Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In France, the bitter controversy over the hijab, or headscarf, worn by some Muslim women relates to citizenship, feminism, and the secularism of the French Revolution and Republic. In America, we have Abercrombie. So perhaps it's fitting that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced it will take its first hijab case to decide whether the chain could deny employment to an otherwise qualified young woman who wanted to wear a headscarf on the job. The case, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch, started in 2008 when 17-year-old Samantha Elauf applied for a job at the Abercrombie Kids store in the Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At Abercrombie, salespeople are called “models,” and part of the job interview is scored on how you look. Once hired, the “models” must comply with an Abercrombie “look policy” that governs how they dress.

Judges in Aberdeen, Rapid City and Sioux Falls may soon have better information to help decide whether to lock up or release criminal defendants awaiting trial. Three South Dakota counties are developing a pilot program to screen and analyze defendants’ background as a way to better predict their flight risk and danger to the public. ... Minnehaha, Brown and Pennington counties are working with the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School to develop a pilot program in South Dakota.

...Divest Harvard’s recent escalation is the outgrowth of a sense of frustration at a University president and Corporation, that to them, are too secretive, too dismissive, and too unresponsive to their fervent calls. ...For Kelsey C. Skaggs [`16], a member of Divest Harvard and president of Harvard Law Students for Sustainable Investment, the arrest was troubling due to its treatment of free speech. “The whole idea of not listening to student speech when it’s presented in the context you want,” says Skaggs, referring to Divest’s attempts to engage with the administration in the year and a half before the blockade, “and then shutting it down and being derogatory about it when it’s something you don’t want is really troubling from a free-speech perspective.”

...Emily Broad Leib is also at Harvard University. She wants to change the way food is grown. She wants to change what people can have available to eat. She’s an absolutely remarkable person.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China's plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person "nominating committee." Critics charge the committee will be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite."...But there's not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Beijing's proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage. The pattern has been common in America's democracy too.

The judge regretted it from the beginning. The 27-year prison sentence he gave Byron Lamont McDade was too long, he said, for a low-level player in an expansive cocaine enterprise. Years later, the punishment still nagged at him...“Every one of us has had cases where you absolutely had no choice but to sentence someone to a term that you experienced as unjust,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who now teaches at Harvard Law School. But even with a federal judge in your corner, she said, there are no guarantees for inmates like McDade. Friedman and others, she said, are “reduced to begging these other authorities to do the right thing.”

Mayday, a political action committee launched by Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, has raised over $6 million since the spring, according to Federal Election Commission filings from August, and the PAC claims on its website that it has raised nearly $2 million more since then...Although it was born on Harvard’s campus, Mayday has generated most of its buzz and donations online, said Andrew Sellars, a fellow at the Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who contributed to the PAC. “The conversation seems to be happening a lot in the internet policy space, where Lessig has been a prominent figure for so long,” Sellars said.

Investors have been pushing for—and often winning—big changes at companies. This week, Ebay EBAY -2.066% split off its PayPal division, a move long urged by Carl Icahn, who controls 30 million shares of the company...One influential study looks at what happened to 2,000 companies targeted by activists over a number of years. It concluded that activism worked out fine for investors, even over a period as long as five years. And “operating performance relative to peers improves consistently,” writes co-author Lucian Bebchuk, an economist at Harvard. This was true even for companies that took on debt or cut capital spending. But another recent study is less upbeat, finding little impact on growth and profit margins.

With apologies to the cast of Cabaret, dark money makes the political world go round. Confusing rules and a regulatory void in campaign finance have unleashed a tsunami of cash from anonymous donors that is expected to have unprecedented influence over the midterm elections in November...The petition has found grassroots groups and investors on Wall Street largely in agreement for once. In addition, nearly a dozen senators and more than 40 members of the House have supported it, according to one of the petition’s drafters, Lucian Bebchuk, a professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard. Bebchuk scoffs at those who say new rules to disclose corporate political spending will hurt confidentiality. “One could understand such an argument for letting individuals anonymously contribute their money,” he told Newsweek. “But such an argument loses its force when public companies make political contributions. In such a case, executives contribute not their own money but shareholders’ money, and there is little basis for allowing them to keep the contribution hidden from the shareholders whose money is spent.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas is one of the most popular state-level officials in the country, but even he is having a tough time fixing an Arkansas state law that lets telecommunications companies charge K-12 schools sky-high prices to connect their students to the Internet.

The Kremlin is worried that the West might try to shut off Russia's access to the global Internet. According to a report by Vedomosti on Sept. 19, the Kremlin might soon deploy a new set of tactics in an effort to defend the country's "digital sovereignty."...More involvement in the web's domain operations would grant the Kremlin some additional capacity to disrupt how the RuNet functions, but the shift would not "surrender control of the Internet to Russia," claims ICANN president Fadi Chehade. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain agrees, saying the Internet works on a "consensus," of which "numbering and naming" is only a "tiny part."

Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program’s Michael Teitelbaum on the impact of immigration policy on the U.S. job market.

The Food Better campaign kicked off with a presentation at the Harvard Community Garden on Monday, one in a week-long series of events designed to improve student awareness on all issues related to food....“We have so much brain power and creative energy across the University that if we can harness that, and encourage students to come up with innovative ideas about the food system and about improving the food system, we can really make a major impact,” said Ona J. Balkus, a clinical fellow at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Individuals and communities can improve the food system, according to members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, which has launched a yearlong, University-wide focus on how to make food distribution more equitable, sustainable, and nutritious...The Food Better campaign will run alongside the Deans’ Food System Challenge, a challenge in the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) that invites creative and entrepreneurial students to develop innovative ideas to improve the health, social, and environmental outcomes of the food system, both in the United States and around the world...“Food is a universal issue, because everyone eats,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “We’re hoping with this campaign to show Harvard’s ongoing commitment to improving our food system. And we’re hoping students will get involved and take away ideas about how individuals can improve the food system.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, the dominance of veteran advocates and their law firms only continues to grow. In the term that ended in June, the justices decided a meager 67 argued cases, less than half the caseload they handled in 1990. Three firms argued seven cases each, and two argued in six—meaning that just five firms fielded lawyers in half of the court's cases. "That is truly remarkable," says Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus of these numbers. Lazarus has written extensively about the development of the elite Supreme Court bar. In 2009, he went so far as to call it "docket capture" of the high court by a small group of lawyers who tend to file, and win, business cases.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. If you’re getting a new iPhone (because you're not bothered by the possibility it might bend), will you select the iPhone 6 or the iPhone 6 Plus? A lot of people have been getting the latter, because it has a bigger screen, more pixels and better battery life. But before you join them, please take a deep breath. You might be making one of the most important, if least known, decision-making mistakes in all of behavioral science.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree discusses with Alex Witt the legacy of his long-time friend Attorney General Eric Holder on the heels of his resignation.

The other day, I attended an investiture ceremony for Robert Wilkins, an African-American judge recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At the ceremony, the Harvard Law Professor Ken Mack spoke about some of Judge Wilkins’s forebears—in particular, Robert Terrell, the first black federal judge, appointed in 1910, and William Henry Hastie, the first black federal Court of Appeals judge, appointed in 1949. These men served under, and swore to enforce, a federal Constitution that blessed racial segregation as “separate but equal.” As Mack said, Judges Terrell and Hastie had to be fair and just in a world that was neither fair nor just to them. Mack did not say but plainly implied that black judges today face a similar challenge—different in degree, to be sure, but not in kind.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. Sometimes, vague can be misleading—and harmful. For years, colleges have identified disadvantaged students based primarily on “diversity” and “need.” But those categories are broad and unspecific, and can be gamed by sophisticated applicants and parents. The result? Schools aren’t helping the students that really need it. And higher education is now perpetuating—rather than alleviating—inequality. We can reverse this pattern by learning from our education history and shifting the focus of that aid effort to first-generation college students. The key here is this: Colleges need to get more specific about who they want to help, and why.

Rachel Martin talks to Noah Feldman, professor of International Law at Harvard School of Law, about why he believes there is no law supporting the American air strikes in Syria.

The Obama administration has handed foreign companies an advantage over American rivals because they will not be caught by new rules governing access to offshore cash....Stephen Shay, a Harvard Law School professor and former Treasury lawyer, said: “It shouldn’t matter whether the new [corporate] structure comes in the form of a new foreign acquirer or an inverted transaction. The fact is there is attempted avoidance of US tax on the offshore earnings either way.”