Media Mentions

Our times have gone mad for metrics. Now, have you ever compared the number of honey-producing bee colonies in the United States with the marriage rate in Vermont or seen any correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the consumption of margarine? Well, that's what the Spurious Correlations blog tries to do by plotting completely unrelated sets of data. It's the project of Tyler Vigen [`16]. He's a geospatial intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army National Guard and a law student at the Harvard Law School.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's speech before a Jewish charity over the weekend, in which he never mentioned Israel, was essentially a campaign speech that had no place at the event, renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz says. "I thought it was a stump speech. It was somewhat inappropriate for a charitable event which had Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, everybody talking about people who do a great deal of good to the world," Dershowitz told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."

An op-ed by Robert D. Truog, I. Glenn Cohen, and Mark A. Rockoff. In an opinion dissenting from a Supreme Court decision to deny review in a death penalty case, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” In the wake of the recent botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma, however, a group of eminent legal professionals known as the Death Penalty Committee of The Constitution Project has published a sweeping set of 39 recommendations that not only tinker with, but hope to fix, the multitude of problems that affect this method of capital punishment.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Since the global financial crisis, regulators have worked hard to make the world’s big banks safer. The fundamental problem is well known: major banks have significant incentives to take on excessive risk. If their risky bets pay off, their stockholders benefit considerably, as do the banks’ CEOs and senior managers, who are heavily compensated in bank stock. If they do not pay off and the bank fails, the government will probably pick up the tab. This confluence of economic incentives to take on risk makes bank managers poor guardians of financial safety. They surely do not want their bank to fail; but, if the potential upside is large enough, it is a risk they may find worth taking.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Anyone of a certain age remembers Willie Horton. Furloughed in 1986 from a life sentence for murder, Horton, who is black, raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé. But Horton’s legacy extends beyond the horrific crime he committed. Many have blamed Governor Michael Dukakis’s failed presidential bid that year on publicity surrounding the case. Less often discussed is how far Horton’s crime set back criminal justice reform in Massachusetts — and still does to this day.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Since the global financial crisis, regulators have worked hard to make the world’s big banks safer. The fundamental problem is well known: major banks have significant incentives to take on excessive risk. If their risky bets pay off, their stockholders benefit considerably, as do the banks’ CEOs and senior managers, who are heavily compensated in bank stock. If they do not pay off and the bank fails, the government will probably pick up the tab. This confluence of economic incentives to take on risk makes bank managers poor guardians of financial safety. They surely do not want their bank to fail; but, if the potential upside is large enough, it is a risk they may find worth taking.

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation recently issued a rather odd and in my view nakedly self-serving report, decrying its contention that the competitiveness of the US equity capital markets is showing continued signs of weakness, and concluding that measures of aversion to US public equity markets are at levels not seen since the global financial crisis. “The competitive landscape of US equity capital markets has started 2014 with a thud,” said CCMR director Hal Scott, Nomura Professor and Director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School. “Foreign companies are choosing to raise capital outside US public markets at rates not seen since the financial crisis.”

Harvard Law School Professor Steven Shavell received the 2014 Ronald H. Coase Medal from the American Law and Economics Association at its annual meeting May 9.  Shavell is the Samuel R. Rosenthal Professor of Law and Economics and director of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Anyone of a certain age remembers Willie Horton. Furloughed in 1986 from a life sentence for murder, Horton, who is black, raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé. But Horton’s legacy extends beyond the horrific crime he committed. Many have blamed Governor Michael Dukakis’s failed presidential bid that year on publicity surrounding the case. Less often discussed is how far Horton’s crime set back criminal justice reform in Massachusetts — and still does to this day.

A book review by Cass R. Sunstein. When I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1981, there were two defining figures: Richard Posner and Richard Epstein. Posner was the world’s most important voice in the emerging field of “law and economics.” At the time he believed that courts should “maximize wealth.” Epstein, a defender of personal autonomy with strong libertarian inclinations, was Posner’s most vocal critic. At the University of Chicago Law School lunch table, where the faculty ate four times each week, the two had some fierce struggles. Tempers flared. No one who was there will forget those lunches, which sometimes seemed like a form of combat.

The Disrupt panel, including visiting scholar Maya Harris, talks about New Hampshire police commissioner Robert Copeland, who called President Obama a racial slur.

Lawrence Lessig may be the greatest radical at work in America today. Lessig, a polymath, professor at Harvard Law School, is not ivory tower type. He is a radical -- someone who strikes at the root of things -- in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson.

While friends and family sprawled out on the warm grass in sandals and colorful sundresses, the Connecticut College Class of 2014 lined up on Tempel Green Sunday morning in somber-looking black gowns. Keynote commencement speaker Noah Feldman, an international law professor at Harvard, told graduates that the path that follows those scary questions is never easy.

If Congress approves comprehensive immigration reform, it will likely more than double the cap on H-1B visas. What would happen then?…Those predictions came from a group that included Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Hal Salzman, professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers; Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School; and Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at University of California at Davis.

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Laurence H. Tribe. Although the two of us frequently approach legal questions from different perspectives, and just as often disagree about the best answers to those questions, we share a respect for our Constitution and a reverence for the judicial process. That’s why, in spite of our disagreements, we agree that Harvard Law School professor David Barron is exceptionally well-qualified to hold a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and that the Senate should promptly confirm him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Outside of "24," the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't usually interrogate a suspect who’s just been shot in the head, pumped full of opioids and shackled to his hospital bed. But that's what happened to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 20 -- and the questioning, by the FBI's high-value interrogation group, went on with breaks all night and again the following night. Tsarnaev’s jaw was wired shut, one of his eyes was sutured closed, but he communicated via notepad and repeatedly asked for a lawyer. Not only was one not provided, but lawyers sent by the federal and state public defenders to represent Tsarnaev were turned away at the hospital door. Now his lawyers say his statements during that questioning should be excluded at trial, planned for November.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. According to the ruling, an individual can compel Google to remove certain reputation-harming search results that are generated by Googling the individual’s name. The court is trying to address an important problem — namely, the Internet’s ability to preserve indefinitely all its information about you, no matter how unfortunate or misleading — but it has devised a poor solution. The court’s decision is both too broad and curiously narrow.

Ambassador Tommy Koh LL.M. ’64 of Singapore was recently presented with the 2014 Great Negotiator Award by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The Senate confirmation process of Harvard Law School professor David J. Barron ’89 continues to provoke controversy as a vocal group of senators from both the left and right call for the public release of memos, which Barron allegedly wrote during his time as a lawyer for the Justice Department. Those memos established the legal justification for the Obama administration’s controversial drone policy.

Harvard law professor David Barron is under fire for signing memos that allowed the U.S. to kill a U.S. citizen overseas in a drone strike. Those blocking his nomination want the documents released.

Google’s simple white interface may look the same from country to country, but in Europe some of its search results are going to be literally lost in translation. In a decision that could prove to be a major thorn in the side of the world’s biggest tech companies, the European Union Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that individuals may ask Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) to remove links to Web pages that contain information about themselves, even if that information is legal and accurate…“It’s an incredibly big deal,” Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University, said. “Search engines are still important as an index to the Internet. It’s like if you tucked information into a book in the library and then removed the card catalog, to use a very 20th century analogy.”