Media Mentions

The new documentary “Citizenfour” centers on a series of candid interviews with Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who last year leaked more than 200,000 classified documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance efforts. The film’s action unfolds in a Hong Kong hotel room over eight days, during which Snowden’s revelations about the vast scope of the surveillance programs hit the press. On Monday afternoon, via videoconference, Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig engaged Snowden in another frank conversation.

According to a new report issued by the Boston Bar Association’s Statewide Task Force to Expand Civil Legal Aid in Massachusetts, 64 percent of the low income people in Massachusetts who applied for and were qualified for civil legal assistance were turned away over the past year because the funding was not there to support the representation. In total, an estimated 30,000 were denied legal services in cases having to do with such things as child custody, foreclosures, and employment violations. Martha Minow is the dean of the Harvard Law School and one of the 32 members of the task force that produced the 37-page report. “When you have people who are literally not represented in actions where they can lose their homes or face physical violence, where they can’t get legal remedies to which they’re entitled, there’s a failure to live up to the rule of law,” said Minow.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. In 2012, more than 33,000 Americans died on the highways. In some recent years, the flu has killed tens of thousands. Alcohol is associated with some 70,000 deaths annually, weight problems with more than 300,000, and smoking with over 400,000. Even a single one of these preventable deaths is a tragedy. But the risks they pose do not greatly trouble most people in their daily lives. What's worrying many people much more these days is the far lower risk, at least in the U.S. and Europe, of contracting Ebola. What, then, can public officials do to stem the public anxiety? The problem is that Ebola fear presents a delicate challenge -- one that official assurances might just make worse, at least if they breed distrust.

At Harvard Law School’s Ames Courtroom on Monday, October 20, Furman professor of law and leadership Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden in Russia via video conference. Using a question-and-answer format, the professor raised issues of institutional corruption and the role of whistle-blowers with the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who revealed last year that the agency routinely conducts mass surveillance of American citizens. Snowden now lives in Russia as he seeks asylum in the European Union.

Monday afternoon inside the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig interviewed the American intelligence contractor and NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden via satellite, or, more specifically, via Google Hangout. Snowden, called a traitor by a number of senior government officials, leaked secret NSA documents about its global surveillance program to journalists from the U.S. version of British media outlet The Guardian and The Washington Post. He is in Russia evading charges of theft of government property and for violating the Espionage Act. The discussion, dubbed “Institutional corruption and the NSA,” covered many topics related to politics and policy, privacy, and the public’s right to knowledge deemed secret by government agencies.

Reacting to an op-ed signed by more than a quarter of the Harvard Law School faculty that condemned the University's new sexual assault policy, University Title IX Officer Mia Karvonides on Monday defended the role she and her office play in the investigatory process..."There were just a huge number of people on the faculty who were concerned about the nature of the Harvard University policy,” Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet said...“My sense honestly is that the faculty by and large is proud that we are standing up on principle and perfectly clear that what is being demanded for us is poor and actually wrong,” Charles R. Nesson ’60, law school professor and one of the op-ed’s signatories, said.

Far from the global glare on Brittany Maynard, physicians across America are risking prison by covertly helping terminally ill people end their lives via lethal overdoses, asserts a leading “death-with-dignity” advocate...Indeed, one of the three choices for terminally ill Americans seeking a physician’s aid to end their lives is to “get illegal assistance in your home states,” said I. Glenn Cohen, director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The other two options, according to Cohen: Move to a state like Oregon where the practice is legal, or travel to Switzerland, where assisted-suicide is legal and where no residency is required.

Rarely is the term “city hall” considered synonymous with the words “innovation” or “efficiency.” Too often, the public image of municipal government is of a static bureaucracy staffed with disinterested clock-watchers focused on petty tasks and arcane processes. But two Harvard authorities on government and technology say it doesn’t have to be that way. In their new book, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance,” Stephen Goldsmith, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School (HLS), offer a road map for managers who want to move beyond the traditional silos of urban government.

Former mayor Thomas Menino hasn’t wasted much time since he left office in January...What kind of books do you like?...I also like to read books about cities. There’s a new book I picked up,“The Responsive City” by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford about art and technology and cities. I’m proud to say the first chapter is about Boston.

Long before there was a United States Supreme Court, before there was even a United States of America, the court today known as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts upheld the law of the land here in the Bay State. Fifteen years ago, for the first time in the court's 300-plus year history, a woman was elevated to serve as chief justice. Perhaps the word that best describes Margaret Marshall’s rise to chief justice of the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Western Hemisphere is “improbable.” Marshall was born and raised in small town in Apartheid-era South Africa.

Nearly 30 years after David McCallum was convicted of murder at age 17 on the strength of a confession he said was beaten out of him—and no other evidence tied him to the crime—he walked out of a Brooklyn courthouse Wednesday as a free man...In July, Michelen made his presentation to Hale and Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., who is serving as special counsel in charge of the Conviction Review Unit...During the news conference, Sullivan said studies of cases resulting in DNA exonerations over the past 10 to 15 years showed a "supermajority" of the convictions were based on incorrect eyewitness evidence or confessions."We learned false confessions leave a very distinct footprint. You can look at certain confessions and see signs, proxies that problems may occur. One sure footprint is a false-fed fact."

It was described as a historic event as hundreds of black alumni from across generations gathered at Harvard University over the weekend, many representing its graduate Schools...The opening panel discussion of the weekend focused on important issues of diversity and improving connections between the University and students and alumni...The panelists included Charles Ogletree, professor at Harvard Law School...Ogletree said that when he leaves campus, many people, including police, see him as just another black man. He said he was recently a victim of racial profiling in California, where he was stopped by an officer for apparently no other reason than driving a luxury SUV in a troubled neighborhood. “I still see young people pulled over and arrested, and I wonder how much has really changed,” said Ogletree during the panel discussion. “I am not seeing the amount of progress I expected, given all the people in this room. Why?”

Harvard overhauled its sexual misconduct policy for the first time, defining the term "sexual harrassment." As Norah O'Donnell reports, current and former professors say the new procedures "lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process." Includes interview with Professor Elizabeth Bartholet.

The Knight Foundation today announced the latest winners of its Knight Prototype Fund. Eighteen projects will receive $35,000 to help them bring their concepts closer to fruition. The fund, launched in 2012, also gives winners a support network and the opportunity to receive human-centered design training in an effort bring early stage media ideas to a formal launch...Meet the winners...Harvard Library Innovation Lab/Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Project lead: Jonathan Zittrain; Cambridge, Mass.): Creating a time-lapse encryption service that will allow archivists, scholars and journalists to securely send a message into the future, so it cannot be read until a certain date or event.

In 2011, after nine years and a $2-billion investment, New York City’s revamped 911 system still had a major problem: trouble in tracking emergency responses, especially when multiple calls came in about the same incident, or one call involved multiple incidents. This made it nearly impossible for officials to tease out why some city residents waited longer for aid—a matter, potentially, of life and death...These are the kinds of challenges that former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Paul professor of the practice of government at Harvard Kennedy School, and Susan Crawford, Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School (and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), tackle in their new book, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (Wiley). They argue for the transformative power of analytics in city governments, so that—once innovators cut through the red tape—simple changes can connect elected officials and city employees to each other and to the citizens they serve.

Just a few months after Harvard University announced a new, tougher policy against campus sexual assault, a group of Harvard law professors is blasting the rules as unfair..."The Harvard policy goes so far that it's pretty shocking," says Harvard Law professor Janet Halley. She says Harvard's process, at its core, is biased, because it is run by a single Title IX compliance office that's under pressure to show the government results. "It's the charging agent like the prosecutor, it's the investigator — they're the judge, and they're the [people] who hears the appeal from all those decisions," she says. "So they're not neutral. They're there to increase the number of persons held responsible."Halley is also troubled that the policy, she says, gives alleged victims many more rights and protections than the accused. She says it is also too broad in what it considers sexual misconduct. The school, she argues, relies too much on what a victim says is a violation, and too little on what a "reasonable person might say," as federal law requires.

Dozens of Harvard Law School faculty members are asking the university to withdraw its new sexual misconduct policy, saying that it violates basic principles of fairness and would do more harm than good...“It’s a totally secret process, in which real genuine unfairnesses can happen, and it’s so airtight that no one would know,” Janet Halley, one of the professors who signed the article, said Wednesday.

Facebook and Apple will offer employees the medical option of freezing their eggs. Supporters say the perk will empower women in the workplace, while critics argue delaying childbirth isn't the answer to lowering the glass ceiling...Guests: I. Glenn Cohen @CohenProf (Cambridge, MA) Co-director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, & Bioethics

Picture a hospital where patients input information about their current conditions on tablets in the waiting room. During the examination, doctor and patient talk about the patient’s hobby of biking. He would like to continue it, but his speeds are slowing down because of knee pain, as the doctor can see from the data he uploaded from his personal fitness tracker into his health record...“No one ever thought your doctor needed explicit consent before he could talk about your case with a colleague,” [Glenn] Cohen says. Yet, this learning from past experience is about to happen on a larger scale with big data, and it’s presenting sticky legal issues.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When is a court not like court? The answer to this riddle is: When it’s the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This special court was imbued with special powers when it was created by Congress in 1982, including the authority to hear appeals from the federal district courts in essentially all patent cases. Such is the uniqueness of the Federal Circuit that, even though appeals courts are supposed to defer to lower courts’ factual findings, the court reviews the interpretation of patents from scratch, granting no deference. The Supreme Court -- which drubbed the federal circuit last term -- is now poised to decide whether the appeals court has exceeded its authority by adopting this unique practice.

As enrollment for next year's health benefits goes on in work places around the United States, Apple and Facebook say they're willing to pay for employees to freeze their eggs...Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert in the intersection of bioethics and law, said the perk could be perceived in several different lights. "The good is that it empowers women and gives them more choices they might not have afforded otherwise," Cohen told ABC News. "The bad is it communicates a message to women that their workplaces may not be tolerant to women who decide to have children on the job and potentially also has more women undergoing a procedure that carries risks that they might not in the end need."