want to be one, you have the opportunity to opt out.

Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, once railed against the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorism suspects, including deriding legal rationales laid out by a former student, John Yoo. After Yoo left the Bush team to return to teach at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school, he found himself a pariah, with many students unsuccessfully urging the school to drop him for policies they said justified torture. Now, Koh is the one finding himself under pressure at an academic institution for his legal reasoning on how to deal with terrorism suspects, in particular the rationales he laid out to justify the use of drone strikes while working for the Obama administration...The letter in support of Koh has more than 400 signatures, including those of several of Koh’s colleagues at Yale and other prominent names — conservative and liberal — from across the country, such as Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School and former U.S. solicitor general Ted Olson.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does the new version of the bill giving Congress a vote on the Iran nuclear agreement -- a bill which President Barack Obama has agreed to sign -- shift the constitutional balance of power when it comes to foreign agreements? At first glance, it looks as if it might: Obama initially declared that he could make an executive agreement with Iran that evaded Congress. Now he has agreed to sign a law that gives Congress the chance to review the deal before it goes into effect and block it if there are enough votes to override a presidential veto. This looks like a restraint on the president's untrammeled executive power in foreign affairs. On second glance, however, the bill seems to be more symbolic than practical.

An op-ed by Tommy Tobin [`16]. For many students, the prospect of summer is exciting, but for students in low-income homes the long break often increases the likelihood of food insecurity. For these students and their families, already-tight food budgets grow even more constrained over the summer. When at school, low-income students across North Carolina are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. With 1 in 4 of North Carolina’s children struggling with food insecurity, this USDA school lunch program addresses a much-needed nutritional gap for many of the state’s youth. For students near the poverty line who qualify, this national program wards off the risk of hunger. While approximately 80 percent of eligible young people receive school meals nationwide, summer means no school and, consequently, less access to healthy and nutritious food.