Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The same-sex marriage cases, which will be argued Tuesday, may well rank among the most important constitutional disputes in American history. The best analogy is Brown v. Board of Education, the iconic 1954 decision in which the Supreme Court struck down school segregation. The parallel is very close, and it clarifies what the same-sex marriage cases are really about. Almost everyone now celebrates Brown as self-evidently correct. But beware of hindsight. It obscures the intense disagreements that preceded that decision, and the firestorms that followed it. At the time, eminently sensible people insisted that the court had overreached, not least because racial segregation was entrenched in many states, and because it was not at all obvious that the Constitution stood in its way.

Columbia University is one of the many schools to be accused of failing to protect the rights of sexual assault victims. This week, it became one of the first to be singled out for failing to protect the rights of the accused. On Wednesday, Paul Nungesser, the male student who was the target of the now-famous “Carry That Weight” campaign filed a federal complaint against Columbia University, its board of trustees, and President Lee C. Bollinger...These cases beg the question: will students accused of sexual assault be headed to court en masse? Legal experts interviewed for this article say that may, in fact, be the next phase in national campus sexual assault reform—and they say the federal government is to blame. “I think the next wave will be students suing the universities. I think there will be an escalating wave,” said Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet...“When you get things like the federal government pressuring universities to create a sexual assault process that lacks adequate due process for those accused, you’re going to get students trying to protect themselves,” said Bartholet. Under current campus policy, she believes “there’s the risk we will find a lot of people responsible for sexual assault when they shouldn’t be. That will lead to some of them fighting back with the help of lawyers against the university and the government. I think that’s a good and healthy thing because what the federal government has done is outrageous,” she said.

Relatives of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are under federal government protection in a Revere hotel, officials said Friday, and are widely expected to assist the defense team as it prepares to present its case next week that Tsarnaev should be spared the death penalty....“So far Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a cardboard figure for the jury,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “Anything that humanizes him is a good thing for the defense.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Every weapons system, from the bow and arrow to the intercontinental ballistic missile, sometimes kills the wrong people. So why has the revelation that a U.S. drone strike accidentally killed two al-Qaeda hostages ­-- a U.S. citizen and an Italian aid worker -- created such a storm of drone “rethinking”? Part of the answer is that liberal critics of drone strikes, who’ve questioned their legality, are using the opportunity to repeat and reframe their criticisms. I’ve joined in some of that criticism in the past and stand by it. But the deeper reason for the renewed discussion is a pernicious myth: the fantasy that drones are uniquely precise.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein. DNA testing and videotaping of police-citizen encounters may have more in common than you might think. Both show not what arguably happened but what is true (or as close to true as we can get). DNA exonerations have enabled us to examine the behavior of lawyers, judges and prosecutors in order to understand how a wrongful conviction happened. Videotaping of police-citizen encounters could well do the same for policing and civil rights challenges to police misconduct.

Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said....But her friends and relatives say she has never viewed her job in government as one of a civil rights advocate. “She’s not an ideologue,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and longtime friend, said recently. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

When it was announced a little more than a year ago, it felt to many like a sure thing. After all, government regulators had approved Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011...The president may have been speaking about net neutrality, but the implications for the merger were clear. “That was just huge,” said Susan Crawford, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “It signaled that the cable industry was no longer calling the shots.”

An op-ed by David Medine and Eliza Sweren-Becker [`15]. Today we learned that in January, a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan inadvertently killed an American and an Italian held as hostages by al Qaeda. The strike also killed a U.S. citizen who was a prominent member of al Qaeda. A separate operation in January killed an American-born al Qaeda spokesman. The deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Portois are tragic and the Obama administration has pledged to conduct an independent review to understand how to prevent this type of grievous mistake. The apparently unintentional killings of two American al Qaeda operatives raise an additional question that President Obama did not address in his televised statement today: under what circumstances may the United States intentionally use targeted lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad?

Virginia is one of many states that have proposed new legislation tackling sexual misconduct on college campuses. However, some people believe this new wave of enforcement is an overreaction to problems at hand. Harvard University law professor Janet Halley was one of more than a dozen professors who wrote an op-ed published in The Boston Globe arguing that Harvard Law School’s new policy designed to crack down on sexual assault was unfair.Halley spoke at Roanoke College on Thursday about the problems she sees with Harvard’s policy and similar policies that have been adopted at schools across the country in response to the attention that sexual assault on campus has received in recent years...Halley, a self-described feminist and progressive, said the policies at Harvard, which were designed to be tough on campus sexual assault, had several problems including giving victims more rights than the accused, a lack of due process and teaching women that they are weak and in need of protection.

An op-ed by Stuart Brotman. The Federal Communication Commission's recent Open Internet Order is intended to develop an enforceable regulatory scheme to ensure that net neutrality would be achieved. One of its rationales is that unless such government intervention is put in place, the United States is likely to slip into the category of Internet also-rans, hurting innovation and our economy as a whole as Internet "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" thwart competition and impede consumer demand. But how accurate is this perception? The Internet, after all, is not just a network of networks, but rather a complex ecosystem comprised of applications and content, devices and networks. The interdependency of these three pillars creates the rich experience of the Internet, not just in the United States, but all around the world.

Researchers who have spent the past few months analyzing the town’s political environment plan to present their findings early next month. Students Seanan Fong and Jiayun Ho from the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program will also release a written report, the program announced this week.

...As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the nation seems more ready to accept it than many imagined even a year ago. But divisions remain, and while more than half of Americans now endorse the idea, about one-third say they oppose it, according to survey data from 2014...“As more couples marry, more people will know people who are married,” said Michael J. Klarman, a legal historian at the Harvard Law School and author of a 2012 book on earlier same-sex marriage rulings. “And those who oppose it will find out that the sky doesn’t fall.”

Citing a rise in wrongful-conviction claims by inmates, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is launching a unit of veteran prosecutors to review the integrity of past convictions, joining a small but growing number of prosecutorial agencies around the country devoting resources to identify innocent prisoners...Forgoing an antagonistic view toward the defense has worked well for prosecutors in Brooklyn’s conviction review unit, said Ron Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who designed and implemented the unit, which has helped exonerate 13 people since it began in 2014...A big part of putting the unit in place, Sullivan said, was creating a new ethos in the office and reinforcing the “notion of prosecutors doing justice instead of trying to get convictions.”

A frequent contributor to Fox News and the Wall Street Journal has injected an oft-missing issue in the #blacklivesmatter movement: facts. The contributor, Jason Riley, faced off with Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor of criminal law and the regulation of race relations, in a civil but intense debate Tuesday evening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Most of the debate, “Liberal Policies make it harder for black Americans to succeed,” centered around affirmative action and social welfare policies, but the rhetorical combatants did address the politically thorny issue of black crime.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 197 new members. They include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, and artists, and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. Those elected from Harvard are...Noah R. Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Philadelphia's Police Department, like many others around the country, is in the midst of a plans to invest in body cameras. The department will purchase 450 of the devices for officers next year with plans to outfit the city's entire force with them by 2019. WHYY talked to Katie McCarthy, a third-year Harvard law student who works at the school's law clinic representing low-income defendants. McCarthy recently wrote "Considering Police Body Cameras" for the Harvard Law Review, a piece on research she's done into the implications of police departments adopting the technology.

“In the face of so much hate let’s show how deeply we love,” said the Harvard Law Women’s Law Association President Kenyon D. Colli [`16] at a vigil for Africans Wednesday evening. Here, students light each other’s candles before singing “Amazing Grace.” The Harvard African Law Association hosted the event in response to recent killings across the continent.

More than two months after receiving initial feedback on its Title IX procedures from the federal Office for Civil Rights, Harvard Law School has still not received final sign-off from OCR on its updated draft of those procedures, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London.

Three filmmakers, operating two cameras and a boom mic, hurry through Pattee Creek Market on a recent Friday afternoon. They are frantically tracking the seemingly mundane action of a store employee transferring milk cartons from one side of the market to a sink on the other side. There, he will pour the contents of the cartons down the drain in compliance with a state law that forbids the sale of milk more than 12 days after it's pasteurized. Led by director and Harvard Law School lecturer Rebecca Richman Cohen, the filmmakers are working with Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Emily Deddens [`15], a Harvard law student, on a short documentary about how confusing dating on food products leads to waste throughout the United States. According to Leib, Montana's policy regarding milk dating is the nation's strictest—and therefore the most glaring example of what's wrong nationwide.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it better to follow the strict letter of the law or to adjust it where appropriate to produce a more equitable result? This is one of the oldest questions in legal thought, one that can be traced back at least to Aristotle -- and on Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in, 5-4, on the side of equity, with Justice Anthony Kennedy providing the deciding vote. Ordinarily, a decision like this one, involving the interpretation of the Federal Tort Claims Act would be of interest only to practitioners who are specialists in statutory interpretation. But this isn’t an ordinary spring. In June, the Supreme Court will hand down its most important statutory interpretation case in a generation, essentially deciding whether the Affordable Care Act will survive or fall.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are nonhuman animals about to become legal persons? You might think so upon hearing about an order issued Tuesday by a New York trial judge that requires officials from the State University of New York at Stony Brook to appear and show cause why two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, should not be released from the facility where they are kept into the custody of Save the Chimps. After all, this order parallels a standard habeas corpus order, which normally requires a jailer to appear and show cause why someone who is detained should not be released under the law. At the top of the order, big as life, is a caption reading “Order to Show Cause and Habeas Corpus.” And the order says that the chimps should be released if there’s a finding that they’re “unlawfully detained.” Not so fast. What’s probably happening is a good deal more modest -- and more legally important than the never-ending debate about the ways chimps or other animals are like humans.