Media Mentions

In 2011, after nine years and a $2-billion investment, New York City’s revamped 911 system still had a major problem: trouble in tracking emergency responses, especially when multiple calls came in about the same incident, or one call involved multiple incidents. This made it nearly impossible for officials to tease out why some city residents waited longer for aid—a matter, potentially, of life and death...These are the kinds of challenges that former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Paul professor of the practice of government at Harvard Kennedy School, and Susan Crawford, Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School (and co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society), tackle in their new book, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (Wiley). They argue for the transformative power of analytics in city governments, so that—once innovators cut through the red tape—simple changes can connect elected officials and city employees to each other and to the citizens they serve.

Just a few months after Harvard University announced a new, tougher policy against campus sexual assault, a group of Harvard law professors is blasting the rules as unfair..."The Harvard policy goes so far that it's pretty shocking," says Harvard Law professor Janet Halley. She says Harvard's process, at its core, is biased, because it is run by a single Title IX compliance office that's under pressure to show the government results. "It's the charging agent like the prosecutor, it's the investigator — they're the judge, and they're the [people] who hears the appeal from all those decisions," she says. "So they're not neutral. They're there to increase the number of persons held responsible."Halley is also troubled that the policy, she says, gives alleged victims many more rights and protections than the accused. She says it is also too broad in what it considers sexual misconduct. The school, she argues, relies too much on what a victim says is a violation, and too little on what a "reasonable person might say," as federal law requires.

Dozens of Harvard Law School faculty members are asking the university to withdraw its new sexual misconduct policy, saying that it violates basic principles of fairness and would do more harm than good...“It’s a totally secret process, in which real genuine unfairnesses can happen, and it’s so airtight that no one would know,” Janet Halley, one of the professors who signed the article, said Wednesday.

Facebook and Apple will offer employees the medical option of freezing their eggs. Supporters say the perk will empower women in the workplace, while critics argue delaying childbirth isn't the answer to lowering the glass ceiling...Guests: I. Glenn Cohen @CohenProf (Cambridge, MA) Co-director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, & Bioethics

Picture a hospital where patients input information about their current conditions on tablets in the waiting room. During the examination, doctor and patient talk about the patient’s hobby of biking. He would like to continue it, but his speeds are slowing down because of knee pain, as the doctor can see from the data he uploaded from his personal fitness tracker into his health record...“No one ever thought your doctor needed explicit consent before he could talk about your case with a colleague,” [Glenn] Cohen says. Yet, this learning from past experience is about to happen on a larger scale with big data, and it’s presenting sticky legal issues.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When is a court not like court? The answer to this riddle is: When it’s the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This special court was imbued with special powers when it was created by Congress in 1982, including the authority to hear appeals from the federal district courts in essentially all patent cases. Such is the uniqueness of the Federal Circuit that, even though appeals courts are supposed to defer to lower courts’ factual findings, the court reviews the interpretation of patents from scratch, granting no deference. The Supreme Court -- which drubbed the federal circuit last term -- is now poised to decide whether the appeals court has exceeded its authority by adopting this unique practice.

As enrollment for next year's health benefits goes on in work places around the United States, Apple and Facebook say they're willing to pay for employees to freeze their eggs...Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert in the intersection of bioethics and law, said the perk could be perceived in several different lights. "The good is that it empowers women and gives them more choices they might not have afforded otherwise," Cohen told ABC News. "The bad is it communicates a message to women that their workplaces may not be tolerant to women who decide to have children on the job and potentially also has more women undergoing a procedure that carries risks that they might not in the end need."

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Matthew Waxman. Late in the summer of 2013, President Barack Obama pulled back from his announced plans to use unilateral military force against Syria and stated that he would instead seek Congress’s approval. “I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress,” and “America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together,” he said. “This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president … while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.” Congress never authorized Obama to use force in Syria, and Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him an out by brokering a deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. But Obama’s statement on the need for congressional consent, and the noted contrast with his predecessor, are nonetheless clarifying in their irony.

Massachusetts legal aid organizations turned away nearly two-thirds of people qualifying for civil legal assistance over the last year due to a lack of funding, leaving thousands of low-income residents without representation in cases from domestic violence to foreclosure, according to the findings of a statewide task force to be released Wednesday. More than 30,000 low-income clients were denied legal services in 2013, meaning many were unable to pursue cases or were left to represent themselves in court, where they often lost their cases, according to the 37-page report. “The overused word ‘crisis’ actually applies here,” said Harvard Law School’s dean, Martha Minow, a member of the task force. “When you have people who are literally not represented in actions where they can lose their homes or face physical violence, where they can’t get legal remedies to which they’re entitled, there’s a failure to live up to the rule of law.”

An op-ed by 28 members of the Harvard Law School faculty. As members of the faculty of Harvard Law School, we write to voice our strong objections to the Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures imposed by the central university administration and the Corporation on all parts of the university, including the law school. We strongly endorse the importance of protecting our students from sexual misconduct and providing an educational environment free from the sexual and other harassment that can diminish educational opportunity. But we believe that this particular sexual harassment policy adopted by Harvard will do more harm than good.

Twenty-eight current and retired Harvard Law School professors are asking the university to abandon its new sexual misconduct policy and craft different guidelines for investigating allegations, asserting that the new rules violate the due process rights of the accused. “This is an issue of political correctness run amok,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, an emeritus Harvard Law professor who was among the faculty members signing an article, sent to the Globe’s Opinion page, that is critical of the new procedures...The professors said the new policy fails to ensure adequate representation for the accused and includes rules governing sexual conduct between two impaired students that are “starkly one-sided as between complainants and respondents, and entirely inadequate to address the complex issues involved in these unfortunate situations involving extreme use and abuse of alcohol and drugs by our students.” In addition to Dershowitz, faculty members who signed the letter included Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, and Charles Ogletree.

Federal law preempts an Indiana right-to-work provision that prohibits employers from forcing union membership or union dues as a condition of employment, a group of law professors told the Seventh Circuit, urging the appeals court to reconsider a challenge to the law. Siding with a union that has challenged the validity of Indiana's right-to-work statute, two professors — Harvard Law School's Benjamin I. Sachs and the University of California at Irvine's Catherine L. Fisk — argued on Thursday in an amicus brief that the Indiana law and those of its ilk in other states should be preempted by the National Labor Relations Act and other federal labor laws. That preemption, the professors said, applies to the extent that the Indiana and other state right-to-work laws interfere with collective bargaining agreements that require nonunion employees to pay dues or fees less than the union amounts.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Jean Tirole's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is being celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic by academics and economists. But there is no joy in the power circles of U.S. telecommunications policy. More than a decade ago, federal policy makers turned their backs on Tirole's sensible assessments of private communications utilities -- and with disastrous results. Tirole's insight was that any company controlling physical lines into homes and businesses, left to its own devices, would act as a natural monopoly, extracting tribute from every other business and customer that depends on communications capacity. To constrain that power, regulators might need to separate wholesale and retail communications-access services, and require interconnection with other networks.

Harvard Law School students with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC) were working with Greater Boston Legal Services on a case involving a Guatemalan man in the summer of 2013 when they collectively had an “aha” moment. The pressure was high, and everybody was working on two sets of legal briefs that were due before the court. “We were having a meeting here, and all of a sudden everybody understood what was on the table, and the writing was very powerful,” said John Willshire Carrera, co-director of the HIRC site at Greater Boston Legal Services. The HIRC program trains students to represent refugees seeking asylum in the United States, as well as other immigrants, said Deborah Anker, the program’s director and a clinical professor of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Ever tried whitening your own teeth? How’d that work out for you? In North Carolina, you probably wouldn’t even have had the option. In the middle of the 2000s, the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners systematically hounded non-dentist teeth-whitening operations out of operation -- and effectively blocked the sales of teeth-whitening agents. Now the Supreme Court will decide whether this was an antitrust violation, as the Federal Trade Commission ruled, or whether the board’s status as a quasi-official North Carolina agency means its campaign was out of the commission’s reach.

This August, Columbia University released a new policy for handling “gender-based” misconduct among students. Since April, universities around the country have been rewriting their guidelines after a White House task force urged them to do more to fight sexual assault. I was curious to know what a lawyer outside the university system would make of one of these codes. So I sent the document to Robin Steinberg, a public defender and a feminist. A few hours later, Steinberg wrote back in alarm. She had read the document with colleagues at the Bronx legal-aid center she runs. They were horrified, she said—not because Columbia still hadn’t sufficiently protected survivors of assault, as some critics charge, but because its procedures revealed a cavalier disregard for the civil rights of people accused of rape, assault, and other gender-based crimes...“We need to take into account our obligations to due process not because we are soft on rapists and other exploiters of women,” says [Janet] Halley, but because “the danger of holding an innocent person responsible is real.”

...The difference between Goodell and the rest, though, is that he runs a nonprofit. That’s right—the National Football League is, in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, a nonprofit...“We are subsidizing this institution that has been so incredibly obtuse about the issues of sexual violence,” says Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and the founder of Rootstrikers, a grassroots advocacy group that has campaigned against the exemption. “The American public obviously likes sports and football, but when you’re in a clearly commercial context, when an enormous amount of money is being made, the idea that you would be subsidizing it is craziness.”

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Winter is coming, and you might be tempted to start buying warm clothes, especially on the first day the temperature drops drastically. If so, be careful: You might purchase something you don't really want. According to standard economic theory, of course, that warning shouldn't be necessary. Human beings are rational, and on an especially cold day, it’s perfectly rational to get that winter coat. Psychologists and behavioral economists aren’t so sure. They've seen that when people are cold, they often project that feeling onto the future. People display “projection bias” when they underestimate how much their current tastes and values will later change.

It’s been just three weeks since Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., signed the nation's first “affirmative consent” — or “yes means yes" — law, yet already lawmakers across the country are copying it....Shulevitz also spoke with Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley, who teaches feminist legal theory. Halley said the notion that universities play investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner is “fundamentally not due process.”

It’s not every day that Wall Street comes out and celebrates a change that erodes its rights in a lucrative market. On the surface, the applause for the change, which was agreed upon this past weekend, didn’t make sense. Why would the banks back something that could lessen their longstanding privileges in one of their most profitable businesses — derivatives trading?...Mark J. Roe, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that the contract overhaul was in some ways a good thing because it would most probably lead to a more orderly winding-down of large banks. But he also argued that the advantages that derivatives continue to enjoy could, over time, reduce the strength of the market...“On that dimension, it doesn’t make us better off, and that’s an important dimension,” Mr. Roe said. “The bottom line is that this chips away at too-big-to-fail, but too big to fail is still big.”

A letter by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. Adrian Walker is absolutely right that Boston needs an honest discussion about race and policing in Boston (“Police bias or faulty finding?” Metro, Oct. 10). But he’s wrong to begin that discussion by criticizing the American Civil Liberties Union for disclosing evidence that the Boston Police Department engaged in racially discriminatory policing...While I share Walker’s optimism that current BPD leadership is committed to change, the alarming findings in the report call for real reform, not for shooting the messenger.