Media Mentions

President Barack Obama could act without congressional approval to limit a key incentive for U.S. corporations to move their tax domiciles abroad in so-called "inversion" deals, a former senior U.S. Treasury Department official said on Monday. By invoking a 1969 tax law, Obama could bypass congressional gridlock and restrict foreign tax-domiciled U.S companies from using inter-company loans and interest deductions to cut their U.S. tax bills, said Stephen Shay, former deputy assistant Treasury secretary for international tax affairs in the Obama administration. He also served as international tax counsel at Treasury from 1982 to 1987 in the Reagan administration.

As legislators across the country pass anti-heroin bills and health officials hold community summits, prosecutors in more states are pursuing homicide, and similarly serious charges, against those who provided the deadly doses…"It's a growing trend, but still a tactic used in a minority of states around the country," said Ron Sullivan, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School.

We’re living in the era of the activist investor. Last year Carl Icahn and his ilk launched initiatives at 200 companies—including Microsoft, Dell, and Dow Chemical—aimed at sprucing up management, improving operations, selling off certain units, and ultimately improving the share price. That’s a sevenfold jump compared with a decade earlier, according to Harvard research, and the ranks of prominent megaphone-wielding investors seem only to be growing. That prompts an obvious question: When Icahn leaps, should you jump too? The short answer: Yes. Evidence shows that buying stocks after change-oriented campaigns are instigated can yield superior returns for several years…Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor who also heads the university's Program on Corporate Governance, found similar initial gains.

By Margaret H. Marshall. During the long years that I was unable to return to South Africa, where I was born, raised, and lived for the first 25 years of my life, I could spend time with Nadine Gordimer only when she visited Boston. She often stayed with close friends of hers in their home on a quiet, leafy street, close to the center of Harvard. She seemed to thrive during those visits, tasting the freedom that we who are privileged to live here too often take for granted. It was a response I knew well: I had endured the offensive restrictions of apartheid, and breathed deeply on my few visits to the United States before I settled here.

Laurence Tribe discusses ACA rulings with Gretchen Carlson.

A three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Affordable Care Act cannot provide subsidies to millions enrolled under the federal health care exchange because the law, as written, does not allow it…Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told the Financial Times that he would not "bet the family farm" on the law being vindicated on appeal. Tribe is a longstanding supporter of the Affordable Care Act. “It looks like the panel is quite divided over what to do with what might [have been] an inadvertent error in the legislation or might have been quite deliberate,” Tribe told the Financial Times. “But it’s very specific that only people that go onto a state exchange are eligible for the subsidies. And if that becomes the ultimate holding of the U.S. Supreme Court, where this is likely to end up — that’s going to have massive practical implications for the administrability of Obamacare.”

In a rare public exchange in June 2011, Jamie Dimon asked then Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke what the total economic costs of the year-old Dodd-Frank Act would be…As the regulatory reform law turns four on July 21, Dimon's question remains unanswered, despite being a recurring concern raised by the financial industry and many Republican lawmakers…"A cost-benefit analysis is an important element of decision-making," said Parkinson. "But as a practical matter, it's hard to quantify the benefits and it's hard to quantify the costs. Often the analysis doesn't provide as much insight as you'd like." Two papers by Jeffrey Gordon, a law professor at Columbia University and John Coates, a law and economics professor at Harvard University, also strongly support that claim.

A letter by Charles Fried. It would help if we called things by their true names. The car dealers who put false income data into loan applications for people living on Social Security, surreptitiously add on unexplained charges, and sometimes even forge signatures are thieves. The banks that — knowingly or with willed ignorance — buy and package these loans are receivers of stolen property. The investors who buy these packages for their high rates of return are like customers who shop for bargains from fences or the tailgates of trucks selling hijacked goods. The free market is great, but it depends on honesty. Why aren’t more of these people being prosecuted?

A Harvard student and graduate of West Springfield High School left Wednesday for a Birthright trip to Israel. This as the conflict with the Palestinians and concerns over airline safety grows. Becca Gauthier [’15] has her bags packed and heads to a train on her way to a flight to Israel. She will be flying El-Al Airlines, as a growing number of other carriers refuse to fly over the embattled air space of the Middle East.

Since the dawn of the Internet, email users have been haunted by the finality of hitting the “send” button. No more. What could be the foremost of all First World problems — the inability to retrieve or delete an ill-conceived email — is now a thing of the past for users of Pluto Mail, according to the Harvard law student who created it. “I’ve been annoyed with the fact that any email I send lasts forever, and I think Snapchat popularized the more-forgettable Internet, and I thought it would be great to bring it to email. It’s a very salient problem. I think everyone has had this ‘uh oh’ moment," said David Gobaud [`15], founder and CEO of Pluto Labs Inc. “Basically the Pluto service turns your emails into dynamic ones that you can maintain control over. I built a new email server that turns an email into a living document.”

em>An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. The moment the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, it became a litigation magnet. The lawsuits threatening to derail it were initially dismissed as ridiculous but became deadly serious by the time Chief Justice John Roberts’s decisive fifth vote two years later barely upheld the law’s individual mandate, while the Court’s decisive 7-2 vote left the health law’s Medicaid expansion in tatters. …But while Boehner’s empty threat makes headlines, a far more serious threat could deliver the death blow that the law’s opponents have been seeking. This new round of litigation attacks the health insurance exchanges at the heart of Obamacare.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs and Catherine Fisk. Last week in Harris vs. Quinn, the U.S. Supreme Court put unions in a bind when it ruled that unionized home-care workers cannot be required to pay for the representation that unions are required by law to provide to them. In cases across the country, including at least one in California challenging the rules for public school teachers (Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Assn.), lawyers are now asking courts to extend the rule of Harris to all public employees and to prohibit government employers from requiring employees to pay their fair share of union representation. Requiring unions to offer free representation to workers who do not want a union makes no sense.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last week Google created an advisory committee to help it implement the “right to be forgotten” online that has been demanded by the European Court of Justice. It has its work cut out: the search giant has received more than 70,000 requests since May to decouple a claimant’s name from search results that may be true but are deemed “irrelevant” and presumably reputation-damaging. Turning theory into practice has revealed unanswered questions – and some outright flaws – in the court’s decision.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In 2010, Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" amused readers with its futuristic depiction of people traveling via UnitedContinentalDeltamerican and banking with AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit. In Shteyngart's imagination, only two television channels provided all "Media": Fox Liberty-Prime and Fox Liberty-Ultra. The merger of Time Warner Inc. and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., apparently suggested by Rupert Murdoch last month, shows Shteyngart was only barely ahead of his time. As Time Warner shares climb to dizzying heights in response to the news -- what investor doesn't love a mega-merger? -- it's worth noticing how we got here.

Former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth and Harvard Law School Visiting Professor Susan Crawford discuss regulatory hurdles facing a Twenty-First Century Fox and Time Warner deal. He speaks on “Bloomberg West.”

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. Few if any men were ever better qualified, at least on paper, to serve as president of the United States than John Quincy Adams. A diplomat several times over, lawyer, senator, and secretary of state, he had grown up in a household with parents who had been center stage at the creation of the American union. By example and exhortation, John and Abigail Adams instilled in their precocious and talented son a deep faith in, and enthusiasm for, the American experiment.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. More than half of humanity now lives in cities; that number will rise to two-thirds by 2050, up from just 30 percent in 1950. Given the grave challenges facing the world's booming urban areas -- including global warming, economic dislocation, and crumbling basic infrastructure, among other torments -- tomorrow's mayors will need to take bold steps to ensure their constituents live in dignity and safety. One of the greatest obstacles to those steps is public distrust of government. For the past 20 years, Brazilian city governments have been experimenting with a way to counter that distrust: participatory budgeting, in which citizens have a hand in allocating resources.

In an indictment of California's death penalty, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that decades-long delays and uncertainty about whether condemned inmates will ever be executed violate the constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment…Carol Steiker, a criminal law professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on the death penalty, described Carney's decision as "stunning" and "path-breaking." "That's a ruling of tremendous breadth," she said. "We haven't seen very many rulings from the federal courts declaring a whole state's system unconstitutional. That's quite stunning."

Harvard's Holly Fernandez Lynch analyzes the impact of the Supreme Court's recent decision, saying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress, will shape the impact as much as the court itself, because the high court used RFRA as its guide.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. At CVS, a 100-tablet package of store-brand aspirin costs you $1.99. Bayer aspirin is three times that much. Nonetheless, millions of people end up buying Bayer. When it comes to headache remedies, salt, sugar and hundreds of other important products, many people choose national brands even when a cheaper store brand is at hand. Why? For the first time, we have solid answers, thanks to a study by Dutch economist Bart Bronnenberg of Tilburg University and three colleagues from the University of Chicago. They found a simple correlation: The more informed you are, the more likely you are to choose store brands.

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said Friday that whoever shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over the Ukraine “must be brought to justice.” But how likely is it that anyone will be compelled to appear in a courtroom and answer for the death of 298 passengers and crew?…Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard Law School, told NBC News he felt it would be hard to bring a criminal case in the ICC against Russian officials, because prosecutors would need to establish that the shooters knew they were firing at a passenger plane.