Media Mentions

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it would scrap a decades-old lifetime prohibition on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, a change that experts said was long overdue and could lift the annual blood supply by as much as 4 percent...“This is a major victory for gay civil rights,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard University who specializes in bioethics and health. “We’re leaving behind the old view that every gay man is a potential infection source." He said, however, that the policy was “still not rational enough."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As a law professor, I taught the nation’s first environmental law class 45 years ago. As a lawyer, I have supported countless environmental causes. And as a father and grandfather, I want to leave the Earth in better shape than when I arrived. Nonetheless, I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means.

A letter by Nancy Gertner. Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s article “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” [NYR, November 20, 2014] is spot on, but doesn’t go far enough. True, we have a federal plea system, not a trial system. True, to call the process “plea bargaining” is a cruel misnomer. There is nothing here remotely like fair bargaining between equal parties with equal resources or equal information. The prosecutors’ power—as Judge Rakoff describes—is extraordinary, far surpassing that of prosecutors of years past, and in most cases, far surpassing the judge’s. Judge John Gleeson, a federal judge of the Eastern District of New York, made this clear during a case involving a charge for which there is a mandatory minimum sentence. As a result of the prosecutor’s decision to charge the defendant with an offense for which there is a mandatory minimum sentence, no judging was going on about the sentence. The prosecutor sentenced the defendant, not the judge, with far less transparency and no appeal.

It will be a long time, if ever, before the public sees Sony Pictures Entertainment’s movie “The Interview.” Instead, we’ve seen a preview of a new kind of warfare. Hackers allegedly backed by the impoverished, backward nation of North Korea have terrorized one of the world’s richest corporations into halting the release of the film, a comedy about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. ...But Andy Sellars, a First Amendment fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, doubts we’ll see a similar incident anytime soon. “To me, it feels much more like a one-off,” Sellars said. “To me, I think it’s an exceptional case under exceptional circumstances.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One part of the U.S. Constitution stood out above all others in 2014: executive power. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, executive power reached what many considered its apogee, and the topic got a lot of press. During the first five years of the Barack Obama administration, the subject seemed to wane in importance, surfacing occasionally on the topic of drone strikes, and then receding. Now it's back, on issues such as the war against Islamic State, immigration reform and diplomatic relations with Cuba. And we can expect much more concern about the use of executive power during the rest of Obama's presidency, as the lame duck becomes the executive duck in charge.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the domain of foreign affairs, 2014 has brought heated national debates on an impressive range of subjects: Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Syria, Ebola, immigration policy and, most recently, torture, North Korea and Cuba. One of the more remarkable features of all these discussions has been the consistent grace of President George W. Bush. This month, Bush offered a rare comment on a public debate. Responding to the Senate’s release of the CIA torture report, he said, “We're fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the CIA serving on our behalf. These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base." Note that Bush paid tribute to the employees of the CIA -- and pointedly declined to take a shot at the Barack Obama administration.

An op-ed by Alan M. Dershowitz. I write to commend President Faust’s decision to investigate the unilateral action of the Harvard University Dining Services to boycott SodaStream products. I have visited the SodaStream factory and spoken to many of its Palestinian-Arab employees, who love working for a company that pays them high wages and provides excellent working conditions. I saw Jews and Muslims, Israeli and Palestinians, working together and producing an excellent product that is both healthy and economical.

Eminent political theorist Danielle S. Allen, M.A. ’98, Ph.D. ’01, has been appointed both to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as a professor in the Government Department and to Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics as its director. The announcement was made jointly today (Dec. 18) by Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith. Allen succeeds Harvard Law School (HLS) Professor Lawrence Lessig as director. Lessig joined the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics in 2009 to direct a five-year “lab” focused on institutional corruption. The lab completes its work in 2015. ...“Allen is a perfect director to continue the focus of the center on issues of practical ethical concern,” said Lessig, the center’s current director. “I am incredibly happy that she will join the center to continue its work.”

On the other side of the country, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk has taken to the New Yorker to express concern over her perception that students are increasingly likely to object when classroom discussion turns to rape. "Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well," she writes. "One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word 'violate' in class—as in 'Does this conduct violate the law?'—because the word was triggering."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The horrific massacre of 132 boys this week at their school in Peshawar, Pakistan, embodies a new trend in Islamist terrorism that has emerged over this year. Past jihadi terrorists, up to and including Osama bin Laden, claimed that their violence was justified as self-defense under their interpretation of the Islamic laws of war. In 2014, however, we’ve seen radical Islamists ignoring those laws altogether. From Islamic State to Boko Haram to the Pakistani Taliban, the killers seem unconcerned to justify their actions in terms of Shariah -- and this development demands careful attention to understand where the jihadis are going. Before you say that you don’t care what rationale terrorists give for their actions, recall that understanding terrorism is a necessary prerequisite to combating it.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Over the past two months, the National Hockey League has experienced a baffling outbreak of mumps. Thirteen players are said to have it, and there's no telling when the outbreak will end. It is a story that seems to have stepped from the mid-20th century...By 2012, the number of reported cases shrunk to 229. Mumps has hardly been wiped out, but in terms of public health, the improvement has been nothing short of spectacular...The success story is worth underlining because both Canada and the U.S. are now experiencing an anti-vaccination movement, limited to a small part of the population, but nonetheless worthy of concern.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With his announcement that the U.S. will open negotiations and try to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama is trying to break the hold of the Cuba lobby once and for all. In historical terms, that's a remarkable undertaking. For decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been guided by the smart, effective lobbying of a relatively small group of interested Cuban-Americans, mostly in Miami. The Cuba lobby’s success has reflected a deep truth of American politics: where there's a concentrated interest on one side of an issue, and only a diffuse interest on the other, the concentrated interest wins. Will it work? If so, why now? And what are the implications for other concentrated lobbying groups, such as the National Rifle Association and the pro-Israel lobby, which have themselves succeeded by following a version of the approach that the Cuba lobby pioneered?

Six preeminent international human rights organizations have sent an open letter to President Thein Sein calling for an end to the prosecution of Shayam Brang Shawng and an independent investigation into the death of his daughter in Kachin State’s Sut Ngai Yang Village....“The case against Brang Shawng is a gross perversion of justice,” said Matthew Bugher, Global Justice Fellow at Harvard Law School. “The military has retaliated against Brang Shawng for speaking out about the death of his daughter, rather than ensuring that those responsible are held to account.”

Federal investigators have now connected the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. to North Korea, a U.S. official said Wednesday, though it remained unclear how the federal government would respond to a break-in that exposed sensitive documents and ultimately led to terrorist threats against moviegoers....Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, said Sony was unquestionably facing anger over the breach and the resulting disclosure of thousands of sensitive documents. But the movie studio may be able to mitigate that reaction and potential legal exposure if it's established that North Korea was behind the attack." If Sony can characterize this as direct interference by or at the behest of a nation-state, might that somehow earn them the kind of immunity from liability that you might see other companies getting when there's physical terrorism involved, sponsored by a state?" Zittrain said.

Though it may not feel like it when you see the latest identity-affirming listicle shared by a friend on Facebook, we are a society moving toward evidence. Our world is ever more quantified, and with such data, flawed or not, the tools of science are more widely applied to our decisions...It’s also quaint to think that users would click through the multiple dialogue boxes necessary to mimic informed consent, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Would you? Instead, he said, there ought to be independent proxies who represent the users and can perform that checking function. "I worry about leaning too hard on choice," he said, "when the real thing is just treat your users with dignity."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Was 2014 the year of the hack? Or 2013? Or maybe 2011? The answer, of course, is that they all were, and that there are going to be lots more coming. But events in 2014 have helped frame a profound question that we’re going to have to answer about the right balance among property, privacy and free speech – and a glance through the year’s prominent hacks sheds some light on how we should answer it.

An op-ed by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and David J. Harris. Last week thousands of demonstrators in Greater Boston and throughout the nation voiced their outrage at the decision of two grand juries not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men, as well as the corruption and bias embedded in our law enforcement system. As veterans of civil rights struggles spanning nearly a half century, we felt heartened by the reemergence of young people as a force for change. Indeed, we experienced the collective refrain of “Enough is enough” as sweet music. But even as we nodded in agreement, we found ourselves asking a few follow-up questions: When is enough not enough? When are rage and protest necessary, but not sufficient? How do we transform “enough is enough” into “we demand more?”

Perturbed by the incivility that has permeated political discourse in town the past couple years, a local clergy association has enlisted the help of outside mediators to solve the problem. Through the collaboration, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and Sudbury Clergy Association will hold listening sessions and focus groups with townspeople this coming spring with the aim of figuring out what’s wrong in Sudbury...“HNMCP is deeply honored to have been invited by the Sudbury Clergy Association to provide counsel and advice based on our experience in negotiation and conflict management,” professor Robert Bordone, the program’s director, said in a statement.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Becons, in just their third year of existence, are already the most coveted of the year-end movie awards. (For those who have been on Mars, the Becons are the Behavioral Economics Oscars.) This year has been a spectacular one for movies with behavioral economics themes, and it has been unusually difficult to pick the winners. But without further ado:

An op-ed by Noah Feldman...I thought of my client on Friday when the Supreme Court agreed to take up the question of retroactivity in connection with its holding that juvenile offenders may not constitutionally be sentenced to life without parole. The doctrine the Supreme Court applies when it ordinarily declines to make its decisions retroactive to convicted defendants is one of the strangest and most horrifying doctrines in the entire body of constitutional law. It’s almost impossible to justify from the standpoint of the Supreme Court’s job to interpret the Constitution. Its rationale is based entirely on practicality. Unfortunately, that practicality enables our system to keep people jailed even when the courts admit that their incarceration violates the Constitution.