Media Mentions

Wisconsin lawmakers on Thursday will begin a final debate on a measure supported by Republican Governor Scott Walker that would prohibit private-sector workers from being required to join a union or pay dues when working under union contracts...the law may make it harder for organized labor in Wisconsin to create new unions and, over time, it could reduce union membership as workers retire or move out of state. The pressure on union membership in turn weakens Democrats, who are typically backed by organized labor, Harvard Law School labor expert Benjamin Sachs said. "This law disables the political opposition," Sachs said.

“If we are so rich, why don’t we eat better food?” Asked by Harvard Business School Professor Gunnar Trumbull, this was one of many thought-provoking questions and intriguing concepts raised at a gathering that spotlighted the range of cross-disciplinary and collaborative food-related research being conducted across Harvard’s Schools...Jacob Gersen, Harvard Law School (HLS) professor and director of the Harvard Food Law Lab, discussed several questions around food labeling. Are labels misleading? Are they confusing or fraudulent? Do labels affect consumer behavior? And what should the law do in this area? Gersen is collaborating with government Professor Stephen Ansolabehere to use the national survey tool that Ansolabehere manages to better understand how consumers perceive food labels.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court gave Amazon.com and other direct marketing retailers a victory today with one hand -- then used the other hand to take it back. Formally, in Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl, the court unanimously reinstated a lawsuit brought by a direct retailer to block a Colorado law requiring them to notify the state about purchases that fall under Colorado’s sales or use tax. That much was a win for the direct shippers. But in a nonbinding message, the court strongly hinted that the appeals court should block the suit on different grounds than it used the first time -- which would give the victory back to Colorado.

On the Supreme Court, it’s always May 17, 1954—at least for any justice contemplating his or her legacy. That was the day the liberal Warren Court handed down a 9-0 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that state-mandated segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The decision has come to be embraced as one of the most important and inspiring constitutional victories of our time...Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe—who was a lead counsel for the then-vice president in Bush v. Gore—says it’s often difficult for the public to separate the justices from the politics of the day, especially in cases that have significant political ramifications. “Ever since Bush v. Gore,” Tribe says, “the public has been inclined to assume that the justices are politicians in robes. Five-to-four decisions in most hotly contested cases look often enough as if they line up along political lines and justices, being aware of how the public sees them, can’t help recognizing this.”

...As the courtroom drama begins this week, important questions of justice and of healing hang in the balance...I ventured to Harvard Law School to discuss them with Prof. Nancy Gertner, a civil rights lawyer, who served 17 years as a U.S. district judge in Boston. She recalls that agonizing week of shock, first responders and memorial services. "The city rose up to shore each other up at every public event, at every opportunity and the stories of people helping one another are legion. So it was remarkable in that respect and what I hope is that legal system lives up to those standards, this extraordinary admirable result."

An op-ed by Chuka Umunna and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Only by joining inclusion to innovation – and so raising productivity across the economy – can Britain assure its future. This is the vision set out in Labour’s plan for prosperity, published this week. Under the present government, average wages have fallen by £1,600 a year. The fiscal deficit remains stubbornly high at £91bn. These are serious problems in their own right. But the cost-of-living crisis and the persistence of the deficit are also symptoms of a broader failure to raise productivity. In leading sectors such as aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals and the creative industries, Britain is world class. Across the economy overall, UK output per hour fell to 17 per cent below the rest of the G7 in 2013, the largest gap since 1991. It takes British workers until the end of Friday to produce what a German or American worker have done by Thursday. Building on existing areas of strength, Britain must back sectors where it already enjoys an advantage.

Congressman Paul Ryan and other influential Republicans sketched out plans Tuesday for how they'd deal with a Supreme Court ruling that cancels Obamacare's subsidies in many of the states, saying they could use such a decision to create a "bridge" to end the health law for good...Matthew Lawrence, an academic fellow at Harvard Law School who teachers a seminar on Obamacare, said Republicans may have a persuasive argument in that a law is easy to fix. "The more probable a congressional fix, the more compelling the argument in favor of strict adherence to the words of the statute becomes," Mr. Lawrence said.

Harvard Law School students offered strategies and tips for navigating discussions about rape law in criminal law courses during a workshop event Tuesday. The discussion, hosted by the Women’s Law Association each year as criminal law courses begin covering rape and sexual assault, also explored what they described as myths associated with rape. Unlike most other criminal law subjects, sexual assault is an issue that law students are more likely to have personally encountered and should be approached with more sensitivity, Lana R. Birbrair, a third-year law student who led the event, said. “Whatever your views are of what rape law ought to be, the reason that we’re here is because it can be really hard to talk about it,” she said.

Heidi Gardner, a law lecturer at Harvard, has studied six global firms (including three law firms) and the way that their partners and others collaborate. She concluded that 'the more disciplines that are involved in a client engagement, the greater the annual average revenue the client generates'.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The growing national concern about economic inequality raises many questions. One has to do with demographic groups. Are some doing better than others? If so, exactly why? A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that as most people assume, education is a key both to mobility and to the accumulation of wealth. But another important factor is economic decision-making. And when it comes to financial prudence, whites and Asian-Americans appear to be doing a lot better than Hispanics and African-Americans.

...Most personal-injury cases settle out of court, so it is impossible to document how often brain scans for pain are being used in civil law. But the practice seems to be getting more common, at least in the United States, where health care is not covered by the government and personal-injury cases are frequent. Several companies have cropped up, and at least one university has offered the service...“A person cannot be found disabled based on pain unless they can point to a specific cause,” says Amanda Pustilnik, a legal expert at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts...But some scientists and ethicists are concerned about where the increasing acceptance of pain imaging might lead. Pustilnik worries that it could become a sort of pass–fail test, not just forcing litigants to provide proof of their pain, but potentially making it a requirement to get prescription medications or insurance coverage. She is heading a working group at Harvard that is developing a list of ethical and scientific standards for the technologies before they become widespread.

Following the Federal Communication Commission's decision to classify the internet as a telecommunications service, thereby allowing the government to regulate it as a utility, Harvard professors praised the ruling considered a victory for net neutrality proponents....Beyond the decision’s positive impact on consumers, faculty members marked the political significance that the decision came into fruition. Yochai Benkler, Berkman Center faculty co-director and Law School professor, acknowledged that successful grassroots movements put pressure on legislators. “[The ruling is] a moment that can give us hope that even in the presence of enormous amounts of money in politics and one of the worst revolving door environments in Washington, people can still organize themselves to force politicians to do the right thing,” Benkler wrote in an email.

Last year, Apple and Facebook both announced that they would cover egg freezing as a benefit for female employees. If you’re a woman who is considering postponing parenthood, this perk might be enticing, but the majority of parents want something different—something a lot less advanced and a lot less expensive. They want flexibility...As law firms—also notorious for demanding long hours of its workers—start considering covering this benefit, Harvard Law School Professor Glenn Cohen questioned the message the new benefit is sending. "Would potential female associates welcome this option knowing that they can work hard early on and still reproduce, if they so desire, later on? Or would they take this as a signal that the firm thinks that working there as an associate and pregnancy are incompatible?"

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. The Supreme Court is about to hear a case — King v. Burwell — that again threatens to undermine the Affordable Care Act and strip health insurance from millions of Americans. The King challenge, which focuses on a handful of words in that famously long piece of legislation, is a clever one. But it’s too clever by half. Finding for the challengers would require taking a few words in the ACA out of their proper context, ignoring the law’s structure and purpose, and even jettisoning the conservative justices’ own pro-states’ rights views.

Administrators from Northwestern University School of Law will help to establish the first U.S.-style law school in the Middle East. They have agreed to advise Hamad bin Khalifa University in creating a three-year juris doctor program in Doha, Qatar....The university first collaborated with Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law & Policy in 2012 to help develop the new law school. Harvard still is involved, institute executive director David Kennedy said, and is happy to see Northwestern join the effort. The institute stages an annual research conference in Doha. “Each year, we bring about 100 young colleagues in the law and policy field from around the world for an intensive week of collaboration and professional development,” he said. “We anticipate that cooperation will continue. I hope this effort, and our other ongoing collaborations with the Qatar Foundation, will contribute to the academic excellence and visibility of their new law school as it gets underway.”

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Should bankruptcy laws that allow companies broad latitude in selecting a venue be reformed? The venue statute effectively allows those filing the case to choose which district’s bankruptcy court will hear the case. That ability to choose leads many firms whose business is located elsewhere to file for bankruptcy in Delaware’s bankruptcy court or in the Southern District of New York. Is this a bad thing? In two dimensions, it is.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. To the Founding Fathers, democracy was a dirty word. What James Madison and his colleagues wanted was a republic -- defined in terms of representative government, not government directly by the public. “We the People” ordained the Constitution -- but we the people were never supposed to govern directly, or heavens knew what trouble we might get into. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday will consider the question of whether to take the Framers’ anti-democratic instincts seriously. At issue is how Arizona shapes the districts for elections to Congress.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I caution my students against seeing the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative justices as antiquarians, eager to take our jurisprudence back to the 18th or 19th centuries. Whatever guise originalism wears, it’s an evolving and, in many ways, forward-looking way of seeing the world. But every so often there's an opinion that conforms to the stereotype. Justice Samuel Alito issued such an opinion Wednesday in an otherwise obscure case about -- not joking -- teeth-whitening in North Carolina.

An op-ed by Glenn Hubbard and Hal Scott. Dodd-Frank restrictions on the Federal Reserve’s powers to act as lender-of-last-resort, coupled with restrictions on federal guarantees for bank deposits and money-market funds, pose a threat to U.S. and global financial stability...The Dodd-Frank Act (July 2010) pulled back the Fed’s lender-of-last-resort powers for non-banks. They can now be exercised only with the approval of the Treasury secretary, and the Fed cannot lend to a single institution as it did with AIG . It must now only lend under a broad program, and must also meet heightened collateral requirements. In addition, the FDIC cannot expand guarantees to bank depositors without congressional approval, and the Treasury can’t do the same to money-market funds without new legislative authority. These changes could make it difficult for the Fed and other regulatory bodies to act effectively in the next crisis.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts faced a conservative backlash after casting a decisive vote to save ObamaCare in 2012. Now he must weigh in on the law once again. The case of King v. Burwell, set for arguments before the Court on Wednesday, threatens to gut the law by invalidating subsidies to help millions of people buy insurance in the roughly three-dozen states relying on the federally run marketplace...“When interpreting statutory text, Roberts isn’t as fixated on isolated words and phrases as some Justices sometimes are,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who taught Roberts as a student, wrote in an email. “He pays close attention to the context in which phrases appear and to a statute’s overall purpose. That became especially clear when he joined Justice Ginsburg’s plurality opinion on Feb. 25 holding that fish didn’t count as ‘tangible objects.’”

The conservative think tanks behind King v. Burwell aren't the only ones giving a close reading to the Affordable Care Act's text. The Obama administration says it has no contingency plan should the Supreme Court bar health insurance subsidies in states that failed to set up their own exchanges. If true, the president's legal team should take a look at an article published in early January by a Harvard law student, whose own close reading of the law says there is a perfectly legal and relatively easy workaround. Writing in the student-run Harvard Journal on Legislation, Freilich Jones, JD16, says a section buried deep in the law gives HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell the authority to set up an exchange for a state either “directly or through an agreement with a not-for-profit entity” (emphasis added by Jones). Elsewhere in the law, exchanges are defined as “a government agency or nonprofit entity that is established by a state.”