Media Mentions

Federal and state Medicaid officials should widen access to prescription drugs that could cure tens of thousands of people with hepatitis C, including medications that can cost up to $1,000 a pill, health care experts have told the White House. The experts, from the Public Health Service and President Obama’s Advisory Council on H.I.V./AIDS, said that restrictions on the drugs imposed by many states were inconsistent with sound medical practice, as reflected in treatment guidelines issued by health care professionals and the Department of Veterans Affairs. ...But Robert L. Greenwald, an expert on health law and policy at Harvard Law School, said: “These criteria defy clinical guidelines and best practices. Rather than recommending the exclusion of people who inject drugs, we should encourage earlier treatment as a way to prevent transmission of the virus.”

(Registration required) Whether the State Bar of California’s plan to require new attorneys to complete at least 15-credits of practical skills courses in law school is unduly restrictive or a needed step to ensure they have some real-world competencies depends on whom you ask—even within the same organization. The Association of American Law Schools is split over the bar’s proposal, with a coalition of law school deans in opposition and a group of clinical professors in favor. …The AALS Deans Steering Committee declined to retract its statement in opposition, according to an Aug. 5 letter from chairwoman and Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow (left), and chair-elect and Northwestern University School of Law Dean Daniel Rodriguez. While the final version of the proposal represented an improvement over the initial draft, the group’s central concerns remain, they wrote.

As Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao met in a Las Vegas ring in May, another fight was being contested around the world. Instead of paying Showtime and HBO $89.95 to $99.95 to watch Mayweather beat Pacquiao or hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a ticket to the fight, viewers found a cheaper way to watch the historic bout. As in free. ... Some of the leagues that have yet to have a full season with Periscope in the mainstream are taking action to stop it.While NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the league was not worried about Periscope, the NFL has filed four copyright take-down requests to the app, according to the website ChillingEffects.org, an archive founded by Wendy Seltzer of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

A large share of the presidential primary season debates will not be aired on free over-the-air broadcast networks. Of the 15 primary season debates, all but five will air on cable TV. That pattern has led Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor, to question whether there is something terribly wrong here. Crawford published a piece last week in Medium about the cable subscription fees necessary for interested voters to watch the debates in real time. She said it amounts to nothing short of a poll tax.

(Subscription required) Silicon Valley icon Lawrence Lessig knows his moonshot bid for the White House hinges on the innovation and support of the tech industry. Mr. Lessig, a 54-year-old Harvard professor who helped build cyber law, is exploring a run as a Democratic presidential candidate on a narrow platform: overhauling campaign finance law. To do that, he is relying on the Internet. He is crowdsourcing donations and polling his site’s visitors to choose his running mate. He said he is the first candidate to make his campaign entirely open source, in the hopes of collecting more data about potential donors and voters. “We don’t have the advantage of a candidate who has been on the field for the last four years, we don’t have the advantage of a reality TV candidate who is worth $10 billion,” Mr. Lessig said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “So one place we might get an advantage is with innovation for software that runs and drives the campaign.”

Her cookbook was a bestseller last year. Episodes of her online food series, “My Drunk Kitchen,” regularly go viral. And with more than 2 million subscribers, her YouTube channel is more popular than those of Jamie Oliver, Martha Stewart and Mario Batali combined. ...Online video has the advantage of customizing its output for target audiences. “There’s nothing fundamentally new about the phenomenon,” says Dan Gillmor of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We’ve been using online forums for a long time for the same purpose: to take a deep dive into arcane or niche subjects.”

... [A] whole range of people have used the term "anchor baby" this week in public discussions about Trump's immigration-related policy ideas -- ideas that include an end to the nearly 150-year-old practice of granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States. It's the former, known as "birthright citizenship," which is delineated in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And as all sorts of public figures have discussed the future of the 14th Amendment this week, the more colloquial -- many say pejorative -- term "anchor baby" has come up over and over again. But the anchor baby, while potent politically, is a largely mythical idea. ... Alternatively, these parents can apply for something even more rare: an extreme hardship exception, according to Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard University Law School’s immigration and refugee clinical program. Very rarely they can apply for a waiver that may allow them to reenter the United States sooner, Anker said. But if that request is denied, there is no form of appeal available. Decisions are final.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Who is blowing up Egypt? Thursday's car bombing in Cairo, which destroyed a national security force building and injured dozens, will be just a blip on the international headlines. But the bombing, along with a string of similar attacks, matters existentially in Egypt, where it's the latest episode in a mounting campaign since the army deposed elected president Mohamed Mursi in a coup d'etat two years ago. The answer, so far at least, isn't what you might expect -- or what Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi's government would have you believe. There's little evidence that the attacks are coming from the Muslim Brotherhood, the now-outlawed party of the former president. Instead they seem mostly to be coming from far more radical jihadi forces based in the Sinai desert, who have recently been identifying themselves with Islamic State. Indeed, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the latest attack.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: When I was a student in a private religious school, I looked with envy on the First Amendment rights of public school children, who couldn’t, I imagined, be disciplined for what they said off campus. Now a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has held that I was wrong. According to the appeals court, a student can be suspended for posting rap lyrics on Facebook and YouTube that threatened a teacher at the school, because the speech was predictably disruptive. Depending on how Thursday's decision is interpreted, it could be used to limit students’ off-campus political speech in cases where no threat existed at all.

An op-ed by Charles Nesson. Boston's Olympic bid spurred a remarkable community deliberation. It gave us a chance to talk about our visions for sports and the city. The discussions were exciting, and we felt a spirit of democracy. But the subsequent withdrawal of the bid left many with an empty feeling. It truncated deliberation about the future of Boston’s engagement with sport by removing its focal point. Suddenly, we had no place to go. We moved on to the issue of chewing tobacco at Fenway. Without an Olympic focal point, our energy dissipated. But we now have an opportunity to regain that energy. The United Nations, through UNESCO, is seeking a host city for its next all-nations sports conference, the International Conference of Ministers and Senior Officials Responsible for Physical Education and Sport, or MINEPS VI, to be held in May 2017. Boston should bid for it.

Video: Mark Roe, Harvard Law School professor, discusses the impact of ending quarterly earnings reports and why short-term thinking often makes sense for U.S. businesses.

A ruling by the ICC judges that admits testimony by hostile witnesses against Deputy President William Ruto could complicate his case. ... Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard University, summed up the ruling as "a very significant decision for the case". "First, it confirms something that the prosecution has been saying for years, that witnesses were improperly interfered with in the Ruto case," Whiting told the Star yesterday.In Parliament, some 40 Jubilee lawmakers yesterday tore into the ICC, accusing The Hague-based court of sabotaging the administration's efforts to unite local communities. They said the decision by the ICC trial judges to admit recanted witness statements as evidence against Deputy President Ruto was part of a plot to break up the Jubilee Alliance ahead of the 2017 polls.

Every year, in mid-August, the Vineyard also turns into think tank in paradise, convening discussions on issues relevant to the black community, who started flocking here more than a century ago. This year, four events in four days focused on policing reform, mass incarceration and how the protesters on the streets of cities including Ferguson and Baltimore (and the resulting hashtags on Twitter) are changing the face of the civil rights movement. Regular attendees couldn’t recall such such consistent themes in the past. ... But after Trayvon Martin was killed, it became clear that even well-to-do black children could face discrimination – or worse — because of the color of their skin. “You just found out you really didn’t matter,” said Carter, in her late 40s, speaking at a forum organized by Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree in Oak Bluffs.

Subscription required: An op-ed by Tommy Tobin '16: Common sense tells us to follow instructions when it comes to food. Unfortunately, our use-by or sell-by labels may be tricking us into throwing away perfectly edible food. Date labels are confusing American consumers. All told, the average American family of four wastes more than $1,500 of food every year. Date labels are inconsistent. There are no federal standards for date-markings on most food products. Infant formula is the only food item federally mandated to contain a date marking. Different states and various cities have created a complex array of rules. In New York State, there are no laws requiring date labels. In California, the state has mandated date labels for shellfish and dairy products. California had no regulations on the post-dated sale of food products. This confusion is costing consumers.

In the case known as “Deflategate,” a federal court judge is presiding over a bizarre dispute between the American sports world’s most profitable entity, the National Football League, and one of the most successful quarterbacks in its history, Tom Brady. A four-time Super Bowl champion, Brady led the New England Patriots to the title in February. ... Peter Carfagna is a lecturer on law and directs the Sports Law Clinic atHarvard Law School. He spoke with the Gazette about the dispute and what impact the case may have on NFL players and on the league.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that in the dog days of summer, an awful lot of hot air is being expended over the inflation of footballs. In the case known as “Deflategate,” a federal court judge is presiding over a bizarre dispute between the American sports world’s most profitable entity, the National Football League (NFL), and one of the most successful quarterbacks in its history, Tom Brady. A four-time Super Bowl champion, Brady led the New England Patriots to the title in February...Peter Carfagna is a lecturer on law and directs the Sports Law Clinic at Harvard Law School (HLS). He spoke with the Gazette about the dispute and what impact the case may have on NFL players and on the league.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Earlier this month, on the same night, we saw a sad contrast. The last Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired. But by far the largest noise came from Donald Trump in the most-watched non-sports cable show in history. Yet I remain optimistic. I have faith that the American electorate will tire of the antics of “short-fingered vulgarian” Donald Trump before the primary season begins next year...What’s more, I have faith that Americans will be able to come up with many more interesting killer apps using high-capacity networks than South Koreans have. They may have the networks, but we have the freedom to create and fail.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, is taking severe steps to rid himself of his troublesome predecessor, Nuri al-Maliki. On the heels of a government shakeup, the latest move is a parliamentary report blaming Maliki and many of his political and military leaders for the fall of Mosul to Islamic State last summer. The report is going to be referred to a public prosecutor -- which means Abadi may be plotting a criminal prosecution. Maliki is fighting back, issuing a public statement repudiating the report. Given that Maliki had more domestic support than Abadi when the U.S., with grudging Iranian acquiescence, forced Maliki out of office, it’s no surprise that Abadi would like to consolidate his authority by purging Maliki completely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The death on Saturday of Julian Bond, a leading 1960s civil rights leader who became chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, raises a deep question about contemporary U.S. politics: Where are today’s young Julian Bonds? Why isn’t there a clear and identifiable national black leadership for the under-50 generation?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Of all the findings in behavioral science, the most significant may be "loss aversion," the idea that people dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains. Loss aversion can create big trouble for businesses and investors. And it can badly confuse political debate -- as it seems to be doing in the current discussions of the nuclear deal with Iran.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a weird new Cool War twist, Washington is demanding that China bring home agents it sent secretly to the U.S. to pressure corrupt Chinese officials and businessmen to return home and be punished. The shoe's on the other foot for the U.S., which has in the past frequently sent its own operatives to other countries without permission to grab not just terrorists but criminals, too. But the turnabout isn't what's most striking about this episode. Rather, the most important thing about China's secret efforts is why China thinks they're necessary at all.