Media Mentions

A decade ago, dozens of former fighters from both sides of Northern Ireland's Troubles sat down to talk about their roles for the oral history the Belfast Project. They were assured that the recordings would not be made public until after their deaths. But in July 2013, Boston College, which had been storing the recordings, was forced to release several tapes to Northern Ireland's police service as part of an investigation into the 1972 murder of Jean McConville. Such transgressions have got Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, thinking about how to ensure that data are protected for the promised time period. Among other concerns, he worries for philanthropic donations of papers or personal effects to libraries and the like. Often, such donations are made with a proviso that they not be revealed for a fixed period of time. “That type of donation will not happen if their stuff is only one subpoena away from disclosure,” he says. Mr Zittrain has just received a $35,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, an organisation dedicated to "informed and engaged communities", to create an encrypted "time-capsule" service. Its aim is to enable scholars and journalists to securely send a message, in effect, into the future—encrypted in such a way that it cannot be read by anyone until a certain date or event.

An op-ed by By Jack Goldsmith, Ryan Goodman and Steve Vladeck. President Obama has stated that he wants “to begin engaging Congress” over a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State and also that he wants to “right-size and update” the 2001 AUMF “to suit the current fight, rather than previous fights.” It appears that Congress, too, is finally getting serious about putting U.S. counterterrorism operations on a contemporary and more rigorous statutory footing. There are many politically contested questions about how the government should accomplish these goals — about, for example, whether U.S. ground troops should be banned from Syria and Iraq, how the fight against the Islamic State should be conducted consistent with U.S. policy against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and what rules should govern the targeted killing of U.S. citizens abroad...We differ among ourselves on some questions. We nonetheless believe that, however they are resolved, an important foundational consensus can be reached — across branches and parties — on five core principles that should guide any new or revised authorization of force related to counterterrorism.

...Nearly 25 years after the first publicly viewable website appeared, the culture of sharing on the Internet is changing. Privacy and anonymity are crucial features of new social apps like Secret, Whisper and Canary. A growing number of websites also offer services that help protect, maintain or even erase what is fast becoming your most permanent and accessible record: data that can be gleaned about you from search engine results....“The options for getting facts and personal information removed once it’s been posted online in the U.S. are fairly limited,” says Christopher T. Bavitz, managing director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “It’s very challenging to regulate the spread of this kind of information, but it’s challenging for very good reasons. The first good reason is the First Amendment.”

Several students at Harvard Law School have organized a new advocacy group to promote discussion about sexual assault and the federal anti-sex discrimination law Title IX. The group, called “Harvard Talks Title IX” or “HTT9,” was born out of discussion this fall in two courses taught by law professor Charles R. Nesson ’60. Nesson surveyed his students earlier this semester to identify what topic they found most difficult to discuss—the “elephant in the room,” as he described it—and the top response was gender discrimination and equality. Several of his students took the initiative to create the group to promote conversation on that issue.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Barack Obama’s much-anticipated executive order on immigration is clever politics, and maybe even a morally inspiring policy. But is it constitutional? Can the U.S. president just announce that he plans not to enforce the laws passed by Congress with respect to millions of people? And if it is constitutional, why is it?

In this turbulent midterm election year, two academics decided to practice what they preached. They left the classroom, confronted the reality of down-and-dirty politics, and tried to replace moneyed interests with the public interest. Neither was successful -- this year, at least -- but on this week's show, Bill talks with them about their experiences and the hard-fought lessons learned about the state of American democracy. Lawrence Lessig, who teaches law at Harvard, is a well-known Internet activist and campaign finance reform advocate. This election cycle, he started a crowd-funded SuperPAC aimed at reducing the influence of money in politics. Lessig tells Bill: "Our democracy is flat lined. Because when you can show clearly there's no relationship between what the average voter cares about, only if it happens to coincide with what the economic elite care about, you've shown that we don't have a democracy anymore."

An op-ed by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford. According to a recent Harris poll, Americans ages 18 to 44 believe that five years from now most interactions with cashiers, cab drivers, and waiters will be handled by online apps. They think there will be “big data” health services that provide real-time medical monitoring and alert their doctors when they’re in danger. And they’re confident they will be asking for help from companies who can send them needed products before they have to order them. This streamlined future will happen on the streets of America’s cities, where more than 80 percent of us live. Municipalities are just starting to use data to improve urban conditions.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. In recent years, many federal judges have voted to strike down bans on same-sex marriage, in part because no one has defended them well. This month, however, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, produced the most powerful defense to date -- one that will give the Supreme Court a serious test. Judge Sutton acknowledged that “the question is not whether American law will allow gay couples to marry; it is when and how that will happen.” Nor did he lament what he saw as history’s arc. Instead he argued that, for federal courts, the only question is: Who decides? His answer: not judges, but the democratic process.

The insurance company MetLife is unhappy that it has been added to the list of firms that get special attention from regulators for being too big, or too interconnected, to fail. It appears to want to fight the designation by arguing that the government has not provided the numbers supporting its analysis, and that this failure to do the math makes the designation unreasonable, and, therefore, illegal....In short, the government did not use math to defend its designation. Should it be required to do so? Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s first regulatory czar and now a law professor at Harvard, has said he believes that agencies should make the quantitative case whenever possible. Another Harvard Law professor, John Coates, on the other hand, argues that the assumptions involved in assessing the costs and benefits of financial regulation look too much like ever-changing guesstimates.

An op-ed by by Robert C. Bordone and Sara E. del Nido [clinical fellow]. On Tuesday, Nov. 12, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China announced a climate accord that demonstrates real promise in making progress to stem global climate change. The climate accord also represents something that is rarely achieved in the struggle to come together around environmental issues: a long-term agreement that meets the interests of both parties; lays the groundwork for future actions by other key players; fundamentally changes the strategic negotiation game; and takes substantial steps toward solving the problem of collective action.

The facts were undeniable: The defendant, one Abraham (no known surname), had teetered on the brink of stabbing his son Isaac to death, only to be stopped by divine intervention. Luckily he had a lawyer with a thirst for tough cases, not to mention a jury pool consisting exclusively of people who proudly claim to be descended from the accused...For the prosecution: Eliot Spitzer, a former governor and attorney general of New York. For the defense: Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who was one of Mr. Spitzer’s former professors but is perhaps better known for defending O. J. Simpson and other notorious clients.

Time flies. It’s four years since Margaret Marshall retired as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and we haven’t heard much from her in the interim. It’s less than two years since Tony Lewis died, and there’s so much we should have heard from him in that time...She spoke about something she and her husband loved almost as much as each other: the First Amendment. “Tony had strong feelings — very strong — about the First Amendment, about law, justice, and liberty,” she said. “Tony spent a great deal of time with judges and lawyers. It was a close call, but in the end, I think Tony admired journalists more than he admired lawyers and judges.” She paused, as lawyers are wont to do, before adding, “But he did marry a judge.”

In the fierce debate about campus sexual assault, Harvard University’s policy has come under particular scrutiny, assailed by some professors as a product of political correctness that stacks the deck against the accused. But a range of specialists who help colleges handle misconduct allegations say Harvard’s policy is decidedly mainstream...Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus Harvard Law professor who was among those who signed the article, said colleges have adopted broadly similar policies on sexual assaults in keeping with federal mandates, which he said are biased against the accused. “It’s really not a criticism of Harvard,” he said. “It’s a criticism of the federal government. It’s a criticism of the Obama administration.”

Legendary music industry executive Clive Davis described his transformation from Harvard Law School student to president of Columbia Records at a lecture in Wasserstein Hall on Friday afternoon. Answering questions from HLS Dean Martha L. Minow and audience members, Davis talked extensively about his work with Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, and other artists before a crowd of several hundred event attendees.

It’s not often that Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow gets rattled. But then, it’s not every day that Clive Davis, the legendary record label executive, producer, and talent nurturer, stops by Wasserstein Hall to reminisce about his illustrious, six-decade career in the music industry. “I have interviewed Supreme Court justices, I’ve been with presidents of countries, I am so nervous!” Minow told Davis, LL.B. ’56, Friday afternoon as they chatted about Davis’ improbable journey as a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn who made it to Harvard Law School (HLS) on a scholarship and went on to become one of the most successful and revered figures in music business history.

Valerie Jarrett is the most talked-about White House aide in Washington — and that’s not always a good thing. Jarrett has come under attack after the midterm elections, with critics charging that she wields too much influence over her boss. Part of her mystique stems from the fact that, as other top aides have come and gone, Jarrett has survived. Her longevity and proximity to President Obama and Michelle Obama have made her something of a Beltway legend — and have conjured up a series of misconceptions about her...Complaints about presidential advisers have a long tradition. “In almost every presidency you can name a powerful White House figure who had informal power of one kind or another that was the subject of dispute,” said Kenneth Mack, a Harvard historian. “Sherman Adams had an immense amount of power in Eisenhower’s White House; same with Harry Hopkins and Franklin Roosevelt.”

“Net neutrality” — you hear those two words a lot these days....To understand the concept of net neutrality you first have to understand the backdrop of the Internet itself, says Jonathan Zittrain who heads the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The Internet is kind of a collective hallucination. It is only a set of protocols that say if somebody joining this network, connecting however it can, speaks those protocols, it’s a full-fledged member of the network. That’s one reason why the Internet has no main menu, it has no CEO, it has no business plan,” says Zittrain.

It was a father-son hiking trip gone terribly wrong. When they reached the mountain peak, the father tied up his son, placed him on a pile of firewood and prepared to slash the boy’s throat—until he heard a voice telling him to stop. On Sunday, the father—also known as the biblical patriarch Abraham —will be brought up on charges of attempted murder and endangering the welfare of his son, Isaac, in a mock trial at Temple Emanu-El synagogue on the Upper East Side...Presiding over the Old Testament-inspired case will be U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan. Representing Abraham will be high-profile defense attorney Alan Dershowitz. Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will lead the prosecution.

The international community watched closely this week as representatives from the U.S. government defended its compliance with the Convention Against Torture (CAT) in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture...Groups like the Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions say that the United States is shielding those responsible, which is in direct violation of its CAT obligations. “It’s is at the heart of everything,” Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and a member of Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions said in an interview with Newsweek. Referring to what she called the “legal framework the U.S. government built to shield itself from liability” (a mixture of legal opinions that distort laws governing torture and the use of the Military Commissions Act to retroactively redefine war crimes to impede prosecution), she added that by “choosing to immunize those responsible, [the U.S. government] legitimizes their actions and the legacy lives on, the precedent is set.”

In his pronouncement on the open Internet Monday, President Obama called for the most stringent option among rules being contemplated – treating Internet providers like public utilities such as electricity companies and subjecting them to tight regulations....It would have the most solid legal grounds to ban "paid prioritization" deals, ones in which ISPs get payments to offer "fast-lane" Internet connections to deep-pocketed content providers that can afford them while others get to deal with slower speeds. "They have to be standing on legal authority," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School.

Obamacare -- the law that refuses to die -- is suddenly under attack again...Harvard Law Professor Einer Elhauge says some states, to protect themselves against possible health care chaos, might finally decide to set up their own arrangements or partner with the federal exchange. "The prospect of that disruption is sufficiently problematic that I would not be surprised to see a lot of states adopt exchanges," said Elhauge, who authored a book on the original Obamacare Supreme Court case.