Media Mentions

A letter by Charles Fried. It would help if we called things by their true names. The car dealers who put false income data into loan applications for people living on Social Security, surreptitiously add on unexplained charges, and sometimes even forge signatures are thieves. The banks that — knowingly or with willed ignorance — buy and package these loans are receivers of stolen property. The investors who buy these packages for their high rates of return are like customers who shop for bargains from fences or the tailgates of trucks selling hijacked goods. The free market is great, but it depends on honesty. Why aren’t more of these people being prosecuted?

A Harvard student and graduate of West Springfield High School left Wednesday for a Birthright trip to Israel. This as the conflict with the Palestinians and concerns over airline safety grows. Becca Gauthier [’15] has her bags packed and heads to a train on her way to a flight to Israel. She will be flying El-Al Airlines, as a growing number of other carriers refuse to fly over the embattled air space of the Middle East.

Since the dawn of the Internet, email users have been haunted by the finality of hitting the “send” button. No more. What could be the foremost of all First World problems — the inability to retrieve or delete an ill-conceived email — is now a thing of the past for users of Pluto Mail, according to the Harvard law student who created it. “I’ve been annoyed with the fact that any email I send lasts forever, and I think Snapchat popularized the more-forgettable Internet, and I thought it would be great to bring it to email. It’s a very salient problem. I think everyone has had this ‘uh oh’ moment," said David Gobaud [`15], founder and CEO of Pluto Labs Inc. “Basically the Pluto service turns your emails into dynamic ones that you can maintain control over. I built a new email server that turns an email into a living document.”

em>An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. The moment the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, it became a litigation magnet. The lawsuits threatening to derail it were initially dismissed as ridiculous but became deadly serious by the time Chief Justice John Roberts’s decisive fifth vote two years later barely upheld the law’s individual mandate, while the Court’s decisive 7-2 vote left the health law’s Medicaid expansion in tatters. …But while Boehner’s empty threat makes headlines, a far more serious threat could deliver the death blow that the law’s opponents have been seeking. This new round of litigation attacks the health insurance exchanges at the heart of Obamacare.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs and Catherine Fisk. Last week in Harris vs. Quinn, the U.S. Supreme Court put unions in a bind when it ruled that unionized home-care workers cannot be required to pay for the representation that unions are required by law to provide to them. In cases across the country, including at least one in California challenging the rules for public school teachers (Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Assn.), lawyers are now asking courts to extend the rule of Harris to all public employees and to prohibit government employers from requiring employees to pay their fair share of union representation. Requiring unions to offer free representation to workers who do not want a union makes no sense.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last week Google created an advisory committee to help it implement the “right to be forgotten” online that has been demanded by the European Court of Justice. It has its work cut out: the search giant has received more than 70,000 requests since May to decouple a claimant’s name from search results that may be true but are deemed “irrelevant” and presumably reputation-damaging. Turning theory into practice has revealed unanswered questions – and some outright flaws – in the court’s decision.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In 2010, Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" amused readers with its futuristic depiction of people traveling via UnitedContinentalDeltamerican and banking with AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit. In Shteyngart's imagination, only two television channels provided all "Media": Fox Liberty-Prime and Fox Liberty-Ultra. The merger of Time Warner Inc. and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., apparently suggested by Rupert Murdoch last month, shows Shteyngart was only barely ahead of his time. As Time Warner shares climb to dizzying heights in response to the news -- what investor doesn't love a mega-merger? -- it's worth noticing how we got here.

Former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth and Harvard Law School Visiting Professor Susan Crawford discuss regulatory hurdles facing a Twenty-First Century Fox and Time Warner deal. He speaks on “Bloomberg West.”

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. Few if any men were ever better qualified, at least on paper, to serve as president of the United States than John Quincy Adams. A diplomat several times over, lawyer, senator, and secretary of state, he had grown up in a household with parents who had been center stage at the creation of the American union. By example and exhortation, John and Abigail Adams instilled in their precocious and talented son a deep faith in, and enthusiasm for, the American experiment.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. More than half of humanity now lives in cities; that number will rise to two-thirds by 2050, up from just 30 percent in 1950. Given the grave challenges facing the world's booming urban areas -- including global warming, economic dislocation, and crumbling basic infrastructure, among other torments -- tomorrow's mayors will need to take bold steps to ensure their constituents live in dignity and safety. One of the greatest obstacles to those steps is public distrust of government. For the past 20 years, Brazilian city governments have been experimenting with a way to counter that distrust: participatory budgeting, in which citizens have a hand in allocating resources.

In an indictment of California's death penalty, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that decades-long delays and uncertainty about whether condemned inmates will ever be executed violate the constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment…Carol Steiker, a criminal law professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on the death penalty, described Carney's decision as "stunning" and "path-breaking." "That's a ruling of tremendous breadth," she said. "We haven't seen very many rulings from the federal courts declaring a whole state's system unconstitutional. That's quite stunning."

Harvard's Holly Fernandez Lynch analyzes the impact of the Supreme Court's recent decision, saying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress, will shape the impact as much as the court itself, because the high court used RFRA as its guide.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. At CVS, a 100-tablet package of store-brand aspirin costs you $1.99. Bayer aspirin is three times that much. Nonetheless, millions of people end up buying Bayer. When it comes to headache remedies, salt, sugar and hundreds of other important products, many people choose national brands even when a cheaper store brand is at hand. Why? For the first time, we have solid answers, thanks to a study by Dutch economist Bart Bronnenberg of Tilburg University and three colleagues from the University of Chicago. They found a simple correlation: The more informed you are, the more likely you are to choose store brands.

Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said Friday that whoever shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over the Ukraine “must be brought to justice.” But how likely is it that anyone will be compelled to appear in a courtroom and answer for the death of 298 passengers and crew?…Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard Law School, told NBC News he felt it would be hard to bring a criminal case in the ICC against Russian officials, because prosecutors would need to establish that the shooters knew they were firing at a passenger plane.

Gay marriage laws and court rulings against sexual-orientation discrimination are all signs that it’s time for the federal government to change its blood-donor policy for gay and bisexual men, authors said in a commentary released Saturday. The lifetime ban for blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM) “may be perpetuating outdated homophobic perceptions,” wrote Dr. Eli Y. Adashi of Brown University and scholars I. Glenn Cohen and Jeremy Feigenbaum, both of Harvard Law School, in the July 23/30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Governor Deval Patrick provided new details Thursday about a federal request to house some of the migrant children crossing the US border, saying he has asked officials to find a location for several hundred Central American children for about four months...John Willshire Carrera and Nancy Kelly, immigration lawyers in Boston, said they will ask federal officials to provide the children with access to lawyers. “As a bar, we are very ready to take on representation of these children. We are definitely welcoming of these kids and we’re going to fight for them,” said Willshire Carrera, a lawyer with the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Greater Boston Legal Services.

Massachusetts lawmakers expressed support for a bill filed on Monday that they say would address safety concerns that arose when the United States Supreme Court last month struck down 35-foot buffer zones for demonstrators standing near entrances to abortion clinics…Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said the new measure appeared to clear both of those lines of criticism. “It is a much more narrowly focused bill in terms of the conduct that it prohibits,” Mr. Tribe said. “It prohibits obstruction of access, which is not an expression of free speech.”

Just three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts law that created a 35-foot buffer zone around clinics that perform abortions, lawmakers there are rushing through a replacement. The new bill, which they hope to pass before the legislative session ends in two weeks, would give police more power to disperse unruly protesters…Harvard Law professor Richard Fallon says that in spirit, at least, Massachusetts has done what the court directed. “What’s innovative about this is that it’s a buffer zone triggered by bad conduct, and it’s a narrower buffer zone,” he says. “But then the questions will be whether this is narrow enough.”

The Supreme Court concluded its annual term last month once again in acrimony, this time over contraceptives and collective bargaining. That followed earlier schisms over campaign finance and prayer at town council meetings. Yet Chief Justice John Roberts sees friends everywhere…"Many times they literally are friends," says Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, a (literal) friend of the chief justice. Besides, he says, "I think it does have an impact on the atmosphere. I think it tends to make it less hostile, less accusatory, less of an effort of one side to demonize the other."

Women lawyers have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court since 1879, but in a forum where opposing counsel traditionally were called "brother," it took nearly a century for the female sex to gain third-person equality…"I would love to be able to say that I had noticed this," said one Stewart protégé who didn't, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Mr. Tribe, who clerked for Justice Stewart during the 1967-68 term, adds that he's not surprised by Justice Stewart's egalitarian vocabulary. "He was as close to being a nonsexist as I could imagine back in that time," Mr. Tribe says.

Opponents of the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm will appeal the dismissal of a federal lawsuit challenging the contract for the project with an all-star constitutional scholar. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe will represent the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound in its appeal of a federal court decision, which dismissed a challenge Cape Wind’s contract with NSTAR. Tribe will be the “principal author of the appeal briefs by the Alliance and will probably present the oral argument of the Alliance in the First Circuit,” he told the Herald.