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Media Mentions

  • Americans Involved in Torture Can Be Prosecuted Abroad, Analysts Say

    December 12, 2014

    The United States is obliged by international law to investigate its citizens suspected of engaging in torture, but even if it does not, Americans who ordered or carried out torture can be prosecuted abroad, by legal bodies including the International Criminal Court, legal experts say. ...But for Ms. Bensouda, who has had enormous difficulty even gaining custody of some of her most high-profile defendants, let alone winning convictions, the prospect of going after Americans could prove especially tricky. The court is still new, and fragile, said one of her former colleagues, Alex Whiting, and picking a fight with the United States could be “damaging” to the court’s standing in the world. “On the other hand the legitimacy of the court depends on it reaching a point where it treats countries alike,” said Mr. Whiting, who was the prosecution coordinator in The Hague from 2010 until last year and now teaches law at Harvard University. “The court is in a very difficult position on this.”

  • Levine on Wall Street: Swaps Pushed Back In, Harvard Gets in Trouble

    December 12, 2014

    ... Here is an utterly loony paper by Securities Exchange Commissioner Daniel Gallagher and former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest arguing that Harvard is violating the securities laws in its Shareholder Rights Project. That project, run by Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk, submits shareholder proposals to public companies asking them to de-stagger their boards, so that all directors are elected every year instead of electing one-third of directors a year to three-year terms. Staggered boards make activism hard and hostile takeovers nearly impossible, and so are often viewed as shareholder-unfriendly. There is some empirical evidence that they are in fact bad for shareholders. There is other empirical evidence that they are good for shareholders. There is yet other empirical evidence that they are sometimes good and sometimes bad. (This is how empirical corporate governance research always works out, by the way.)

  • ‘Senior status’ lets federal judges keep working — for free

    December 12, 2014

    Seasoned judges like Wolf and Ponsor, who oversaw the only two death penalty trials in the state in modern times, and veteran judges Rya W. Zobel and Joseph L. Tauro recently went on senior status, creating the vacancies that allowed for the appointments. Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, who stepped down in 2011 and now teaches at Harvard, said she chose to leave the bench entirely so that she could speak more openly about judicial matters, something she wouldn’t be able to do as a judge. She recently wrote a Globe column criticizing the legal process used in the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting investigation. She has also has given media interviews, and said, “I feel freer now to be critical.” “Do I miss the bench? Yes, there’s something very special about being able to assess a just result, in your courtroom,” she said.

  • Inversions Are Last Step in Companies’ Tax-Avoidance Hopscotch

    December 12, 2014

    The surge in U.S. companies avoiding taxes by taking a foreign address has been condemned by President Barack Obama and stirred a policy debate in Congress. What’s often overlooked is that these “inversions” are typically a final step in a hopscotch of multinational tax dodging. ... The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by governments around the world, is attempting to restrict profit shifting. Its initiatives could affect U.S. companies including Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Starbucks Corp. “Transfer pricing is the elephant in the room,” said Stephen E. Shay, former deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs at the Obama Treasury Department, now a professor at Harvard Law School. “Transfer pricing is what makes inversions even more valuable.”

  • Silicon Valley companies paying hackers ‘bounties’ to find their flaws before crooks do

    December 11, 2014

    With cyberattacks seemingly getting worse every day, a bidding war has broken out between Silicon Valley tech giants and black marketeers for the talents of hackers who spot software vulnerabilities that can be used to steal everything from corporate trade secrets to consumers' financial information....But critics fear that U.S. and other authorities sometimes fail to correct these flaws, leaving the public dangerously exposed, and that the purchase of bugs by various nations is fueling the black market. "The actions of world governments to buy these things has made it more likely that hackers will sell vulnerabilities and we will all remain vulnerable," said Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

  • Law Students Grieved by Grand Jury Decisions

    December 11, 2014

    Students at a number of top U.S. law schools have asked that winter-term deadlines be extended because they are upset over the recent grand jury decisions in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases. “We have no faith in our justice system, which systematically oppresses black and brown people,” read a Dec. 7 letter from the Harvard Law School Affinity Group Coalition to the university’s administration. “We are afraid for our lives and for the lives of our families. We are in pain. And we are tired.” ...McKenzie Morris [`15], president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, said in an email to Epoch Times that the students’ reaction to both the Brown and Garner cases was based on both legal reasoning and life experience. “Students were devastated when the Ferguson grand jury decision came out,” wrote Morris. “When the Garner decision came out, we were absolutely distraught. Pouring salt into an already open wound doesn’t even come close to the devastation we and so many Americans felt. Each decision, and so many other cases, are collectively the reason why we are working so hard to try to make change.”

  • As views on race relations dim, Obama grasps for historical context

    December 11, 2014

    After President Obama was sworn in as the nation's first African-American president, Americans had a bright outlook on race relations: 66 percent of Americans in April 2009 said race relations were generally good. More than five years later, the latest CBS News poll shows, views on race relations have dimmed dramatically. Just 45 percent say race relations are generally good, the lowest figure in CBS News polling since 1997. ...In some ways, improving attitudes about race have made the more persistent social problems harder to root out, historians say. "Whereas few publicly argue today that Jim Crow was justified, no one can dispute that law enforcement has a legitimate interest in ensuring public safety. Officers sometimes are justified in using force," Prof. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, told CBS. "The question is whether law enforcement officers police fairly, and whether there is accountability in the criminal justice system when officers engage in misconduct."

  • Harvard Law students ask for finals delay after protest (video)

    December 11, 2014

    Students at some of the most prestigious law schools across the country have spent the past two weeks protesting, and now they're saying they didn't have time to study for finals. The students, including some from Harvard University, asked school officials to postpone finals. “When the law does something so flagrantly ill law students need to say something about it and do something about it,” Harvard Law student Dami Animashaun [`16] said....“There are some things more important than an exam. Give us a chance to actually do some real things that have implications, then we can come back and finish our exams,” Martin Njoroge [`17] said.

  • SEC Commissioner Warns Harvard of Vulnerability

    December 11, 2014

    A top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken the unusual step of saying Harvard University could be vulnerable to legal action from the agency or investors over a corporate governance project. In an academic paper, Daniel Gallagher, one of five SEC commissioners, criticized the Shareholder Rights Project at Harvard, which helps large investors like pension funds file shareholder ballot measures meant to help investors get more influence over corporate boards...Lucian Bebchuk, director of the Harvard project, rejected any suggestion the project’s efforts violate securities laws, saying its work is “entirely consistent with SEC rules and not false or misleading in any way.”

  • Tsarnaev trial: Let’s not relive the Marathon bombings

    December 10, 2014

    An op-ed by Nancy Gertner, Michael B. Keating and Martin F. Murphy. On Jan. 5, we are set to relive the Boston Marathon bombing when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial begins. For months after that, a cast of thousands — lawyers, court officials, jurors, police officers, survivors, evidence technicians, and an army of photographers and reporters — will gather at the federal courthouse in South Boston to recreate those days in April 2013. Prosecutors will show photos and videos of the bleeding, dazed victims. The wounded survivors at the finish line and the brave families of the four who died that week — two young women, an 8-year-old boy, and an MIT police officer — will be asked to re-experience the trauma that they (and we) can never forget. And round-the-clock news reporting will rekindle the emotions the event engendered. But the fact is, it is not inevitable: There need not be a trial at all.

  • Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand Wage Labor

    December 10, 2014

    An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Back in the 1940s, when the U.S. Supreme Court last spent a lot of time struggling with the question of what parts of a worker’s day were included in the job for the purposes of getting an hourly wage, the cases tended to come out 5-4. Then, liberals inclined toward unions while moderates and conservatives preferred employers. Times have changed. Today, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 decision that warehouse employees who spend their days fulfilling Amazon orders won’t be paid for mandatory end of the day screening designed to check if they’ve stolen anything from the shelves. To do so, the court interpreted the 1947 Portal to Portal Act essentially as a pro-employer law. And the liberal justices were supremely uninterested in the moral logic of employee compensation.

  • Why the CIA Won’t Be Punished for Torture

    December 10, 2014

    An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Why won’t any U.S. politician, official or contractor ever be prosecuted for torturing people? That big question looms in the background of the just-released CIA report. Until now, the conventional wisdom had been that the Central Intelligence Agency's actions were essentially immunized from prosecution because the agency relied on opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice -- the so-called torture memos. The report championed by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California says that CIA interrogations went well beyond the techniques described to the Office of Legal Counsel and authorized as legal in its memos. If that’s true, then the interrogators essentially flouted even the counsel's expansive and doubtful approval of enhanced interrogation techniques. So shouldn’t somebody be held criminally responsible? And if not, why not?

  • The Experience of Dignity: Community Courts and the Future of the Criminal Justice System

    December 10, 2014

    An article by Michael Zuckerman `17. We do a lot of punishing in America these days—more than virtually every other country, and far more than we did when crime rates were higher...In recent years, a nascent recognition has begun to take root on both sides of the political aisle that our current incarceration system is not only too harsh and too expensive, but an assault on the dignity of the people pulled into it. (Among theorists and activists, these critiques go back a lot farther.) As we think about reforms, we should note the successes of a still-exotic creature in that system: the community court.

  • Fallout From A Controversial Rolling Stone Magazine Story On A Campus Sex Assault (audio)

    December 10, 2014

    A story in last month’s Rolling Stone magazine described the gang rape of a student at a University of Virginia fraternity house. The university responded by suspending all fraternities and a criminal investigation was launched. But in recent weeks, key elements of the alleged victim’s story have been questioned and could not be verified by other news organizations. Advocates say the firestorm around the story has led to blaming the victim and sets back efforts to address campus sex assault. Diane and guests discuss a controversial Rolling Stone article and what it means for journalism standards, the rights of victims and those accused. Guests: Diane Rosenfeld lecturer on law and director, Gender Violence Program, Harvard Law School; former Senior Counsel to the Violence Against Women Office, U.S. Department of Justice.

  • What Amtrak Has in Common With Government

    December 9, 2014

    An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Ever sit on Amtrak's Acela high-speed service wondering why our train system is so medievally slow compared with, say, China’s? Or rather: Have you ever sat on the Acela and not thought that? Either way, the U.S. Supreme Court has a case for you. Today it's considering the constitutionality of a law that, at least in theory, allows Amtrak to pressure the companies that own the rail lines and freight trains to improve access for passenger trains. And the constitutional issue is a fascinating one that goes back to the New Deal: How much lawmaking authority can Congress delegate to bodies other than itself?

  • The Silence of the Lawyers

    December 9, 2014

    An op-ed by Bruce Hay. As another grand jury has let a cop walk away for gratuitously killing an unarmed black man, a loud silence reverberates through the country, just at it has for many years. It is the silence of the nation’s lawyers. The fact is, we operate two criminal justice systems in the United States. One is for affluent white people, who when accused of crime are treated as citizens, as people with rights. They get the benefit of the constitutional protections we boast about in textbooks and television shows, protections like due process and trial by jury and proof beyond reasonable doubt. And they are often shown great leniency for very serious crimes, including homicide. The other system is for poor people and racial minorities, who are treated more like trash to be removed from the streets.

  • Activist, 81, walks from Sarasota to Tallahassee

    December 9, 2014

    Rhana Bazzini believes that government should change the way elections are funded. She believes the corporate influence on politics is corrupt and the power of change should be with the people. That simple idea prompted the 81-year-old activist to walk 435 miles from Sarasota to the steps of the Old Capitol...Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig flew into Tallahassee on Tuesday to be a part of the movement. "I've been keen to support movements that are trying to push for a change in the way we fund elections," Lessing said. "We have such an incredibly concentrated and centralized way of funding elections right now. A tiny fraction of the one percent are the relevant funders of congressional campaigns."

  • A Brake on Reincorporating Abroad via Mergers

    December 9, 2014

    For much of the year, Wall Street advisers were scrambling to engineer the cross-border transactions known as inversions. The result was billions of dollars in mergers and acquisitions, adding fuel to a banner year for deal-making. But an abrupt change to tax rules in September left the future of inversions in limbo...“It has elevated the issue of corporate tax avoidance to a public issue more than it has been in quite some time,” said Stephen E. Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School. “It’s also elevated the issue of anomalies in our tax rules and the need for reform.”

  • ‘We are Boston’ honors Margaret Marshall

    December 9, 2014

    Add another tribute to the long list of them heaped on Margaret Marshall...over the course of her career. Monday night, the former chief justice of the state’s highest court received the 2014 “We Are Boston Leadership Award,” which honors people and organizations that embrace diversity and immigrant heritage. Marshall, of course, is a native of South Africa and wrote the 2003 Supreme Judicial Court opinion that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. She was also the first female general counsel of Harvard University.

  • Trust in the legal system must be regained

    December 9, 2014

    An op-ed by Martha Minow and Robert Post. In the wake of the recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island, outrage and despair are reverberating across the nation, including at the law schools where we teach. Many of our students are struggling to reconcile their ideals of justice with what they perceive as manifest injustices in the criminal law system. Law establishes its legitimacy through procedures that are open and fair. Legal procedures create accountability for those who wield power. We ought to determine the law’s legitimacy at least in part from the perspective of those who suffer its coercion. When the law’s blows fall persistently on the lives and bodies of identifiable groups, and when the procedures we have designed to create legal accountability are short-circuited or fail, our aspiration for a legitimate social order is put at risk.

  • In ever-clubbier bar, 8 men emerge as Supreme Court confidants

    December 8, 2014

    About 30 seconds into an appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall, lawyer Paul Clement was interrupted by a question. It came from Justice Elena Kagan, and it cut to the heart of his case. But during Clement's response, another justice jumped in: his former boss, Justice Antonin Scalia. He suggested a different answer to the question that his fellow justice had posed. Clement, once a clerk for Scalia, took the cue. "You could definitely say that, Justice Scalia."...As retired Justice John Paul Stevens explained, "They earn respect by their performances. And because they have respect, they are more successful. I am not aware of any downside."...Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, disagrees. "I think that hearing different voices, from more women and people of color, would change the way the court looked at cases and analyzed them," Ogletree said.