Media Mentions

Five weeks after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed African-American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., ripples from the shooting and the ensuing days of angry public protests continue to radiate nationally. While the nightly standoffs and news coverage have ended, a panel convened by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS) and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, reflected on what Brown’s death, and the crisis that followed it, means for broad policy issues, including racial discrimination, political disenfranchisement, policing, and the criminal justice system. The panel met Wednesday night at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Last month, at a US Federal Reserve Bank conference on the money market, officials lamented the market’s enduring fragility. Indeed, six years after a run on the money market nearly brought the United States – indeed, global – financial system to its knees, critical risks that underpinned that crisis still have not been brought under control.

A group of recent Harvard Law School graduates received grants to jumpstart their careers in public service. The Public Service Venture Fund awarded a total of $1 million to 23 recipients, who were chosen based on their visions for solving public service problems on a community level. Three recent graduates were chosen for the largest grants. They will receive $80,00 per year, which includes a $45,000 stipend, with expectation of renewal for a second year. An additional 20 graduating students were named as fellows and will receive $45,000 for one year to supplement their work in a nonprofit or government agency. Additional partial fellowships have also been awarded. “Through these fellowships, our talented graduates are able to provide badly needed assistance to underserved communities and causes,” said Assistant Dean for Public Serve Alexa Shabecoff.

In the wake of the conflict in Ferguson, Mo. this summer, police departments need to work even harder to build trust with their local communities, panelists at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum event said Wednesday. The event, entitled “Reflections on Ferguson,” was moderated by Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree and featured panelists who included a former police chief, a current mayor, a reverend, and a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.

In a conversation to open the new academic year, President Drew Faust spoke at Sanders Theatre on September 16 with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof ’82 ...On the further question of political diversity, given the documented liberal bias of academic institutions, Faust acknowledged, “This is an important issue for us,” and noted that intellectual prowess is the key factor in hiring professors. “We try to penetrate through political valences,” she said. She praised in particular the leadership of former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan and current dean Martha Minow in shaping a politically diverse law faculty.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 5. Preventing terrorism often requires a choice of evils: to target terrorists and their leaders, knowing civilians will be killed; to collect massive amounts of private data in an effort to track terrorists; to detain potential terrorists without trial. But perhaps no choice of evils is more controversial than the use of torture to secure real-time intelligence against imminent acts of terrorism. Is there ever a justification for the use of torture?

Today, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on the greatest perceived threats to our national security. It's been 13 years since the September 11th attacks, but terrorism remains one of the foremost threats facing the United States...Mark Tushnet, author of "The New Constitutional Order" and professor at Harvard Law School, examines the tricky balance between national security and privacy.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the tiny town of Jun, Spain, (population: 3,000) meeting rooms in city hall have their own Twitter accounts. When residents want to reserve them, they send a direct message via Twitter; when it's time, the door to the room unlocks automatically in response to a tweet. Jun's mayor, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, says he coordinates with other public servants via Twitter. Residents routinely tweet about public services, and city hall answers. Every police officer in Jun has a Twitter handle displayed on his uniform. Now the New York Police Department, the largest in the U.S., is starting a broad social media initiative to get every precinct talking and listening online via Twitter, to both serve citizens and manage police personnel. The question is whether the kind of positive, highly local responsiveness the residents of Jun expect is possible across all parts of local government -- not just from the police -- in a big city. If it works, the benefits to the public from this kind of engagement could be enormous.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Just what, exactly, is going on with the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran? That's a question U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't want answered. Yesterday the Department of Justice asked a federal district court to dismiss a defamation suit against the group on the ground that a trial might reveal state secrets. How, you ask, could a nongovernmental, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization be in possession of classified information so important that revealing it would materially harm U.S. interests? The government -- big shock -- won't tell you. In the absence of any public justification whatsoever, we're left to parse through the possibilities by speculation -- and to ask whether such a dismissal is compatible with the rule of law.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 4. President Obama recently announced that the United States had targeted and killed Ahmed Abdi Godane, the leader of an Al Qaeda-linked group of terrorists in Somalia, and that it is now targeting ISIS leaders for assassination. We have, of course, targeted several alleged terrorists in the past, including at least one US citizen. Although our government’s official position is that we would prefer to capture and detain wanted terrorists, rather than kill them, the way the Navy SEAL team went after Osama bin Laden strongly suggests we preferred him dead rather than alive. But his killing may have been an exception — because of his high visibility — to the salutary general rule that it is better to capture than to kill, if for no other reason than that a live detainee is a potential source of valuable intelligence. But what should a democracy, constrained by the rule of law, do if a dangerous terrorist cannot be captured, or can only be captured with undue risk to our soldiers?

An op-ed by Lucian Bebchuk. Wall Street is eagerly watching what is expected to be one of the largest initial public offering in history: the offering of the Chinese Internet retailer Alibaba at the end of this week. Investors have been described by the media as “salivating” and “flooding underwriters with orders.” It is important for investors, however, to keep their eyes open to the serious governance risks accompanying an Alibaba investment. Several factors combine to create such risks. For one, insiders have a permanent lock on control of the company but hold only a small minority of the equity capital. Then, there are many ways to divert value to affiliated entities, but there are weak mechanisms to prevent this. Consequently, public investors should worry that, over time, a significant amount of the value created by Alibaba would not be shared with them.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. At the 11th hour, the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committee received an extraordinary letter from U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington purporting to represent the federal judiciary. In it, Bates criticized the Senate proposal to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and implied support for the House version. The Senate bill would create a permanent special advocate tasked with challenging the government’s presentations before the FISA court and is more protective of civil liberties and privacy than the House version. But whatever the merits of Bates’ concerns—and other judges have dissented from it—he most assuredly does not speak for the Third Branch.

An anonymous school-gossip website that saw a sharp rise in popularity over the past year has become a campus cause célèbre since an enterprising journalism student outed the site's top-secret editor..."Anonymity has a storied relationship with American democracy," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor who co-founded the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It's a way for the powerless and disadvantaged to speak without fear of repercussion. Of course, that same lack of repercussion can make for a license for abusive behavior."

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 3. How should a nation committed to the rule of law deal with captured terrorists who are believed to be dangerous but who cannot realistically be brought to trial? This issue has arisen in the context of the debate over whether to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, which candidate Barack Obama promised to do, but President Obama has not yet done. A major reason why Guantanamo remains open is that it contains several detainees — the precise number is unknown — who, if released, would almost certainly return to a life of terrorism. Indeed, some have, and many in detention have overtly stated their malignant intentions. Others have histories that suggest the likelihood of recidivism. But even some of the most dangerous detainees cannot be tried, either because there is insufficient admissible evidence of a specific crime or because the evidence comes from undercover sources the government is unwilling to out. If Guantanamo were to be closed, as it should be, and the detainees transferred to other facilities, the basic problem would still remain.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Does the Barack Obama administration have the legal authority to use military force against Islamic State? Some constitutional scholars, and some members of Congress, have been skeptical, even dismissive. But as a matter of law, the president has a strong justification...In 2001, Congress gave the George W. Bush administration broad authorization to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks. The Authorization for Use of Military Force explicitly says the president can “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks, or even that “harbored such organizations or persons.” For present purposes, the most important word here is “organizations,” and the key phrase is “he determines.”

Judge Robert Wilkins was formally sworn in on Friday as the 61st judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit at a ceremony dedicated to the African American judges who preceded Wilkins on the bench...Four of Wilkins’ friends and former colleagues spoke. Kenneth Mack, a professor at Harvard Law School and a friend of Wilkins since the two were law students at Harvard, spoke about Hastie, Robinson and the legacy of other black federal judges in history, who strived to deliver justice at a time when they faced discrimination outside the courthouse. Their service meant that Wilkins “would not be faced with the kinds of dilemmas that they faced every day,” he said.

The Obama administration is moving to ease access to student loans for parents with damaged credit, a policy reversal that could saddle poor families with piles of debt but also boost college enrollment...Credit counselors say they have seen a rise in borrowers who took out large sums despite being on limited incomes. "This debt will remain a huge problem for the rest of their lives," said Toby Merrill, head of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University's Legal Services Center.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 2. The recent disclosure by Edward Snowden of the US government’s wide net of surveillance has stimulated an emotional debate about security, privacy, and secrecy. We have learned from Snowden that the National Security Agency engages in virtually unchecked monitoring of all sorts of communications that were thought to be private but that we now know are maintained in secret government databases. Three fundamental issues are raised by these disclosures: Was it proper for the government to conduct such massive surveillance and to maintain such extensive files? Was it proper for the government to keep its surveillance program secret from the public? If not, did this governmental impropriety justify the unlawful disclosure of so much classified information by Snowden?

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 1. When democracies seek to protect their citizens against new threats posed by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and Boko Haram, the old rules — designed for conventional warfare among nations — sometimes become anachronistic. New balances must be struck between preserving people’s civil liberties and protecting them against terrorist violence. As Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel — a nation that has confronted this issue over many decades — once put it: “Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.”

It started with the iPod. In 2001, Apple promised to do away with stacks of CDs and put 1,000 songs in your pocket. Thirteen years later, the music industry is unrecognizable: most brick-and-mortar record stores have shuttered and a pocket-sized hard drive filled with music seems quaint in a world with YouTube and Spotify. ...Susan Crawford, an Internet policy expert and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, sees the payment system as a way of locking in increased loyalty for already-adoring Apple fans. If Apple can leverage its customers' preexisting trust to help consumers jump over their privacy concerns associated with e-payments, she says, the company may have made one more reason for users to keep their iPhones clutched tightly in their hand at all times. "Really this is all about affection for these devices, which are literally very close to people's hearts," Crawford says.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley joined a panel of journalists and academics Thursday night in a discussion of the new pope that was part of an event marking the launch of The Boston Globe’s new website Crux, which will cover the Roman Catholic Church across the world...The cardinal was joined on stage by Globe associate editor John L. Allen Jr., of Crux; Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand professor of law at Harvard University and the former US ambassador to the Holy See; Robert Christian, editor and blogger; and Hosffman Ospino, a Boston College assistant professor of Hispanic ministry and religious education.