Media Mentions

Harvard Law School celebrated the Harvard Law School Class of 2014, conferring a total of 750 degrees—576 J.D.s, 167 LL.M.s, and 7 S.J.D.s. Festivities began on Class Day, Wednesday, May 28, and continued through Commencement, on Thursday, May 29.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman. President Obama is expected to announce his much anticipated rule for power plants on Monday, requiring for the first time that older and dirtier plants reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, which account for a sizable share of the nation’s carbon pollution. This new rule has rightly been called the “cornerstone” of the president’s climate action plan. If successful, it has the potential to transform the nation’s power sector by driving new investments in efficiency and renewable energy, and by increasing the use of cleaner natural gas in place of coal.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Can GM run from its bad cars? GM’s faulty ignition switches killed people. As a matter of ethics and public relations, GM should stand behind its cars. But does bankruptcy law require it to do so? Technically, no. Bankruptcy law says that an “old GM” was sold to a “new GM” and the “new GM” excluded product liability from the debts it picked up in the sales agreement. But it’d take a bankruptcy expert to know the difference between the old and the new GM; GM today is the same organization as the one that put the bad switches into is cars and, the media reports, knew about it years ago.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, the Supreme Court's death penalty holding today seems like a win for rationality and smart statistics. The 5-4 decision in Hall v. Florida said the state may not use an absolute cutoff of 70 on the IQ test as its measure of intellectual disability, below which a murderer cannot be executed -- because the standard error of measurement on the test is five points plus or minus…On closer examination, though, the decision is less satisfying than it appears.

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.

Sixty years ago, with its historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. President Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t sound too happy about that… “Eisenhower’s lack of enthusiasm for Earl Warren’s decision certainly did not help the cause of school desegregation,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Lawyers defending immigrants charged with crimes must be more clear when it comes to the immigration consequences of their cases, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Monday. The court’s decision says telling immigrants they could be “eligible for deportation” or “face deportation” if convicted is not correct legal advice when deportation is “practically inevitable.” Phil Torrey, who lectures on immigration law at Harvard Law School, said the court could not have offered a prescription because there is no magic formula — each case is unique. “I think it’s clear that defense attorneys are going to have to say more than simply, ‘Oh, you’re not a citizen, you’re pleading guilty to a crime, there might be some immigration problems down the road,’” Torrey said.

After Cass Sunstein co-wrote bestseller Nudge on behavioral economics with Richard Thaler, he went on to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009-2012, acting as the President's top regulator. But some of his more curious — and controversial — research is on conspiracy theories: how they work, and why they're often rational for people to believe. His new book, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas, details this research. He spoke with Ezra Klein on his theory, and how it helps explain the disagreements between our current political parties.

An article by Sean Mirski [`15]. Centuries ago, Chinese fishermen referred to the isles of the South China Sea as “magnetic rocks”—a morbid allusion to the uncanny force that drew ships to unlucky fates on the shoals. Today, however, the South China Sea attracts a different kind of trouble. For the last six decades, the Sea has been the center of a geopolitical maelstrom fueled by great power politics, toxic nationalism, and bountiful petroleum reserves. Six different parties – Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam – feud with each other over both the South China Sea’s insular territories and their surrounding waters.

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.