Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the past 40 years, we have seen a revolution in thinking about thinking. The central idea is that human beings depart, in systematic ways, from standard economic approaches to rationality. Because the departures are systematic and predictable, they can be taken into account by researchers, clinicians, and others who want to improve health and reduce premature mortality. Behavioral scientists have shown, for example, that people are “loss averse”; they tend to dislike losses more than they like corresponding gains...These and related findings help to explain preventable health problems and also suggest a wide range of potentially promising interventions.

What would make a smoker more likely to quit, a big reward for succeeding or a little penalty for failing? That is what researchers wanted to know when they assigned a large group of CVS employees, their relatives and friends to different smoking cessation programs. The answer offered a surprising insight into human behavior. Many more people agreed to sign up for the reward program, but once they were in it, only a small share actually quit smoking. ...“This is an original set of findings,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who helped develop some influential ideas in the field of behavioral economics, notably that if the social environment can be changed — for example, by posting simple warnings — people can be nudged into better behavior. “They could be applied to many health issues, like alcoholism, or whenever people face serious self-control problems.”

Maura Healey is having a difficult time understanding the NFL’s justice system. “I’m just struck by the fact that somebody like Ray Rice gets a two-game suspension and Tom Brady, over deflated balls, is facing a four-game suspension,” said the Massachusetts attorney general. “It doesn’t add up for me.” That has been a common refrain since the NFL doled out a four-game suspension to Brady, the Patriots quarterback, for his role in the deflation of game-used footballs as outlined in the Wells Report, and his lack of cooperation in the investigation...“This is conduct detrimental, the clause everybody signs on for under the uniform player contracts, and all the teams agree to it,” said Peter Carfagna, a sports law lecturer at Harvard Law School. “This is an on-field misconduct situation, which makes it different. “There’s always been finding a careful distinction between on-field and off-field misconduct.”

Berkeley City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed the first reading of a “Right to Know” ordinance to require cellphone retailers in Berkeley to provide consumers with information that warns them to keep a minimum safe distance between their bodies and their phones...City staff had assistance from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard, and Robert Post, dean of Yale Law School, in drafting the ordinance. Lessig has offered to defend the city pro bono if the law is challenged, as expected, by cellphone manufacturers...“How I carry it is how people should not carry it,” Lessig said. “I carry it in my back pocket.”

The City Council of Berkeley, California last night unanimously voted to require electronics retailers to warn customers about the potential health risks associated with radio-frequency (RF) radiation emitted by cell phones, moving a step closer to becoming the first city in the country to implement a cell phone "right to know" law...The Berkeley law is more narrowly tailored. "This ordinance is fundamentally different from what San Francisco passed," Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who helped draft the Berkeley law, told the council at last night's meeting. He has offered to defend the measure in court pro bono. "San Francisco's ordinance was directed at trying to get people to use their cell phones less. This ordinance is just about giving people the information they need to use their phone the way it is intended."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Ben Carson will never be president. (There, I’ve said it.) But his candidacy and the views associated with it aren't a joke; they’re an important reflection on the current state of American populist conservatism. That's why it's worth analyzing Carson’s recent comments suggesting that the president may not have to obey the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the law.

One of the major bragging points of Obamacare, the landmark legislation overhauling health insurance in the U.S., was that it guaranteed free birth control for women. Or at least, it was supposed to. After reports in April revealed widespread noncompliance, the Department of Health and Human Services issued new guidance Monday detailing precisely how health insurance companies have to cover preventative health care for women, including contraception, as required by the Affordable Care Act....“I don’t think that these new regulations are a cure-all,” Carmel Shachar, an attorney at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said. “There will still be women who find that their birth control of choice won’t be covered or do have cost-sharing,” she said, referring to when patients must pay out-of-pocket fees, such co-pays or deductibles. Still, she described the effect of the guidance as a positive step overall, saying, “It’s a real sign from HHS that they’re acknowledging that insurance companies are undermining the spirit of the law.”

The Berkeley City Council voted unanimously 9-0 Tuesday night to pass the cell phone "right to know” ordinance that supporters say is about protecting the public....Advocates for the Berkeley ordinance say they are prepared for a legal fight. They've already enlisted the help of Harvard Law School's Lawrence Lessig. "This is not about telling people not to use cell phone. It's just saying here's the information you should know and make your own decision," said Lessig, a constitutional law expert.

The popularity of an American legal education is dwindling in the face of disappointing job prospects for graduates. To rescue themselves from oblivion, some law schools are fashioning themselves after a more successful educational institution: business school. In April, New York Law school announced it would make room in its building for an offsite location for the University of Rochester's Simon Business School, making it easier for law students to take B-School classes. The same month, Harvard Business School announced it would offer incoming students an 11-week course in the fundamentals of business created by HBX, its online business training program. “Lawyers need to understand and use the tools and skills involved in growing and running a business,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow in a statement on Harvard Business School’s website. “Law firms, businesses, and also public sector and nonprofit employers increasingly value these skills.”

Female lawyers work on average four more hours a week than their male counterparts do, are more likely to not have children and are vastly more likely to work part time or leave the profession altogether once they do have a child, according to a Harvard Law School survey of its graduates, released Monday...“It is painfully evident that female lawyers still bear the overwhelming burden of the legal profession’s continuing struggles to integrate work and family,” the study’s authors said...It is titled “The Women and Men of Harvard Law School: Preliminary Results from the HLS Career Study” and was authored by David B. Wilkins, Bryan Fong and Ronit Dinovitzer.

It’s well-known that women in nearly every sector earn less than their male peers, but in the legal profession the gap appears to actually have grown starting in 1975. That news comes from an empirical study conducted by Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession...“The most important explanatory factor appears to be the fact that men are far more likely than women to work in business (not practicing law), particularly in more recent [classes], and that when they do, they earn total compensation that is far in excess of even their highly paid law firm peers,” the report’s authors wrote. According to the study, authored by David Wilkins, the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at HLS, and also Bryon Fong, assistant research director at HLS’s Center on the Legal Profession, and Ronit Dinovitzer, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, men from the class of 1995 whose incomes fell in the 75 percentile of those that participated in the survey, made in excess of $1.625 million. Since women in that class were less likely to work in the business sector than their male classmates, they were less likely to earn such outsized compensation, the report notes.

Of all the winners of the 2015 Webby Awards, the winner of the law category might have the most lasting effect. And not just because it’s a groundbreaking project. Rather, perma.cc got the nod for an effort that could help solve a major problem for legal analysts and academics: the tendency, over time, of a hyperlink to “rot,” or lose its original URL...The project emerged from the work of three Harvard Law School researchers—professors Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig and student Kendra Albert—who noted that only half of all links used in recent Supreme Court decisions were still active at the time they published a 2013 paper on the topic...“Libraries are in the forever business,” Harvard Library Innovation Lab Director Kim Dulin said in a news release. “We developed Perma.cc to allow our users to protect and preserve their sources, no matter where they originate.”

The American legal scholar Cass Sunstein has become one of the most influential non-economists toiling in the world of economics. Over the course of his career, his interests arced from constitutional law to a pioneering synthesis of behavioral economics and public policy developed in concert with the economist Richard Thaler. Originally called “libertarian paternalism,” the Sunstein-Thaler approach stresses the fact human choices can’t help but be influenced by the way those choices are framed...In his new book Choosing not to Choose, Sunstein zeroes in on a particular kind of nudge, a default setting, which is extraordinarily effective at shaping outcomes. He argues that defaults are perhaps the best of all nudges. For one thing, they can always be over-ridden, thereby preserving the ability to choose. They also, he says, preserve a certain kind of liberty that people lose when they’re forced to make a decision: the freedom not to choose. What follows are edited excerpts of Sunstein’s conversation with Quartz, when he stopped by recently.

Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession on Monday released the results of a widespread survey of its graduates which suggests women work more hours on average than men, among other potentially myth-busting findings. Through a survey of HLS graduates from the classes of 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2000 and other research, it provides a detailed portrait of the gender gap within the legal profession, including all the ways women have advanced or failed to advance. Entitled, “The Women and Men of Harvard Law School,” it collected data on the four HLS classes through a survey that was sent by mail between 2009 and 2010 and is also available online...The authors include David Wilkins, who is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at HLS, and also Bryon Fong, assistant research director at HLS’s Center on the Legal Profession, and Ronit Dinovitzer, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

For more than three years, workers doing asbestos removal and demolition jobs for several Woburn companies were paid in cash, resulting in more than $700,000 in unreported wages, federal prosecutors charged in an indictment last week. Meanwhile, construction workers around the state — particularly immigrants hired by subcontractors — say they sometimes go for weeks without pay. When they do get paid, it can be less than promised, and overtime pay is virtually nonexistent...Before the economic downturn, as many as one in four Massachusetts construction employers were misclassifying construction workers as independent contractors, according to a 2004 Harvard University study, the most recent construction-specific estimates available. The problem is no doubt worse today, said study author Elaine Bernard, executive director of the law school’s Labor and Worklife Program.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Since the Supreme Court cleared the way for unlimited independent political expenditures by individuals, unions and corporations, there has been a fierce debate among academics and activists about what the term “corruption” means. For five justices on the court, “corruption” means “quid pro quo” — a bribe, or an exchange of a favor for influence. But an almost unanimous view, certainly among Democrats, and even among many Republicans, has emerged that this is a hopelessly stunted perspective of a much richer disease. Certainly, quid pro quo is corruption. But equally certainly, it is not the only form of corruption. Even if no deals are made, the influence of special-interest super PACs is a corrupting influence on American democracy.

A rift widened between President Barack Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress over trade as he and Senator Elizabeth Warren renewed their gripes a day before a key vote on a potential deal with Pacific nations....As a matter of law, Warren is correct that a trade deal approved under fast track could override U.S. laws, including Dodd-Frank, though a future president and Congress would have to approve the pact, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “Any duly ratified treaty overrides any contrary prior federal legislation,” Tribe said.

An op-ed by Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro. Congress is in an intense debate over trade bills that will shape the course of the US economy for decades. Much of this debate has been characterized as a fight over whether international trade itself creates or destroys American jobs. There is, however, another major concern — that modern “trade” agreements are often less about trade and more about giant multinational corporations finding new ways to rig the economic system to benefit themselves...Economist Joe Stiglitz, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, and others recently noted that “the threat and expense of ISDS proceedings have forced nations to abandon important public policies” and that “laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input.”

It’s another town reaching its breaking point as the Gray family lays their 25 year old son Freddie to rest. Upon a mysterious death following an arrest, the City of Baltimore is crying out for justice; some lashing out with violence. Attorney and President of the NAACP’s Boston Branch Michael Curry joins law professor and director of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute Ronald Sullivan. Together, they hash out the root causes of many of the recent backlashes, plus the systemic change necessary to bring peace.

Hunched over burgers and chili cheese dogs at a Boston-area pub, a group of friends digested Monday's news of punishment in the "Deflategate" scandal for the New England Patriots and star quarterback Tom Brady..."Even as a Patriots fan, I feel like it's not as harsh as it should be," said Derecka Purnell [`17], a 25-year-old Harvard law student, as she and husband Grandon Purnell strolled with their baby in Cambridge. "NCAA titles are stripped away for much lesser things," she said, referring to the college sports governing body. "But Boston would be in riots if the Patriots lost the Super Bowl title."

The Obama administration on Monday ordered all insurers to provide IUDs, the contraceptive patch and other birth control free of out-of-pocket charge to all women, thereby rewriting the rules after reports that some insurance carriers were refusing to cover all types of contraceptives...Pro-choice groups and others had said insurers were using so-called "medical management" to either skirt the rules or plead ignorance. For example, an inquiry by the New York attorney general found one plan told a patient she couldn't get the NuvaRing — for which there is no generic on the market — without cost-sharing because she could use birth control pills with the same chemical formulation. Holly Lynch, a bioethics experts at Harvard Law School who closely tracks Obamacare's contraception rules, said that was exactly the type of problem that HHS wanted to erase. "Just because a pill would be available for free doesn't mean that an insurer could refuse to make the ring available for free," she said.