Media Mentions

From the first day, it’s clear that law professor Jon Hanson’s new Systemic Justice class at Harvard Law School is going to be different from most classes at the school. Hanson, lanky, bespectacled, and affable, cracks jokes as he paces the room. He refers to the class of 50-odd students as a community; he even asks students to brainstorm a name for the group. But behind the informality is a serious purpose: Hanson is out to change the way law is taught. “None of us really knows what ‘systemic justice’ is—yet you’re all here,” he points out. The new elective class, which is being taught for the first time in this spring term, will ask students to examine common causes of injustice in history and ways to use law and activism to even the field...The class is part of a new Systemic Justice Project at Harvard, led by Hanson and recent law school graduate Jacob Lipton. They’re also leading a course called the Justice Lab, a kind of think tank that will ask students to analyze systemic problems in society and propose legal solutions. Both classes go beyond legal doctrine to show how history, psychology, and economics explain the causes of injustice. A conference in April will bring students and experts together to discuss their findings.

An open letter by Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Prime Minister Cameron, You recently proposed that all internet apps – and their users' communications – be compelled to make themselves accessible to state authorities. I want to explain why this is a very bad idea even though it might seem like a no-brainer...First, the landscape of internet communications services is profoundly different from telephony, where lawful intercept’s habits were honed.

There’s growing bipartisan interest in tapping a new source of revenue to pay for highways, light rail systems, and other infrastructure: the nearly $2 trillion of U.S. corporations’ earnings now held overseas. President Barack Obama has proposed a one-time tax of 14 percent on those earning...But as infrastructure funding becomes entangled in the effort to enact corporate tax reform, the complexities will grow. There are voices of caution. One is Mihir Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Here are excerpts of our conversation with Desai Thursday, starting with his comment on the need for broad corporate tax reform:

Attendees at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting got glimpses of the library of the future as companies offered products to move libraries well beyond books....Other panelists identified trends including gamification that rewards patrons with T-shirts, tablets or wiped library fines and beacon technology that sends prompts to visit the library or reminders to renew a checkout. “You could have a beacon at the local train station or airport,” said Carli Spina, emerging technologies and research librarian at Harvard Law School Library. “It’s a really great opportunity to meet their patrons in areas they really couldn’t before.”

Lani Guinier, the first tenured woman of color at Harvard Law School, went through a trial by fire in 1993, when President Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination for assistant attorney general for civil rights. Negative publicity about her political and academic views had made her a polarizing figure. Conservatives called her “the quota queen,” though her essays, published in “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy,” make it clear she opposed quotas and was seeking voting systems that would promote representation not just of the majority but also of a greater range of groups. Her new book, “The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America,” returns to the theme of inclusion, making the case that college admissions has become a “testocracy” in which standardized test scores are seen as the most important measure of merit, and character counts for little. She argues for a rethinking of merit that would better reflect the values of a democratic society.

There's cold, and then there's New-Hampshire-in-winter cold...These were the sub-zero conditions that roughly 500 reform-minded activists faced as they marched south from Dixville Notch, down the roads and highways of the frozen-over Granite State last month...But Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, policy thinker and internet-famous political activist, wants to change that. In 2013, he started NH Rebellion — a "cross-partisan movement," in his words — "to end the system of corruption in Washington." This January's bitter-cold 10-day walk across the state was the group's second. The final one will happen next year, on the eve of New Hampshire's all-important presidential primary. "We have to put this issue on the table because the politicians won't talk about it otherwise," Lessig told us after his third day of marching in the frigid north.

In March 1955, about a month before his own death, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” he wrote. “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.”...Notable among those who disagree is Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Smolin is one of the bad boys of contemporary physics and cosmology; a generator of radical ideas and an iconoclast...And his new book, a broadside against many of the most widely accepted theories in cosmology, is co-written with someone who is even more of a maverick than he is. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a humanist, a professor at the Harvard Law School.

In the first Affordable Care Act case three years ago, the Supreme Court had to decide whether Congress had the power, under the Commerce Clause or some other source of authority, to require individuals to buy health insurance. It was a question that went directly to the structure of American government and the allocation of power within the federal system...These examples all come from a brief filed on the government’s behalf by a group of law professors who are specialists in statutory interpretation, administrative law or constitutional law. One is Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard who served as solicitor general during the second Reagan administration.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The news that the head of the Federal Communications Commission just proposed that the agency should use its authority — under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — to oversee high-speed Internet access services should be welcomed by all who use the Internet. But let's be clear about what this is and isn't. He's not proposing to "regulate the Internet" or the websites of businesses that use the Internet to reach customers. This would not constrain what Americans can say online, nor would it constrain the extraordinary innovation that has come about because of the Internet's borderless and permission-free nature.

Laws regarding rape should be taught in criminal law classes at Harvard Law School despite its potential to trigger psychological trauma, two Law professors argued at a discussion on the topic Wednesday afternoon. Law professor Jeannie C. Suk, who has taught criminal law and procedure at the Law School, and Andrew M. Crespo ’05, who served as Harvard Law Review’s first Latino president and will teach criminal law for the first time next fall, both stressed the pedagogical value of including rape law in a curriculum. Suk spoke out on the issue when she penned a New Yorker article called “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law" in December.

In the long-running battle over a proposed 65-story office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, a little-known real estate investor has lobbied New York City officials, supported community opposition and offered to buy the project site from the developer. Nothing seemed to work. So as the planned office tower and a rezoning proposed by the de Blasio administration nears the end of the city’s lengthy review, the investor, Andrew S. Penson, brought in a weapon that he hoped would extinguish the project once and for all: Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar from Harvard...Mr. Tribe testified at a City Planning Commission hearing on Wednesday that the rezoning and the 1.6-million-square-foot tower — twice as big as the current zoning allows — “would amount to an unconstitutional taking” of the Grand Central owner’s property, saddling taxpayers with a potential $1 billion liability.

With all the critical acclaim being heaped on the civil rights drama “Selma,” which recently won an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, two big names in Boston’s African-American business community wanted to make sure black students have a chance to see the movie, too. So Flash and Bennie Wiley—he’s of a counsel at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, she’s principal of The Wiley Group — reached out to their network of friends and colleagues, who collectively raised $120,000 for the Students of Selma Fund, which at last count has enabled 10,890 Boston middle and high schoolers to see the film for free...The scores of donors included...Harvard Law School’s Charles Ogletree and his wife, Pam, CEO of Children’s Services of Roxbury.

This week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to propose reclassifying how Internet service providers are regulated, treating them treated like utilities. The idea is to foster net neutrality, so all data flowing across the Internet is treated equally. What would the new regulation mean for consumers? ...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, says: “Everybody can keep powder dry. I don’t think there are any immediate changes." FCC officials seem to be just focusing on net neutrality, Zittrain says. “These are not wild-eyed radicals somehow wanting to blow up the system,” he says. Zittrain says these are all things the FCC could do, if it wanted to – and that’s a big if.

Carol Steiker’s interest in criminal justice took hold while she was at Harvard Law School (HLS) in the 1980s. While studying there, she recalled, “It began to appear to me that criminal justice was a great engine of American inequality.” Steiker became interested in capital punishment while clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, an ardent opponent of the death penalty. Now the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at HLS, Steiker is using her year as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Rita E. Hauser Fellow to work with her brother and frequent collaborator, Jordan M. Steiker, on a book about the past half-century’s experiment with the constitutional regulation of capital punishment in America. She spoke with the Gazette about the history and future of the death penalty in the United States.

Second-year Harvard Law School student and government Ph.D. candidate Jonathan S. Gould ’10 has been elected the 129th president of the Harvard Law Review, a student-run legal journal independent from the Law School. Gould succeeds third-year law student Rachel G. Miller-Ziegler. Gould hails from Newton, Mass. and studied Social Studies at Harvard as an undergraduate. The Law School posted an announcement of the election on Tuesday night.

An op-ed by Mary Ann Glendon. My title echoes a lecture given almost a century ago by the great German social theorist Max Weber, in which he argued that in modern constitutional states nearly everyone is engaged in politics at least by avocation - if only through voting and discussing the issues with one's friends. Granted, if politics is, as many believe, only about getting and keeping power, it would be silly to think of politics as a "calling" in any meaningful sense. And if politics is only about power, there is no particular reason why principled people should choose public service over other pursuits, or why men and women in private life should take much interest in civic matters. But, if one takes the Aristotelian definition of politics as "free men deliberating about how we ought to order our lives together" and combines it with Weber's insight that nearly all of us are drawn into politics, the idea of politics as a calling becomes more understandable. Moreover, one comes close to what Catholic social thought has been trying for the past fifty years to communicate about the political responsibilities of laymen and women.

I’m delighted to report that Prof. Jennifer Rothman and I have just submitted an amicus brief supporting en banc review by the Ninth Circuit in Davis v. Electronic Arts (and thus calling on the Ninth Circuit to reconsider Keller v. Electronic Arts, on which Davis relies). The brief is on behalf of 27 intellectual property law and constitutional law professors: [including]...Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School)...As the Keller majority acknowledged, references to real people, whether in novels, plays, songs, books, or video games, are on equal footing under the First Amendment. When that opinion, and the panel decision in this case, held that fantasy football video games are constitutionally unprotected against right of publicity claims, a wide range of speech was put in danger.

Two high-profile trials are in the spotlight in Massachusetts, but one will be devoid of photographs and video from inside the courtroom. While cameras are documenting every move in the murder trial of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez in Fall River Superior Court, artist’s sketches will offer perhaps the only visual glimpse inside the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a former UMass Dartmouth student. “I think it’s outrageous there are no cameras allowed in the federal courts,” said retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “It doesn’t make sense, and in my view, it’s actually a scandal.”

Elite colleges admit students in a way that will fail to diversify higher education -- and the current use of affirmative action has little impact, according to a new book by Lani Guinier. Her new book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, has just been published by Beacon Press. In it she argues that current admissions systems are based on tests, rankings and prestige -- in ways that undermine American democracy. And she argues for replacing what she calls "testocratic merit" with a new "democratic merit." This shift would place more emphasis on the good to society of educating a diverse group of people than on identifying the people with the best credentials (as currently defined by society) for admission. Guinier, a professor of law at Harvard University, responded via e-mail to questions about her new book.

Following the lack of an indictment in two widely-publicized cases involving police homicides in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, New York City, calls for grand jury reform are growing louder...But Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan says that secrecy also prevents the defense from being able to present evidence to the jury, and blocks them from accessing critical information that only the prosecution knows—things that can hinder a fair trial. “My personal view is that claims of secrecy are outdated, and an outmoded way of thinking about the grand jury. More information in criminal cases is more fair,” said Sullivan via a phone interview.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are famous for being “originalists”; they believe that constitutional provisions mean what they meant at the time they were ratified. In Scalia’s words, originalism promotes the rule of law, because it can help ensure a “rock-solid, unchanging Constitution.” Whether or not we agree, Scalia's goal is honorable: He wants to limit the discretion of federal judges and allow the American people to govern themselves. As the lawyers prepare their briefs for the upcoming Supreme Court argument about bans on same-sex marriage, how remarkable, then, that some prominent originalists -- and admirers of Scalia -- are saying that such bans are inconsistent with the original understanding of the 14th Amendment.