Media Mentions

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.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. For the first time in modern history, the leading issue concerning voters in the upcoming presidential election, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, is that “wealthy individuals and corporations will have too much influence over who wins.” Five years after the Supreme Court gave corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited amounts in political campaigns, voters have had enough...Real reform will require changing the way campaigns are funded — moving from large-dollar private funding to small-dollar public funding.

Maria Hinojosa, Ron Christie, Kenneth Mack, and Efrén C. Olivares join Melissa Harris-Perry to consider why some babies born in Texas are being denied birth certificates - even though the 14th Amendment should guarantee their citizenship.

Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel break [including Professor Kenneth Mack] down President Obama's unprecedented week, in which he addressed criminal justice reform, foreign policy, and more.

The federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination regulations ruled that civil rights law protects gays and lesbians, citing a Massachusetts lawsuit filed more than a decade ago, among other cases...In a ruling in 2002, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner denied the Postal Service’s bid to have the suit thrown out on the grounds that Title VII did not specifically mention sexual orientation...Gertner, who has retired from the bench and teaches at Harvard Law School, said Tuesday night that the commission ruling in the Miami case is the first time the agency has explicitly said the Chapter VII provision against sex discrimination applies to sexual orientation. “It is a big deal,” she said, adding that while the ruling does not affect Massachusetts, which has protections for gays and lesbians, “it would matter nationwide.”

...It would follow that once infrastructure investments decline, Internet prices should go down, but that hasn’t been the case. A study by Harvard scholar Susan Crawford and telecommunications analyst Mitchell Shapiro shows that while companies’ capital expenses have declined, they make more and more profit off of what exists.

...Indeed, less than 20% of the provisions relate to trade – the rest are economic and political issues. Obama's law mentor, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe together with other very senior US law experts agree that this is not a trade agreement. "It's about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When Texans, including Governor Greg Abbott, give credence to the possibility that the U.S. military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise is a pretext to occupy Texas and confiscate the people's guns, it's easy to dismiss them as paranoid fantasists. And certainly, those concerns are demonstrably paranoid. But it's paranoia that reflects a quintessentially American concern about the risks of a standing army -- one that goes back to James Madison, and is tied to the origins of the Second Amendment.

...“I think she really made the government angry because of her human rights work,” said Teng Biao, one of China’s best-known civil rights lawyers and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. “These lawyers are well organized and they are well connected. They can mobilize people through social media.”

...Readers have been shocked, dismayed, disillusioned and disoriented. But one thing they perhaps should not be, according to Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, is surprised.

...While circuit courts aren’t bound by each other’s rulings and the cases are not identical, the 10th Circuit’s narrow view of the Commerce Clause is sure to be raised in Minnesota’s appeal, said Ari Peskoe, energy fellow at Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative, which tracks energy litigation.

An article by Ted Hamilton '16. The video is no less horrifying for being familiar: a young black man surrounded by about 20 police officers, nearly all of them white, being beaten while offering no resistance. Tyree Carroll had been biking to his grandmother’s home in northwest Philadelphia late one April night when officers stopped him on suspicion of narcotics possession. What happened appears to be a textbook case of police brutality, at least according to the cellphone video of the incident released this month: a chokehold, repeated blows to the face and body, and hurled epithets. A bruised Carroll, the Philadelphia Police Department later said in a statement, was “transported to the hospital after intentionally striking his own head against the protective shield located in the police vehicle.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Japan’s Diet has begun the process of passing legislation that would authorize the country’s self-defense forces to fight in foreign conflicts, in apparent violation of the country’s pacifist constitution. And that’s a good thing, despite the apparent danger it poses to the rule of law. Behold the power -- and the danger -- of a living constitution.

Joining me is Congressman Bobby Scott, Democrat from Virginia, who is pushing a major criminal reform bill through Congress and Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree... One of the things that we`ve been doing...for race and justice at Harvard, we`ve been talking about how important it is to deal with mass incarceration, to deal with the fact that too many people are in jail, and we like this idea the president is thinking about people need to be treated and helped and given a second chance like we talked about decades ago. And I think that`s what is going to be very important.

Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth Mack weighs in on President Obama's unprecedented remarks about rape allegations surrounding Bill Cosby.

An article by Cass Sunstein. When Americans think about Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell. Does it make a plausible argument for continuing to display the Confederate flag? Not even close. But it does raise a host of questions—about winners’ narratives, about honor and humiliation, about memory, about innocence and guilt, about men and women, about what’s taken for granted, about the particularity of human lives, and about parallel worlds.