Science & Technology

As the 2020 Tanner Lecturer on Human Values at Clare Hall, Cambridge, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain explores the clash of free speech and public health online.

Even if there was no COVID-19, online courts would still be the wave of the future: This idea was the starting point for a recent webinar, “Online Courts: Perspectives from the Bench and the Bar,” a half-day event convened by the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.

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.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society researchers Yochai Benkler and Robert Faris document how polarized media in the United States shape political discourse and the 2020 election.

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

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.

Andrew H. Choi ’23 was eager for a serious challenge in his first Army posting, so he chose as radically different an environment as he could imagine: Fairbanks, Alaska.

By March 17, just two weeks after Texas reported its first case of COVID-19, Judge Emily Miskel ’08 was back on the figurative bench, presiding over a one-hour virtual temporary restraining order hearing from home.

In an effort to combat multiple potential vectors of attack on the 2020 U.S. election, two Berkman Klein Center affiliates have published a package of “tabletop exercises,” freely available to decisionmakers and the public to simulate realistic scenarios in which disinformation threatens to disrupt the 2020 election.

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.”

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.

“Confused,” “frustrating,” “fragmented,” “acute,” and “a reckoning” were just some of the ways three health care experts described the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic during a recent Berkman Klein virtual discussion.

“I’ve always had a passion for engaging in my curiosity,” says João Marinotti ‘20, a linguist turned lawyer whose work focuses on sustainability, business, property, and private law.

With a background in chemical engineering and business, Brian Kulp ’20 is eyeing a future in appellate law

Student fellows at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics recently celebrated their fellowships’ end virtually when their capstone meeting moved to Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students, faculty and staff in the Harvard Law School's Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic are still hard at work, pushing back against the current administration’s attempts to undo environmental regulations approved under former President Barack Obama ’91.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is currently taking the lead in the effort to explore the ways data can be mined to increase understanding of COVID-19 and to fight it more efficiently.

In a Q&A, scholars at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School raise important legal and ethical questions about health care delivery and the enactment of extraordinary public health measures in response to the ongoing epidemic.

Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program filed its first Supreme Court brief challenging the Trump administration’s waiver of laws regarding the U.S.-Mexico border wall construction. Ashley Maiolatesi ’20 recently corresponded with Harvard Law Today about what is at stake, the specific ramifications of these waivers, and her own personal connection to the project.

This month, Harvard Law Professors Jim Greiner and I. Glenn Cohen teamed up with bioethics scholar Holly Fernandez Lynch to author “Overcoming obstacles to experiments in legal practice,” in which the collaborators argue in favor of randomized studies in legal research over the common practice of relying on the expertise and judgment of individuals.