Media Mentions

An op-ed by Michael Klarman. Over the last year, lower federal court judges have removed most of the suspense from the questions of whether and when the Supreme Court might rule marriage equality to be a federal constitutional right. In case after case, in red states and blue, judges have ruled that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional. This makes it very likely that the Supreme Court will grant review in such a case this year, and even more likely, assuming it does, that it will rule that the Constitution requires states to extend marriage equality to gay couples.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. If you are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister did? Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, "partyism" now exceeds racial prejudice -- which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election campaigns.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign definitively told Steven Salaita this month that he was out of a job there. Debate about whether the university did the right thing in pulling his job offer weeks before the start of classes due to the tenor of his anti-Israel remarks on Twitter lives on....Some, including Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who backed Summers and opposed the tenure bid of Norman Finkelstein, the controversial former political scientist at DePaul University, have a more cynical take. Dershowitz said that in his experience, academics working in STEM tend, “in general, to be more objective and principled, and those in the humanities tend to be ideologues and results-oriented, and believe it’s the appropriate role of the scholar to use his or her podium to propagandize students.”

Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program celebrated on Friday afternoon the increased awareness surrounding issues of human rights since its founding three decades ago and detailed the next steps for activists in the field....“It is wonderful to look back at the graduates we’ve had go on to have distinguished careers, the scholarship we have produced, and the engagement we’ve had in projects,” said Gerald L. Neuman ’73, director of the Human Rights Program. “We are looking back but also forward to the problems of the day.”

Virtu Financial’s CEO Vincent Viola is not having a good year. First, his company’s IPO gets cancelled, and now he can’t unload his palatial Upper East Side mansion...“They [Virtu] became a poster-child for people that want to attack high-frequency trading,” said Hal Scott, director of the program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School.

If you're in the business of higher education, the issue of sexual assault is on your radar. The White House is expected to unveil a nationwide plan to address the issue Friday at the same time some 70 colleges and universities are under investigation for how they've handled sexual assault cases...Diane Rosenfeld, who runs the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, says people must be smart consumers and do some digging. "See if there are dedicated resources to preventing campus sexual assault, look at statements the president has made [look at] whether the school has been sued or not," she says.

As lawmakers grapple with President Obama’s claim that he already has congressional authorization for airstrikes against the Islamic State, legal specialists are saying that even legislative inaction could create a precedent leaving the executive branch with greater war-making powers....Still, the Obama administration’s broad claims, and the fact that “Congress has done nothing to push back,” may become a precedent that the executive branch could use for future interpretations of statutory authorizations to use military force, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department official.

Five weeks after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed African-American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., ripples from the shooting and the ensuing days of angry public protests continue to radiate nationally. While the nightly standoffs and news coverage have ended, a panel convened by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS) and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, reflected on what Brown’s death, and the crisis that followed it, means for broad policy issues, including racial discrimination, political disenfranchisement, policing, and the criminal justice system. The panel met Wednesday night at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Last month, at a US Federal Reserve Bank conference on the money market, officials lamented the market’s enduring fragility. Indeed, six years after a run on the money market nearly brought the United States – indeed, global – financial system to its knees, critical risks that underpinned that crisis still have not been brought under control.

A group of recent Harvard Law School graduates received grants to jumpstart their careers in public service. The Public Service Venture Fund awarded a total of $1 million to 23 recipients, who were chosen based on their visions for solving public service problems on a community level. Three recent graduates were chosen for the largest grants. They will receive $80,00 per year, which includes a $45,000 stipend, with expectation of renewal for a second year. An additional 20 graduating students were named as fellows and will receive $45,000 for one year to supplement their work in a nonprofit or government agency. Additional partial fellowships have also been awarded. “Through these fellowships, our talented graduates are able to provide badly needed assistance to underserved communities and causes,” said Assistant Dean for Public Serve Alexa Shabecoff.

In the wake of the conflict in Ferguson, Mo. this summer, police departments need to work even harder to build trust with their local communities, panelists at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum event said Wednesday. The event, entitled “Reflections on Ferguson,” was moderated by Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree and featured panelists who included a former police chief, a current mayor, a reverend, and a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.

In a conversation to open the new academic year, President Drew Faust spoke at Sanders Theatre on September 16 with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof ’82 ...On the further question of political diversity, given the documented liberal bias of academic institutions, Faust acknowledged, “This is an important issue for us,” and noted that intellectual prowess is the key factor in hiring professors. “We try to penetrate through political valences,” she said. She praised in particular the leadership of former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan and current dean Martha Minow in shaping a politically diverse law faculty.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 5. Preventing terrorism often requires a choice of evils: to target terrorists and their leaders, knowing civilians will be killed; to collect massive amounts of private data in an effort to track terrorists; to detain potential terrorists without trial. But perhaps no choice of evils is more controversial than the use of torture to secure real-time intelligence against imminent acts of terrorism. Is there ever a justification for the use of torture?

Today, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on the greatest perceived threats to our national security. It's been 13 years since the September 11th attacks, but terrorism remains one of the foremost threats facing the United States...Mark Tushnet, author of "The New Constitutional Order" and professor at Harvard Law School, examines the tricky balance between national security and privacy.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the tiny town of Jun, Spain, (population: 3,000) meeting rooms in city hall have their own Twitter accounts. When residents want to reserve them, they send a direct message via Twitter; when it's time, the door to the room unlocks automatically in response to a tweet. Jun's mayor, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, says he coordinates with other public servants via Twitter. Residents routinely tweet about public services, and city hall answers. Every police officer in Jun has a Twitter handle displayed on his uniform. Now the New York Police Department, the largest in the U.S., is starting a broad social media initiative to get every precinct talking and listening online via Twitter, to both serve citizens and manage police personnel. The question is whether the kind of positive, highly local responsiveness the residents of Jun expect is possible across all parts of local government -- not just from the police -- in a big city. If it works, the benefits to the public from this kind of engagement could be enormous.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Just what, exactly, is going on with the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran? That's a question U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't want answered. Yesterday the Department of Justice asked a federal district court to dismiss a defamation suit against the group on the ground that a trial might reveal state secrets. How, you ask, could a nongovernmental, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization be in possession of classified information so important that revealing it would materially harm U.S. interests? The government -- big shock -- won't tell you. In the absence of any public justification whatsoever, we're left to parse through the possibilities by speculation -- and to ask whether such a dismissal is compatible with the rule of law.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 4. President Obama recently announced that the United States had targeted and killed Ahmed Abdi Godane, the leader of an Al Qaeda-linked group of terrorists in Somalia, and that it is now targeting ISIS leaders for assassination. We have, of course, targeted several alleged terrorists in the past, including at least one US citizen. Although our government’s official position is that we would prefer to capture and detain wanted terrorists, rather than kill them, the way the Navy SEAL team went after Osama bin Laden strongly suggests we preferred him dead rather than alive. But his killing may have been an exception — because of his high visibility — to the salutary general rule that it is better to capture than to kill, if for no other reason than that a live detainee is a potential source of valuable intelligence. But what should a democracy, constrained by the rule of law, do if a dangerous terrorist cannot be captured, or can only be captured with undue risk to our soldiers?

An op-ed by Lucian Bebchuk. Wall Street is eagerly watching what is expected to be one of the largest initial public offering in history: the offering of the Chinese Internet retailer Alibaba at the end of this week. Investors have been described by the media as “salivating” and “flooding underwriters with orders.” It is important for investors, however, to keep their eyes open to the serious governance risks accompanying an Alibaba investment. Several factors combine to create such risks. For one, insiders have a permanent lock on control of the company but hold only a small minority of the equity capital. Then, there are many ways to divert value to affiliated entities, but there are weak mechanisms to prevent this. Consequently, public investors should worry that, over time, a significant amount of the value created by Alibaba would not be shared with them.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. At the 11th hour, the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committee received an extraordinary letter from U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington purporting to represent the federal judiciary. In it, Bates criticized the Senate proposal to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and implied support for the House version. The Senate bill would create a permanent special advocate tasked with challenging the government’s presentations before the FISA court and is more protective of civil liberties and privacy than the House version. But whatever the merits of Bates’ concerns—and other judges have dissented from it—he most assuredly does not speak for the Third Branch.

An anonymous school-gossip website that saw a sharp rise in popularity over the past year has become a campus cause célèbre since an enterprising journalism student outed the site's top-secret editor..."Anonymity has a storied relationship with American democracy," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor who co-founded the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It's a way for the powerless and disadvantaged to speak without fear of repercussion. Of course, that same lack of repercussion can make for a license for abusive behavior."

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz. Part 3. How should a nation committed to the rule of law deal with captured terrorists who are believed to be dangerous but who cannot realistically be brought to trial? This issue has arisen in the context of the debate over whether to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, which candidate Barack Obama promised to do, but President Obama has not yet done. A major reason why Guantanamo remains open is that it contains several detainees — the precise number is unknown — who, if released, would almost certainly return to a life of terrorism. Indeed, some have, and many in detention have overtly stated their malignant intentions. Others have histories that suggest the likelihood of recidivism. But even some of the most dangerous detainees cannot be tried, either because there is insufficient admissible evidence of a specific crime or because the evidence comes from undercover sources the government is unwilling to out. If Guantanamo were to be closed, as it should be, and the detainees transferred to other facilities, the basic problem would still remain.