Media Mentions

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow has appointed a Title IX committee to begin implementing the school’s new set of procedures for responding to cases of alleged sexual harassment, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London...After a group of 28 professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe that criticized Harvard’s policy in October, Minow appointed a committee, chaired by Law School professor John Coates, to draft a new set of school-specific procedures.

When the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that POM Wonderful was overstating pomegranate juice's health benefits in its advertisements, a press release from the FTC, which was challenging POM in court, called the decision “a victory for consumers.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, describing it as “a notable win.” In a sense, it was: The company was banned from trumpeting its juice as an elixir that could help prevent heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction if there wasn't sufficient research done to back up those claims. But in another sense, the decision wasn’t a victory at all. Buried in the FTC’s press release was the reluctant acknowledgement that the Circuit Court denied the FTC the ability to require that POM base its advertising on at least two randomized, well-controlled clinical trials... To arrive at this decision, the Court wasn’t relying on some obscure bit of corporate law; it was relying on the First Amendment. How problematic is it that a company selling at least $100 million worth of juice every year based on sketchy empiricism could defend its preposterous advertising claims in court on free-speech grounds, and still be humored? That’s one question that John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former corporate lawyer, explores in a recent survey of what he calls “the corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” According to Coates, companies are now the beneficiaries of cases involving the First Amendment just as often as individuals, and the frequency of those cases has been rising since the mid-70s.

Liberal Harvard professor Laurence Tribe doesn’t think of himself as aligned with Senate leader Mitch McConnell, but the two men agree that the regulations proposed by the EPA to control greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired plants is an abuse of executive power. Both are tossing hand grenades into President Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change, and although they’ve never talked and don’t know each other, they are a formidable team. Tribe mentored the young Obama and taught him constitutional law at Harvard, so it was a shock to hear him testify last month at a hearing of the House Energy and Power committee that Obama’s plan to gradually reduce pollution from coal-burning plants was the equivalent of “burning the Constitution.” In the same hearing, Tribe tried to distance himself from McConnell, calling the GOP leader’s “just say no” strategy on climate change “reckless” and “irresponsible.” In a lengthy email, Tribe says he had misgivings about the EPA regs when he first became aware of them late last year.

Four of the teams that took part in a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab last weekend will go on to present their practical solutions for reducing institutional corruption to a conference at Harvard Law School later this spring...Scholars, researchers, news reporters, and activists have contributed to the Safra Center’s five-year project under the direction of Lawrence Lessig, studying, mapping, and looking for solutions to the institutional corruption that takes place in all corners of the globe. The project will culminate with a two-day conference, “Ending Institutional Corruption,” at Harvard Law School in May. Judges initially planned to let top three teams present their proposals at the conference, but the ideas were so strong that the organizers decided to let all four teams give at least an abbreviated report.

A recent study claims that "corporations have begun to displace individuals as direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment." Its author [John Coates] joins HuffPost Live to discuss his findings and explain what they mean for free speech.

An article by Jeremy Schwarz `15. They expected him to fail. But 50 years later, while we remember the man Harry Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed Singapore from a British colonial outpost into a prosperous, global city-state, we must not overlook some of his key lessons in leadership. After separation from Malaysia, the future of Singapore looked bleak. Mr Lee inherited a toxic mix of racial unrest, an unemployment rate of 30 per cent, domestic instability and economic uncertainty. Singapore could have followed the path of some of its neighbours: increasing nationalist rhetoric, racial division, economic instability, communist insurgency and continued unrest. Mr Lee could have followed the path of Mr Sukarno, Mr Ferdinand Marcos or even Mr Ngo Dinh Diem. Mr Lee concluded otherwise.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When your state breaks federal law in a way that affects you, can you sue in federal court to make it do the right thing? On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court made doing so substantially harder. In a case involving private health-care providers in Idaho, the justices held that the health workers can’t sue Idaho -- even though the state was paying them less than required under federal Medicaid law. If this sounds weird to you, the fault isn’t yours. The problem lies with the version of federalism that underlies the 5-4 decision. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court’s controlling opinion, bent over backward to say that the Constitution shouldn’t be read to provide an automatic right to sue your state when it violates federal law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Expanding the Rhodes scholarships to China is a great idea -- and not because China under President Xi Jinping is on its way to becoming a constitutional democracy. Since Cecil Rhodes created the scholarship (of which I was a recipient) in his will, its grand aspiration -- which some might find overblown -- has always been to reconcile countries that might otherwise be in conflict.

In what Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow described as a “very unusual event,” University President Drew G. Faust and visiting Law School professor Leon Wieseltier discussed the status of intellectualism and the humanities Tuesday night. The discussion, held in a question and answer format between Faust and Wieseltier as well as members of the crowd at Wasserstein Hall on the Law School campus, revolved around the potentially corruptive influence of technology on public thought. “What we really have to think about is the impact of this technology on cognition and on consciousness and on culture,” said Wieseltier, who is also a fellow at the Brookings Institute, a think tank. Wieseltier tied “the tyranny of the devices” and the rise of “snackable” reading to what he described as the decline of the humanities.

Closing arguments will be heard Monday in the Marathon Bombing trial. Today, the defense rested after calling just four witnesses. Adam Reilly was in the courtroom again today. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, Rev. Jeffrey Brown, of Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church, and Boston Public Radio co-host Margery Eagan discuss.

The Palestinians formally joined the International Criminal Court on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to put international pressure on Israel and exact a higher price for its occupation of lands sought for a Palestinian state...Palestine's court membership could help shift focus to settlements as a legal and not just a political issue, said Alex Whiting, a former official in the international prosecutor's office.

...There is no suspense around the verdict in this case. With the virtually irrefutable evidence the government's offered and Tsarnaev's attorney's own admission that he did it, the defense team's only goal now is to convince at least one juror that the 21-year-old doesn't deserve to die. But even that is fraught. Ron Sullivan: "The client is still toxic to the mind of so many citizens that the defense has to be exceedingly careful about everything they say."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. An old saw has it that “Arab unity” is an oxymoron on par with “military intelligence.” Read not as racial essentialism but as a critique of pan-Arabism, the observation has been true in the modern era. Yet Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s announcement of an agreement “in principle” by the Arab League to create a joint military force may just be different. Because Islamic State is unlikely to be defeated by air power alone, the U.S. should probably welcome the step -- as should Israel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom says that executing a person of reduced mental capacity is cruel and unusual punishment. On Monday, it took up the question of whether a convicted defendant should get a separate hearing, apart from the death penalty determination, to ascertain what the court still calls mental retardation. Under the surface, however, the case is really about something else: As the Supreme Court chips away at the death penalty, should it multiply procedural hurdles to make it harder and harder to administer?

A letter by Laurence Tribe. To read Richard L. Revesz’s Op-Ed article attacking as “far-fetched” the arguments I made against the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate plan in a recent congressional hearing (“An Obama Friend Turns Foe on Coal,” March 26), one would never know that Mr. Revesz also testified at that hearing, making the identical attacks, which I refuted in detail. I strongly disagree with the way he portrays my arguments...To say my arguments would imperil the Clean Air Act’s centerpiece is absurd. The E.P.A. is defying the rule of law, and allowing its gambit here would allow agencies to rewrite the United States Code at their pleasure.

University President Drew G. Faust is defending Harvard’s governance structure after two Harvard Law School professors were sharply critical of the central administration in an op-ed that called for the formation of a faculty senate...Faust was responding directly to an op-ed published last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Law School professors Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin, who argued that Harvard’s central administration and “bureaucracy” had grown extensively. “And the results have not always been good,” it read. The authors also suggested that observers should not assume that the FAS, whose monthly meetings are chaired by Faust, speaks for the whole University. Fried and Mnookin pointed in particular to the unveiling of Harvard’s University-wide sexual assault policy and procedures last July and the new health benefits plans for non-union employees last fall as examples of decisions that they argued did not involve enough faculty input. But Faust took issue with each of those examples, maintaining that broad input from across Harvard was sought.

If you want to know why the so-called wisdom of crowds is a load of B.S., just take a look at the widespread reaction last week to Indiana’s new religious-freedom law. If you listened to all the voices who have weighed in on this subject, from TV to radio to the Internet, you’d think Indiana just passed a law giving a green light to anti-gay bigotry. But after talking to some legal experts who had actually read the law in question, I found out Indiana had done no such thing...Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the law might be used to justify discrimination against gays — if the courts agree that that was the intent of the legislators who passed it, and if the courts cannot find a compelling public interest against such discrimination.

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn...Renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz recalled Cruz was "not a very smiley guy," and he thought would become an "extraordinarily able appellate lawyer."...Another longtime Harvard law professor Charles Fried said he worked with Cruz when the latter was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. "I have a vivid recollection of a very smart, very disciplined man," he said. "I've been reading all these sharp elbow stories but I didn't see that. He was, I would say, correct. Respectful and correct."

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. The National Commission on Forensic Science was formed in response to widespread concerns that forensic evidence that lacked any meaningful scientific basis was being regularly permitted in trials. The concerns were not just about the “expert” witnesses, but about the judges who, according to the National Academy of Sciences report that led to the commission’s creation, have been “utterly ineffective” in assessing the quality of research behind the evidence. The evidence used to win convictions has often been based on bad science. In about half of the cases in which D.N.A. evidence led to exoneration, invalid or improper forensic science contributed to the wrongful conviction.

It was 2009 when the state’s highest court moved to curb abuses by debt collectors in small claims courts. Since then, debt collection attorneys have been required to certify they have sued debtors at the correct address and have evidence that the debt is actually owed. But the Supreme Judicial Court did nothing to provide the same protections to the tens of thousands of debtors who are sued in the civil sessions of the 62 district courts and the Boston Municipal Court...At municipal court, which is under separate jurisdiction than district courts, attorneys with the Volunteer Lawyers Project and Harvard Law professor James Greiner have found evidence that some civil claims appear to have been sent to defendants’ old addresses...Greiner, who has a PhD in statistics, said that when researchers looked at the first 87 cases, they found 28 where the address used by the plaintiff did not match the defendant’s address contained in the commercial database. In 14 of those cases, the plaintiff had filed with the court an address that appeared to be the defendant’s prior address.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The most illuminating free-speech case of 2015 has nothing to do with political speech, or civil-rights protests, or hate speech, or any other issues we used to associate with the First Amendment. It has to do with an obscure provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to inform the public if their products use conflict minerals. The case, brought by the National Association of Manufacturers, is the culmination of a stunningly successful corporate movement to transform the First Amendment into an all-purpose shield against even modest regulation. Let’s give the movement a name: Free Speech Inc.