Media Mentions

Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen, who co-wrote the argument against the ban on gay male blood donation in the Journal of the American Medical Association, joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the 26th annual World AIDS Day.

Hundreds of Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents marched on Mass. Ave. and blockaded streets at the heart of Harvard Square early Monday afternoon in protest of a grand jury’s recent decision not to indict a white police officer who shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., this summer...Speakers shared personal anecdotes and challenged Harvard students to keep the issue alive through protest. Law School student Victoria I. White-Mason, [`15] who recently returned from Ferguson, said that she saw “13-year-olds getting tear-gassed” in the protests...At 1:01 p.m, Law School student Rebecca N. Chapman, [`15] one of the protest’s organizers, led the gatherers in a “die-in,” in which protesters laid down silently for 4 and a half minutes. According to Chapman, the duration of the “die-in” was intended to represent the length of time the body of the late Ferguson resident Michael Brown lay in the street before it was taken to a morgue—4.5 hours.

At colleges and high schools, outside police stations, courthouses, city halls and federal buildings, a series of nationwide protests on Monday maintained the momentum of those seeking justice for the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., almost four months ago...At Harvard Law School, some 300 people gathered and chanted, “No justice, no peace,” and hoisted a banner reading, “Your peace is violence.”...At the Harvard protest, Prof. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., founder of the law school’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, exhorted students to fight for a more equitable society. “Everyone has to get involved. Your friends, your neighbors, even your enemies,” Professor Ogletree said. He added, “We have to make sure that we are the people standing up for the people who find themselves victims of police violence.”

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a heart stent implanted on Wednesday, reviving talk about how long the 81-year-old liberal jurist will be staying on the court...Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, welcomed the news that Ginsburg plans to be back at the court next week, and he said she’d already hired one of his research assistants to clerk for her the year after next. “I expect her to still be there and thriving,” he added. He had harsh words for those liberals who were pushing for Ginsburg to retire, “With all respect to some of my liberal friends, I think they are being ridiculous,” he said. “She is not a quitter.”

The NFL suffered a rare setback Friday when its far-reaching and high-profile suspension of Ray Rice was overturned, allowing the running back to return to the league immediately — if anyone will take him...One legal expert said that even though the Rice case does not establish precedent, it moves the league closer to a day when ultimate decisions on punishment are not made by the commissioner. “The walls are beginning to tumble down on the commissioner hearing the final appeal,” said Harvard law professor Peter Carfagna, former chief legal officer of media firm IMG. “It's like the Alamo, but they haven't climbed in and taken it yet.” How that impacts Goodell's overall authority, Carfagna said, is “in the eye of the beholder.”

In 2011, Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, the largest maker of computer components on the planet, stood up at an employee party and announced that he would replace the workers who spray, weld and assemble products for Apple, Sony and Nokia with 1 million robots in three years...Because they have to follow the rules of the road (or the sky), jobs in transportation and logistics and are particularly vulnerable to the smart machine invasion, says Richard B. Freeman, co-director of the Labor and Work Life Forum at the Harvard Law School and director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. So are office support jobs. “They follow rules, which means they can be described by computer program,” Freeman says.

The federal government is on the brink of lifting restrictions put in place more than three decades ago when regulators, alarmed by the spread of the virus that causes AIDS, barred men who had sex with other men from donating blood. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will begin a two-day meeting on the issue Tuesday, amid growing calls from medical groups, gay rights activists and lawmakers to jettison the ban as outdated and discriminatory...“They really are out of step with the rest of the world,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who with two colleagues recently argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association for a new U.S. policy. Cohen noted that numerous countries have abandoned blanket bans and put in place shorter deferral periods.

An op-ed by Alica M. Rodriguez [`15]. If you are one of the lucky ones, you have glimpsed a turkey walking around Harvard’s campus, totally out of place but strutting its stuff nonetheless. Turkeys have long graced the North American wilderness, but there’s a reason tourists and students routinely stop to photograph them: It’s rare to spot a wild turkey because the majority of turkeys are now raised in factory farms, without ever having seen the light of day. The Harvard turkey is, therefore, among the luckiest of its kinsmen. Each year, a whopping 46 million turkeys are killed for Thanksgiving celebrations. Unlike wild turkeys that are free to roam, forage, and live their lives naturally, these turkeys have been through the worst types of cruelty imaginable.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. The airwaves are alive with Thanksgiving and Christmas calorie stories. Makes sense. But are those pecan pie dissections really all that relevant? After all, holidays come around once a year. What's more important is what you take in on normal days...A new rule from the Food and Drug Administration will require calorie and other nutrition information to be disclosed by chain restaurants -- including bakeries, cafeterias, coffee shops, convenience stores, movie theaters and vending machines. The rule might turn out to be one of the most important regulatory initiatives of the past decade, with a significant effect on consumer behavior and public health.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It's official: As of this week, Israel is no longer the only democracy in the Middle East. The immediate reason is that Tunisia, which has a newly minted democratic constitution, held a free presidential election to follow its successful legislative elections. That’s a happy story: the more democracies in the Middle East, the better for its peoples. But there's another reason to keep a close eye on Israel's democracy: a draft basic law -- in essence, a constitutional amendment -- approved by the Israeli cabinet that represents a big step backward from Israel's traditional self-identification as both Jewish and democratic.

The Harvard Law School professor says there is a racial divide in this country that is not going to end with Ferguson.

It's not as if lawyers are lacking industry publications to read, but the folks at Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession say its new digital magazine offers something different. Called The Practice (wasn't that a television show – about doctors?), the digital magazine launched in November and a new issue will post every two months. What makes it different than other legal publications is that the articles are based on the center's empirical research, Bryon Fong, The Practice's managing editor, told me.

President Obama could leave office with the most aggressive, far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White House. Yet it is very possible that not a single major environmental law will have passed during his two terms in Washington. Instead, Mr. Obama has turned to the vast reach of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard University’s environmental law program, and a former counselor to the president, said Mr. Obama was using the Clean Air Act “to push forward in a way that no president ever has.”

"This was a strategic and problematic use of a grand jury to get the result he wanted," said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University. "As a strategic move, it was smart; he got what he wanted without being seen as directly responsible for the result." Sullivan called the case "the most unusual marshaling of a grand jury's resources I've seen in my 25 years as a lawyer and scholar."

Monday, a grand jury decided not to indict a police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Missouri. Protests have been held nationwide, and across New England, after people learned Darren Wilson would not be charged in the death of Michael Brown. ... Tuesday, retired U.S. district court judge Nancy Gertner weighed in on the decision when she joined Jim Braude on Broadside.

Encourage policy makers to create and foster a food system that serves consumer health and the environment. Improving labeling policies and practices can decrease confusion for consumers, leading to a reduction in food waste. A recent report by Emily Broad Leib, Director of Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, states, "Congress, federal administrative agencies, state legislatures, and state agencies should work towards a system of date labeling that is more standardized, more easily understood by consumers, and less arbitrary."

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Both sides in the debate over President Barack Obama's immigration reforms have offered simple legal arguments. According to critics, the president is acting unlawfully by defying acts of Congress and arrogating the authority of a king. According to supporters, Obama is acting within his broad discretion as chief executive to deport those he thinks should be deported and let others stay in the U.S. But the administration's own legal analysis is much subtler and more precise. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel argues that the Department of Homeland Security does indeed have the authority to “prioritize” the removal of certain categories of undocumented aliens, and it can create a “deferred-action program” to let some people remain in the U.S. for a specified period. But it has to be careful about how it decides who gets to stay.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When was the last time you heard of a grand jury decision causing a riot? Well … never. That's because grand juries are obscure relics of past practice, not designed to bear the full weight of a politically and symbolically important decision like the nonprosecution of police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The decision by St. Louis County Chief Prosecutor Robert McCulloch to put the issue neutrally before the grand jury was intended to create a sense of public legitimacy for whatever result followed, and also no doubt to deflect blame from the prosecutor's own exercise of discretion. It failed on both counts -- and with good reason.

Emphasizing the importance for host nations to develop infrastructure, services, and policy that last after the conclusion of major sporting events, Brazilian Vice-Minister of Sports Luis Fernandes discussed Brazil’s preparation for both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics at a panel on Monday evening. Held at the Law School and moderated by Law School professor Charles R. Nesson ’60, the panel opened with Nesson noting that the event was relevant to Boston’s current bid to host the upcoming Olympic Games in 2024.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. It isn’t surprising that a grand jury on Monday ruled against indicting police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown last August in Ferguson, Mo. Although many are saying that the decision may have to do with race, it is more likely that Wilson is not facing charges because courts have decimated the law that holds officers accountable for excessive force, rulings that make incidents similar to Ferguson all the more likely. For example, two months before the Brown shooting, the US Supreme Court ruled in Plumhoff v. Rickard that even egregious police conduct is not “excessive force” in violation of the Constitution.

An op-ed by Johanna Wald. For weeks this summer, after black teenager Michael Brown was gunned down by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the nation was witness to many disturbing images. We saw police in riot gear jumping out of armored trucks as if they were an occupying army, citizens being tear gassed in their own yards, and community members gasping in horror and disbelief. But the image that is seared forever in my consciousness is of the lifeless body of Michael Brown, lying on the ground in the street, alone, uncovered, in the middle of the afternoon, with blood spilling from his head. He was left by the police to lie like that for four hours. No grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson can erase that image. No amount of justifications or rationalizations by the Ferguson Police Department about procedures or protocols will ever convince me that they would have allowed a white body to linger on the street like that. That image gave the permanent lie to any notions that we have somehow transformed into a “post-racial” society. It powerfully conveyed what those of us who examine the research on a regular basis have long acknowledged. In this country, we have two systems of justice: one for White America and one for Black America, particularly for Young Black Male America.