Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Remember George Plimpton’s classic book, "Paper Lion"? In the 1960s, Plimpton decided to find out what would happen if an ordinary person tried to play professional football. Amazingly, the Detroit Lions agreed to give him a tryout, allowing him to come to training camp as a third-string quarterback. The result? Disaster...A few days ago, I followed in his footsteps. Not, thank goodness, on the football field. My sport is squash -- played with a racquet and a small ball in an indoor court.

The Supreme Court’s surprising move to pass on deciding whether state prohibitions on same-sex marriage violate the U.S. Constitution may reflect two things about the justices: a natural inclination for incremental steps and a worry on the part of conservatives that the battle — for now — appears lost...“I’m astonished,” said Richard Fallon, a Harvard law professor who is a student of the court. Neither side of the court’s ideological split has enough motive to insist that the issue be taken up now, he believes. “There are some justices who aren’t in any hurry to take this, and four who are worried they are going to lose,” Fallon said.

If we have kill switches on consumer products, why don't we have them on military weaponry? Jonathan Zittrain is the Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and he argues we should have a way to disable dangerous weapons at a distance.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Back in the dark ages in America, coffee didn’t come from sleek, fast Italian machines: it dripped, one painful drop at a time, through a filter into a waiting pot. This, my best-beloved, was called “percolation” -- and it provides the central metaphor for how the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to take controversial cases. Today's decision by the justices to deny seven petitions asking them to decide whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was a classic example. Impervious to the pressures of the news media or the gay-rights movement, the justices decided to let the issue percolate a while longer.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Many people are stunned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review any of the recent lower-court decisions requiring states to recognize same-sex marriages. They shouldn’t be. The court’s silence is a fresh tribute to what Yale law professor Alexander Bickel, writing in the early 1960s, called “the passive virtues.” For the Supreme Court, not to decide is often the best course, especially when the nation is sharply divided.

Translated from German: Mark Roe, Professor at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Michael Troege Professor at ESCP Europe in Paris, … want to tax banks' debt [instead of profits on their equity]. Equity capital thus becomes more attractive as an alternative form of finance. The idea is that as a result banks would raise less debt and finance more with equity [and be safer]. In return, the corporate taxes on bank profits should decrease or be completely eliminated.”

For Alec Karakatsanis and Phil Telfeyan winning cases means getting justice for clients unable to fight for themselves. Clients like the hundreds of people locked up in a Montgomery, Ala., jail because they were too poor to pay their traffic tickets. Equal Justice Under Law, the organization founded by the two Harvard Law alums to provide pro bono legal services, filed a federal lawsuit in March arguing that Montgomery’s system of requiring people who couldn’t pay fines to sit out their debts behind bars at a rate of $50 a day was unconstitutional...Without the seed grant that Karakatsanis and Telfeyan won from Harvard Law’s Public Service Venture Fund in 2013, some of those inmates might still be in jail. The two were the first to benefit from a program designed to help Harvard Law graduates found startups that target unmet legal needs at a time when other sources of funding were drastically reduced by a recession and years of slower economic growth...“We have lots of wonderful students who are willing to forego the big salaries to work longer and take more risks about getting a job,” said Alexa Shabecoff, Harvard’s assistant dean of public service who directs the venture fund. But those students needed “a light at the end of the tunnel – a job or a way to do the work they were passionate about.”

...Before the halt, Guatemala was one of the most popular nations for Americans looking to adopt, its system sending 4,000 children a year to this country. Now, some experts say, the closure of that adoption pipeline is contributing to the flow of unaccompanied children who have poured into the United States from Central America over the past year...Fueling antiadoption sentiment in Guatemala is “a kind of nationalist attitude that says, 'We don't need this former imperialist power (America) ripping us off again,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor and international adoption expert.

Joshua Matz didn't bother waiting to write about the Supreme Court until he went to work there. He teamed with a renowned Harvard law professor to finish a book about the court before he started his year as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy...In "Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution," Matz and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe argue that on a range of big issues, political gridlock and societal change have increased the court's influence. ..."He was impressive enough that I felt I should call Justice Kennedy, not just write a letter, but call him and emphasize what an unusual catch Joshua would be," Tribe said in a telephone interview.

One federal judge has allowed a voter ID law to take effect in Wisconsin. Another is now contemplating whether to do the same in Texas. Defenders of these laws, which exist in some form in 34 states, insist that requiring people to show government-issued identification at the polls will reduce fraud—and that it will do so without imposing unfair burdens or discouraging people from voting. In North Carolina, for example, Republican Governor Pat McCrory wrote an op-ed boasting that the measures fight fraud “at no cost” to voters. ...But in 2008, when the Court approved Voter ID laws, the Court left open the possibility of new challenges if plaintiffs can demonstrate the laws impose a burden on would-be voters. There are now good reasons to think the laws do exactly that. One reason is a report, published over the summer, from Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Researchers there complied published articles and legal testimony, in order to calculate the cost of of obtaining a government-issued identification. They included everything from the cost of waiting to the cost of traveling and obtaining documentation. Their conclusion? The costs can range anywhere from $75 to $400 per person. The study is not a comprehensive, since it examines evidence from just three states— Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, which had its law blocked by the U.S. Justice Department but upheld by a District Court.

If the last term is any guide, the dominance of veteran advocates and their law firms at the lectern of the U.S. Supreme Court will only continue when the court returns Oct. 6. In the term that ended in June, the justices decided 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 on one side or the other in roughly half of the court's oral arguments. "That is truly remarkable," Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said about the numbers. Lazarus has written extensively about the ­development of the elite Supreme Court bar. Less than 30 years ago, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist said there was no Supreme Court bar as such.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: You're going to like this column a lot. It’s the best one you’ll read today, or any day this month. I showed an early draft to a close friend of mine, a famous French novelist I have dinner with whenever I'm in Paris, and he said, “I only wish I could write so well!” Another friend, a billionaire who has two Nobel prizes and an Olympic gold medal (and who recently told me I'm the best-dressed person he knows), responded with just one word: “Wow.” Why do people brag? They want to make a good impression, whether the context is employment, business, friendship or romance. And sometimes self-promotion does work. When it carries over into bragging, though, it makes the person seem anxious, annoying and unbearably self-involved. New research by social scientists Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau offers a powerful explanation for why people undermine their own goals, and create a seriously negative impression, by bragging. In a nutshell, braggarts project their own emotions onto the person they're talking to.

Promoting diversity in education was one the biggest and most widely practiced ideas of the 20th century. But as Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Daniel P.S. Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at Harvard, argued in last week’s edition of The Weekly Wonk, diversity isn’t getting us where we need to go to help students who are truly disadvantaged. She has another big idea to make higher education a real pathway to social mobility: directing resources to students who are the first in their families to attend college. In this episode, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Brown-Nagin outline the stakes for how reaching out to first-generation students can make college, in the words of Horace Mann, a “great equalizer.”

An op-ed by Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz: Last year the Obama administration issued, with considerable fanfare, a new military policy designed to reduce civilian casualties when U.S. forces are attacking enemy targets. This policy required "near certainty" that there will be no civilian casualties before an air attack is permitted. When Israel acted in self-defense this summer against Hamas rocket and tunnel attacks, the Obama administration criticized the Israeli army for "not doing enough" to reduce civilian casualties. When pressed about what more Israel could do—especially when Hamas fired its rockets and dug its terror tunnels in densely populated areas, deliberately using humans as shields—the Obama administration declined to provide specifics.

With a click or a tap, Amazon users can buy everything from light bulbs to washing machines. Now imagine if those devices could send data back to Amazon and encourage their owners to buy more stuff from — you guessed it — Amazon. Like Apple and Google, Amazon is reportedly getting into the smart home game. The company is investing $55 million into its Lab126 division over the next five years, according to Reuters, which includes money for developing smart home devices. ... A smart home might be able to provide a similar picture based on what consumers do in real life. "Your home could be a place that could analyze you and provide information to potential advertisers," Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told NBC News.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In France, the bitter controversy over the hijab, or headscarf, worn by some Muslim women relates to citizenship, feminism, and the secularism of the French Revolution and Republic. In America, we have Abercrombie. So perhaps it's fitting that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced it will take its first hijab case to decide whether the chain could deny employment to an otherwise qualified young woman who wanted to wear a headscarf on the job. The case, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch, started in 2008 when 17-year-old Samantha Elauf applied for a job at the Abercrombie Kids store in the Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At Abercrombie, salespeople are called “models,” and part of the job interview is scored on how you look. Once hired, the “models” must comply with an Abercrombie “look policy” that governs how they dress.

Judges in Aberdeen, Rapid City and Sioux Falls may soon have better information to help decide whether to lock up or release criminal defendants awaiting trial. Three South Dakota counties are developing a pilot program to screen and analyze defendants’ background as a way to better predict their flight risk and danger to the public. ... Minnehaha, Brown and Pennington counties are working with the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School to develop a pilot program in South Dakota.

...Divest Harvard’s recent escalation is the outgrowth of a sense of frustration at a University president and Corporation, that to them, are too secretive, too dismissive, and too unresponsive to their fervent calls. ...For Kelsey C. Skaggs [`16], a member of Divest Harvard and president of Harvard Law Students for Sustainable Investment, the arrest was troubling due to its treatment of free speech. “The whole idea of not listening to student speech when it’s presented in the context you want,” says Skaggs, referring to Divest’s attempts to engage with the administration in the year and a half before the blockade, “and then shutting it down and being derogatory about it when it’s something you don’t want is really troubling from a free-speech perspective.”

...Emily Broad Leib is also at Harvard University. She wants to change the way food is grown. She wants to change what people can have available to eat. She’s an absolutely remarkable person.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China's plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person "nominating committee." Critics charge the committee will be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite."...But there's not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Beijing's proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage. The pattern has been common in America's democracy too.

The judge regretted it from the beginning. The 27-year prison sentence he gave Byron Lamont McDade was too long, he said, for a low-level player in an expansive cocaine enterprise. Years later, the punishment still nagged at him...“Every one of us has had cases where you absolutely had no choice but to sentence someone to a term that you experienced as unjust,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who now teaches at Harvard Law School. But even with a federal judge in your corner, she said, there are no guarantees for inmates like McDade. Friedman and others, she said, are “reduced to begging these other authorities to do the right thing.”