Harvard Law & Policy Review

Archives for January 2016

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Technology Development Needs a Culture of Adaptation

By Sam King* Bad technology is pervasive, but it doesn't have to be. Healthcare.gov's initial problems threatened to derail the Affordable Care Act and took a tremendous effort to fix. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has 98,000 disability claims that have been in a backlog for over 125 days, partly because the technology wasn't adapting to changing needs. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because NASA used metric units and Lockheed Martin used English units. Because of many issues like …

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Citizens Will Suffer if Political Parties Extend Citizens United Even Further

By Peg Perl* Today is the sixth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The electorate has survived three election cycles of being bombarded by advertising funded by almost unlimited amounts of outside group spending in candidate races from local school board to President of the United States, most of it minimally disclosed—if at all. Yet, the major political parties are arguing publicly that they—not the voters—are the true victims of …

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Let’s Stop Asking “Should We Legalize Marijuana?”

By Andrew Freedman* Samuel Caldwell was relaxing in Colorado’s Lexington Hotel when federal agents pounded at his door. It was October 2, 1937, and Caldwell would become the first American arrested for selling marijuana. Seventy-seven years later, a few miles away from the old Lexington hotel, Iraq War veteran Sean Azzariti became the first person to ever buy legal, regulated, recreational marijuana. In the intervening years, America has been torn apart by diametrically opposed and deeply …

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That’s Him, I Think; The Role of the Police in Eyewitness Identification Reform

By Chief William G. Brooks III* In the words of U.S. Supreme Court justice William Brennan, there is "nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant, and says 'That's the one!'"  But we now know that such compelling evidence can be wrong.  According to the Innocence Project, of the 336 prisoners freed after DNA proved they were innocent, over 70% went to prison after an eyewitness mistakenly identified them as the offender.  In other …

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