Media Mentions

“There is widespread agreement that the legal profession is in a period of stress and transition; its economic models are under duress; the concepts of its professional uniqueness are narrow and outdated; and, as a result, its ethical imperatives are weakened and their sources ill-defined.” That’s the premise put forth in a paper presented at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession conference today. Authored by former general counsel of the General Electric Corporation Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr., Wilmer Hale partner William F. Lee, and Harvard Law School Vice Dean of the Legal Profession David B. Wilkins, the paper contemplates lawyers’ ethical responsibilities and their role as the profession grows increasingly competitive.

An op-ed by Alan M. Dershowitz, Neal K. Katyal, Theodore B. Olson and H. Jefferson Powell. Constitutional arguments stand or fall on their merits. That principle is as old as the Republic, but a recent debate suggests that it is worth restating. The issue is the constitutionality of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe arguing that the EPA’s proposed actions would violate constitutional principles of separation of powers and federalism, and might require just compensation payments to energy companies; his critics vigorously dispute each of Tribe’s claims. But it is not the substance of their disagreement that has caught our attention...The great Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1805 that in debate over “any political proposition,” an individual’s judgment will be greatly “influenced by the wishes, the affections, and the general theories of those by whom” it is to be discussed and decided. He might have added that less dignified, self-interested motives can be at play as well...we can and should emulate Marshall and draw a line between public critique, however vigorous, and the public invocation of private suspicions.

Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke about the importance of experience in the private sector, the 2016 presidential campaign, and his time as a student at Harvard Law School during a public question and answer session at the Law School Friday. Law School Dean Martha L. Minow joined Romney on stage and questioned him on topics ranging from modern-day political polarization to finding a work-life balance. She later handed the microphone over to members of the crowd in a packed Milstein East Hall. Romney graduated from the Law School in 1975 and Harvard Business School in 1974.

Robin Steinberg, a New York public defender who was initially disinvited in February as an honoree of a separate Law School event, addressed her connection to a controversial online video that some say endorsed killing white police officers in retribution for police violence against black men at a Harvard Law School lecture Friday...The decision to revoke Steinberg’s honor prompted outcry from some in the Law School community, and Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., who directs the Criminal Justice Institute, said it was “a very unfortunate episode that occurred [there].”

Campaigning for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt Romney, J.D./M.B.A. ’75, decided he would spend one day every week doing someone else’s job. He cooked hot dogs at Fenway Park, worked at a day care center, took a turn on a paving crew. One day he hung off the back of a garbage truck making its rounds through the city of Boston. “It was really educational,” Romney said, recalling the experience for a Harvard Law School audience on Friday. “We’d pull up to a corner and there’d be people waiting to cross the street, and I’m not more than two feet from these people. And they don’t see you. You’re invisible. If you’re on a garbage truck, you’re an invisible person. “I thought, wow — we don’t see each other as we ought to in society.” The former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, visiting Harvard Law School (HLS) for a Q&A session hosted by Dean Martha Minow, encouraged a renewed civility in politics and society, emphasizing the difference one person can make through serving others.

When the United Kingdom resoundingly approved mitochondrial replacement therapy in February, it became the first country to give people this new medical option. In parallel it gave the United States serious cause to reflect on how it handles matters of reproductive innovation, argues a trio of experts in the journal Science. "We have fundamentally different regulatory cultures," said co-author Dr. Eli Adashi, former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University. The essay's other authors are I. Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law and ethicist Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford.

When the jury in the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rendered their guilty verdict Wednesday afternoon, there was one thing that eluded even the most avid followers of the coverage: a look at Tsarnaev’s now-famous face...Harvard Law School professor and former federal judge Nancy Gertner finds the rule incredibly out of date and inconsistent with the modern media landscape, which relies on much more than a pen and paper. “It’s preposterous and it says something more about the power of the leadership of the federal courts to block this in the face of congressional pressure, public pressure, the pressure of some judges,” Gertner said. To Gertner, the arguments against cameras aren’t based on the realities of the situation. “Everyone sees the issue in terms of O.J. Simpson, which is absurd,” she says of opponents who fear that broadcasting a trial could result in a media frenzy that alters the outcome. “It’s absurd on so many levels. One, because that was a badly tried case. Two, because the cameras were much more intrusive in that case. It was 20 years ago.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So-called conversion therapies to make gay people straight are based on poor science or none, and U.S. President Barack Obama was right to condemn them. But the president was wrong to encourage the passage of more laws like the one in California that bans the use of such therapy on minors. Legislatures, whether state or federal, make terrible judges of the scientific validity of medical therapies. And setting a precedent for lawmakers to prohibit treatments because they consider them to be morally mistaken is even worse. It opens the door to the legislation of morality in the guise of protecting public health and safety.

An op-d by Noah Feldman. The correct ethical response to the video of Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back is to condemn the crime -- with one exception. The exception is Slager’s attorney, who has an ethical obligation as a lawyer to defend his client, not to abandon him or harm him by a public act of distancing. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast, Slager’s lawyer did just that, dropping his client like a hot potato and strongly implying that Slager either had been set on a course of perjury or was simply too repulsive to represent. Obviously, the overwhelming cause for outrage here is the apparent murder of an unarmed, fleeing black man by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. But the whole point of having defense attorneys is that they’re especially necessary when the whole world considers their client immediately guilty. It’s therefore worth spending a moment examining what Slager's lawyer did and said -- and why it was an ethical mistake for him to act like any other ordinarily moral person.

Republican Senator Rand Paul officially announced he's running for president this week, and he has pledged to get rid of the US Department of Education if he's elected. We reached out to famous Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe to find out whether Paul would have the Constitutional ability to shutter the DOE for good. The DOE was created in 1979 through the Department of Education Organization Act, which was passed by Congress, and Tribe told us that "it would of course require another Act of Congress to eliminate the United States Department of Education." "There is no Constitutional obstacle to the enactment of such a law," added Tribe, a legendary professor who counted President Barack Obama among his research assistants.

Rapid technological innovation has revolutionized warfare; it has pulled soldiers away from war’s front lines and gradually replaced them with advanced weaponry. Drones, for instance, covertly strike targets around the globe as their operators sit safely elsewhere. But humanity is now on the cusp of developing “killer robots,” or fully autonomous weapons capable of killing without operators, and human rights defenders want them banned. In a report released on Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Harvard Law School jointly call for the weapons to be declared unlawful by international treaty before they become a reality. Though fully autonomous weapons do not exist yet, technology is moving in that direction; Israel’s Iron Dome is programmed to respond to incoming explosives on its own and projects looking to enhance the autonomy of drones are in the works. The authors of "Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots" assert that under existing law, humans who manufacture, program and command the lethal robots of the future would escape liability for any suffering caused.

An op-ed by Matthew Thiman '16, Courtney Svoboda `16, and Tyler Giannini. Shortly after his daughter’s death, Brang Shawng sat down to write the first of two letters that would eventually get him convicted. He wrote to the president of Myanmar first, and then to the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission, wanting to know what had happened to his daughter, whom he believed had been shot by the Myanmar military. “A submission is made with great respect,” he wrote to the president, “to find out the truth in connection with the killing, without a reason, of an innocent student, my daughter Ma Ja Seng Ing, who wore a white and green school uniform.”

An international legal expert says the settlement between the world's biggest gold miner and a group of women who were raped by security guards and police at the company's Pogera mine in Papua New Guinea has wider significance. The 11 women, and the families of three other people, were planning to file a lawsuit against Barrick Gold in the United States but the parties reached an out-of-court settlement. The confidential settlement means the women and their lawyers at Earth Rights International can't say much publicly. But one person who can is Tyler Giannini, a clinical professor of law and Co-Director of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program. He has written widely about abuses related to the mining industry and carried out investigations in many countries including PNG. Mr Giannini says even though the details of deal can't be publicised, the deal by Barrick Gold is still highly significant.

A federal appeals court's ruling siding with tobacco companies on Wednesday could be devastating to Florida smokers' tort lawsuits, says a Miami law professor following the cases. This week's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit tossed a verdict won against tobacco companies by the estate of a Florida smoker. A three-judge panel held that the practice of using jury findings from an earlier tobacco class action conflicted with federal law on cigarettes...So the Eleventh Circuit's ruling, that federal law doesn't allow the use of those findings, "is almost like a neutron bomb for the Engle-type cases," said Sergio Campos, a law professor at the University of Miami who is not involved in the cases but has been following them closely. Campos, who is visiting at Harvard Law School right now, allowed that the Eleventh Circuit decision says plaintiffs may proceed on their claims as long as they do not rely on the class jury's findings. "But," he predicted, "a lot of cases are going to just disappear."

Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter spoke with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow on April 6 about the R-word...Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter returned to Harvard Law School—where he earned his J.D. in 1990—on April 6 to talk to students and faculty about racial slurs promulgated by the names of mascots and sports teams in today’s America. The Oneida Nation and the National Congress of American Indians launched the Change the Mascot campaign two years ago to pressure the National Football League’s Washington “Redskins” team to change its name.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 charges in the Boston Marathon bombing trial and may now face the death penalty. Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan offers analysis.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The first phase of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was supposed to be about liability. In reality, it felt like a penalty hearing, albeit in slow motion. Now that Tsarnaev has been found guilty for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the jury will deal directly with the only critical question — should Tsarnaev get life in prison or the death penalty? But, even at this late stage, the real question is: Why was this trial necessary? Why did the US attorney general insist on the death penalty here, while calling for its moratorium elsewhere? Why did the US government press for the death penalty when the defendant would have pled to life without parole? That was, after all, the defense message from the outset with the opening statement of Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev’s lawyer — “it was him.” “We will not sidestep Tsarnaev’s responsibility for his actions,” she said, actions which were “incomprehensible” and “inexcusable.”

In 2009, 40 percent of Harvard Law School’s entering class, according to data provided the school’s Admissions Office, arrived directly from their senior year of college, maybe even still sporting the odd T-shirt from last year’s big rivalry football game. It was the continuation of a years-long trend: From 2005 to 2009, between 39 and 45 percent of each incoming class were just recently undergraduates, with the remainder having spent at least one year working or studying elsewhere. But the next year, in 2010, the young students matriculating straight from undergrad only constituted 28 percent of the entering Law School class. More than two-thirds had post-graduate experience...“When I became dean, I directed our admissions team to give extra weight to applicants with experience since college,” [Martha] Minow wrote in an email. Now, since after 2009, roughly three-fourths of each incoming class of Harvard Law students comes to campus having spent some time beyond their college campuses. It’s a change Minow and Jessica L. Soban ’02, chief admissions officer at the Law School, broadcast as a way to enhance the Harvard Law School experience for students, allowing them to cultivate a better sense of their interests and bring a more experienced perspective to the classroom.

Fully autonomous weapons, already denounced as “killer robots”, should be banned by international treaty before they can be developed, a new report urges the United Nations. Under existing laws, computer programmers, manufacturers and military commanders would all escape liability for deaths caused by such machines, according to the study published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and [the International Human Rights Clinic at] Harvard Law School. Nor is there likely to be any clear legal framework in future that would establish the responsibility of those involved in producing or operating advanced weapons systems, say the authors of Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots. The report is released ahead of an international meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems at the UN in Geneva starting on 13 April.

...On Wednesday, Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 counts against him..."It will give some sense of closure for people," said Ronald Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law professor and director of the school's criminal justice institute. "Healing is a more difficult concept."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was sleeting hard in Boston on Wednesday afternoon as the jury returned a guilty verdict on all 30 counts against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed an 8-year-old and two women and wounded at least 260 people. Somehow the weather seems appropriate, even though it’s after Easter. Throughout this intensely cold, snowy winter in Boston, the specter of the Tsarnaev trial has been a constant and unwelcome reminder that for all its liberalism and toleration, this city isn’t immune from the troubles that plague the rest of the world.