Media Mentions

The Harvard-run New England Primate Medical Research Center has come under additional scrutiny following allegations that between 1999 and 2011, a dozen monkeys were found dead in their cages or euthanized at the center...However, critics of the center question Flier’s justification for the closure. Alicia M. Rodriguez [`15], president of the Harvard Law School Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, said she did not think it was a “coincidence” that the closure of the center was announced in the midst of scrutiny surrounding the monkey deaths. “[With] multiple violations, it doesn’t seem to me that it was feasible for them to continue running the lab,” Rodriguez said. “I think the legacy was already a negative one, and the new documents that have come out have added to the negative press and the negative reputation the primate center has.”

Corporations with religious objections have already been granted relief from Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, but religious colleges and charities are still fighting the administration in court, saying that, as of right now, they’re getting even worse treatment. Two Baptist colleges take their case to a federal appeals court in Houston on Tuesday, and another appeals court in Denver is expected to rule any day now on an appeal from the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns that also objects to the mandate...“I do not think that nonprofits can look to Hobby Lobby and say we should be exempt too, like for-profits, because for-profits are only temporarily exempt,” said Holly Lynch, a health and ethics expert at Harvard Law School. “The question is whether the accommodation that has been offered to nonprofits, and soon to certain for-profits, can withstand an RFRA challenge.”

Laurence Tribe's days as a liberal icon are over for green groups and many environmental law professors. One of the country's best-known constitutional scholars, the Harvard law professor has made headlines for his two-fisted attack on President Obama's proposed greenhouse gas standards for power plants, a pillar of the administration's effort to combat climate change...In an email exchange about the outrage his recent comments have generated, Tribe said "strong criticism comes with the territory if you don't let your lawyering follow the political winds or be influenced by how it might affect your image. I've always done what I thought was right and let the chips fall where they may," he added. "I've never let the fact that my opinions might prove unpopular with many, including with some people who are my allies in many a political and legal fight, deter me from speaking my mind. As long as I (and those who know me best) don't doubt my integrity or my motives, I'm okay with the situation."

Laurence H. Tribe, the highly regarded liberal scholar of constitutional law, still speaks of President Obama as a proud teacher would of a star student. “He was one of the most amazing research assistants I’ve ever had,” Mr. Tribe said in a recent interview. Mr. Obama worked for him at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Tribe has taught for four decades...Which is why so many in the Obama administration and at Harvard are bewildered and angry that Mr. Tribe, who argued on behalf of Al Gore in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, has emerged as the leading legal opponent of Mr. Obama’s ambitious efforts to fight global warming...“The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website.

Twelve jurors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will soon face one of the most profound decisions related to civic duty, yet their task next week seems remarkably simple: Vote on the guilt of a defendant who has virtually admitted he committed the crimes. A verdict seems possible within minutes. But legal specialists say that such a swift verdict in the first part of a two-stage death penalty trial related to the Boston Marathon bombing is unlikely...Harvard Law professor Carol Steiker, who has done extensive research on capital cases, also said that even though the jury is supposed to consider only Tsarnaev’s guilt at this phase, many jurors may use some time this week to consciously — or unconsciously — process their thoughts about the next phase, when jurors will decide whether Tsarnaev should be executed for his crimes. “I’m sure they’ll be thinking about it, even if the judge says not to do it,” she said.

Late last year, ambassadors from the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council shuffled into the Council's chamber to vote on the future of Palestine. After months of negotiations, the Arab states threw caution to the wind when Jordan introduced a text that called for Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territory within three years. The resolution fell one vote short of passing, and Palestinian ambitions were squashed yet again. Three months later, much has changed...Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who worked for the court from 2010 to 2013, told VICE News that Palestinian leaders may still choose to refer a case in the future, despite the political repercussions — even if the Bensouda is already studying the issue they want to raise. "If they do make the referral, that will add some pressure on the prosecution to open an investigation," Whiting said. "It's not that the referral removes an impediment to getting the investigation started, but it creates an atmosphere of some expectation and pressure and signals to the prosecution that Palestine is really willing to cooperate with a future investigation."

They were searching for a way to help thousands of students nationwide who had been mired in debt by predatory for-profit colleges. And a group of Democratic senators found the solution buried deep in a federal promissory note signed by every student who takes out government loans: the “defense to repayment” provision, a little-known clause that has become a rallying point for lawmakers and activists in the wake of the shutdown of the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges...“Of course there’s always secret passageways and back doors, but they’re usually not within federal law,” said Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “It was really surprising that this exists.”

The value of a clear understanding of your country’s objectives and the power of personal relationships — along with the wisdom of not drinking too much lemonade — were among the insights former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shared with a Harvard audience Thursday. “Personal relationships do ease things a lot,” said Albright, who served as secretary of state during President Bill Clinton’s second term from 1997 to 2001. “But you can’t let that personal relationship get in the way.” Albright was a guest of the American Secretaries of State Project, a joint effort by the Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Future of Diplomacy Project and the Program on Negotiation. She was joined on stage by the project’s three faculty directors: Nicholas Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics at HKS; Robert Mnookin, Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS); and James Sebenius, Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS). The three faculty members co-teach the “Great Negotiators, Effective Diplomacy, and Intractable Conflicts” class, and their students were in the audience and able to press Albright further on key points.

In a speech on climate change delivered during her visit to China last month, Harvard President Drew Faust described the problem as “a struggle, not with nature, but with ourselves.” During Climate Week April 6-10, Harvard will take a long look at the ongoing struggle to find man-made solutions to this man-made problem...At Harvard Law School, faculty members are debating President Barack Obama’s proposed power plant rules, which aim to reduce greatly the carbon dioxide emissions from existing facilities. Two of the nation’s top environmental lawyers, Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and director of the School’s Environmental Law Program, and Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, have posted online rebuttals to constitutional scholar and Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe’s contention that the proposed rules are unconstitutional.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 1960, the great theater critic Martin Esslin argued that the work of several avant-garde European playwrights -- including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Arthur Adamov -- could be unified under the category of "theater of the absurd." Their plays, Esslin explained, “confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on.” The theater of the absurd is characterized, he said, “by the open abandonment of rational devices.”...The stalled nomination of Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next attorney general, has started to look like something straight from Beckett's play.

An op-ed by by Nancy Gertner and Harvey Silverglate. According to the claims of the US Attorney’s office in Boston, the goal behind the continuing grand jury investigation into the Probation Department scandal is to get at the truth. Truth? First, let’s be honest about the grand jury. Despite its well-intentioned origins, the grand jury has become an instrument of the prosecutor, not an independent fact finder. To put “the truth” in the same sentence as “grand jury investigation” should surely raise some eyebrows, particularly after recent grand jury proceedings against police officers, some of which left much to be desired in terms of independence.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright spoke about her experience in international negotiations and interpersonal diplomacy as part of a panel hosted at the Harvard Business School on Thursday...Albright was invited as part of the American Secretaries of State Project, organized by the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. The program, which plans to interview all former Secretaries of State, has previously welcomed former Secretaries George P. Schultz, James A. Baker III, and Henry A. Kissinger. The event featured a panel discussion between Albright and a trio of Harvard professors—Harvard Kennedy School professor R. Nicholas Burns, HLS professor Robert H. Mnookin and HBS professor James K. Sebenius—who also facilitated an audience question and answer session.

The story of how state Senator Eric Lesser `15 will celebrate Passover in the White House with President Obama Friday begins where few grand tales do: in a dim basement room of a Sheraton in Harrisburg, Pa. During the Pennsylvania primary, one of the toughest patches of the 2008 presidential contest, Lesser and other Obama campaign aides organized an impromptu Passover Seder there and were joined by a surprise guest. In the years since, the President, who is Christian, has not only brought the yearly ceremony to the White House, but makes a point of participating and including Lesser and other members of the original crew. So Lesser, after doing the mundane work of a backbench legislator this week — huddling with staff about the closure of a small bridge, talking with a constituent about arts programs, fielding budget queries — will head to Washington and is set to break bread, matzo, with the commander-in-chief in another chapter of an unlikely story.

Nearly 800 former research subjects and their families filed a billion-dollar lawsuit Wednesday against the Johns Hopkins University, blaming the institution for its role in 1940s government experiments in Guatemala that infected hundreds with syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases...Legal experts said the lawsuit's arguments could be a stretch. Today, professors who frequently serve on a volunteer basis with the National Institutes of Health, for example, are generally considered to be acting independently and not in their capacity as university faculty, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard University Law School.

Massive union-backed protests, an improving economy and regulatory action undertaken by the Obama administration all contributed to McDonald’s’s decision Wednesday to raise workers’ wages. But the move won’t likely be enough to take the heat off the fast food giant...“It’s almost implausible to claim that there’s no relationship between Fight For $15 and this wage increase,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard. “It’s good news. It’s not good enough news.”

The Standard Indian Legal Citation (SILC) standard has been recognised by Harvard Law School as one of six citation standards and the only citation manual from Asia. The style which had been accepted by around 32 law schools in 2014 shortly after its launch, as reported by Legally India at the time, has seen an adoption and been downloaded by more than 100 colleges...In a press release, Professor David B Wilkins, Harvard Law School’s vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, said: “In 1926, Erwin Griswold and his student colleagues at the Harvard Law Review published the first edition of “A Uniform System of Citation,” today commonly referred to as “The Blue Book.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’d never heard the acronym AIIB until this week, don’t blame yourself. Strictly speaking, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank doesn't even exist yet. But the Chinese-created alternative to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is turning out to be extremely important. More than 40 countries have applied to join, almost all of them close U.S. allies -- and they've applied despite aggressive American efforts to discourage them. The upstart bank is already emerging as a major foreign policy victory for China, one all the sweeter because it's a direct diplomatic win over the U.S. It raises a very basic question: What's going on here? How can nations that depend on the American superpower for their security -- including protection against China -- so cavalierly ignore U.S. interests in favor of the only global state that can credibly challenge U.S. superpower status?

Four years after pro-democratic protests and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, known as the Arab Spring, offered hope of a new era of calm and stability across the region, much of it has plummeted into chaos, and at a quickening pace. Bloody conflicts and civil wars bedevil Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen; diplomatic ties have frayed between the United States and Israel over Iran and the Occupied Territories; and the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS, is proving durable in its brutal campaign to create a caliphate in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. It is a time of historic political, social, and military transformation in the region and one that is likely to continue, Harvard analysts say...Noah Feldman ’92, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS), said, “The violence now, much of it is centering around locations where the breakdown of sovereignty is near complete. And that’s historically unprecedented.

As Harvard Law School moves to break from the University’s central approach to handling cases of alleged sexual harassment, Law professors are questioning the relationship between their school and Harvard’s central administration and faculty governance structures more broadly. Two Law School professors, Charles Fried and Robert H. Mnookin, penned an op-ed last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the “cadre of administrators” at Harvard and called for the creation of a faculty senate as a mechanism to ensure faculty participation in major University decisions...In an interview this week, Mnookin said he had been thinking about University centralization issues over the past couple of years, but “it’s certain the importance of it was underscored by the process by which both the decisions on Title IX and with regard to our health policies were adapted.”

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow has appointed a Title IX committee to begin implementing the school’s new set of procedures for responding to cases of alleged sexual harassment, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London...After a group of 28 professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe that criticized Harvard’s policy in October, Minow appointed a committee, chaired by Law School professor John Coates, to draft a new set of school-specific procedures.

When the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that POM Wonderful was overstating pomegranate juice's health benefits in its advertisements, a press release from the FTC, which was challenging POM in court, called the decision “a victory for consumers.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, describing it as “a notable win.” In a sense, it was: The company was banned from trumpeting its juice as an elixir that could help prevent heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction if there wasn't sufficient research done to back up those claims. But in another sense, the decision wasn’t a victory at all. Buried in the FTC’s press release was the reluctant acknowledgement that the Circuit Court denied the FTC the ability to require that POM base its advertising on at least two randomized, well-controlled clinical trials... To arrive at this decision, the Court wasn’t relying on some obscure bit of corporate law; it was relying on the First Amendment. How problematic is it that a company selling at least $100 million worth of juice every year based on sketchy empiricism could defend its preposterous advertising claims in court on free-speech grounds, and still be humored? That’s one question that John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former corporate lawyer, explores in a recent survey of what he calls “the corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” According to Coates, companies are now the beneficiaries of cases involving the First Amendment just as often as individuals, and the frequency of those cases has been rising since the mid-70s.