Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. What, exactly, is wrong with economic inequality? Thomas Piketty’s improbable best-seller, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," has put that question in sharp relief. As just about everyone now knows, Piketty contends that over the next century, inequality is likely to grow. In response, he outlines a series of policies designed to reduce wealth at the very top of society, including a progressive income tax and a global wealth tax. But Piketty says surprisingly little about why economic inequality, as such, is a problem.

The peace process, at least for now, is over. Fatah and Hamas announced a reconciliation agreement, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority Prime Mahmoud Abbas of colluding with a terrorist organization and negotiations were cut off. Hamas reiterated its commitment to the tactics of terror, and nobody thinks official negotiations will restart anytime soon. Unofficial negotiations are all set to go ahead next month…The negotiations will be mediated by Harvard University’s Program on Negotiation chairman Prof. Robert H. Mnookin, an expert on negotiations and conflict resolution.

Has the age of the Robocop and Terminator arrived? The U.N. thinks it might be around the corner. On Tuesday, the world body holds its first-ever multinational convention on “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”…Ahead of the UN meeting, Human Rights Watch on Monday released a report saying that in the not-too-distant future, fully autonomous weapons—killer robots—could be used by law enforcement agencies and thus trigger questions about international human rights law. The report, co-published by HRW and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, finds that “fully autonomous weapons threaten to violate the foundational rights to life and…undermine the underlying principle of human dignity.”

The most powerful weapon that debaters wield against the unwary is causation: marijuana use leads to heroin addiction, pornography to rape, video games to mass murder, high consumption of margarine to divorces in Maine…Whoops. The first three of these are common juxtapositions of parallel trend lines, and the fourth is from the website Spurious Correlations, the work of a Harvard Law School student named Tyler Vigen [`16].

In the statistics field, it is said that correlation does not imply causation - just because two variables are related, it does not mean that one causes the other. To prove this, a new website - Spurious Correlations - is posting daily graphs showing the surprising relationships between pairs of random statistics. Some are extremely unusual - Nicolas Cage films v female Harvard Law Review editors - while others are altogether unexpected, such as the inverse relation between the divorce rate and number of lawyers in Virginia. The website was created by Tyler Vigen [`16], a student at Harvard Law School, using statistics from the US Census and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The site also has a generator so that users can create new spurious correlations by viewing two randomly related variables.

The Obama administration on Friday scored its third major legal victory on air pollution in less than month when a federal appeals court rejected an industry challenge to its latest health standards for fine particulate matter, or soot. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was within its discretion in 2012 when it tightened limits on lung-damaging soot…“The three rulings together create quite the trifecta by significantly furthering the administration’s agenda on addressing climate change through the existing Clean Air Act,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School.

… 4. I’ll cash out at the first opportunity. Since the accounting scandals of the early 2000s, corporate reformers have argued that CEOs should be required to own company stock and to keep it throughout their tenure — ensuring that the CEO’s financial interests are aligned with those of the company’s shareholders. But although 95% of the top 250 U.S. public firms have adopted these policies, they’ve been “extremely ineffectual” in requiring CEOs to hold onto their own firm’s stock, according to a paper accepted for publication in the Indiana Law Journal by Nitzan Shilon [SJD `14], a research fellow at Harvard Law School… 8. Activist shareholders pull my strings. CEOs at publicly traded companies are supposed to listen to their shareholders — but some investors speak louder than others. Recent years have brought a spike in “activist” investing by hedge-fund managers and other big-money players whose modus operandi is to buy a large share of a company, and then demand changes in strategy and management. “Acting in the shadow of shareholder activism, companies are also reviewing their boards and removing people who aren’t equipped to be there,” says Jesse Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies executive compensation and corporate governance. In theory, this helps companies make better decisions, he adds.

The Obama administration is facing a liberal revolt in the Senate over two high-priority judicial nominations, potentially jeopardizing its push to shape the federal judiciary in advance of the midterm congressional election…As that fight plays out, prominent senators from both parties, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, are trying to block, or at least delay, a planned vote on Harvard law professor David Barron, whom Obama has nominated to be a judge on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from New England. As a Justice Department lawyer, Barron wrote at least one memo that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of Anwar Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was slain by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The fight over Barron has made complicated alliances. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Democratic Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon have joined the ACLU in saying all of Barron's memos on drones must be made public or at least made available to senators before any vote.

“This is the politics of resignation.” That’s how Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessigdescribes the American people’s attitude toward the influence of money in politics. They don’t like it. But they don’t think anything can be done to change it. In his recent book, “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It” Lessig outlined his plan for wrenching control of the political system out of the hands of wealthy interest groups. He called for overhauling government by putting a critical mass of reform-minded politicians in office. But the question is how to get those people elected.

…Governments must impose a preemptive ban on fully autonomous weapons before it’s too late, even though they don’t yet exist, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Harvard Law School said in a report released Monday...“We found these weapons could violate the most basic human rights—the right to life, the right to a remedy and the principle of dignity,” HRW researcher and Harvard Law School lecturer Bonnie Docherty wrote in an email. “These rights are the basis for all others.”

Commencement speaker Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School evoked the 1954 fight for the right to a public education led by Thurgood Marshall, grandson of a slave and later a Supreme Count Justice.

Claflin University awarded degrees to the largest class in the institution's history during its Commencement Convocation on Saturday...The ceremony's guest speaker was Dr. Charles Ogletree, from Harvard Law School, who urged graduates to remember those who came before them and helped lay the foundation of the road they have traveled.

Unusual patterns have been revealed by a science website that compares graphs - and its figures will confuse and amaze you. The site was created by Tyler Vigen [`16], a scientist who is studying at Harvard Law School in the US. He brought together graphs from around the world and compiled the ones with similar trends together, sparking some worrying conclusions. One graph suggests the amount of films Nicolas Cage appears in, has a direct correlation with the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool. Both figures dipped in 2003 before spiking in 2007, falling again and then rising from 2009. Another strange trend is the Age of Miss America appears to correlate with the amount of murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects.

At some companies, shareholders lose even when they win. Vornado Realty Trustis a case in point. At every annual meeting since 2007, investors have approved a resolution asking the company to require that the board win a majority of the vote to get re-elected. For the past four years, shareholders in the U.S. real-estate investment trust also have backed a measure asking that each board member be required to stand for election every year. Vornado has refused to implement either proposal...Majority-vote requirements are now common, and the Shareholder Rights Project run by Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk has helped get 121 companies to commit to annual elections since 2011.

When the White House nominated David Barron to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, based in Boston, it expected the usual Republican opposition. Mr. Barron, a Harvard law professor, is known as a liberal who was pointedly critical of President George W. Bush’s national security policy. What it didn’t expect — but should have — was that Democrats would have some problems with the nominee, too. Mr. Barron served as a top official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Obama, and he wrote several memos justifying the use of drones to kill an American citizen affiliated with Al Qaeda. The citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, died in a C.I.A. drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

When Turkey’s dictator blocked Twitter and YouTube earlier this year, many citizens quickly found other ways to access the sites, proving further support for the adage that “the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.” The saying, and the tools that make such rerouting possible, are a testament to the flexible technical protocols that make the internet so accessible to so many people. Yet the ability of Turkish citizens to see blocked websites is also a triumph for the internet’s political protocols, which time and again lead unaffiliated people to unite in an effort to overcome censorship…The most level-headed response to the outcry came from Jonathan Zittrain, a computer science and law professor at Harvard, who pointed out that it would be hard for the U.N. or anyone else to exert control over the internet for the simple reason that it’s not really something that can be owned in the first place.

As Massachusetts' first female and first Hispanic U.S. Attorney, Carmen Ortiz was widely considered a potential rising star in Democratic Party politics. But over the past three years she has had her hands full with controversial cases that have left whatever political plans she may have had in a state of uncertainty…That same year — 2011 — Ortiz's office pursued federal charges on behalf of MIT against a talented computer programmer named Aaron Swartz…“If Aaron had been Goldman Sachs than it would have been handled in a much different way," said Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, Swartz's friend and mentor.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Speed-reading Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the prayer case decided Monday, I got carried away. For years I’ve been frustrated with Thomas’s idiosyncratic argument that the establishment clause of the First Amendment was actually intended not only to bar establishment of a national religion but also to protect state establishments of religion. As I wrote on Tuesday and at much greater length in an academic article and in a book, this view is wrong and historically unsupported. No state admitted to having an established religion by 1789. The New England states facilitated local funding of ministers, but they didn’t call it an “establishment,” which was already a dirty word. And Thomas’s idea of protecting state establishments was, unsurprisingly, unmentioned in any state ratifying convention or in Congress when the clause was being proposed and discussed. In short, there’s no evidence in support of the view, and lots against it.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers want to stage a constitutional challenge to the death penalty in the wake of last week’s botched Oklahoma execution — but a leading death penalty opponent says the accused jihadi is the wrong poster boy for the cause. “This is not a good case,” Harvard Law School professor and constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz said about Tsarnaev, accused of acting on a Islamic extremist agenda in the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath that left four people dead, hundreds injured, and more than a dozen badly maimed.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. The White House Correspondents' Association dinner, which I attended last Saturday night, is an astonishing spectacle -- a unique combination of journalists, government officials and celebrities. Amid the laughter and the conviviality, however, there is an uneasy undercurrent: Many journalists are disturbed that outside of an annual dinner, they cannot get a lot of access to those same officials.

How does the U.S. currently regulate animal farming, what are the barriers to reform, and what can be done to strengthen protections for consumers, animals, and nearby communities? How can we create a more transparent food system so that consumers can choose healthy, sustainably- and humanely-raised food? Those were some of the questions addressed when the Harvard Food Law Society hosted The Meat We Eat: 2014 Forum on Industrial Animal Farming, on Friday, April 4. The forum, co-hosted with the HLS Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, explored the legal and policy aspects of industrial animal farming and related effects on public health, the environment and animal welfare.