Faculty Scholarship

Public health expert Carmel Shachar discusses the COVID-19 vaccine, who is likely to get it first, and whether people can be required to get vaccinated.

Can President Donald J. Trump pardon himself before his term ends in January? This hotly debated legal question was given new urgency by the president’s recent decision to pardon Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia.

Experts gathered this week to discuss the ethical, social, and legal implications of technological advancements that facilitate the early detection of dementia.

“The Connected Parent,” a new book by John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03  is a practical guide for addressing concerns brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and navigating an increasingly digital world.

Jack Goldsmith speaks with the Bulletin about the most effective approach to regulating the executive branch, “the absolute low point” of presidential relations with the press, and the one issue on which he, an independent, and his co-author, a Democrat, could not agree.

Cass Sunstein ’78, Robert Walmsley University Professor and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, believes “Nudge theory” might help bridge the gap between supply and demand for organ transplants.

In a recent Harvard Gazette roundup, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Phil Torrey and other university scholars, analysts, and affiliates took a look at what the election tells us about the prospects for greater unity and progress, and offered suggestions and predictions about where the new administration will, and should, go.

Professor Jim Greiner at the Access to Justice Lab is aiming to find out whether the practice of law can be transformed by using evidence to determine which legal interventions are safe and effective, both for individuals in the justice system and society as a whole.

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.