Media Mentions

A row has broken out between leading US law school professors and SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher after he co-authored an article with Stanford professor Joseph Grundfest making allegations about Harvard’s Shareholder Rights Project. The Shareholder Rights Project is part of the Harvard law faculty and is run on a pro bono basis to help students get to grips with corporate governance practices.

The Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School has released a Know Your Rights video series consisting of 97 videos informing Massachusetts residents of their legal rights when faced with foreclosure or eviction. The videos are a product of the Mattapan Initiative — a free legal services anti-foreclosure and eviction defense program created in 2013 in response to the foreclosure crisis that ravaged the Mattapan section of Boston, as well as other low-income neighborhoods throughout Massachusetts...Attorney Roger Bertling, Director of the Mattapan Initiative and Director of the Consumer Protection/Predatory Lending Clinic at the Legal Services Center, says “we created these videos in hope that they’ll be used as a resource for distressed homeowners. The mission of the Legal Services Center is to protect the legal rights of the communities we serve, and as an extension of that mission, these videos are available to help people make informed decisions regarding their foreclosure or eviction.”

Tuesday's State of the Union address was the first since 2001 to not mention al-Qaeda. It opened with the promise of a post-post-9/11 era...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former Bush administration official, believes Obama's call for Congress to authorize force against ISIS isn't sincere. Writing the morning after the State of the Union, he noted that the administration hasn't submitted draft language for a new AUMF to Congress, as the Bush administration did in 2001. But he also speculated that the U.S. government's expansive use of the 2001 AUMF since 9/11 may have had a chastening effect on Obama, who is wary of releasing another vaguely worded authorization into the wild:

Following a Supreme Court decision last Friday to hear arguments on the issue of same-sex marriage, several Harvard Law School professors predict that the Court will grant a historic constitutional right to same-sex marriage nationwide, but they say a more moderate outcome remains a possibility...“I would guess that the best reading of the tea leaves is that there will be five votes upholding a right to gay marriage,” Richard H. Fallon, a Law School professor, said. He along with Charles Fried and Michael J. Klarman, also Law School professors, identified Justice Anthony Kennedy as the potential “swing vote.”...Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk Laurence H. Tribe ’62 echoed the prediction in an email, writing that the he thinks the Court will “hold that the U.S. Constitution requires universal marriage equality.”...Mark V. Tushnet ’67, a Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk, said that the addition of the second question allows the Court to “deal with the issue comprehensively, no matter the which way the first question came out.”

The proposals by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, to make illegal forms of encryption that would block intelligence services from reading messages from terrorist suspects were criticised yesterday in by a group of Harvard professors....Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science, said that the proposals, which Mr Cameron has pledged to implement if he is re-elected as prime minister this year, would have a huge impact on the way that the digital economy worked. “This is not just about hardware but software. You would have to find a way for a phone not to be able to download any app that could defeat [the breaking of] encryption,” he said. “That would be a referendum on our entire ecosystem.”

Harry Belafonte, an icon of American stage and screen with a lifelong commitment to social activism, recalled his experiences during the civil rights movement at a Chancellor’s Lecture Series event Jan. 13 in Langford Auditorium. Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos and award-winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Michael Beschloss joined Belafonte for a far-reaching conversation on the history, legality and politics surrounding the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marks its 50th anniversary this year...Black legal scholars began assembling cases, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, to chip away at segregationist laws and usher in the sweeping social legislation of the 1960s. “But law always has its limitations, so direct action comes in and helps,” Gordon-Reed said. “Law legitimizes things, but they both have to work together.”

Of the more than 1,300 people called as potential jurors for the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, more than 100 have already been dismissed. The remainder are being individually questioned by lawyers on both sides, giving us a glimpse into how their pasts and possible prejudices could impact this case. WGBH News special correspondent Emily Rooney and Harvard Law School professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. gave insight into the process.

Todd Bowles had at least six interviews for N.F.L. head coaching jobs over the past five years. After each interview and rejection, he called an adviser to report who had been present, what questions had been asked, how long the interview had lasted and how he had performed....Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard University’s law school and the founder of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, embraces the rule. But he said that it had not corrected the wide disparity between the numbers of black players and black coaches. “There is a big difference between interviewing and hiring,” Professor Ogletree said. “There has just been too little effort in that regard. There needs to be more hiring in a significant way, and not just because they are black, but because they are talented and do well when they get those jobs. There is no acceptable reason for this underrepresentation.”

The annual Word Economic Forum in Davos is a renowned event that engages political, business, academic and other leaders of society in shaping a collaborative global agenda. This year's program appears even more stimulating than usual, covering a variety of technology topics and featuring a whole section devoted at exploring tomorrow's online issues...Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder at Harvard's Berkman Center has spent many years researching the future of the Internet, and his 2009 book (under the same title) provides an important and still current overview of the Net evolution and its most urgent problems -- such as privacy, copyright, security and related regulations. In June 2013, Jonathan Zittrain co-authored also a pivotal report produced by the Council on Foreign Relations, directed by Adam Segal and involving also Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America Foundation) -- "Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet". The report proves still very relevant, especially for its detailed analysis about the many reasons preventing US and Europe in establishing a shared approach to address and draft common regulations about the Internet.

Two Harvard Law School professors -- one a former federal judge -- and a national defense lawyer organization want to help former governor Bob McDonnell win bond pending his appeal...Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts now a senior lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and Charles J. Ogletree, who also teaches there and is the executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, filed papers Tuesday siding with McDonnell...In their brief filed Tuesday, Gertner and Ogletree wrote that they intend to file a brief urging McDonnell's convictions be reversed and argue that the "official act" question is a substantial one.

As the Harvard-led academic crowd continues to fire salvos at a Republican Securities and Exchange Commission chairperson, the debate over what will either benefit corporate management, keeping board of director positions more secure, or activist investors such as Bill Ackman, making board structures weaker, hangs in the balance. Boston University Law School Professor Tamar Frankel was the latest to fire a salvo directly at SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher. In a post on titled “What Sitting Commissioners Should and Shouldn’t Do,” Frankel again used a Harvard Law School blog to launch his attack of Commissioner Gallagher. Frankel says that it was improper for Gallagher to publish accusations against specific individuals or organizations unless that took place as part of an SEC process. The spat started when Gallagher and Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford professor, published an academic report questioning if the Harvard Shareholder Rights Program violated federal securities law.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. As recently as 20 years ago, it would have been pretty preposterous to argue that the U.S. Constitution requires states to recognize same-sex marriages. But there is a good chance that this summer, the Supreme Court will rule that it does. To the many people who believe in judicial restraint, or in following the original understanding of the document, such a dramatic shift in the Constitution’s meaning is alarming, even illegitimate. Are they right? A vivid answer can be found in an important but widely neglected speech from one of the greatest figures in the history of America law: Justice Thurgood Marshall.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, there was not much noteworthy about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in Holt v. Hobbs except maybe that a Muslim won a religious liberty case in the infidel West. The Arkansas prison regulation that prohibited prisoners from growing beards was silly. The court applied the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to hold that Arkansas didn't have a compelling interest in the rule and failed to adopt the least restrictive means necessary to avoid a religious burden. Deep in the weeds of the decision, however, lurk signs of a much bigger project being pursued by Justice Samuel Alito and other members of the court. Step by step, the justices are expanding the logic of religious exemptions from otherwise neutral laws. Over time, this is leading to a de facto reversal of the Supreme Court's doctrine that ordinarily denies religious exemptions under the Constitution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s the eve of the U.S. invasion of Havana -- and it’s legal to bring back cigars now. But souvenirs aside, is anything changing in Cuba after the U.S.'s diplomatic opening and Cuba's release of 53 political prisoners? I spent the last four days in Havana, fortuitously arriving the day the new U.S. regulations kicked in. On the basis of thoroughly unsystematic conversations with Cuban-Americans who do business there, government officials and artists, the answer is: not yet.

...According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.”...The footnote problem, though, stands a good chance of being fixed. Last year, a tool called Perma.cc was launched. It was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America. Perma.cc promises “to create citation links that will never break.” It works something like the Wayback Machine’s “Save Page Now.” If you’re writing a scholarly paper and want to use a link in your footnotes, you can create an archived version of the page you’re linking to, a “permalink,” and anyone later reading your footnotes will, when clicking on that link, be brought to the permanently archived version.

The first page of a petition seeking Supreme Court review is the most important. It sets out the “question presented,” the one the court will answer if it takes the case. The justices do not ordinarily tinker with the wording of those questions. But on Friday something unusual happened: In agreeing to hear four same-sex marriage cases, the court framed for itself the issues it would address...“The court’s order represents good housekeeping,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. But Professor Tribe also voiced a small note of caution. “The rephrased questions,” he said, “technically leave open a middle path along which the court would prevent states from discriminating against same-sex couples lawfully married in their home states without requiring any state to take the affirmative step of issuing its own marriage licenses to same-sex couples.”

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Last month, the United States Congress succumbed to Citigroup’s lobbying and repealed a key provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: the rule that bars banks from trading derivatives. The Dodd-Frank law’s aim was to prevent another financial crisis like that of 2007-2008; the repeal reduces its chances of success...This sub rosa government indemnification of major banks’ derivatives portfolios undermines financial stability. If a major bank defaults on its derivative trades, the banks with which it has traded could also fail. If several large, interconnected derivatives-trading banks collapse simultaneously, the financial system could be paralyzed, damaging the real economy – again.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Suppose you're watching a baseball game, and your favorite player, a terrific hitter with a .320 average, has struck out three times in a row. If you’re like most people, you might think, “He’s due!” -- and conclude that on his fourth at-bat, he’s likely to get a hit. Now suppose that you are working in a college admissions office. Your job is to evaluate 200 applicants, about 50 of whom will be admitted. You've just accepted three in a row, and now you might be inclined to think that the next two are unlikely to deserve admission. You might even evaluate their applications with that skeptical thought in mind.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Affordable Care Act challenge that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider later this year, and presumably decide in June, could be the biggest case of the year. It will definitely be the most important statutory interpretation case in a long time. It's tempting, therefore, to depict it as a battle royale between the two leading theories of statutory interpretation that have been fighting it out at the court for the last two decades, known to cognoscenti as textualism and purposivism. I've certainly tended to see it that way, and in a column this week I suggested that two textualist statutory interpretation decisions written by Justice Antonin Scalia might provide a preview of what's coming.

Activists sparred Saturday with the mayor and police chief of Ferguson, Mo., during a Harvard Law School event exploring, among other topics, the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man killed by one of the city’s police officers in August. The event, sponsored by the school’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute For Race and Justice, came after decisions not to indict police officers in the deaths of Brown and another unarmed black man, Eric Garner, in New York City...But panelist Derecka Purnell [`17], a Harvard Law School student who protested in Missouri, said she was uncomfortable sitting next to people “who are responsible for the guns that were pointed in my face.”

An op-ed by Derecka Purnell [`17].At a recent protest in Boston, a middle-aged woman angrily chanted at four black men: “Go to school! Get a job!” These men were my fellow Harvard Law School classmates, serving as legal observers to protect the rights of the protesters. Her thinking was an extreme representation of what many others believe: Young people are aimlessly “die-ing in” or stopping traffic without goals, strategies, preparation or even stakes. But young people are working and organizing.