Media Mentions

The top three U.S. law schools have joined forces to track law firms' policies on working for Russian clients in the wake of that country’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, accusing some of "splitting hairs about which clients they will avoid." Law professors at Stanford, Yale, and Harvard categorized statements by major U.S. and U.K. law firms regarding their Moscow offices and Russia-related work, calling on them to fully cut ties with the Kremlin, state-owned or controlled firms, and sanctioned entities and people. ... Harvard law professor John Coates said Thursday that researchers hope to expand the scope of the list and to monitor whether firms are living up to their commitments. Such a policing effort would be extremely difficult, however, since many law firm-client relationships are not public.

A former public defender, who has been pursuing a high-profile legal challenge to the federal judiciary's process for handling sexual harassment complaints under a pseudonym, is stepping forward to inform Congress about the judiciary's "unfair and biased" procedures. Caryn Devins Strickland, a former federal public defender in North Carolina, said she decided to shed the pseudonym in order to testify publicly before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee examining sexual harassment in the judiciary. ... The case is Roe v. United States, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 21-1346. For Roe: Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School and Cooper Strickland

A Metro Detroit native and Harvard alum, Stephen L. Ball has been elected Harvard Law School’s new dean of students— making history as the first Black male to hold the title in over two centuries. According to C and G News, the 36-year-old is the first Black male to serve in the role and the second Black person, following the previous appointment of a Black woman to the post. ... “This is such a tremendous opportunity on both a professional and personal level,” said Ball in a press release statement.

Citigroup, one of the largest financial institutions in the United States, has begun offering to pay for travel expenses for employees who travel out of state to access reproductive health care. The new policy, which went into place this year, is "in response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states in the U.S.," the bank said Tuesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). ... "We'll be watching what the details are because that could matter to in terms of whether the court seems open to arguments that abortion is unconstitutional, and states should be disallowed from having abortion be legal within their borders or not," Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and author of "Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present," told ABC News in January. "That will tell us a lot about what states are actually going to be able to do."

An op-ed co-written by Alejandra Caraballo: In February, the indicted Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sent a letter to Texas state representative Matt Krause offering his legal opinion on gender-affirming care for trans youth. His opinion, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, is that such care amounts to child abuse. Texas governor Greg Abbott then vouched for Paxton’s opinion, directing state officials and even private citizens to report and investigate the families of trans youth for affirming their children’s gender identity.

Annie Hollister had designs on a public interest career when she entered law school in fall 2017 as the campaign to organize Harvard University's graduate student workers and teaching assistants geared up for a second election. Hollister had inherited a "vaguely positive attitude" toward unions from her father, a member of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 52. So she was an easy sell when a classmate approached her about signing a union card in the lead-up to a rerun election, but not quite a true believer. ... Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program, said he's observed an uptick in interest in the labor program over the last several years amid broader public attention to unions. Now, labor law courses are overenrolled and students face long waitists to join seminars in advanced labor topics. "My sense is that participation in the graduate student union has been an incredibly important and formative experience for a lot of those students," alongside other initiatives, like the Clean Slate for Worker Power project that reimagines labor law, Sachs said.

"Bottom line – Ukraine got what it wanted from the court in this case, which is the indication of provisional measures asking Russia to stop its military operation," wrote Dr Marko Milanovic, professor of Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law, in the European Journal of International Law, shortly after the ICJ pronounced its order in the case brought on by war-torn Ukraine against Russia. ... Meanwhile, Radhika Kapoor, a program fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict told The Quint: "First, the decision is in some sense an ex parte decision, since Russia all but refused to participate. Second, the application in itself is very convoluted because unlike the genocide case against Myanmar, e.g., this one is sideways: Ukraine is saying we did not commit genocide so how can Russia say they're invading to prevent genocide?"

An op-ed co-written by Laurence Tribe: On 8 March, a jury took three hours to render a guilty verdict against Guy Reffitt, a January 6 insurrectionist. Donald Trump could not have been pleased. DC is where Trump would be tried for any crimes relating to his admitted campaign to overturn the election. Jurors there would have no trouble finding that the evidence satisfies all statutory elements required to convict Trump, including his criminal intent, the most challenging to prove. That is our focus here. A 3 March New York Times story asserted that “[b]uilding a criminal case against Mr Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors ... given the high burden of proof ... [and] questions about Mr Trump’s mental state”.

In less than three weeks, Ukraine’s apartment buildings, once warm homes to families and pets, have become impossible to live in. Infrastructure that once served millions, has become inoperable, unusable. City centers full of shoppers have been reduced to rubble. Hospitals meant to provide care and sanctuary have become scenes of destruction. ... “People are killed in the damage. People are left homeless. People are killed in the rubble as the building collapses. But then there also is environmental damage,” said Bonnie Docherty, associate director of armed conflict and civilian protection at Harvard University’s International Human Rights Clinic. She noted that some buildings contain asbestos or other types of toxic material that could be released in the destruction.

Weeks into the war in Ukraine, Facebook's parent company Meta is poised to tap its oversight board for guidance about a policy shift allowing users in Ukraine to post some calls for violence against Russian invaders. It would mark the first time the panel has formally weighed in on the tech giant's flurry of actions in response to the war, and it could shape its rules on violent rhetoric moving forward. ... The oversight board has effectively been unable to weigh in on any of the tech giant's massive policy shifts in recent weeks, and now that it will, it's on "a very small slice of what Facebook's doing," said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

The media have been quick to rubbish Attorney General Merrick Garland for his failure so far to indict former President Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have tarred him with epithets worthy of Trump himself, such as “Merrick the Mild” and “Merrick the Meek.” And a host of former prosecutors and law professors have criticized his inaction, saying that Garland needs to indict Trump to vindicate the rule of law. ... Frustrated at the inaction, the redoubtable Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has called on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Tribe argues that a special counsel is “the best way to reassure the country that no one is above the law, justice is nonpartisan and fears of political fallout will not determine the decision on whether to bring charges.” Tribe says that such an appointment is “imperative.”

An article written by Jill Lepore: In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.

The unprecedented sanctions the West imposed on Russia have hobbled its economy and are hurting the global system, too. But their primary purpose, arguably, is to stop the fighting. And that's not yet happening. Why it matters: Sanctions are increasingly one of the go-to tools in American foreign policy, all over the world — that doesn't mean they always work. ... "Sanctions allow you to feel like you’re doing something. It doesn’t necessarily accomplish what you want to accomplish in practical terms,"said Elena Chachko, a fellow at Harvard Law School who's written extensively about this strategy.

In a small Polish town in September last year, a 30-year-old woman named Izabela checked into the hospital. She was 22 weeks pregnant with her second child, and her water had just broken prematurely. Her life was in danger, but instead of aborting her pregnancy, the doctors stalled. ... “It’s a slow, iterative process on the ground in building [reproductive rights] up,” said Alicia Ely Yamin, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy at Harvard Law School. “On the other hand, tearing them down seems quite easy.”

After hours of debate over a controversial plan by Democrats to push dense housing developments near train stations, a Greenwich Republican staunchly opposing the bill asked a pointed question. Rep. Kim Fiorello’s target: a 20-year-old supporter of the proposal, who had just testified that many people his age are leaving the state because it’s too expensive to live here. “Is housing a right?” Fiorello asked Alan Cavagnaro, a sophomore at Manchester Community College and a Planning & Zoning commissioner for South Windsor. “Are you entitled to have the housing that you want?” ... Nick Abbott (JD '22), of Greenwich, a student at Harvard Law School and deputy director at Desegregate CT, said Fiorello’s comments made it seem as if “people from my generation were asking for handouts” when in reality they are looking for more reasonably priced housing options, including in the communities where they grew up.

Anjum Rahman knows more than most about the harmful effects of media content. Over the years, Rahman - an accountant by trade, who also founded the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono and acts as spokesperson for the Islamic Women’s Council - has been a leading voice from the Muslim community speaking about the harms caused by online extremism. She’s received a fair deal of pushback for this, ranging from fairly civil to downright abusive. ... As Harvard Law School’s Evelyn Douek puts it, regulators should be wary of building content moderation policy on the assumption that techies at online media platforms can simply “nerd harder” and stop the spread of all harmful content, without any trade-offs, if they just put their mind to it.

The Fairfax County School Board is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that invalidated the recently revised admissions system for the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology magnet school. ... It is unclear when the 4th Circuit will weigh in on the TJ case, although it could take months. The Supreme Court’s ruling in its next term on use of race in admissions could have ramifications for how the TJ case is ultimately decided, according to Harvard law professor Richard H. Fallon Jr. He said it has historically been harder, under Supreme Court precedent, to justify racial preferences in the K-12 arena than in higher education. “When the Harvard case is decided, it will undoubtedly have ripple effects,” Fallon said, “because what happens in postsecondary education is obviously not wholly unrelated to what happens in the K-12 context.”

As the psychedelics industry continues to pursue a pharmaceutical business model, the conversation surrounding intellectual property is gaining traction. The business of psychedelic drugs has gained a serious air of legitimacy by modeling itself after the pharmaceutical market. But with this benchmark comes the question of how the industry will marry its goodwill intentions with the hard-nosed business of intellectual property (IP). ... Mason Marks, a senior fellow and project lead with the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School, said in order to patent a psychedelic substance there needs to be genetic manipulation so that there is a new aspect to the actual substance. “Whether or not you modify the mushroom, you could also patent various methods of growing it and utilizing it, because in those instances, you aren’t patenting the product of nature itself, but a method of producing or using it,” he explained.

The number of hunting trophies brought into the United States increased during the early years of the Trump administration before falling off amid the Covid-19 pandemic, newly released Fish and Wildlife Service data shows. All told, hunters imported more than 700,000 trophy specimens taken from giraffes, rhinos and other species from 2016 to 2020, according to the data provided to the Center for Biological Diversity following a lawsuit filed on its behalf by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic. ... “That the [Fish and Wildlife Service] is now releasing these data after years of refusal shows the importance of the Freedom of Information Act to conservation advocacy,” said Ben Rankin (JD '23), a second-year student at Harvard Law School, who led the case for the law clinic.

The décor of the Nushama Psychedelic Wellness Clinic was designed to look like bliss. “It doesn’t feel like a hospital or a clinic, but more like a journey,” said Jay Godfrey, the former fashion designer who co-founded the space with Richard Meloff, a lawyer turned cannabis entrepreneur. The “journey,” in this instance, is brought on by ketamine, administered intravenously, as a treatment for mental health disorders, albeit one that has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. ... “There’s nothing suspicious” about off-label prescription use in general, said Mason Marks, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School specializing in the regulations around psychedelics, but ketamine providers need to be careful about over-promising the drug’s benefits, particularly when there’s limited evidence of its efficacy. According to Dr. Dan Iosifescu, a psychiatrist at N.Y.U. Langone, ketamine is also potentially addictive, heightening the risk of using the drug, even in a therapeutic setting.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Partisan gerrymandering in the computer age has undermined majoritarian democracy — that much is clear. Using algorithms to give one party a numeric advantage over another is more effective than old-fashioned gerrymandering done by hand, and reduces the number of competitive districts for the House of Representatives. It’s equally clear that no solution to the problem is in sight. As statistical modeling becomes more sophisticated, things could conceivably even get worse. The Supreme Court flirted with ruling that partisan gerrymanders were unconstitutional, but ultimately opted against intervening. It won’t take up the issue again under the court’s current composition.