Media Mentions

Ever since the International Criminal Court (ICC) began bringing suspected war criminals to The Hague, it has been criticised for not taking crimes involving sexual violence seriously enough…Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School, believes that one of the challenges facing ICC prosecutors is that pre-trial judges have required them to charge suspects under a single mode of liability, rather than several.

The al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) announced Friday that a Shariah-based system of governance will be imposed in Mosul and other cities and towns in Iraq that have been overtaken by militants…“Today’s advocates of Shariah as the source of law are not actually recommending the adoption of a comprehensive legal code derived from or dictated by Shariah — because nothing so comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history,” says Noah Feldman…a law professor at Harvard University...“To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else. It means establishing a legal system in which God’s law sets the ground rules, authorizing and validating everyday laws passed by an elected legislature.”

Newsmax Media CEO Christopher Ruddy announced the signing of an agreement with best-selling author and legal expert Alan Dershowitz to host “You and the Law,” a weekly TV series offering practical legal advice to ordinary Americans.

On a rain-drenched night in the summer of 1997, Sherwin Gibbons was shot dead, murdered as he sipped a beer in the vestibule of a building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. It was, law enforcement officials said at the time, a case of mistaken retribution: Someone had stolen a gold chain at a dice game; someone had to pay, and someone did — even if Mr. Gibbons was not the intended target. A suspect, Roger Logan, was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder. Almost 17 years later, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office took on the task of discovering what really happened in the vestibule, at 373 Chauncey Street, on that July 24...Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law professor who directs the criminal justice institute there, is a consultant to the district attorney on the design and operations of the unit; a panel of three independent lawyers reviews the unit’s recommendations before Mr. Thompson makes the final decisions.

We are a nation of law. Change the law, change the country. The ultimate arbiter is the Supreme Court. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the country is changing. On campaign finance. Money politics. Corporate power. Unions. Guns. Health care. Gay marriage. Race. In 5-4 decision after decision, the Roberts court is changing the country. Critics call it a politicized high court, not above polarization but part of it. My guest today, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, says it’s more subtle than that. More interesting. This hour On Point: the Roberts court, and where it is taking the country.

Nothing about the narrow cream-coloured lobby at 160 Aldersgate Street in the City of London financial district gives a hint of its role at the centre of the offshore oil industry. That's because the building is occupied by a law firm. Yet, on paper at least, it is also home to Rowan Companies, one of the largest operators of drilling rigs in the world…"The UK has made a very clear policy decision to engage in tax competition for multinationals. It's fair to say it's rivalling Ireland," said Stephen Shay Professor of Law at Harvard University who has testified to Congressional investigations into corporate tax reform.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. More than a decade ago, researchers at Boston College interviewed people from both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, promising each contributor to the Belfast Project that his or her interview recording wouldn’t be released until the contributor died. In the meantime, the tapes would be deposited at the college’s rare books library under lock and key. On the basis of those promises, some people spoke for the first time about painful actions that remain murky in the public eye, including unsolved murders that they’d helped commit or cover up. When the British government learned of the Belfast Project about 10 years later, it invoked a mutual legal assistance treaty to demand immediate access to some of the tapes...Are we stuck with either having to destroy our secrets or leave them exposed to near-instant disclosure? It might be possible to split the difference: to develop an ecosystem of contingent cryptography for libraries, companies, governments, and citizens.

A week after President Obama's 2012 reelection, the conservative Federalist Society gathered 1,500 lawyers in black tie to hear one of their own, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., vow to hold the line against an ever-expanding federal government that "towers over people."…Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Reagan, gives Alito mixed grades, saying he has been careful and thoughtful, but also too driven by ideology..."The quality of his work is excellent. He is not a wiseguy. He's doesn't demean those who disagree with him. And you don't get pompous sloganeering from him," Fried said. "But I'm sorry that on the agenda items, he's been quite predictable. There's a real sense of an agenda with this court, and he's been part of that."

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. There are all sorts of things people want the federal government to do -- for example, reduce poverty, make highways safer, protect against workplace risks, safeguard privacy online, regulate their least favorite companies or, for that matter, engage in deregulation. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, federal officials often answer: “Not now.” In turn, public-interest groups, individuals and businesses have asked federal courts to require public officials to act. And for decades, courts came back with unclear and confusing responses -- until 2007, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had acted unlawfully in refusing to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. That decision led to last week’s proposals for new limits on emissions from existing power plants. And it raised the real possibility that courts would start to oversee federal agencies' authority to set priorities -- and constrain the president’s authority as well.

Republicans have reacted harshly to the Obama administration’s decision to swap five top former Taliban commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was the sole American prisoner of war in Afghanistan. When it comes to the legality of the decision to do so, they have a point…The fact that the law doesn’t address “a time-sensitive prisoner-exchange negotiation of this sort,” Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues, doesn’t mean Obama was within the law when he approved the transfer. “I don’t think it accurate or useful to say that the statute doesn’t address the Bergdahl situation, since it imposes a requirement without exception,” Goldsmith writes.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. We are in the midst of a shift in political thinking about constitutional amendments. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, is among many progressive thinkers now promoting constitutional change -- in her case, to allow Congress to restrict corporate spending on political campaigns. Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in a new book, calls for no fewer than six constitutional amendments, involving not only campaign finance but also gun control, capital punishment, political gerrymandering, sovereign immunity and federalism. Yet, for decades, constitutional change was something championed more by conservatives than by liberals. What's going on?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Scratch a patent-law expert and you’ll find a Supreme Court critic. Most patent lawyers I know disdain the Supreme Court, or at least think it should butt out of their disputes and let the Federal Circuit, made up of experienced patent-law judges, do its own thing. Today in a pair of unanimous decisions reversing the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court made it clear the contempt is mutual. It not only slapped down the specialist court, but also implied strongly that the lower court has run amok, making patent law based on its own policy preferences and not what the patent laws actually say.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The case is out of Agatha Christie: Twenty-four separate times, Carol Anne Bond spread an arsenic-based compound and potassium dichromate on the car door, mailbox and doorknob of the woman who was both her closest friend and, it turned out, her husband’s lover. All she managed was a single burned thumb; the case would never have reached the U.S. Supreme Court had not overreaching prosecutors charged Bond with a chemical weapons violation. Today, the court ducked the potential international implications by holding that it wasn’t “utterly clear” that the chemical weapons law covered Bond’s conduct. Unfortunately, to reach that common-sense conclusion, the court felt it had to invent a new quasi-constitutional doctrine with potentially far-reaching implications. The whole sordid tale can tell us something important about how the court does its business today when interpreting statutes.

On June 2, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it will seek to require the nation’s power plant operators to cut their combined carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030…“It’s no secret that everyone preferred having Congress draft climate legislation,” says Jody Freeman, Obama’s former counselor for energy and climate change. Using the Clean Air Act “was always Plan B.”

…Nearly a decade later, the Nashville teen and her egg donor came together in a way as modern as her birth, after a search on an Internet database, a timid message on Facebook and, finally, a tearful introduction on Katie Couric's daytime TV talk show. The show will air June 12…The identity of U.S. sperm and egg donors is protected by default. In the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries, sperm and egg donors must be willing to be contacted when their offspring turns 18, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard University law professor who specializes in bioethics. But some birth parents still never tell because they don't want to be undermined by a second relationship, Cohen said, and it can be tough for a child to be rejected by the donor. If the United States were to mandate more openness, Cohen said, he'd also like laws that determine how much responsibility the donor must take on.

There’s nothing that gets American journalists quite so giddy as an authoritarian mouthpiece failing to get a joke—as when, in September 2012, Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency reported on a Gallup poll that found an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans preferred President Ahmadinejad to President Obama. It wasn't a real Gallup poll, of course: It was an Onion article, as every English-language news site in the world gleefully pointed out...In the U.S., satirical writing—even if it makes reference to real people, and even if those references are defaming—is protected speech. But according to Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, there are established standards for determining whether or not content is comedic and not criminally libelous—standards that can get tricky when your business is predicated on deceiving your readers. “The question a court would ask is whether the average reader would think the article was factual or satirical,” he says.

Along rows of cubicles at the General Motors Technical Center in suburban Warren, engineers knew for years about faulty ignition switches in small cars. Safety officials in the same complex knew, too. So did the lawyers downtown...But John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School, says often the only way to get investigation results quickly is to hire a lawyer who is familiar with the company. Corporate investigations don't always conform to the company's strategy, he says. Investigations happen more often now, creating a lucrative business line for law firms. If a firm finds no criminal wrongdoing, but it comes out later, "it is their personal reputation at stake," Coates says.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections? The answer was yes.

Amid a statewide surge in heroin use, Wisconsin prosecutors are more frequently pursuing charges against those who provide fatal doses — doubling the number of such homicide charges from 2011 to 2013…Ron Sullivan, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, said the discrepancy “on its face seems unfair,” but it is not surprising given the power prosecutors have to set policy in their counties.

A recent Sunday morning found Roxbury’s Marcella Park nearly empty save for Robert Lewis Jr., bat in hand, leading a handful of his young ballplayers in a light workout. “Head down! Keep your feet sturdy!” barked Lewis as he tossed pitches to Hugo Mateo, 17, a Madison Park High School junior from Everett who’s hoping to play for Lewis’s elite 17-and-under travel team this summer…“What you saw when you looked around that room — law enforcement officials and clergy, educators and athletes, black people and white — reflects the essence of what [Lewis] is doing,” Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree said later. “Now he’s using baseball, of all things, to open up opportunities for young men.”By locating his new program in the heart of Roxbury, Ogletree added, “He’s not only talking the talk, he’s walking the walk.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering Thursday's commencement speech at Harvard University, criticized what he described as a disturbing trend of liberals silencing voices "deemed politically objectionable." Harvard Law School graduate Jared Nicholson [`14] said the speech was "a great message ... about tolerance of different ideas and diversity of opinions."