Media Mentions

Much of Bernie Sanders' career is centered around his disgust for money in politics. He hates the fact of it, hates its effects, and, naturally, he has deep disdain for the process of raising it. The bigger the number, the more contempt he has. “I don’t do these fundraisers for $100,000 apiece or $10,000,” the Vermont senator, a self-described independent socialist, spat in his heavy Brooklyn accent during a recent speech to the National Press Club...“Hillary’s weakness, to the extent that she has one, is the perception that she’s part of an old system of influence and that she is as close to the influence game as anybody,” Harvard law professor Larry Lessig said in an interview. Lessig just led a failed $10 million effort to elect campaign-finance reformers to Congress. “What Bernie’s saying is, ‘Don’t elect a person who’s part of the problem.’ It’s not impossible that the issue blows up during the primary and she’s on the wrong side of it. And it’s not completely stupid to imagine that she fails because of it.”

Khairullozhon Matanov deliberated with his attorneys three times before hesitantly pleading guilty yesterday to all four counts of obstructing the 2013 investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing. This was not an easy decision for him to make. “The whole case is mystery,” he wrote to The Daily Beast last fall. “FBI is trying to destroy my life.” If Judge William Young agrees to the deal, he’ll get 30 months in prison, including 10 months he’s already served. If he goes to trial and is found guilty, he could spend the next 20 years behind bars...“There is no obligation to turn in your neighbor,” explains former federal judge and Harvard law professor Nancy Gertner. “It is a crime not to tell on your neighbors in Soviet countries, but not here.”

An op-ed by Jody Freeman and Richard J. Lazarus. When Mitch McConnell sent his recent letter to the nation’s governors urging them to ignore the White House’s upcoming clean-power rules, it was striking for two reasons. First, as the headlines pointed out, it’s a dramatic moment when a congressional leader openly tries to rally the states against a new federal policy. And second, McConnell’s legal justification relies on none other than Laurence Tribe—Barack Obama’s former law professor, and one of the nation’s top liberal law scholars—to argue that the upcoming EPA rules are unconstitutional.

Following controversy surrounding her role in an online video, Robin Steinberg, a New York public defender whose invitation to a Harvard Law School event was rescinded earlier this year, will deliver the inaugural “Trailblazer” lecture there in April. The “Trailblazer” lecture is hosted by the Criminal Justice Institute, directed by Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan. Efforts to bring Steinberg to Cambridge began after pushback against the decision to rescind her initial invitation. “We felt that it was only fair that she had the opportunity to speak,” Sullivan said. “Ms. Steinberg has made significant and groundbreaking contributions in the area of criminal law.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s the difference between an opinion and a fact? That sounds like a question of philosophy, or language, or maybe social science -- but it’s also a highly practical question of law, one the U.S. Supreme Court decided Tuesday in a case about registration statements filed by issuing companies under the Securities and Exchange Act. The court tried to frame a compromise between the interests of corporations that issue securities and securities class-action lawyers, whose job it is to keep the corporations honest and get rich in the process. The compromise had two parts.

Internet service providers have filed suit against the FCC over its recent decision to regulate broadband internet as a public utility, alleging the decision hamstrings the ability of private industry to offer customers new and innovative products...Praised by some and reviled by others, the FCC's decision mostly preserved the status quo, says Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain. In a Big Think interview, Zittrain discusses the unusually strong protection the government has given to the internet, which protects users as well as keeps companies from offering a suite of products to its customers.

Harvard's fossil fuel divestment movement recently hit a snag. Last week, a Massachusetts court dismissed a novel lawsuit brought by seven Harvard students seeking to make the university in Cambridge, Mass., divest its $36.4 billion endowment of holdings in major coal, oil and natural gas companies...Alice Cherry, a plaintiff in the case and a second-year law student at Harvard, told InsideClimate News that she and the other students plan to appeal. This is the first time students have attempted to use a lawsuit to force fossil fuel divestment. Cherry said she believes "lawsuits could be an important part of escalating the divestment movement going forward."

It isn’t easy to reform the campaign finance system. Ask Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who last year raised $11 million to elect candidates who favored restrictions on unlimited contributions and spending only to find he’d become the issue’s latest Don Quixote. But he’s back with a new plan, and other groups are trying new lines of attack, hoping to change the behavior of candidates and lawmakers through rewards and punishments.

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin. Today Harvard faces a serious governance problem that requires institutional change. When we first came here, the university was organized on the constitutional principle: “Each tub on its own bottom.” This meant first of all that each of the component schools (arts and sciences, medical school, law school, and so on) had not only a high degree of budgetary independence but also that its faculty and dean had a large measure of autonomy. And at the level of the schools such administrators as there were worked under the direction of the dean and in close cooperation with faculty committees. Correspondingly, the central administration was very small: There were four vice presidents to oversee administration, alumni affairs and development, finance, and government relations, and a general counsel...The time has come for Harvard to institute, as other universities have done, a representative faculty senate that would include ladder-rank faculty from all schools in the university.

‘Even the East Germans couldn’t follow everybody all the time,” Bruce Schneier writes. “Now it’s easy.” This may sound hyperbolic, but Schneier’s lucid and compelling “Data and Goliath” is free of the hysteria that often accompanies discussions about surveillance. Yes, our current location, purchases, reading history, driving speed and Internet use are being tracked and recorded. But Schneier’s book, which focuses mainly on the United States, is not a rant against the usual bad guys such as the U.S. government or Facebook. Schneier describes how our data is tracked by both corporate and government entities, often working together. And in many cases, the American people allow them to do it...The theme of dangerous little brothers is central to Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum’s “The Future of Violence,” a lively and often terrifying exploration of the dark side of our technological age. Technology is increasingly cheap and widely available, a trend that can help empower the masses and weaken central governments. Sounds great, right? We tend to celebrate this phenomenon when individual dissidents use social media to provoke authoritarian regimes. But what happens when these tools of mass empowerment fall into the wrong hands?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Critics of the Supreme Court's conservative wing like to say it’s instinctively pro-business. The justices on Tuesday will test that proposition in a fascinating case about whether bankruptcy law instructs judges to void liens on underwater properties. On one side lie the interests of Bank of America, which is the petitioner and doesn't want the loans to be “stripped off,” that is, voided. On the other side is the plain statutory text, which says they should be. The poetic twist is that, in a very similar 1992 case, the Supreme Court ignored the plain text and held in favor of the banks -- over the forceful dissent of one Justice Antonin Scalia.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The personalized license plate is as American as … well, ever seen a plate with a design celebrating your favorite soda in any other country? Today, not for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the equally quirky American question of free speech in the license plate context. At issue is a decision by Texas to block an organization from using the Confederate battle flag as a license plate logo. Many free-speech advocates think the state shouldn’t be able to pick and choose what symbols should appear. Texas wants to exclude a flag that has come to symbolize the violent repression of black Americans. Who’s right? There’s a legal answer to this question, but it turns out to be surprisingly complicated.

Advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to potentially dangerous technologies. Authors Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum explore what this means for how government should protect our us.

A Massachusetts Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of Harvard students against the University late last year, which urged Harvard to divest from fossil fuel companies. “Plaintiffs have brought their advocacy, fervent and articulate and admirable as it is, to a forum that cannot grant the relief they seek,” reads the memo, signed by Superior Court Justice Paul D. Wilson. The 11-page complaint, filed last November by seven Harvard students who call themselves the Harvard Climate Justice Coalition, claimed Harvard’s investment in fossil fuels is “a breach of [Harvard’s] fiduciary and charitable duties as a public charity and nonprofit corporation.” The plaintiffs, all members of the activist group Divest Harvard, also charged that the University is misallocating its funds by investing in “abnormally dangerous activities.” The group plans to appeal the decision, according to Harvard Law School student Joseph “Ted” E. Hamilton, [`16] one of the plaintiffs.

‘As a thought experiment,” write Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum, “imagine a world composed of billions of people walking around with nuclear weapons in their pockets.” If such an exercise doesn’t strike you as bonkers, then I’ve got an enthusiastic book recommendation for you. Sadly for the rest of us, the fear-mongering in “The Future of Violence” is no laughing matter but rather a depressingly accurate summation of how centrist Washington has come to view the democratization of technology: with a distrust bordering on panic. Mr. Wittes and Ms. Blum, from their respective perches at the Brookings Institution and Harvard Law School, are worried chiefly about what they almost pejoratively describe as “technologies of mass empowerment”—the Internet, gene-splicing, nanotechnology, robots, 3-D printing and so forth.

At Harvard Law School, contentious legal debates are commonplace. Whether in a classroom, over lunch, or in the pages of one of the school’s many legal journals, professors and students respond to, critique, and question one another’s views. But notably, over the past week, University professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 and Law School professors Richard J. Lazarus and Jody Freeman, in what Tribe described as an “uncommon event in Harvard Law School’s history,” took the discussion to the Harvard Law Today website. The exchange began after Tribe testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Power on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan.”

Liberals used to love the First Amendment. But that was in an era when courts used it mostly to protect powerless people like civil rights activists and war protesters. These days, a provocative new study says, there has been a “corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” The assertion is backed by data, and it comes from an unlikely source: John C. Coates IV, who teaches business law at Harvard and used to be a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the prominent corporate law firm. “Corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment,” Professor Coates wrote. The trend, he added, is “recent but accelerating.” Professor Coates’s study was only partly concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions amplifying the role of money in politics. “It’s not just Citizens United,” he said in an interview, referring to the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations in elections. His study, he said, analyzed First Amendment challenges from businesses to an array of economic regulations...In a recent essay, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, offered a cautious partial defense of the Citizens United decision. But he said it was an instance of a larger phenomenon. “It is part of a trend in First Amendment law that is transforming that body of doctrine into a charter of largely untrammeled libertarianism,” he wrote, “in which the regulation of virtually all forms of speech and all kinds of speakers is treated with the same heavy dose of judicial skepticism, with exceptions perversely calculated to expose particularly vulnerable and valuable sorts of expression to unconvincingly justified suppression.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Who needs law school? For centuries, the answer in the English-speaking world was: no one. You prepared for the bar by serving as an apprentice or an intern alongside practicing lawyers. Sure, you had to read a lot of cases. At first, they probably made no sense. But over time, you learned by watching and doing to connect the decisions in the books with real cases and real clients. Today there’s renewed talk of returning to a world where you could join the bar after extended internships rather than formal legal study. I’m a law professor, so you’d expect me to defend the current system. Before I do, however, let me make a big admission: Law school isn’t really necessary for lawyers or their clients...Yet law school is absolutely essential -- not for lawyers with clients, but for our society as a whole. The reason has everything to do with what makes law distinct as a social phenomenon.

With a bit of technical knowledge and a good imagination, any malevolent person may soon be able to eradicate the human race. This is a mildly exaggerated version of a fundamental claim in The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat, an alarming and informative new book by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriela Blum.

You need to know this number: $18,433. That's the median amount in a 401(k) savings account, according to a recent report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Almost 40 percent of employees have less than $10,000, even as the proportion of companies offering alternatives like defined benefit pensions continues to drop..."Nobody thought they were going to take over the world," said Daniel Halperin, a professor at Harvard Law School. who was a senior official at the Treasury Department when 401(k) accounts came into being..."401(k)'s changed two things: you could choose not to participate, and you chose your own investments, which a lot of people, I think, screw up," Halperin said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attaching himself to an unlikely bedfellow in his growing efforts to take down President Barack Obama’s climate plan. Liberal legal lion Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who taught constitutional law to President Barack Obama, is the new GOP darling in the fight against the Environmental Protection Agency’s upcoming climate regulations for power plants. Tribe handed Republicans a ready-made talking point during a House hearing this week, when he accused his former student of “burning the Constitution” in the effort to combat global warming. And two days later, McConnell pointed to Tribe in a letter Thursday to the governors of all 50 states, urging them to refuse to comply with EPA’s climate rules.