Media Mentions

An op-ed by Michael Klarman. The Supreme Court reflects shifting social mores at least as much as it influences them. Rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell were inconceivable until enormous changes in the surrounding social and political context had first occurred. Before Brown, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the first black general in American history, President Harry S Truman issued executive orders desegregating the federal military and the civil service, and Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball. Even in the South, black voter registration increased from 3 percent in 1940 to 20 percent in 1950, and blacks began serving on juries and in local political offices for the first time since Reconstruction. Justice Sherman Minton noted “a different world today” with regard to race, during the Brown deliberations, and Felix Frankfurter remarked upon “the great changes in the relations between white and [black] people.”

Eighteen years ago, Vitomir Spiric, his wife and young daughter arrived in Phoenix to start over. They're Bosnian Serbs who were displaced by the Balkan wars in the 1990s. The US government awarded them refugee status...Spiric and his family settled into their new life in Phoenix. Then, about a decade ago, US immigration officials discovered his name on the militia’s rosters. That’s when Spiric’s American dream came crashing down. The US government prosecuted Spiric for making a false statement on his immigration form and initiated deportation proceedings...Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting says these deportation cases are necessary to uphold the integrity of the US refugee system. “People do not have a right to come into the country and fail to disclose relevant pertinent information that is required of them,” Whiting says.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Thursday, July 9, announced major staff appointments to focus attention on environmental, consumer protection, and civil rights priorities within the office...Max Weinstein will serve as Chief of the Consumer Protection Division...Weinstein will join the Attorney General’s Office following his role as Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer at Law at Harvard Law School. Working as part of the Predatory Lending/Consumer Protection Clinic, Weinstein litigated consumer protection claims on behalf of low-income consumers across the Commonwealth and practiced in areas including mortgage origination and servicing, foreclosure, and student loan collection and servicing.

More than 100 people were swept up in an unprecedented police crackdown on mainland human rights advocates on the weekend, with six – including four lawyers – criminally detained in what state media said was a nationwide operation to smash a “criminal gang.”...Teng Biao, visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, said the Qingan incident was only a pretext for action against rights lawyers and activists, who have long been seen as a thorn in the side of the authorities. He said the crackdown on the lawyers made a mockery of the authorities’ claim to “rule the country by law”.

...[Bernie] Sanders, an Independent running for the Democratic presidential nomination, characterized the law as providing immunity for gun manufacturers from being sued when a gun is misused by a third party. It’s as if a hammer manufacturer were be held responsible if someone used the hammer to beat someone else, he said....While the law provides protections that no other industry has, courts have been reluctant to impose liability on manufacturers for third-party misuse of the product, said John Goldberg, Harvard Law School professor who specializes in product liability. So the types of lawsuits that Sanders mentioned (for hammers or guns) didn’t have a slam-dunk chance in court before this law came about. Instead, this law ensures that those types of lawsuits can’t be brought against gun manufacturers.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last week's Supreme Court decision striking down a federal regulation on mercury and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants is a temporary setback for those who seek to reduce air pollution. At the same time, however, it should be welcomed as a ringing endorsement of cost-benefit analysis by government agencies. It's a kind of rifle shot, with potentially major effects on a host of future regulations that have nothing to do with the environment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Will Xi Jinping, who has consolidated power more than any Chinese leader since the 1980s, pay a political price for the big decline in the Chinese stock market over the last week? In the very short term, market losses are likely to harm rich and powerful Chinese who might otherwise be pushing back against his increased authority, so it might conceivably help him. But in the medium to long term, this correction is going to be costly for Xi -- because it’s going to help ordinary Chinese learn the painful lesson that no government, however centralized and powerful, can guarantee the stability of assets when the markets think they are overvalued.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’ve been following the crisis in Greece, you may not have noticed, but President Barack Obama held a news conference Monday at the Pentagon that will be significant for his legacy. What was important was not so much what he said as what he didn’t say: that there’s any chance of defeating Islamic State in the foreseeable future. Instead, the president emphasized that the fight against the Sunni Muslim insurgent group will be “long” and that experience has shown that it can be “degraded” only with effective local ground forces.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Nonprofit groups are supposed to exist to promote the public welfare, not to run political campaigns. IRS rules say that tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations, which are allowed to campaign consistent with their welfare-promoting missions, can’t have politicking as their primary activity. But because those rules aren’t being enforced, presidential campaigns now feature such nonprofits. Why is this happening? And what -- if anything -- can be done to stop it?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No U.S. state has defaulted on its bonds since the Great Depression -- yet Puerto Rico, a commonwealth that operates much like a state without being one, is on the brink. Is there any connection between Puerto Rico’s unique constitutional status and it economic woes? If not, what does that say about the prospect for future default by any of the actual 50 states of the union?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, there was nothing shocking about Monday's decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to strike down a Puerto Rico law that would’ve let the commonwealth’s municipalities and utilities declare bankruptcy. A federal district court had already held in February that Puerto Rico’s proposed Recovery Act was pre-empted by the federal bankruptcy code. But from a long-term perspective, the court’s decision was fairly extraordinary. Over an outraged concurrence by Judge Juan Torruella -- the only Puerto Rican on the federal appeals court that's responsible for cases from the island -- the court held that Puerto Rico is uniquely legally disabled from managing its financial problems.

What is Google’s responsibility to its searchers? In a Thursday panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard law school, offered a hypothetical that captured why that question is so difficult to answer...Zittrain’s hypothetical raised larger questions about what it means to act in a searcher’s best interests. “Suppose Google is a fiduciary to us, they and Bing decide that they're going to look out for us. And I happen to believe that vaccines are probably bad,” he began. “And I Google ‘should I vaccinate my child?’” “If Google is ‘looking out for me,’” he continued, “should they interpret that in the best way as, you've got to shake this person by the lapels, the way that I presume a doctor would?”

Eric Holder Jr. has returned home to Covington & Burling after more than six years as U.S. attorney general, and he said it is the “last stop” in his legal career. He even ruled out a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, if he is asked...."There's no question that there needs to be more pro bono across the board. I started at the Justice Department this office called the Access to Justice Initiative, which we started out with [Harvard Law School professor] Larry Tribe. That was in recognition of the fact that too many people in this country make consequential legal decisions without the assistance of counsel. It's a shocking thing to see. You have juveniles who plead guilty without ever talking to a lawyer. You have child-custody disputes that are resolved oftentimes in front of a judge but without a lawyer."

Ah, to be a law-firm summer associate. For several thousand lucky law students, it’s the season to be courted by the nation’s top firms...Mark Weber, Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for career services, said the “wining and dining” element of summer associate programs is important to give the law students a sense of a firm’s personality. “If it’s just all about work and you really don’t know these people…that’s not good, either,” Mr. Weber said.

Sen. Ted Cruz spent his years at Harvard Law School working to secure a Supreme Court clerkship and then made his name as a lawyer by arguing in front of the body nine times. But now, as a presidential candidate seeking support from the right wing of his party, Cruz (R-Tex.) has made excoriating the high court a central part of his campaign...Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was solicitor general under Ronald Reagan and wrote one of Cruz’s recommendations for his Supreme Court clerkship, said Cruz’s call for a constitutional amendment and his harsh criticism of the court pale in comparison to dissents by Justice Antonin Scalia, who called the marriage decision “a threat to American democracy.” “Just compare what he says to what Scalia says in his dissents and tell me which you think is more vituperative,” Fried said of Cruz. “This isn’t vituperative. It is an opinion. It is a judgment, a legal judgment. It isn’t correct — I mean I don’t agree with it — but it’s not out of line.” Fried said he is more wary of Cruz’s assertions that only the parties to a judicial case must follow its rulings. “The suggestion that town clerks and justices of the peace and so on don’t have to follow this law — that’s a more dangerous proposition,” Fried said.

American Legion National Commander Michael D. Helm and Citizen's Flag Alliance (CFA) Chairman Richard Parker have news for members of Congress who resist support of a U.S. flag protection amendment on the grounds that no one burns flags anymore. Wednesday evening in Brooklyn, NY, an anarchist group that wants to strip the New York police Department of its authority and weapons, burned a U.S. flag and a confederate flag that the protestor described as symbols of oppression...“The physical desecration of the American flag in Brooklyn today was an act of cultural terrorism,” said Richard Parker, a Harvard law professor and chairman of the CFA, a coalition of more than 140 organizations that wants Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to prohibit U.S. flag desecration. “It was an attempt to equate the American flag with the confederate battle flag – to redefine it as, according to their words, ‘a symbol of oppression and genocide.’

On a cool spring day in May 2012, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in McCormick Place, Chicago. The 28 heads of state comprising the military alliance had come to the Windy City to discuss the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan, among other strategic matters...Not long before the Chicago summit, President Barack Obama had publicly declared that the United States would begin pulling out its troops from Afghanistan and that a complete withdrawal would be achieved by 2014. NATO was therefore set to decide on the details of a potential exit strategy. A few days before the summit, placards appeared in bus stops around downtown Chicago urging NATO not to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. “NATO: Keep the progress going!” read the posters...Harvard law professor David Kennedy describes the human-rights training programs run by the US military in recent decades as courses in which the message is clear: “This is not some humanitarian add-on—a way of being nice or reducing military muscle,” he says. “We asserted, with some justification, that it is simply not possible to use the sophisticated weapons one purchases or to coordinate with the international military operations in which they would be used without an internal military culture with parallel rules of operation and engagement.”

The spread of hepatitis C could be grossly underreported, with fewer than 1 percent of cases reported to federal public health officials, while tens of thousands could be undetected, according to researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital who say the growing opioid crisis is 
fueling the problem....Another study out this week, co-authored by Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy, focused on the difficulty addicts have obtaining Medicaid coverage for costly medications. A highly effective drug, Sovaldi by Gilead, costs about $84,000 for a 12-week course. “We are seeing a decrease in cost of treatments, and haven’t seen a commensurate lessening of coverage restrictions,” Greenwald said. Under some programs within MassHealth, patients must be sober for at least six months — which cuts many addicts out of treatment.

When it comes to healthcare costs, there's what you may owe the hospital, what you may owe your doctor and what you may owe the drugstore. Most patients would probably agree that paying an additional fee solely to receive your bill is a bit much..."Businesses hate class actions because, otherwise, they could continue getting away with mischarging for small amounts," said William Rubenstein, a Harvard University law professor. "No one would ever sue them."

An op-ed by Mark Roe. A deal between Greece and its creditors might not happen. Several factors are in flux; Greek and northern European interests are not aligned; and personal animosities are in play. For Greece, an exit from the euro would not be easy, but if the alternative is endless austerity without debt forgiveness, its government may conclude that leaving the eurozone is the better choice.

Shortly after Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in 2007, he established his own firm, Jeb Bush & Associates, designed to maximize his earning potential as one of the country’s more prominent politicians. Tax returns disclosed this week by the Republican’s presidential campaign revealed that the business not only made him rich but also provided a steady income for his wife and one of his sons...Daniel Halperin, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in pensions, said federal law allows companies to take a tax write-off for large pension contributions in an effort to encourage them to offer solid retirement plans to their employees. He said those rules make less sense in the case of Jeb Bush & Associates, which offers the plan to only two people. “It is generous,” Halperin said. But, he added, “the law allows them to be generous.”