Media Mentions

Sorority women at the University of Virginia were ordered to stay home on the biggest party night of the year to protect their “safety and well-being” -- and they are furious about it. Members of the National Panhellenic Conference told 16 UVA sorority chapters last week not to participate in Boys’ Bid Night fraternity parties on Saturday. The revelry has led to allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking in the past. Women who break the prohibition may face sanctions...“This is the wrong approach to thinking about how to empower women,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor of civil rights and family law at Harvard Law School. “It’s not the right reaction to say we need to keep women away.” Bartholet is one of 28 law professors who signed an open letter last year condemning Harvard’s sexual-misconduct policy, saying it “departs dramatically” from current law.

Virginians rightly disgusted by the sleazy behavior of ex-Gov. Bob McDonnell need to brace for the possibility that he and his wife could eventually be fully cleared on appeal even though they were convicted of a total of 19 corruption felonies....“None of the case law up until that point, nothing in the statute, would have suggested that introductions and access were criminal,” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who now teaches law at Harvard, said. She and a Harvard colleague wrote a brief supporting McDonnell. “The criminal law has to be clear. It has to give notice. Otherwise, every politician is vulnerable to an ambitious prosecutor,” said Gertner, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton.

With a push from the NFL, all 50 states and the District of Columbia passed youth concussion laws over the span of about five years. They were modeled after legislation passed in Washington state in 2009. But an Associated Press analysis shows just 21 of the laws that followed included all four key elements in Washington's bill. "Washington state is the 'gold standard,'" said Peter Carfagna, the founder of a sports marketing company and a teacher at Harvard Law School. "I have a hard time thinking of a good reason why you'd deviate from it."

It’s nearly the end of the college application season and, for many high school seniors, that means the end of a years-long process full of AP tests, extracurricular activists, volunteer hours and SAT prep — much of it a means to an end: getting into the highest ranking college. For years, SAT critics have argued the test disadvantages poor students, but now, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier is saying the test has hurt the mission of higher education. She outlines that position in her new book, “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America."

The law can be an important tool in increasing low breastfeeding rates. Mississippi has some protections already in place for breastfeeding mothers...The language, drafted by Harvard Law School/Mississippi State University Delta fellow Desta Reff, doesn't give women any new legal rights. Instead, it extends "the support of the Mississippi Senate for the needs and rights of breastfeeding mothers consistent with the law."...A 2006 state law protects women's right to breastfeed in any location, but has no enforcement provision. "So if someone tells you (to) cover up, you have no recourse," says Reff.

Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), made his first appearance before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday for a pretrial hearing. What now? IJT asked two experts what they expected of this first ICC case against a former child soldier-turned-perpetrator...The arrest warrant dates from 2005 and does not include crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic (CAR) or South Sudan. It is possible newcharges will be added later, says Harvard professor Alex Whiting, who worked as an investigation and prosecution coordinator at the ICC from 2010 to 2013...Whiting, however, believes it “is not a big deal” that the ICC is prosecuting a formervictim. He compares it with domestic criminal cases against violent adults who were mistreated in childhood. “The fact that you were a victim is no excuse for becoming a perpetrator,” he says. Still, he agrees that proving Ongwen was “coerced” to com- mit the crimes or “damaged” may allow his past to “count as a mitigating factor”, though not hinder his prosecution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish forces say that, with the help of three months of U.S. airstrikes, they’ve retaken the town of Kobani on the Syria-Turkey border from Islamic State. This success doesn’t change the basic strategic calculus of the war on the insurgent group: The fight for Kobani was always more about symbolism than military advantage. But the victory, if you can call it that, carries three lessons about how the conflict with Islamic State is going -- and how it can and cannot be affected by the use of force. The first and most important lesson is that airstrikes alone can’t retake territory from Islamic State.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news that California will ban its judges from participation in the Boy Scouts has been on my mind since it was announced Friday. The decision is interesting on many levels, with implications from the mainstreaming of gay rights to the centrality of scouting to Mormonism and beyond. But the angle that’s been gnawing at me is constitutional: How, exactly, can the state code of judicial conduct prohibit judges from exercising what would otherwise be their constitutional right to free association? You and I can join any private organization we want. Why can’t judges?

Poor and middle-class litigants in Florida are increasingly showing up to court without lawyers, resulting in a significant access-to-justice problem throughout the state. That was the consensus of a panel on "The Importance of Access to Justice to the Judiciary" held Friday at the University of Miami School of Law. The panel was part of a Legal Services Corp. half-day seminar. Panelists included Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Labarga; U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami; Richard Leefe of Leefe, Gibbs, Sullivan & Dupre in Louisiana; Puerto Rico Supreme Court Chief Justice Liana Fiol Matta; and William Van Norwick Jr., a retired judge from Florida's First District Court of Appeal. The panel was moderated by Harvard law dean Martha Minow.

...To investigate the role of motivated reasoning in the sort of institutional flip-flops that politicians and judges engage in, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein and I conducted a series of surveys. In one, we asked people whether President Bush acted rightly by using a loophole to make appointments in defiance of Senate opposition. Most Republicans said he did the right thing while most Democrats said he acted wrongly. We then put Obama’s name in for Bush with a different group of respondents and asked the same question. This time the vast majority of Republicans opposed the appointments while most Democrats said he did the right thing.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Questioning prospective jurors is tedious. The press usually ignores it. In Massachusetts, few judges or lawyers pay much attention to it. One judge bragged about the speed with which he picked a jury: “Ten minutes, tops, no matter what the case is.” But with the two high-profile cases of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Aaron Hernandez , all eyes are on jury selection. A new state statute and guidelines from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court may forecast a new approach for state courts — permitting jurors to be questioned by lawyers, not just judges, and on a broad range of issues — but only for cases after Feb. 1.

The Rev. Lorenzo Lynch was in his living room here, surrounded by photographs of his daughter Loretta, when he first heard the news that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was stepping down and she was on the short list of candidates to replace him...When she graduated law school, Lynch and another Harvard student, Annette Gordon-Reed, both joined the Wall Street law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel as litigation associates. They and another African American woman at the firm called themselves “the triplets” and worked brutal hours. “We often found ourselves sitting in a conference room at 3:00 in the morning eating Chinese food and working on a case,” said Gordon-Reed, now a Harvard law professor. “She’s a Southern steel-magnolia-type person — very, very strong,” Gordon-Reed said. “But she’s also one of the funniest people I know and a good mimic.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. For many decades, the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York has ranked among the most universally despised rulings in the history of American law. In that long-repudiated case, the court struck down a maximum-hours law for bakers. A week ago, Senator Rand Paul -- a likely candidate for president, and among the most influential members of the Republican Party -- explicitly embraced Lochner, and proudly endorsed the whole idea of “judicial activism.” That tells us a lot about contemporary law and politics, and probably about the future of conservative thinking as well.

A group of 38 Harvard Law School professors have signed a letter “in support of” Law School professor emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz, who was recently accused of having sexual relations with a minor who was allegedly trafficked by billionaire Jeffrey E. Epstein...A group of three Law School faculty members—Nancy Gertner, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Philip B. Heymann—began the effort to write the letter in support of their colleague late last week, Gertner and Heymann said...In an interview, Heymann said he took issue with how “Jane Doe No. 3’s” lawyers presented their allegations against Dershowitz. "[The allegations have] been set up, either purposely or by accident, I don't know which, in a way that denies him all opportunity to defend his reputation [in court]," Heymann said, adding that "he can say it, but to have the [charges] resolved officially [in court] has been put out of reach."

Scored to an ironic use of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the pic opens with homevideos of women receiving their college acceptance letters, with cries of “I got in!” While this may seem like cheap cynicism, it sets up one of the major arguments of the film, which is that universities are selling a brand and have a financial incentive to downplay incidents of campus sexual assault. Citing studies from 2000 to the present that suggest that 16% to 20% of women are sexually assaulted, the film makes the case that colleges are breeding grounds — not an association they like. Harvard Law lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld draws an analogy: If you were to advertise that a prospective student had an equivalent chance of being the victim of a drive-by shooting, their desire to pay tuition would diminish.

When some bondholders bought debt in casinos operated by Caesars Entertainment, they didn’t think they were gambling. Instead, they were relying on the guarantees of the parent company that it would stand behind the debt payments even if something went wrong. But after Caesars got into trouble and the company eliminated the guarantee, the investors turned to an obscure, rarely invoked Depression-era law devised to protect bondholders from abusive tactics...But over the decades, few cases have explicitly invoked this aspect of the law. That two recent cases do is noteworthy, Mark Roe, a professor at Harvard Law School, said, and may change the way debt restructurings are handled. “This statutory provision affects all bond issues and has long been dormant in litigation,” Mr. Roe said in an interview last week. “But now we’ve had two recent rulings in a row taking seriously the statute’s prohibition on voting outside of bankruptcy. People doing these restructurings will have to pay attention to it.”

An op-ed by Carl L. Miller [fellow] and Dennis O. Ojogho. In November, we released a video featuring several Harvard students as they struggled to pass the 1964 Louisiana Literacy Test. While the project has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, in the comments sections of many sites across the web, several debates have been sparked in response to the video. Some commenters have questioned the comparison between literacy tests and voter identification laws and others have even questioned the purpose of this project. With this op-ed, we hope to explain exactly why this project is so important and why the comparison between literacy tests and voter ID laws is absolutely valid.

The defence teams of Deputy President William Ruto and journalist Joshua arap Sang are set to file a motion of no-case-to-answer as the prosecution prepares to close its case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) by March 2015. But the possibility of halting the trial after the prosecution concludes its case is minimal, in the view of Harvard University law professor Alex Whiting. “However, because the judges must take the prosecution’s evidence at its highest during this process, these motions very rarely succeed,” Whiting explained to Capital FM News.

When Crazy Larry took the microphone in front of the State House yesterday, he did something that momentarily proved his newly adopted moniker. He told a hundreds-strong crowd of activists for campaign finance reform that their stance toward Citizens United was ungrateful...And here their leader, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, was telling them they’re ungrateful for the 2010 ruling whose name alone spurred raucous boos? “No, really, I think we’re being a little ungrateful,” Lessig said from under the three-cornered hat he’d inherited from a rebel called Crazy Steve. “Citizens United has been the best gift to our movement since Richard Nixon.” Lessig noted that movements to take on the system of corruption in Washington have historically stalled. In New Hampshire, he said, the people backed Sen. John McCain when he said in Bedford 16 years ago that he’d take on the system, and they backed their native Doris “Granny D” Haddock when she marched across the country for the campaign finance reform movement at the age of 90. But local focus on the issue didn’t translate to the rest of the country.

At the Supreme Court Wednesday, shouts of protest and the clatter of overturned chairs disrupted the usual calm and formality of the nation’s highest court. People yelled, “We are the 99 percent,” “Money is not speech” and “overturn Citizens United.” They were protesting the court’s 2010 decision on campaign finance, which was issued five years ago. According to critics, the decision uncorked a flood of campaign cash. The protest was short-lived, as guards hauled the demonstrators out of the courtroom. But concerns about the impact of Citizens United remain. Last year, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, started a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. The idea was to raise millions of dollars — a lot of it through a Kickstarter campaign — to support about six candidates last November who were sympathetic to serious campaign finance reform.

Carl Icahn thinks that eBay Inc. ’s PayPal and Gannett Co. ’s publishing business will be prime takeover targets when they soon become independent. And he is trying to make sure nothing gets in a suitor’s way. In a corporate-governance double punch that began this week with a pact with eBay and a missive Thursday to Gannett, the billionaire joined other activist investors pushing back against a recent trend in which spun-off companies are cloaked with tough takeover defenses...Some observers said the defenses are justified. “With activists prowling everywhere these days…it’s not unreasonable to give brand-new companies a little breathing room,” said Guhan Subramanian, a professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.