Media Mentions

An op-ed by Kayleigh McEnany [`16]. In an astonishing display of disrespect, police protesters defiled a fallen officer memorial in Denver, Colorado on Saturday, covering it in fake blood. As if this bloody, distasteful symbol was not enough, one protester knelt down and shot a bird in front of the memorial, an image the activist group “Anonymous” opted to tweet out to it’s 1.45 million followers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you were about to lose your kids to a legal guardian who wasn't you, what rights would you have? You’d think this would be a question of pressing national importance. But when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court guaranteed parents the right to a lawyer in a guardianship proceeding this week, only a local paper noticed. I wouldn't have known about this fascinating case except that it was brought, argued and won by a particularly brilliant former student of mine at New York University School of Law who has devoted her career to representing the indigent. The case is crucially important because it deals with a fundamental problem in child welfare law: who gets to take guardianship of children in troubled situations, and why.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. President Obama’s free community college proposal and college ratings initiatives promise to further the historic expansion of college access begun in 1965, when Congress created the Pell Grant Program, which pried open the doors of higher education to deserving but poor students. But the administration’s chosen means to the praiseworthy end of further expanding college access do not fundamentally challenge inequality in higher education; instead, they reinforce our two-tiered and unequal system. Federal policy instead should encourage academically qualified, lower-income students to matriculate to selective, four-year colleges. A monetary rewards system (a Race to the Top for higher education) or statutory mandates could advance that objective.

An op-ed by Nimra Azmi [`15]. The slayings of Razan Abu-Salha, Yusor Abu-Salha and Deah Barakat has convulsed the Muslim-American community as no other event has since September 11, 2001. It is not simply that we see ourselves reflected back in those three beautiful young people. We see our ugliest fears about the United States reflected back—that our college educations and professional degrees cannot keep us safe, that someday, someone will hate us for our faith or our skin color and no amount of American Dream will safeguard us.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal district judge in Alabama has struck back against state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. The latest development in the conflict between state and federal authority over gay marriage is an order Thursday by federal Judge Callie Granade requiring one particular state probate judge not to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as he had been doing on the basis of an order from Moore. Yet the struggle may not be over. The federal judge's order seems definitive with respect to that one probate judge, Don Davis, in Mobile County. But if the logic of Moore's position were to be followed, that judge could appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals. And other probate judges, who aren't named in the order, could claim that the order doesn't bind them.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does President Barack Obama's proposed authorization for the war against Islamic State go too far or not far enough? This should be a simple question, but it isn't. Legally, the proposal has the effect of mildly extending presidential power to fight Islamic State, not limiting it. Politically, however, it imposes some real-world constraints that weren't there before. The proposal therefore has something for everyone -- but it also gives everyone something to criticize.

An op-ed by Anna Joseph [`16] and Kerry Richards [`17]. Alan Dershowitz--famed defense attorney and former professor at Harvard Law School--has been accused of being one of the individuals who were provided with an underage "sex slave" by Jeffrey Epstein, Dershowitz's friend and client. Dershowitz has not been charged with a crime and is not a party to the lawsuit in which the accusing affidavit was filed. Though neither Dershowitz's liberty nor his property are at stake, he has responded with public and aggressive victim-blaming.

The trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was supposed to have started three weeks ago. But now it's anybody's guess when this highly anticipated trial will begin. ...Why is it taking so long? Is this the longest jury selection ever? Nobody seems to keep track of such things, said Teresa Saint-Amour, a researcher at the Harvard law library. She couldn't find a single database and steered me to a study of the state courts. An analyst for the organization that conducted the study said it likely was outdated.

The youngest to die was a 4-day-old girl, the oldest a 92-year-old man. They were among at least 844 Palestinians killed as a result of airstrikes on homes during Israel's summer war with the Islamic militant group, Hamas...On its own, a high civilian death toll does not constitute evidence of war crimes, and each strike has to be investigated separately, according to interna[tiona]l law experts, including Alex Whiting of Harvard. But it "certainly raises a red flag and suggests that further investigation is warranted," said Whiting, a former top official at the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands.

Twenty Harvard Law School professors who had publicly spoken out against Harvard’s University-wide sexual harassment policy submitted a memo last fall requesting that the Law School investigate its own sexual harassment cases, rather than go through Harvard’s central investigation office...The document, parts of which signatory and Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet shared with The Crimson this week, sheds light on the process that led to the adoption of the local procedures that, if implemented, in many respects will circumvent Harvard’s newly centralized approach to handling sexual misconduct...Law School professor John Coates, who chaired the committee that wrote the school’s new procedures, confirmed in an email that the committee considered the memo’s principles when it drafted the procedures.

A group of 170 Brooklyn Law School students cut short their winter break and headed back to campus in January for an intensive three-day training session. But not in the law. Instead, they spent the “boot camp” sessions learning about accounting principles, reading financial statements, valuing assets and other basics of the business world — subjects that not long ago were thought to have no place in classic law school education...Last year, Cornell University Law School started a similar business-focused workshop, called “Business Concepts for Lawyers.” The idea came from a Harvard Law School survey of employers released in February 2014, said Lynn A. Stout, a professor of corporate and business law at Cornell. The 124 firms that responded to the survey, called “What Courses Should Law Students Take? Harvard’s Largest Employers Weigh In,” listed accounting, financial statement analysis and corporate finance as the best courses to prepare lawyers to handle corporate and other business matters.

Money may feel as solid as the Bank of England, but it is an ever-shifting phenomenon...But in a new book, “Making Money”, Christine Desan, a Harvard law professor, challenges the view of money’s history as a fall from grace. She is part of the “cartalist” school which argues that money did not develop spontaneously from below, but was imposed from above by the state or ruler.

A political eternity ago, back in May 2013, President Barack Obama felt able to boast that the core of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan was on a path to defeat, allowing America to declare an end to the global war on terror that began after the September 11th 2001 attacks...Jack Goldsmith, a former Pentagon lawyer who teaches national-security law at Harvard Law School, says the draft AUMF amounts to a striking expansion of presidential authority. The 2001 AUMF is already being interpreted broadly to allow strikes on IS. But rather than supersede that old authorisation or place time limits on its validity, this new 2015 AUMF “builds on and adds to it”, he says.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the U.S. arm Ukraine for its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin? Before you say “Duh,” consider this: Arms shipments alone are almost never enough to enable a smaller, weaker actor to defeat a big-time power. If the U.S. commits itself to sending arms to Ukraine, it’s signing up for more than military aid. When Ukraine needs more help, America’s credibility will be on the line -- and pressure will be great to escalate even to the point of air support.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Brian Williams and Sam Smith may have little in common, apart from being award-winning celebrities (Williams has 12 Emmys and Smith, four Grammys), but at the moment both are being held accountable for wrongdoing. Together, the two cases spotlight a risk that anyone in public life must run. Let’s call it the Denominator Problem. Over the course of a career, a politician, a news anchor, a musician, a movie star or a professional athlete will have said and done countless things. In this respect, they are no different from anyone else -- except that their statements and actions are subject to continual and sometimes obsessive public scrutiny.

In seeking authorization for his six-month-old military campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group, President Obama on Wednesday did something that few if any of his predecessors have done: He asked Congress to restrict the ability of the commander in chief to wage war against an overseas enemy...“In a way, that’s been the story of his presidency,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who, as a top lawyer in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department, was at the heart of the last administration’s debates about presidential power. “He’s been talking during his entire presidency about wanting to restrain himself. But in practice, he’s been expanding his power.”

Convicted SAC Capital Advisors LP fund manager Mathew Martoma is getting help with his insider-trading appeal from the same Harvard professor who helped him fight expulsion for faking his law school transcript 15 years ago. Charles Ogletree Jr., a friend and former law professor of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, said Martoma visited him in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, office in October to ask for help...Ogletree agreed to join Martoma’s appeal.

Hispanic communities were particularly vulnerable to unscrupulous lenders during the last housing boom and the hardest hit by the bust, experiencing the sharpest drop and slowest recovery in home values, according to a study to be released Monday...“They were basically the most innocent consumers on the marketplace,” said Eloise Lawrence, a staff attorney at Harvard Legal Aid Bureau who works with struggling Lynn tenants and homeowners. “They knew the least about what was happening, and they were the most eager to climb onto the first rung of the American dream.”

The diesel engine is a wonder of torque and thermal efficiency, but it emits soot and other unpleasantness. The Environmental Protection Agency is a wonder among regulatory agencies, having discovered authority to regulate diesel-engine pollution in other countries...Volvo will be supported by a National Association of Manufacturers friend-of-the-court brief written by none other than liberal superhero Laurence Tribe of Harvard.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, management has a tip: Try harder. Fearing they’ll crush employees’ confidence and erode performance, employers are asking managers to ease up on harsh feedback. “Accentuate the positive” has become a new mantra at workplaces like VMware Inc., Wayfair Inc., and the Boston Consulting Group Inc., where bosses now dole out frequent praise, urge employees to celebrate small victories and focus performance reviews around a particular worker’s strengths—instead of dwelling on why he flubbed a client presentation. ... Showing people how they stack up is the “emotionally loudest” type of feedback, according to Sheila Heen, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and co-author of “Thanks for the Feedback.” Most employees feel unappreciated, Ms. Heen says, and criticism tends to overshadow appreciation or coaching, especially among young workers.

A book review by HLS Professor Sam Moyn: After the attacks of 9/11, the story goes, all the president’s men went over to the dark side. They redefined torture in a series of infamous memos in order to make brutal practices consistent with America’s domestic law and international agreements. They denied that the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the cornerstone of the law of war, should be applied to captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. And they made Guantanamo Bay a “law-free zone” where America denied prisoners the very human rights the country had contributed to the world. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, both within the Bush administration and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and he went even further by shutting down the harsh interrogation program on his second day in office, winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promising to make America stand on principle once more. This simplistic morality tale is rejected by Jens David Ohlin, a Cornell law professor, in “The Assault on International Law.”