Media Mentions

Investors have been pushing for—and often winning—big changes at companies. This week, Ebay EBAY -2.066% split off its PayPal division, a move long urged by Carl Icahn, who controls 30 million shares of the company...One influential study looks at what happened to 2,000 companies targeted by activists over a number of years. It concluded that activism worked out fine for investors, even over a period as long as five years. And “operating performance relative to peers improves consistently,” writes co-author Lucian Bebchuk, an economist at Harvard. This was true even for companies that took on debt or cut capital spending. But another recent study is less upbeat, finding little impact on growth and profit margins.

With apologies to the cast of Cabaret, dark money makes the political world go round. Confusing rules and a regulatory void in campaign finance have unleashed a tsunami of cash from anonymous donors that is expected to have unprecedented influence over the midterm elections in November...The petition has found grassroots groups and investors on Wall Street largely in agreement for once. In addition, nearly a dozen senators and more than 40 members of the House have supported it, according to one of the petition’s drafters, Lucian Bebchuk, a professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard. Bebchuk scoffs at those who say new rules to disclose corporate political spending will hurt confidentiality. “One could understand such an argument for letting individuals anonymously contribute their money,” he told Newsweek. “But such an argument loses its force when public companies make political contributions. In such a case, executives contribute not their own money but shareholders’ money, and there is little basis for allowing them to keep the contribution hidden from the shareholders whose money is spent.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas is one of the most popular state-level officials in the country, but even he is having a tough time fixing an Arkansas state law that lets telecommunications companies charge K-12 schools sky-high prices to connect their students to the Internet.

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

Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program’s Michael Teitelbaum on the impact of immigration policy on the U.S. job market.

The Food Better campaign kicked off with a presentation at the Harvard Community Garden on Monday, one in a week-long series of events designed to improve student awareness on all issues related to food....“We have so much brain power and creative energy across the University that if we can harness that, and encourage students to come up with innovative ideas about the food system and about improving the food system, we can really make a major impact,” said Ona J. Balkus, a clinical fellow at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Individuals and communities can improve the food system, according to members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, which has launched a yearlong, University-wide focus on how to make food distribution more equitable, sustainable, and nutritious...The Food Better campaign will run alongside the Deans’ Food System Challenge, a challenge in the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) that invites creative and entrepreneurial students to develop innovative ideas to improve the health, social, and environmental outcomes of the food system, both in the United States and around the world...“Food is a universal issue, because everyone eats,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “We’re hoping with this campaign to show Harvard’s ongoing commitment to improving our food system. And we’re hoping students will get involved and take away ideas about how individuals can improve the food system.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, the dominance of veteran advocates and their law firms only continues to grow. In the term that ended in June, the justices decided a meager 67 argued cases, less than half the caseload they handled in 1990. Three firms argued seven cases each, and two argued in six—meaning that just five firms fielded lawyers in half of the court's cases. "That is truly remarkable," says Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus of these numbers. Lazarus has written extensively about the development of the elite Supreme Court bar. In 2009, he went so far as to call it "docket capture" of the high court by a small group of lawyers who tend to file, and win, business cases.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. If you’re getting a new iPhone (because you're not bothered by the possibility it might bend), will you select the iPhone 6 or the iPhone 6 Plus? A lot of people have been getting the latter, because it has a bigger screen, more pixels and better battery life. But before you join them, please take a deep breath. You might be making one of the most important, if least known, decision-making mistakes in all of behavioral science.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree discusses with Alex Witt the legacy of his long-time friend Attorney General Eric Holder on the heels of his resignation.

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.