Media Mentions

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.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Corporate “short-termism” may not be as interesting as Donald Trump’s latest gaffe, but it’s becoming an issue in the 2016 presidential race. Corporations, the idea goes, are being run too much with an eye toward quarterly earnings instead of the long-term good of their businesses, their employees and the economy. Investors are to blame, and something needs to be done. Hillary Clinton has proposed making changes to capital-gains taxes and holding periods to encourage long-term investments. But it isn’t just Democrats who are concerned about short-termism...Among those who opine on the topic, most take for granted that corporate short-termism is pervasive, and more important damaging to the U.S. economy. But is it? Or is it a small issue on which we could do better but that’s been blown out of proportion by those fearful of change? I see it as just that.

An op-ed by Hal Scott and John Gulliver. The three-hour shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange last month made headlines world-wide. Despite the brief calamity, investors emerged largely unharmed, because the technical glitch was with the NYSE’s trading platform. The outcome would have been very different had the problem been with the exchange’s consolidated public market data feed—the live feed that lets traders and investors see public bid and ask prices, the price and time of the last trade, and other crucial information. Any future problem with the public market data feed of the NYSE or Nasdaq exchange would cause trading NYSE stocks with $19 trillion in value or Nasdaq stocks with $6.8 trillion in value to come to a halt for an indefinite period. This would shake investor confidence in this country’s public market, and might even affect the attractiveness of U.S. capital markets to private U.S. companies and foreign issuers. There is a way to stop such a shutdown from happening, but it will take a change in regulatory policy.

For the last four years, a little-known civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education has forced far-reaching changes in how the nation’s colleges and universities police, prosecute and punish sexual assaults on campus...."It’s tragic what the federal government has done," said Elizabeth Bartholet, a civil rights activist and professor at Harvard Law School. "They are creating a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for."..."When the case is ambiguous, when the memories are clouded by alcohol consumption or time, we shouldn’t be punishing people," said [Janet] Halley, a self-described feminist once responsible for investigating such accusations at Stanford University. "I’m afraid that’s what we are doing, we are over-correcting," Halley said. "The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due-process procedures."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the Jews have a pope? For most of the last 2,000 years, the answer has been “no.” Rabbinic authority has been decentralized, with each community choosing its own religious leaders to follow. But now Israel’s Chief Rabbinate is seeking to monopolize and centralize control over Jewish law through the power of the state of Israel. A few Orthodox rabbis are fighting back, like those who announced a new conversion court this week. Because Israel won’t recognize the court, the battle is going to be joined in earnest.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s been 150 years since U.S. law allowed masters to rape enslaved girls and women. Almost all modern Muslim societies banned slavery in the last century. So why is Islamic State turning back the clock, actively embracing and promoting enslavement of Yazidi women, thereby enabling them to be raped under one interpretation of classical Islamic law? Islamic State’s goal isn’t primarily about money or sex, but about sending the message that they are creating an Islamic utopia, following the practices of the era of the Prophet Muhammad. They want to go back in time, to the days of the earliest Muslims and the Prophet’s companions. The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.

An op-ed by Johanna Wald. One could almost hear a collective sigh of relief emanating from the Massachusetts criminal justice reform community at the announcement last week that the state would—finally—begin a long-overdue Justice Reinvestment effort. While more than 20 states have already undergone this data driven process aimed at reducing rates of incarceration, “liberal” Massachusetts had been strangely resistant to the federally-backed initiative. In fact, the Legislature veered off in the opposite direction several years ago, passing a controversial “Three Strikes” law to increase mandatory sentences for some offenses.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Earlier this week I launched a committee to explore the possibility of running in the Democratic Primary to be a very different kind of president. As I explained then, the run would be a referendum around a very simple idea: that if, as Elizabeth Warren puts it, “the system is rigged,” then we need a plan to fix that rigged system. My plan is a referendum. My candidacy would be a referendum. Elected with a single mandate to end this corrupted system, I would serve only as long as it takes to pass fundamental reform. I would then resign, and the vice president would become president. The most common (polite) reaction to this obviously implausible idea was two words: Bernie Sanders.

Lawrence Lessig wants to be president—for a day. The Harvard law professor, who says his top priority is to “unrig this rigged system,” is launching an unconventional bid to be what he calls a “referendum president.” His idea is straightforward: If elected, Mr. Lessig would take action to overhaul campaign-finance laws and end what he describes as voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Then — perhaps even after a single day, though he acknowledges that’s “hopeful”—he would step aside and let his vice president lead. He says he would consider Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—who has repeatedly said she does not plan to run—to join him on the ticket.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It must be good news that Iraq’s parliament passed Prime Minister Haidar Al-Abadi’s anti-corruption reforms this week -- right? As with most things in Iraq, the answer isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface. In the abstract, it’s a nice idea for Iraq to stop dividing the spoils of government office among its denominational and ethnic factions. But that structure, with all its obvious flaws and faults, was built into the DNA of the Iraqi constitution for a reason: to help quell Sunni Arab fears that the Shiite majority, in collusion with the Kurdish minority, would dominate the Sunnis in perpetuity and refuse to share oil revenue.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s more than a little eerie to hear that authorities have declared a state of emergency in Ferguson, Missouri. The state of emergency, aka the state of siege, casts a long shadow over the history of government attempts to produce and maintain public order. States of emergency are the favored tool of dictators and would-be dictators who want to suspend regular, constitutional procedures. Their invocation often heralds a crackdown on civil liberties. In the case of St. Louis County, the reality is more complicated. The declared state of emergency does in fact give the elected county executive, Steve Stenger, almost absolute authority to declare a curfew and thereby order arrests and end protests.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. What would you think if a presidential candidate -- Republican or Democrat -- proposed a new federal program claiming to reduce poverty, boost employment, improve the health of infants and mothers, and increase the likelihood that people would graduate from college? You’d probably think the candidate was blowing a lot of smoke. Yet the earned income tax credit is doing every one of these things.

When the American Psychological Association (APA) voted 156-1 last week to ban psychologists from participating in national security interrogations, the lone dissenter was retired Colonel Larry James, a former chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. He is also one of the people who inspired the vote in the first place...In 2010, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic filed two ethical complaints against James for his work at the prison facilities, one in each of the two states he’s licensed to practice—Louisiana and Ohio. The complaint alleges that during his tenure at Guantanamo in 2003, “boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.” In 2009, Harvard Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, then a fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described an incident involving James at Guantanamo.

In the 1990’s and accelerating into the 2000’s, a number of major law firms adopted a two-tier partnership structure, mainly for economic reasons, legal experts said...Recently, though, that model has been coming under pressure. “When the market went in the downturn, firms found themselves with a lot of non-equity partners who had very little incentive to actually go out and get business, who were being paid a lot of money,” said David Wilkins, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the legal profession.

Five hundred years ago, cities were both smaller and more autonomous, their citizens happily exempt from the laws and obligations of the feudal countryside. Today, the situation is reversed. Roughly three-quarters of the developed world is urbanized. The bigger, richer, and more numerous that cities have become, the more their power has been absorbed by both nation-states and supranational bodies, like the European Union. ...Or, much like Congress on these issues, they might do nothing at all. Skeptics argue that the GPM threatens to add, not subtract, from the bureaucracy that makes it difficult for civic leaders to do their jobs. Some argue that mayors need more basic authority before lending it to others. Referring to Barber’s book, Harvard law professor Gerald Frug notes, “The more useful title would be ‘If Mayors Ruled Their Cities.’ ”

Senate Republicans announced new legislation Tuesday to bar the government from forcing business to provide insurance for drugs and services that violate their moral beliefs, tapping into renewed debates over religious liberty, abortion and the persistent legal fight over Obamacare’s birth control mandate...Holly Lynch, a bioethics expert at Harvard Law School who closely tracks the debate, said the new bill didn’t balance its focus on rights of conscience with a women’s access to services. “All these senators are doing is focusing on one side of the equation, and that is a serious problem,” she said.

President Obama’s climate-change plan will face a fierce challenge in the courts this fall, when lawyers for at least 15 states join the coal and power industries to block the carbon-reducing rules before they take effect...But other experts in environmental law say the outcome is hard to predict. “EPA will not have smooth sailing,” said Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus, noting the high court’s June ruling against another clean-air rule came as a “dose of cold water” for environmental advocates.

An epic legal battle is about to begin over President Obama's plan to address climate change, in which the Environmental Protection Agency is putting in place new limits on greenhouse gases from power plants. Critics argue the plan is on shaky legal ground, but the administration says it's prepared to defend the regulations in court...Others say the EPA is likely to prevail on that point. Harvard law professor Jody Freeman, a former legal expert on energy and climate change for the Obama administration, says the final version of the regulations is "far more legally defensible than the draft was." For example, Freeman notes that the draft version set emission targets for entire states instead of specific polluters. "Now, what EPA has done is put the regulatory burden directly on the power plants themselves to cut their pollution," she says. "That's just much more direct, and it aligns better with the Clean Air Act."