Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”…Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: David Sanger and Thom Shanker have a lengthy story in the New York Times about various National Security Agency techniques for penetrating foreign computers and networks, including a strategy for accessing seemingly air-gapped computers. … [T]his article shows how much publication norms have changed in recent years. (Sanger and Shanker note that the NYT did not publish some of the details in the current story when it reported on cyber attacks on Iran in 2012.)

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Robert Gates has been an extraordinarily distinguished public servant. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he has worked for eight presidents, serving as defense secretary under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. The nation owes him a deep and enduring debt of gratitude. But his new memoir, “Duty,” raises troubling ethical questions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I wouldn't believe it if I weren't sitting here in Tunisia's parliament building. But I just watched the nation's constituent assembly adopt, 116-40 with 32 abstentions, an amendment to its draft constitution requiring the government to create parity for women in all legislative assemblies in the country, national as well as local. After the vote, the assembly and audience stood up spontaneously and sang the national anthem. There wasn't a dry eye in the house -- including mine.

Four of the world’s most important financial regulators – the Bank of England, Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority – recently asked the world’s derivatives industry to change the way it does business. The question now is whether the regulators can make that happen with a request, as opposed to something more substantial. That will not be easy.

An op-ed by Mary Ann Glendon and Katrina Lantos Swett: December 10 marks Human Rights Day, the 65th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), signed by 48 nations — with just eight abstentions. Sixty-five years ago, naysayers insisted it was nobody else's business how governments behaved within their borders. The declaration confronted this cynical view — and continues to do so today. Human rights abuses and their consequences spill beyond national borders, darkening prospects for harmony and stability across the globe. Freedom of religion or belief, as well as other human rights, are essential to peace and security.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. experienced a significant economic recovery, in which average real income growth jumped by 6 percent. That's the good news. The bad news is that almost all of that increase -- 95 percent -- was enjoyed by those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. To appreciate this remarkable finding, set out in an important paper by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, we need to add some context. From 2007 to 2009, the recession produced a 17.4 percent decline in average real income -- the largest drop since the Great Depression. Every income class was hit hard, but in percentage terms, those at the top of the economic ladder suffered the biggest decreases.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Nelson Mandela sold out black South Africans. Now there's a sentence you won't have heard in the days since his death and that you won't be hearing at his memorial tomorrow. Yet it's incontrovertibly true that after centuries of being robbed of possibly the greatest mineral wealth the world has ever known, not to mention decades of being repressed by apartheid, black South Africans got almost no compensation for what should rightfully have been theirs when the old regime was swept away for the new South Africa.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: Just when we are rightly celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- what historians call the "signature achievement" of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations -- that law has been gutted. Federal judges from trial courts to the Supreme Court have interpreted the Civil Rights Act virtually, although not entirely, out of existence. This is so across judicial philosophies, across the political spectrum and even across presidential appointments.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz: Shortly after I began working as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg I was in his secretary’s…

According to the Constitution, the President of the United States has the power to appoint federal judges “by and with the Advice and Consent of…

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Harvard Law School media roundup: From the NSA scandal to the regulatory battles of a new taxi cab app June 17, 2013 Over the past…

Noah Feldman, the Bemis Professor of International Law, is a regular columnist for Bloomberg. “How, exactly, could the government order a Verizon division…

Yochai Benkler  ’94 is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies and co-director of the Berkman Center for…

Cass Sunstein ‘78 is the Robert Walmsley University Professor and director of HLS’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. “People can run into two problems when they need to find a taxi. The first is that they don’t know whether a taxi will be available. The second is that they don’t know when a taxi will be available.

Can you patent genes? In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the U.S. Supreme Court answered this imponderable question with a split decision: You can't if they are naturally occurring, and you've simply discovered the gene; but if you've crafted a synthetic gene, you've invented it -- and you can keep the patent.

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An op-ed by Professor Jack Goldsmith: Since the United Nations was created in 1945, its Charter has been more honored in the breach than the observance. So…

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Judith Resnik: Just as Attorney General Eric Holder was rightly decrying the impact of onerous drug sentences for low-level, nonviolent offenders this…