Media Mentions

An article by Elena Chachko: The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of diplomatic, political, economic and military responses. But more than in previous geopolitical crises, tech giants’ policies and sanctions have played a major role in the Ukraine conflict, alongside those of states and international organizations. Companies like Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and even TikTok increasingly recognize that they cannot afford to sit geopolitical crises out.

You won’t find Red Pill News or the X22 Report on YouTube anymore. The far-right online shows were taken down in the fall of 2020 after the major social media and tech companies started purging accounts that spread the QAnon conspiracy theory. But you will find both of them on a video-sharing platform called Rumble, where their content ranks among the most popular on the site. ... “It’s an intensely engaged population,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who is a co-author of a book about the ways conservative outlets reinforce their messages through repetition and shut down dissent. For an individual platform like Rumble, he added, the audience is likely to be larger than whatever the size is on paper.

Conservative activists have lodged a record number of shareholder proposals at US annual meetings this year, setting up a highly politicised proxy season as they take advantage of new regulatory guidelines and borrow topics and tactics from their liberal foes. ... Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor who studies shareholder resolutions, said that sharply worded proposals sometimes draw attention but their impact may be limited. “The pressure [chief executives] are facing is not so much the number of proposals but what percentage of support they think the proposals will get,” he said. “When they think a proposal will not get many votes, it is not a source of pressure that would lead them to do anything different.”

Washington obsesses over how many Republicans will vote for the eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, or Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) latest attention-getting move, or the forever tribulations of Vice President Kamala Harris. There's a lot more real action out in the states, at least in the red states. They are shredding rights for voting, minorities, women, gays and people with disabilities. ... “This is political demagoguery,” says Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, an expert on the subject. It's used mainly, he told me, by right-wingers to “smear any liberal who advances a progressive race agenda.” There are, he adds, critical race theorists who “spout implausible and sometimes downright ugly theories,” which serve to give “oxygen to the right-wing campaign of repression.”

Occasionally a Supreme Court case puts its dominant block of Justices in the difficult position of having to choose between two deeply held policy goals. How they resolve this conflict offers a glimpse of their cultural and political values and interpretive commitments in action. This political quandary was visible last week when the Court released its decision in Ramirez v Collier. Ramirez required the current conservative majority to choose between its longstanding desire to expedite executions and its commitment to offering expansive protections to religious freedom. ... Writing about such interest balancing almost sixty years ago, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried said that it did little to constrain judges. Interest balancing, Fried said, “neither compels a precise solution nor even precludes one.”

Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said that Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "must be subpoenaed" by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack against the U.S. Capitol after her text messages with a top Trump administration official were reported this past week. ... "I agree fully with NYU's Stephen Gillers," Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe posted to Twitter on Friday. "Justice Thomas must take no part in the consideration of any case related to the 2020 election, the 1/6 Committee, the attempted coup, or the insurrection."

Back in the 1990s, when I was a reporter in Japan, one of the most prescient commentators about financial trends I knew was Chris Wood, the veteran reporter-turned-stock-market-analyst, who predicted the collapse of the Japanese bubble, and now writes perceptively about global markets for Jefferies. ... But the rise of these ESG-linked bonus metrics can be dangerous to shareholders, employees and the environment, according to research published this month by Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita at Harvard Law School. Too often, these new ESG-linked bonuses are vague, opaque and “can be exploited by self-interested CEOs to inflate their pay-offs, with little or no accountability for actual performance,” they said.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Pioneers and Pathfinders, we present this "best of" episode, featuring our first guest, Dr. Heidi Gardner. Dr. Gardner is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession and faculty chair of the school's Accelerated Leadership Program and Sector Leadership Masterclass. She is also the best-selling author of Smart Collaboration and noted thought leader on the topics of collaboration, lateral hiring, in-house legal teams, leadership, and performance.

The 2022 Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Distinguished Speakers Series at Harvard Law School put a spotlight on the toxic health effects of burn pits, and featured a keynote address by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

Legal experts quickly knocked former President Donald Trump's lawsuit filed Thursday targeting former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and a number of others—calling it "absurd" and "garbage." Trump's attorneys filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, claiming that Clinton and other members of the DNC "orchestrated an unthinkable plot—one that shocks the conscience and is an affront to this nation's democracy." The alleged plot in question involved falsifying records and manipulating data in an attempt to "cripple Trump's bid for presidency" during the 2016 election, they contend. ... "An absurd lawsuit by an absurdly litigious former president who has only himself to blame for being compromised by Putin and thus looking like he is compromised by Russia," Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, tweeted on Thursday.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearings may have been historic, in that she is the first Black woman nominated for the Supreme Court. But they have not been without precedent, at least with regard to questions on crime and race that she faced from some Republican senators, such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who have tried to portray her as "soft on crime." ... Guy-Uriel Charles, a professor at Harvard Law School, attributed that to what he described as a combination of "extreme partisanship" and racial and gender dynamics. "There's no doubt that the Republicans are trying to score as many partisan points as they possibly can with their base, and that they believe that there is some retribution to be paid for past Republican nominees," such as Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, he said. "So part of their motivation is clearly partisan. One has to account for that."

The way activist investing works in the U.S. is generally that an activist investor quietly buys up a chunk of a company’s stock, announces that she owns the stock, and goes to the company’s managers asking them to change something about their strategy or operations. Sometimes the managers agree, there is a productive conversation, the activist helps the company improve, the stock goes up and eventually the activist sells at a profit. Sometimes the managers disagree, and the activist tries to pressure them into doing what she wants. She might wage a public campaign, writing open letters explaining her position. She might talk to other shareholders — big institutional holders who don’t wage activist campaigns themselves but who own a lot of stock — to persuade them that she is right. ... And here is a comment letter from Harvard Law School professor Lucian Bebchuk: For hedge fund activists that accumulate economic positions in a target with significant market value through equity swaps, the Equity Swap Rule would lead to disclosure of the activist’s potential interest in engaging with the company at a much earlier time and stage of accumulation than under current rules. Disclosure at such an early stage would curtail the ability of such activists to accumulate a position prior to their initial disclosure. Such early disclosure would also enable management to start engaging in defensive actions much earlier than under current rules. Altogether, for such activists, the Equity Swap Rule would substantially reduce their payoffs and considerably discourage their activities.

Over and over again during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republicans denounced the idea of “packing the Court”  by expanding the number of justices from nine to 13. But Wednesday’s decision rejecting Wisconsin’s voting maps and throwing the 2022 election process — which is already underway — into chaos, demonstrates that Republicans have packed the Court already. ... Former federal judge and Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner argues that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has been undermined by Republican efforts to “manipulate its membership” and to roll back voting rights. Our democratic institutions are in crisis at every level. As Gertner puts it, “This is a uniquely perilous moment that requires a unique response.” Gerner favors expanding the U.S. Supreme Court to push back against the gathering threats to democracy.

Former San Antonio mayor and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro is adding professor to his resume. A son of San Antonio's Westside, Castro will pull from his experiences on the local and federal level to teach a Harvard Law School course on leadership and urban America. ... Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Harvard Law School Professor John F. Manning spoke of Castro's preparedness for a role in higher education in a statement for the announcement.  “Secretary Castro has been a thoughtful and impactful public servant at both the local and federal levels, and we are delighted that he will share with our students the deep insights and experience he has gained relating to cities and housing in the 21st century,” Manning, a 1985 Harvard graduate, said. “I’m thrilled to welcome him back to HLS.”

As a lawyer in Ukraine pursuing a U.S. law degree, Dmytro Tymoshchenko is well versed in contracts, negotiation and intellectual property. Over the past month, he has picked up new skills: preparing Molotov cocktails and sourcing supplies to help Ukraine's military repel Russian forces. ... “We’ve put on hold our life here and are trying to understand what’s going on and trying to help,” said Ukrainian lawyer Svitlana Starosvit, who is on track to earn a doctorate of juridical science at Harvard Law School in May. A former lawyer in Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Starosvit has spoken to law students about the situation in Ukraine and the role of international law in combating aggression.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is defending her record during the second day of hearings on her nomination to the Supreme Court. Alan Jenkins, professor of practice at Harvard Law School, joins CBS News' Tanya Rivero and Nikki Battiste with more on how the judge is responding to certain lines of questioning.

After all of the entreaties from top Republicans to show respect at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday afternoon chose to grill the first Black woman nominated for the Supreme Court on her views on critical race theory and insinuate that she was soft on child sexual abuse. The message from the Texas Republican seemed clear: A Black woman vying for a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land would, Mr. Cruz suggested, coddle criminals, go easy on pedophiles and subject white people to the view that they were, by nature, oppressors. ... But to Mark Victor Tushnet, a Harvard law professor who clerked for Justice Marshall, the attacks against Judge Jackson have been far less veiled than those against Justice Marshall. “Dog whistles are supposed to be things that you can’t hear but that you receive in the subconscious,” Mr. Tushnet said. “This is all quite open.”

President Joe Biden's struggles to deliver on his ambitious climate agenda are getting a big boost from the leader of one often overlooked agency who is scrutinizing the greenhouse gas emissions of energy infrastructure and the environmental harms facing low-income people and communities of color. Now, that official, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Richard Glick, may see his efforts to put climate change at the forefront of federal energy policy cost him his job. Glick's departure could stall FERC's work in updating transmission policies and market rules to support the development and expansion of clean energy, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “The worst case scenario would be a split commission,” he said.

Virginia voted in 2020 to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the 38th state to do so, pushing the measure past the required three-fourths majority to make ERA the 28th Amendment. It’s not recognized as such yet, but should be, according to two constitutional scholars. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, released today opinion letters from Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus, and Russ Feingold, president of the American Constitution Society. “My conclusion as a constitutional scholar is that the ERA is currently a valid part of the United States Constitution, that Congress should act concurrently to recognize it as such, and that even if Congress takes no such action the Archivist should publish it as the Twenty-Eight Amendment,” Tribe said.

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, about Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's judicial philosophy.

The formerly anonymous attorney suing the leaders of the federal judiciary over their alleged mishandling of her complaints of on-the-job sexual harassment has officially revealed her identity. Former assistant federal public defender Caryn Devins Strickland acknowledged in a court filing Monday that she is the plaintiff known as Jane Roe in the much-watched lawsuit against the Judicial Conference, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the Fourth Circuit and others. The Fourth Circuit issued an order amending the case's caption to replace "Jane Roe" with Strickland's name Tuesday. ... Strickland is represented by Jeannie Suk Gersen and Cooper Strickland.