Media Mentions

“You’re paying my bills,” MJ told the audience, running a finger over her mouth. “$35 for a flash,” one viewer responded. Another asked how much to send to her Cash App. As she posed and pursed her lips, her long blonde hair draped over her tight black bralette, some asked MJ to show them her feet. “I’m 68 and you owe me one,” one attendee told her as more requests piled on. These exchanges did not take place between adults at a nightclub; they took place on TikTok Live, where MJ, who said she was 14 years old, was broadcasting with friends to 2,000 strangers on a recent Saturday night. A Forbes review of hundreds of recent TikTok livestreams reveals how viewers regularly use the comments to urge young girls to perform acts that appear to toe the line of child pornography — rewarding those who oblige with TikTok gifts, which can be redeemed for money, or off-platform payments to Venmo, PayPal or Cash App accounts that users list in their TikTok profiles. It’s “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds,” says Leah Plunkett, an assistant dean at Harvard Law School and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, focused on youth and media. Imagine a local joint putting a bunch of minors on a stage before a live adult audience that is actively giving them money to perform whatever G, PG or PG-13 activities they request, she said. “That is sexual exploitation. But that's exactly what TikTok is doing here.”

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that a former federal public defender in North Carolina could sue the judiciary for violating her constitutional rights by being deliberately indifferent to her complaints of sexual harassment. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals partly reversed a judge's dismissal of a 2020 lawsuit by Caryn Strickland, who alleged she was sexually harassed by a superior and stonewalled in her efforts to have the judiciary address her complaint. ... "Today’s decision is a major victory," Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School who represents Strickland.

Some LGBTQ people fear that the harassment they face on Twitter could get worse should Elon Musk successfully purchase the company and take it private. Twitter’s board of directors unanimously agreed to sell the platform to Musk for $44 billion on Monday, but the deal requires shareholder and regulatory approval before it’s final. ... Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic and a transgender rights advocate, said she is afraid that Musk might remove Twitter’s content moderation policy that prohibits misgendering or boost accounts like Libs of TikTok, which has shared videos of LGBTQ teachers that reportedly led to some of them being reprimanded or losing their job. “There’s a plethora of ways that he can just make life hell for trans people on sites like this,” she said. “And there will be no way to really moderate or keep it in check.” Caraballo said if Musk takes the company private, he won’t have to answer to anyone but himself. “I don’t know if I want to sound too apocalyptic or hyperbolic, but I really think this is a danger to democracy,” she said, noting that Twitter is one of the most influential social media platforms in the world.

A report issued Tuesday by a committee appointed by Harvard President Larry Bacow and led by legal scholar and historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin details the University’s deep connections to slavery in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and to legacies of slavery well into the 20th century. It also illuminates how those ties “powerfully shaped Harvard” and suggests a range of actions the University can take to help “ameliorate the persistent educational and social harms that human bondage caused to descendants, to the campus community, and to surrounding cities, the Commonwealth, and the nation.” Harvard has pledged to provide long-term funding to address the initiative’s findings. The Gazette spoke with Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, about the report and the path forward. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

An article by evelyn douek: A fun thing about content moderation—the practice of social-media platforms deciding what we can and cannot say in some of the world’s most important online spaces—is that almost everyone thinks that it’s broken, albeit in different ways. Almost everyone also thinks that if you just put them in charge, they would fix things. When you’re the world’s richest man, you can actually give it a shot. And so, Elon Musk is buying Twitter, and a main reason is that he doesn’t like the company’s content moderation.

Today, workers at Amazon’s LDJ5 warehouse facility will vote on whether to organize with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the same union that pulled off a historic win at another Staten Island, New York, facility earlier this month. With ballots scheduled to be counted on May 2nd, the election will last just one week. After months of slow buildup, workers are just a week away from learning whether their site will unionize — assuming there aren’t any tiebreaker court fights of the kind that held up Bessemer’s second vote. ... “It seems to me that Amazon has to worry about its public persona, and to be viewed as viciously anti-union and anti-worker at this moment in history is probably a bad look for them,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, in an interview with The Verge. According to Sachs, support from the public and policymakers is a factor in the ALU’s favor. “I think the support from President Biden matters. I think the visible support from the National Labor Relations Board to enforce the law matters,” Sachs said. “Broad public support definitely matters in a lot of ways. It helps to embolden workers who are making this decision about whether to support the union, knowing that the country is essentially behind them.”

Chris Green, executive director of the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School, will receive the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section (TIPS) Animal Law Committee’s Excellence in the Advancement of Animal Law Award at a reception on April 28 during the TIPS Section Conference, April 27-30. The award recognizes exceptional work by an Animal Law Committee member who, through commitment and leadership, has advanced the humane treatment of animals through the law.

This week, a federal judge struck down the CDC’s authority to mandate masks on public transportation, a move that many health officials oppose. Experts on Greater Boston told Jim Braude that decisions like those shouldn’t be left up to the legal system. "I think it's disappointing that a judge was actually the decision maker. I think even if the mandate is coming to an end, it seems like a sorry end to kind of the authority of the CDC in our public health arena,” said Dr. Louise Ivers, executive director of MGH Center for Global Health. Although some people celebrated the end of masking on planes and public transportation, others worry about the spread of coronavirus, especially to the elderly and young children. "I think from a social point of view, it's a really unsatisfying answer to say 'okay, well, people should just decide," said Carmel Shachar, executive director of Harvard Petrie-Flom Center.

While Amazon workers in Alabama and New York were trying to unionize their warehouses last year, the tech giant hired a large cast of anti-union consultants to undermine the organizing campaigns. Known as “persuaders,” these consultants led meetings in the warehouses and pulled workers aside for one-on-one conversations, all with the aim of turning workers against the idea of a union. ... Terri Gerstein, a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute think tank, recently argued in The American Prospect that employers like Amazon should have to reveal their persuaders sooner. She noted the murkiness surrounding the Rayla Group: The firm’s address appears to be a post office box at a UPS Store in Troy, Michigan. “​​When well-paid proxies are deployed to convince people not to unionize, those workers have a right to know the specifics,” Gerstein wrote.

A United States appellate court has confirmed the legality of ‘scraping’ information from web sites, in a dispute with implications for the data privacy and freedom of information, and which looks likely to be appealed again. The Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals has ruled against Microsoft-owned social network LinkedIn on its dispute with hiQ Labs, over its right to prevent scraping of publicly available data by third parties, the remit of data use legislation and the potential for anti-competitive conduct. ... The team advising hiQ included Renita Sharma and Terry Witt of Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, assisted by Aaron Panner and Gregory Rapawy of Kellogg Hansen Todd Figel & Frederick, Brandon Wisoff of Farella Braun + Martel, along with academic and Harvard professor emeritus Laurence Tribe. Academic and hiQ’s counsel Tribe said: “Despite a trip up the judicial ladder all the way to the US Supreme Court and back down again, and despite the intervening developments and detours, the underlying legal issues and the relevant factual landscape are remarkably unchanged,” adding that he found the judge’s opinion “entirely persuasive”.

As Earth Day month draws to a close, food and beverage manufacturers are celebrating efforts to reduce food waste, in their factories and in consumers’ homes, through increasingly creative and data-backed initiatives, including Hellmann’s ‘fridge night’ challenge and flexipes and Dole’s upcycling efforts. ... Hellmann's, for example, is working with The Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy clinic to advocate for federal legislation to standardize date labelling - a source of confusion for many consumers that leads to safe, edible food being thrown away.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision finding the U.S. Tax Court had the authority to consider a law firm's day-late challenge to an IRS levy will likely have a limited impact, but it could ease litigation for unrepresented taxpayers in particular. Thursday's unanimous opinion from the high court, which determined that Internal Revenue Code Section 6330(d)(1)  's 30-day deadline for filing collection due process cases in the Tax Court is not jurisdictional, won't affect many taxpayer disputes with the Internal Revenue Service, according to several taxpayer clinic directors and attorneys. The same goes for its conclusion that the statute is eligible for equitable tolling, or deadline relief for petitioners under certain circumstances. T. Keith Fogg, director of the Federal Tax Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, told Law360 that just 4% of petitions filed in the Tax Court are CDP cases, which involve challenges to IRS levies and other collection actions before they are imposed. And only a portion of those CDP cases would be filed late and eligible for equitable tolling under the new high court precedent, said Fogg, who penned an amicus brief in the case that urged the justices to side against the IRS in its dispute with North Dakota firm Boechler PC. "It's not like this is going to be a floodgate," Fogg said. "It's just going to be a trickle. If you don't have a good excuse, you are still barred from coming into court."

The battle for abortion access is moving from the courts and legislatures to state ballots. Why it matters: The effort to codify public support through a referendum illustrates what many experts say is the future of abortion rights in America. They envision a state-by-state battle to keep abortion legal as the Supreme Court's conservative majority gears up to pare back or overturn Roe v. Wade. What we're watching: Twenty ballot measures addressing reproductive rights are in process for this year, according to the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. ... What's next: "This is just the tip of the iceberg," said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University College of Law and visiting professor at Harvard Law School. "I think there'll be much more of states turning outward, to think about what will happen as people cross state lines to have abortions," Ziegler told Axios.

The Florida Department of Health broke with the US Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, issuing guidance that seeks to limit the treatment options for transgender children in Florida. The recent report, which is non-binding, suggests that anyone under the age of 18 "should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy," breaking with the American Medical Association and other leading experts' guidance in treating transgender children. ... Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyber Law Clinic and a transgender activist, told Insider that the guidance, while not binding, could hold "tremendous ramifications" for transgender people in the state and across the country.  "Having the state come out and say that the existence of trans kids isn't recommended by the state of Florida can increase substantial amounts of harassment and threats to kids in schools by other students, teachers, and administrators," Caraballo said.

The effort to document war crimes in Ukraine has gotten strong international support. But what does it actually take to put a former leader on trial at The Hague? For an example, we look at the violence that enveloped Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the trial of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The World’s Chris Harland-Dunaway tells the story of two men: the prosecutor — Alex Whiting, and Milan Babic, and insider who turned on Milosevic.

Amid criticism of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s narrow scope in the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation, the DOJ has hired a career federal prosecutor to help decide whether to investigate MAGAland’s election steal schemes. It’s all part of the DOJ’s broader probe into the Capitol attack, signaling officials may be becoming increasingly interested in post-election events beyond just the violence itself, according to the New York Times. ... Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who spoke to TPM last month about Garland’s slow pace in the Jan. 6 probe, tweeted on Wednesday that Windom’s appointment shows that the attorney general is “NOT asleep at the switch.”

Native American rights groups say a host of new Republican-backed bills that restrict or limit common voter registration and absentee ballot practices threaten to disenfranchise thousands of tribal citizens. Many of the laws that have passed in recent years, driven by Republicans who have used former President Trump’s false claims about his 2020 loss as cover for a campaign against broader voter access, will take a disproportionate toll on Native American voters, those groups say, because those voters are disproportionately older, rural and impoverished. ... Neswood’s group, along with the ACLU and Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic, led a challenge to two Montana laws passed by the Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year they said would directly impact the Native American vote.

The odds are against anyone being brought to justice for atrocities committed in Ukraine. Despite mounting evidence that Russian forces executed civilians and targeted residential neighborhoods for bombardment, a successful prosecution of the perpetrators -- from military commanders in the field all the way up to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin -- before an international tribunal will be difficult. In the 76 years since the Nuremberg trials, which set the standard for punishing individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes investigators have faced many obstacles. In this episode, former International Criminal Court prosecutor Alex Whiting explains the challenges confronting those seeking justice for victims of wars of aggression and atrocities.

In its decision in Ramirez v. Collier, a landmark case on capital prisoners’ religious freedom rights, the Supreme Court credited the Harvard Law School Religious Freedom Clinic's brief as providing the necessary historical underpinning for the Court’s decision.

An op-ed by Eli Nachmany (JD'22): IN the coming months, the Supreme Court will issue decisions in two cases that could begin to shift the balance of power away from the so-called administrative state and back to the judicial branch. Two cases currently pending before the Court — Becerra v. Empire Health Foundation and American Hospital Association v. Becerra — present important questions about judicial deference to federal administrative agencies.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, joined Cheddar News to talk about the legal underpinnings of the ruling to lift the federal travel mask mandate. "Judge Mizelle decided that she would issue a nationwide injunction, which she and other conservatives have criticized in the past," he said. "That didn't stop her from doing it this time. She did it by just wiping away the CDC's rule, and she did it, have to say, in an opinion that was, well, I'll be honest, really stupid."