Media Mentions

David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard University and Director of the Center on the Legal Profession, said partners are increasingly switching firms in groups — as demonstrated by at least 12 Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman partners who are joining Winston & Strawn. Wilkins explained what’s driving this trend, and why he expects it to continue at major law firms.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you confess to murder alone, in the bathroom, while looking into the mirror -- and wearing a microphone -- is your confession admissible in court? On the surface, this is the question raised by Robert Durst’s statement, aired Sunday night in the final episode of HBO’s “The Jinx”: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” Answering the question requires going deeply into the law -- but also into the circumstances of the statement. At the bottom lies a profound question about fantasy versus reality, the nature of a soliloquy, and the fascinating human strangeness unleashed by the era of reality television.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. U.S. Supreme Court justices may be wise, obtuse, fair or political, but we don't ordinarily think of them as eccentric. William O. Douglas, who was on the court in the middle of the 20th century, has long counted as the only unambiguously eccentric justice. But now, as an opinion on separation of powers issued last week makes clear, Justice Clarence Thomas has joined him. A judge can be counted as eccentric if he holds positions that don't fit with established law and that depart, frequently and significantly, from those that prevail within the court. A judge who is eccentric is not necessarily wrong, and eccentricity can be appealing. To many liberals, and especially to many law students, Justice Douglas seemed bold and admirably rebellious, in part because he was not bound by precedents.

Australia has been urged to comply with a United Nations ruling and allow more than 30 refugees to challenge the secret ASIO assessments used to justify their indefinite detention. Harvard University law specialist Gerald Neuman, who recently completed a four-year elected term on the UN's top human rights expert panel, said Australia's refusal to reveal the reasons for detention was shocking. "No one questions the ability of Australia to take steps to protect its security in proper ways," Professor Neuman said on Monday. "[But] I don't understand Australia to have ever said these men, women and children were a threat to the security of Australia." Professor Neuman, who served as the United States' representative on the UN Human Rights Committee until December last year, contributed to a scathing UN ruling against Australia's "cruel and degrading" practice to lock up refugees indefinitely without a right of appeal.

...January also saw the launch of a Massive Open Online Course (Mooc) on contract law from Harvard Law School. Students will get a taste of this foundational part of the law school curriculum at one of the country’s top institutions. The programme is intended for a general audience rather than part of studies for a law degree, and will “give people a sense of how the law works, and what kind of thing the law is”, according to Charles Fried, a Harvard professor and the course’s instructor. According to Professor Fried, it has already proven immensely popular. Students registered for the course number “well over 15,000 people, and they’re in all sorts of places, including two in Papua New Guinea.”

House Republicans will hold a slate of hearings challenging some of the Obama administration's main environmental rules. The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy and power is planning a Tuesday hearing to attack the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed carbon rules for power plants...The star witness for Republicans will be Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University Law School professor who once taught President Obama and later served as his adviser. In comments commissioned by coal giant Peabody Energy Corp., Tribe last year challenged the EPA’s legal grounding for the rule. Other legal experts and representatives from states will also testify.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Is law just a form of politics? Is the Supreme Court highly politicized? If you focus on the court’s anticipated divisions over Obamacare and same-sex marriage, you probably think so. But the court’s two dissent-free decisions Monday offer a different picture. They are a triumph for the ideal of a Supreme Court that focuses on law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If the devolution from Marvin Gaye to Robin Thicke doesn’t stand for the decline of Western civilization, nothing does. The Los Angeles jury that found Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” unintentionally plagiarized Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” apparently agreed. Choosing the dead genius over the living epigone was artistically correct -- but it set a terrible legal precedent. The case turned on a deep question about of copyright law: Is the point to protect the moral rights of the original author or to maximize socially valuable artistic production? The jury went with the author. It was wrong to do so. And Pharrell Williams, the true author of Thicke’s song, can help us see why.

The trick to interviewing a justice of the Supreme Court as it prepares to issue major decisions is to ask seemingly general questions that might nonetheless elicit a preview of what is to come. Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard, is a master of the technique, and on Thursday night, he made vigorous use of it to see what he could learn from Justice Stephen G. Breyer in a public conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York. But the justice proved nimble in avoiding giving much away.

The University of Oklahoma expelled two fraternity members this week after video of them leading a racist chant went viral. Now, a Google search of the young men’s names shows the incident right at the top of the results. But should this still be the case in 30 years?...On Wednesday night at the Kaufman Center in New York City, the Oklahoma frat brothers were discussed as part of a larger debate over whether it’s time for the U.S. to adopt a “right to be forgotten” law to help people hide their past...McLaughlin and Harvard Law’s [Jonathan] Zittrain saved special scorn for the process by which Europe arranges for the “right to be forgotten” to occur, saying it forces Google to choose between an easy path of simply granting the request, or else risking an expensive legal headache. ..Zittrain also took issue with Nemitz’s claim that Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law is not censorship because it merely deletes information from Google, not from the entire Internet. “It’s like saying the book can stay in the library, we just have to set fire to the catalog,” he said.

An article by John C. Coates, Jesse M. Fried, and Kathryn E. Spier. An online survey of 124 practicing attorneys at major law firms suggests possible new directions for educating and training Harvard Law School students. The most salient result from the survey is that students should learn accounting and financial statement analysis, as well as corporate finance. These two subject areas are viewed as particularly valuable both for lawyers in litigation and lawyers working in corporate/transactional practice areas.

Fifty black law students from some of the nation's top schools hunkered down with 80 African-American, Latino and African middle schoolers in Portland Thursday to coach them through legal exercises...But the verdict the law students really cared about came through loud and clear, the middle school students said: There is value in learning to see both sides of an issue, and law school is in reach for young people of color. "Cases aren't obvious. You have to look at it very deeply," said eighth-grader Jared Melgarejo, after being coached for hours by University of Virginia law student Josephine Biempka and Harvard law student Rob Hickman [`15]. "You need to break stuff down and look for the main parts."...Jane Ehinmoro [`16], Harvard law student, said she felt the law students conveyed to their younger counterparts that law school and elite professions are "not out of reach. That can be done by anyone." Spending time with the Portland students was invigorating, she said. "They are very bright," Ehinmoro said. "It was quite refreshing."

Three Miami public interest lawyers received a grant from a Harvard Law School fund to open the Community Justice Project, focused on working with South Florida community organizations on racial, poverty and human rights issues. The Community Justice Project, already in the works, will officially open its doors July 1 at space leased in downtown Miami from Florida Legal Services. Its being launched by Alana Greer, Meena Jagannath and Charles Elsesser, all currently lawyers at Florida Legal Services...Greer, a 2011 graduate of Harvard Law School, was the one who was able to apply for the grant from the Harvard Public Service Venture Fund.

So you're going to ask for a raise...Head to the negotiation armed with facts. "Information is going to be your best friend," says Robert Bordone, founding director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School. Otherwise, he adds, "If you're just going to haggle, that's going to be a real challenge."

...In an amicus brief in the high court's same-sex marriage challenges, ten LGBT student organizations—six from law schools at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, UCLA and New York University—argue that so-called non-recognition laws impose special harms on their members as they try to begin new careers in a highly mobile nation...At Harvard Law, Sean Cuddihy and Lior Anafi, co-presidents of Harvard Lambda, submitted the draft brief to its members before signing. "Over 20 of our members read the brief and discussed it in an online forum," Cuddihy said.Because the justices will only get to the non-recognition issue if they say "no" to the broader constitutional question, the Harvard group asked Sanford Heisler to emphasize more strongly the members' view that the high court should recognize a Fourteenth Amendment right to marriage for same-sex couples. The group also sought the views of faculty members. Cuddihy and Anafi called the brief "an innovative and interesting" treatment of the issue. "The perspective it represents, highlighting the harmful effects of patchwork marriage laws on young professionals and academics at the mercy of unpredictable hiring systems, is also highly relevant to many of our members and we're grateful for the opportunity to participate," they said in a statement.

The billions of dollars in pension obligations faced by cities and states across the country have politicians from many of them calling for some type of reform. A commission appointed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wants to freeze the state's current pension plan, while in California, Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill that increases the retirement age, among other things. In Illinois, Gov. Bruce Rauner wants to eliminate overtime in the determination of pension benefits...Little more than seven years ago, the idea of touching pensions in bankruptcy "was treated as a little short of crazy," said bankruptcy historian David Skeel, currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. But the Detroit and Stockton cases were not the first time cities flirted with impairing pensions, Skeel wrote in an October 2013 paper for The Federalist Society's White Paper Series.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. University of Oklahoma President David Boren has expelled two members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity on his campus for leading a horrifying racist chant. Does his decision violate their First Amendment rights? And if it does, what’s wrong with this picture, in which a public university wouldn’t be able to sanction students who not only bar blacks from their organization, but also refer to lynching in the process?

In 2014, the European Union’s Court of Justice determined that individuals have a right to be forgotten, “the right—under certain conditions—to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.” It is not absolute, but meant to be balanced against other fundamental rights, like freedom of expression. In a half year following the Court’s decision, Google received over 180,000 removal requests. Of those reviewed and processed, 40.5% were granted. Largely seen as a victory in Europe, in the U.S., the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. Was this ruling a blow to free speech and public information, or a win for privacy and human dignity? Debaters include: Jonathan Zittrain.

Bob McDonnell suddenly has a lot of friends. An unlikely coalition of current and former politicians from both parties, prominent legal scholars, and even retired federal judges has gone to bat for the former Virginia governor in his appeal of federal corruption charges...Another brief, signed by retired judge Nancy Gertner and Charles Ogletree, a former professor of and mentor to President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, argues that the definition of official acts used to convict the former governor is “ill defined” and “unconstitutionally vague.” Gertner told Politico that she believes the issue of what acts and what receipts constitute corruption raises an important constitutional question and could end up in the Supreme Court. Though she understands that people may be “uncomfortable” with the size of the gifts, she does not believe that the former governor’s actions met the quid pro quo requirement. “The theory of the prosecution was too broad,” Gertner said.

Last month, a North Carolina sheriff announced that people on the state’s sex-offender registry could not attend church services in the community. Instead, Sheriff Danny Millsaps said, they could go to church at the county jail....Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, says such laws are sound as long as there is a consistent approach between secular and religious contexts. “If the county’s policy is to permit registered sex offenders to attend school events like ball games as long as school administrators have warning and the offenders are monitored,” he says, “then a similar exception needs to be made for church attendance as long as pastors are aware and agree to monitor the offenders.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does the ever-deepening public conflict between state and federal courts in Alabama serve or hinder the cause of gay marriage nationally? This difficult question faces federal District Judge Callie Granade, who must now choose the next move in her legal chess match with the Alabama Supreme Court. Her answer will affect more than the gay couples who want to marry in Alabama between now and when the U.S. Supreme Court decides the issue in late June. It may affect the nature of the Constitution itself.