Media Mentions

Cass Sunstein: The most important Supreme Court decision of the 2013 term may well be EPA v. Homer City, which upheld the Environmental Protection Agency’s cross-state air pollution rule…Laurence Tribe: In a year in which the high court weighed in on presidential appointment power, public unions, abortion and religious freedom, many observers will say that the court is reshaping our politics and culture with sweeping pronouncements that inject it squarely into the most salient, controversial issues of the day…Martha Minow: Free speech and religious expression win; equality does less well; growing reliance on communications technologies and on government to address environmental harms informs the law; corporations and employers gain power relative to employees; tensions between branches continue, amid bold assertions of humility…Mark Tushnet: ...The court is constructing what in fancy terms we can call an ideology or philosophy of constitutional law. And, the current court’s philosophy is, broadly speaking, conservative, skeptical of expansive exercises of government power in the domestic arena, tending in a mildly libertarian direction.

In “Uncertain Justice,” Laurence Tribe, the Harvard Law School professor and a pre-eminent authority on the Constitution, and Joshua Matz, a recent graduate of that school and, beginning this fall, a clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, refuse to either “stereotype the justices” or draw the familiar, categorical lines between the court’s liberals and conservatives, its Democratic and Republican appointees, its “activists” and apostles of “restraint.” Instead, Tribe and Matz set out to portray the Roberts court in what they see as its messy complexity.

The nation greets the coming of July each year with fireworks on the National Mall and, days earlier, explosive decisions at the U.S. Supreme Court…The theme of what one wag called "faux-nanimity" repeated itself again and again. "It represents a success in herding cats, but there is deep division underneath," observes Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe…"Precedent is getting a very hard knock all over the place," says Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration.

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Gregory D. Curfman. At the tail end of this year's Supreme Court term, religious freedom came into sharp conflict with the government's interest in providing affordable access to health care. In a consolidated opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Burwell (collectively known as Hobby Lobby) delivered on June 30, the Court sided with religious freedom, highlighting the limitations of our employment-based health insurance system.

Following this week’s Supreme Court ruling that some businesses can refuse to offer contraceptive coverage to employees for religious reasons, a prominent antiabortion group used the case as an argument against Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and other Democrats seeking reelection...Harvard Law School professor Richard Fallon said the high court rarely has had a major impact on off-year elections. But “if we’re in a new era of politics” in which the base plays an increasingly important role, he said, “it’s more possible that it would matter.”

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. Most people don’t associate freedom of speech with a deregulatory economic agenda. But that agenda is an untold story of the Roberts court, and it’s vital to understanding this morning’s decision in Harris v. Quinn.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that closely held, for-profit corporations have a right to exercise the religious beliefs of their owners and therefore cannot be required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide contraception coverage to employees if it conflicts with those views. The Gazette spoke with Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, about the decision and what it means for future corporate challenges to the ACA.

An op-ed by Charles Fried. Taking a page from former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman's book, "The Lost Lawyer," at Harvard as at many other law schools we try to teach our students that being a good lawyer is not just thinking of clever legal arguments to beat our clients' adversaries but offering our clients persuasive, wise counsel. There has been sad evidence lately that this lesson may not be getting across. Among those belatedly fired by General Motors Corp. in the faulty-ignition-switch fiasco were whole teams of lawyers who advised that cases be closed with confidential settlements and apparently did not persuasively urge prompt admissions and safety recalls.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia could have ridden to the rescue of public employee unions in Harris vs. Quinn, the important labor rights case the Court decided Monday, as some scholars thought he might. But he didn't. "The dicta in Harris about Abood is serious, and it shows that some number of Justices would like to overturn Abood," writes Benjamin Sachs, a labor law expert at Harvard Law School. In other words, there might be a plurality to overturn Abood, but not a majority. Sounds like a hairsbreadth escape for Abood, this time.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision on recess appointments has been treated as a big loss for the Barack Obama administration. That's narrow thinking, in terms of the arc of constitutional law and the system of separation of powers. A look at the actual opinions shows that the most important questions in the case produced a sharp split between Justice Antonin Scalia's approach to constitutional interpretation and that of Justice Stephen Breyer -- long Scalia's principal intellectual adversary. The outcome was an unambiguous victory for Breyer.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Chief Justice John Roberts' announcement yesterday that Justice Samuel Alito would deliver both of the Supreme Court final decisions for the term marked a personal triumph for Alito. Thus far, his year at the court had been relatively quiet. He’d for the most part refrained from any dramatic concurrences or dissents -- as though keeping his powder dry for Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the biggest religious-liberty decision in years.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Today, in the U.S. Supreme Court's much-anticipated Hobby Lobby case, swing Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to cut the unborn baby in half. He joined four conservatives, signing a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito stating that closely held corporations are exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Labor unions lost a legal battle today as the U.S. Supreme Court held, 5-4, that “partial” public employees can’t be required to contribute to unions to cover the cost of collective bargaining. The unions averted, for now, a far greater disaster: the possibility that the court would reverse its precedent and hold that no public employees at all can be made to contribute to unions' collective-bargaining costs. That result could’ve broken many public unions. But the sword of Damocles still hangs over them.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. We are witnessing another swing of the pendulum in the way the U.S. conducts surveillance. This time, to ensure that National Security Agency programs remain effective without violating people's privacy, Congress needs to ensure that the NSA is subject to better judicial oversight.

About 700,000 of Facebook’s one billion or so users recently served as test subjects in a psychology experiment. Researchers altered the users’ “news feeds” — the news stories and photos that roll across everyone’s Facebook’s home page…The clearly marked ads we understand — nothing hidden about that agenda. But for everything else, “people really are trusting them to be acting more or less in their interests,” said Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain…The US does not have anywhere near the same attitude toward regulating the Internet as Europe, and even if we were to adopt tougher restrictions here, Zittrain points out those would likely violate the companies’ First Amendment right to publish what they choose. So Zittrain suggests an alternative — Internet gatekeepers would voluntarily agree to abide by ethical standards similar to what doctors, lawyers and financial planners pledge. Those standards would codified in the companies’ terms of service, so they would be legally bound to follow them.

POISON pills are again being dispensed by corporate America with all the enthusiasm of an exterminator in a rat-infested basement. The metaphorical rodents nowadays are not just hostile bidders—the pests that the poison-pill defence was designed to exterminate, back in the 1980s—but in some cases shareholders simply trying to change the way companies are run…Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor and campaigner for corporate-governance reforms, calls this “pernicious”: the board would be seeking to stifle legitimate debate among the owners of the company by making it hard to build a majority for change.

The “super PAC to end all super PACs” reached its fund-raising goal in just over two months, but now comes the hard part: winning elections. The Mayday PAC, a project begun May 1 by the Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, seeks to elect a Congress that will achieve “fundamental reform in the way political campaigns are funded by 2016,” beginning with five pilot races in this year’s House elections. In a July 4 posting to supporters after announcing the PAC reached its goal, Mr. Lessig wrote, “You have guaranteed” change.

An op-ed by Cass R. Sunstein. Consider this hypothesis about modern presidential elections: Whenever American voters elect a new president, they choose someone who is, along a critical dimension, the antithesis of the incumbent. The Incumbent Antithesis hypothesis, as I’ll call it, fits recent history, and it may be correct. If so, it suggests a real challenge for the next Democratic nominee, even if it is Hillary Clinton -- perhaps especially if it is.

Years after the end of the recession, enrollment at the nation’s law schools continues to plummet, a wrenching shift that has forced many schools to cut expenses and raised concerns about the long-term financial prospects of some…At Harvard, applications for the first-year class of about 600 are up significantly this year, a promising sign and part of a national increase among students who score high on the LSAT. “The turn-around at the top of the pool shows that people who are serious about law school are coming back,” said Jessica Soban, assistant dean and chief admissions officer at Harvard Law School.

Celebrated Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree convened a distinguished panel of speakers to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Governor Deval Patrick and Attorney General Martha Coakley, responding to last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s buffer zone law, called Wednesday for legislation to crack down on harassment and obstruction outside abortion clinics…But Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said that any effort to narrowly tailor the legislation could go too far and appear to target antiabortion protesters for the content of their speech. Crafting “a package that is limited to the abortion situation just raises the suspicion that these are all indirect ways of suppressing antiabortion speech,” he said.