Media Mentions

More than 20 years ago, a newly elected President Bill Clinton decided that overhauling the country’s loophole-ridden campaign fund-raising rules would be a top goal of his first year in office. Months later, faced with battles over health care and the deficit as well as opposition from lawmakers in his own party who had prospered under the old political-money regime, Mr. Clinton dropped the issue. ... Still, Lawrence Lessig, a political theorist at Harvard and founder of a super PAC that has tried — but so far mostly failed — to turn dismay over Citizens United into a winning political issue, said he welcomed Mrs. Clinton’s help. “There is no hypocrisy in saying you can run a campaign according to the rules of the road while also saying that you want to change the system,” he said. Mrs. Clinton’s signal in Iowa, Mr. Lessig said, “reflects the increasing awareness everyone has that unless we address this issue, we can’t address any other issues.”  

In an era of rapid globalisation, the digital media has become a powerful way for children and young people to realise their rights --- ranging from accessing information, playing games, to expressing themselves freely and even anonymously. The latest digital technologies have a crucial role to play in empowering children by facilitating communication, education and activism. A growing body of evidence from across the world indicates that more and more children and young people are relying on digital tools, platforms and services to learn, engage, participate or socialise....In this regard, the publication Children's Rights in the Digital Age: A download from children around the world is a very useful and comprehensive tool for all working for the betterment of children and young people. In April 2014, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and UNICEF co-hosted, in collaboration with PEW Internet, EU Kids Online, the Internet Society (ISOC), Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), and YouthPolicy.org, the first-ever international 'digitally connected' symposium on children, youths, and the digital media. 

President Obama’s ambitious plan to battle climate change by forcing power plants to reduce their greenhouse gases appeared to survive its first court challenge Thursday, but only because the formal rules are still pending at the Environmental Protection Agency....Industry attorneys were joined by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a onetime mentor to Obama. He suggested the plan was unconstitutional because federal officials were “commandeering” states to do the bidding of Washington. Tribe, who was hired by Peabody Energy Corp., raised eyebrows last month when he testified before a House committee and described Obama’s environmental policies as “burning the Constitution.” ... “It was a good day for the government, but just the first of many to come,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law professor and environmental expert who supports the EPA rules.

A federal appeals court panel suggested Thursday that it may be too early for a court challenge to an Obama administration proposal to cut carbon emissions from U.S. power plants. The case against the Environmental Protection Agency, up for oral argument at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is the first test of how well the central component of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda can withstand legal scrutiny. ...“If it winds up that the court for whatever reason stops EPA, that will be a very significant blow to the president’s agenda,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former climate adviser in the White House during Mr. Obama’s first term as president.

Coal-mining companies Peabody Energy and Murray Energy have sued to block the Environmental Protection Agency from finalizing its Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s broadest plan to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Today lawyers present oral arguments in the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In general, the law favors the EPA, according to Harvard law professor Jody Freeman, a former attorney for the Obama White House who wrote the book on climate change and U.S. law, published by the American Bar Association. If the court allows the case to move forward, "I would be very surprised," she says. "Now, of course, look: Courts sometimes do unusual things." A decision against the EPA—  even if reversed later— would mean delay, which could be costly to President Obama, who has a tight timeline.  

On the the 70th Holocaust Remembrance Day, renowned legal analyst Alan Dershowitz tells Newsmax TV that most Germans want to forget about the Holocaust. "The vast majority of Germans want to put it behind them and want to forget about it," Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor emeritus, told John Bachman and Miranda Khan on "Newsmax Now" on Thursday. "That's true all over Europe. People feel guilty about it," he explained. "We have to remember because if you don't remember, it can be repeated." According to Dershowitz, who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, "to prevent another Holocaust, we must always remember the prior Holocaust, and as Elie Wiesel once put it so well, 'the lesson of the Holocaust is always believe the threats of your enemies more than the promises of your friends.' "

Everything about Berry Bros. and Rudd's showroom in St James’s Street, London, suggests tradition. The walls are panelled in dark oak. Leather-bound volumes record “the weights of customers of this establishment” from 1765 onwards, sitting alongside a set of weights from a time when the shop sold coffee rather than alcohol. Simon Berry represents the 7th generation of Berrys to run the company, and he looks the part. ... John Coates and Reiner Kraakman, of Harvard Law School, who studied the tenure of CEOs in the Standard & Poor’s 500 in 1992-2004, found that those who held more than 1% of the stock (which includes family firms) were at the helm for an average of 13.4 years, compared with 5.5 years for other companies.

In the first legal test of the Obama administration's plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, two of three federal judges hearing a challenge to the regulations on Thursday expressed skepticism about weighing in before they are formally adopted. ... The high-profile hearing featured arguments by Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama mentor. Working on behalf of Peabody Energy Corporation, which intervened in the case, Tribe said EPA's proposal was an unconstitutional attempt to circumvent the law. "It's clear they're trying to make law, not execute law," he said.

A messy scene erupted this week outside Harvard president Drew Faust’s office as students and activists protested the university’s refusal to shed its investments in the fossil fuel industry. ... Some student activists and faculty dismissed the forum because, in contrast to MIT’s debate, divestment was not the main focus. Panelists briefly discussed the issue, but most did not agree it is a good option. “It seems like they’re trying to distract from the issue,” said Ted Hamilton, a second-year law school student who stood outside the forum, which required a ticket to enter.

President Obama’s most far-reaching regulation to slow climate change will have its first day in court on Thursday, the beginning of what is expected to be a multiyear legal battle over the policy that Mr. Obama hopes to leave as his signature environmental achievement. ... Among the lawyers arguing on behalf of the coal companies is Laurence H. Tribe, a renowned Harvard scholar of constitutional law, who was also a mentor to Mr. Obama when he attended law school. Republicans who opposed the rule have cheered Mr. Tribe’s role in the case. Legal experts say it is also possible that the judges could throw the case out, since the rule has only been proposed and thus contains language that could change when released in the final form. “Is industry right that the agency lacks the authority to regulate? The challenge is extremely unusual, since the rule is proposed, and not final,” said Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard University’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to Mr. Obama. “For a court to entertain that would go against decades and decades of precedent.”  

An op-ed by Asher Herzog ’16: In the 10th grade I studied the same tractate of Talmud that I did in the 5th grade. I remember cynically telling my rabbi at the time that this made no sense and that I had already covered the material. He answered me that the changes within me, and the changes in the world around me, made learning the same exact material a completely different experience, and that I would gain something completely different out of the material this time around. He was predictably correct, and I recall this learning experience every year when Yom Hashoah comes around. Every year millions of Jews around the world spend at least one day of the year trying to make sense out of the incomprehensible events of the Holocaust. We grieve for the six million who died purely for being Jewish, and attend events that endeavor to in some way memorialize this unfathomable number.  However, every year we find that though the horrific events of the Holocaust do not change over time, the changes within us and the world around us can make our receipt and remembrance of these same events very different experiences. Unfortunately, the change in the world around us this past year makes this Yom Hashoah a particularly layered and difficult experience.

Two black intellectuals engaged in a heated exchange at UCLA this week over the high homicide rate among young black men and the shooting deaths of black men by racist or lawless police officers, with one arguing that’s not the main problem facing the black community and the other suggesting it’s a huge crisis.The dispute took place during a debate on campus titled “Liberal Policies Make it Harder for Black Americans to Succeed” between Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal and Harvard law school Professor Randall Kennedy. ... “That is a huge problem that is going to require a multi-focus,” Kennedy responded. “… I am not saying white racism is the all- purpose explanation for what we are talking about. I am saying is what we are going to have to do is address many different things. One of those things, however, is the problem of police.”

One of the great mysteries of the scientific world is what happens to Ph.D. recipients after they finish their degrees. Only a small percentage get the tenure-track faculty positions they ostensibly spent years training for. The rest move on to other careers, obviously, but little is currently known about their exact destinations. Now Melanie Sinche of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School is trying to learn more. “If you earned a PhD in any of the physical, life, computational, engineering, or social sciences between 2004 and 2014 and have ever worked, trained, or studied in the U.S.,” you can help by participating in a confidential online survey estimated to take about 15 minutes. Sinche wants to know “where recent science PhDs are currently employed” so that she can “create a visual map of career clusters,” according to the survey website. The study also aims to “identify the skills and experiences required to enter different fields, and … determine whether these skills were developed in the educational/training period of the PhD or on the job, thereby informing the design of graduate and postdoctoral training programs.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Is the European Union out to get Google? You might think so, considering that EU regulators are poised to bring anti-competitive-conduct charges against the search giant, while U.S. regulators happily settled their differences with Google a couple of years ago. Add the European regulatory efforts to force Google to let people eliminate certain permanent-seeming records of their past conduct, and you might think there's some deeper cultural explanation, such as old world skepticism of new world technology.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The big murder trial that’s been obsessing Bostonians has ended with a guilty verdict. No, you're not having déjà vu. Today's jury decision came in the case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star tight end. Hernandez was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd, a semiprofessional football player who was also dating Hernandez's fiancée’s sister. Although the motive remains shady, it seems possible that the 2013 murder was connected to the still unresolved criminal charge that Hernandez killed two other people the year before -- strangers who accidentally insulted him in a nightclub. If that charge also turns out to be true, then Hernandez killed almost as many people as the Tsarnaev brothers who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing two years ago today.

Another day, another town. Ryan T. Anderson, the conservative movement’s fresh-faced, millennial, Ivy League-educated spokesman against same-sex marriage, has another busy schedule. ... Discourteous is not a description usually applied to Anderson. “He’s a smart, likeable, very well-educated young person: an ideal spokesperson for the opposition to gay marriage,” Harvard law professor Michael Klarman, who recently sparred with Anderson at a law school event, writes in an e-mail. But Klarman, who wrote the book “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” adds, “It’s almost inconceivable to me that he persuaded anyone in the audience by his arguments.”

The environmental case being argued on Thursday in a federal appeals court in Washington is equal parts legal freak show and serious legal business. On the serious side, it is the latest attempt by fossil-fuel interests to embalm the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama administration's climate plan. But it is the legal sideshow orchestrated by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard that is unsettling to many environmental lawyers. ... Jody Freeman, another Harvard law professor, called the challenge’s timing "extremely unusual," and Harvard’s Richard Lazarus, who called the legislative history of the disputed clauses in the law "beyond novel" and "really bizarre." Both professors strongly disagree with Tribe’s arguments.