Media Mentions

…There are various reasons why international adoption is changing rapidly, including the embrace of The Hague Protocol and, in some parts of the world, a backlash to international adoption. Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who is director of its child advocacy program, said some charities have played a role in declining international adoptions by lobbying developing countries to stop allowing international adoptions, saying the children are better off in their own countries. Bartholet disagrees. “If you look overall at the kids placed, overwhelmingly they do really well and end up with really good, loving and nurturing parents.” The alternative, she added, is often institutionalization, which is bad for children.

The Westmoreland Hemp & Ganja Farmers Association has published a petition requesting that Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller free the parish from the ganja laws in the form of an authoritative "non-enforcement declaration" from Cabinet, which will allow the association to grow and trade, within the parish, free from prosecution. The petition, which was submitted by Triston Thompson, Paul Burke, Delano Seiveright and Fern and Charles Nesson, Harvard law professor, said the issuance of the prospective declaration of non-enforcement of ganja laws in Westmoreland would allow the association to "exemplify for all the parishes of Jamaica the responsible integration of cannabis culture into Jamaican society".

Andrew Manuel Crespo ’08, an expert in criminal law and criminal justice, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School in 2015 as an Assistant Professor of Law. Crespo is currently a staff attorney in the Trial Division of the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where he represents defendants in jury trials and other proceedings in the criminal process, and also assists in the training of other criminal defense attorneys.

Qiong Dai and her husband had an offer on their Southborough home and were ready to move into their new place in Wellesley when the sale collapsed two weeks ago. The problem: They had purchased their Southborough Colonial in a foreclosure sale in 2007, and the title to it was among the hundreds in Massachusetts muddied because of sloppy paperwork by previous lenders. That made the house hard to sell now…“Three years strikes me as a very short period of time,” said Max Weinstein, who works at the Jamaica Plain-based Legal Services Center, a Harvard Law School group that helps low-income clients. Weinstein said he fears that lenders will just keep troubled homeowners in limbo for three years — easily done, given the amount of time it takes to work through the foreclosure process — until the time to sue for the title expires.

Ten years ago, many political activists had high hopes for the Internet…From the world of academia, Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler argued that the Internet had enabled the rise of a new “networked public sphere” that was more open to diverse voices and less driven by big money, and that this new media system would nurture a politics that was more small-d democratic. Over the years, Benkler has pointed to a series of Net-driven successes, including the 2004 blogger-led boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting, the Diebold voting machine scandal, the many revelations published by WikiLeaks, and the grass-roots defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) as proof of this power shift.

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about breaking a glass ceiling,” says Michele Roberts, the new executive director of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). She went ahead and shattered one anyway…“As a trial lawyer, you have to clarify minds, and change minds,” says Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who recruited Roberts to the public defender’s office. “She does the homework, and understands the arguments that need to be made. There won’t be a time when someone across the bargaining table doesn’t say, ‘Wow, I learned something.’”

A new SuperPAC aims to reduce the influence of big money in politics — and it's starting by raising millions of dollars, in part from wealthy donors…Lawrence Lessig: In 2016, we want to raise a substantially larger amount of money - could be 200 million, could be 800 million - so that we can win a Congress committed to fundamental reform in the way campaigns are funded.

The American Bar Association will honor Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, with its Thurgood Marshall Award at its annual meeting in Boston. The award recognizes members of the legal profession for long-term contributions to advancing civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights in the United States.

When a catastrophic event like the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 occurs, there is an understandable demand for accountability…But the question stands: Where can justice be found?…Even if all these jurisdictional hurdles could be overcome and the ICC gets the chance to conduct an investigation, a successful prosecution is still far from inevitable. A prosecution would likely involve war crimes charges of murder and attacking civilians, says Alex Whiting, a professor of practice in international criminal law at Harvard. He adds, however, that this would require the prosecutor to prove the rebels "actually knew that they were targeting civilians."

The Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Carol Pforzheimer Professor of Advanced Studies at the Radcliffe Institute, Annette Gordon-Reed has become the authority not only on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship but also on the legacy, sensibility, and politics of our brilliant yet hypocritical third president…who owned more than 100 slaves when he declared all men to be equal…My guest is now exploring the more up-to-date lineage of the Hemings family. She then plans a biography of Jefferson that will illuminate his life as a slaveholder. As cases of sexual scandal ensnaring our elected officials persist, Gordon-Reed’s investigative lens is ever relevant, as is her illumination of America’s moral complexity.

When he arrived at the Texas border, Celvyn Mejia Romero was a scared 10-year-old, with a machete scar and memories of a murdered uncle as reminders of why he'd embarked on a long, perilous journey from Honduras…"He explained the harm he had suffered but he couldn't really explain the underlying reasons," John Willshire-Carrera, co-managing director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Greater Boston Legal Services, says of his client…"The process has become more responsive to children's needs ...," says Nancy Kelly, the Boston clinic's co-managing director. "On the other hand, a series of decisions have been made which seem to be making it harder for children who, in our opinion, are true refugees from getting relief because of the way gang-related harm is viewed."

Despite including a tax, Obamacare doesn’t violate the Constitution’s requirement that all tax bills originate in the House of Representatives, a key appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling that gives the Obama administration a health care win before the courts…Legal scholars say origination clause challenges, historically, have been a tough sell in the courts. Indeed, it is “very rarely litigated,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a health expert at Harvard Law School who said “it has only been considered by the U.S. Supreme Court a handful of times.”

President Barack Obama could act without congressional approval to limit a key incentive for US corporations to move their tax domiciles abroad in so-called "inversion" deals, a former senior US Treasury Department official said on Monday. By invoking a 1969 tax law, Obama could bypass congressional gridlock and restrict foreign tax-domiciled U.S companies from using inter-company loans and interest deductions to cut their US tax bills, said Stephen Shay, former deputy assistant Treasury secretary for international tax affairs in the Obama administration.

The U.S. Treasury Department should use immediate stopgap regulations to make offshore transactions known as corporate inversions less lucrative, said the department’s former top international tax lawyer. The administration can unilaterally limit inverted companies from taking interest deductions in the U.S. or from accessing their foreign cash without paying U.S. taxes, Stephen Shay said in an interview and in an article published today in Tax Notes. “If you take away the incentives, a large portion of these deals would not happen because they are indeed tax-motivated,” said Shay, who left the Obama administration in 2011 and is now a professor at Harvard Law School.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig discusses money in politics and his crowdfunded PAC’s election strategy. He speaks on ‘Market Makers.”

An unlikely alliance of liberal intellectuals, big donors and Republican strategists has hit on a solution to the influence of big money in politics: even more money. Starting Monday, the recently formed Mayday “super PAC” began a $12 million advertising campaign to help elect lawmakers of both parties who support proposals to diminish the influence of big donors. The PAC is the most ambitious effort yet to turn dismay over supersize contributions into a winning political issue. “Inside-the-Beltway people don’t think this issue matters, they don’t think voters vote on the basis of this issue, and they advise their politicians not to talk about it,” said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School with ties to Silicon Valley who is a founder of the Mayday PAC with Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. “We think this issue does matter, and we want to prove it.”

A federal appeals panel on Tuesday blocked a Mississippi law that would have shut the sole abortion clinic in the state by requiring its doctors to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals, something they had been unable to do…Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said that the principle of state responsibility enunciated by the circuit court “is deeply established and fully entrenched.” “It goes not only to the issue of reproductive freedom but to the very character of the federal union,” he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. While we endure endless speculation about who will run for president in 2016, an important question is being left unaddressed: How will the ultimate winner be able to take any useful action?

If a U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage looks inevitable, perhaps it is. Since a pivotal high court ruling 13 months ago, gay-marriage advocates have tallied more than two dozen lower court victories without a single defeat. With this week’s decision in Virginia, two federal appeals courts have now backed same-sex marriage. Courts have consistently read last year’s ruling, U.S. v. Windsor, as undercutting any rationale for state bans. “I can’t think of any Supreme Court decision in history that has ever created so rapid and broad a lower-court groundswell in a single direction as Windsor,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “Nor can I think of any historical examples in which lower courts have so overwhelmingly and universally read a Supreme Court decision one way, only to have the court say ‘Never mind, you’ve all gotten it wrong.’”

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, recently said, “I love America.” Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, wrote an opinion article saying, “Investing in America still produces the best return.”Yet guess who’s behind the recent spate of merger deals in which major United States corporations have renounced their citizenship in search of a lower tax bill? Wall Street banks, led by JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs…“This is an economic game. There are no virgins anywhere,” said Stephen E. Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary for international tax affairs in the Obama administration. “We can’t look to the banks to stop inversions. They will not look at this based on morality. They will look at it on the basis of fees.”

An op-ed by Charles Ogletree. I have wondered countless times over the past 30 years whether I would live to see the end of the death penalty in the United States. I now know that day will come, and I believe that the current Supreme Court will be its architect.