Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does President Barack Obama's proposed authorization for the war against Islamic State go too far or not far enough? This should be a simple question, but it isn't. Legally, the proposal has the effect of mildly extending presidential power to fight Islamic State, not limiting it. Politically, however, it imposes some real-world constraints that weren't there before. The proposal therefore has something for everyone -- but it also gives everyone something to criticize.

An op-ed by Anna Joseph [`16] and Kerry Richards [`17]. Alan Dershowitz--famed defense attorney and former professor at Harvard Law School--has been accused of being one of the individuals who were provided with an underage "sex slave" by Jeffrey Epstein, Dershowitz's friend and client. Dershowitz has not been charged with a crime and is not a party to the lawsuit in which the accusing affidavit was filed. Though neither Dershowitz's liberty nor his property are at stake, he has responded with public and aggressive victim-blaming.

The trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was supposed to have started three weeks ago. But now it's anybody's guess when this highly anticipated trial will begin. ...Why is it taking so long? Is this the longest jury selection ever? Nobody seems to keep track of such things, said Teresa Saint-Amour, a researcher at the Harvard law library. She couldn't find a single database and steered me to a study of the state courts. An analyst for the organization that conducted the study said it likely was outdated.

The youngest to die was a 4-day-old girl, the oldest a 92-year-old man. They were among at least 844 Palestinians killed as a result of airstrikes on homes during Israel's summer war with the Islamic militant group, Hamas...On its own, a high civilian death toll does not constitute evidence of war crimes, and each strike has to be investigated separately, according to interna[tiona]l law experts, including Alex Whiting of Harvard. But it "certainly raises a red flag and suggests that further investigation is warranted," said Whiting, a former top official at the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands.

Twenty Harvard Law School professors who had publicly spoken out against Harvard’s University-wide sexual harassment policy submitted a memo last fall requesting that the Law School investigate its own sexual harassment cases, rather than go through Harvard’s central investigation office...The document, parts of which signatory and Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet shared with The Crimson this week, sheds light on the process that led to the adoption of the local procedures that, if implemented, in many respects will circumvent Harvard’s newly centralized approach to handling sexual misconduct...Law School professor John Coates, who chaired the committee that wrote the school’s new procedures, confirmed in an email that the committee considered the memo’s principles when it drafted the procedures.

A group of 170 Brooklyn Law School students cut short their winter break and headed back to campus in January for an intensive three-day training session. But not in the law. Instead, they spent the “boot camp” sessions learning about accounting principles, reading financial statements, valuing assets and other basics of the business world — subjects that not long ago were thought to have no place in classic law school education...Last year, Cornell University Law School started a similar business-focused workshop, called “Business Concepts for Lawyers.” The idea came from a Harvard Law School survey of employers released in February 2014, said Lynn A. Stout, a professor of corporate and business law at Cornell. The 124 firms that responded to the survey, called “What Courses Should Law Students Take? Harvard’s Largest Employers Weigh In,” listed accounting, financial statement analysis and corporate finance as the best courses to prepare lawyers to handle corporate and other business matters.

Money may feel as solid as the Bank of England, but it is an ever-shifting phenomenon...But in a new book, “Making Money”, Christine Desan, a Harvard law professor, challenges the view of money’s history as a fall from grace. She is part of the “cartalist” school which argues that money did not develop spontaneously from below, but was imposed from above by the state or ruler.

A political eternity ago, back in May 2013, President Barack Obama felt able to boast that the core of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan was on a path to defeat, allowing America to declare an end to the global war on terror that began after the September 11th 2001 attacks...Jack Goldsmith, a former Pentagon lawyer who teaches national-security law at Harvard Law School, says the draft AUMF amounts to a striking expansion of presidential authority. The 2001 AUMF is already being interpreted broadly to allow strikes on IS. But rather than supersede that old authorisation or place time limits on its validity, this new 2015 AUMF “builds on and adds to it”, he says.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should the U.S. arm Ukraine for its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin? Before you say “Duh,” consider this: Arms shipments alone are almost never enough to enable a smaller, weaker actor to defeat a big-time power. If the U.S. commits itself to sending arms to Ukraine, it’s signing up for more than military aid. When Ukraine needs more help, America’s credibility will be on the line -- and pressure will be great to escalate even to the point of air support.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Brian Williams and Sam Smith may have little in common, apart from being award-winning celebrities (Williams has 12 Emmys and Smith, four Grammys), but at the moment both are being held accountable for wrongdoing. Together, the two cases spotlight a risk that anyone in public life must run. Let’s call it the Denominator Problem. Over the course of a career, a politician, a news anchor, a musician, a movie star or a professional athlete will have said and done countless things. In this respect, they are no different from anyone else -- except that their statements and actions are subject to continual and sometimes obsessive public scrutiny.

In seeking authorization for his six-month-old military campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group, President Obama on Wednesday did something that few if any of his predecessors have done: He asked Congress to restrict the ability of the commander in chief to wage war against an overseas enemy...“In a way, that’s been the story of his presidency,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who, as a top lawyer in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department, was at the heart of the last administration’s debates about presidential power. “He’s been talking during his entire presidency about wanting to restrain himself. But in practice, he’s been expanding his power.”

Convicted SAC Capital Advisors LP fund manager Mathew Martoma is getting help with his insider-trading appeal from the same Harvard professor who helped him fight expulsion for faking his law school transcript 15 years ago. Charles Ogletree Jr., a friend and former law professor of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, said Martoma visited him in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, office in October to ask for help...Ogletree agreed to join Martoma’s appeal.

Hispanic communities were particularly vulnerable to unscrupulous lenders during the last housing boom and the hardest hit by the bust, experiencing the sharpest drop and slowest recovery in home values, according to a study to be released Monday...“They were basically the most innocent consumers on the marketplace,” said Eloise Lawrence, a staff attorney at Harvard Legal Aid Bureau who works with struggling Lynn tenants and homeowners. “They knew the least about what was happening, and they were the most eager to climb onto the first rung of the American dream.”

The diesel engine is a wonder of torque and thermal efficiency, but it emits soot and other unpleasantness. The Environmental Protection Agency is a wonder among regulatory agencies, having discovered authority to regulate diesel-engine pollution in other countries...Volvo will be supported by a National Association of Manufacturers friend-of-the-court brief written by none other than liberal superhero Laurence Tribe of Harvard.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, management has a tip: Try harder. Fearing they’ll crush employees’ confidence and erode performance, employers are asking managers to ease up on harsh feedback. “Accentuate the positive” has become a new mantra at workplaces like VMware Inc., Wayfair Inc., and the Boston Consulting Group Inc., where bosses now dole out frequent praise, urge employees to celebrate small victories and focus performance reviews around a particular worker’s strengths—instead of dwelling on why he flubbed a client presentation. ... Showing people how they stack up is the “emotionally loudest” type of feedback, according to Sheila Heen, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and co-author of “Thanks for the Feedback.” Most employees feel unappreciated, Ms. Heen says, and criticism tends to overshadow appreciation or coaching, especially among young workers.

A book review by HLS Professor Sam Moyn: After the attacks of 9/11, the story goes, all the president’s men went over to the dark side. They redefined torture in a series of infamous memos in order to make brutal practices consistent with America’s domestic law and international agreements. They denied that the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the cornerstone of the law of war, should be applied to captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. And they made Guantanamo Bay a “law-free zone” where America denied prisoners the very human rights the country had contributed to the world. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, both within the Bush administration and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and he went even further by shutting down the harsh interrogation program on his second day in office, winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promising to make America stand on principle once more. This simplistic morality tale is rejected by Jens David Ohlin, a Cornell law professor, in “The Assault on International Law.”

On a weekend in March almost three years ago, Ellie Clougherty flew from London to Rome with Joe Lonsdale. She was a 21-year-old junior at Stanford University, and it was her first trip to Italy. Lonsdale, then 29, was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and he booked a room for them for two nights in a luxury hotel — a converted Renaissance mansion in the shadow of the Pantheon...In November 2013, they attended a conference on gender-based violence at Harvard and heard a talk given by Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard lecturer and lawyer. “Diane said, ‘You have these rights in Title IX,’ and that’s when it clicked,” Anne said. “I chased her into the bathroom and said: ‘You have to meet my daughter. We need your help.’ ” Rosenfeld agreed to represent Clougherty in negotiations with Stanford and Lonsdale over her allegations of sexual harassment and assault and gave her a refrigerator magnet with the slogan “You Are Pure Potential.”

Seven research projects aimed at confronting the challenge of climate change using the levers of law, policy, and economics, as well as public health and science, have been awarded grants in the inaugural year of President Drew Faust’s Climate Change Solutions Fund...The seven winners and their projects are...Emily Broad Leib, lecturer, Harvard Law School: Reducing Food Waste as a Key to Addressing Climate Change...Forty percent of food produced in the United States goes uneaten, according to Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC). Broad Leib and her team will use their award to continue addressing the global problem of food waste. The HLS team is identifying key legal and policy levers to reduce the emissions associated with food waste by investigating, amending, and enacting new polices ― such as tax incentives and liability protection ― that remove the barriers to food donation.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. An outright confrontation between the state of Alabama and the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of gay marriage has come two steps closer in the past 24 hours. Last night, Roy Moore, the renegade Alabama chief justice, ordered the state probate judges who supervise all marriages to deny licenses to same-sex couples. This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a stay that would have delayed a direct conflict between Moore's order and that of the federal district court that has declared Alabama's prohibition of gay marriage unconstitutional. As of now, a federal court order effectively requires Alabama judges to issue marriage licenses -- while the chief justice of the state Supreme Court has ordered them not to do it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Jordan’s King Abdullah II was in battle gear last week, quoting Clint Eastwood and bombing Islamic State targets in retaliation for the horrific burning-alive of a Jordanian pilot. Is this a sign that Jordan is entering the war against the insurgent group in earnest, or is it a temporary show for a stunned Jordanian public? The complicated reality is that Jordan and Islamic State are enmeshed in an extended, dynamic, repeat-play game in which the rules are just now being set.

Faced with dwindling sources for execution drugs and a pending Supreme Court review of the constitutionality of using the tranquilizer midazolam, some death penalty states are looking back to the future for alternative methods of killing inmates. ...Harvard law professor Carol Steiker said recently she believes the death penalty may be on its way out, but not for another decade or so. "It would not surprise me if the death penalty were constitutionally invalidated sometime in the next couple of decades," she said. "The Supreme Court has been on a trajectory of narrowing and questioning the death penalty. In 2002, it held that people with mental retardation, now called intellectual disability, couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2005, it held that juvenile offenders couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2008, it held that people who commit crimes other than murder — even the crime of aggravated rape of a child — couldn’t get the death penalty. These are really significant limitations on capital punishment."