Media Mentions

.By contrast, Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith points out that the president cannot enter a treaty on his own. He can make agreements with foreign leaders until he is blue in the face, but those agreements can’t force a reduction in U.S. emissions unless Congress passes a law saying so. Goldsmith sees the president’s action as symbolic, a way to stake out a legacy and inspire his base. So which is it, gauzy PR or yet another step toward dictatorship?

Treasury officials will be especially careful about what information they share with anyone who calls or asks questions, a former agency official said. “To the extent that you work on something that might be market-moving, you hunker down,” said Stephen Shay, who was the top Treasury Department international tax official earlier in Obama’s presidency. “Particularly when you don’t know what the decision’s going to be.” Shay, now a Harvard Law School professor, wrote a Tax Notes article in July urging the administration to think more broadly about its regulatory authority.

A system crash blacking out broadband service for all 11.4 million of Time Warner Cable’s customers for three hours early Wednesday morning raises questions about the stability of U.S. Internet infrastructure and the potential impact of Time Warner’s proposed mega-merger with Comcast, experts say. ...The lack of disclosure about accidental outages is itself a serious issue, says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. “We ought to have standards for release of data by broadband providers to allow apples-to-apples comparisons and tracking of outages over time so the public, and policymakers, can gauge trends in connectivity,” he says.

After 24 days dissecting public acts and private pain, closing arguments were scheduled for Friday in the federal corruption trial of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen. ... The wrangling over wording can appear esoteric but is critical because it is how a judge tells the jury “here is what I think is the framework in which you have to operate. It’s significant especially in white-collar cases,” which can be more nuanced than street crimes, said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge on the faculty at Harvard Law School.

In attempting to use the necessity defense, the lawyers are veering from tradition. America is home to a long history of acts of civil disobedience — acts that that can help draw attention to a cause or an injustice. But such protestors normally admit that they committed crimes. Retired federal judge and Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner defended anti-nuclear protesters charged with trespass during the 24 years that she worked as a lawyer. They copped to their crimes, which they felt were justified. The difference here, she says, is that attorneys defending the lobster boat blockaders will argue that the necessity of the situation means that no crime was committed. “The necessity defense is a defense that justifies a particular criminal act,” Gertner said. “You’re saying the harm created by the criminal act is outweighed by the harm to be avoided. It’s saying it isn’t a crime.”

And with this as his starting point, Roberto Unger embarks on an exploration of the processes by which social change and spiritual rebirth could beget a living actualization of individual human divinity. The title of Unger's new book, The Religion of the Future, refers to the theoretical product of a modern spiritual revolution. The goal of this revolution would be to promote a greater life for the ordinary individual. The means by which this revolution would be achieved depends entirely on the important relationship between personal conduct and the structures of society.

Plaintiffs have filed their opening brief in an appeal of a federal judge's decision to throw out a lawsuit that contended that state regulators' approval of a contract to sell power from Cape Wind to NStar was unconstitutional. The suit was filed against Cape Wind, state officials and NStar by the town of Barnstable, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and several individuals and businesses. ... According to the brief, co-written by noted constitutional lawyer and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, the U.S. Supreme Court has established that the amendment does not preclude valid challenges to the "ineffectiveness" of past state actions or policies.

The effort to reach an agreement on a $1.5 billion sale of Market Basket — a complicated transaction under any circumstances — has dragged out amid intense legal maneuvering by members of the Demoulas family who have been fighting each other in court for nearly 25 years. ... “What’s clear is that both sides demonize the other,” said Robert Mnookin, the chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and author of the book, “Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.” “Because of anger and fear, people often have a very hard time thinking through how they might be able to serve their own long-run interests,” Mnookin said. “Their impulse is to fight someone they don’t trust.”

Experts say the limited number of Internet service providers—and unimpressive bandwidth speeds—available to many Americans is a major issue. “This outage sheds light on one of the most significant challenges facing the United States: our lack of a plan for world-class, stable, resilient communications capacity,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo Law School, visiting professor at Harvard Law School

Where food is concerned, basic self-preservation pretty much requires you to develop a Goldilocks-type of attitude. After all: too much [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for your health, and too little [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for you too; in order to be healthy, you must eat an amount that's Just Right. ... For example: earlier this month, when the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) held its annual Food Safety Conference in Indianapolis, conference attendees including Emily Broad Lieb, director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, agreed that America's food-dating system (more specifically, its lack of a standard one) might be part of the problem.

The parents and relatives of Michael Brown laid him to rest Monday as the country looked on, and calls for change continue. Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree and Slate’s Jamelle Bouie join to discuss.

Over the last two weeks, a formerly obscure suburb of St. Louis has become a crucible for how race is lived in America.In Ferguson, much depends on the course of the investigation and whether residents consider it impartial and thorough. A failure to charge the officer involved or to secure a guilty verdict is likely to produce fresh clashes. “It’s going to be hard to convince the African Americans in Ferguson that this police officer didn’t do something outrageous,” says Michael Klarman, a legal historian and constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at Harvard University and scholar on race, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." ... Last week, I had an e-mail exchange with her about race relations in the U.S. after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

America's corporate citadels are becoming less impregnable. A more aggressive stance by shareholders is opening new avenues to hostile bids and ushering in radical changes to boards and management teams. ... In 2002, 60% of S&P 500 companies had staggered boards, according to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. Today, just 10% do. A project spearheaded by Harvard Law School Prof. Lucian Bebchuk has floated nearly 200 proposals to destagger boards since 2012. The nonbinding measures received 80% of votes cast, and at least 98 companies have voluntarily adopted them, according to the project's website.

Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and a political activist, planned the walk with his organization N.H. Rebellion, which advocates for campaign finance reform.

An op-ed by Edward Glaeser and Cass Sunstein: A lot of attention has been devoted in recent years to overregulation at the national level. For many people, though, the regulations that hit hardest come from states and localities. The story of Uber's fight with overzealous local regulators is only a well-publicized tip of the iceberg. A 2012 study conducted by the Institute for Justice finds that 102 trades and occupations now face licensing requirements in states or cities. The people who suffer most from them are those without a lot of money or advanced education.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama tried to attract support for one of his highest priorities when he said, “Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits.” He’s right. Economists disagree about a lot of things, but on behalf of immigration reform, there is a professional consensus that cuts across the usual political divisions. Why, then, has reform stalled in Congress?

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: The United States Supreme Court has said that “the constitutional right of free expression is powerful medicine.” Powerful and essential, and it needs to be administered to everyone, including physicians and those regulating their practice. Recent decisions by two federal appeals courts suggest, to the contrary, that the doctor’s office is becoming a First Amendment-free zone…Still, both judicial opinions are troubling for the same reason: They broadly paint medical care as “conduct,” not “speech,” and thereby entirely exempt occupational-licensing laws from the usual First Amendment scrutiny.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if – as he hoped – America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war. And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own.

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree is calling for the arrest of the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9. Appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, Ferguson commented after host Andrea Mitchell noted that police still have not released details of the shooting, including whether Brown was shot at close range and where he was shot…NBC News has this transcript. Ogletree agreed that information is critical. “And I think the first thing that needs to happen,” Ogletree continued, “we need to arrest Officer Wilson. He shot and killed a man, shot him multiple times. And he's walking free. No one knows anything about him, no one knows why he did it. We need to have that done, number one.” Second, he said, was the need for increased dialogue.

An unarmed black teenager shot dead on a Missouri street. A distraught community protests the killing at the hands of a white police officer. Violent clashes follow between protesters and police, who use tear gas, rubber bullets, and wooden pellets…“It’s an outrageous shooting,” said Charles Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor. “People have just had enough and are not yet over what happened with Trayvon Martin,” an unarmed black youth killed two years ago by a Florida crime watch volunteer. Ogletree, who is black, called for continued rallies but without the violence of Wednesday night, when protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at heavily armed police in Ferguson, Mo. “There needs to be a lot of noise — nonviolent but forceful — to make it known that we can’t afford to lose another black child,” Ogletree said.