Media Mentions

The spread of hepatitis C could be grossly underreported, with fewer than 1 percent of cases reported to federal public health officials, while tens of thousands could be undetected, according to researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital who say the growing opioid crisis is 
fueling the problem....Another study out this week, co-authored by Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy, focused on the difficulty addicts have obtaining Medicaid coverage for costly medications. A highly effective drug, Sovaldi by Gilead, costs about $84,000 for a 12-week course. “We are seeing a decrease in cost of treatments, and haven’t seen a commensurate lessening of coverage restrictions,” Greenwald said. Under some programs within MassHealth, patients must be sober for at least six months — which cuts many addicts out of treatment.

When it comes to healthcare costs, there's what you may owe the hospital, what you may owe your doctor and what you may owe the drugstore. Most patients would probably agree that paying an additional fee solely to receive your bill is a bit much..."Businesses hate class actions because, otherwise, they could continue getting away with mischarging for small amounts," said William Rubenstein, a Harvard University law professor. "No one would ever sue them."

An op-ed by Mark Roe. A deal between Greece and its creditors might not happen. Several factors are in flux; Greek and northern European interests are not aligned; and personal animosities are in play. For Greece, an exit from the euro would not be easy, but if the alternative is endless austerity without debt forgiveness, its government may conclude that leaving the eurozone is the better choice.

Shortly after Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in 2007, he established his own firm, Jeb Bush & Associates, designed to maximize his earning potential as one of the country’s more prominent politicians. Tax returns disclosed this week by the Republican’s presidential campaign revealed that the business not only made him rich but also provided a steady income for his wife and one of his sons...Daniel Halperin, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in pensions, said federal law allows companies to take a tax write-off for large pension contributions in an effort to encourage them to offer solid retirement plans to their employees. He said those rules make less sense in the case of Jeb Bush & Associates, which offers the plan to only two people. “It is generous,” Halperin said. But, he added, “the law allows them to be generous.”

Religious nonprofits hoping to force yet another Obamacare showdown before the Supreme Court haven’t chalked up the appellate win they need to put the issue on a glide path to the justices, but they aren’t losing faith, saying it’s only a matter of time before their legal campaign pays off...Holly Lynch, a bioethics expert at Harvard Law School who has tracked the debate, said circuit courts don’t necessarily take their cues from each other. “That’s how we get splits,” she said. “However, it is plausible to think that a judge is more likely to be swayed by an argument she or he knows that other judges have found legally persuasive — even more so if they know that lots of other judges have found the same way.”

Corporations are turning to the nation’s biggest business lobby to help fend off activist investors such as Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is forming a coalition to make sure “long-term value creation” drives public companies’ decisions, according to a letter it sent last week to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White. The group plans to weigh in on regulations that affect corporate governance, the letter said...If the chamber’s coalition wants to “facilitate long-term value creation, they should support reforms that strengthen shareholder rights and oppose arrangements that insulate managements from shareholders,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Sarah Jeong and Kendra Albert `16. The privacy of countless website owners is at risk, thanks to a proposal in front of the byzantine international organization at the heart of the Internet: ICANN. If adopted, the new proposal could limit access to proxy and privacy services, which protect domain registrants from having their home addresses exposed to everyone on the Internet.

...Business Insider reached out to Bruce Schneier to discuss the feasibility of Cameron' proposed ban on "safe spaces" online. Schneier is a widely respected crypography and security expert and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, serves on the board of digital liberties pressure group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and writes frequently on encryption and security. He didn't hold back..."My immediate reaction was disbelief, followed by confusion and despair. When I first read about Cameron's remarks, I was convinced he had no idea what he was really proposing. The idea is so preposterous that it was hard to imagine it being seriously suggested."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Greeks invented democracy. So it might seem natural and appropriate that they’re having a referendum Sunday to decide whether to take a bailout deal previously offered by the European Union that would require austerity measures. But in fact, under conditions of crisis, a referendum is a truly terrible idea. There are times when going around elected representatives is democratically valuable -- but in the middle of a life-or-death negotiation isn’t one of them. It’s a fantasy to think that some magical “popular will” can emerge from the vote by a divided Greek public.

It was a historic term, a surprisingly liberal term — and a nasty term...The outcomes this term were so much of a turnaround that the liberal justices looked positively serene, even perky, in June, while the tone of the conservative dissents was unusually harsh..."[Scalia] wrote the nastiest thing I have read in any Supreme Court opinion," says Charles Fried, who served as the government's chief advocate in the Supreme Court during the Reagan administration...Fried, now a professor at Harvard Law School, says that in some ways, Kennedy's opinion provoked that reaction. He says that Kennedy should have focused on legal precedents instead of poetic passages. In particular, the court's 1967 decision striking down state bans on interracial marriage, and two more recent decisions dealing with same-sex relations and marriage. Those three court precedents dictated the result, Fried maintains, adding, "That is the law. Suck it up!"

Former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1994. She presided over trials for 17 years. And Sunday, she stood before a crowd at The Aspen Ideas Festival to denounce most punishments that she imposed. Among 500 sanctions that she handed down, “80 percent I believe were unfair and disproportionate,” she said...No theory of retribution or social change could justify them, she said. And that dispiriting conclusion inspired the radical idea that she presented: a call for the U.S. to mimic its decision after World War II to look to the future and rebuild rather than trying to punish or seek retribution. As she sees it, the War on Drugs ought to end in that same spirit. “Although we were not remotely the victors of that war, we need a big idea in order to deal with those who were its victims,” she said, calling for something like a Marshall Plan.

An op-ed by Charles Ogletree. The last time I visited Shreveport, the Confederate flag still adorned the Caddo Parish Courthouse. It was 2011 and I came to meet with Carl Staples, the man who refused to serve on a jury so long as that flag — a symbol of one of the most "heinous crimes ever committed to another member of the human race" — flew over the courthouse lawn. How could we be here for justice, Staples asked, when we "overlook this great injustice by continuing to fly this flag?" When I heard about Staples' courage I had to meet him. It was an honor to stand with him and Caddo Parish's community, business and church leaders as they asked the Caddo Parish Commission to take down that flag.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The government focused on the claim that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not show remorse for his heinous, unimaginable crime until last week’s sentencing proceeding. That, counsel suggested, was too little, too late. Why was Tsarnaev silent during the penalty phase, when his life was on the line, only to speak after the jury chose death, when it no longer mattered? The sealed docket entries, the arguments of counsel, the documents that have been kept from the public, may hold the clue.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You didn’t really think you could get out of this U.S. Supreme Court term without a teaser about the next big case, did you? On its last day of public business until the first Monday in October, the court dropped a big hint about next season’s episodes. It agreed to hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which squarely poses the question of whether the basic public-union arrangement that’s been in place since 1977 violates the First Amendment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The end of this term at the U.S. Supreme Court felt like the culmination of an era -- or rather of two eras. Periods in the history of the court tend to form in relation to the great, defining political issues of the day, which eventually make their way to the court in legal guise. The gay-marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, marks the culmination of a 25-year period of gay-rights decisions that coincided with an era of gay-rights advocacy, starting with the 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York. The Affordable Care Act case, King v. Burwell, belongs to a shorter wave of cases, challenges to the social and economic legislation enacted partly in reaction to the financial crisis of 2007-08.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Score one for the living Constitution. No, not gay marriage, which the framers couldn’t have imagined as a fundamental constitutional right, yet became one last week. Monday's winner is the referendum, which the framers would’ve hated but has been part of our government for more than a century. The case, Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Districting Commission, involved an obscure provision of the Constitution that was actually extremely important to those who drafted it during the long, hot summer of 1787.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a significant defeat for Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote Monday rejected emissions regulations for power plants because the agency didn’t engage in a full-blown cost-benefit analysis at the very first stage of its regulatory process. From the Obama administration’s perspective, if it had to lose Justice Anthony Kennedy’s deciding vote in one high-profile case this term, it was better for it to lose this environmental case than the Affordable Care Act decision. But the loss will still smart for environmentalists.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Other justices appointed by Republicans, most notably Harry Blackmun, turned to the left toward the end of their careers, as Justice Anthony Kennedy has gradually and selectively done. But Blackmun’s turn famously included a refusal to tinker with the “machinery of death,” and a consequent rejection of capital punishment. On the last day of the U.S. Supreme Court term, Kennedy showed he wasn’t even close to there. He provided the fifth and deciding vote Monday to reject death-row inmates’ claim that the drug midazolam, part of the drug cocktail designed to render you unconscious before killing you, is unconstitutionally ineffective.

China adopted a sweeping, new national security law that the government says is needed to counter emerging threats but that critics say may be used to quash dissent and exclude foreign investment. Approved by the legislature’s standing committee Wednesday, the law sets an expansive definition of national security that outlaws threats to China’s government, sovereignty, national unity, as well as its economy, society and cyber and space interests...“This law will legitimize the abuse of power by state and public security bureaus,” said Teng Biao, a prominent Chinese lawyer who was detained in the past over his rights activism, and is now a fellow at Harvard Law School. “For the Communist Party, the rule of law means using legislation as a tool of control.”

The Supreme Court will once again take up affirmative action in college admissions. The Court announced Monday it would review whether considering race and ethnicity while building a college class is constitutional..."It's always been a highly contentious issue," says Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who teaches law and history at Harvard. Brown-Nagin says the Court is taking up affirmative action at a time when the country is debating questions of access for students of color. "It's incredibly competitive to be admitted to selective institutions of higher education," she says. "On the one hand you have the continuing controversy over the use of race in admission. On the other hand you have a lot of anxiety in the public about whether students will be admitted to college."

The secretariat of strategic affairs in Brasília lies in a nondescript ministry building in the middle of the plano piloto — the aircraft-shaped street layout of Brazil’s modernist capital. The job of its new minister, philosopher and Harvard law professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is to chart a long-term development plan for President Dilma Rousseff, whose palace lies a kilometre away in the “cockpit” of the plano piloto. It is not an easy task. Latin America’s largest economy is suffering increased turbulence from the end of the commodities super cycle and a credit-driven consumption boom. Economists forecast the economy will shrink nearly 1.5 per cent this year. Unemployment is increasing fast. “The underlying frailty of the system that we built was its very low productivity,” said Mr Unger, one of Brazil’s best-known academics internationally who won tenure at Harvard Law School aged just 29 in 1976.