Media Mentions

President Obama calls the death penalty "deeply troubling," but he still has not changed his position in favor of using it for particularly heinous crimes. In an interview Thursday with the Marshall Project, Obama said, "At a time when we’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to make the system more fair, more just, that we have to include an examination of the death penalty in that.” ... Charles J. Ogletree Jr. — a prominent death penalty opponent who was a law professor of the president and first lady Michelle Obama when both were students at Harvard Law School — has also urged Obama to alter his position. "He's not there yet, but he's close, and needs some help," Ogletree said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.

Forget about trying to get any work done on Thursday: the Internet Cat Video Festival is returning to Boston. The festival comes to the Berklee Performance Center for the second straight year to showcase a collection of amusing and adorable cat clips. ... The event is produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This year’s videos were curated by Will Braden, creator of the popular Henri le Chat Noir videos on YouTube. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain will serve as the event’s emcee. “Why did I agree to do this? Because it’s a fun thing,” says Zittrain, an admitted dog owner who specializes in cyber law and policy. “Whatever we’re worried about, there are always cat videos to watch. And I’m grateful for that.”

Harvard Law School raised $241 million of its $305 million of its goal during the quiet phase of its capital campaign, which launched with fanfare on Friday evening. Titled the “Campaign for the Third Century,” the fundraising effort will focus on clinical education and financial aid for students. The Law School recently finished a capital campaign in 2008, when it raised $476 million, surpassing its $400 million goal. Because of the proximity to its last fundraising drive, the Law School is the last of Harvard’s schools to launch its part of the University-wide Harvard Campaign, which kicked off publicly in 2013 and seeks to raise $6.5 billion.    

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an unusual, head-snapping reversal, Amazon.com has convinced a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to retract an opinion on its search results technique and replace it with a decision in its favor. To make the result even weirder, the single judge who flipped isn't a member of the 9th Circuit all. He’s a 78-year-old partly retired judge from the Western District of Michigan sitting by designation with the appellate court whose megacircuit covers the half-moon from Arizona to Montana. What gives?

Harvard is fertilizing a new crop of ideas to combat climate change. The Climate Change Solutions Fund will award grants of up to $150,000 each to stoke ideas for creative climate-related work in business, design, policy, public health, and the sciences. It was launched last year with $1 million from the office of President Drew Faust, who challenged alumni and friends to assist in raising $20 million for the fund as one pillar of a broader campaign to support the energy and environment...“This funding was a total game-changer for us,” said Emily Broad Leib, assistant clinical professor of law and deputy director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, who was awarded a grant to reduce food waste. Leib has been able to make time for efforts to raise awareness of the issue through media appearances and by working with her students to make a short documentary about state expiration-date policies and the need for change at the federal level.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Night Cafe” will stay at the Yale University Art Gallery, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled this week, even though the Bolsheviks stole it from a private collector in 1918. The court said it has no authority to consider the validity of a foreign government’s act confiscating private property. So how come confiscated Nazi art, like the Gustav Klimt painting in the film “Woman in Gold,” can end up returned to its rightful heirs, while Soviet-confiscated art can’t? The legal answer turns out to be surprisingly convoluted. In essence, it’s this: The Nazis are different.

Without mincing words, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy disparaged the American criminal justice system on Thursday for the three prison scourges of long sentences, solitary confinement, and overcrowding. “It’s an ongoing injustice of great proportions,” said Kennedy during a conversation with Harvard Law School (HLS) Dean Martha Minow at Wasserstein Hall, in a room packed mostly with students...Kennedy, LL.B. ’61, whose views on the court reflect a preoccupation with liberty and dignity, has often been described as the high court’s swing vote on major issues. But during his talk with Minow, he said he hated to be depicted that way. “Cases swing. I don’t,” he quipped, as the room erupted in laughter.

In an hour long question and answer session at Harvard Law School on Thursday, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy discussed a breadth of topics ranging from his time on the Court, concepts of dignity and freedom, and his own time as a student at the Law School...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow, who moderated the discussion, eventually opened up the event to questions from members of the packed crowd in Milstein Hall; Kennedy answered questions on campaign finance laws and recommended reading material, including Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” When Minow asked him what he had learned as a Law School student, Kennedy again turned to humor to describe his studious days as a student. “I remember a lot of the cases I had in Law School better than cases I’ve worked with,” Kennedy said to laughs.

U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus highlighted his efforts to reduce the incidence of sexual assault in the military to students, government officials, and veterans gathered to hear him speak at Harvard Law School on Thursday...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow praised Mabus and the Disabled American Veterans group for their efforts in helping veterans across the country and for their participation in events like Thursday’s. “Their commitment to raising awareness about the needs of veterans inspires us all,” Minow said.

When Harvard Law School publicly launches its capital campaign on Friday, kicking off an effort that aims to raise several hundred million dollars, it will continue a years-long attempt to rebrand itself. Instead of evoking the halcyon days of the donors’ student experiences as a way to entice them to open their wallets, according to Steven Oliveira, dean of development and alumni relations, the Law School will share another message: The school is very different now...The launch will also showcase the work of professors in new disciplines of law that may not have even existed when some of the donors were students. At a 90-minute panel discussion titled “HLS Thinks Big,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow will moderate a panel of experts from fields like bioethics and internet law. I. Glenn Cohen, one of the professors who will speak on Friday, wrote in an email that he will discuss bioethics and health law. “As part of the campaign I do whatever I can to connect with alumni interested in these areas (health law, bioethics, food and drug law, biotechnology) and explain why this is such an exciting time for our students and our law school to be involved in these issues,” Cohen wrote.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The idea that financial markets are too focused on the short term is gaining ground in the media and among academics. And now it is attracting political attention in the United States. Investors’ obsession with short-term returns, according to the new conventional wisdom, compels corporate boards of directors and managers to seek impressive quarterly earnings at the expense of strong long-term investments. Research and development suffers, as does long-term investment in plant and equipment. Similarly, short-term thinking leads major companies to buy back their stock, thereby sapping them of the cash they need for future investments. None of this is good news for the economy – at least, it wouldn’t be, if it were real. Upon closer inspection, the supposed negative consequences of investor short-termism appear not to be happening at all.

The year is 2050. A fighter jet roars across the sky, zeroing in on targets in enemy territory somewhere in the Middle East. But the targets are really a group of farmers holding hoes and rakes, which the jet identifies as guns. Within minutes, it fires a series of rockets, killing all of them. The jet is pilotless, and the aircraft is not being directed from a base. It registers its operation as successful. The prospect of such scenarios has led some activists and human rights groups to call for a complete ban on so-called "killer robots" — advanced artificial intelligence weaponry that they believe could one day blanket battlefields and make life and death decisions independent of human direction...Michael Schmitt, a fellow at Harvard Law School's program on international law and armed conflict, agreed that a ban was "unrealistic." Regulation, he said, would be more likely to succeed. "Since autonomous weapons have the potential to be a game changer in modern warfare, some states will wish to develop them either to extend their technological edge on the battlefield or to offset their weakness," he suggested, adding that from a humanitarian perspective, solutions "must be practical and realistic about what states are likely to accept and move in that direction."

The H-1B guest worker visa program has been coming under scrutiny lately. The program is important to colleges both in terms of their ability to hire postdocs and other researchers from abroad and, more indirectly, in providing a pathway for the international students they recruit to work in the U.S. after graduation...“The only reason it would be a good idea from a national interest perspective is if indeed there were a shortage of such people, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of that except in some small fields, or fast-growing fields,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Teitelbaum is the author of Falling Behind: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent, in which he argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no evidence of a generalized shortage of STEM workers in the U.S.

What happens when you try to fit an evolving electric grid into an 80-year-old statute? Lawsuits wind their way to the Supreme Court. In a move that surprised energy experts, the high court has decided to hear at least two cases this year that deal with how to regulate evolving electricity markets...Ari Peskoe, an energy fellow at Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, said it's surprising the court decided to take back-to-back FERC cases. "Hopefully, these two decisions combined will give a lot of clarity in an area that I think really needs it," he said. "This section of the Federal Power Act was written 80 years ago, and it hasn't changed, but the industry has."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, Monday's decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upholding most of the assault weapons bans passed by New York and Connecticut is a win for gun-control advocates. But down in the weeds, the unanimous decision by a panel of three Democratic appointees nevertheless points to potential trouble for similar laws should they ever be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court held that assault weapons do in general fall within the core protections of the Second Amendment. But the judges applied a lenient standard to uphold the laws -- and a more aggressive Supreme Court might well apply a tougher standard and strike them down.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Scientists say they hope to avoid government regulation of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, by using a variant on a powerful new method to knock out some plant genes. This thinking is worrisome -- not so much for scientific reasons as for legal ones. When research is aimed at achieving a regulatory goal rather than a scientific one, it's a sign that something is wrong with the regulations, and that they need to be changed sooner rather than later.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. So far as I know, no neurosurgeon has ever written a book about the U.S. Constitution. But then again, no neurosurgeon has ever made a serious run for the presidency. Combining personal graciousness and plain exposition with some wild right-wing clichés, Ben Carson’s slim volume tells us a lot about the sources of his appeal. Like the man himself, the book is not what you might expect.

Robert P. George is not a political consultant. “I’m not Karl Rove or David—what’s his name?—Axelrod.” In fact, he says, “Any candidate who’d ask me for campaign advice should drop out immediately, because he’s too stupid to be running for president.” Yet few advisers are having more influence on conservative thinking this presidential campaign cycle...“What he brings to the debate is even more method than ideas,” says his friend Mary Ann Glendon, of Harvard Law School. That method being his commitment to the proposition that, as he explains it to students, “when two people who are well disposed engage in debate, despite their differences they are bound together as a little community integrated around a common good. What is that good? Getting at the truth.”

An expert in animal law has flown to the defense of Delta Air Lines after a group of safari hunters sued the airline over its ban on transporting exotic animal hunting trophies...Earlier this year, a petition on Change.org asked Delta, the only U.S. airline serving South Africa directly, to stop transporting exotic animal hunting trophies. The petition was filed by Chris Green, a Delta Diamond Medallion frequent flier who has since become the executive director of the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School. This week, Green responded to the lawsuit in a letter on the Change.org petition page, writing that public response to the lawsuit “will confirm to Delta Air Lines that it did exactly the right thing by listening to the majority of its customers,” adding that “Delta should be commended for sticking to its principled stance.” The post generated hundreds of comments in support in less than 24 hours.

...The distressing features of this much larger part of the higher-education industry have spawned a critical, even dire, literature that merits attention for its own sake—and because the issues echo in the elite stratum, too. And for those seeking entry to the top-tier institutions, the ever more frenzied admissions lottery has begun to provoke overdue skepticism. Herewith, an overview of some recent books with heft....Lani Guinier looks beyond Bruni’s personal narratives and advice to the societal consequences of college admissions as the ultimate funneling device. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy (Beacon, $24.95), the Boskey professor of law advances a broad argument about the definition of merit as social benefit rather than as individual accomplishment, and the role of inclusiveness in strengthening the civic fabric and better addressing human problems.

The first time Smart professor of law Jon Hanson lived on wheels, he was managing a restaurant and sharing a trailer with his high-school sweetheart, Kathleen. The newlyweds had bought the trailer cheap and persuaded their shop teacher to let them fix it up during class senior year. Neither planned to attend college. That changed after Hanson’s father died, when something jumped out among his father’s few possessions: his books. Applying to Rice on Kathleen’s suggestion, Hanson got in and soared, earning a fellowship for research in Europe. (They traveled in a camper van there, later taking their three kids across America in an RV.) Then on to Yale—he to the law school, and Kathleen to the college. By Hanson’s “2L” year, he’d coauthored his first law-review article, and was off to the scholarly races. At Harvard, Hanson stands out for connecting law to the mind sciences and for his approach to legal education.