Media Mentions

A week after President Obama's 2012 reelection, the conservative Federalist Society gathered 1,500 lawyers in black tie to hear one of their own, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., vow to hold the line against an ever-expanding federal government that "towers over people."…Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Reagan, gives Alito mixed grades, saying he has been careful and thoughtful, but also too driven by ideology..."The quality of his work is excellent. He is not a wiseguy. He's doesn't demean those who disagree with him. And you don't get pompous sloganeering from him," Fried said. "But I'm sorry that on the agenda items, he's been quite predictable. There's a real sense of an agenda with this court, and he's been part of that."

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. There are all sorts of things people want the federal government to do -- for example, reduce poverty, make highways safer, protect against workplace risks, safeguard privacy online, regulate their least favorite companies or, for that matter, engage in deregulation. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, federal officials often answer: “Not now.” In turn, public-interest groups, individuals and businesses have asked federal courts to require public officials to act. And for decades, courts came back with unclear and confusing responses -- until 2007, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had acted unlawfully in refusing to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. That decision led to last week’s proposals for new limits on emissions from existing power plants. And it raised the real possibility that courts would start to oversee federal agencies' authority to set priorities -- and constrain the president’s authority as well.

Republicans have reacted harshly to the Obama administration’s decision to swap five top former Taliban commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was the sole American prisoner of war in Afghanistan. When it comes to the legality of the decision to do so, they have a point…The fact that the law doesn’t address “a time-sensitive prisoner-exchange negotiation of this sort,” Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues, doesn’t mean Obama was within the law when he approved the transfer. “I don’t think it accurate or useful to say that the statute doesn’t address the Bergdahl situation, since it imposes a requirement without exception,” Goldsmith writes.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. We are in the midst of a shift in political thinking about constitutional amendments. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, is among many progressive thinkers now promoting constitutional change -- in her case, to allow Congress to restrict corporate spending on political campaigns. Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in a new book, calls for no fewer than six constitutional amendments, involving not only campaign finance but also gun control, capital punishment, political gerrymandering, sovereign immunity and federalism. Yet, for decades, constitutional change was something championed more by conservatives than by liberals. What's going on?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Scratch a patent-law expert and you’ll find a Supreme Court critic. Most patent lawyers I know disdain the Supreme Court, or at least think it should butt out of their disputes and let the Federal Circuit, made up of experienced patent-law judges, do its own thing. Today in a pair of unanimous decisions reversing the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court made it clear the contempt is mutual. It not only slapped down the specialist court, but also implied strongly that the lower court has run amok, making patent law based on its own policy preferences and not what the patent laws actually say.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The case is out of Agatha Christie: Twenty-four separate times, Carol Anne Bond spread an arsenic-based compound and potassium dichromate on the car door, mailbox and doorknob of the woman who was both her closest friend and, it turned out, her husband’s lover. All she managed was a single burned thumb; the case would never have reached the U.S. Supreme Court had not overreaching prosecutors charged Bond with a chemical weapons violation. Today, the court ducked the potential international implications by holding that it wasn’t “utterly clear” that the chemical weapons law covered Bond’s conduct. Unfortunately, to reach that common-sense conclusion, the court felt it had to invent a new quasi-constitutional doctrine with potentially far-reaching implications. The whole sordid tale can tell us something important about how the court does its business today when interpreting statutes.

On June 2, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it will seek to require the nation’s power plant operators to cut their combined carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030…“It’s no secret that everyone preferred having Congress draft climate legislation,” says Jody Freeman, Obama’s former counselor for energy and climate change. Using the Clean Air Act “was always Plan B.”

…Nearly a decade later, the Nashville teen and her egg donor came together in a way as modern as her birth, after a search on an Internet database, a timid message on Facebook and, finally, a tearful introduction on Katie Couric's daytime TV talk show. The show will air June 12…The identity of U.S. sperm and egg donors is protected by default. In the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries, sperm and egg donors must be willing to be contacted when their offspring turns 18, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard University law professor who specializes in bioethics. But some birth parents still never tell because they don't want to be undermined by a second relationship, Cohen said, and it can be tough for a child to be rejected by the donor. If the United States were to mandate more openness, Cohen said, he'd also like laws that determine how much responsibility the donor must take on.

There’s nothing that gets American journalists quite so giddy as an authoritarian mouthpiece failing to get a joke—as when, in September 2012, Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency reported on a Gallup poll that found an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans preferred President Ahmadinejad to President Obama. It wasn't a real Gallup poll, of course: It was an Onion article, as every English-language news site in the world gleefully pointed out...In the U.S., satirical writing—even if it makes reference to real people, and even if those references are defaming—is protected speech. But according to Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, there are established standards for determining whether or not content is comedic and not criminally libelous—standards that can get tricky when your business is predicated on deceiving your readers. “The question a court would ask is whether the average reader would think the article was factual or satirical,” he says.

Along rows of cubicles at the General Motors Technical Center in suburban Warren, engineers knew for years about faulty ignition switches in small cars. Safety officials in the same complex knew, too. So did the lawyers downtown...But John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School, says often the only way to get investigation results quickly is to hire a lawyer who is familiar with the company. Corporate investigations don't always conform to the company's strategy, he says. Investigations happen more often now, creating a lucrative business line for law firms. If a firm finds no criminal wrongdoing, but it comes out later, "it is their personal reputation at stake," Coates says.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections? The answer was yes.

Amid a statewide surge in heroin use, Wisconsin prosecutors are more frequently pursuing charges against those who provide fatal doses — doubling the number of such homicide charges from 2011 to 2013…Ron Sullivan, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, said the discrepancy “on its face seems unfair,” but it is not surprising given the power prosecutors have to set policy in their counties.

A recent Sunday morning found Roxbury’s Marcella Park nearly empty save for Robert Lewis Jr., bat in hand, leading a handful of his young ballplayers in a light workout. “Head down! Keep your feet sturdy!” barked Lewis as he tossed pitches to Hugo Mateo, 17, a Madison Park High School junior from Everett who’s hoping to play for Lewis’s elite 17-and-under travel team this summer…“What you saw when you looked around that room — law enforcement officials and clergy, educators and athletes, black people and white — reflects the essence of what [Lewis] is doing,” Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree said later. “Now he’s using baseball, of all things, to open up opportunities for young men.”By locating his new program in the heart of Roxbury, Ogletree added, “He’s not only talking the talk, he’s walking the walk.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering Thursday's commencement speech at Harvard University, criticized what he described as a disturbing trend of liberals silencing voices "deemed politically objectionable." Harvard Law School graduate Jared Nicholson [`14] said the speech was "a great message ... about tolerance of different ideas and diversity of opinions."

Harvard Law School celebrated the Harvard Law School Class of 2014, conferring a total of 750 degrees—576 J.D.s, 167 LL.M.s, and 7 S.J.D.s. Festivities began on Class Day, Wednesday, May 28, and continued through Commencement, on Thursday, May 29.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman. President Obama is expected to announce his much anticipated rule for power plants on Monday, requiring for the first time that older and dirtier plants reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, which account for a sizable share of the nation’s carbon pollution. This new rule has rightly been called the “cornerstone” of the president’s climate action plan. If successful, it has the potential to transform the nation’s power sector by driving new investments in efficiency and renewable energy, and by increasing the use of cleaner natural gas in place of coal.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Can GM run from its bad cars? GM’s faulty ignition switches killed people. As a matter of ethics and public relations, GM should stand behind its cars. But does bankruptcy law require it to do so? Technically, no. Bankruptcy law says that an “old GM” was sold to a “new GM” and the “new GM” excluded product liability from the debts it picked up in the sales agreement. But it’d take a bankruptcy expert to know the difference between the old and the new GM; GM today is the same organization as the one that put the bad switches into is cars and, the media reports, knew about it years ago.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, the Supreme Court's death penalty holding today seems like a win for rationality and smart statistics. The 5-4 decision in Hall v. Florida said the state may not use an absolute cutoff of 70 on the IQ test as its measure of intellectual disability, below which a murderer cannot be executed -- because the standard error of measurement on the test is five points plus or minus…On closer examination, though, the decision is less satisfying than it appears.

An op-ed by Robert D. Truog, I. Glenn Cohen, and Mark A. Rockoff. In an opinion dissenting from a Supreme Court decision to deny review in a death penalty case, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” In the wake of the recent botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma, however, a group of eminent legal professionals known as the Death Penalty Committee of The Constitution Project has published a sweeping set of 39 recommendations that not only tinker with, but hope to fix, the multitude of problems that affect this method of capital punishment.

Sixty years ago, with its historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. President Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t sound too happy about that… “Eisenhower’s lack of enthusiasm for Earl Warren’s decision certainly did not help the cause of school desegregation,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Lawyers defending immigrants charged with crimes must be more clear when it comes to the immigration consequences of their cases, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Monday. The court’s decision says telling immigrants they could be “eligible for deportation” or “face deportation” if convicted is not correct legal advice when deportation is “practically inevitable.” Phil Torrey, who lectures on immigration law at Harvard Law School, said the court could not have offered a prescription because there is no magic formula — each case is unique. “I think it’s clear that defense attorneys are going to have to say more than simply, ‘Oh, you’re not a citizen, you’re pleading guilty to a crime, there might be some immigration problems down the road,’” Torrey said.