Media Mentions

It was 2009 when the state’s highest court moved to curb abuses by debt collectors in small claims courts. Since then, debt collection attorneys have been required to certify they have sued debtors at the correct address and have evidence that the debt is actually owed. But the Supreme Judicial Court did nothing to provide the same protections to the tens of thousands of debtors who are sued in the civil sessions of the 62 district courts and the Boston Municipal Court...At municipal court, which is under separate jurisdiction than district courts, attorneys with the Volunteer Lawyers Project and Harvard Law professor James Greiner have found evidence that some civil claims appear to have been sent to defendants’ old addresses...Greiner, who has a PhD in statistics, said that when researchers looked at the first 87 cases, they found 28 where the address used by the plaintiff did not match the defendant’s address contained in the commercial database. In 14 of those cases, the plaintiff had filed with the court an address that appeared to be the defendant’s prior address.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The most illuminating free-speech case of 2015 has nothing to do with political speech, or civil-rights protests, or hate speech, or any other issues we used to associate with the First Amendment. It has to do with an obscure provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to inform the public if their products use conflict minerals. The case, brought by the National Association of Manufacturers, is the culmination of a stunningly successful corporate movement to transform the First Amendment into an all-purpose shield against even modest regulation. Let’s give the movement a name: Free Speech Inc.

A conference focusing on interdisciplinary examination of justice in the food system drew hundreds to Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall this weekend for “Just Food?,” a joint project between the Harvard Food law Society and Harvard’s Food Literacy Project. Featuring guest speakers, workshops, panels, movie screenings, and exhibits, the conference solicited over 500 registrations. Several notable guests spoke at the conference, including Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, who delivered a welcome address. Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was originally scheduled to deliver a keynote talk on Sunday but was unable to attend, according to conference organizers...Margiana R. Petersen-Rockney, the Food Literacy Project coordinator, and Alexandra M. Jordan, a second-year Law School student and president of the Harvard Food Law Society, organized the two-day conference under the Food Better campaign, an initiative launched by the Deans’ Food System Challenge “to raise awareness about food systems issues,” according to its website.

In November 2012, the corporate law guru who is most revered by managers faced off against the corporate law guru who is most feared by managers, at the Conference Board think tank in New York, in a friendly debate that was about to turn hostile. Martin Lipton has defended CEOs against all comers since forming Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz 50 years ago. Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor, champions the "activist" hedge funds that assail CEOs in an intensifying struggle for control of America's boardrooms...Lucian Bebchuk, age 59, likes to attack blue chip stocks. His astonishing success has made him the only law professor listed among the 100 Most Influential People in Finance by Treasury and Risk magazine. A lowly student clinic led by Bebchuk—the Shareholder's Rights Project—has destaggered about 100 corporate boards on the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500 stock index since 2011. As a critic of CEO compensation, Bebchuk paved the way for the Dodd-Frank Act rules that give shareholders more "say on pay." Shareholder activism has drawn him into debates with Lipton in 2002, 2003, 2007, and more or less continually since 2012.

In 1988, a group of black students at Harvard Law School compiled a report designed to recognize the growing achievements of black students on campus and share their wisdom with newcomers. The longest essay in the 50-page newsletter was written by a 24-year-old third-year student named Michelle Robinson, who devoted more than 3,000 words to an appeal for greater faculty diversity. “The faculty’s decisions to distrust and ignore non-traditional qualities in choosing and tenuring law professors,” she wrote, “merely reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.” ... During her three years on campus, Michelle represented indigent clients, worked on a law journal focused on African-American perspectives and sought to inspire a greater sense of purpose in her fellow students. Her friends were not surprised. “Michelle always, everything she wrote, the things that she was involved in, the things that she thought about, were in effect reflections on race and gender,” said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard professor and mentor to Michelle. “And how she had to keep the doors open for women and men going forward.”

Climate-change activists and advocates seldom have trouble finding villains. But recently, they've found a new one in a strange place: famed legal scholar and Obama mentor Laurence Tribe, in his office at Harvard Law School. Tribe has been the highest-profile legal scholar to criticize the Obama administration's rules for carbon-dioxide emissions from coal plants, which were formally proposed in June 2014. (He's one of the few law professors who is frequently and plausibly referred to as an "icon.") In a formal comment submitted to the EPA, a Wall Street Journal column, a House energy committee hearing last week, and other venues, Tribe has argued against the rule, suggesting both that it runs contrary to the relevant statute and that it violates the Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. ... And Tribe's opponents also bring significant legal firepower to the discussion. One opponent is Richard Revesz, dean emeritus of New York University Law School, who testified in favor of the rule in last week's House hearing and wrote a New York Times op-ed Thursday disagreeing with Tribe. Two others are Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, colleagues of Tribe's at Harvard Law.

Laurence H. Tribe, the liberal icon and legal scholar, has grabbed headlines in recent weeks for publicly attacking President Obama’s signature climate change initiative — the Clean Power Plan — which would regulate carbon emissions from power plants. He was retained as an independent expert by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, and is representing it in a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the plan...In the estimation of his Harvard Law School colleagues Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus, “Were Professor Tribe’s name not attached to” these arguments, “no one would take them seriously.” But even if his claims don’t help Peabody in federal court, they are undoubtedly useful in the court of public opinion, where sentiment can be swayed by legal arguments, however weak, from a scholar of Professor Tribe’s reputation.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Pregnant women won a somewhat surprising victory at the U.S. Supreme Court today. The court’s four liberals got help from Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the majority opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, and a surprise concurrence in the judgment from Justice Samuel Alito, who rarely crosses over to the liberal side. Roberts and Alito may each have had his own reason for breaking conservative ranks. At issue in the case was the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy and childbirth. Then, in a separate provision, it requires employers to treat pregnant women the same “as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Imagine that someone has wronged you, and you sue them. Then the government magically appears in court and asks that your suit be dismissed because, for reasons it won't tell you, state secrets might be dredged up in the course of the litigation. You have no idea what they're talking about. But after secret discussions with the judge from which both you and the defendant are excluded, the court dismisses your suit. This Kafkaesque scenario couldn’t happen in the U.S., right? Not until Monday, it couldn’t. But a federal judge in the Southern District of New York just did exactly this, dismissing a defamation suit by Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis against a shady advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran.

Much of Bernie Sanders' career is centered around his disgust for money in politics. He hates the fact of it, hates its effects, and, naturally, he has deep disdain for the process of raising it. The bigger the number, the more contempt he has. “I don’t do these fundraisers for $100,000 apiece or $10,000,” the Vermont senator, a self-described independent socialist, spat in his heavy Brooklyn accent during a recent speech to the National Press Club...“Hillary’s weakness, to the extent that she has one, is the perception that she’s part of an old system of influence and that she is as close to the influence game as anybody,” Harvard law professor Larry Lessig said in an interview. Lessig just led a failed $10 million effort to elect campaign-finance reformers to Congress. “What Bernie’s saying is, ‘Don’t elect a person who’s part of the problem.’ It’s not impossible that the issue blows up during the primary and she’s on the wrong side of it. And it’s not completely stupid to imagine that she fails because of it.”

Khairullozhon Matanov deliberated with his attorneys three times before hesitantly pleading guilty yesterday to all four counts of obstructing the 2013 investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing. This was not an easy decision for him to make. “The whole case is mystery,” he wrote to The Daily Beast last fall. “FBI is trying to destroy my life.” If Judge William Young agrees to the deal, he’ll get 30 months in prison, including 10 months he’s already served. If he goes to trial and is found guilty, he could spend the next 20 years behind bars...“There is no obligation to turn in your neighbor,” explains former federal judge and Harvard law professor Nancy Gertner. “It is a crime not to tell on your neighbors in Soviet countries, but not here.”

An op-ed by Jody Freeman and Richard J. Lazarus. When Mitch McConnell sent his recent letter to the nation’s governors urging them to ignore the White House’s upcoming clean-power rules, it was striking for two reasons. First, as the headlines pointed out, it’s a dramatic moment when a congressional leader openly tries to rally the states against a new federal policy. And second, McConnell’s legal justification relies on none other than Laurence Tribe—Barack Obama’s former law professor, and one of the nation’s top liberal law scholars—to argue that the upcoming EPA rules are unconstitutional.

Following controversy surrounding her role in an online video, Robin Steinberg, a New York public defender whose invitation to a Harvard Law School event was rescinded earlier this year, will deliver the inaugural “Trailblazer” lecture there in April. The “Trailblazer” lecture is hosted by the Criminal Justice Institute, directed by Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan. Efforts to bring Steinberg to Cambridge began after pushback against the decision to rescind her initial invitation. “We felt that it was only fair that she had the opportunity to speak,” Sullivan said. “Ms. Steinberg has made significant and groundbreaking contributions in the area of criminal law.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s the difference between an opinion and a fact? That sounds like a question of philosophy, or language, or maybe social science -- but it’s also a highly practical question of law, one the U.S. Supreme Court decided Tuesday in a case about registration statements filed by issuing companies under the Securities and Exchange Act. The court tried to frame a compromise between the interests of corporations that issue securities and securities class-action lawyers, whose job it is to keep the corporations honest and get rich in the process. The compromise had two parts.

Internet service providers have filed suit against the FCC over its recent decision to regulate broadband internet as a public utility, alleging the decision hamstrings the ability of private industry to offer customers new and innovative products...Praised by some and reviled by others, the FCC's decision mostly preserved the status quo, says Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain. In a Big Think interview, Zittrain discusses the unusually strong protection the government has given to the internet, which protects users as well as keeps companies from offering a suite of products to its customers.

Harvard's fossil fuel divestment movement recently hit a snag. Last week, a Massachusetts court dismissed a novel lawsuit brought by seven Harvard students seeking to make the university in Cambridge, Mass., divest its $36.4 billion endowment of holdings in major coal, oil and natural gas companies...Alice Cherry, a plaintiff in the case and a second-year law student at Harvard, told InsideClimate News that she and the other students plan to appeal. This is the first time students have attempted to use a lawsuit to force fossil fuel divestment. Cherry said she believes "lawsuits could be an important part of escalating the divestment movement going forward."

It isn’t easy to reform the campaign finance system. Ask Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who last year raised $11 million to elect candidates who favored restrictions on unlimited contributions and spending only to find he’d become the issue’s latest Don Quixote. But he’s back with a new plan, and other groups are trying new lines of attack, hoping to change the behavior of candidates and lawmakers through rewards and punishments.

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin. Today Harvard faces a serious governance problem that requires institutional change. When we first came here, the university was organized on the constitutional principle: “Each tub on its own bottom.” This meant first of all that each of the component schools (arts and sciences, medical school, law school, and so on) had not only a high degree of budgetary independence but also that its faculty and dean had a large measure of autonomy. And at the level of the schools such administrators as there were worked under the direction of the dean and in close cooperation with faculty committees. Correspondingly, the central administration was very small: There were four vice presidents to oversee administration, alumni affairs and development, finance, and government relations, and a general counsel...The time has come for Harvard to institute, as other universities have done, a representative faculty senate that would include ladder-rank faculty from all schools in the university.

‘Even the East Germans couldn’t follow everybody all the time,” Bruce Schneier writes. “Now it’s easy.” This may sound hyperbolic, but Schneier’s lucid and compelling “Data and Goliath” is free of the hysteria that often accompanies discussions about surveillance. Yes, our current location, purchases, reading history, driving speed and Internet use are being tracked and recorded. But Schneier’s book, which focuses mainly on the United States, is not a rant against the usual bad guys such as the U.S. government or Facebook. Schneier describes how our data is tracked by both corporate and government entities, often working together. And in many cases, the American people allow them to do it...The theme of dangerous little brothers is central to Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum’s “The Future of Violence,” a lively and often terrifying exploration of the dark side of our technological age. Technology is increasingly cheap and widely available, a trend that can help empower the masses and weaken central governments. Sounds great, right? We tend to celebrate this phenomenon when individual dissidents use social media to provoke authoritarian regimes. But what happens when these tools of mass empowerment fall into the wrong hands?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Critics of the Supreme Court's conservative wing like to say it’s instinctively pro-business. The justices on Tuesday will test that proposition in a fascinating case about whether bankruptcy law instructs judges to void liens on underwater properties. On one side lie the interests of Bank of America, which is the petitioner and doesn't want the loans to be “stripped off,” that is, voided. On the other side is the plain statutory text, which says they should be. The poetic twist is that, in a very similar 1992 case, the Supreme Court ignored the plain text and held in favor of the banks -- over the forceful dissent of one Justice Antonin Scalia.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The personalized license plate is as American as … well, ever seen a plate with a design celebrating your favorite soda in any other country? Today, not for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the equally quirky American question of free speech in the license plate context. At issue is a decision by Texas to block an organization from using the Confederate battle flag as a license plate logo. Many free-speech advocates think the state shouldn’t be able to pick and choose what symbols should appear. Texas wants to exclude a flag that has come to symbolize the violent repression of black Americans. Who’s right? There’s a legal answer to this question, but it turns out to be surprisingly complicated.