Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Is the European Union out to get Google? You might think so, considering that EU regulators are poised to bring anti-competitive-conduct charges against the search giant, while U.S. regulators happily settled their differences with Google a couple of years ago. Add the European regulatory efforts to force Google to let people eliminate certain permanent-seeming records of their past conduct, and you might think there's some deeper cultural explanation, such as old world skepticism of new world technology.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The big murder trial that’s been obsessing Bostonians has ended with a guilty verdict. No, you're not having déjà vu. Today's jury decision came in the case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star tight end. Hernandez was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, a semiprofessional football player who was also dating Hernandez's fiancée’s sister. Although the motive remains shady, it seems possible that the 2013 murder was connected to the still unresolved criminal charge that Hernandez killed two other people the year before -- strangers who accidentally insulted him in a nightclub. If that charge also turns out to be true, then Hernandez killed almost as many people as the Tsarnaev brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago today.

Another day, another town. Ryan T. Anderson, the conservative movement’s fresh-faced, millennial, Ivy League-educated spokesman against same-sex marriage, has another busy schedule. ... Discourteous is not a description usually applied to Anderson. “He’s a smart, likeable, very well-educated young person: an ideal spokesperson for the opposition to gay marriage,” Harvard law professor Michael Klarman, who recently sparred with Anderson at a law school event, writes in an e-mail. But Klarman, who wrote the book “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” adds, “It’s almost inconceivable to me that he persuaded anyone in the audience by his arguments.”

The environmental case being argued on Thursday in a federal appeals court in Washington is equal parts legal freak show and serious legal business. On the serious side, it is the latest attempt by fossil-fuel interests to embalm the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama administration's climate plan. But it is the legal sideshow orchestrated by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard that is unsettling to many environmental lawyers. ... Jody Freeman, another Harvard law professor, called the challenge’s timing "extremely unusual," and Harvard’s Richard Lazarus, who called the legislative history of the disputed clauses in the law "beyond novel" and "really bizarre." Both professors strongly disagree with Tribe’s arguments.  

A simple google search for the word “sharia” illustrates the magnitude of the gap Harvard Law School (HLS) professor Intisar A. Rabb wants to fill. Up top, there’s a 2,000-word overview from the Council on Foreign Relations, along with the usual Wikipedia link. But even on that first page of results, there’s also a far less neutral take from a Christian missionary website, and an alarmist article on sharia law in Dearborn, Michigan, that on further investigation turns out to come from the satirical news site National Report.

Environmental activists at Harvard are hoping to flip the equation on global warming this week: instead of climate change bringing rising temperatures, they hope adding heat to the discussion will change the climate of the University’s approach to the issue. ... Joseph Hamilton, a Harvard Law student with Harvard Climate Justice Coalition, told ThinkProgress that while it’s great to have as much discussion about climate change as we can, Climate Week was “definitely a deflection.” He said it had a marked absence of voices from the social movement or from the student body. “It’s no coincidence that they announced Climate Week after we announced Heat Week,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that there’s no serious engagement with the divestment issue.” Hamilton, who is participating in the sit-in this week, is part of a group of seven student plaintiffs that have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the University to divest its fossil fuel holdings. In March, a Massachusetts trial court sided with Harvard Corporation and dismissed the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are preparing to file an appeal. Hamilton said the concerns of those participating in Heat Week and those filing the lawsuit are the same.

University President Drew G. Faust did not address Divest Harvard’s ongoing blockade of Massachusetts Hall, which houses her office, when she introduced a panel discussion on climate change on Monday. After Faust introduced the panel, the group of seven climate change experts and talk show host Charlie Rose, who moderated the discussion, covered topics ranging from national energy policy to divestment at Harvard. ... Faust has long said that Harvard should not divest from fossil fuels, though she did not discuss the issue at Monday’s event. Some professors said they have advocated for an open discussion to engage with Faust on the issue of divestment at Harvard. James M. Recht, an assistant professor at the Medical School, and Bruce L. Hay, a Law School professor, said they were disappointed that that Monday’s event did not address that request. The panel, on the other hand, did address the topic of divestment, and different members debated how the University should engage the question of divesting the endowment from fossil fuels.

A congressional drafting error and clunky phrase is putting a second of President Barack Obama’s signature endeavors in jeopardy. This time it’s climate change. Challengers to Obama’s policies are exploiting a law written 25 years ago in a lawsuit to derail Environmental Protection Agency rules designed to curb carbon emissions. The case, using a line of attack similar to one against his massive health-care overhaul, is set for a hearing Thursday in federal court. ...To add legal heft, coal producer Peabody Energy Corp. hired Laurence Tribe, Obama’s law professor and mentor at Harvard University, to help. Tribe, a leading liberal constitutional scholar, has argued 35 cases at the Supreme Court, including the 2000 election case for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore over Republican George W. Bush.

As top-notch experts met at Harvard University to discuss global warming impacts and solutions Monday, dozens of Harvard students and alumni held protests encouraging the university to divest from fossil fuels...Ted Hamilton, a second-year Harvard law student who was part of the Massachusetts Hall blockade, said he was "pretty disappointed" by the presidential panel. It was a "conversation in a bubble," he said, with lots of talk about solutions but "no imagination" about how to scale up the solutions to a global level...Hamilton's classmate Sima Atri, a third-year law student, said she's frustrated at the administration's refusal to hold open, on-the-record discussions about divestment. In contrast, she said, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—just a few miles down the road from Harvard—held a public debate last week about the pros and cons of divestment.

A letter by Charles Fried and Robert Mnookin. Your editorial entitled “Title IX and University Administration” argues the importance of uniform Title IX procedures across “One Harvard." Uniformity in some matters is good, but you do not say why it is needed for this one. The reason the law faculty drafted its own procedures was the overwhelming sentiment in our faculty that the university’s Title IX procedures were so unfair as to be unacceptable. At our meetings not a single faculty member spoke in defense of the university’s procedures. And, after all, procedure is what we do. If we had not been allowed to draft our own procedures a strong denunciation by the faculty would almost certainly have followed and would have made law suits by accused students a virtual certainty.

...John Iovine, his health still a work in progress, was finally sent home in April of last year, after several months in a rehab facility. And this moment in a patient's recovery--when they seemingly have to sink or swim on their own--is the one that everyone in the health system is paying attention to right now. For too long, too many Johns sunk, ending up right back in the hospital. The industry calls these preventable readmissions, and they are a huge drain, costing Medicare alone $15 billion annually..."I think there is a lot of interest in the area right now, and it is a great coming together of the healthcare world and the computer science world, as well as the patient experience world," says I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, who has written about the legal and ethical concerns raised by the collision of health care and big data. He believes there are still gray areas, though, about ownership and control of the information. "Here there are questions of whether people whose data is going to be used to build the engine have the right to opt out, do they have to affirmatively opt in? Do they have to even be notified it's being used?"

An op-ed by Martha Minow and Sharon Browne. Although our economy is improving, the experiences of many truly poor people in this country remain very challenging. The legal rights of low-income Americans struggling with the many burdens of poverty must be protected, and that has been essential to the mission of the Legal Services Corporation since it was authorized in 1974 as one of the last acts of the Nixon Administration. Legal rights are not self-enforcing. The availability of legal advice and counsel can make all the difference to low-income Americans who are fighting to avert unlawful foreclosure, escape domestic violence, secure veterans’ benefits, or address many other legal challenges that go to the heart of their security and well-being.

For the second time in less than a year, the Yale School of Medicine is embroiled in charges of sexual harassment. A nephrology professor, Dr. Rex L. Mahnensmith, who worked at the university for over 20 years, has been accused of a pattern of sexual harassment while he was medical director of the New Haven Dialysis Clinic, where university physicians treat their patients...Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School, said universities that might have looked the other way when confronted with such accusations were “all of a sudden finding that there’s a realistic risk of losing funding if they don’t take complaints seriously.”

...Pastor Barclay’s story puts the recent flap about Religious Freedom Restoration Acts in perspective. Many supporters of both the Indiana and Arkansas laws claimed that new “religious liberty” legislation was needed to prevent Caesar from dragging ministers from the pulpit...Most of the furor surrounding the Indiana and Arkansas statutes has concerned “public accommodations,” meaning certain businesses holding themselves open to the public. Since at least the sixteenth century, English courts required certain businesses—inns, stagecoaches (and then railroads), companies that carried goods, surgeons, and even blacksmiths—to serve any customer who could pay. The rationale, according to Harvard Law Professor Joseph Singer, was that by “holding themselves open to the public,” they offered a binding contract to everyone, and had to honor it. In Singer’s account, the “traditional” right of a property owner to refuse service at whim is relatively recent. It arose after the Civil War, when newly freed African Americans were using the vote and access to the courts to seek inclusion in Southern politics and the economy.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. Complaining about the complexity of the tax code has become a treasured ritual during spring tax season. The code has grown ever more complex and this complexity has considerable costs. As one example, the incredible complexity of tax incentives for education limits uptake and redistributes wealth away from those targeted and toward sophisticated taxpayers. How could we transform this ritual of complaining into spring cleaning? Addressing complexity in the tax code requires analogizing to other complex systems and drawing on the research that demonstrates how to manage that complexity. Indeed, there is a well-developed literature on how to manage complex systems that can provide the foundation for simplifying the tax code. In particular, we know a lot about how to manage the evolution of software codes. This analogy yields two primary lessons.

Hundreds of students, alumni, faculty and community members joined forces in Harvard Yard on Sunday night to launch "Harvard Heat Week," a weeklong sit-in for fossil fuel divestment. As of 11:00 p.m., dozens of students and supporters were still blockading the doors of Massachusetts Hall, where Harvard President Drew Faust will show up for work on Monday..."Harvard's inaction is providing safe cover for those reluctant to change the status quo," said Ted Hamilton [`16], a student at Harvard Law School and organizer with Divest Harvard.

Amid a weeklong protest by environmental activist group Divest Harvard, at least 18 members of Harvard Faculty for Divestment intend to devote portions of their course meetings this week to the topic of climate change and divestment. A few faculty members—including Medical School assistant professor James M. Recht, English professor Nicholas J. Watson, and Law School professor Bruce Hay—passed out flyers to passersby Monday morning just steps away from a blockade around Massachusetts Hall, which houses offices of top Harvard officials including University President Drew G. Faust. Divest Harvard has stationed members outside of Mass. Hall entrances since Sunday night...Hay plans to hold an additional class session for students in his Extension School course LSTU E-160: "Art and the Law” to talk exclusively about issues of divestment and climate change.

An article by Heidi Gardner. Rainmakers inspire a certain degree of awe from their peers. Most partners recognize that the way the biggest rainmakers build an enormous portfolio is by generating work and referring it to others – a specific kind of collaboration. But in our research, we find that lawyers who observed strong collaborators often see the process as somewhat mysterious. They don’t understand how “mere mortals like me” (one lawyer’s actual words) could achieve such greatness. This post starts to demystify rainmakers’ collaboration – first by acknowledging some of the common myths, then by digging into our data to how they stand up to reality.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. What separates conservatives from liberals? In the past decade, the most illuminating answers to this question have come from Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist whose research bears directly on the emerging 2016 presidential campaign -- even if his answers might not be quite right. Haidt’s basic finding is simple. Throughout history, human beings have operated under five sets of moral commitments: avoidance of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Conservatives recognize all five, but liberals recognize only the first two.

An op-ed by Alyssa Richardson `15. We all saw the horror film: unimpeachable video evidence that Walter Scott was shot repeatedly in the back while fleeing from North Charleston Police Officer Michael Sleger. Although this video was not captured through the official lens of a dashboard camera or a body-mounted camera, the footage is no less telling. There is little debate about what happened, and as a result, Officer Sleger has been arrested and many community leaders, including Scott family attorney Rep. Justin Bamberg, have beseeched the public to “let the justice process run its course.” But for Scott and countless other casualties of police brutality, ex poste justice comes a few gunshots too late. We are therefore confronted with a hard question: How can we stop the violence ex ante?...But put bluntly, all of these measures aimed at curbing police behavior do little to address the underlying perception that black people are inherently dangerous. Changing this belief is at the heart of solving the problem.

It's as if sportswriting has invaded the energy and environment beat. President Barack Obama’s actions on climate change are “sidestepping” or making an "end run” around Congress, critics and news accounts say – including some stories by this reporter. But that depiction, more applicable perhaps to a wide receiver than a Washington politician, is at best imprecise. And at worst, it's just plain false, some legal scholars contend...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe – testifying opposite Revesz in a House hearing last month – went one further, accusing the administration of "burning the Constitution."...Others, however, argue that the Clean Air Act's language is “expansive,” in the words of Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, writing in the Harvard Law Review in March 2013. “The relevant language has lain largely dormant for decades, but is now ripe for a presidential awakening,” Lazarus argued.