Media Mentions

Type a search term into Google’s ubiquitous blue box, and there’s a good chance you’ll reflexively scroll down to the autocomplete suggestions. While you may not think much about those suggestions, you probably think even less about the ones you never see. Here’s why you should start: For about half a decade, bisexual advocates have been fighting to get Google Inc. to untangle the word “bisexual” from its complex predictive algorithm.... Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University, who has followed those lawsuits, said he believes similar autocomplete court battles would be “doomed to failure” in the United States, where Google has strong First Amendment protections on its side. “Fundamentally, it’s Google’s search engine and they can do what they want with it,” he told IBTimes. “They can impose whatever filter they want on particular results, so a legal claim there is unlikely to be successful.”

After months of scrutiny directed at the University’s policies concerning sexual assault, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith announced Tuesday the creation of an FAS committee charged with bringing Harvard’s largest branch into compliance with a University-wide sexual assault policy still being reviewed by the Federal Office for Civil Rights...The faculty members of the committee include…Law School professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., the master of Winthrop House.

With the help of the Cyberlaw Clinic, the Consortium of School Networks (“CoSN”) has released the Protecting Privacy in Connected Learning Toolkit. The toolkit, issued in March as part of CoSN’s new Protecting Privacy in Connected Learning initiative, provides an in-depth, step-by-step privacy guide is to help school system leaders navigate complex federal laws and related issues.

President Obama’s choice for a powerful appeals court appointment is in peril from both the left and the right, highlighting how the fraught politics of an election year are threatening the president’s agenda even among his allies on Capitol Hill. The nomination of David Barron, who was a Justice Department lawyer at the start of the administration and is now a Harvard Law School professor, is mired in a maw of contentious issues. Republicans object to what they say are his radically liberal views on the Constitution. Democrats in conservative-leaning states, especially those who are up for re-election, are wary that a vote for him might backfire with voters at home. And members of both parties say they are disturbed by Mr. Barron’s authorship of legal memos that justified the United States’ killing of an American citizen overseas with a drone.

An influential US senator from Kentucky has threatened to derail President Obama’s nomination of a Harvard Law School professor to fill a rare vacancy on the federal Appeals Court in Boston, the court that helps establish the region’s legal climate. US Senator Rand Paul said in a letter to Senate leadership that he will block the confirmation of David Barron to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit until the White House releases controversial memos Barron drafted that justified the US military’s unchecked killing of American citizens overseas…Barron is married to former Boston Globe editorial columnist Juliette Kayyem, a Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts. His nomination was supported by lifelong Republican John F. Manning, a colleague at Harvard Law, and Charles Fried, also a Harvard professor and solicitor general to President Reagan.

An op-ed by Lauren Willis (visiting professor) and Marina Cassio '15. “Of the 600,000 items in the American grocery store, 77 percent of them have added sugar,” says Robert Lustig in a recent article published in the MIT Technology Review. “You can’t even reduce your consumption when you’re trying to.” But proposed changes to the Nutrition Facts label on every package of food Americans buy may help. Among other things, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is adding a line for “Added Sugars.” The goal is to encourage Americans to eat less added sugar to lower obesity and improve health.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Saturday marked the death of Gary Becker, perhaps the greatest social scientist of the last 50 years. More than anyone else, Becker is responsible for the rigorous pursuit of the idea that human beings are rational and responsive to incentives. That’s a simple idea, but Becker used it to produce path-breaking insights into countless areas, including crime, discrimination, addiction, politics and the structure of the family. Becker was a colleague and a friend of mine, and he was a quintessentially rational man.

A blockade of Harvard University President Drew Faust’s office yesterday failed to convince school officials to divest from fossil fuel companies, but students pledged not to give up. “This is the first of many big steps we’re prepared to take,” said Kelsey Skaggs [`16], a Harvard Law School student. “We will continue to put pressure on the administration until they divest.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Aristotle said that when a general law doesn’t fit a particular case, the proper course is to rectify the law so it does fit. Today, in the last oral argument of this term, the U.S. Supreme Court grappled with his advice in the case of Limelight Networks v. Akamai Technologies.

For years, the government has upheld the principle of “net neutrality,” the belief that everyone should have equal access to the web without preferential treatment. But now, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a former cable and telecommunications top gun, is circulating potential new rules that reportedly would put a price tag on climbing aboard the Internet. ..This week, speaking with Bill Moyers …are David Carr [who] covers the busy intersection of media with business, government and culture for The New York Times. Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

In January, the White House announced a task force to study the issue of college sexual assault. White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett joins Katie to share the task force's recommendations. Also commenting in the segment: Diane Rosenfeld, lecturer on law.

The 848-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act dedicates 149 words to framing a new disclosure about “pay versus performance” at public companies. Boards and management must deliver “a clear description” to shareholders of “the relationship between executive compensation actually paid and the financial performance of the issuer,” the law states…“If you’re stripping out pension valuations and other things, you’re cooking the books,” says Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried, co-author of Pay without Performance: the Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.

…Since the start of the 21st century, a new breed of shareholder—the activist hedge fund—has frequently played a decisive role in interactions between corporations and markets...A major recent study by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang of activist investments from 1994 through 2007 also found five-year improvements in the operating performance of targeted companies.

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz condemned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling's "very bad" racist comments, but told Newsmax that his greater concern was that "I don't think we want the thought police to be intruding on people's private conversations." "We need to preserve privacy," Dershowitz said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. "We need to be able to preserve a person's ability to share his thoughts, even if we don't agree with his thoughts, with private people."

Democrat Sen. Edward Markey from Massachusetts says the government should crack down on broadcast messages that promote what he calls hate crimes, by regulating content on television, radio and the Internet...That claim has other First Amendment legal minds howling. “He’s not going to be able to come up with legislation that sufficiently protects the First Amendment,” said Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, Breitbart reported.

A letter by Charles Fried. There is a deep connection between the old news about the rapidly growing wealth gap in this country and the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday striking down the longstanding and regularly reaffirmed aggregate limits on how much an individual can give to candidates...If we must be governed by those whom the billionaires choose to fund, then the social contract really has been ruptured. And it is only the five Pollyannas on the Supreme Court who would have us believe that those who have unlimited cash to spend on elections will not call the tune.  

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Campaign finance law is dying the death of a thousand cuts. Today the U.S. Supreme Court delivered an especially devastating blow in striking down aggregate contribution limits. And the most remarkable part of it is that, under its own logic, the decision made perfect sense because the court said contributions to an unlimited number of candidates does not give rise to the "appearance of corruption."

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. At the core of the disaster that is the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision lies a mistake. A strategic mistake, made by the government. In this mistake, we can see all that’s wrong with modern American constitutional law. From the first moment that this case arose, it has been obvious to everyone that the decision would turn on the meaning of the word “corruption.” Congress has the power to regulate campaign contributions only if it is doing so to regulate “corruption.” So the central question raised by McCutcheon was this: Is a law limiting aggregate contributions a law designed to limit “corruption?”

A paper by John C. Coates and Suraj Srinivasan of Harvard Business School. We review and assess research findings from 120 papers in accounting, finance, and law to evaluate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We describe significant developments in how the Act was implemented and find that despite severe criticism, the Act and institutions it created have survived almost intact since enactment. We report survey findings from informed parties that suggest that the Act has produced financial reporting benefits.

A paper by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson Jr. of Columbia Law School. We argue that the state-law rules governing poison pills are vulnerable to challenges based on preemption by the Williams Act. Such challenges, we show, could well have a major impact on the corporate-law landscape. Our study examines this subject and concludes that there is a substantial basis for questioning the continued validity of current state-law rules authorizing the use of poison pills.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Late last month, the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of the Federal Open Markets Committee (the Fed’s monetary-policy-setting body) meetings from the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, too many reports on the transcripts miss the big picture. Criticizing the Fed for underestimating the dangers from the underground rumblings that were about to explode makes it seem that particular players just got it wrong. In fact, underestimating financial risk is a general problem – the rule, not the exception.