Media Mentions

Four of the world’s most important financial regulators – the Bank of England, Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority – recently asked the world’s derivatives industry to change the way it does business. The question now is whether the regulators can make that happen with a request, as opposed to something more substantial. That will not be easy.

An op-ed by Mary Ann Glendon and Katrina Lantos Swett: December 10 marks Human Rights Day, the 65th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), signed by 48 nations — with just eight abstentions. Sixty-five years ago, naysayers insisted it was nobody else's business how governments behaved within their borders. The declaration confronted this cynical view — and continues to do so today. Human rights abuses and their consequences spill beyond national borders, darkening prospects for harmony and stability across the globe. Freedom of religion or belief, as well as other human rights, are essential to peace and security.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. experienced a significant economic recovery, in which average real income growth jumped by 6 percent. That's the good news. The bad news is that almost all of that increase -- 95 percent -- was enjoyed by those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. To appreciate this remarkable finding, set out in an important paper by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, we need to add some context. From 2007 to 2009, the recession produced a 17.4 percent decline in average real income -- the largest drop since the Great Depression. Every income class was hit hard, but in percentage terms, those at the top of the economic ladder suffered the biggest decreases.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Nelson Mandela sold out black South Africans. Now there's a sentence you won't have heard in the days since his death and that you won't be hearing at his memorial tomorrow. Yet it's incontrovertibly true that after centuries of being robbed of possibly the greatest mineral wealth the world has ever known, not to mention decades of being repressed by apartheid, black South Africans got almost no compensation for what should rightfully have been theirs when the old regime was swept away for the new South Africa.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: Just when we are rightly celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- what historians call the "signature achievement" of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations -- that law has been gutted. Federal judges from trial courts to the Supreme Court have interpreted the Civil Rights Act virtually, although not entirely, out of existence. This is so across judicial philosophies, across the political spectrum and even across presidential appointments.

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz: Shortly after I began working as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg I was in his secretary’s…

According to the Constitution, the President of the United States has the power to appoint federal judges “by and with the Advice and Consent of…

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Harvard Law School media roundup: From the NSA scandal to the regulatory battles of a new taxi cab app June 17, 2013 Over the past…

Noah Feldman, the Bemis Professor of International Law, is a regular columnist for Bloomberg. “How, exactly, could the government order a Verizon division…

Yochai Benkler  ’94 is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies and co-director of the Berkman Center for…

Cass Sunstein ‘78 is the Robert Walmsley University Professor and director of HLS’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. “People can run into two problems when they need to find a taxi. The first is that they don’t know whether a taxi will be available. The second is that they don’t know when a taxi will be available.

Can you patent genes? In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, the U.S. Supreme Court answered this imponderable question with a split decision: You can't if they are naturally occurring, and you've simply discovered the gene; but if you've crafted a synthetic gene, you've invented it -- and you can keep the patent.

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An op-ed by Professor Jack Goldsmith: Since the United Nations was created in 1945, its Charter has been more honored in the breach than the observance. So…

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Judith Resnik: Just as Attorney General Eric Holder was rightly decrying the impact of onerous drug sentences for low-level, nonviolent offenders this…

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, a friend and mentor to President Barack Obama, discusses the state of civil rights in the United States on the…

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs: The financial challenges low- and middle-income Americans face are daunting. But the poor and middle class are in an equally serious, if…

A group of veteran security experts and former White House officials has been selected to conduct a full review of U.S. surveillance programs and other…