Media Mentions

Chief executives love to talk about “stakeholder capitalism.” But when they face a final choice to sell a company and divide the spoils between workers and shareholders, guess who gets the money? You got it: Shareholders are the winners—along with the executives themselves. An analysis of takeover deals during the pandemic by academics at Harvard Law School reveals the priorities of America’s corporate leaders. In public, they talk about the importance of employees, communities, the environment and other stakeholders in the business. In private, they negotiate deals they know will lead to job losses and closed offices but don’t demand compensation for the losers. ... “The enthusiasm for the Business Roundtable and Davos visions was because people can read into them whatever they like,” says Prof. Lucian Bebchuk, director of Harvard Law School’s program on corporate governance and co-author of the research. “They avoid the difficult trade-off questions.”

An op-ed co-authored by Laurence Tribe: It’s as if we are back again in 1965 in Selma before “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state police violently attacked peaceful demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, leading Congress to enact the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Only this time, it’s five Supreme Court justices effectively blocking the path of Black Alabamians seeking to protect their right to vote. On Feb. 8, in Merrill v. Milligan, in an emergency docket ruling, the reactionary 5-4 Supreme Court majority shredded a three-judge panel’s painstaking and convincing Jan. 24 decision enjoining Alabama from using its new, racially discriminatory congressional map in future elections.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Democrats have been frustrated in their hopes to pass a comprehensive voting rights bill. But with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on board, things are looking up for the most important voting rights legislation that is actually possible right now: the Electoral Count Modernization Act.

Last month, Entergy New Orleans revealed it was pulling funding from a vital city project to shore up the city’s flood defenses. Citing the massive cost of recovering from Hurricane Ida, the company said it could no longer fulfill its commitment to loan $30 million to the Sewerage and Water Board. Four days later, the utility’s parent company, Entergy Corp. announced quarterly shareholder dividend payments at $1.01 per share, totaling $202 million. ... But Entergy is not a typical company. It’s a government-backed monopoly, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “It’s just a classic case of the company’s owners doing well at the expense of their captive customers,” Peskoe said. “That’s the important thing here that differentiates it from other businesses. Customers are just completely captive to Entergy.”

The history of Black women and the law is, until relatively recently, "a history of impressive firsts," according to Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of law and history at Harvard. There's Charlotte Ray, the first Black woman lawyer and a graduate of Howard law school. There's Jane Bolin, the first Black woman judge in the United States. There's Pauli Murray, who coined the term Jane Crow, and whose legal arguments laid the groundwork for desegregating public schools and extending the rights of women and LGQTB people. Murray was the first Black person to earn a JSD from Yale Law, and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.

A former federal public defender is asking an appellate panel to either vacate a lower court’s ruling against her, or disqualify itself from deciding her sexual harassment claims against the judiciary, citing a conflict of interest stemming from the selection of judges. ... Roe’s attorneys, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Cooper Strickland, said records and information the government released related to the assignment process show the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and Judicial Conference participated in selecting judges to hear the lawsuit, even though they’re named defendants. Roe’s lawyers are urging the panel to either vacate U.S. District Judge William Young’s dismissal of the lawsuit, or reassign the case to a new panel that would vacate the lower court’s order.

One reliable strategy for Democrats in gerrymandering battles over the past decade has been to sue Republicans for racial gerrymandering — arguing that Republicans illegally packed minority voters into districts so these voters had less power to elect additional representatives. ... But “race-blind” policies would probably still benefit Republicans by diluting minority voters. The University of Michigan’s Jowei Chen and Harvard Law’s Nicholas Stephanopoulos did an analysis of “race-blind” redistricting in all of the nation’s state House districts. They found that there would be “substantially fewer” minority-majority districts, and those that remained would have smaller minority populations in them. In the South in particular, Republicans would benefit from this by picking up more districts.

Chief Justice John Roberts was once in the vanguard as the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act. But as his more conservative colleagues showed Monday in restoring a Republican-drawn Alabama congressional map, Roberts is no longer in control. ... “Not even Chief Justice Roberts, author of the infamous Shelby County decision, could bring himself to join the radical right majority in draining the Voting Rights Act of all meaning and leaving it a hollow shell,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe tweeted.

In the early 21st century, the internet—and the social internet, in particular—has enabled a more connected world. But it’s also enabled and amplified some of humanity’s worst behaviors. Fringy, toxic opinions and outright disinformation proliferate. Antisocial behavior is normalized. Facts—when they can be recognized—are used to bolster preexisting opinions, not to challenge assumptions. Kids (and adults) measure their self-worth by their Instagram comments and follower count. Expecting the huge tech companies that operate the platforms to proactively fix the problems gets more unworkable as online communities grow into the billions. ... Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and Special Assistant to the President for science, technology, and innovation policy in the Obama administration “Someday, we’ll cease to differentiate between on- and offline, just as we have stopped talking about ‘electrified’ life. Much that we now treasure will disappear. But the human spirit is creative and playful—we’ll be up to new augmented shenanigans that we cannot now imagine.”

An op-ed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Will anything be left of the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court finishes with it? It’s looking pretty grim. In 2013, the Supreme Court dismantled the part of the law that required states with a history of discrimination to get approval for changes to election rules. Last year, the court all but eliminated minority voters’ ability to use another part of the law to challenge discriminatory voting restrictions. Now, the court has signaled its interest in frustrating the law’s aim of ensuring that minority voters are adequately represented.

Usually, an A grade would be seen as a measure of a job well done. However, when it comes to progress toward hepatitis elimination, New York is only now getting back on track. The Empire State has work to do in order to regain our status as national leaders in this effort. As evaluated by Hep ElimiNATION, a joint project of  the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, New York’s A grade comes with caveats, specifically a lack of dedicated, sufficient funding for proactive case finding, linkage to care and harm reduction services for New Yorkers living with and at risk of developing viral hepatitis.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: President Biden has promised to nominate a Black woman to fill retiring Justice Stephen Breyer's seat on the Supreme Court. That historic first has Black women in the legal profession reflecting on how long it's taken to get this far. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports. ... TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: If we can get to a point where it's not so significant that a Black woman is appointed to some prestigious position, then we will have come closer to the dream of equality that so many civil rights activists and lawyers fought for for so many years.

Fair Districts GA and the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit over Georgia’s redistricting plans. The brief aims to demonstrate that it is not hard to draw Georgia legislative districts that respect lawmakers’ discretionary choices while complying with the Voting Rights Act. Plaintiffs in Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity v. Raffensperger argue that the Georgia General Assembly violated the Voting Rights Act by not drawing sufficient districts in the state House and Senate plans to protect Black voters’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.

Oregon would only allow the use of one mushroom species in its new psilocybin system and would ban chemically synthesized psilocybin. These are just two details in a release of new draft rules expected Tuesday from the Oregon Health Authority. The rules, crafted by an advisory board of doctors and other public health experts, will be used to create Oregon’s ground-breaking system for allowing the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic substance produced by many mushrooms. ... “It is kind of a landmark moment because Oregon is the very first state to have created such a system of regulation,” said Mason Marks, a member of Oregon’s psilocybin advisory board and a senior fellow on the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School. “These are the very first draft rules that we’re seeing, so it really is a kind of pivotal event.”

A U.S. appeals court will consider reviving a former federal judiciary employee’s sex discrimination claims in a case that could lower the bar for workers to win misconduct lawsuits against the nation’s judicial branch. ... Justice Department spokeswoman Danielle Blevins declined to comment. Roe’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Neil young was five years old when, in 1951, he was partially paralysed by polio. Joni Mitchell was nine when she was hospitalised by the same illness around the same time. Both grew up to become famous singers—and, lately, prominent campaigners against anti-vaccine misinformation. The two musicians, followed by a handful of others, have withdrawn their music from the world’s biggest streaming service in protest at a podcast that gave airtime to anti-vaxxers. ... “It’s always been baffling to me how podcasts have flown under the content-moderation radar,” says Evelyn Douek of Harvard Law School. “It’s a massive blind-spot.” It could also prove to be a pricey one. As audio platforms host more user-generated content, the moderation task will expand. It will probably involve lots of human moderators; automating the process with artificial intelligence, as Facebook and others are doing, is even harder for audio than it is for text, images or video. Software firms’ valuations “have long been driven by the notion that there’s no marginal cost”, says Mr Page. “Content moderation might be their first.”

On a recent winter Tuesday just off Boston’s Southeast Expressway, dozens of aspiring carpenters were banging nails, sawing wood and hoisting heavy steel rails to other apprentices at the local union training site. One of them was Annisha Simpson, a 27-year-old from Boston. Simpson is Black and part of a growing number of minority construction workers in the state. ... Mark Erlich, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, said the only way to move the workforce needle is for state agencies to set ambitious goals and then hold their contractors accountable for making sure a larger percentage of minority workers get hired. “In the absence of that kind of intentional policy efforts,” he said, “the industry will continue to evolve very slowly in terms of becoming more diverse.”

Jane Goodall, the renowned naturalist who revolutionized views of animal behavior with her 60-year study of chimps, has turned her attention to a unique aspect of human nature: hope. ... What books are you recommending for Black History Month? “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.,” edited by James M. Washington. “México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women,” by B. Christine Arce.

Racial tensions and injustices across the U.S. and the globe are unfortunately nothing new, neither are the responses they can elicit. For Randall Kennedy, Harvard scholar and law professor, this has long been a concern. For the majority of his life he has been studying and writing about U.S. law and order, culture, and race. On February 8, the 20th Anniversary edition of his book N-word: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word will hit the bookshelves loaded with a new introduction, where Kennedy stands by his original rejection of the eradication and excessive censorship of the n-word, claiming the word is here to stay "for good and for bad."

When the Rev. Kaeley McEvoy began at Westmoreland Congregational in 2018 she faced a question: Should she tell her new congregation she’d recently had an abortion? McEvoy was already a reproductive rights advocate, and to her the experience wasn’t in conflict with her faith. When the pastor and her then-boyfriend learned in 2016 that she was pregnant, the first place they went was to a cathedral, to pray — and to call doctors’ offices in search of one to do the abortion. ... Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on the legal history of reproduction said the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned and new state measures that include criminal penalties for doctors and civil fines for women “has made this more salient.”

The Saturday Night Live comedian appears in the condiment brand's 2022 Super Bowl commercial, which is aimed at driving awareness around the issue of wasted food at home by reminding viewers to tackle those leftovers and "make taste, not waste." ... Food waste is a global problem, with the United Nations setting a sustainable development goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent over the next eight years. In that effort, Hellmann's is working with Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic to help enact policy change at a federal level, including legislative policy for the standardization and clarity of food date labels (which they call "one of the most common drivers of at-home waste").