Media Mentions

Everything about Berry Bros. and Rudd's showroom in St James’s Street, London, suggests tradition. The walls are panelled in dark oak. Leather-bound volumes record “the weights of customers of this establishment” from 1765 onwards, sitting alongside a set of weights from a time when the shop sold coffee rather than alcohol. Simon Berry represents the 7th generation of Berrys to run the company, and he looks the part. ... John Coates and Reiner Kraakman, of Harvard Law School, who studied the tenure of CEOs in the Standard & Poor’s 500 in 1992-2004, found that those who held more than 1% of the stock (which includes family firms) were at the helm for an average of 13.4 years, compared with 5.5 years for other companies.

In the first legal test of the Obama administration's plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, two of three federal judges hearing a challenge to the regulations on Thursday expressed skepticism about weighing in before they are formally adopted. ... The high-profile hearing featured arguments by Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama mentor. Working on behalf of Peabody Energy Corporation, which intervened in the case, Tribe said EPA's proposal was an unconstitutional attempt to circumvent the law. "It's clear they're trying to make law, not execute law," he said.

A messy scene erupted this week outside Harvard president Drew Faust’s office as students and activists protested the university’s refusal to shed its investments in the fossil fuel industry. ... Some student activists and faculty dismissed the forum because, in contrast to MIT’s debate, divestment was not the main focus. Panelists briefly discussed the issue, but most did not agree it is a good option. “It seems like they’re trying to distract from the issue,” said Ted Hamilton, a second-year law school student who stood outside the forum, which required a ticket to enter.

President Obama’s most far-reaching regulation to slow climate change will have its first day in court on Thursday, the beginning of what is expected to be a multiyear legal battle over the policy that Mr. Obama hopes to leave as his signature environmental achievement. ... Among the lawyers arguing on behalf of the coal companies is Laurence H. Tribe, a renowned Harvard scholar of constitutional law, who was also a mentor to Mr. Obama when he attended law school. Republicans who opposed the rule have cheered Mr. Tribe’s role in the case. Legal experts say it is also possible that the judges could throw the case out, since the rule has only been proposed and thus contains language that could change when released in the final form. “Is industry right that the agency lacks the authority to regulate? The challenge is extremely unusual, since the rule is proposed, and not final,” said Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard University’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to Mr. Obama. “For a court to entertain that would go against decades and decades of precedent.”  

An op-ed by Asher Herzog ’16: In the 10th grade I studied the same tractate of Talmud that I did in the 5th grade. I remember cynically telling my rabbi at the time that this made no sense and that I had already covered the material. He answered me that the changes within me, and the changes in the world around me, made learning the same exact material a completely different experience, and that I would gain something completely different out of the material this time around. He was predictably correct, and I recall this learning experience every year when Yom Hashoah comes around. Every year millions of Jews around the world spend at least one day of the year trying to make sense out of the incomprehensible events of the Holocaust. We grieve for the six million who died purely for being Jewish, and attend events that endeavor to in some way memorialize this unfathomable number.  However, every year we find that though the horrific events of the Holocaust do not change over time, the changes within us and the world around us can make our receipt and remembrance of these same events very different experiences. Unfortunately, the change in the world around us this past year makes this Yom Hashoah a particularly layered and difficult experience.

Two black intellectuals engaged in a heated exchange at UCLA this week over the high homicide rate among young black men and the shooting deaths of black men by racist or lawless police officers, with one arguing that’s not the main problem facing the black community and the other suggesting it’s a huge crisis.The dispute took place during a debate on campus titled “Liberal Policies Make it Harder for Black Americans to Succeed” between Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal and Harvard law school Professor Randall Kennedy. ... “That is a huge problem that is going to require a multi-focus,” Kennedy responded. “… I am not saying white racism is the all- purpose explanation for what we are talking about. I am saying is what we are going to have to do is address many different things. One of those things, however, is the problem of police.”

One of the great mysteries of the scientific world is what happens to Ph.D. recipients after they finish their degrees. Only a small percentage get the tenure-track faculty positions they ostensibly spent years training for. The rest move on to other careers, obviously, but little is currently known about their exact destinations. Now Melanie Sinche of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School is trying to learn more. “If you earned a PhD in any of the physical, life, computational, engineering, or social sciences between 2004 and 2014 and have ever worked, trained, or studied in the U.S.,” you can help by participating in a confidential online survey estimated to take about 15 minutes. Sinche wants to know “where recent science PhDs are currently employed” so that she can “create a visual map of career clusters,” according to the survey website. The study also aims to “identify the skills and experiences required to enter different fields, and … determine whether these skills were developed in the educational/training period of the PhD or on the job, thereby informing the design of graduate and postdoctoral training programs.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Is the European Union out to get Google? You might think so, considering that EU regulators are poised to bring anti-competitive-conduct charges against the search giant, while U.S. regulators happily settled their differences with Google a couple of years ago. Add the European regulatory efforts to force Google to let people eliminate certain permanent-seeming records of their past conduct, and you might think there's some deeper cultural explanation, such as old world skepticism of new world technology.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The big murder trial that’s been obsessing Bostonians has ended with a guilty verdict. No, you're not having déjà vu. Today's jury decision came in the case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star tight end. Hernandez was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, a semiprofessional football player who was also dating Hernandez's fiancée’s sister. Although the motive remains shady, it seems possible that the 2013 murder was connected to the still unresolved criminal charge that Hernandez killed two other people the year before -- strangers who accidentally insulted him in a nightclub. If that charge also turns out to be true, then Hernandez killed almost as many people as the Tsarnaev brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago today.

Another day, another town. Ryan T. Anderson, the conservative movement’s fresh-faced, millennial, Ivy League-educated spokesman against same-sex marriage, has another busy schedule. ... Discourteous is not a description usually applied to Anderson. “He’s a smart, likeable, very well-educated young person: an ideal spokesperson for the opposition to gay marriage,” Harvard law professor Michael Klarman, who recently sparred with Anderson at a law school event, writes in an e-mail. But Klarman, who wrote the book “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” adds, “It’s almost inconceivable to me that he persuaded anyone in the audience by his arguments.”

The environmental case being argued on Thursday in a federal appeals court in Washington is equal parts legal freak show and serious legal business. On the serious side, it is the latest attempt by fossil-fuel interests to embalm the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama administration's climate plan. But it is the legal sideshow orchestrated by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard that is unsettling to many environmental lawyers. ... Jody Freeman, another Harvard law professor, called the challenge’s timing "extremely unusual," and Harvard’s Richard Lazarus, who called the legislative history of the disputed clauses in the law "beyond novel" and "really bizarre." Both professors strongly disagree with Tribe’s arguments.  

A simple google search for the word “sharia” illustrates the magnitude of the gap Harvard Law School (HLS) professor Intisar A. Rabb wants to fill. Up top, there’s a 2,000-word overview from the Council on Foreign Relations, along with the usual Wikipedia link. But even on that first page of results, there’s also a far less neutral take from a Christian missionary website, and an alarmist article on sharia law in Dearborn, Michigan, that on further investigation turns out to come from the satirical news site National Report.

Environmental activists at Harvard are hoping to flip the equation on global warming this week: instead of climate change bringing rising temperatures, they hope adding heat to the discussion will change the climate of the University’s approach to the issue. ... Joseph Hamilton, a Harvard Law student with Harvard Climate Justice Coalition, told ThinkProgress that while it’s great to have as much discussion about climate change as we can, Climate Week was “definitely a deflection.” He said it had a marked absence of voices from the social movement or from the student body. “It’s no coincidence that they announced Climate Week after we announced Heat Week,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that there’s no serious engagement with the divestment issue.” Hamilton, who is participating in the sit-in this week, is part of a group of seven student plaintiffs that have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the University to divest its fossil fuel holdings. In March, a Massachusetts trial court sided with Harvard Corporation and dismissed the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are preparing to file an appeal. Hamilton said the concerns of those participating in Heat Week and those filing the lawsuit are the same.

University President Drew G. Faust did not address Divest Harvard’s ongoing blockade of Massachusetts Hall, which houses her office, when she introduced a panel discussion on climate change on Monday. After Faust introduced the panel, the group of seven climate change experts and talk show host Charlie Rose, who moderated the discussion, covered topics ranging from national energy policy to divestment at Harvard. ... Faust has long said that Harvard should not divest from fossil fuels, though she did not discuss the issue at Monday’s event. Some professors said they have advocated for an open discussion to engage with Faust on the issue of divestment at Harvard. James M. Recht, an assistant professor at the Medical School, and Bruce L. Hay, a Law School professor, said they were disappointed that that Monday’s event did not address that request. The panel, on the other hand, did address the topic of divestment, and different members debated how the University should engage the question of divesting the endowment from fossil fuels.

A congressional drafting error and clunky phrase is putting a second of President Barack Obama’s signature endeavors in jeopardy. This time it’s climate change. Challengers to Obama’s policies are exploiting a law written 25 years ago in a lawsuit to derail Environmental Protection Agency rules designed to curb carbon emissions. The case, using a line of attack similar to one against his massive health-care overhaul, is set for a hearing Thursday in federal court. ...To add legal heft, coal producer Peabody Energy Corp. hired Laurence Tribe, Obama’s law professor and mentor at Harvard University, to help. Tribe, a leading liberal constitutional scholar, has argued 35 cases at the Supreme Court, including the 2000 election case for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore over Republican George W. Bush.

As top-notch experts met at Harvard University to discuss global warming impacts and solutions Monday, dozens of Harvard students and alumni held protests encouraging the university to divest from fossil fuels...Ted Hamilton, a second-year Harvard law student who was part of the Massachusetts Hall blockade, said he was "pretty disappointed" by the presidential panel. It was a "conversation in a bubble," he said, with lots of talk about solutions but "no imagination" about how to scale up the solutions to a global level...Hamilton's classmate Sima Atri, a third-year law student, said she's frustrated at the administration's refusal to hold open, on-the-record discussions about divestment. In contrast, she said, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—just a few miles down the road from Harvard—held a public debate last week about the pros and cons of divestment.

A letter by Charles Fried and Robert Mnookin. Your editorial entitled “Title IX and University Administration” argues the importance of uniform Title IX procedures across “One Harvard." Uniformity in some matters is good, but you do not say why it is needed for this one. The reason the law faculty drafted its own procedures was the overwhelming sentiment in our faculty that the university’s Title IX procedures were so unfair as to be unacceptable. At our meetings not a single faculty member spoke in defense of the university’s procedures. And, after all, procedure is what we do. If we had not been allowed to draft our own procedures a strong denunciation by the faculty would almost certainly have followed and would have made law suits by accused students a virtual certainty.

...John Iovine, his health still a work in progress, was finally sent home in April of last year, after several months in a rehab facility. And this moment in a patient's recovery--when they seemingly have to sink or swim on their own--is the one that everyone in the health system is paying attention to right now. For too long, too many Johns sunk, ending up right back in the hospital. The industry calls these preventable readmissions, and they are a huge drain, costing Medicare alone $15 billion annually..."I think there is a lot of interest in the area right now, and it is a great coming together of the healthcare world and the computer science world, as well as the patient experience world," says I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, who has written about the legal and ethical concerns raised by the collision of health care and big data. He believes there are still gray areas, though, about ownership and control of the information. "Here there are questions of whether people whose data is going to be used to build the engine have the right to opt out, do they have to affirmatively opt in? Do they have to even be notified it's being used?"

An op-ed by Martha Minow and Sharon Browne. Although our economy is improving, the experiences of many truly poor people in this country remain very challenging. The legal rights of low-income Americans struggling with the many burdens of poverty must be protected, and that has been essential to the mission of the Legal Services Corporation since it was authorized in 1974 as one of the last acts of the Nixon Administration. Legal rights are not self-enforcing. The availability of legal advice and counsel can make all the difference to low-income Americans who are fighting to avert unlawful foreclosure, escape domestic violence, secure veterans’ benefits, or address many other legal challenges that go to the heart of their security and well-being.

For the second time in less than a year, the Yale School of Medicine is embroiled in charges of sexual harassment. A nephrology professor, Dr. Rex L. Mahnensmith, who worked at the university for over 20 years, has been accused of a pattern of sexual harassment while he was medical director of the New Haven Dialysis Clinic, where university physicians treat their patients...Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School, said universities that might have looked the other way when confronted with such accusations were “all of a sudden finding that there’s a realistic risk of losing funding if they don’t take complaints seriously.”

...Pastor Barclay’s story puts the recent flap about Religious Freedom Restoration Acts in perspective. Many supporters of both the Indiana and Arkansas laws claimed that new “religious liberty” legislation was needed to prevent Caesar from dragging ministers from the pulpit...Most of the furor surrounding the Indiana and Arkansas statutes has concerned “public accommodations,” meaning certain businesses holding themselves open to the public. Since at least the sixteenth century, English courts required certain businesses—inns, stagecoaches (and then railroads), companies that carried goods, surgeons, and even blacksmiths—to serve any customer who could pay. The rationale, according to Harvard Law Professor Joseph Singer, was that by “holding themselves open to the public,” they offered a binding contract to everyone, and had to honor it. In Singer’s account, the “traditional” right of a property owner to refuse service at whim is relatively recent. It arose after the Civil War, when newly freed African Americans were using the vote and access to the courts to seek inclusion in Southern politics and the economy.