Media Mentions

The state of Florida has declined to investigate a complaint from a mother whose baby died after heart surgery at St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, which CNN found had a high mortality rate for pediatric open-heart surgeries from 2011 to 2013....I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist at Harvard Law School, said inspections like these are not meant to directly assess whether patients received the appropriate care, or try to find the cause of bad outcomes. He said site visits evaluate the systems around the care, such as whether doctors and nurses are licensed and whether operating rooms are cleaned properly. "The analogy would be to driving a car. Let's say you get into a lot of accidents, they would come and certify that the signals work and you've taken your driver's license test, but they don't actually look at your driving record," he said.

Law schools don’t prepare graduates for the financial realities they’ll face when their student loans come due, an American Bar Association task force has concluded after a year spent examining legal education costs. Next week, the House of Delegates will take up a proposal to fix that...Ken Lafler, assistant dean for student financial services at Harvard, said the law school boosted its financial programing in 2007 and continues to look for ways to educate students about personal finance. All graduating students must attend an hourlong small-group session on loan repayment, and one-on-one counseling is available, Lafler said. The school holds voluntary sessions on borrowing, budgeting and investing, and discusses loans during its admitted-students weekend. Convincing law students to pay attention presents a challenge, however. Many are preoccupied with classes, grades and career development, worrying about their loans only after they’ve taken the bar exam. “If you’re talking about a student with a free hour during the day, is attending a financial-planning session really what they’re choosing to do?” Lafler said. “Our students are extremely busy, and we want to be sensitive to that, which is why we’re loath to make sessions mandatory.”

Iran has the potential to be a boom market for American tech companies. The majority of the population is under 30 and well educated, and over half the country has access to the Internet. Many businesses have to wait until more sanctions are lifted, but certain tech companies can already go into Iran legally because the U.S. has lifted sanctions on various communication technology. They just aren't sure they want to...So, last year the Obama administration lifted sanctions on American tech companies that sell personal communication technologies. "It is fully legal to sell cellphones, laptops, tablets, modems, Wi-Fi routers and most of the software that most people use every day," says Vivek Krishnamurthy, who teaches at Harvard Law School. But, Krishnamurthy says, that hasn't meant that American tech companies have jumped into Iran — there's still no Apple Store there. "Doing business with Iran is extremely difficult today because of the comprehensive financial sanctions," he says. "It's really hard to get money in or out of the country."

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Do shoppers suffer too much in bankruptcy, or should they be expected to share the pain? Brick-and-mortar retailing is in upheaval. The Internet is changing the way people shop and buy, in case any brick-and-mortar retailer hasn’t yet noticed. Traditional retailers that can’t adjust quickly enough will end up in chapter 11. When one does, customers can face problems with their gift cards, warranty claims, return-if-not-satisfied privileges and assurances of privacy protection regarding their customer information.

It was a remarkable week for President Obama: On Monday he commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders; on Tuesday he called for sweeping criminal justice reform in an address to the NAACP; and on Thursday he became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison...“It’s shocking and surprising to see this kind of vision coming from the White House,” said David Harris, managing director of Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “I can’t imagine any other president having the breadth of knowledge that he displayed. … To the extent that other presidents have used crime as a code for race, this president actually named some of the racial disparities that impact our communities in ways that others haven’t.”

The complaints that flooded into Texas Auto Center that maddening, mystifying week were all pretty much the same: Customers’ cars had gone haywire. Horns started honking in the middle of the night, angering neighbors, waking babies. Then when morning finally came, the cars refused to start...a check of the dealership’s computers suggested something more sinister at work: Texas Auto Center had been hacked...Physical injuries would make cases against manufacturers of connected devices far stronger, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is faculty director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He predicted a coming wave of litigation relying on tort law, a foundational legal principle that can lead to large damage awards when the action of one person or company can be proved to have caused harm to another.“If my heart monitor fails and I die as a consequence, the company can’t say, ‘Oh, it was only software,’ “ Zittrain said. “That’s no defense. That’s not going to fly.”

After spending more than $50,000 in legal bills trying to win custody of her daughters, Amy Andrade ran out of money...“A presumption of joint physical custody is a bad idea,” Robert Mnookin, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody, told Boston.com. “It’s fine if the parents agree to it, but is terrible if they don’t.” In his book, Mnookin argues that shared parenting agreements where there is “substantial parental conflict” invite more legal conflict, not less, and children often feel even more caught in the middle of parental conflict than they do already.

If it seems like your airplane tickets cost too much this summer or your bank is overcharging you at the ATM, you might think about blaming your mutual fund. That is the startling—or maybe head-scratching—contention of some recent research that argues the top money-management companies have grown so large that they are indirectly stifling competition in other areas of the economy. In a paper posted online earlier this month, Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, asserts that concentrated shareholdings by such giant fund managers as BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street and Vanguard Group “are likely to anticompetitively raise prices when the owned businesses compete in a concentrated market.”

Protesters who hijacked a presidential forum in Arizona last Saturday demanding that the candidates spend more time addressing problems in the black community left feeling dissatisfied. But a week later, what at the time felt like a disastrous disruption has supercharged the Black Lives Matter movement — and pushed Hillary Clinton and her rivals for the Democratic nomination to speak to the concerns of an African-American community that is enraged by high-profile incidents of police misconduct and is demanding that its voice be heard...It’s something [Martin] O’Malley seems to have realized. On Wednesday, he released a statement saying his “heart breaks for Sandra Bland and her family” and called for a “thorough and independent investigation of the traffic stop, the arrest and Ms. Bland’s tragic death in custody.” He also called Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree on Wednesday to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement and topics important to the African-American community, as part of a series of discussions ahead of unveiling his criminal justice platform.

So you want an escape from the city? One Harvard University-based startup, called Getaway, is looking to help city dwellers realize that goal by giving them the opportunity to rent a tiny house in the middle of nowhere. The startup, run by Harvard MBA student Jon Staff and Harvard Law student Peter Davis, officially launched today.

Normally, you’d think your 401k is a force for good. You put money in, let your nest egg grow, and draw it down when it comes time to retire. But Harvard Law professor Einer Elhauge argues that the mutual funds that make up your 401k, along with everyone else’s, have become so immense that they have created a perverse anti-competitive incentive: to keep prices high in industries like airlines and banks, thereby hurting you, the consumer.

The Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy at Boston College Law School is pleased to announce the selection of its 2015 Fellows. This year’s group includes Rebecca Harris [`17] from Sharon, a law student at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Turkey’s airstrikes against Islamic State and its decision to allow U.S. warplanes to operate from its air bases are in direct response to terrorist attacks in the Turkish town of Suruc earlier in the week. The cause-and-effect relationship highlights what’s becoming a central strategic dilemma for Islamic State. Ideologically, the organization embraces the jihadi techniques developed by al-Qaeda, which call for suicide bombings against civilians within regimes deemed to be the enemy. Practically, however, Islamic State’s best chance of survival as a quasi-sovereign entity is to leave its Sunni neighbors alone in the hopes they won’t provide the ground troops that would be necessary to defeat the militant group.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should Denmark prosecute a 90-year-old Dane who volunteered as a Nazi concentration-camp guard more than 70 years ago? The question isn’t hypothetical: The Simon Wiesenthal Center has presented Danish authorities with a dossier urging the prosecution of Helmuth Leif Rasmussen, who by his own account was present at the Bobruisk camp in 1942-43 when 1,400 Jews were killed there.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It's becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, isn't going to be closed during President Barack Obama's administration -- or beyond, despite the administration's efforts. That raises a deep question about foreign policy and the rule of law: What if Guantanamo never closes, and some of its detainees remain there for the rest of their lives?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Leaked intelligence reports say that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the titular head of Islamic State, is delegating authority in anticipation of his untimely demise. That raises some timely questions: Can you have a caliphate without a caliph? What will happen to Islamic State if Baghdadi is killed? And, by extension, how much effort should the U.S. and its allies put into trying to target and kill him?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When I last checked, the U.S. was still a majority-Christian country. So what's the world coming to when the Republican Congress seems more excited to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than Pope Francis? The answer holds a lesson about the role of religion in shaping symbolic politics -- and helps make sense of some of the opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. In the U.S., faith often jump-starts a political movement or position -- but pretty soon, politics takes over the driver's seat and brings the religion along.

...But even though Amtrak has announced that it will not contest lawsuits filed against the company for the accident, Ms. Varnum and Mr. MacFarland fear they will have to come up with tens of thousands of dollars for medical bills out of their own pockets. The couple hope their lawsuit will highlight the fact that the congressionally mandated cap on liability for Amtrak accidents can leave victims with enormous bills...“When Congress enacted the cap, it made the judgment that victims of large-scale railroad crashes will be among those who have to bear the cost of keeping Amtrak up and running,” said John C. P. Goldberg, a law professor at Harvard and expert on tort law. “It is very difficult to see why, in effect, some of the subsidy should come from the victims of train crashes rather than the public.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent years, high-level Western officials have argued that terrorism is a product of poverty, a lack of education or mental illness. Other influential voices have urged that terrorist acts expose the truth about Islam, and still others that they are a natural, if excessive, response to legitimate grievances against the West. On Monday, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pointedly rejected every one of these theories -- and went on to provide what may well be the most clear-headed explanation ever offered by a head of state...In Cameron's view, the root cause of terrorism is instead an extremist ideology, fueled by a process of radicalization.

Leave it to Berkeley: This city, which has led the nation in passing all manner of laws favored by the left, has done it again. This time, the city passed a measure — not actually backed by science — requiring cellphone stores to warn customers that the products could be hazardous to their health, presumably by emitting dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation...Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School and an expert on the First Amendment, have agreed to defend Berkeley pro bono over claims that the legislation is unconstitutional. “The First Amendment is being contorted to all sorts of wrong ends,” Mr. Lessig said. “We’re not intending to challenge the science of cellphones,” Mr. Lessig said. “We’re just making people aware of existing regulations.”

As any civil practitioner can attest, the number of people who show up in court without an attorney seems to increase every year. But what’s driving the surge in pro se litigants? How do those trend lines compare in different jurisdictions? And, more broadly, what can be done to improve access to justice? Those were just a few of the questions posed by Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow at the quarterly meeting of Legal Services Corporation at the University of St. Thomas law school in Minneapolis last Friday. As it turns out, the precise incidence of pro se cases is surprisingly difficult to quantify. But Minow’s panelists — four state supreme court justices from the upper Midwest and one U.S. District Court judge — agreed on one point: The shortage of pro bono lawyers is most pronounced in family law.