Elizabeth Warren has been taking quite a bit of flak for recent revelations that she allowed Harvard to claim her as a “minority hire” during her time at Harvard Law School . The claim struck many as dishonest: Warren appears to be Caucasian, and not a Cherokee Indian, and one would expect that she experienced very little racial discrimination as a child growing up.

But while Warren has been suffering from political jibes, most commentators have not reflected their ire at Harvard University , the institution which had initially made the dubious claim that Warren did not rebut. On MindingTheCampus.com, I argue that the absurd, indeed trivial, claim about Warren ’s ancestry makes perfect sense when one considers the nature of Harvard University today: a highly corporatized PR machine, focused more on burnishing its brand and its image as a “diverse” and “multicultural” institution, rather than on disseminating truth. The university’s role in creating the “diversity” myth surely adds a layer of irony to Harvard’s institutional – indeed, corporate – motto: VERITAS.

You can find the piece by clicking here:

This summer, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in the case Arizona v. United States, and decide the constitutionality of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB 1070. On Forbes.com this week, my research assistant Daniel R. Schwartz and I argue that no matter the outcome of Arizona v. United States, a series of oppressive violations of immigrants' rights—and some truly shocking civil liberties violations—currently enshrined into law are unlikely to disappear.

You can find the article here. 

John Emshwiller and Gary Fields of The Wall Street Journal have been producing a series of front-page stories about overcriminalization in the United States, with a focus on vague and overbroad statutes, especially federal statutes. Their stories have highlighted an unfortunate basic fact about living in this country: the Department of Justice has an unconscionable number of laws at its disposal, and they know how to use and abuse them to target the innocent – many of the same themes I’ve covered in my “Injustice Department” series on forbes.com.

But in one of their recent articles about the DOJ’s practice of bringing “false statements” prosecutions, they failed to discuss the most important—and most pernicious—aspect of the feds’ use and abuse of the false statement statute. These false statements prosecutions must be understood in conjunction with the FBI’s deliberate policy not to record their interrogations and interviews of targets and of witnesses, and to instead rely on agents’ “Form 302” reports to supposedly document interviews. The result is a truly corrupting and terrifying combination, and helps to explain the problem Emshwiller and Fields highlight.

You can find a link to our article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2012/04/18/what-the-wall-street-journal-missed-about-false-statements-made-to-the-fbi/