Matthew Stephenson

For over a year, a global mystery has been growing: Why are so many governments around the world collapsing amid corruption scandals? Attention is now focused on South Korea, where the Parliament voted Friday to impeach President Park Geun-hye...“The normal institutions of justice — the courts, the prosecutors, the auditors, the ombudsmen, you name it — are themselves so thoroughly corrupted that you can steal with impunity,” said Matthew C. Stephenson, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies corruption. That batters public trust, and strengthens the perception that corruption is universal and unavoidable.

Enforcement of the U.S. law against foreign bribery, considered a hallmark in the global fight against corruption, may drop during the Trump administration, some experts said. Others disagreed, however, saying it was too early to tell or that the new administration may want to show it’s serious...Matthew Stephenson, a professor at the Harvard Law School, wrote a post on the Global Anti-Corruption Blog this week saying the “era of vigorous FCPA enforcement…is over.” “It’s hard for me to imagine that the attorney general of a Trump administration…would make prosecuting foreign bribery a significant priority, or would devote substantial resources to this area,” he wrote. “It might take a little while for the change to become apparent–there are still some cases in the pipeline, after all–but I’d be shocked if the U.S. maintained anything like its current level of FCPA enforcement.”

There is a fun legal theory floating around advocating one way the Obama administration could resolve the mess over Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. In brief, the theory says this: A few months from now, Garland could just show up at the Supreme Court building and start working...Dahlia Lithwick has a rundown of the theory, which comes from this Yale Law Review article by Matthew Stephenson, a law professor at Harvard. The idea takes off from the Take Care Clause of the Constitution, which says that the president “must take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and the Appointments Clause...According to Stephenson, there is occasional tension between these two clauses, and it has become more pronounced in our highly polarized modern moment, because the president appoints cabinet secretaries, agency heads, and other executive positions as essentially surrogates to carry out his agenda, denying him the ability to make these appointments keeps whole swaths of the Executive Branch from functioning, thus inhibiting his ability to faithfully execute the laws.

It’s hard to imagine a public official with more toys than Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, who spent $300 million on Ferraris, a Gulfstream jet, a California mansion and even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” jacket. The buying spree is all the more remarkable since this scion of the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea, one of Africa’s smallest countries, bought all this while on an official salary of $100,000 a year. ... “This is not like a murder, where you have a body,” said Matthew C. Stephenson, a professor at Harvard Law School and editor of the Global Anticorruption blog. “Financial crimes are much more complicated.”

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a new policy that gives companies a clearer idea of what to expect when self-reporting foreign corruption violations to the government, a move strikingly similar to a corporate-minded approach to criminal liability advocated by law professor Jennifer Arlen at New York University....Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson described the process of calibrating corporate liability as finding a balance of carrots and sticks. But he has warned such a corporate pass policy may encourage companies to push compliance responsibility solely to individuals. Companies might have “much weaker incentives to invest substantial resources in effective training, integrity promotion, or other activities designed to prevent bribe-paying,” Mr. Stephenson wrote recently.

The ranks of the Harvard Law School faculty expanded over the summer with the arrival of three new assistant professors and two new tenured professors of law. The hires are part of an effort to bring about a net increase of 15 faculty members over the next decade.