Media Mentions

...STEM can sometimes be an overused buzzword, the negative impacts of which are felt by students who don’t get a quality, well-rounded education. But in general its hype is justified because students simply need greater scientific and technological literacy than they did before to function in today’s society and economy. “Anything that gets this kind of buzzword character tends to lose some of its real meaning in the process,” said Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and author of the new book Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.

...About 300 Harvard law students convened on campus Monday chanting “no justice, no peace,” before they joined a larger Ferguson protest in Harvard Square...Ferguson protests have raged across the country in the week since the grand jury’s decision was made public, and law students appear to be especially active in the movement. That’s likely because many law students are strongly committed to social justice and feel an added responsibility to ensure that the law is applied fairly, said McKenzie Morris [15], president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association. “From my experience, when you are learning the law every day, you learn that the law has many limits and that the word ‘justice’ can be construed in many ways,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Some days you just can't catch a break. Larry Whitfield had one of those on Sept. 26, 2008. First, he botched a bank robbery without even getting in the door. Fleeing, he ended up in the home of a 79-year-old woman, Mary Parnell -- who promptly died of a heart attack. Whitfield wasn’t convicted of murder, but he was convicted of the federal crime of forcing someone to accompany him while in the act of a bank robbery. The “accompanying,” prosecutors said, took place when Whitfield asked Parnell to move one from one room in her house to another. Now, the Supreme Court will decide whether the prosecutors overreached -- and therein lies an intriguing legal tale.

Once Barack Obama's mentor, Professor Tribe says the commander-in-chief could have done a little better on some things.(Also, he gave Obama an A+ in school--Ted Cruz got only an A.)

...Rebecca Chapman, HLS ’15, who went to Ferguson in October, notes that, “despite what we are taught in law school, the law is not neutral; lawyers and law students have a unique perspective on the reality that law does not protect everyone equally. Judges, prosecutors, politicians, policemen – everyone is complicit in perpetuating our unequal, racist, sexist system of laws.” Victoria White, HLS ’15 returned from Ferguson only a few days ago. “The time I spent in Ferguson reaffirmed for me the idea that there is an integral role for lawyers to play in social movements—not only to work alongside organizers and activists, but also to protect the civil and human rights of those who exercise their right to protest. We must use our legal education to begin addressing systemic injustice, one day at a time.”

Global leaders are gathering in Lima, Peru for United Nations-sponsored climate change talks. It will be the last major gathering before a new climate pact is finalized in Paris at the end of 2015...Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard University's environmental law program and the former White House Counselor for Energy and Climate Change, says that having two of the world’s biggest polluters at the negotiation table makes all of the difference. “The terrible air pollution problem in China may be driving them even more than the problem of climate change,” says Freeman. “Either way, the U.S.-China deal is a game changer and it adds tremendous momentum to these talks in Lima. The U.S. and China are the two indispensable nations on this problem. Together, they’re responsible for 40 percent of global emissions.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Free speech doesn't permit you to make a true threat against the safety of another person. But what’s a true threat? Is it enough that a reasonable listener would consider the threat real? Or do you have to mean it? The Supreme Court has considered this First Amendment question in the past, but now it’s taking it up in the age of Facebook and gangsta rap -- and the answer may well be different to fit a different era.

New scrutiny on the prevalence of campus rape and government inquiries into how college administrators handle the problem have compelled many schools to reconsider how they respond to reports of sexual assault. Some universities have turned to hiring nonacademics to investigate rape cases, but that approach invites new concerns about who’s qualified to judge whether one student has victimized another—and what should be done about it...Full-time investigators aren’t necessarily impartial just because they work outside academia, either. Schools “could easily choose an outsider who has the same mindset” as the administration, says Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor who signed a letter in the Boston Globe that condemned Harvard’s new sexual harassment policy. “I don’t think simply farming out the job will solve the problem,” she says.

Impeachment has faded in Republican circles as an option to punish President Barack Obama over his sweeping executive actions to reshape immigration enforcement, ruled out even by hardliners like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) who are livid with the president and want to retaliate. An alternative that has gained some traction among Republicans is to "censure" the president...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said a congressional resolution to censure a president is not clearly authorized by the Constitution, "so a strict constitutionalist would say that it's an action beyond the authority of Congress."

...Ms. Andersen's daughter will arrive shortly after the family joined Medi-Share, a type of health coverage little known in New York but common in the Bible Belt. Christian health-care-sharing ministries are nonprofit cooperatives that mimic health-insurance companies...The model offers no consumer protections, critics charge. Courts in some states have ruled that health-care-sharing ministries can operate as long as they make it abundantly clear that they do not guarantee that members' medical bills will be paid. "These companies are walking a fine line," said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. "On the one hand, they're telling courts and regulators they're not insurance. On the other, they're telling people, 'You don't need insurance. Use us instead.' "

Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen, who co-wrote the argument against the ban on gay male blood donation in the Journal of the American Medical Association, joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the 26th annual World AIDS Day.

Hundreds of Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents marched on Mass. Ave. and blockaded streets at the heart of Harvard Square early Monday afternoon in protest of a grand jury’s recent decision not to indict a white police officer who shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., this summer...Speakers shared personal anecdotes and challenged Harvard students to keep the issue alive through protest. Law School student Victoria I. White-Mason, [`15] who recently returned from Ferguson, said that she saw “13-year-olds getting tear-gassed” in the protests...At 1:01 p.m, Law School student Rebecca N. Chapman, [`15] one of the protest’s organizers, led the gatherers in a “die-in,” in which protesters laid down silently for 4 and a half minutes. According to Chapman, the duration of the “die-in” was intended to represent the length of time the body of the late Ferguson resident Michael Brown lay in the street before it was taken to a morgue—4.5 hours.

At colleges and high schools, outside police stations, courthouses, city halls and federal buildings, a series of nationwide protests on Monday maintained the momentum of those seeking justice for the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., almost four months ago...At Harvard Law School, some 300 people gathered and chanted, “No justice, no peace,” and hoisted a banner reading, “Your peace is violence.”...At the Harvard protest, Prof. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., founder of the law school’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, exhorted students to fight for a more equitable society. “Everyone has to get involved. Your friends, your neighbors, even your enemies,” Professor Ogletree said. He added, “We have to make sure that we are the people standing up for the people who find themselves victims of police violence.”

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a heart stent implanted on Wednesday, reviving talk about how long the 81-year-old liberal jurist will be staying on the court...Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, welcomed the news that Ginsburg plans to be back at the court next week, and he said she’d already hired one of his research assistants to clerk for her the year after next. “I expect her to still be there and thriving,” he added. He had harsh words for those liberals who were pushing for Ginsburg to retire, “With all respect to some of my liberal friends, I think they are being ridiculous,” he said. “She is not a quitter.”

The NFL suffered a rare setback Friday when its far-reaching and high-profile suspension of Ray Rice was overturned, allowing the running back to return to the league immediately — if anyone will take him...One legal expert said that even though the Rice case does not establish precedent, it moves the league closer to a day when ultimate decisions on punishment are not made by the commissioner. “The walls are beginning to tumble down on the commissioner hearing the final appeal,” said Harvard law professor Peter Carfagna, former chief legal officer of media firm IMG. “It's like the Alamo, but they haven't climbed in and taken it yet.” How that impacts Goodell's overall authority, Carfagna said, is “in the eye of the beholder.”

In 2011, Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, the largest maker of computer components on the planet, stood up at an employee party and announced that he would replace the workers who spray, weld and assemble products for Apple, Sony and Nokia with 1 million robots in three years...Because they have to follow the rules of the road (or the sky), jobs in transportation and logistics and are particularly vulnerable to the smart machine invasion, says Richard B. Freeman, co-director of the Labor and Work Life Forum at the Harvard Law School and director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. So are office support jobs. “They follow rules, which means they can be described by computer program,” Freeman says.

The federal government is on the brink of lifting restrictions put in place more than three decades ago when regulators, alarmed by the spread of the virus that causes AIDS, barred men who had sex with other men from donating blood. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will begin a two-day meeting on the issue Tuesday, amid growing calls from medical groups, gay rights activists and lawmakers to jettison the ban as outdated and discriminatory...“They really are out of step with the rest of the world,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who with two colleagues recently argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association for a new U.S. policy. Cohen noted that numerous countries have abandoned blanket bans and put in place shorter deferral periods.

An op-ed by Alica M. Rodriguez [`15]. If you are one of the lucky ones, you have glimpsed a turkey walking around Harvard’s campus, totally out of place but strutting its stuff nonetheless. Turkeys have long graced the North American wilderness, but there’s a reason tourists and students routinely stop to photograph them: It’s rare to spot a wild turkey because the majority of turkeys are now raised in factory farms, without ever having seen the light of day. The Harvard turkey is, therefore, among the luckiest of its kinsmen. Each year, a whopping 46 million turkeys are killed for Thanksgiving celebrations. Unlike wild turkeys that are free to roam, forage, and live their lives naturally, these turkeys have been through the worst types of cruelty imaginable.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. The airwaves are alive with Thanksgiving and Christmas calorie stories. Makes sense. But are those pecan pie dissections really all that relevant? After all, holidays come around once a year. What's more important is what you take in on normal days...A new rule from the Food and Drug Administration will require calorie and other nutrition information to be disclosed by chain restaurants -- including bakeries, cafeterias, coffee shops, convenience stores, movie theaters and vending machines. The rule might turn out to be one of the most important regulatory initiatives of the past decade, with a significant effect on consumer behavior and public health.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It's official: As of this week, Israel is no longer the only democracy in the Middle East. The immediate reason is that Tunisia, which has a newly minted democratic constitution, held a free presidential election to follow its successful legislative elections. That’s a happy story: the more democracies in the Middle East, the better for its peoples. But there's another reason to keep a close eye on Israel's democracy: a draft basic law -- in essence, a constitutional amendment -- approved by the Israeli cabinet that represents a big step backward from Israel's traditional self-identification as both Jewish and democratic.

The Harvard Law School professor says there is a racial divide in this country that is not going to end with Ferguson.