Media Mentions

Celebrated Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree convened a distinguished panel of speakers to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Governor Deval Patrick and Attorney General Martha Coakley, responding to last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s buffer zone law, called Wednesday for legislation to crack down on harassment and obstruction outside abortion clinics…But Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said that any effort to narrowly tailor the legislation could go too far and appear to target antiabortion protesters for the content of their speech. Crafting “a package that is limited to the abortion situation just raises the suspicion that these are all indirect ways of suppressing antiabortion speech,” he said.

Embark, whose software helps colleges to process online applications, has owed graduate and professional schools millions of dollars and misled university officials about why it wasn’t quickly paying up, a former executive of the company is alleging amid an ongoing legal dispute…In February 2013, a graduate program within Harvard Law School asked Embark for $120,000 owed to it since November and December 2012. “Despite the promise of wire transfers by Embark (supposedly made on Feb. 1 initially and then again on Feb. 20), and despite our request for actual confirmation of the transfers, we have not received anything, not even evidence that any of the wire transfers were actually made,” Harvard assistant dean Jeanne Tai wrote in a February 2013 email, which appeared in the court filing. Harvard is not a party to the litigation. Reached last month by phone, Tai said everything had since been squared away.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. Even as a committed supporter of a woman’s — increasingly imperiled — right to choose, I must acknowledge that the Supreme Court got it right on Thursday. In McCullen v. Coakley, the Court unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law setting a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics. While the buffer zone was enacted to ensure the safety of women seeking abortions, it also restricted the peaceful activities of the plaintiff, Eleanor McCullen, and other opponents of abortion, who sought to stand on the sidewalk and urge those women not to make what they see as a tremendous mistake.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy. On January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans cheered and prayed for him. His inauguration was a signal moment in black history, reminiscent of the celebrations that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling and the March on Washington…For many, the passion has cooled. For some, the thrill is gone.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Detroit’s bankruptcy offers a cautionary tale for responsible municipal officials on how, and how not to, manage their budget. The pressure from pension obligations was a big factor in the Detroit bankruptcy. The simple lesson focuses on how municipalities save up to pay pensions to their retired police, firefighters, and other municipal employees. The city sets aside funds for the future retirement payments and expects earnings from the investments to help pay the pensions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Finally, after intense negotiation between the Barack Obama administration and senators including drone-strike stalwart Rand Paul, the government released the much discussed memo justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, which was written by David Barron when he was the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel. And the revelation is … nothing, or near enough to it. The reason isn’t that the memo is benign. It’s that it’s crucially incomplete. The administration redacted the important passages of the memo referring to Awlaki’s due process rights as a U.S. citizen. And it referred to another memo, also by Barron, that dealt with the constitutional issues. That memo is -- you guessed it -- still secret.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. We know, or at least think we know, how Supreme Court terms are supposed to end: with a string of high-profile, divided decisions. That's certainly what happened last term. Ten of the court’s final 12 decisions of the term featured dissenting opinions—including 5–4 decisions (along what some describe as “party lines”) about gay marriage, the Voting Rights Act, and employment discrimination. This term, however, something very different is happening. With only two cases remaining to be handed down, a trend has already appeared: This is the term for high-profile unanimous decisions.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. …Wednesday’s decision—remarkable in its unanimity—was only superficially about cellphones. As Chief Justice John Roberts said, the term cellphone is “itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone.” He added, “They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.”

The Supreme Court, offering a sweeping endorsement of Americans’ right to digital privacy, unanimously declared Wednesday that police must obtain a warrant before searching a suspect’s cellphone….“This is a very clear ruling about cellphone searches incident to an arrest. I would not extrapolate from it,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general under President Reagan. Fried pointed to a separate concurring opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who invites Congress to weigh in and enact legislation that draws “reasonable distinctions based on categories of information.” “Alito generally has been rather skeptical about honoring the concerns of the privacy Taliban,” Fried said.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the Environmental Protection Agency the green light to regulate greenhouse gases that are emitted from new and modified utility plants and factories on Monday…"This was kind of reminiscent of Macbeth's final soliloquy — a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing," said Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus, who specializes in environmental law. "The EPA's authority and ability to use the Clean Air Act to address climate change is essentially unchanged after today."

em>An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a decision that was a legal defeat for the Barack Obama administration but may well be a practical victory, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices voted 5-4 to block the Environmental Protection Agency from a creative-yet-practical interpretation of the Clean Air Act that would have let the EPA significantly increase its regulation of greenhouse gases. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservatives nevertheless threw the EPA a bone, allowing regulation of greenhouse gases from plants that already emitted significant other pollutants.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases was generally a big victory for the Barack Obama administration. But the court’s opinion contains a poison pill, one that lawyers will undoubtedly invoke in future cases involving the Affordable Care Act. While the decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, largely upheld the EPA’s authority, it invalidated the agency’s decision to exempt small emitters and thus “tailor” its greenhouse-gas regulations to allow greater flexibility. The text of the Clean Air Act seems to prohibit the EPA from creating such exemptions, but there are millions of small emitters, and the EPA invoked the idea of “administrative necessity” to exempt them.

In a big win for environmentalists, the Supreme Court on Monday effectively endorsed the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from sources like power plants, even as it criticized what it called the administration’s overreaching…The decision, said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, “gave the agency a tongue-lashing and suggested the potential for some significant limitations on how the agency chooses to exercise its authority in the future.”… That statement was “a warning shot,” said Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard. “It suggests that the courts will look skeptically at assertions of authority that are very new and very far-reaching.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has always been riven and 5-4 rulings under Chief Justice John G. Roberts on issues including prayers at government meetings and federal recognition of same-sex marriage isn’t a new phenomenon, high-court scholar Laurence Tribe said in an interview. Roberts’s predecessors heading the court managed to persuade their colleagues more often to hide those divisions, Tribe said in a Bloomberg Radio interview today. Tribe is a Harvard University law professor and author of “Uncertain Justice,” a book examining the work of the court under Roberts.

Picking up a book entitled Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, it is reasonable to assume that the book is critical: the title promises to damn the Court as not reliable in delivering justice, or, at the very least, as a little wobbly and tentative when it does justice. It’s a tantalizing title, since there is nothing more appealing to legal pundits (and by extension book publishers) than a scathing critique of a court that has lost its way. The fact that one of the authors, Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, is among the nation’s most celebrated legal scholars raises the stakes that much more.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Executive power lost the battle but won its war with the Senate over recess appointments in an important case decided today by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court held that the president may make recess appointments during both breaks within sessions and breaks between sections, for offices that come open either before or during these recesses. This part was the win for executive power. It also said that breaks within sessions of between three and 10 days are presumptively not recesses -- and therefore canceled the National Labor Relations Board appointments that Barack Obama had made and that were challenged in this case. This was the battle at hand, and the administration lost it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s becoming a June ritual: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberals to issue a moderate, centrist opinion, and leaves his erstwhile conservative admirers flailing. Roberts’s latest foray into moderation comes in today’s free-speech case involving a 35-foot no-access zone around hospitals or abortion clinics opposed by Massachusetts law.

…On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Massachusetts law creating buffer zones around the state’s abortion clinics…“It was a bad law,” said Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet. “It would be astonishing if any lawyer won this case.” Tushnet credited the Massachusetts attorney general’s office with winning a small tactical victory, even in defeat. A majority of the justices, he noted, found that the law did not discriminate against antiabortion protesters for the content of their speech. Instead, the justices found, it impinged on the rights of everyone outside the clinics, whatever their views. Tushnet said the finding, that the buffer zone law was “content-neutral,” could provide an opening for new, more limited measures designed to protect clinic-goers and employees…Nancy Gertner, a former US District Court judge and now a law professor at Harvard University, said she is not surprised that the two unanimous decisions did not produce a simple “bad week for Coakley” narrative. “You can’t begrudge the attorney general of the state defending a statute that supports the right to choose,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Dilemma for the day: You run the pension plan for your own company -- and as an insider, you know the company’s stock is seriously overvalued. What are you supposed to do? You can’t sell without violating insider-trading laws. But you’re also a fiduciary of the plan, so if you don’t sell, you’re violating your responsibilities under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which is, by the way, your bible. You are, ahem, flummoxed either way. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court tried to help out pension plan decision-makers who are also corporate insiders. Its answer was a little complicated but, in essence, the court said: “Don’t break the law by selling; don’t buy any more of the stock; and we’ll try to cover you if you get sued.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford.A group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission today, demanding it do everything in its power to let cities build competitive fiber networks. It's the next big fight in telecom policy -- and the FCC is going to need all the help it can get.