Media Mentions

The other day, I attended an investiture ceremony for Robert Wilkins, an African-American judge recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At the ceremony, the Harvard Law Professor Ken Mack spoke about some of Judge Wilkins’s forebears—in particular, Robert Terrell, the first black federal judge, appointed in 1910, and William Henry Hastie, the first black federal Court of Appeals judge, appointed in 1949. These men served under, and swore to enforce, a federal Constitution that blessed racial segregation as “separate but equal.” As Mack said, Judges Terrell and Hastie had to be fair and just in a world that was neither fair nor just to them. Mack did not say but plainly implied that black judges today face a similar challenge—different in degree, to be sure, but not in kind.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. Sometimes, vague can be misleading—and harmful. For years, colleges have identified disadvantaged students based primarily on “diversity” and “need.” But those categories are broad and unspecific, and can be gamed by sophisticated applicants and parents. The result? Schools aren’t helping the students that really need it. And higher education is now perpetuating—rather than alleviating—inequality. We can reverse this pattern by learning from our education history and shifting the focus of that aid effort to first-generation college students. The key here is this: Colleges need to get more specific about who they want to help, and why.

Rachel Martin talks to Noah Feldman, professor of International Law at Harvard School of Law, about why he believes there is no law supporting the American air strikes in Syria.

The Obama administration has handed foreign companies an advantage over American rivals because they will not be caught by new rules governing access to offshore cash....Stephen Shay, a Harvard Law School professor and former Treasury lawyer, said: “It shouldn’t matter whether the new [corporate] structure comes in the form of a new foreign acquirer or an inverted transaction. The fact is there is attempted avoidance of US tax on the offshore earnings either way.”

Being home to the nation’s first presidential primary does more than just fill our TV screens with lots of political commercials, according to Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig: It gives us a lot of heft to change the way politics is paid for. “You in particular have the power. ... You might not be enough, but you are necessary. We will not get to victory unless victory starts here,” Lessig told about 90 people who showed up at the Amato Center Wednesday to hear him discuss campaign finance reform.

You're entitled to your opinion – just be prepared for possible legal consequences if you share it online. A growing number of companies now have "non-disparagement clauses" in their contracts or terms of use. They limit a customer's right to comment on social media sites such as Yelp about the product or service they purchased – even if that comment or review is truthful and accurate...."Non-disparagement clauses have the potential to create a profound chilling effect," said Andy Sellars with the Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic. "Their mere existence may scare consumers from writing a review in the first place."

Anita Hill’s work isn’t done. In 1991, she started a national conversation about sexual harassment. Now, she says, it’s time for that conversation to move “beyond awareness to consequences” for harassment and gender violence...At Harvard Law School’s (HLS) Wasserstein Hall on Wednesday, Hill, along with her legal adviser back then, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, and Nan Stein, senior research scientist at Wellesley’s Centers for Women, came together to view a screening of the 2013 documentary “Anita,” and to talk about what has changed since 1991 and what has not.

After DNA analysis began vindicating long-time claims of innocence from prisoners on death row in the 1990s, it was just a matter of time before the press and the public began taking seriously appeals from inmates sent to jail in cases involving suspicious patterns in police and prosecutorial conduct...The profound power of the judicial system to upend lives and devastate families should never be exercised indiscriminately, says Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., 48, a former Washington, D.C., public defender who helped revamp New Orleans’ public defense system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Thompson selected Sullivan in the spring to head up the review panel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Barack Obama administration has offered no credible legal authorization for a war against Islamic State, and Congress plainly will not provide one. What's going on here, asks the shade of James Madison? Has the U.S. completely lost the part of the Constitution that imagines Congress and thus the people as a check on the president’s war powers? And if so, does it matter?

The Kremlin is worried the West might try to shut off Russia’s access to the global Internet. According to a report by Russian newspaper 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 Chehadé. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain agrees, saying the Internet works on a “consensus,” of which “numbering and naming” is only a “tiny part.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. When I decided to join Students Matter, the group that spearheaded a lawsuit that invalidated California's teacher tenure, dismissal and "last in, first out" layoff laws, I expected negative reactions from fellow progressives. Sure enough, the day of the announcement, lots of incredulous and even hostile e-mails appeared in my inbox, accusing me of betraying the Democratic Party, our allies in organized labor and even my own K-12 public school teachers. These negative reactions are rooted in a misunderstanding of what is at stake as lawsuits similar to Vergara v. California spread to the other states with similar laws.

After spending nearly six years of his presidency installing a series of constraints on U.S. counterterrorism operations, President Obama has launched a broad military offensive against Islamist groups in Syria that stretches the limits of those legal and policy enclosures....“There are a lot of lines that he’s drawn in the sand. Just about every one of which he seems to have crossed now,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor and senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration, who attributed the outcome in part to the nature of Obama’s job. “The reality is that security threats are his first responsibility,” Goldsmith said. “Between past statements and pretty-sounding principles on the one hand, and the reality of security threats on the other, every president will always address the security threats and discard the principles.”

Inversions, the hottest deal structure on Wall Street, appear to be safe for now. But they just became less profitable and more difficult to pull off...But compared with some proposals that had been floated, the actions did not go as far as some had feared. “The objective is not to stop all these transactions,” said Stephen Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The objective is to stop transactions that aren’t based on sound business objectives; it’s to stop transactions that are aimed at avoiding U.S. taxes. This is a good first step.”

First, do no harm. As world leaders gather at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York this week, Harvard environmental economist Robert Stavins says the next major global climate agreement should heed that age-old admonition to physicians, and make sure that its provisions don’t hamstring budding market-based solutions to curbing the excess carbon pouring into the atmosphere. ....The meeting discussed the report’s executive summary, which was drafted by Stavins, Arizona State University Law Professor Daniel Bodansky, Harvard Law School student Seth Hoedl `15, and Tufts University Economics Professor Gilbert Metcalf. The full report will be released before this year’s annual international climate meeting, called COP 14, which will take place in December in Peru.

Two Harvard Law School professors critiqued the legal grounds of President Obama’s military strategy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria during a lecture Monday. Speaking to an audience of nearly 200 people at the Law School, professors Jack L. Goldsmith and Noah R. Feldman ’92 analyzed the Obama administration’s legal justifications for the increased use of U.S. military force against ISIS.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Every country gets the government it deserves … right? So the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled -- in a fascinating and weird decision denying the Iraqi people the right to sue corporations that allegedly colluded with Saddam Hussein to defraud them. In essence, the court said, the Iraqis can’t sue because they’re responsible for Saddam’s conduct when he was their lawful president.

An op-ed by Jeremy Schwarz `15. It is seductive to think that the Russian war in Ukraine—and NATO’s sluggish response—is a crisis wholly tied to Russian nationalism and power politics. But in reality, the current crisis is neither simply a function of personal leadership nor political decision-making. As this crisis slowly expands and escalates, we must look at the deeper and far more consequential forces at work upon which the future of Europe—and Ukraine—rest. Russian President Vladimir Putin deals in the currency of force and power. He has found the nations of Europe to be weak, self-indulgent, irresolute, and intestinally unfit for confrontation.

Hiyam Kholi’s voice quivers with anguish as she sits in her North York living room describing the post-apocalyptic landscapes in Aleppo and Homs...Last November, a report on Canada’s refugee reforms by Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Law Clinic concluded: “Canada is systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers, (with) measures (that) deter, deflect and block asylum seekers from lawfully making refugee claims in Canada in arbitrary and unprincipled ways.”

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.”