Media Mentions

A coalition of academics, good-government advocacy groups and shareholder activists announced last week that one million Americans have written the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asking for a rule to make corporations reveal how they spend money for political purposes...In a blog post, Jackson and fellow petitioner Lucian Bebchuk noted that the issue had attracted far more comments than any other the SEC had ever considered. Asked why, Bebchuk, a widely cited professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard, said, “The case for transparency in this area is clear and compelling to a broad spectrum of people, including individuals who would otherwise not consider expressing a view on SEC matters. The current freedom of public companies to spend money on politics without telling their investors is clearly unacceptable to a large number of people who care enough about it to write to the SEC.”

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler. But national security is different. There are limited protections for internal whistleblowers, and none at all for those who go to the press. Defenders of that approach argue that the critical nature of national security justifies complete secrecy. But that very critical nature also means that mistakes can have devastating effects, while the secrecy that national-security organizations demand makes them more likely to get stuck in erroneous patterns. Secrecy disables many of the mechanisms that other systems use to correct failure dynamics.

An article by Laurence Tribe. At the Supreme Court, the spotlight often jumps from justice to justice...Yet the coverage often passes over two of the court’s more junior members, Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor. Too often we hear only that both justices are predictable partisans, neither idiosyncratic nor unique, representing the new extremes of right and left on the court. But while they do frequently disagree on hot-button issues, neither is so easily reduced to caricature. Closer analysis reveals distinct perspectives that strongly differentiate them from their fellow justices and unexpected commonalities that unite them—and can bend the whole gravitational field of the court in their direction. So ignore them no more: Understanding Alito and Sotomayor, both where they divide and where they converge, is essential to understanding the future of the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. The movement for marriage equality yesterday received its greatest legal victory. Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote a powerful opinion ordering Indiana and Wisconsin to recognize same-sex marriages. In the process, he eviscerated the states’ efforts to defend their discriminatory laws. The author matters in this case. Posner was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and he isn't known for favoring an active judicial role or for thinking that courts should promote social change. He is also widely admired, and probably counts as the most influential lower court judge of the past 50 years. When he speaks, people listen.

It was the luckiest of breaks, in a life long overdue for one. Manuel Ordonez-Quino sat in a detention center in El Paso, awaiting deportation to Guatemala. Swept up in the massive raid on a New Bedford factory in 2007, immigration officials said he had agreed to leave the country. But some of his fellow detainees told lawyers that was impossible. Ordonez-Quino was deaf, they said. An indigenous Maya, he spoke only Quiché, not English or Spanish. He could not have understood what was happening to him, let alone agreed to it. So John Willshire-Carrera and Nancy Kelly of Greater Boston Legal Services and the Harvard [Immigration and Refugee [Clinical] Program took on his case. That one stroke of good fortune will change not only Ordonez-Quino’s life, but many others.

Diabetes is a costly epidemic in North Carolina, and it is rapidly expanding. That’s a disturbing finding headlining a report by Harvard University researchers released earlier this year. While North Carolina is fortunate to be the focus of a diabetes study by the Center for Health Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, the reason for the attention is ominous: North Carolina has a huge problem.

When Iraq’s American-equipped army fled their posts in Mosul last June, they left that American equipment in the hands Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the attacking violent insurgent group. Since then, the U.S. Air Force destroyed some of the captured vehicles. Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wonders if there’s a better way to stop stolen equipment from working. He proposes “kill switches,” like those found in iPhones, as a means for keeping American arms, given to allies, from working in the hands of enemies...Through email, Popular Science spoke with Zittrain about how these proposed killswitches could work, and what they would mean for arming allies in the future.

The District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington on Thursday said the full 11-member court will rehear (PDF) the controversial case that ruled Americans could not receive subsidies to help pay for plans on federally run health insurance exchanges. Oral arguments will begin Dec. 17...Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional law scholar at Harvard Law School, agrees that the likelihood of the Supreme Court taking the case “would go down substantially” if the full D.C. Circuit sides with the Obama administration. “This is unlikely to be the kind of issue that the Supreme Court would be eager to take up in the absence of a circuit conflict,” Tribe said in an e-mail.

...In an entertaining talk in HLS’s Wasserstein Hall with Dean Martha Minow on Wednesday, [Elena] Kagan displayed her trademark wit and wisdom, honed during her years as a Harvard Law School (HLS) student, professor, and dean, her work with the Clinton administration, and her stint as solicitor general. She also pulled back the curtain a little on the nation’s highest court.

Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney, one of a number of female celebrities whose private nude photos were posted online without their consent, has now taken legal action against several of the websites that posted her images. Maroney says she was under 18 at the time the photos were taken, which has some wondering whether the images constitute child pornography....A naked picture of a child does not always constitute child pornography, according to Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and current faculty member at Harvard Law School. "It depends on the pose, whether it's lewd or lascivious," she said over the phone. If the pose is lewd or if it can be construed to be lewd, Gertner said, "then those who are downloading it are downloading child pornography.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. Most college students now returning to campuses will never hear the words that the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. spoke in August to the managements of the country's 11 largest banks: You've failed. Each of these big banks flunked the course titled "living wills." The Fed and the FDIC required the banks to make contingency plans detailing how in a crisis they would be wound down without suspending critical financial services, and without public support. The two regulators announced jointly last month that no plan earned a passing grade.

Imagine what the Internet would be like if most major websites had imposed controls preventing the naked photos stolen from Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities from being posted online..."The platforms that host that content can't readily police all of it the way that a newspaper can carefully select what should go in as a letter to the editor," says Harvard University Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, who is also co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When a computer somewhere in China hacks into your company’s server, the Department of Justice says that’s a crime. But good luck hauling an anonymous junior officer in the People’s Liberation Army into court -- much less deterring future Chinese cyber-attacks through criminal prosecution. SolarWorld Americas, a major U.S. producer of solar panels, has another idea. It has asked the Department of Commerce to impose trade sanctions against China as retaliation for cyber-attacks it has suffered. The idea is legally creative, politically risky -- and the harbinger of things to come in the emerging cool war between China and the U.S.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions’ worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army, including Humvees, helicopters, antiaircraft cannons and M1 Abrams tanks. ISIS staged a parade with its new weapons and then deployed them to capture the strategic Mosul Dam from outgunned Kurdish defenders. The U.S. began conducting air strikes and rearming the Kurds to even the score against its own weaponry. As a result, even more weapons have been added to the conflict, and local arms bazaars have reportedly seen an influx of supply. It is past time that we consider whether we should build in a way to remotely disable such dangerous tools in an emergency.

The Treasury Department is considering new regulations that would make corporate inversions less profitable. Hedge fund managers, investment bankers and others are handicapping the timing and scope of any new rules and to whom they would apply. Possibilities include reclassifying certain debt held by United States subsidiaries of foreign corporations as equity, further limiting earnings stripping or restricting the repatriation of untaxed offshore cash from corporations that have gone through an inversion. Another question is whether any new regulations will hold up in court. Even Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew questioned whether his department had the legal authority to act unilaterally. But after Stephen Shay, a law professor at Harvard University, published an article urging Treasury to act, the department’s lawyers began developing some options. Mr. Shay suggested that by looking beyond Section 7874, the specific code section that addresses inversions, the Treasury might find other ways to curb some of the economic tax benefits of an inversion. In my view, Mr. Shay’s suggestions are indeed within the lawful authority of the Treasury Department.

... According to a study last fall by the National Resources Defense Council and the Harvard Food Law & Policy Clinic, up to 40 percent of food produced in the United States goes to waste, largely caused by confusion over expiration labels and fear that food inside could be unsafe. "There is so much confusion; people think they are getting unsafe food and they are really outraged about it," said Emily Leib, a Harvard Law School professor and deputy director of the university's Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation, which co-sponsored the study titled "The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: Amazon.com Inc.'s announcement last week that it would pay $970 million in cash to buy Twitch Interactive Inc., a hugely popular game-streaming service that is just over three years old, marks a key moment for telecommunications policy in the U.S. But the reason might be unexpected. E-games substituting for "real" sports is not news: There is nothing more human than the desire to be close to the lives of gladiators and other celebrities, and online interaction will fulfill that need at an enormous scale. What is crucial is that the destiny of Twitch, Netflix Inc. and any other future high-capacity streaming service -- think telemedicine, education and civic engagement -- is utterly dependent on the goodwill of just four companies: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The message China’s leaders sent when they announced that they would have to approve any future elected leaders of Hong Kong should be heard loud and clear -- not as much in Hong Kong as in Taiwan, where it really matters, and throughout the region. Hong Kong isn’t just a unique entity within China, governed in theory by the principle of "one country, two systems." It's also a model of what Taiwan could expect if Chinese hegemony over the island it claims as its own were to become greater. China’s message to Hong Kong puts Taiwanese democrats in a difficult strategic bind in their attempt to assure their future. It also has consequences for American efforts to engage Asian allies who are growing economically closer to China each passing day.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, this summer’s Gaza war seemed like a repetition of what happened in 2012. The rockets from Gaza into Israel, the bombing of Gaza by Israel, the mutual recriminations about who started it -- even the proportions of civilian and military casualties seem eerily similar. Small wonder that to many who care about Palestinians, Israelis or (yes, it’s possible) both, this summer’s events felt like an eternal return as imagined by Nietzsche: repetitive, circular and pointless. In fact, though, this round of Gaza violence was different -- and its meaning for setting policy is correspondingly different as well. Hamas is in a very different strategic place than it was in 2012. That war came because it seemed the Arab Spring might herald a new era of popular, even democratic Islamism.

Burger King may have taken a lot of flack in the past week for a deal that should curb its US tax bill but in many ways it is consistent with the burger chain's aggressive tax-reduction strategies in recent years…“I would be surprised if in five years' time, their tax rate does not come down reasonably dramatically,” said Professor Stephen Shay, from Harvard Law School, who has testified to Congress on corporate taxation.

A British labor activist began his fight against defamation charges in a Bangkok court Tuesday, after a report he co-authored made serious allegations regarding abuses in Thailand’s food production industry. Andy Hall, 33, faces both civil and criminal lawsuits after he alleged that practices including forced labor, the exploitation of children, the paying of unfair wages and up to 10 hours forced overtime daily were rife at factories belonging to Thai fruit firm Natural Fruit…Should Hall be convicted, Benjamin Zawacki, a human rights visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, fears a “chilling effect” for similarly outspoken activists who take on big business. Criminal defamation, he says, “is a ready-made tool for use against critical, unpopular, oppositional speech — the very thing human rights defenders are known for and states are known not to welcome.”