Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did the Department of Justice go too far in 2012 when it apparently expanded the National Security Agency’s authority for warrantless searches of Internet traffic to search domestic data for signs of foreign hacking? The text of the secret Justice memos isn’t part of the latest batch of material revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. But a reading of the leaked materials doesn’t (yet) reveal a smoking gun that would obviously exceed the Constitution or legal authority. The searches were expanded -- but legal safeguards were also put in place.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Barack Obama administration has said it won’t reconsider the long-standing rule against paying ransoms in its review of policy concerning U.S. citizens kidnapped by terrorists abroad. That’s a mistake -- morally, politically and legally. In theory, it’s great to say that the U.S. government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. In practice, we negotiate with terrorists all the time. And it’s outrageous that family members of kidnapping victims would be threatened with criminal prosecution for trying to save their loved ones' lives. The hostage-policy review should air these issues. If it doesn’t, then it will be seriously flawed.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk of President Barack Obama’s immigration initiative has slowed now that the program is stalled in court, and may not be implemented until the end of his term, if at all. But this week, the Supreme Court decided an immigration case, Mellouli v. Lynch, that has meaningful implications for potential deportees convicted of crimes. The case made few headlines, because its consequences weren’t obvious to nonspecialists. Nevertheless, on close reading, the case matters -- and it raises important questions about how the U.S. decides whom to deport.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The proposed USA Freedom Act passed by the House is far from perfect -- but it does make some potentially meaningful improvements to move the U.S. away from a system of secret legal decisions made by a court that only hears the government’s side of the argument. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have proposed two amendments that would gut the act’s reforms to the existing bad system. It’s worth taking note of both, because both go to the very essence of what it means to be governed under the rule of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the U.S. be the international sheriff, enforcing its laws aggressively across borders to assure fairness and fight corruption? The prosecution of FIFA, the world's soccer governing body, has been met with mostly positive reaction (apart from the cynical Vladimir Putin) -- which supports a broad use of this power. The U.S. Supreme Court now has the chance to decide whether it will consider an analogous issue in the context of an antitrust suit brought by Motorola Mobility: Do U.S. laws authorizing private antitrust lawsuits extend to cartels that sell to subsidiaries of U.S. companies?

Foreclosure lawyers, take note: A massive foreclosure prevention workshop held at Gillette Stadium in 2008 may not qualify as a face-to-face meeting between lenders and borrowers...Julie E. Devanthéry of Harvard Law School's Legal Services Center represents the borrowers. She says Wells Fargo tried to argue that the HUD regulation merely requires that a lender representative have a meeting in the same room with borrowers, while she countered that the regulation contemplates "something much more nuanced and personalized."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The universal voter registration system that Hillary Clinton is calling for is a terrific idea. Free speech and freedom of religion are every American's right; no paperwork is required to get them. To be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures or to enjoy a right to a jury trial, there is no need to register with the authorities. The right to vote should be treated the same way.

An op-ed by David Harris and Johanna Wald. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall spoke to a crowd of 15,000 at Harvard University’s commencement...“The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle,” stated George Marshall in the speech. Indeed. We propose to create a new Houston/Marshall Plan (named after civil rights giants Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall), focused on helping communities restore themselves after decades of intentional disinvestment. This new Houston/Marshall Plan will advance strategies, innovations, and solutions designed by those living and working in these neighborhoods. It is their voices that have been routinely ignored or silenced in public policy discussions.

When deciding how much to pay their senior executives, the directors at Jarden Corp.—the owner of brands including Yankee Candle, Rawlings sports equipment, and Bicycle playing cards—use what might seem to be an unlikely measuring stick: the top managers at Oracle Corp., the world’s largest data-base maker. Oracle is one of 14 companies Jarden identified in 2011 as a “peer”to help it gauge the going rate for executive pay—a common practice among boards when setting compensation for top managers...Jarden isn't alone in picking bigger companies, or aspirational peers, for its group. The practice can be a way for corporations to signal the quality of their executives to investors, says Craig Ferrere [`17], a former University of Delaware fellow who co-authored a 2012 paper on peer groups with finance professor Charles Elson...The idea to survey pay at companies of comparable size was hatched in the 1950s by Milton Rock, then a compensation consultant at Hay Group, says Ferrere. As businesses began operating globally, the managerial skills needed to run them were largely the same. Rock argued executives had become participants in a “global exchange of talent,” Ferrere wrote.

As a student at Harvard Law School, native St. Louisan and former tennis pro Blake Strode would often spend his weekends in Boston knocking on the doors of recently foreclosed homeowners. Sometimes the families wouldn’t even know their houses were in foreclosure, said Strode, who graduated with honors in May...Strode has decided to return to St. Louis to work with the Arch City Defenders, the nonprofit that has pushed for systematic reform of municipal courts in Missouri. Strode said there’s a lot of energy focused on building a more equitable region in his hometown, and he wants to be part of “harnessing” that energy towards helping marginalized residents.

...Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig (@lessig) talks about money corrupting politics and how to fix it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Striking a blow not only for religious liberty, but also for diverse standards of beauty, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday that Abercrombie & Fitch could not deny employment to a young woman because she wears a headscarf for religious reasons. The court also clarified that the job applicant, Samantha Elauf, didn't have to tell her interviewer that she needed a religious accommodation. If the company chose not to hire her because it didn't want to make an accommodation by allowing her to wear the headscarf, that amounted to prohibited religious discrimination.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the conviction of Anthony Elonis, the would-be rapper who threatened to kill his wife, an FBI agent and others in a series of poetic Facebook postings. The decision managed to avoid ruling on the ambiguity of poetic threats, and Elonis is almost certain to be retried. Yet because the court left open exactly what will have to be proved at his retrial, Elonis’s case may drag on.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. This month, as the Supreme Court finalizes some unusually momentous decisions, it’s a good time to ask: Which of the justices' opinions have been the greatest of all time? To qualify as great, an opinion must be foundational, in the sense that it helps orient large areas of the law. It also has to have extraordinary analytic power or sheer eloquence. Here's my short list, in ascending order:

An article by Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Scholar, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. True rainmakers don’t need to be convinced to collaborate: referring work to colleagues and developing a loyal team capable of extraordinary client service is the only way they can build an enormous portfolio. But for many of today’s law firm partners, the link between collaboration and professional success is ambiguous. Is collaboration the source of success, or is it a mere byproduct of rainmakers’ triumphs? When faced with definite rewards for boosting their own billables, does it make sense to hand off work to others? Why should they risk precious control over a client by getting more partners involved?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Dennis Hastert has a secret -- one he was willing to pay $3.5 million to keep quiet, and which the U.S. government is also now hiding. Federal prosecutors have indicted Hastert on charges of structuring cash withdrawals to avoid bank reporting and then lying to them about it. Yet even as the indictment paints an implicit picture of blackmail, the government has apparently agreed with Hastert’s lawyers to suppress whatever was so embarrassing that Hastert was willing to break the law to hush it up. There's something very worrisome about the government secrecy here -- particularly in conjunction with the criminal prosecution on the morally mild charge of withdrawal structuring. I’d sum up the secrecy problem this way: Either Hastert did something terrible, in which case the government shouldn't be suppressing it, or Hastert was being unjustifiably blackmailed, in which case the government shouldn't be prosecuting him for breaking the withdrawal laws to avoid ruin.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is Thursday's $1.2 billion antitrust settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries a victory for consumers? Or is it a sign of government enforcement run amok? The answer to that question, it turns out, goes back to a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case, FTC v. Actavis, in which five justices allowed the FTC to pursue a new kind of antitrust litigation. And the issue at the heart of that case was fascinating: What happens when the good kind of monopoly created by a patent runs headlong into the bad kind of monopoly created by collusion between merchants?

To honor the life work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, L ’59, LL.D. ’11, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) convened a panel discussion of the Roberts Court on Radcliffe Day, traditionally held on the Friday after Commencement...The panel, she said, would discuss some of these calls, moderated by Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and senior research fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. “I cannot think of a better umpire,” Cohen said of Marshall, who received the Radcliffe Medal in 2012 (she is also a director of Harvard Magazine Inc.). The panelists were Linda Greenhouse ’68, former Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, now a journalist in residence and lecturer at Yale Law School; Michael Klarman, Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, the author of the Harvard Magazine feature “How Same-Sex Marriage Came to Be”; Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D. ’05, an assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law; and John Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, Bromley professor of law at HLS.

Each year when Harvard Law School students decided which professor’s section to seek for a course that goes by the shorthand name “federal courts,” many chose Daniel J. Meltzer because of his reputation for running a demanding class. “They wanted him. They wanted the rigor,” said Richard Fallon, a Harvard Law professor and longtime friend. “They knew that if they could somehow pass muster under the Meltzer standard they were going to be better lawyers than they would be otherwise.”...Mr. Meltzer, whose caring nature drew as much praise from colleagues as his legal brilliance, died of cancer last Sunday in Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was 63 and lived in Cambridge.

The Notorious RBG was in town Friday. That’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yes, the Supreme Court justice, honored at Harvard University for her work as a pioneer in gender equality, is having a cultural moment...Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told stories of Ginsburg’s long push for gender equity in her professional — and personal — life. At one point during her time as a professor, Supreme Court litigator, and speaker in demand across the country, said Klarman, she received a series of calls about her son James acting up in class. “Finally, exasperated at the repeated phone calls, Ginsburg responded to one of them as follows: ‘This child has two parents. I suggest from now on you alternate between them when you need to speak to someone about James,’ ” said Klarman, who once clerked for the justice. “Ginsburg reports that even though James’s behavior did not materially improve, the phone calls ceased because the school would not dream of bothering a busy male tax attorney.”

An op-ed by Bonnie Docherty. What would happen if countries took a step beyond remote-controlled drones and used weapons that targeted and killed people on their own, without any human intervention? Who would be responsible if one of these weapons made a fatal mistake, and who could be punished? The answer is no one. Such fully autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” are under development in several countries. But the robots’ use of force would undermine the fundamental legal and moral principle that people should be held responsible for their wrongdoing.