Media Mentions

An essay by Randall Kennedy. My parents inculcated in me and my two siblings a particular sense of racial kinship: in our dealings with the white world, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as ambassadors of blackness. Our achievements would advance the race, and our failures would hinder it. The fulfillment of our racial obligations required that we speak well, dress suitably, and mind our manners. In our household we felt tremendous pride in the attainments of blacks, and we took personally their disgrace. My father and mother loved to regale us with stories about the accomplishments of Jackie Robinson and Wilma Rudolph, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Drew, Paul Robeson and Mary McLeod Bethune. At the same time, when scandal ensnared a prominent black person, we all felt ashamed, diminished. We were also embarrassed when blacks with poor diction and sloppy comportment appeared on television...Is it wrong for black parents to deliver to their children the sort of talks that my parents gave to me?

Harvard Law School professor Jeannie C. Suk argued at a forum in New York this week that the criminal court system, not campus resources, should investigate and adjudicate cases of alleged sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. At the forum—hosted by Intelligence Squared Debates and titled “Courts, Not Campuses, Should Decide Sexual Assault Cases”—Suk and Yale Law School professor Jeb Rubenfeld argued in favor of the motion..."What campuses are doing under pressure from the Department of Education is hurting the cause of gender equality,” Suk argued during an opening statement. “Campus tribunals use procedures that lack basic fairness and often reach inaccurate outcomes.”

Former Govs. Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joined the legal attack on California’s teacher tenure laws Wednesday, telling a state appeals court the job-security and seniority statutes leave some of the state’s neediest students in the hands of incompetent teachers...No other state allows “such lopsided school laws which favor teacher interests over the rights of students,” said a second brief coauthored by Tribe, a Harvard law professor with liberal leanings whose students have included future President Barack Obama and U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. Other academics who signed the brief included Rachel Moran, a UCLA law school professor and former dean.

When it comes to federal taxes, there is a fundamental reason we should protect religious organizations — even those we disagree with. Functionally, the federal tax exemption is akin to a public forum: a government-provided resource that welcomes and encourages a diversity of viewpoints...As Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow writes, [Robert] Cover critiqued “the power and practice of a government that rules by displacing, suppressing, or exterminating values that run counter to its own...Minow notes that Cover recognized that in a pluralistic society, some norms would “be at odds with his own notions of human equality and liberty.”

With a new process for responding to cases of alleged sexual harassment now in place at Harvard Law School, a new group of administrators are overseeing the beginning stages of integrating the new system and informing students about it...According to Catherine Claypoole, the Law School's interim chief Title IX officer, she is the only member of the original Title IX unit still at the school. Jeffrey C. McNaught, the acting dean of students, and Kathryn Beaudry, the acting assistant dean of human resources, are now interim Title IX officers. “We will revisit composition of the Title IX Unit and roles after our new Dean of Students and our new Chief Human Resources Officer settle into their jobs. For the time being the current coordinators will remain in place,” Claypoole wrote in an email.

The world’s largest brewer wanted to keep the biggest deal of the year under wraps. Market chatter and the U.K.’s unique takeover rules got in the way. The Takeover Panel forced SABMiller Plc to release a statement about an approach from larger rival Anheuser-Busch InBev NV after speculation on Tuesday sent London-based SABMiller’s shares up as much as 4.1 percent, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private...“Media attention following disclosure of deal negotiations can be disruptive to the companies, and can kill an otherwise valuable deal” said John Coates, professor of law and economics at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The mother who posted a video to YouTube of her baby dancing to a Prince song may not have had to take it down after all, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Monday, because the company hadn’t considered whether the video was fair use under copyright law before ordering her to remove it. But don’t go thinking the decision was a big victory for free information or fair use or even just moms who let their babies dance to Prince.

One of the world's leading experts on copyright has reviewed the Kim Dotcom case and says there is no basis for extradition. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has weighed into the Megaupload prosecution with a legal opinion which condemns the prosecution case against the filesharing website. In an opinion released by Dotcom's lawyers, Professor Lessig said the allegations and evidence made public by the US Department of Justice "do not meet the requirements necessary to support a prima facie case that would be recognised by United States federal law."

A new attempt by Democrats to boost worker bargaining power has a lot of failure behind it. The American workplace has changed a whole lot over the past half century. But the major law that governs how workers and employees interact — the National Labor Relations Act — has been essentially frozen since 1947, when the law was reformed to constrain worker power...“There’s a sense that this is about workers, not about unions,” says Harvard Law professor Benjamin Sachs of the new proposal. "EFCA, that’s a union bill. If you think about the Fight for $15 [an hour], this would apply to those workers.” That’s important, he says, because it could draw a larger base of support. “When unions succeed politically is when they push for things that are for all workers,” Sachs says, "and do poorly when they push for things that are just for unions.”

Medford Police Detective Stephen LeBert will face a disciplinary hearing Oct. 15 to determine a course of punishment after he was caught on video threatening to “blow a hole” in a driver’s head July 26, an incident that became national news overnight....According to the hearing notice, Coates, the 26-year-old Malden driver involved in the incident, will testify at the hearing. Coates’ attorneys, Kristin Muniz and Dehlia Umunna of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, would not say whether Coates planned to file charges against LeBert. “We will not comment at this time regarding other legal action against Police Office LeBert other than to say that all options are being considered,” Umunna wrote in an email response. “Our main focus at this point is to await the results of the disciplinary hearing.”

Supreme Court commentators have found many different ways to analyze and describe the Court and the Justices, from labeling ideology and methodology to counting laugh lines at oral argument and evaluating opinion-writing reliance on the rhetoric in briefs. It is not easy to add interesting, new analysis to the mix. But Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein offers a fresh way of thinking about the Court in a new book, Constitutional Personae: Heroes, Soldiers, Minimalists and Mutes. As the title suggests, Sunstein divides Justices (and other federal judges) into four groups that transcend politics and ideology and that span Supreme Court history. The four personae that Sunstein describes are the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute.

The Nudge is back at the White House. President Obama signed an executive order Tuesday directing federal agencies to incorporate behavioral and social science into their policies, giving federal employees and citizens a "nudge" to make better decisions by simplifying forms, sending reminders, or re-framing their choices...The White House policy borrows from a line of recent behavioral science research popularized by such books as Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Sunstein's argument — that people often make irrational choices because of unconscious biases that can be overcome by reframing the choices — was particularly influential early in Obama's presidency. Obama tapped Sunstein to oversee White House regulatory policy in Obama's first term, and was influential in shaping health care and other regulations.

Corporate executives and board members regularly make market-beating returns from buying and selling their companies’ stock in the days before disclosing a significant event, according to a study that says it has found a link between insider knowledge and investment profits...“To leave open a gap like that is an invitation to insider trading,” said Robert Jackson, a Columbia Law School professor who co-wrote the study with his colleague Joshua Mitts and Alma Cohen of Harvard.

An op-ed by Michael Teitelbaum. As the world watches wave after wave of migrants and refugees pour into and across Europe, what was once shocking now seems routine. There can be no doubt that a major crisis, both humanitarian and political, is under way...As they consider responses to these challenges, European government, advocacy, and media leaders need to keep in mind two important concepts: tragic choices and moral hazards.

Shareholders are hitting a wall with some major companies in their effort to persuade them to disclose how they spend corporate money to support political candidates. According to the Center for Political Accountability, at least one in 10 big publicly traded companies doesn’t reveal details of its donations to electoral candidates, parties or causes on its website, where investors could easily find it...Many investors want to know how and where companies put corporate funds to work, said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Without disclosure and accountability, companies may well spend funds on political causes that insiders favor but shareholders do not.”

A bill being considered in the House that would prohibit colleges from punishing students accused of sexual assault without first notifying law enforcement officials has provoked the first major wave of protests from student activists and advocacy groups since the school year began...But Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, argues that these campus sexual assault cases should be tried on campus. “I think there’s an overlapping jurisdiction—when you’re talking about a campus in a small community, you can talk about behavior that is beyond the pale in that small community for those four years,” she said. “Whether you follow that through in the larger, non-campus community with consequences is a different issue.”

Stock markets today move by the microsecond. Fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye. Yet public companies are still allowed to wait four business days before announcing a major merger, bankruptcy, layoff or a new CEO. That kind of news can send share prices soaring or crashing. And a potential 96-hour delay in revealing those events translates into an eon by the clock that runs modern markets...It’s called “trading the gap.” And in the last six years, corporate insiders have earned $105 million in above-market profits by doing it, researchers found. It’s not illegal. But the findings raise questions about whether this was the intended effect of financial regulations, write study authors Alma Cohen of Harvard Law and Robert J. Jackson, Jr. and Joshua R. Mitts at Columbia Law.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Digital-era humans are constantly optimizing — sometimes it feels as if we’re all engaged in an endless game of Frogger, continually navigating past a continual stream of obstacles, seeking the home of a thriving life. Nowhere is this practice as visible as in cities, where densely-packed populations weave past one another and new technology could provide opportunities to make life better. As mayors become more responsive to their citizens, how could adding the magic of public-enabled digital information to structures and streets help out? And what’s the role of the private sector in this transformation? One possible answer is emerging in The Big Orange, Los Angeles.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Iran nuclear deal is all but an accomplished fact, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually agree on something: Both have made it clear that they don’t want any more engagement between the U.S. and Iran. Iranian and Israeli hardliners alike want the nuclear deal to be a one-off that doesn’t change the basic structure of regional opposition between Iran and its Shiite proxies on the one hand, and the U.S. and its alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. But moderates in the U.S. and Iran -- and possibly even Israel -- will see things differently. Many of them perceive large areas of overlapping American and Iranian interests, most notably the defeat of Islamic State and a solution to the generational humanitarian and policy debacle that is Syria.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did George Washington add the words “so help me God” to the constitutionally prescribed oath of office when he was sworn in as president on April 30, 1789? I’ve always thought so, and when discussing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s misinterpretation of her oath of office last week, I wrote that the U.S. Constitution doesn't include the words but that Washington “famously added them.” Immediately I received an e-mail citing an essay that claims this widely held view was in fact a myth, unsubstantiated by contemporary historical evidence and derived from a doubtful childhood memory by Washington Irving. I read the essay, and then found counterarguments on the web and in a good old-fashioned book. So what's the truth? And why should we care, other than historical accuracy, which is always desirable and never perfectly attainable?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How much should you know before your baby is entered into a medical study? That complicated and heartbreaking question has been at the center of a controversy about a clinical trial that tested the effects of different oxygen levels on premature infants with extremely low birth weights. A federal judge in Alabama rejected last month the legal claims of parents whose children suffered adverse effects after participating. The court's decision was correct -- but not because the consent form given to parents was adequate for them to understand the risks, which as an ethical matter it probably wasn't.