Media Mentions

The effort to reach an agreement on a $1.5 billion sale of Market Basket — a complicated transaction under any circumstances — has dragged out amid intense legal maneuvering by members of the Demoulas family who have been fighting each other in court for nearly 25 years. ... “What’s clear is that both sides demonize the other,” said Robert Mnookin, the chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and author of the book, “Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.” “Because of anger and fear, people often have a very hard time thinking through how they might be able to serve their own long-run interests,” Mnookin said. “Their impulse is to fight someone they don’t trust.”

Experts say the limited number of Internet service providers—and unimpressive bandwidth speeds—available to many Americans is a major issue. “This outage sheds light on one of the most significant challenges facing the United States: our lack of a plan for world-class, stable, resilient communications capacity,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo Law School, visiting professor at Harvard Law School

Where food is concerned, basic self-preservation pretty much requires you to develop a Goldilocks-type of attitude. After all: too much [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for your health, and too little [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for you too; in order to be healthy, you must eat an amount that's Just Right. ... For example: earlier this month, when the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) held its annual Food Safety Conference in Indianapolis, conference attendees including Emily Broad Lieb, director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, agreed that America's food-dating system (more specifically, its lack of a standard one) might be part of the problem.

The parents and relatives of Michael Brown laid him to rest Monday as the country looked on, and calls for change continue. Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree and Slate’s Jamelle Bouie join to discuss.

Over the last two weeks, a formerly obscure suburb of St. Louis has become a crucible for how race is lived in America.In Ferguson, much depends on the course of the investigation and whether residents consider it impartial and thorough. A failure to charge the officer involved or to secure a guilty verdict is likely to produce fresh clashes. “It’s going to be hard to convince the African Americans in Ferguson that this police officer didn’t do something outrageous,” says Michael Klarman, a legal historian and constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at Harvard University and scholar on race, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." ... Last week, I had an e-mail exchange with her about race relations in the U.S. after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

America's corporate citadels are becoming less impregnable. A more aggressive stance by shareholders is opening new avenues to hostile bids and ushering in radical changes to boards and management teams. ... In 2002, 60% of S&P 500 companies had staggered boards, according to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. Today, just 10% do. A project spearheaded by Harvard Law School Prof. Lucian Bebchuk has floated nearly 200 proposals to destagger boards since 2012. The nonbinding measures received 80% of votes cast, and at least 98 companies have voluntarily adopted them, according to the project's website.

Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and a political activist, planned the walk with his organization N.H. Rebellion, which advocates for campaign finance reform.

An op-ed by Edward Glaeser and Cass Sunstein: A lot of attention has been devoted in recent years to overregulation at the national level. For many people, though, the regulations that hit hardest come from states and localities. The story of Uber's fight with overzealous local regulators is only a well-publicized tip of the iceberg. A 2012 study conducted by the Institute for Justice finds that 102 trades and occupations now face licensing requirements in states or cities. The people who suffer most from them are those without a lot of money or advanced education.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama tried to attract support for one of his highest priorities when he said, “Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits.” He’s right. Economists disagree about a lot of things, but on behalf of immigration reform, there is a professional consensus that cuts across the usual political divisions. Why, then, has reform stalled in Congress?

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: The United States Supreme Court has said that “the constitutional right of free expression is powerful medicine.” Powerful and essential, and it needs to be administered to everyone, including physicians and those regulating their practice. Recent decisions by two federal appeals courts suggest, to the contrary, that the doctor’s office is becoming a First Amendment-free zone…Still, both judicial opinions are troubling for the same reason: They broadly paint medical care as “conduct,” not “speech,” and thereby entirely exempt occupational-licensing laws from the usual First Amendment scrutiny.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if – as he hoped – America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war. And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own.

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree is calling for the arrest of the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9. Appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, Ferguson commented after host Andrea Mitchell noted that police still have not released details of the shooting, including whether Brown was shot at close range and where he was shot…NBC News has this transcript. Ogletree agreed that information is critical. “And I think the first thing that needs to happen,” Ogletree continued, “we need to arrest Officer Wilson. He shot and killed a man, shot him multiple times. And he's walking free. No one knows anything about him, no one knows why he did it. We need to have that done, number one.” Second, he said, was the need for increased dialogue.

An unarmed black teenager shot dead on a Missouri street. A distraught community protests the killing at the hands of a white police officer. Violent clashes follow between protesters and police, who use tear gas, rubber bullets, and wooden pellets…“It’s an outrageous shooting,” said Charles Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor. “People have just had enough and are not yet over what happened with Trayvon Martin,” an unarmed black youth killed two years ago by a Florida crime watch volunteer. Ogletree, who is black, called for continued rallies but without the violence of Wednesday night, when protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at heavily armed police in Ferguson, Mo. “There needs to be a lot of noise — nonviolent but forceful — to make it known that we can’t afford to lose another black child,” Ogletree said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The government would have to overcome major legal hurdles to charge John Hinckley Jr. in the murder of James Brady some 30 years after the fact. But if that were the morally right thing to do, it would be worth trying, despite the improbability of success. Is it? The answer is no -- but not for the reasons you might think. It doesn’t have to do with Hinckley’s guilt or Brady’s heroism or Ronald Reagan’s presidential status. The reason not to prosecute Hinckley lies in the kind of criminal justice system we want to have: one that doesn’t seek solely to punish the guilty, but rather to punish the guilty subject to the requirements of basic fairness.

An op-ed by Joseph E. Hamilton `16. On May 15, 2013, Ken Ward and Jay O’Hara anchored their lobster boat in the shipping channel off the Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset. Flying an American flag and a banner reading “#coalisstupid,” the two men blocked the delivery of 40,000 tons of Appalachian mountaintop coal to New England’s largest coal-burning power plant for a day. At their trial, scheduled for Sept. 8 in Fall River District Court, Wood and O’Hara face charges of disturbing the peace, conspiracy, and motorboat violations. Although conviction could result in nine months of jail time, they’ll admit to everything. They’ll argue that it’s really climate change and the government’s ineffective policies that should be on trial. Then they’ll ask the jury to find them not guilty by reason of “necessity.” This trial will mark a pioneering invocation of the necessity defense, the longstanding legal doctrine that it is acceptable to commit a crime if you are preventing a greater harm.

Harvard law professor and leading campaign finance reform advocate Lawrence Lessig called on supporters of his anti-corruption super PAC to help fund the campaign of Zephyr Teachout, the Democratic primary challenger to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. "I’m writing today to ask you to support someone who I believe is the most important anti-corruption candidate in any race in America today -- Zephyr Teachout, running for Governor in New York," Lessig wrote in an email blast to supporters of his Mayday PAC.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” So said the poet William Blake, referring to the way, in John Milton’s "Paradise Lost," Satan steals the show. Ron Perlstein, author of "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan," is not a poet, but he is an excellent nonfiction writer. And while he knows that Ronald Reagan is nothing like the devil, he is not exactly in Reagan’s political camp. Yet when discussing Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Perlstein writes in fetters. As soon as Reagan appears, the author is at liberty, and his prose soars.

More than a decade ago, when corporate inversions first came under scrutiny, a group of leading New York tax lawyers took a principled stand and called for urgent action to stop these deals….The deafening silence on the policy of inversions comes at a time when tax partners at corporate firms face mounting pressure to boost their revenues. “Because of the highly competitive legal environment, tax lawyers at major firms increasingly feel less free to speak their mind on tax policy issues than they did in the past,” says Stephen Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School who was a tax partner at Ropes & Gray for 22 years…Shay points out that the inversion discussion today is more complex than in 2002, when the deals under attack were more aggressive. Back then, companies could do a “naked inversion” by simply creating a foreign shell in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands.

Few states in the nation are worse than Maine when it comes to Internet connectivity and reliability. But today, a town on the mid-coast flipped the switch on its own ultra-fast Web hook-up. The municipally-owned, fiber optic network, serving parts of Rockport, immediately makes Maine an unlikely leader in the push for greater access to high speed Internet service. Fewer than 25 percent of all U.S. consumers have access to the highest speed Internet service, which runs on fiber optic networks. "There is no infrastructure question more important to the future of the United States," says Dr. Susan Crawford, Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the university's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Rockport, Maine, population 3,321, is trying to solve the existential dilemma of small-town America: How do you get people like Meg Weston's students to stick around?…The town's Internet access connection didn't have enough room to handle the school's demands, and private companies would charge too much to be a realistic option. That is, until this week, when Rockport opened its own gigabit-scale municipal fiber optic network -- meaning it can transmit a thousand megabits of data a second.