Media Mentions

The International Criminal Court was created in 2002 with an audacious promise: to go after the biggest perpetrators of crimes against humanity and those who commit genocide. But so far, it seems, the arm of international law has been able to reach only those who have few powerful friends to protect them...Given its inability to arrest suspects on its own, said Alex Whiting, a former attorney with the I.C.C. prosecutor’s office and now a law professor at Harvard, the International Criminal Court “will only be as relevant as the international community allows it to be.” South Africa was only the most recent country to let Mr. Bashir visit and leave without arrest. It was a reminder, Mr. Whiting argued, of how hard the court must work to overcome the perception that it is targeting only Africans — and a reminder of how justice cannot be meted out unless the world powers invest in it.

What is more unexpected: that Jewish author A.J. Jacobs, known for his ambitious lifestyle experiments, has some Asian and Scandinavian roots? Or that rapper Ludacris is 1/16th Jewish? These are the types of questions that were raised by the Global Family Reunion on June 6, a Comic Con-esque celebration of the advancement of genealogy technology. People from countries as far away as New Zealand and Brazil, along with a diverse cast of celebrity speakers and musicians, gathered on the grounds of the New York Hall of Science in Queens, New York to emphasize one basic but uplifting idea: that we’re all more related than we thought...Cass Sunstein, a prominent Harvard Law School professor – and Jacobs’ first cousin once removed – perhaps best summarized the sentiments behind the project after his talk. "We tend to think of members of our family as people we protect and sacrifice for and care for, and that tends to be limited to a very small group,” Sunstein told JTA. “But if you think of the extent to which your connections are much broader and more surprising than you know, then maybe those feelings of generosity and kindness can broaden.” Well said, professor.

It is relatively unsplashy, as these things go — not very long, not very elegantly written, just 3,500 or so words of Medieval Latin crammed illegibly onto a single page of parchment. But Magna Carta, presented by 40 indignant English barons to their treacherous king in the 13th century, has endured ever since as perhaps the world’s first and best declaration of the rule of law, a thrilling instance of a people’s limiting a ruler’s power by demanding rights for themselves...“It’s a mistake to think that a document’s importance can be measured solely by the immediate context in which it’s produced,” said Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School. Magna Carta’s resonance, he continued, “doesn’t rest on what King John and those particular barons were doing at that particular time, but on the length of the legacy in using and interpreting and holding up this document as a banner for the rule of law.” Scholars who say that the claims for Magna Carta are exaggerated, he added, are merely following academic fashion. “Among historians it’s the cool thing to say,” he said. “It’s precisely from the capacity it’s had over this 800-year period of functioning as a rallying cry, a symbol, an ideal of the rule of the law that it’s important,” Dr. Feldman said. “No other document in world history has been able to function in so many times and places as the epitome of that ideal.”

Steep downward revisions to oil and gas reserves at the end of this year are likely to increase scrutiny of how energy companies tally future barrels - a process that has become more opaque with the rise of shale drilling...Bala Dharan, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while progress was made after the 2009 SEC changes, more could be done. "The next step would be to look at the feasibility of requiring more widespread adoption of external review," he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. North Carolina just passed a law that allows magistrates to refuse to perform gay marriages -- or any others -- if the marriages violate their religious beliefs. It’s a terrible idea, of course, allowing public employees to skip out on their official obligations based on their private beliefs. But is it unconstitutional? And if so, why?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.K. government made headlines last week by withdrawing a terrorism prosecution against a Filipino-Swede who had fought for an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. It’s unclear what’ll happen to him now. It’s politically unlikely but, in principle, he could actually be sent to the U.S. for trial. He wouldn't be the first European jihadi to land in the Southern District of New York; two Somali-Swedes and a Somali who had been a British subject recently pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. That they’d never been to the U.S until the FBI brought them here couldn't stop the prosecution. It turns out U.S. law is distinctly well-suited to prosecuting jihadis -- and that’s making us into a clearinghouse for minor fighters whose European countries of citizenship can’t or won’t put them behind bars.

When Sardar Biglari, CEO of Biglari Holdings, won a hotly contested shareholder proxy in April, investors feared his next move would be to cement control over the company. They were right, and a review of Biglari’s actions in recent months shows he did so with the help of leading Wall Street investment banks....“The tender offer is an aggressive entrenchment move aimed at enabling the CEO to use the shareholders’ money to gain control over the company,” says Lucian Bebchuck, director of the program on corporate governance at Harvard Law School. “Given that the CEO’s management and performance has been controversial, it is especially important for this company’s shareholders to retain the power to vote for a change of control. Unfortunately, if the tender offer is successful, the CEO would become fully entrenched,” he adds.

On Monday, just as the Supreme Court handed Barack Obama a resounding victory in a turf battle with Congress over foreign affairs, the president criticised the justices at a press conference in Krün, Germany, site of the G7 summit. In response to a reporter’s question about King v Burwell, the challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) set to be decided this month, Mr Obama said it would take a “twisted interpretation of four words in...a couple-thousand-page piece of legislation” for the court to eliminate tax subsidies for health insurance in the 34 states where the federal government operates health-care exchanges..." These comments drew some criticism even from supporters of the president. Mr Obama’s old law-school professor, Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, said “presidents should generally refrain from commenting on pending cases during the process of judicial deliberation.”

Cass Sunstein is a professor and legal scholar at Harvard Law School, the author of numerous books and the former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He spoke about his experiences in the Obama administration, his views on regulatory policy and leadership, his favorite sport (squash) and being married to a powerful woman...Q. In your new book, "Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter," you divide leaders into two categories: those who are complacent and easygoing and those who are anxious. Which type makes a better leader? A. A complacent leader is someone who is upbeat, optimistic, who has a clear sense of direction, who is quite confident that things will be fine and who has a degree of sunniness. An anxious leader is someone who may be easy to get along with but also is thinking about all the things that could go wrong and always seeing the worst-case scenario. There is no question that the anxious leader is much better than the complacent leader.

For centuries Magna Carta, or “The Great Charter,” has been held up as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy...Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’97, J.D. ’07, sees merit in both arguments. “When it was first issued in 1215, Magna Carta was really about the 1 percent, to put it in modern parlance,” said Kamali, a scholar of medieval law who will join Harvard Law School in July as an assistant professor. The document largely addressed property rights for “very elite individuals,” she said. One had to dig to find the clauses “we now associate with due process and the things that we value.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Civil disobedience is an honorable American tradition. The Boston Tea Party helped spark the Revolutionary War, and during the 1960s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated civil disobedience as “expressing the highest respect for law.” Invoking King’s idea (if not his name), prominent conservatives are now calling for new forms of disobedience. Some of their arguments are hard to accept, but they have a kind of internal logic, and they are resonating in influential circles. Consider Charles Murray’s spirited new book, “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” which is rooted in an extraordinary claim: “America is no longer the land of the free.” The source of this unfreedom is not NSA surveillance, police misconduct or mass incarceration. It is the rise of the modern regulatory state, from the New Deal to the present, which has subordinated our founding commitment to freedom.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the wake of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upholding a Texas law that would close many of the state’s abortion clinics because they don’t comply with new regulations, you might be thinking that the conservative court’s decision can’t possibly survive Supreme Court review. Think again.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Ohio law being used by community leaders in Cleveland to seek prosecution of police officers involved in the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice is highly unusual: It allows any citizen to petition a magistrate or judge to initiate prosecution, instead of relying on the usual process where the decision is up to a professional, in this case the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. Although very few states have such laws, they may be useful in situations where the prosecutors are compromised -- for example, by an ongoing relationship with the police force. But the Ohio law is also, in a way, a throwback to a time before prosecutors -- and before police.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. So it turns out voters don’t like it when you build a $600 million presidential palace. The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lost its majority in Sunday's Turkish elections for the first time in 12 years. A new pro-Kurdish opposition party, the Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, crossed the 10 percent threshold necessary to get into parliament. But it’s too soon for Erdogan’s enemies to start celebrating his downfall -- or for democracy lovers anywhere to be entirely sanguine at this result.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Remember the days of the George W. Bush administration, when conservatives liked executive power and liberals criticized it? Those days are gone. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's liberals powered a 6-3 decision giving President Barack Obama exclusive executive power to decide how to label the birthplace of Jerusalem on U.S. passports. The much-anticipated case, Zivotofsky v. Kerry, will become a landmark in the constitutional law of the separation of powers. But the weird politics of its lineup will confound students for generations, unless they take account of both changes in the party in the White House and the gravitational pull of U.S. Middle East policy.

U.S. school cafeterias are starved for funds, lack facilities, and are staffed by workers who often know more about wielding “box cutters and can crushers” than chefs’ knives, according to Ann Cooper, a onetime celebrity chef turned Colorado lunch lady and school food reformer....Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, said that Congress is now considering reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which expires in September. Among other things, the act provides nutritional guidelines for school lunches, and must be reauthorized every five years. The last reauthorization, in 2010, took significant steps toward improving the nutritional quality of school lunches, Leib said. Possible changes this time include increasing the amount of federal reimbursement for meals, taking steps to increase student participation in the program, and providing grants for kitchen equipment and staff training.

The Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva was quick to cut its losses yesterday after U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan of Pittsburgh recommended a preliminary injunction barring Kirkland & Ellis from continuing to advise Teva in its hostile bid for Mylan, an occasional Kirkland client since 2013. Kirkland announced that it will file an objection to Judge Lenihan’s recommendation, which will be reviewed by U.S. Chief District Judge Joy Conti, but in the meantime, Teva hired Sullivan & Cromwell to replace the firm in the Mylan takeover battle....In an expert report for Mylan that Judge Lenihan ultimately considered very persuasive, Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that virtually all previous litigation could be considered related to an unsolicited bid because so many factors shape the hostile takeover process.

As President Obama took the stage at a hotel ballroom on Tuesday to deliver his latest defense of the Affordable Care Act, you had to wonder who exactly he was trying to reach. Was it the members of the Catholic Health Association—the supportive audience in front of him? Republicans in Congress? The divided public at large? Or perhaps, was it just the two particular Catholics—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy—who at this moment hold the fate of Obama’s healthcare law in their hands?...Yet there’s less evidence that even the most persuasive use of the bully pulpit can sway the justices. “Would it help or hurt? I can’t imagine it’ll make any difference, and I can’t imagine he thinks it’ll make any difference,” said Charles Fried, the Harvard law professor who argued cases before the court as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. (Fried has weighed in on the Obama administration’s side in King v. Burwell.)

...Uber, with a head-spinning valuation of $50 billion, has become a dominant force in the passenger transportation industry in large part by luring more drivers to its platform than anyone else. In an effort to maintain that edge and expand its pool of self-employed drivers beyond those who already own a car, the company has been steering potential drivers with bad credit to subprime lenders whose leases lock borrowers into years of weekly payments at sky-high interest rates...Roger Bertling, an attorney and Harvard Law School instructor who specializes in predatory lending, says these terms are bad even compared with those generally used with subprime borrowing. “That [lease] is as bad as any I’ve seen on the predatory lending level for autos,” he says of the Santander agreement. While borrowers with poor credit always face high interest rates, Bertling cites the automatic weekly payment deductions and restrictions against personal use of the vehicle as being unique in the subprime auto loan industry.

The cell-phone industry, leery of any attempt to link its products to radiation, sued Berkeley on Monday over a new ordinance requiring consumers to be warned that carrying a switched-on phone in their pockets or bra might exceed federal safety standards....Berkeley officials said they were confident the ordinance would be upheld. Councilman Max Anderson, the measure’s lead sponsor, said the warning language was taken directly from manufacturers’ statements in product manuals. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, helped to draft the ordinance and has agreed to defend it without charge. “I believe Berkeley has a right to assure its residents know of the existing safety recommendations,” Lessig said by e-mail.

Immediately after the police and the F.B.I. on Tuesday shot and killed a black Muslim man who had been under surveillance for possible terrorism, law enforcement officials moved quickly to share information with civic and religious leaders, hoping to quell any potential unrest....At a news conference on Thursday afternoon, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor, said he was representing the Rahim family. He said he was concerned that the police appeared to have had no surveillance warrants. But he said the family was grateful for the chance to see the video before it became public, which they did Thursday evening.