Media Mentions

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Digital-era humans are constantly optimizing — sometimes it feels as if we’re all engaged in an endless game of Frogger, continually navigating past a continual stream of obstacles, seeking the home of a thriving life. Nowhere is this practice as visible as in cities, where densely-packed populations weave past one another and new technology could provide opportunities to make life better. As mayors become more responsive to their citizens, how could adding the magic of public-enabled digital information to structures and streets help out? And what’s the role of the private sector in this transformation? One possible answer is emerging in The Big Orange, Los Angeles.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Iran nuclear deal is all but an accomplished fact, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually agree on something: Both have made it clear that they don’t want any more engagement between the U.S. and Iran. Iranian and Israeli hardliners alike want the nuclear deal to be a one-off that doesn’t change the basic structure of regional opposition between Iran and its Shiite proxies on the one hand, and the U.S. and its alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. But moderates in the U.S. and Iran -- and possibly even Israel -- will see things differently. Many of them perceive large areas of overlapping American and Iranian interests, most notably the defeat of Islamic State and a solution to the generational humanitarian and policy debacle that is Syria.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did George Washington add the words “so help me God” to the constitutionally prescribed oath of office when he was sworn in as president on April 30, 1789? I’ve always thought so, and when discussing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s misinterpretation of her oath of office last week, I wrote that the U.S. Constitution doesn't include the words but that Washington “famously added them.” Immediately I received an e-mail citing an essay that claims this widely held view was in fact a myth, unsubstantiated by contemporary historical evidence and derived from a doubtful childhood memory by Washington Irving. I read the essay, and then found counterarguments on the web and in a good old-fashioned book. So what's the truth? And why should we care, other than historical accuracy, which is always desirable and never perfectly attainable?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How much should you know before your baby is entered into a medical study? That complicated and heartbreaking question has been at the center of a controversy about a clinical trial that tested the effects of different oxygen levels on premature infants with extremely low birth weights. A federal judge in Alabama rejected last month the legal claims of parents whose children suffered adverse effects after participating. The court's decision was correct -- but not because the consent form given to parents was adequate for them to understand the risks, which as an ethical matter it probably wasn't.

This year, the obscure tech-politics debate over whether and how we pay to use the Internet leaped into the mainstream, attracting the voices of Silicon Valley’s top brass, a late-night comedian, millions of disgruntled broadband service consumers and the president. But net neutrality’s big moment was a long time coming, with a varied group of cyber law scholars each making a push for an open Internet...[Susan] Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been tackling the broader problem of lack of competition among telecom giants, comparing them to the railroad barons of the late 19th century. In the book she published last fall, Captive Audience, she argued the fight over net neutrality is a symptom of a defective market in which companies have undue influence in deciding regulations. Instead, she is pushing communities to maintain their own fiber networks separate from major Internet providers.

Seven years after the United Nations Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities was signed by countries around the world, there is still a long way to go, according to Michael Stein, Executive Director, Harvard Law School, Harvard Law School Project on Disability. “While it would be wonderful if there was a huge change, slow progress is to be expected,” he said, explaining that the treaty was introduced to countries with decades, and even hundreds of years of legal exclusion. “It also came in the wake of millennia of stereotyping the disabled,” he said.

In addition to predictable changes that come with every new school year—new classes, perhaps a new place to live—Harvard Law School students are also adjusting to a major policy change that rolled out over the summer: the new process their school is using to investigate and hear sexual harassment cases. The procedures, which differ significantly from the approach in place at other Harvard schools, are the product of months of debate among faculty members who pushed for the Law School to adopt the unique model after they raised concerns about Harvard’s protection of the due process rights of the accused...“At this point, I guess, the procedures themselves were mostly the brainchild of the faculty,” Robert K. Fountain, a Law School student and organizer for student group Harvard Talks Title IX, said last semester...Leland S. Shelton, also a third-year Law student, said that he does not know many specifics about the new procedures, but he is hopeful that they will help address the problem of campus sexual assault. “I still haven’t really formed an opinion on those rules. What I do hope is that the new sexual assault policy will curb the sexual assaults that happen on Harvard’s campus, including the Law School’s,” he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Larry Lessig, the law professor now running for president, seems to be trying to produce a real-life Frank Capra movie. He hopes to tap into a deep strain in American culture -- the one that defined Capra's work...Capra's best movies focus on the power of goodness and purity. His central opposition is between greed and corruption on the one hand and simple human decency on the other.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal judge who released Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk, from jail wasn't following the usual protocol: He was trying to effect a compromise on gay marriage. Ordinarily, someone jailed for disobeying a direct judicial order wouldn’t be freed unless she agreed to comply with it. Davis didn’t.

Last summer, the Harvard law professor Janet Halley sat down at her dining-room table to look through a set of policies that her university created for handling complaints of sexual assault and harassment...But as Halley read the new rules, she felt alarmed — stunned, in fact. The university’s definition of harassment seemed far too broad...Halley’s critique has reverberated — as the latest salvo in a long-running war, with deep intellectual roots, over how to grapple with rape and sex as a feminist. In the late 1970s, when Janet Halley was writing a dissertation on 17th-century poets like Donne and Milton, a young lawyer and political scholar named Catharine MacKinnon opened new possibilities for the women’s movement by conceiving the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

First, he started a crowd-sourced campaign to elect members of Congress willing to change the way campaigns are financed. Now, he’s decided to run for office himself, but not just any old office – the presidency. Harvard Law School professor, author, and activist Lawrence Lessig, who now can add Democratic presidential candidate to his resume, is crowd-sourcing his campaign. If it seems familiar, it’s because it is. Lessig adopted a similar formula when he helped start Mayday PAC, billed as the super PAC to end all super PACs.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Stock buybacks are big and controversial. Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the US Democratic presidential nomination, says they undercut the American economy at the expense of needed investment. Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, wrote that buybacks “deliver immediate returns to shareholders” while their companies are “underinvesting in innovation, skilled workforces or essential capital expenditures”. High-end publications pronounce stock buybacks to be killing the American economy and, as buybacks spread in Europe and Asia, they have become more controversial there too. Fine companies, the idea runs, sacrifice their future to satisfy cash-hungry hedge funds. Buybacks are indeed up, amounting to about a half-trillion dollars annually. But is that bad? Is American business really liquidating itself, destroying businesses with buybacks? No.

Chief executives love to declare that “people are our greatest asset.” It is rarely clear what they mean, but a group of investors managing approximately $2.5 trillion is seeking to find out...One of the key reports reviewed by the group so far is a meta-analysis of 92 studies examining the relationship between human-capital policies and financial performance, released this spring by the Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School and funded by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute. Of the 92 studies, 67 found a positive correlation between investments in training and HR policies and outcomes like profitability, stock price and sales growth.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused a federal judge's direct order to issue marriage licenses, was freed from jail Tuesday. But some conservatives have questioned why she was there in the first place, comparing her stand with that of President Barack Obama, who says he won’t deport some immigrants in the U.S. without legal authority; with the noncooperation of "sanctuary city" mayors with federal immigration authorities; and with the refusal of California Governor Jerry Brown to defend Proposition 8 when it was challenged in federal court. These public officials, the conservatives point out, refused to follow the law. Yet they are not only free, but also lauded by liberals. This charge of hypocrisy requires a serious response.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk about mixed signals. Last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a 300,000-man reduction in the size of the People’s Liberation Army -- a decision at least partly calculated to look like China has no aggressive intentions toward the rest of the world. Yet at almost the same time, he sent five Chinese ships into the Bering Sea near Alaska, in an unprecedented maneuver timed to coincide with the last day of President Barack Obama’s visit to the state. This sort of symbolism is pretty close to the textbook definition of muscle-flexing aggression.

Next week, Apple is expected to make a long-awaited update to its Apple TV set-top box, which hasn't been refreshed since 2012...Security experts, however, believe this could cause trouble. There are a lot of unanswered questions around these "always listening" devices that have yet to be answered, such as how they can use the data, who they can share it with, and whether or not they're using the data for alternative purposes. "[The license agreements] have an extraordinarily wide latitude," Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law, said to Business Insider. "And that's a huge worry."

...The organization that Adam and Don work for, Food for Free, is one of a few in Boston seeking to solve two of America’s major problems at once: We have a lot of unwanted food that goes to waste, and a lot of people who go hungry...This law seems like it should be a fantastic opportunity for food rescue operations like Food for Free. But it might not work out that way. “I think the one weakness is the laws don’t really incentivize you donating the food as opposed to, say, composting it or sending it to the anaerobic digester,” says Emily Broad Leib, an assistant professor of law at Harvard who directs the university’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. While composting food is a better option than throwing it out, it too has a significant carbon footprint.

Work is becoming a much less pleasant place. From Uber drivers without job security to salesmen whose every move is electronically tracked to accountants expected to answer e-mails at all hours of the day and night, the nature of work is evolving — often in worker- unfriendly ways...“We’re living in an era of real uncertainty and dislocation when it comes to the world of work,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School professor who studies labor issues. “It’s a moment where we need to think carefully and reevaluate the policies we have governing the labor market.”

Following a months-long search to replace Ellen M. Cosgrove as Harvard Law School's dean of students, Marcia Sells, an administrator at Columbia, will assume the post on Sept. 21...Students from affinity groups and student government played a role in formulating a job description for the position, and they helped interview finalists, according to students involved in the process and Jeffrey C. McNaught, the acting dean of students. Faye E. Maison, a student leader of Students for Inclusion—a student group at the Law School that focuses on the common concerns of different affinity groups—said questions focused on issues of mental health and diversity...Students from affinity groups said they are optimistic about the administrative change. Leland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, said he hopes Sells will help change the environment at the Law School. “In an ideal world a new dean of students would look to address issue of intersectionality and microaggression both at the Law School and at the classroom and helping minority students acclimate to the Law School environment and helping them feel comfortable,” Shelton said.

Does the Constitution protect people who feel that the law requires them to act contrary to their beliefs? NPR's Linda Wertheimer speaks with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman about the Kentucky case.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig met his self-imposed goal of crowd-funding $1 million by Labor Day, and Sunday on ABC announced he's running for the Democratic nomination for President. Lessig, an activist with a grassroots following among some progressives, says he's running on a singular platform — the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. It would expand voting access, ban gerrymandering and institute campaign finance reform. "I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room," Lessig said Sunday on ABC. "This stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work. And we have to find a way to elevate the debate to focus on the changes that would actually get us a government that could work again, that is not captured by the tiniest fraction of the one percent who fund campaigns."