Media Mentions

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. Complaining about the complexity of the tax code has become a treasured ritual during spring tax season. The code has grown ever more complex and this complexity has considerable costs. As one example, the incredible complexity of tax incentives for education limits uptake and redistributes wealth away from those targeted and toward sophisticated taxpayers. How could we transform this ritual of complaining into spring cleaning? Addressing complexity in the tax code requires analogizing to other complex systems and drawing on the research that demonstrates how to manage that complexity. Indeed, there is a well-developed literature on how to manage complex systems that can provide the foundation for simplifying the tax code. In particular, we know a lot about how to manage the evolution of software codes. This analogy yields two primary lessons.

Hundreds of students, alumni, faculty and community members joined forces in Harvard Yard on Sunday night to launch "Harvard Heat Week," a weeklong sit-in for fossil fuel divestment. As of 11:00 p.m., dozens of students and supporters were still blockading the doors of Massachusetts Hall, where Harvard President Drew Faust will show up for work on Monday..."Harvard's inaction is providing safe cover for those reluctant to change the status quo," said Ted Hamilton [`16], a student at Harvard Law School and organizer with Divest Harvard.

Amid a weeklong protest by environmental activist group Divest Harvard, at least 18 members of Harvard Faculty for Divestment intend to devote portions of their course meetings this week to the topic of climate change and divestment. A few faculty members—including Medical School assistant professor James M. Recht, English professor Nicholas J. Watson, and Law School professor Bruce Hay—passed out flyers to passersby Monday morning just steps away from a blockade around Massachusetts Hall, which houses offices of top Harvard officials including University President Drew G. Faust. Divest Harvard has stationed members outside of Mass. Hall entrances since Sunday night...Hay plans to hold an additional class session for students in his Extension School course LSTU E-160: "Art and the Law” to talk exclusively about issues of divestment and climate change.

An article by Heidi Gardner. Rainmakers inspire a certain degree of awe from their peers. Most partners recognize that the way the biggest rainmakers build an enormous portfolio is by generating work and referring it to others – a specific kind of collaboration. But in our research, we find that lawyers who observed strong collaborators often see the process as somewhat mysterious. They don’t understand how “mere mortals like me” (one lawyer’s actual words) could achieve such greatness. This post starts to demystify rainmakers’ collaboration – first by acknowledging some of the common myths, then by digging into our data to how they stand up to reality.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. What separates conservatives from liberals? In the past decade, the most illuminating answers to this question have come from Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist whose research bears directly on the emerging 2016 presidential campaign -- even if his answers might not be quite right. Haidt’s basic finding is simple. Throughout history, human beings have operated under five sets of moral commitments: avoidance of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Conservatives recognize all five, but liberals recognize only the first two.

An op-ed by Alyssa Richardson `15. We all saw the horror film: unimpeachable video evidence that Walter Scott was shot repeatedly in the back while fleeing from North Charleston Police Officer Michael Sleger. Although this video was not captured through the official lens of a dashboard camera or a body-mounted camera, the footage is no less telling. There is little debate about what happened, and as a result, Officer Sleger has been arrested and many community leaders, including Scott family attorney Rep. Justin Bamberg, have beseeched the public to “let the justice process run its course.” But for Scott and countless other casualties of police brutality, ex poste justice comes a few gunshots too late. We are therefore confronted with a hard question: How can we stop the violence ex ante?...But put bluntly, all of these measures aimed at curbing police behavior do little to address the underlying perception that black people are inherently dangerous. Changing this belief is at the heart of solving the problem.

It's as if sportswriting has invaded the energy and environment beat. President Barack Obama’s actions on climate change are “sidestepping” or making an "end run” around Congress, critics and news accounts say – including some stories by this reporter. But that depiction, more applicable perhaps to a wide receiver than a Washington politician, is at best imprecise. And at worst, it's just plain false, some legal scholars contend...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe – testifying opposite Revesz in a House hearing last month – went one further, accusing the administration of "burning the Constitution."...Others, however, argue that the Clean Air Act's language is “expansive,” in the words of Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, writing in the Harvard Law Review in March 2013. “The relevant language has lain largely dormant for decades, but is now ripe for a presidential awakening,” Lazarus argued.

“There is widespread agreement that the legal profession is in a period of stress and transition; its economic models are under duress; the concepts of its professional uniqueness are narrow and outdated; and, as a result, its ethical imperatives are weakened and their sources ill-defined.” That’s the premise put forth in a paper presented at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession conference today. Authored by former general counsel of the General Electric Corporation Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr., Wilmer Hale partner William F. Lee, and Harvard Law School Vice Dean of the Legal Profession David B. Wilkins, the paper contemplates lawyers’ ethical responsibilities and their role as the profession grows increasingly competitive.

An op-ed by Alan M. Dershowitz, Neal K. Katyal, Theodore B. Olson and H. Jefferson Powell. Constitutional arguments stand or fall on their merits. That principle is as old as the Republic, but a recent debate suggests that it is worth restating. The issue is the constitutionality of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe arguing that the EPA’s proposed actions would violate constitutional principles of separation of powers and federalism, and might require just compensation payments to energy companies; his critics vigorously dispute each of Tribe’s claims. But it is not the substance of their disagreement that has caught our attention...The great Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1805 that in debate over “any political proposition,” an individual’s judgment will be greatly “influenced by the wishes, the affections, and the general theories of those by whom” it is to be discussed and decided. He might have added that less dignified, self-interested motives can be at play as well...we can and should emulate Marshall and draw a line between public critique, however vigorous, and the public invocation of private suspicions.

Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke about the importance of experience in the private sector, the 2016 presidential campaign, and his time as a student at Harvard Law School during a public question and answer session at the Law School Friday. Law School Dean Martha L. Minow joined Romney on stage and questioned him on topics ranging from modern-day political polarization to finding a work-life balance. She later handed the microphone over to members of the crowd in a packed Milstein East Hall. Romney graduated from the Law School in 1975 and Harvard Business School in 1974.

Robin Steinberg, a New York public defender who was initially disinvited in February as an honoree of a separate Law School event, addressed her connection to a controversial online video that some say endorsed killing white police officers in retribution for police violence against black men at a Harvard Law School lecture Friday...The decision to revoke Steinberg’s honor prompted outcry from some in the Law School community, and Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., who directs the Criminal Justice Institute, said it was “a very unfortunate episode that occurred [there].”

Campaigning for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt Romney, J.D./M.B.A. ’75, decided he would spend one day every week doing someone else’s job. He cooked hot dogs at Fenway Park, worked at a day care center, took a turn on a paving crew. One day he hung off the back of a garbage truck making its rounds through the city of Boston. “It was really educational,” Romney said, recalling the experience for a Harvard Law School audience on Friday. “We’d pull up to a corner and there’d be people waiting to cross the street, and I’m not more than two feet from these people. And they don’t see you. You’re invisible. If you’re on a garbage truck, you’re an invisible person. “I thought, wow — we don’t see each other as we ought to in society.” The former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, visiting Harvard Law School (HLS) for a Q&A session hosted by Dean Martha Minow, encouraged a renewed civility in politics and society, emphasizing the difference one person can make through serving others.

When the United Kingdom resoundingly approved mitochondrial replacement therapy in February, it became the first country to give people this new medical option. In parallel it gave the United States serious cause to reflect on how it handles matters of reproductive innovation, argues a trio of experts in the journal Science. "We have fundamentally different regulatory cultures," said co-author Dr. Eli Adashi, former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University. The essay's other authors are I. Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law and ethicist Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford.

When the jury in the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rendered their guilty verdict Wednesday afternoon, there was one thing that eluded even the most avid followers of the coverage: a look at Tsarnaev’s now-famous face...Harvard Law School professor and former federal judge Nancy Gertner finds the rule incredibly out of date and inconsistent with the modern media landscape, which relies on much more than a pen and paper. “It’s preposterous and it says something more about the power of the leadership of the federal courts to block this in the face of congressional pressure, public pressure, the pressure of some judges,” Gertner said. To Gertner, the arguments against cameras aren’t based on the realities of the situation. “Everyone sees the issue in terms of O.J. Simpson, which is absurd,” she says of opponents who fear that broadcasting a trial could result in a media frenzy that alters the outcome. “It’s absurd on so many levels. One, because that was a badly tried case. Two, because the cameras were much more intrusive in that case. It was 20 years ago.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So-called conversion therapies to make gay people straight are based on poor science or none, and U.S. President Barack Obama was right to condemn them. But the president was wrong to encourage the passage of more laws like the one in California that bans the use of such therapy on minors. Legislatures, whether state or federal, make terrible judges of the scientific validity of medical therapies. And setting a precedent for lawmakers to prohibit treatments because they consider them to be morally mistaken is even worse. It opens the door to the legislation of morality in the guise of protecting public health and safety.

An op-d by Noah Feldman. The correct ethical response to the video of Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back is to condemn the crime -- with one exception. The exception is Slager’s attorney, who has an ethical obligation as a lawyer to defend his client, not to abandon him or harm him by a public act of distancing. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast, Slager’s lawyer did just that, dropping his client like a hot potato and strongly implying that Slager either had been set on a course of perjury or was simply too repulsive to represent. Obviously, the overwhelming cause for outrage here is the apparent murder of an unarmed, fleeing black man by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. But the whole point of having defense attorneys is that they’re especially necessary when the whole world considers their client immediately guilty. It’s therefore worth spending a moment examining what Slager's lawyer did and said -- and why it was an ethical mistake for him to act like any other ordinarily moral person.

Republican Senator Rand Paul officially announced he's running for president this week, and he has pledged to get rid of the US Department of Education if he's elected. We reached out to famous Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe to find out whether Paul would have the Constitutional ability to shutter the DOE for good. The DOE was created in 1979 through the Department of Education Organization Act, which was passed by Congress, and Tribe told us that "it would of course require another Act of Congress to eliminate the United States Department of Education." "There is no Constitutional obstacle to the enactment of such a law," added Tribe, a legendary professor who counted President Barack Obama among his research assistants.

Rapid technological innovation has revolutionized warfare; it has pulled soldiers away from war’s front lines and gradually replaced them with advanced weaponry. Drones, for instance, covertly strike targets around the globe as their operators sit safely elsewhere. But humanity is now on the cusp of developing “killer robots,” or fully autonomous weapons capable of killing without operators, and human rights defenders want them banned. In a report released on Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Harvard Law School jointly call for the weapons to be declared unlawful by international treaty before they become a reality. Though fully autonomous weapons do not exist yet, technology is moving in that direction; Israel’s Iron Dome is programmed to respond to incoming explosives on its own and projects looking to enhance the autonomy of drones are in the works. The authors of "Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots" assert that under existing law, humans who manufacture, program and command the lethal robots of the future would escape liability for any suffering caused.

An op-ed by Matthew Thiman '16, Courtney Svoboda `16, and Tyler Giannini. Shortly after his daughter’s death, Brang Shawng sat down to write the first of two letters that would eventually get him convicted. He wrote to the president of Myanmar first, and then to the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission, wanting to know what had happened to his daughter, whom he believed had been shot by the Myanmar military. “A submission is made with great respect,” he wrote to the president, “to find out the truth in connection with the killing, without a reason, of an innocent student, my daughter Ma Ja Seng Ing, who wore a white and green school uniform.”

An international legal expert says the settlement between the world's biggest gold miner and a group of women who were raped by security guards and police at the company's Pogera mine in Papua New Guinea has wider significance. The 11 women, and the families of three other people, were planning to file a lawsuit against Barrick Gold in the United States but the parties reached an out-of-court settlement. The confidential settlement means the women and their lawyers at Earth Rights International can't say much publicly. But one person who can is Tyler Giannini, a clinical professor of law and Co-Director of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program. He has written widely about abuses related to the mining industry and carried out investigations in many countries including PNG. Mr Giannini says even though the details of deal can't be publicised, the deal by Barrick Gold is still highly significant.

A federal appeals court's ruling siding with tobacco companies on Wednesday could be devastating to Florida smokers' tort lawsuits, says a Miami law professor following the cases. This week's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit tossed a verdict won against tobacco companies by the estate of a Florida smoker. A three-judge panel held that the practice of using jury findings from an earlier tobacco class action conflicted with federal law on cigarettes...So the Eleventh Circuit's ruling, that federal law doesn't allow the use of those findings, "is almost like a neutron bomb for the Engle-type cases," said Sergio Campos, a law professor at the University of Miami who is not involved in the cases but has been following them closely. Campos, who is visiting at Harvard Law School right now, allowed that the Eleventh Circuit decision says plaintiffs may proceed on their claims as long as they do not rely on the class jury's findings. "But," he predicted, "a lot of cases are going to just disappear."