Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The horrific massacre of 132 boys this week at their school in Peshawar, Pakistan, embodies a new trend in Islamist terrorism that has emerged over this year. Past jihadi terrorists, up to and including Osama bin Laden, claimed that their violence was justified as self-defense under their interpretation of the Islamic laws of war. In 2014, however, we’ve seen radical Islamists ignoring those laws altogether. From Islamic State to Boko Haram to the Pakistani Taliban, the killers seem unconcerned to justify their actions in terms of Shariah -- and this development demands careful attention to understand where the jihadis are going. Before you say that you don’t care what rationale terrorists give for their actions, recall that understanding terrorism is a necessary prerequisite to combating it.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Over the past two months, the National Hockey League has experienced a baffling outbreak of mumps. Thirteen players are said to have it, and there's no telling when the outbreak will end. It is a story that seems to have stepped from the mid-20th century...By 2012, the number of reported cases shrunk to 229. Mumps has hardly been wiped out, but in terms of public health, the improvement has been nothing short of spectacular...The success story is worth underlining because both Canada and the U.S. are now experiencing an anti-vaccination movement, limited to a small part of the population, but nonetheless worthy of concern.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With his announcement that the U.S. will open negotiations and try to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama is trying to break the hold of the Cuba lobby once and for all. In historical terms, that's a remarkable undertaking. For decades, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been guided by the smart, effective lobbying of a relatively small group of interested Cuban-Americans, mostly in Miami. The Cuba lobby’s success has reflected a deep truth of American politics: where there's a concentrated interest on one side of an issue, and only a diffuse interest on the other, the concentrated interest wins. Will it work? If so, why now? And what are the implications for other concentrated lobbying groups, such as the National Rifle Association and the pro-Israel lobby, which have themselves succeeded by following a version of the approach that the Cuba lobby pioneered?

Six preeminent international human rights organizations have sent an open letter to President Thein Sein calling for an end to the prosecution of Shayam Brang Shawng and an independent investigation into the death of his daughter in Kachin State’s Sut Ngai Yang Village....“The case against Brang Shawng is a gross perversion of justice,” said Matthew Bugher, Global Justice Fellow at Harvard Law School. “The military has retaliated against Brang Shawng for speaking out about the death of his daughter, rather than ensuring that those responsible are held to account.”

Federal investigators have now connected the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. to North Korea, a U.S. official said Wednesday, though it remained unclear how the federal government would respond to a break-in that exposed sensitive documents and ultimately led to terrorist threats against moviegoers....Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, said Sony was unquestionably facing anger over the breach and the resulting disclosure of thousands of sensitive documents. But the movie studio may be able to mitigate that reaction and potential legal exposure if it's established that North Korea was behind the attack." If Sony can characterize this as direct interference by or at the behest of a nation-state, might that somehow earn them the kind of immunity from liability that you might see other companies getting when there's physical terrorism involved, sponsored by a state?" Zittrain said.

Though it may not feel like it when you see the latest identity-affirming listicle shared by a friend on Facebook, we are a society moving toward evidence. Our world is ever more quantified, and with such data, flawed or not, the tools of science are more widely applied to our decisions...It’s also quaint to think that users would click through the multiple dialogue boxes necessary to mimic informed consent, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Would you? Instead, he said, there ought to be independent proxies who represent the users and can perform that checking function. "I worry about leaning too hard on choice," he said, "when the real thing is just treat your users with dignity."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Was 2014 the year of the hack? Or 2013? Or maybe 2011? The answer, of course, is that they all were, and that there are going to be lots more coming. But events in 2014 have helped frame a profound question that we’re going to have to answer about the right balance among property, privacy and free speech – and a glance through the year’s prominent hacks sheds some light on how we should answer it.

An op-ed by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and David J. Harris. Last week thousands of demonstrators in Greater Boston and throughout the nation voiced their outrage at the decision of two grand juries not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men, as well as the corruption and bias embedded in our law enforcement system. As veterans of civil rights struggles spanning nearly a half century, we felt heartened by the reemergence of young people as a force for change. Indeed, we experienced the collective refrain of “Enough is enough” as sweet music. But even as we nodded in agreement, we found ourselves asking a few follow-up questions: When is enough not enough? When are rage and protest necessary, but not sufficient? How do we transform “enough is enough” into “we demand more?”

Perturbed by the incivility that has permeated political discourse in town the past couple years, a local clergy association has enlisted the help of outside mediators to solve the problem. Through the collaboration, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and Sudbury Clergy Association will hold listening sessions and focus groups with townspeople this coming spring with the aim of figuring out what’s wrong in Sudbury...“HNMCP is deeply honored to have been invited by the Sudbury Clergy Association to provide counsel and advice based on our experience in negotiation and conflict management,” professor Robert Bordone, the program’s director, said in a statement.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Becons, in just their third year of existence, are already the most coveted of the year-end movie awards. (For those who have been on Mars, the Becons are the Behavioral Economics Oscars.) This year has been a spectacular one for movies with behavioral economics themes, and it has been unusually difficult to pick the winners. But without further ado:

An op-ed by Noah Feldman...I thought of my client on Friday when the Supreme Court agreed to take up the question of retroactivity in connection with its holding that juvenile offenders may not constitutionally be sentenced to life without parole. The doctrine the Supreme Court applies when it ordinarily declines to make its decisions retroactive to convicted defendants is one of the strangest and most horrifying doctrines in the entire body of constitutional law. It’s almost impossible to justify from the standpoint of the Supreme Court’s job to interpret the Constitution. Its rationale is based entirely on practicality. Unfortunately, that practicality enables our system to keep people jailed even when the courts admit that their incarceration violates the Constitution.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Well, you heard it here first: Ignorance of the law is an excuse, so long as you're the police. Or so the U.S. Supreme Court has said in a 8-1 decision that symbolically strengthened the hand of the police to make stops even on the basis of nonexistent laws. The court split hairs, explaining that police ignorance is excusable only when the crime for which the defendant was convicted is different from the nonexistent crime for which he was stopped and searched. If that sounds iffy, it is. Here's why.

Labor may be at a turning point in this country. New campaigns have started to infuse fresh energy into a moribund and declining movement, and new models of collective action are being proposed in the course of these ongoing efforts. While the existing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)/National Mediation Board (NMB) certification election-contractual bargaining system still functions on paper, in practice it has broken down...There’s absolutely no doubt that if workers are going to ultimately make their own destiny that a new model or approach is needed for unions. One that has been proposed, separately by the UAW at the much-discussed Chattanooga, Tennessee, Volkwagen plant, by Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, and by labor lawyer and writer Tom Geoghegan is the implementation of works councils in the United States.

On Sunday night, famed attorney David Boies sent a threatening letter on behalf of Sony Pictures to The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times and other news organizations demanding destruction of stolen information and warning of consequences for publishing the company's secrets...That decision offers tremendous hope for news organizations that Sony's threats against the news media are empty. "Unless the media is involved in the hacks themselves, the Bartnicki case puts the law on the side of the media," says Andy Sellars at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

We recognize four outstanding contributors to Harvard Magazine for their work on readers’ behalf in 2014, and happily confer on each a $1,000 honorarium...The talented Michael Zuckerman ’10 (a writer, Lowell House resident tutor, and first-year Harvard Law student) took readers inside undergraduate life today in “The Lowell Speeches Project” (September-October), a model of warmth and clarity. He also reported in print in the same issue (“Citizen Scholars,”) and has written astutely online, on Teach for America and other topics. It is fitting to celebrate his contributions with the Smith-Weld Prize which honors thought-provoking writing about Harvard in memory of A. Calvert Smith ’14, a former secretary to the Governing Boards and executive assistant to President James Bryant Conant, and of Philip S. Weld ’36, a former president of the magazine.

How much power should a president have? Anyone who thought America settled that question late in the 18th Century with the ratification of the Constitution hasn’t been paying attention to the news. The Speaker, John Boehner, has hired law professor Jonathan Turley to represent the House in a lawsuit over President Obama’s unilateral changes to the health care law...Into this fight wades a Harvard Law School professor, Cass Sunstein, with a new paper that attempts to provide a theoretical rationale for increased executive authority and discretion. Professor Sunstein, who served in the Obama administration, offers his essay with the warning that it is “subject to substantial revision” and was “originally intended for oral presentation” as the keynote lecture at the University of Chicago Legal Forum. Professor Sunstein’s essay defines and describes a new ill he calls “Partyism.”

An op-ed by William Desmond [`15]. Over the last week, much has been said about law students’ petitioning for exam extensions in light of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers. Students at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Georgetown University Law Center and several other schools requested that their administrations allow extensions on final exams for students who have been confronting the aftermath of the recent failed grand jury indictments of the officers who killed the unarmed black men. In response, opponents of exam extensions have declared that to grant these requests would be a disservice to the students. Law students, they argue, must learn how to engage critically with the law in the face of intense adversity...Speaking as one of those law students, I can say that this response is misguided: Our request for exam extensions is not being made from a position of weakness, but rather from one of strength and critical awareness.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk. Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood. What should his instructors do? Criminal-law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law...But my experience at Harvard over the past couple of years tells me that the environment for teaching rape law and other subjects involving gender and violence is changing. Students seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.

Well, that was fast. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Nov. 19, Melvin Watt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was in the hot seat, explaining to Senator Elizabeth Warren why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had done so little to help families who were facing foreclosure save their homes....Housing advocates like Eloise Lawrence, a staff lawyer with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, have an answer. Although expressing disappointment about the limited nature of the directive, Ms. Lawrence described it as “a positive move in the right direction.” She also noted that the bureau has four families who would directly benefit.

Cass Sunstein ’75, J.D. ’78, has been regarded as one of the country’s most influential and adventurous legal scholars for a generation. His scholarly articles have been cited more often than those of any of his peers ever since he was a young professor. At 60, now Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, he publishes significant books as often as many productive academics publish scholarly articles—three of them last year. In each, Sunstein comes across as a brainy and cheerful technocrat, practiced at thinking about the consequences of rules, regulations, and policies, with attention to the linkages between particular means and ends. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology as well as behavioral economics, he is especially focused on mastering how people make significant choices that promote or undercut their own well-being and that of society, so government and other institutions can reinforce the good and correct for the bad in shaping policy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Was there racial bias in the jury rooms of Ferguson, Missouri, and New York's Staten Island? We’ll probably never know -- and if we did, it wouldn’t change the outcome in the cases tied to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. According to a 230-year-old rule, courts ordinarily won’t reopen verdicts based on juror testimony about what went on behind closed doors, not even if the evidence would invalidate the verdict. The U.S. Supreme Court strengthened the code of silence yesterday, holding that federal evidence rules bar juror testimony that another juror lied in the jury selection process. But is jury omertà a good thing? It turns out that its meaning and justification have changed considerably over the centuries. In this age of open government and concern about jury racism, it may be time to reconsider a principle that lets the jury get away with almost anything.