Media Mentions

Harvard law professor David Barron is under fire for signing memos that allowed the U.S. to kill a U.S. citizen overseas in a drone strike. Those blocking his nomination want the documents released.

Google’s simple white interface may look the same from country to country, but in Europe some of its search results are going to be literally lost in translation. In a decision that could prove to be a major thorn in the side of the world’s biggest tech companies, the European Union Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that individuals may ask Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) to remove links to Web pages that contain information about themselves, even if that information is legal and accurate…“It’s an incredibly big deal,” Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University, said. “Search engines are still important as an index to the Internet. It’s like if you tucked information into a book in the library and then removed the card catalog, to use a very 20th century analogy.”

The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative of the Brookings Institution, published a memo earlier this month that highlighted the economic costs of crime and incarceration in the United States… Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is a clinical professor of law and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School...Sullivan spoke with the Gazette about racial and national sentencing disparities, the economic and social costs of mass incarceration, and the sentencing reforms now under consideration.

Europe’s highest court said on Tuesday that people had the right to influence what the world could learn about them through online searches, a ruling that rejected long-established notions about the free flow of information on the Internet… Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, said those who were determined to shape their online personas could in essence have veto power over what they wanted people to know. “Some will see this as corrupting,” he said. “Others will see it as purifying. I think it’s a bad solution to a very real problem, which is that everything is now on our permanent records.”

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Laurence H. Tribe. Although the two of us frequently approach legal questions from different perspectives, and just as often disagree about the best answers to those questions, we share a respect for our Constitution and a reverence for the judicial process. That’s why, in spite of our disagreements, we agree that Harvard Law School professor David Barron is exceptionally well-qualified to hold a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and that the Senate should promptly confirm him.

…These days, just about every kid applying to a selective college — one that judges applicants on more than just grades and test scores — is doing it through Common App. Is that a violation of the Sherman Act? One of Common App’s for-profit competitors claims it is. In a new antitrust complaint, filed Thursday in federal court in Portland, Oregon, CollegeNET alleges that over the last 10 years, Common App has stealthily changed its agreements with member colleges to impede competition from other application processing companies...I was curious about whether for-profit companies can sue non-profits for Sherman Act violations, so I checked in with Harvard Law School antitrust professor Einer Elhauge, who said that they can indeed.

Canaries can be useful creatures. Coal miners used to bring them into the mines as a warning sign of methane or carbon monoxide. A dead canary meant the miners needed to get out of there pronto. Now a clever loophole in the rules regarding NSA requests for information is letting companies warn their customers in the same way a little yellow bird might signal trouble. It's called a "warrant canary", and several major companies like Apple have already used it in their "transparency reports."…According to Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, it's not only a clever way to let customers know if their information may have been acquired by the NSA, but also a way for the private sector to agitate Government agencies on the issues involved in privacy.

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.