Media Mentions

An independent investigation by the Harvard Law School has found that troops commanded by Myanmar's powerful interior minister and two other senior officials tortured and killed civilians over six years ago while fighting an ethnic rebellion. Researchers spent four years collecting information about Home Affairs Minister Major General Ko Ko, Brigadier General Khin Zaw Oo and Brigadier General Mang Maung Aye, said the report released on Thursday. They commanded troops during an offensive against rebels in eastern Karen state between 2005 and 2008, when soldiers fired mortars at villages and executed civilians, among other crimes, it said..."We've established that they had command and control over the forces that were committing these crimes," said Matthew Bugher, one of the authors of the report by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School who handed over the report's findings to the government on Wednesday.

Their parents had abandoned them, but the three small children clung together, a family without grown-ups. Roman took care of his younger brother and sister, begging for food and stealing potatoes from a field in Rudnoye, their Russian village...Roman lives in Watertown today, 6,000 miles from his hometown in the Russian far east. He was so small when he got to the United States five years ago that his height and weight — 4 feet, 4 inches and 57 pounds — placed him below zero percent on the international growth chart for children...Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program, says that adoptive parents hold the same legal rights as biological parents to make decisions for their children. “There is not much in the law that honors the right of siblings to contact each other just because they are blood siblings,” said Bartholet, who is not involved in the Davis case.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in many states was a titanic step forward for the LGBT community, but the community still faces a number of challenges in gaining full equality, according to Mary Bonauto, a leading lawyer in the field...Bonauto spoke Tuesday at a brown-bag luncheon at Harvard Law School (HLS), during which she was interviewed by Dean Martha Minow and fielded questions from students in the audience.

A report by Harvard researchers due to be released on Friday says there is sufficient evidence to prosecute high-ranking officers in Myanmar’s military for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against an ethnic minority. The report, published by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, is based on a three-year study of villages near the Thai border, where the military conducted a large-scale offensive against ethnic Karen fighters from 2005 until 2008. The authors say that “widespread and systematic” attacks directed against civilians during the offensive justify war-crime prosecutions.

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny Central European duchy, leaked documents show...“A Luxembourg structure is a way of stripping income from whatever country it comes from,’’ said Stephen E. Shay, a professor of international taxation at Harvard Law School and a former tax official in the U.S. Treasury Department. The Grand Duchy, he said, “combines enormous flexibility to set up tax reduction schemes, along with binding tax rulings that are unique. It’s like a magical fairyland.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is a fish a tangible object? Does a sawed-off shotgun pose serious risk of injury? Laugh if you must, but the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up these questions in a pair of cases that will form another chapter in the saga of our vastly expanding federal criminal law. Funny as the cases may seem -- both funny strange and funny ha-ha -- they illustrate how policy and law constantly interact for a court deeply divided about the nature of statutory interpretation.

Technology companies and the federal government are locked in an escalating legal battle over data surveillance and consumer rights, said Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith at a Law School forum Tuesday...Conversing with Law School Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who moderated the forum, Smith argued that the U.S. government must respect both domestic and international privacy laws, instead of unilaterally and opaquely obtaining data.

On Tuesday, former Kirkland House tutor Eric P. Lesser ’07 [HLS `16] secured the Massachusetts State Senate seat for the First Hampden and Hampshire District, which consists of eastern Springfield and surrounding towns. Lesser was expected to do well after receiving high-profile Democratic endorsements on his behalf, most notably Senator Elizabeth Warren. He received 51 percent of the vote, according to the Associated Press, with 90 percent of precincts reporting. A third year student at the Law School who resided in Kirkland during his time in the College, Lesser left in January to secure the Democratic nomination.

Voters are usually inclined to vote their pocketbooks. But that's become more difficult with every election, as the pocketbooks that carry the most weight aren't those of the individual voter, but corporations and plutocrats...Shareholder interest in how much money their companies spend on politics, and where, is high. In recent years, according to a study by Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard and Robert L. Jackson Jr. of Columbia, disclosure of such spending has been the top subject of shareholder proposals at U.S. public companies...Inevitably, at least some shareholders will consider themselves out of step with the corporate brass: "Shareholders do not sort themselves among companies according to their political preferences," Bebchuk and Jackson observe.

The conflict between snooping governments seeking to defeat encryption and users demanding ever more robust privacy tools has turned into an arms race -- and it's time for arms control talks, Microsoft's general counsel said on Tuesday. Resolving that conflict requires a new consensus on how to balance public safety and personal privacy, Brad Smith said in a forum at Harvard Law School...In an expansive conversation about privacy and rebuilding trust in technology after revelations of widespread government spying, Smith talked about Microsoft's first "sea-change" moment. It came in the year after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Microsoft, among other Internet companies and telcos, was asked to voluntarily share data with U.S. law enforcement. In the heat of the moment, in 2002, "it was easy to do things that we wouldn't otherwise do," Smith told Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who moderated the event.

Open Facebook today and you’ll see a public service announcement of sorts. “It’s Election Day,” proclaims the text. “Share that you’re voting in the U.S. Election and find out where to vote.”...In other words, to paraphrase Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, the 2000 presidential election—where George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes—could have been altered by a Facebook election button...As Zittrain wrote earlier this year, the company could easily combine that tranche of data with selective deployment of its “I Voted” button and tilt an election. Just make certain populations more likely to see the button, and, ta-da: modification managed.

An op-ed by Adrian Vermeule. How should we approach legal decisions regarding private property for public use? How can constitutional risk be managed in order to maximise the benefits? In this article adapted from the author’s book The Constitution of Risk, Adrian Vermeule explores such questions, looking at the role of constitutional risk within free market development, financial regulation, and how constitutional rulemakers are able to optimise strategy in these fields.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. When a company files for Chapter 11 protection a second, third or even fourth time, who’s to blame? Bankruptcy recidivism has a bad name. The best data points to one out of six restructured companies refiling for bankruptcy not long after getting a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization confirmed. If blame needs to be handed out, one could point to the judge who is charged under the Code with independently concluding that the plan is not likely to lead to a further restructuring of the company. But blaming the judge would be harsh, because the statutory standard of ‘not likely’ doesn’t require a “guarantee,” just a likelihood. The data suggests that most—more than 80%—don’t refile.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Menachem Zivotofsky hasn’t had his bar mitzvah yet, but he’s already been to the Supreme Court -- twice. A U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem, Zivotofsky (through his American-Israeli parents) seeks to have his birthplace named as “Israel” on his U.S. passport, not “Jerusalem” as is State Department practice. Having previously determined that the courts had the authority to hear the case, the Supreme Court is now hearing oral arguments and will decide whether a 2002 law requiring the State Department to add “Israel” to the place of birth on passports such as Zivotofsky’s unconstitutionally infringes on the president’s foreign relations power.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Edward Snowden may never appear before a U.S. court, much less the Supreme Court -- but that doesn't mean his whistle-blowing is far from the justices’ minds. What they think about it will be very much in evidence as the court hears oral arguments today in Department of Homeland Security v. MacLean, a case concerning an air marshal who was fired for disclosing "sensitive security information" to the media. The justices will have to decide whether the federal law that protects whistle-blowers extends to those who break an agency's regulations but not a law passed by Congress. This will matter for individual whistle-blowers in the future as well as for the overall environment in which prosecutions of government employees continue to be brought.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it a lie if you don’t know what you're saying isn't true? This eternal philosophical question, well-known to 6-year-olds everywhere, is now before the U.S. Supreme Court -- and the stakes are hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of securities class-action litigation. To be more precise, the court is considering whether Section 11 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1933, which makes issuers liable for making material false statements in their registration statements, applies when the issuer says it “believes” it is complying with the law, even when objectively speaking it isn’t. The appellate courts are split on the issue, and the Supreme Court’s resolution will have significant consequences for any issuing company that falls afoul of regulators and wants to avoid paying out to a shareholder class action.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. In tomorrow's election, the Republican Party seems poised to make significant gains in the U.S. Senate and the House, and might well end up with control of both. If so, how will it define itself? It is tempting to answer by pointing to concrete policy proposals -- reducing regulation, promoting free trade, cutting the federal budget. But does any general theory, or approach to government, unify those proposals? In a magnificent essay, one of modern conservatism’s greatest heroes, Friedrich Hayek, offered an answer. Published in 1960, Hayek’s “Why I Am Not A Conservative” deserves careful attention today, perhaps above all from Republicans.

An op-ed by Lani Guinier and Penda D. Hair (co-director of the Advancement Project). Contrary to popular belief, Americans’ right to vote is not guaranteed. Sure, the Constitution mentions voting more than any other right – forbidding it from being abridged on the basis of race, for example, or the ability to pay a poll tax. Yet it contains no language that makes this right explicit. This missing safeguard has become more glaring in recent years, as politicians have enacted laws that make it harder for certain people to vote. The Supreme Court’s gutting of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 in the Shelby County vs. Holder decision made voting rights more vulnerable than ever. In the past two years alone, the Advancement Project and other civil rights organizations legally challenged restrictive voting laws in Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina and other states.

Personhood and abortion rights ballot measures will take center stage on Tuesday as voters in three states – North Dakota, Colorado and Tennessee - seek to determine when life begins and, potentially, the role government has in limiting abortions. Although recent polling shows that only North Dakota’s measure is likely to pass, that may be enough for personhood and right-to-life advocates. ..."It's [the North Dakota law] that’s dangerous from the perspective of women’s rights. Even though this law doesn’t successfully unravel anything about Roe v. Wade, it could still make abortion less widely available,” says Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law.

An op-ed by Patrick Wit `17. I am a first-year student at Harvard Law School, and I join the 28 members of our faculty who recently protested the university’s adoption of a new and expansive sexual harassment policy. While I agree wholeheartedly that universities have a moral as well as a legal obligation to provide their students with learning environments free of sexual harassment, I echo the faculty’s concern that this particular policy “will do more harm than good,” and I urge the university to reconsider its approach to addressing the problem. If considered only in the abstract, many might wonder how a policy with such a laudable aim could draw any serious objections. And I might well have been among them — were it not for the fact that such a policy nearly ruined my life. Now, in the hopes that my painful and humiliating experience might yet produce some good by improving the final measures adopted, I offer my own story as a real-life example of how this well-intended policy can produce disastrous consequences if it remains detached from the most basic elements of fairness and due process that form the foundation of our legal system.

An op-ed by Anna Byers `16, Anna Joseph `16 and Maggie Dunbar `15...In response to their professors’ public statement, several Harvard Law School students drafted the following response petition, which addresses points on which they disagree with those 28 faculty members. As students of Harvard Law School, we write to voice our support for survivors of sexual assault, for promoting equal access to the benefits of education, and for administrators who treated federal civil rights law as a floor rather than a ceiling...Because going to Harvard is a privilege, but safety is a right; because when you speak, people listen; because we respect you, and consider your voices when finding our own: we ask you to reconsider the positions you stated in your op-ed...The petition has 117 student signatories and was endorsed by Harvard Law School’s Sexual Assault/Sexual Harassment advisers, HLS American Civil Liberties Union, HLS Lambda, HLS National Lawyers Guild, and HLS Students for Inclusion.