Media Mentions

The tech industry and activists hailed yesterday’s long-awaited Federal Communications Commission vote on net neutrality rules, saying startups and other innovative companies no longer have to fear that they might be required to ante up to compete with more established businesses on the Internet. “If the FCC had not taken this step, then the Internet was headed down a path in which it becomes unrecognizable ... an Internet in which the people who provide access to the Internet make decisions based on their commercial interest,” said David Weinberger, a senior researcher at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The strength of the Internet has always been that it’s not designed for any particular service — users get to decide what matters to them, what they think the Internet is for. The access providers were turning the Internet into a type of cable TV.”

An article by Heidi K. Gardner [distinguished fellow at the Program on the Legal Profession]. After spending vast sums to build and buy stables of thoroughbreds and extend their geographic reach and practice breadth, today's law firms have come to a sobering conclusion: Accumulating stars is no longer enough. All that talent cannot be harnessed for competitive advantage or profit growth unless they find a way to get partners to collaborate. Specifically, lawyers with highly specialized expertise must work across silos to tackle clients' most sophisticated problems. When firms get collaboration right—that is, when they do complex work for clients that spans practices and offices within the firm—they earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, gain access to more lucrative clients, and attract more cutting-edge work. Sharing work actually boosts the practices of individual partners, too—even rainmakers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What does a red grouper have to do with the Affordable Care Act? Maybe a lot. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday on a quirky case in which it had to decide whether the fish counted as a “tangible object” under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The decision broke down in a particularly strange way across the usual liberal-conservative lines. Reading the tea leaves -- or maybe the fish entrails -- it's possible to get some clues about how the court will interpret the ACA in the major case it will hear March 4...the dissent in the case was written not by Justice Antonin Scalia, the king of textualists, but by Justice Elena Kagan, the outlying liberal. In her punchy dissent that could almost be called Scalian, she cited the Dr. Seuss classic, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” to show that a fish was indeed a tangible object. And she dismissed Alito’s use of an old canon involving a “game of Mad Libs.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Could the U.S. Supreme Court allow the Affordable Care Act to survive its latest legal challenge because the plaintiffs in the case before it haven’t been injured by the law? It’s possible. The more probable result is still that the court will reach a decision on the merits of the case and eliminate the insurance subsidies necessary to make the law work in many states. But if Chief Justice John Roberts wants to avoid the criticism that the Roberts court is the most activist conservative court in history, he could plausibly use the standing argument to avoid a decision -- especially if he could get cover from the archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who more or less invented the constitutional doctrine of standing in a 1992 case argued successfully by -- you guessed it -- then-Deputy Solicitor General John Roberts.

With their “listening tours,” “town hall meetings” and “community dinners,” politicians make a grand show of seeking input from constituents. But when it comes to shaping public policy, “the average voter’s views do not matter,” Harvard Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig said Monday night at the Roger Williams University School of Law. Lessig — author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It” — wasn’t offering a casual observation. He was summarizing what he called “the largest empirical study of actual policy decision by our government, maybe in the history of political science.” In 2014, Princeton’s Martin Giles and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page found that “when the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree is asking outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to spare the life of alleged Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Ogletree is scheduled to meet with Holder in Washington on Friday. Attorney General Eric Holder has already called for a moratorium on the death penalty pending the outcome of a Supreme Court ruling on the use of lethal injection drugs in Oklahoma. Ogletree says he is asking the nation’s top law enforcement official to take it a step further and make it permanent.

The case for strong government rules to protect an open Internet rests in large part on a perceived market failure — the lack of competition for high-speed Internet service into American homes...The F.C.C.’s approach makes sense, proponents say, because for genuine high-speed Internet service most American households now have only one choice, and most often it is a cable company. “For the moment, cable has won the high-speed Internet market,” said Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and a former adviser to the Obama administration.

If any Republican former state attorney general from the South announced his support for LGBT advocates’ side of a political issue, the move would make news. When Mike Bowers decided to do so, it was more than that. For 17 years, Bowers’ name was synonymous with the legal inferiority of gay people. Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 Supreme Court decision allowing state bans on “homosexual sodomy,” was only before the Supreme Court because Bowers, then the attorney general of Georgia, asked the justices to hear the case and uphold the constitutionality of the ban. Nearly 30 years later, Bowers says he’s “changed as society has changed.”...The man who represented Michael Hardwick before the Supreme Court, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, is taking in this week’s developments with a similar gracious-but-not-ignoring-the-past approach to Bowers. “I’ve been delighted to watch Mr. Bowers evolve,” Tribe told BuzzFeed News. “Better late than never!”

There is a delicate balance between preserving individual rights and protecting public health when it comes to vaccines, experts argued at a panel discussion at Harvard Law School on Wednesday. In the wake of the recent outbreak of measles in California, the panel emphasized the need for Americans to be more informed in their decisions for or against vaccination. While allowing an opt-out option to remain in place, the panel proposed making the opt-out process for vaccines more difficult...Panel event organizer Holly F. Lynch, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Law School, said the prevailing culture of maintaining polite conversation can complicate the push for vaccination. “I’m wondering if there’s a way that we can get past this politeness and really get down to brass tax of what people are doing when they refuse to vaccinate their kids,” Lynch said. “There’s this challenge between respecting people’s decisions, but calling them on it when their decisions may be underinformed in some way.”

For more than 14 years a group of South African nationals have been fighting it out in court with the US-based corporations IBM and Ford, using a once-obscure American law from the 18th century to file a lawsuit claiming the companies aided and abetted human rights abuses carried out by the government of South Africa during apartheid rule. In a class action filing known as In re South African Apartheid, dozens of plaintiffs accuse IBM of knowingly creating a plan for, and providing technology to, the South African government — as early as the 1950s — that was used in the apartheid regime's campaign to denationalize black citizens. ..."IBM in the US basically formed and executed a plan for the South African government to denationalize black south Africans," Susan Farbstein, at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Clinic, which is currently a co-counsel on the case, told VICE News. Farbstein added that "Ford [in the US] was making key decisions" about operations in the country, which maintained apartheid from 1948 to 1994 and was placed under international sanctions in 1986.

The FCC is expected to vote Thursday to change the way the Internet is regulated in the United States and begin enforcing so called "net neutrality." Its a move that has caused ripples from the halls of Congress to the garages of Silicon Valley. But what exactly is "net neutrality," and what does the FCC's vote mean for Internet users?...Here’s how Rob Faris, research director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, breaks it down. "The basic idea is that all bits are treated equally as they’re passed on to computers," Faris said. Online, everything’s made of bits — every email, high-resolution photo, or YouTube video. In a world of net neutrality, whether those bits add up to The New York Times home page or your cousin’s cat blog, they are treated equally and delivered at the same speed. Faris says it’s that level playing field that has made the Internet the Internet.

A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state’s century-old ban on corporate contributions to political candidates, and injecting new life into a long-running debate over the influence of special interests in Massachusetts politics...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said “the law is moving inexorably in the direction of invalidating almost all campaign finance limits.” Properly designed limits on direct corporate contributions to candidates may be one of the few restrictions that survive, he said. However, Tribe also suggested the Massachusetts law, as enforced, is not likely to meet court muster.

After the National Association of the Deaf filed lawsuits against Harvard and MIT alleging that the universities’ online content discriminates against the deaf and hard of hearing, some legal experts said they believe the suit has merit...Harvard Law School professor Martha A. Field said she disagreed with Stafford, and argued that in either case the university is required to caption the materials. “It’s not a gray area,” she said. “It’s explicit in the ADA act that universities are covered.”...Although some disability law experts said that the plaintiff's case is strong, Field said that she believes Harvard will put up captioning before the suit makes it to court. “The university has to start captioning,” she said. “They’ll be silly if they litigate it all the way [to court].”

...Columbia Law School retained its place as the top provider of law graduates hired by those big firms, and the University of Pennsylvania jumped from fifth to second place on The National Law Journal's annual Go-To Law Schools list..."I think things are better," said Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School. "You can feel it. There is a healthy sense of cautious optimism, and that wasn't always the case."..."Harvard also saw a small increase in the percentage of graduates hired by large firms in 2014, Weber said. "I don't think we're back to the days of the early 2000s, but it's a much healthier picture than before," he said. "We're very fortunate that employers come to Harvard and hire our students, and they are hiring even more now."

Remember when UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that he wanted to pass a law that would compel messaging apps to provide a backdoor for security agencies? That would, in effect, ban encrypted software that has no key. President Barack Obama agreed with him. In response to that proposal, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard University, wrote an open letter to Cameron, explaining why he thinks it’s a “very bad idea.” It’s one thing to try and regulate WhastApp, says Zittrain, because the government knows where Facebook “lives,” and the Silicon Valley company has assets that could be seized. But what happens when someone produces the next wildly popular messaging app? What if that someone happens to be, as Zittrain wrote in his letter, “two caffeine-fueled university sophomores?” They would be pretty hard to regulate, or even find, according to him. “You’re kind of stuck, which means you have to go double or nothing,” says Zittrain. “You now have to try to regulate the entire app ecosystem.”

Ever since Buju Banton, one of Jamaica's most talented and controversial reggae singers, was convicted of cocaine trafficking and gun charges in 2011, there have been signs his trial was not on the up-and-up...So is there a wider probe into potential misconduct that could move Banton a step closer to freedom? "I hope," says defense attorney Charles Ogletree, who heads Harvard Law School's Institute for Race and Justice. He has been representing Banton (real name Mark Myrie) for the past year. "Here we have a wildcat juror, somebody who's going way beyond their authority and doing things that were completely inappropriate. This undermined the search for truth, which resulted, I think, in the conviction of [Banton]."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. has a pressing need to increase the number of well-educated graduates in science, technology, engineering and math, pretty much everyone agrees...But why, exactly, aren’t more girls focusing on math and science?...A new study...indicates that much of the problem lies with biased primary school teachers, who have major and enduring influences on female achievement. That’s really hard to prove, but Victor Lavy of the University of Warwick and Edith Sand of Tel Aviv University found a way by studying children in Israel.

After University President Drew G. Faust referred the discussion of news that researchers had photographed thousands of students last year without their knowledge to an electronic oversight committee, that body is discussing the broad implications related to privacy and expects to report back to her by the end of the term...“The committee has not been charged with investigating or reporting on the attendance study,” the chair of the group, Harvard Law School professor John C. P. Goldberg, wrote in an email last month. He added that the “study served as a springboard for general discussions among committee members about privacy interests that may be at stake when classrooms are observed.”

As colleges grapple with the recent publicity over campus sexual assaults and violence, so, too, are lawyers dealing with the complicated legal issues involved in filing and investigating grievances. The problem, some lawyers say, is that due process has been abandoned in campus disciplinary procedures that address student-on-student sexual misconduct claims...There’s a sense among some law school faculty that Harvard should have pushed back on the OCR finding, particularly regarding due process rights for the accused, says professor Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the signers. “There are many university leaders who have a problem with the policy. Harvard could have provided an important leadership role in terms of challenging the government. I think [universities] are very nervous and are acting incredibly timidly,” says Bartholet, who serves as faculty director of the law school’s Child Advocacy Program.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can New York City bar religious worship in its school buildings? This very basic question about the First Amendment has been hotly contested in the courts for years -- and the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to announce Monday whether it will take the case. If it does, as I expect it will, the case will probably be a landmark in constitutional law. It poses perfectly the tension between the free exercise of religion on the one hand and the nonestablishment of religion on the other. Getting it right won't be easy for the court, because there's no one right answer.

Will the Black Lives Matter movement succeed? The entire country waits with bated breath to hear that question answered. And although pundits and protestors alike have compared Black Lives Matter to the civil rights movement generally in order to evaluate and predict the future of the contemporary demonstrations, a specific branch of that earlier campaign deserves additional attention...Bradley sees some promise in smaller reforms that have been made in Ferguson’s municipal government, as well as in the few policy goals—like putting cameras on police officers—that have begun to emerge. McKenzie Morris [`15], president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, expressed hope to the HPR that these policies would take hold. “The police cameras, in my opinion, are the first tangible step through which people are trying to get to the main goal, which is accountability,” she said. “That is the main policy goal out of all of this: a true checks and balances system that does not currently exist.”