Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? The justices of the Supreme Court might not care much for Marshall Mathers -- assuming they know who he is -- but they share his penchant for studied self-contradiction. Today they decided two cases on the interpretation of treaties based on almost perfectly opposed principles. In one case, involving child kidnapping, the court said the global treaty should not be interpreted as though it were a U.S. law. In the other, which concerned arbitration, the court said that the treaty should be read just as though it were a domestic contract. Huh?

An op-ed by Kelsey C. Skaggs ['16]. The implications of climate change are increasingly well documented: Rising sea levels, more severe storms, and increased food scarcity are just a few….Harvard’s President Drew G. Faust continues to reject student, faculty, and alumni calls to divest our endowment from fossil fuel extraction companies. President Faust’s justification for this rejection is nothing new. It is the same set of arguments that Harvard’s administration made in the 1970s and ’80s in response to student pressure to divest from companies that supported the South African apartheid regime.

An op-ed by HLS Visiting Professor Lorie Graham. "Does it stay on all the time or does it come off?" Ahmed asked from his hospital bed, frowning at the thought of a prosthetic leg. "I want one that doesn't come off." These are the words of a 12-year-old boy, an innocent victim of a brutal regime and an international system that has in too many ways failed the people of Syria. My own 13-year-old, reading these words in the newspaper, asks whether there is something that can be done to help. I begin my usual "It's complicated" — there are legal constraints, there is the lack of political will — but seeing the look in my son's eyes, I say instead, "Yes there is."

A book review by Adrian Vermeule. In the era of a polarized and stymied Congress, in which legislation is especially prone to be paralyzed by the filibuster and other supermajority devices, Melissa Schwartzberg’s new study of supermajority rules could not be more timely. In another sense, it could not be less timely: Schwartzberg generates her insights by recovering the origins of voting, majority rule, and supermajority rule in pre-modern polities. Her findings suggest that supermajority rule ought to be suspect in a polity otherwise committed to democratic principles of equal political dignity among voters.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. David Cohen, Comcast Corp.'s executive vice president and the mastermind behind its deal to buy Time Warner Cable Inc., sounded pugnacious and confident on a recent conference call with investors. Regulatory and antitrust approval of the deal, he says, will happen within the next nine to 12 months. But even Cohen had to acknowledge that the public might be worried about the power of this combination. "It may sound scary," he said. Indeed it does.

Jody Freeman in Scotusblog. In this comment I make two claims about the greenhouse gas cases that may seem controversial but should not be.  First, from a practical perspective, the cases are, at this point, of limited significance…Second, the EPA might have averted this particular legal challenge had it been somewhat more risk averse initially.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. As we started the 185-mile trek from Dixville Notch to Nashua, there were certain things that I knew. I knew that our system of government had become corrupt. That the system—not necessarily any individuals, but all the individuals together—had been contorted into a shape that makes it impossible for government to address even the most fundamental and important issues sensibly…For seven years, I’ve been speaking about it. In lectures across the country and across the world, some small, some very large, I’ve been developing a way to explain it, using slides and stories that aim to bring people of all sorts to this view: that this corruption may not be the most important issue. But it is the first issue that we, as a nation, have to solve. And that until we solve it, we will solve nothing else, sensibly.

An op-ed by Elizabeth Bartholet. Since the mid-1990s, United States law has prohibited any effort to keep children within same-race families and prevent transracial adoption. Congress will not go back on this law, the Multiethnic Placement Act. The racial matching regime outlawed by MEPA was aberrational – inconsistent with our nation’s constitutional and legal tradition making any use of race highly suspect. Racial matching failed to meet the narrow affirmative action exception to that tradition: It hurt rather than helped black children, by locking them into foster care and denying them available nurturing homes.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”…Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: David Sanger and Thom Shanker have a lengthy story in the New York Times about various National Security Agency techniques for penetrating foreign computers and networks, including a strategy for accessing seemingly air-gapped computers. … [T]his article shows how much publication norms have changed in recent years. (Sanger and Shanker note that the NYT did not publish some of the details in the current story when it reported on cyber attacks on Iran in 2012.)

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Robert Gates has been an extraordinarily distinguished public servant. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he has worked for eight presidents, serving as defense secretary under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. The nation owes him a deep and enduring debt of gratitude. But his new memoir, “Duty,” raises troubling ethical questions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I wouldn't believe it if I weren't sitting here in Tunisia's parliament building. But I just watched the nation's constituent assembly adopt, 116-40 with 32 abstentions, an amendment to its draft constitution requiring the government to create parity for women in all legislative assemblies in the country, national as well as local. After the vote, the assembly and audience stood up spontaneously and sang the national anthem. There wasn't a dry eye in the house -- including mine.

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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