Faculty Scholarship

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election in the United States, experts from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society convened to discuss how platforms are approaching mis- and disinformation and what they can improve going forward.

In an “Election 2020 Debrief” event, a panel of Harvard Law School professors agree that the essential divisions of the American electorate remain unresolved, but find cause for some highly cautious optimism.

On Nov. 3, voters in Massachusetts and Alaska will have the opportunity to adopt ranked-choice voting (RCV) statewide. HLS Lecturer Peter Brann argues that Maine has led the nation in adopting the system that better ensures that the most popular candidate in any election wins.

Lawrence Lessig discusses institutional threats to representative democracy.

In “The Arab Winter: A Tragedy,” Feldman writes: “People whose political lives had been determined and shaped from the outside tried politics for themselves, and for a time succeeded. That this did not lead to constitutional democracy or even to a more decent life for most of those affected is not a reason to believe that the effort was meaningless.”

New works on redeeming the administrative state, navigating parenting in a world in which children are immersed in technology, and understanding the importance of understanding how much information you need.

A month ahead of elections in Myanmar, the International Human Rights Clinic and 18 organizations released a major report documenting and analyzing the role that hate speech, rampant misinformation campaigns, and ultranationalism have played in the resurgence of oppression and human rights violations in the country.

Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice recently co-authored amicus curiae briefs in two Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court cases with significant impact on racial profiling.

The Harvard Gazette recently asked Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law Robert Anderson, and other members of the Harvard community, “Is this the end of Columbus Day, and how can America best replace it?” 

In the “good old days” of cybersecurity risk, we only had to worry about being hacked or downloading malware. But the stakes have ramped up considerably in the past decade, say Berkman Klein directors James Mickens and Jonathan Zittrain.

In an interview with Harvard Law Today, Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, says that political interference in the FDA’s process for ensuring that a vaccine is both safe and effective “opens the door to a public health disaster.”

This Saturday, October 3, 2020, the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School and the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law will launch a year-long pilot project called “The Justice Initiative” with the first of 10, three-hour programming sessions.

A new report from Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and a team of researchers from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society shows that the mail-in voting fraud disinformation campaign—intentionally spreading false information in order to deceive—is largely led by political elites and the mass media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the health disparities that result from systemic and structural racism. But while the law has created these disparities, it may also provide opportunities to correct them.

A new report from the HLS International Human Rights Clinic and the Conflict and Environment Observatory establishes a new framework for addressing human harm resulting from the environmental consequences of conflict.

Harvard Law Today spoke Monday with tax experts Keith Fogg and Thomas Brennan about the New York Times' report on President Donald J. Trump’s taxes.

In the first of a seven-part series about policing in America, experts discuss how this moment may be an inflection point.

Anti-corruption law expert Matthew Stephenson focuses his recent scholarship on anticorruption reform in U.S. history.

Mark Tushnet discussed with Harvard Law Today the possibilities for, and potential pitfalls of, any effort by an incoming Democratic majority to pack the Supreme Court.

In the first colloquium of a sweeping new series, “COVID-19 and the Law,” five Harvard Law faculty members grappled with the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of governmental powers during a public health crisis.

Cass Sunstein ’78, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, has been tapped by the World Health Organization to chair its Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health.