Media Mentions

Joshua Matz didn't bother waiting to write about the Supreme Court until he went to work there. He teamed with a renowned Harvard law professor to finish a book about the court before he started his year as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy...In "Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution," Matz and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe argue that on a range of big issues, political gridlock and societal change have increased the court's influence. ..."He was impressive enough that I felt I should call Justice Kennedy, not just write a letter, but call him and emphasize what an unusual catch Joshua would be," Tribe said in a telephone interview.

One federal judge has allowed a voter ID law to take effect in Wisconsin. Another is now contemplating whether to do the same in Texas. Defenders of these laws, which exist in some form in 34 states, insist that requiring people to show government-issued identification at the polls will reduce fraud—and that it will do so without imposing unfair burdens or discouraging people from voting. In North Carolina, for example, Republican Governor Pat McCrory wrote an op-ed boasting that the measures fight fraud “at no cost” to voters. ...But in 2008, when the Court approved Voter ID laws, the Court left open the possibility of new challenges if plaintiffs can demonstrate the laws impose a burden on would-be voters. There are now good reasons to think the laws do exactly that. One reason is a report, published over the summer, from Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Researchers there complied published articles and legal testimony, in order to calculate the cost of of obtaining a government-issued identification. They included everything from the cost of waiting to the cost of traveling and obtaining documentation. Their conclusion? The costs can range anywhere from $75 to $400 per person. The study is not a comprehensive, since it examines evidence from just three states— Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, which had its law blocked by the U.S. Justice Department but upheld by a District Court.

If the last term is any guide, the dominance of veteran advocates and their law firms at the lectern of the U.S. Supreme Court will only continue when the court returns Oct. 6. In the term that ended in June, the justices decided 67 argued cases, less than half the caseload they handled in 1990. Three firms argued seven cases each and two argued in six — meaning that just five firms fielded lawyers on one side or the other in roughly half of the court's oral arguments. "That is truly remarkable," Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said about the numbers. Lazarus has written extensively about the ­development of the elite Supreme Court bar. Less than 30 years ago, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist said there was no Supreme Court bar as such.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: You're going to like this column a lot. It’s the best one you’ll read today, or any day this month. I showed an early draft to a close friend of mine, a famous French novelist I have dinner with whenever I'm in Paris, and he said, “I only wish I could write so well!” Another friend, a billionaire who has two Nobel prizes and an Olympic gold medal (and who recently told me I'm the best-dressed person he knows), responded with just one word: “Wow.” Why do people brag? They want to make a good impression, whether the context is employment, business, friendship or romance. And sometimes self-promotion does work. When it carries over into bragging, though, it makes the person seem anxious, annoying and unbearably self-involved. New research by social scientists Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau offers a powerful explanation for why people undermine their own goals, and create a seriously negative impression, by bragging. In a nutshell, braggarts project their own emotions onto the person they're talking to.

Promoting diversity in education was one the biggest and most widely practiced ideas of the 20th century. But as Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Daniel P.S. Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at Harvard, argued in last week’s edition of The Weekly Wonk, diversity isn’t getting us where we need to go to help students who are truly disadvantaged. She has another big idea to make higher education a real pathway to social mobility: directing resources to students who are the first in their families to attend college. In this episode, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Brown-Nagin outline the stakes for how reaching out to first-generation students can make college, in the words of Horace Mann, a “great equalizer.”

An op-ed by Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz: Last year the Obama administration issued, with considerable fanfare, a new military policy designed to reduce civilian casualties when U.S. forces are attacking enemy targets. This policy required "near certainty" that there will be no civilian casualties before an air attack is permitted. When Israel acted in self-defense this summer against Hamas rocket and tunnel attacks, the Obama administration criticized the Israeli army for "not doing enough" to reduce civilian casualties. When pressed about what more Israel could do—especially when Hamas fired its rockets and dug its terror tunnels in densely populated areas, deliberately using humans as shields—the Obama administration declined to provide specifics.

With a click or a tap, Amazon users can buy everything from light bulbs to washing machines. Now imagine if those devices could send data back to Amazon and encourage their owners to buy more stuff from — you guessed it — Amazon. Like Apple and Google, Amazon is reportedly getting into the smart home game. The company is investing $55 million into its Lab126 division over the next five years, according to Reuters, which includes money for developing smart home devices. ... A smart home might be able to provide a similar picture based on what consumers do in real life. "Your home could be a place that could analyze you and provide information to potential advertisers," Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told NBC News.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In France, the bitter controversy over the hijab, or headscarf, worn by some Muslim women relates to citizenship, feminism, and the secularism of the French Revolution and Republic. In America, we have Abercrombie. So perhaps it's fitting that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced it will take its first hijab case to decide whether the chain could deny employment to an otherwise qualified young woman who wanted to wear a headscarf on the job. The case, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch, started in 2008 when 17-year-old Samantha Elauf applied for a job at the Abercrombie Kids store in the Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At Abercrombie, salespeople are called “models,” and part of the job interview is scored on how you look. Once hired, the “models” must comply with an Abercrombie “look policy” that governs how they dress.

Judges in Aberdeen, Rapid City and Sioux Falls may soon have better information to help decide whether to lock up or release criminal defendants awaiting trial. Three South Dakota counties are developing a pilot program to screen and analyze defendants’ background as a way to better predict their flight risk and danger to the public. ... Minnehaha, Brown and Pennington counties are working with the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School to develop a pilot program in South Dakota.

...Divest Harvard’s recent escalation is the outgrowth of a sense of frustration at a University president and Corporation, that to them, are too secretive, too dismissive, and too unresponsive to their fervent calls. ...For Kelsey C. Skaggs [`16], a member of Divest Harvard and president of Harvard Law Students for Sustainable Investment, the arrest was troubling due to its treatment of free speech. “The whole idea of not listening to student speech when it’s presented in the context you want,” says Skaggs, referring to Divest’s attempts to engage with the administration in the year and a half before the blockade, “and then shutting it down and being derogatory about it when it’s something you don’t want is really troubling from a free-speech perspective.”

...Emily Broad Leib is also at Harvard University. She wants to change the way food is grown. She wants to change what people can have available to eat. She’s an absolutely remarkable person.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China's plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person "nominating committee." Critics charge the committee will be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite."...But there's not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Beijing's proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage. The pattern has been common in America's democracy too.

The judge regretted it from the beginning. The 27-year prison sentence he gave Byron Lamont McDade was too long, he said, for a low-level player in an expansive cocaine enterprise. Years later, the punishment still nagged at him...“Every one of us has had cases where you absolutely had no choice but to sentence someone to a term that you experienced as unjust,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who now teaches at Harvard Law School. But even with a federal judge in your corner, she said, there are no guarantees for inmates like McDade. Friedman and others, she said, are “reduced to begging these other authorities to do the right thing.”

Mayday, a political action committee launched by Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, has raised over $6 million since the spring, according to Federal Election Commission filings from August, and the PAC claims on its website that it has raised nearly $2 million more since then...Although it was born on Harvard’s campus, Mayday has generated most of its buzz and donations online, said Andrew Sellars, a fellow at the Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who contributed to the PAC. “The conversation seems to be happening a lot in the internet policy space, where Lessig has been a prominent figure for so long,” Sellars said.

Investors have been pushing for—and often winning—big changes at companies. This week, Ebay EBAY -2.066% split off its PayPal division, a move long urged by Carl Icahn, who controls 30 million shares of the company...One influential study looks at what happened to 2,000 companies targeted by activists over a number of years. It concluded that activism worked out fine for investors, even over a period as long as five years. And “operating performance relative to peers improves consistently,” writes co-author Lucian Bebchuk, an economist at Harvard. This was true even for companies that took on debt or cut capital spending. But another recent study is less upbeat, finding little impact on growth and profit margins.

With apologies to the cast of Cabaret, dark money makes the political world go round. Confusing rules and a regulatory void in campaign finance have unleashed a tsunami of cash from anonymous donors that is expected to have unprecedented influence over the midterm elections in November...The petition has found grassroots groups and investors on Wall Street largely in agreement for once. In addition, nearly a dozen senators and more than 40 members of the House have supported it, according to one of the petition’s drafters, Lucian Bebchuk, a professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard. Bebchuk scoffs at those who say new rules to disclose corporate political spending will hurt confidentiality. “One could understand such an argument for letting individuals anonymously contribute their money,” he told Newsweek. “But such an argument loses its force when public companies make political contributions. In such a case, executives contribute not their own money but shareholders’ money, and there is little basis for allowing them to keep the contribution hidden from the shareholders whose money is spent.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas is one of the most popular state-level officials in the country, but even he is having a tough time fixing an Arkansas state law that lets telecommunications companies charge K-12 schools sky-high prices to connect their students to the Internet.

The Kremlin is worried that the West might try to shut off Russia's access to the global Internet. According to a report by Vedomosti on Sept. 19, the Kremlin might soon deploy a new set of tactics in an effort to defend the country's "digital sovereignty."...More involvement in the web's domain operations would grant the Kremlin some additional capacity to disrupt how the RuNet functions, but the shift would not "surrender control of the Internet to Russia," claims ICANN president Fadi Chehade. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain agrees, saying the Internet works on a "consensus," of which "numbering and naming" is only a "tiny part."

Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program’s Michael Teitelbaum on the impact of immigration policy on the U.S. job market.

The Food Better campaign kicked off with a presentation at the Harvard Community Garden on Monday, one in a week-long series of events designed to improve student awareness on all issues related to food....“We have so much brain power and creative energy across the University that if we can harness that, and encourage students to come up with innovative ideas about the food system and about improving the food system, we can really make a major impact,” said Ona J. Balkus, a clinical fellow at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Individuals and communities can improve the food system, according to members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, which has launched a yearlong, University-wide focus on how to make food distribution more equitable, sustainable, and nutritious...The Food Better campaign will run alongside the Deans’ Food System Challenge, a challenge in the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) that invites creative and entrepreneurial students to develop innovative ideas to improve the health, social, and environmental outcomes of the food system, both in the United States and around the world...“Food is a universal issue, because everyone eats,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “We’re hoping with this campaign to show Harvard’s ongoing commitment to improving our food system. And we’re hoping students will get involved and take away ideas about how individuals can improve the food system.