Media Mentions

Faced with dwindling sources for execution drugs and a pending Supreme Court review of the constitutionality of using the tranquilizer midazolam, some death penalty states are looking back to the future for alternative methods of killing inmates. ...Harvard law professor Carol Steiker said recently she believes the death penalty may be on its way out, but not for another decade or so. "It would not surprise me if the death penalty were constitutionally invalidated sometime in the next couple of decades," she said. "The Supreme Court has been on a trajectory of narrowing and questioning the death penalty. In 2002, it held that people with mental retardation, now called intellectual disability, couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2005, it held that juvenile offenders couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2008, it held that people who commit crimes other than murder — even the crime of aggravated rape of a child — couldn’t get the death penalty. These are really significant limitations on capital punishment."

The Supreme Court on Monday gave its strongest signal yet that the legal fight for nationwide gay marriage has been won even before the issue is argued in April. The justices, with only two dissenting votes, turned down Alabama’s plea to delay same-sex marriages, clearing the way for gay couples to seek marriage licenses for the first time in the Deep South. A federal judge in Alabama had struck down in January the state’s law limiting marriage to a man and a woman...“It seems almost inconceivable that there are not five votes now for gay marriage, and I think a lot of us are wondering if the chief justice won’t be sorely tempted to be a sixth vote,” said Harvard law professor Michael Klarman, who has written about the fight for same-sex marriage.

The best law firm websites are complete destinations, not pit stops. Many law firms focus more on the design aspect of their websites, rather than looking at the big picture...It is said that people hire attorneys as much as they hire law firms, and that they deeply value thought leadership. I interviewed Prof. David Wilkins of Harvard Law School and he had this to say about leading with content and ideas. “So I think that thought leadership is very important and I think it’s increasingly important and this is something I think is true at all levels, wherever a lawyer is practicing. That’s because clients understand that the world is becoming increasingly complex and that they are looking for lawyers who can demonstrate an understanding of that complexity and also an ability to help them to navigate that complexity.

As Attorney General Eric Holder prepares to leave the Obama administration after five years on the job, environmental attorneys are sizing up his record and generally applauding his efforts to protect public health and natural resources...Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor who wrote some of those early climate rules as White House counselor for energy and climate change from 2009 to 2010, said that ruling was critical to the Obama administration's global warming efforts. "This is a particularly important time," Freeman said. "For climate change, this is the beginning of the process. So if the department wasn't on its game defending these rules, they would run into serious problems implementing [the president's] climate agency. "We're going to see more of it," she added, referring to litigation challenging Obama's Clean Power Plan and proposed greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants.

A group of students suing the University to divest from fossil fuels is preparing for a hearing on motions by Harvard and the attorney general’s office to dismiss the case. The hearing was scheduled for Tuesday but has been called off due to inclement weather....“[The] Harvard Corporation should not be able to hide behind the fact that we are students who are here for four years,” Harvard Law School student and one of the plaintiffs Joseph E. Hamilton [`16] said. “They should still be accountable for their charitable duties.” Hamilton added that he expects the judge to return a decision on the motion to dismiss within a few months and if the case is dismissed, the Climate Justice Coalition will file an appeal.

Lori Cain, chief operating officer of HomeStart Inc., listened in disbelief as a lawyer on the other end of the phone told Cain she had practically hit the lottery. A check for $188,000, the result of a class-action legal settlement with the Boston Housing Authority, was on its way to the nonprofit agency that aids the homeless. Cain had never heard of the case...The check did come through, but it reached its destination only after a decade-long court battle that pitted the Boston Housing Authority against lawyers representing the tenants at the Charlestown and Bunker Hill housing developments, among the largest public-housing complexes in New England...“When you fight, the legal process has to take its course,” said Rafael Mares, who represented the tenants through what was then called the Hale & Dorr Legal Services Center, a clinic affiliated with Harvard that offers legal assistance to the poor. “It can take time.”...Colon, the mother of four, received $15,000 for initiating the complaint, and the Harvard legal clinic, now named WilmerHale Legal Services Center, received $35,000 to cover its costs.

When Google’s venture capital arm poured more than $250 million into Uber in 2013, it looked like a match made in tech heaven. Google, with billions of dollars in the bank and house-by-house maps of most of the planet, seemed like the perfect partner for Uber, the hugely popular ride-hailing service...Certainly, one day they could both be leaders in the self-driving car business. But for now, they are not only stuck with each other — they also need each other. “It’s a good example of ‘co-opetition,’ ” said Jonathan Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Emojis can be a lot of fun. Little pictures on our phones seem to express sentiments when words just fall short. Sometimes we need to punctuate our sentences with a sad cat, floating hearts, maybe an alien head. They aren't complicated when they appear in our personal email or texts, but emojis are now popping up in a place where their meanings are closely scrutinized: courtrooms...."The judge actually found that the emojis should be read into the testimony and that the jury should have the ability to read the texts or online messages themselves so that they could see the emojis in context," Dalia Topelson Ritvo says. Topelson Ritvo, an assistant director of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, tells NPR's Rachel Martin that context is crucial for understanding just what an alien head might mean.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Are Americans worried about climate change? Do they want their government to regulate greenhouse gases? A recent survey -- from Stanford University, the New York Times and Resources for the Future -- found that strong majorities say “yes” to both questions. But there’s a big catch, which isn't getting the attention it deserves: A strong majority also say that they oppose increasing taxes on either gasoline or electricity in order to reduce climate change. That’s important, because any serious effort to lower emissions is going to raise prices (certainly in the short run).

We all understand the importance of college in the modern economy. This signal economic importance leads to the SAT becoming the sole difference between getting into a great school and potentially being set for life, or not. Students sweat the process. Families spend thousands to prepare children, and schools pride themselves on their students’ average SAT scores. It’s time, writes Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier, that we question not just the value of that one test, but frankly, the entire system that claims this test measures merit. “[W]e need to change our understanding of merit,” she says--it is too narrow. Her new book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,’’ “propose[s] a new framework, one focused on advancing democratic rather than testocratic merit.” It is a scheme that reminds colleges that their duty “is to give students an educational experience in which merit is cultivated, not merely scored.”

From the first day, it’s clear that law professor Jon Hanson’s new Systemic Justice class at Harvard Law School is going to be different from most classes at the school. Hanson, lanky, bespectacled, and affable, cracks jokes as he paces the room. He refers to the class of 50-odd students as a community; he even asks students to brainstorm a name for the group. But behind the informality is a serious purpose: Hanson is out to change the way law is taught. “None of us really knows what ‘systemic justice’ is—yet you’re all here,” he points out. The new elective class, which is being taught for the first time in this spring term, will ask students to examine common causes of injustice in history and ways to use law and activism to even the field...The class is part of a new Systemic Justice Project at Harvard, led by Hanson and recent law school graduate Jacob Lipton. They’re also leading a course called the Justice Lab, a kind of think tank that will ask students to analyze systemic problems in society and propose legal solutions. Both classes go beyond legal doctrine to show how history, psychology, and economics explain the causes of injustice. A conference in April will bring students and experts together to discuss their findings.

An open letter by Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Prime Minister Cameron, You recently proposed that all internet apps – and their users' communications – be compelled to make themselves accessible to state authorities. I want to explain why this is a very bad idea even though it might seem like a no-brainer...First, the landscape of internet communications services is profoundly different from telephony, where lawful intercept’s habits were honed.

There’s growing bipartisan interest in tapping a new source of revenue to pay for highways, light rail systems, and other infrastructure: the nearly $2 trillion of U.S. corporations’ earnings now held overseas. President Barack Obama has proposed a one-time tax of 14 percent on those earning...But as infrastructure funding becomes entangled in the effort to enact corporate tax reform, the complexities will grow. There are voices of caution. One is Mihir Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Here are excerpts of our conversation with Desai Thursday, starting with his comment on the need for broad corporate tax reform:

Attendees at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting got glimpses of the library of the future as companies offered products to move libraries well beyond books....Other panelists identified trends including gamification that rewards patrons with T-shirts, tablets or wiped library fines and beacon technology that sends prompts to visit the library or reminders to renew a checkout. “You could have a beacon at the local train station or airport,” said Carli Spina, emerging technologies and research librarian at Harvard Law School Library. “It’s a really great opportunity to meet their patrons in areas they really couldn’t before.”

Lani Guinier, the first tenured woman of color at Harvard Law School, went through a trial by fire in 1993, when President Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination for assistant attorney general for civil rights. Negative publicity about her political and academic views had made her a polarizing figure. Conservatives called her “the quota queen,” though her essays, published in “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy,” make it clear she opposed quotas and was seeking voting systems that would promote representation not just of the majority but also of a greater range of groups. Her new book, “The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America,” returns to the theme of inclusion, making the case that college admissions has become a “testocracy” in which standardized test scores are seen as the most important measure of merit, and character counts for little. She argues for a rethinking of merit that would better reflect the values of a democratic society.

There's cold, and then there's New-Hampshire-in-winter cold...These were the sub-zero conditions that roughly 500 reform-minded activists faced as they marched south from Dixville Notch, down the roads and highways of the frozen-over Granite State last month...But Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, policy thinker and internet-famous political activist, wants to change that. In 2013, he started NH Rebellion — a "cross-partisan movement," in his words — "to end the system of corruption in Washington." This January's bitter-cold 10-day walk across the state was the group's second. The final one will happen next year, on the eve of New Hampshire's all-important presidential primary. "We have to put this issue on the table because the politicians won't talk about it otherwise," Lessig told us after his third day of marching in the frigid north.

In March 1955, about a month before his own death, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” he wrote. “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.”...Notable among those who disagree is Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Smolin is one of the bad boys of contemporary physics and cosmology; a generator of radical ideas and an iconoclast...And his new book, a broadside against many of the most widely accepted theories in cosmology, is co-written with someone who is even more of a maverick than he is. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a humanist, a professor at the Harvard Law School.

In the first Affordable Care Act case three years ago, the Supreme Court had to decide whether Congress had the power, under the Commerce Clause or some other source of authority, to require individuals to buy health insurance. It was a question that went directly to the structure of American government and the allocation of power within the federal system...These examples all come from a brief filed on the government’s behalf by a group of law professors who are specialists in statutory interpretation, administrative law or constitutional law. One is Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard who served as solicitor general during the second Reagan administration.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The news that the head of the Federal Communications Commission just proposed that the agency should use its authority — under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — to oversee high-speed Internet access services should be welcomed by all who use the Internet. But let's be clear about what this is and isn't. He's not proposing to "regulate the Internet" or the websites of businesses that use the Internet to reach customers. This would not constrain what Americans can say online, nor would it constrain the extraordinary innovation that has come about because of the Internet's borderless and permission-free nature.

Laws regarding rape should be taught in criminal law classes at Harvard Law School despite its potential to trigger psychological trauma, two Law professors argued at a discussion on the topic Wednesday afternoon. Law professor Jeannie C. Suk, who has taught criminal law and procedure at the Law School, and Andrew M. Crespo ’05, who served as Harvard Law Review’s first Latino president and will teach criminal law for the first time next fall, both stressed the pedagogical value of including rape law in a curriculum. Suk spoke out on the issue when she penned a New Yorker article called “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law" in December.

In the long-running battle over a proposed 65-story office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, a little-known real estate investor has lobbied New York City officials, supported community opposition and offered to buy the project site from the developer. Nothing seemed to work. So as the planned office tower and a rezoning proposed by the de Blasio administration nears the end of the city’s lengthy review, the investor, Andrew S. Penson, brought in a weapon that he hoped would extinguish the project once and for all: Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar from Harvard...Mr. Tribe testified at a City Planning Commission hearing on Wednesday that the rezoning and the 1.6-million-square-foot tower — twice as big as the current zoning allows — “would amount to an unconstitutional taking” of the Grand Central owner’s property, saddling taxpayers with a potential $1 billion liability.