Media Mentions

The Supreme Court concluded its annual term last month once again in acrimony, this time over contraceptives and collective bargaining. That followed earlier schisms over campaign finance and prayer at town council meetings. Yet Chief Justice John Roberts sees friends everywhere…"Many times they literally are friends," says Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, a (literal) friend of the chief justice. Besides, he says, "I think it does have an impact on the atmosphere. I think it tends to make it less hostile, less accusatory, less of an effort of one side to demonize the other."

Women lawyers have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court since 1879, but in a forum where opposing counsel traditionally were called "brother," it took nearly a century for the female sex to gain third-person equality…"I would love to be able to say that I had noticed this," said one Stewart protégé who didn't, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Mr. Tribe, who clerked for Justice Stewart during the 1967-68 term, adds that he's not surprised by Justice Stewart's egalitarian vocabulary. "He was as close to being a nonsexist as I could imagine back in that time," Mr. Tribe says.

Opponents of the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm will appeal the dismissal of a federal lawsuit challenging the contract for the project with an all-star constitutional scholar. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe will represent the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound in its appeal of a federal court decision, which dismissed a challenge Cape Wind’s contract with NSTAR. Tribe will be the “principal author of the appeal briefs by the Alliance and will probably present the oral argument of the Alliance in the First Circuit,” he told the Herald.

By Glenn Cohen and Adam Teicholz. Before dawn on a Wednesday in January, Cesar Flores, a 40-year-old employed by a large retail chain, woke up at his home in Chula Vista, California. He got in his car and crossed the border into Tijuana. From there, he headed for a local hospital, where he got lab tests—part of routine follow-up to a kidney stone procedure. He had his blood drawn and left the hospital at 7:30. He arrived home before 10. Uninsured Americans have long known that seeking medical care abroad is often more cost-effective than seeking it at home…But Flores’s situation isn’t medical tourism as we know it. Flores has insurance through his wife’s employer. But his insurer, a small, three-year-old startup H.M.O. called MediExcel, requires Flores to obtain certain medical treatment at a hospital across the border.

Baltimore is changing the way it handles cases of alleged child abuse and neglect — part of a broad social-services strategy that has been touted by Maryland officials but abandoned in some other states…Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said an emerging body of research shows that claims about the success of alternative approaches might not be what they seem. Some research is promoted by groups pushing a premise that children are almost always better off staying in their home, she said. She's worried that will lead to federal policy changes and further drain resources from traditional child protective services in favor of in-home treatment programs, leaving the most vulnerable children in dangerous situations.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. To Europeans with whom I speak, the $8.9 billion fine imposed on the French financial-services company BNP Paribas for violating American sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Sudan seems excessive. Yes, BNP did something seriously wrong. But $8.9 billion? Isn’t that extremely disproportionate for an otherwise highly responsible bank? French President François Hollande asked US President Barack Obama to intervene to have the fine reduced, as did the European Union’s commissioner for the internal market and services, Michel Barnier...Three factors, not all of which are being discussed, seem to explain the size of the penalty.

The deteriorating situation in Iraq has the international community scrambling for some way to avoid all-out sectarian warfare…Noah Feldman, professor at Harvard Law School, served as the senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq immediately after the war. He helped to draft Iraq's interim constitution, which provided for the election of a National Assembly, included a bill of rights and outlined a separation between religion and state. At the time, Feldman and the Bush administration were criticized for excluding Arab, Iraqi, and Muslim legal experts from the process. But today's chaos, Feldman says, is a direct result of the administration's inability to see security and nation building as two distinctly difference processes.

An op-ed by Richard D. Brown and Bruce H. Mann. Thomas Piketty, writing from France, is the latest person to sound an alarm about the growing inequality of income and wealth. But his ideas have distinctly American roots that date to the country's formation…Today, however, as Americans arrive at the brink of a new Gilded Age of wealth and inequality, calls for intervention are going unheeded. Wages have stagnated. Executive compensation has ballooned from about 20 times the average wage income to nearly 300 times...The economic, social and political consequences of these changes are profound

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court says closely held religious corporations get a religious exemption from providing contraceptive insurance. Should President Barack Obama follow the court’s lead and exempt religious affiliates from an executive order requiring federal contractors not to discriminate against gay people? The answer is no -- not because the court was wrong, and not because the religious affiliates aren’t sincere. The reason is that the contraceptive case and the question of federal contractors respecting gay rights are fundamentally different. One case is about a right against government coercion; the other is about the privilege of getting a federal contract. And while contraceptive insurance is nice, it isn’t a constitutional value -- anti-discrimination is.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. One of the most appealing features of modern conservative thought is its insistence on fidelity to the Constitution. Whether or not we endorse “strict construction,” or the claim that the Constitution means what it originally meant, it is certainly honorable to emphasize that public officials are bound by our founding document. How odd, then, that prominent conservatives have been embracing Speaker John Boehner’s proposed lawsuit by the House of Representatives against President Barack Obama -- an idea that reflects a stunningly cavalier approach to the Constitution.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Cornyn of Texas, leaders of the Judiciary Committee, have long shown an admirable commitment to open government, and their recent bill to amend the Freedom of Information Act is winning a ton of praise. Some of its reforms make sense, but, unfortunately, its key provision is a horrible idea. By reducing the protection now given to deliberations within the executive branch, it would have a chilling effect on those discussions.

By I. Glenn Cohen, Ruben Amarasingham, Anand Shah, Bin Xie and Bernard Lo. Predictive analytics, or the use of electronic algorithms to forecast future events in real time, makes it possible to harness the power of big data to improve the health of patients and lower the cost of health care. However, this opportunity raises policy, ethical, and legal challenges.

Facebook isn’t the only company that wants to capitalize on information collected from millions of people do do research. Health care systems want to use…

American companies are conducting a record amount of business in Chinese yuan, looking to benefit from cost advantages over dollar transactions…"If China in the long run is interested in having the renminbi challenge the dollar as a reserve currency, given the size of the U.S. economy, U.S. firms will have to get on board," said Mark Wu, a former World Bank economist who teaches at Harvard Law School.

The Vatican named a new head and board for its scandal-plagued bank Wednesday, capping a cleanup campaign overseen by Pope Francis that has seen hundreds of suspect accounts shut down. French financier Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, who called his new job "a mission," will oversee a two-year program to cede the bank’s asset-management business to a newly formed Vatican department, leaving the institution handling only payment services for priests and religious organizations...The new six-person board of lay experts appointed Wednesday to work with De Franssu includes Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

…This week, Harvard is entwined once more as it hosts a weeklong pilot program presented by the Warrior-Scholar Project. The nonprofit group, started at Yale University three years ago, organizes academic boot camps for veterans thinking of making a transition from the military to college…Why Harvard? “It was the next logical move for us, expanding from Yale,” said co-founder Christopher Howell. He said the move was also eased by support in Cambridge from Jesse Reising [`15], a student at Harvard Law School, and Lowry Pressly, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Michigan, like other states, struggles to keep abused and neglected children safe while controlling the number of children in foster care, which is costly. Our law and policy attempt to balance the protection of maltreated children (the paramount consideration), respect for parents’ rights to raise their children, and the state’s interest in keeping children safe, all with too little money…Conservatives like these programs because they hope to save money, liberals because they minimize government intervention into families and because they often think child protection is simply an attack on poor and minority parents. Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet calls this right-left convergence “the unholy alliance.”

Legal experts are skeptical of the $10 million lawsuit filed by a man after he was broadcast on ESPN while sleeping during a baseball game…“[Rector was] clearly..set up for ridicule. He’s unfortunate. He’s been made a butt of jokes. But there’s just no defamatory statement about him,” Harvard Law School professor John Goldberg told TIME, noting that defamation suits rest more on reputation damages than emotional distress. Goldberg added that the suit, which was filed in Bronx County Supreme Court in New York, would face an uphill — if not entirely vertical — battle. Though there are constitutional limits applying to all U.S. states, New York is “notoriously unfriendly to defamation suits,” and it is “very unlikely that the suit will get anywhere,” he said.

Since President Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, he’s been both elevated and burdened by one popular title in particular: America’s first black president...Now, in 2014, as President Obama looks towards his last 18 months in the White House, Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy asks a provocative question: has Obama failed black America? In the recent issue of Politico Magazine, Kennedy writes: “Obama said that the subject of race was too important to ignore and implicitly promised to confront it if he won the presidency. He has not.”

As more evidence emerges that the Central American children arriving at the U.S border are fleeing horrific violence, lawmakers and advocates are starting to call it as they see it...“Gang-related violence has been viewed through a lens that characterizes it as common crime,” explained Nancy Kelly, managing director at Harvard Law’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic, setting a high bar for those who have been persecuted by gangs. “And for a child who’s trying to go forward without an attorney, it’s next to impossible.”

Money plays a crucial role during the political campaign season. The amount of money backing your campaign could mean a win or loss in a seat in Congress. And when Super PACs were deemed legal by the Supreme Court in 2010, the game changed...Fair or not, this is one issue that is set in stone... or at least was. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, wants to take down these Super PACs... by creating one of his own. This past weekend, the MayDay PAC reached its fund raising goal of $5 million. Lessig plans to start the anti-Super PAC campaign for this year's House of Representative election.