Media Mentions

A book review by Cass R. Sunstein. When I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1981, there were two defining figures: Richard Posner and Richard Epstein. Posner was the world’s most important voice in the emerging field of “law and economics.” At the time he believed that courts should “maximize wealth.” Epstein, a defender of personal autonomy with strong libertarian inclinations, was Posner’s most vocal critic. At the University of Chicago Law School lunch table, where the faculty ate four times each week, the two had some fierce struggles. Tempers flared. No one who was there will forget those lunches, which sometimes seemed like a form of combat.

The Disrupt panel, including visiting scholar Maya Harris, talks about New Hampshire police commissioner Robert Copeland, who called President Obama a racial slur.

Lawrence Lessig may be the greatest radical at work in America today. Lessig, a polymath, professor at Harvard Law School, is not ivory tower type. He is a radical -- someone who strikes at the root of things -- in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson.

While friends and family sprawled out on the warm grass in sandals and colorful sundresses, the Connecticut College Class of 2014 lined up on Tempel Green Sunday morning in somber-looking black gowns. Keynote commencement speaker Noah Feldman, an international law professor at Harvard, told graduates that the path that follows those scary questions is never easy.

If Congress approves comprehensive immigration reform, it will likely more than double the cap on H-1B visas. What would happen then?…Those predictions came from a group that included Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Hal Salzman, professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers; Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School; and Norm Matloff, a professor of computer science at University of California at Davis.

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Laurence H. Tribe. Although the two of us frequently approach legal questions from different perspectives, and just as often disagree about the best answers to those questions, we share a respect for our Constitution and a reverence for the judicial process. That’s why, in spite of our disagreements, we agree that Harvard Law School professor David Barron is exceptionally well-qualified to hold a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and that the Senate should promptly confirm him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Outside of "24," the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't usually interrogate a suspect who’s just been shot in the head, pumped full of opioids and shackled to his hospital bed. But that's what happened to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 20 -- and the questioning, by the FBI's high-value interrogation group, went on with breaks all night and again the following night. Tsarnaev’s jaw was wired shut, one of his eyes was sutured closed, but he communicated via notepad and repeatedly asked for a lawyer. Not only was one not provided, but lawyers sent by the federal and state public defenders to represent Tsarnaev were turned away at the hospital door. Now his lawyers say his statements during that questioning should be excluded at trial, planned for November.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. According to the ruling, an individual can compel Google to remove certain reputation-harming search results that are generated by Googling the individual’s name. The court is trying to address an important problem — namely, the Internet’s ability to preserve indefinitely all its information about you, no matter how unfortunate or misleading — but it has devised a poor solution. The court’s decision is both too broad and curiously narrow.

Ambassador Tommy Koh LL.M. ’64 of Singapore was recently presented with the 2014 Great Negotiator Award by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The Senate confirmation process of Harvard Law School professor David J. Barron ’89 continues to provoke controversy as a vocal group of senators from both the left and right call for the public release of memos, which Barron allegedly wrote during his time as a lawyer for the Justice Department. Those memos established the legal justification for the Obama administration’s controversial drone policy.

Harvard law professor David Barron is under fire for signing memos that allowed the U.S. to kill a U.S. citizen overseas in a drone strike. Those blocking his nomination want the documents released.

Google’s simple white interface may look the same from country to country, but in Europe some of its search results are going to be literally lost in translation. In a decision that could prove to be a major thorn in the side of the world’s biggest tech companies, the European Union Court of Justice on Tuesday ruled that individuals may ask Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) to remove links to Web pages that contain information about themselves, even if that information is legal and accurate…“It’s an incredibly big deal,” Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University, said. “Search engines are still important as an index to the Internet. It’s like if you tucked information into a book in the library and then removed the card catalog, to use a very 20th century analogy.”

The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative of the Brookings Institution, published a memo earlier this month that highlighted the economic costs of crime and incarceration in the United States… Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is a clinical professor of law and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School...Sullivan spoke with the Gazette about racial and national sentencing disparities, the economic and social costs of mass incarceration, and the sentencing reforms now under consideration.

Europe’s highest court said on Tuesday that people had the right to influence what the world could learn about them through online searches, a ruling that rejected long-established notions about the free flow of information on the Internet… Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, said those who were determined to shape their online personas could in essence have veto power over what they wanted people to know. “Some will see this as corrupting,” he said. “Others will see it as purifying. I think it’s a bad solution to a very real problem, which is that everything is now on our permanent records.”

An op-ed by Charles Fried and Laurence H. Tribe. Although the two of us frequently approach legal questions from different perspectives, and just as often disagree about the best answers to those questions, we share a respect for our Constitution and a reverence for the judicial process. That’s why, in spite of our disagreements, we agree that Harvard Law School professor David Barron is exceptionally well-qualified to hold a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and that the Senate should promptly confirm him.

…These days, just about every kid applying to a selective college — one that judges applicants on more than just grades and test scores — is doing it through Common App. Is that a violation of the Sherman Act? One of Common App’s for-profit competitors claims it is. In a new antitrust complaint, filed Thursday in federal court in Portland, Oregon, CollegeNET alleges that over the last 10 years, Common App has stealthily changed its agreements with member colleges to impede competition from other application processing companies...I was curious about whether for-profit companies can sue non-profits for Sherman Act violations, so I checked in with Harvard Law School antitrust professor Einer Elhauge, who said that they can indeed.

Canaries can be useful creatures. Coal miners used to bring them into the mines as a warning sign of methane or carbon monoxide. A dead canary meant the miners needed to get out of there pronto. Now a clever loophole in the rules regarding NSA requests for information is letting companies warn their customers in the same way a little yellow bird might signal trouble. It's called a "warrant canary", and several major companies like Apple have already used it in their "transparency reports."…According to Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, it's not only a clever way to let customers know if their information may have been acquired by the NSA, but also a way for the private sector to agitate Government agencies on the issues involved in privacy.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. What, exactly, is wrong with economic inequality? Thomas Piketty’s improbable best-seller, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," has put that question in sharp relief. As just about everyone now knows, Piketty contends that over the next century, inequality is likely to grow. In response, he outlines a series of policies designed to reduce wealth at the very top of society, including a progressive income tax and a global wealth tax. But Piketty says surprisingly little about why economic inequality, as such, is a problem.

The peace process, at least for now, is over. Fatah and Hamas announced a reconciliation agreement, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority Prime Mahmoud Abbas of colluding with a terrorist organization and negotiations were cut off. Hamas reiterated its commitment to the tactics of terror, and nobody thinks official negotiations will restart anytime soon. Unofficial negotiations are all set to go ahead next month…The negotiations will be mediated by Harvard University’s Program on Negotiation chairman Prof. Robert H. Mnookin, an expert on negotiations and conflict resolution.

Has the age of the Robocop and Terminator arrived? The U.N. thinks it might be around the corner. On Tuesday, the world body holds its first-ever multinational convention on “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”…Ahead of the UN meeting, Human Rights Watch on Monday released a report saying that in the not-too-distant future, fully autonomous weapons—killer robots—could be used by law enforcement agencies and thus trigger questions about international human rights law. The report, co-published by HRW and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, finds that “fully autonomous weapons threaten to violate the foundational rights to life and…undermine the underlying principle of human dignity.”

The most powerful weapon that debaters wield against the unwary is causation: marijuana use leads to heroin addiction, pornography to rape, video games to mass murder, high consumption of margarine to divorces in Maine…Whoops. The first three of these are common juxtapositions of parallel trend lines, and the fourth is from the website Spurious Correlations, the work of a Harvard Law School student named Tyler Vigen [`16].