Media Mentions

“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.

An op-ed by Janet Halley. Students have rightly protested shoddy and outright malign handling of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct claims and demanded fairer procedures on college campuses. Many of the resulting reforms will improve things by sending the clear message that sexual abuse will not be tolerated or condoned. But, as often happens when public indignation and government power combine to force reform, it is easy to go too far and to make hasty fixes that threaten values that are forgotten at the moment of crisis...We have reached that point in the institutional, political and governmental demand for stricter enforcement of sexual harassment policies by institutions of higher education. Harvard University’s new Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Policy, and its new procedures for student discipline, exemplify this trend.

Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Peter K. Bol, who authorized a now-controversial lecture attendance study that involved photographing students without their knowledge last spring, notified the students who took the affected courses by email on Wednesday...Kyros Law in Hingham, Mass. is actively seeking faculty and students to take part in a potential class action lawsuit against the University for allegedly violating privacy and breaking state and federal laws through the attendance study....“A lawsuit is an awful way to sort out a situation like this one,” Computer Science and Law Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain wrote in an email Monday to The Crimson, adding that “there may be reasons to rethink how studies of this sort are done—who approves them, and who's informed about it before, during, and after —but I don't see any useful role for a lawsuit here, and I suspect the plaintiff's firm is rather hoping to simply settle, banking on the University not wishing ongoing bad publicity.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Barack Obama has made headlines by announcing that he favors net neutrality -- and in particular that he wants the Federal Communications Commission to designate Internet service providers as common carriers that would be regulated like utilities. What's weird about the president's announcement is not the policy perspective, about which reasonable people can differ. What's weird is that the president’s statement has no legal effect. He appointed a majority of the FCC’s commissioners -- but he can't fire them short of malfeasance, and they won't ever run for election. What kind of democracy is this?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Do you earn any money outside your state? Whether you’re an NBA player or a lowly lecturer-consultant like some of us, you know the drill: Pay income tax where you earned the money, then get a credit from your home state when you file your return. Unless, that is, you live in Maryland. Maryland refuses to credit residents for part of the money they earn elsewhere, choosing instead to double-tax them. The U.S. Supreme Court now has to decide whether this is constitutional. Depending on the outcome, copycats probably won’t be far behind.

The company's new policy has given hope to both supporters and opponents of efforts by the United Auto Workers to unionize its first foreign-owned plant in the region. The outcome of the union drive at the Chattanooga plant is being closely monitored by other German and Asian automakers in the region, and by Republican officials who dread the prospect of a UAW breaking its losing streak among what the union refers to as the "transplants."...Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard University, said Volkswagen's new policies "could be important to the United Auto Workers' organizing efforts" in Chattanooga. Voluntarily providing access to the plant for meetings, notices and other activities is a departure from the practices of most companies where "the worksite is off limits for union organizing, by and large," Sachs said.

If Congress got what it deserved, the Capitol Dome would never have been permitted to be the backdrop for Tuesday’s Concert for Valor on the Mall honoring Veterans Day. Why? The 535 lawmakers who work there have cravenly dodged their constitutional responsibility to make the tough decision about whether President Obama is right to lead the country into war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria...Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former special counsel to the Defense Department, said that when he testified before Congress last year, he was stunned by key senators’ lack of knowledge about U.S. military operations, such as drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. “It was remarkable how little the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee knew about where we were fighting and against whom,” Goldsmith said. “They don’t even know where it’s going on.”

An op-ed by Jacob E. Gersen and Benjamin I. Sachs. Every year, 5.5 million people are sickened by norovirus, a highly contagious gastrointestinal bug. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus is the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States and is spread primarily by “infected food workers.” Last year cooks, waiters and other workers were involved in about 70 percent of the outbreaks. This is just one example of the critical role that food workers play in our nation’s economic and public health systems. And yet, while we often tailor employment rules for work that has a special impact on the public, the law has yet to recognize food workers as a distinct class — an approach that harms consumers, the economy and the workers themselves. Sick restaurant workers provide a particularly vivid example of the kind of legal reform that’s needed.

Considered one of the most important American diplomats of the 20th century, onetime Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited the Harvard Law School (HLS) campus last week to share some of the lessons learned as adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A key architect of U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977 and a proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger reflected on his long career with HLS Professor Robert H. Mnookin, Harvard Business School Professor James Sebenius, and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Nick Burns during an afternoon session in crowded Austin Hall on Nov. 6.

In a move that caught many observers off guard, the U.S. Supreme Court last week announced it would review one of four cases currently challenging provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)...Einer Elhauge, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and founding director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, writes frequently about U.S. health care law and is the author of the 2012 book “Obamacare on Trial.” He talked to the Gazette via email about the court’s decision to take up this case, what is at issue, and implications for the ACA should the court rule in favor of the plaintiffs.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I keep saying that telecom policy is blood and guts stuff — giant principles of equity, speech, and the importance of free markets run headlong into the extraordinary political powers wielded by Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T. All too often the drama is buried in an avalanche of acronyms and incremental influence. Then came yesterday’s message from President Obama. Here was our best Obama, telling the FCC in plain language that it should consider acting like a regulator. The message actually brought a tear to my eye. It’s the equivalent of the moving part of the war movie when the gruff but effective leader calls his troops to their better selves, reminding them why they’re there in the first place. So although the president sounded like the law-professor-in-chief yesterday (“I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act”), to me it was a General Patton moment. This is a battle cry designed to give heart to his administration — and particularly the corner of the executive branch crouching in terror behind the walls of the FCC.

Because Sen. Ted Cruz loves political journalists and wants them to be happy and get traffic, he responded to President Obama's big net neutrality announcement by tweeting that network neutrality is like Obamacare for the internet...But if Obamacare for the internet isn't a particularly meaningful concept, a public option for the internet is. Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at the Harvard Law School, explained the idea to me in an interview.

Harvard Law School visiting Professor Susan Crawford spoke with Morning Edition host Bob Seay about Net Neutrality saying the momentum behind the issue and President Obama's recent support demonstrates the need to give oversight to the Internet. Crawford says, "Net Neutrality isn't about the roads of the Super information Highway or the Internet, it's about the cars."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Today's word is linkage. For example, Iran is confirming that, in October, President Barack Obama sent supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a letter linking ongoing nuclear talks to the two countries’ joint interests in fighting the Islamic State. At the Supreme Court, linkage is going to be just as important. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit last week essentially forced the Supreme Court to decide whether there's a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, by refusing to recognize such a right itself. The next day, the court agreed to hear a potentially fatal legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Taken together, these two cases transform the current Supreme Court term into a blockbuster -- and the linkage relationship between them will be all-important.

Every time Gary Katcher sees the article, he feels that his reputation is being dragged through the mud again. It's an article from Forbes, dated Jan. 13, 2012, touching on a lawsuit between him and an ex-partner in his investment firm over a nasty business divorce. The article was accurate, reporting fairly on the claims of wrongdoing exchanged between the former partners during four years of litigation. It eventually was settled in Katcher's favor, but the magazine never ran a follow-up...Options for an American right to be forgotten are beginning to emerge. Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says focusing on search engines "allows for the information itself to remain public, with a question of how to narrow the indexing of it." He also praised an experiment launched by Google years ago, allowing people quoted or mentioned in a news article to append a clarifying comment next to the article on the Google News service. The function doesn't appear to be available any longer.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Thought you were done with the U.S. Supreme Court and health care? Think again. The court has agreed to review the question of whether the federally created health insurance exchanges violate the law’s expectation that the exchanges be created by a state. Reading the tea leaves can only tell you so much about what the court is going to do. But from the standpoint of the Barack Obama administration, there is reason to be curiously concerned that the president’s signature legislative accomplishment is in jeopardy once again.

Standing in near-frozen water while guarding a bridge during the notorious Battle of the Bulge in 1945, the infantryman sustained such severe frostbite he almost lost a foot. Evacuated to a hospital in England, he avoided amputation but had serious problems with his feet the rest of his life. When he died in 2008 from a variety of health problems, his widow — who had very little income — applied for a type of benefit for survivors of veterans whose death had resulted, at least in part, from a service-related disability...It took nearly six years and a trip to federal court, but with the help of the Harvard Law School (HLS) Veterans Legal Clinic the widow finally prevailed, winning a monthly payment from the VA that completely changes her financial health....In just two years, more than 30 HLS students have enrolled in the Veterans Legal Clinic — housed at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center (LSC) in Jamaica Plain, with [Dan] Nagin as its faculty director — and represented more than 100 clients in areas of federal and state veterans’ benefits, discharge upgrades, and estate-planning matters.