Media Mentions

Like an over-protective parent, toymaker Mattel Inc has long had a reputation for zealously defending its Barbie doll-related intellectual property. So when Rap Snacks Inc…

Former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton isn’t a fan of the new 1% tax on stock buybacks. “It is a tax on shareholders,”…

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell speaks to Harvard constitutional law Professor Laurence Tribe about new details of the Justice Department investigation into the classified documents that were…

Nothing has been able to kill scam robocalls — not federal regulation, not individual state lawsuits, not private software. Each effort has made a dent,…

Is the United States doing enough to prevent outbreaks from ever starting or spreading? A team of researchers from across the globe are working on…

Blackouts are growing more frequent in the United States. The average American experienced just over eight hours of power outages in 2020, with overall duration…

An op-ed by Ann Linder: Nineteen years ago, a 3-year-old from Wisconsin, Schyan Kautzer, was hospitalized; her small body was covered with a strange rash.

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, 80, is a professor emeritus at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1968, counting among his former students Barack…

A looming Supreme Court challenge to California’s hog confinement standards implicates a wide array of environmental and other state laws, a Harvard Law School program…

Democrats have pulled off a quiet first in their just-passed legislation addressing climate change and health care: the creation of a tax on stock buybacks,…

After the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie during a Friday event in western New York, key questions about the suspect — who was charged with…

Donald Trump hadn’t even taken office before Attorney General Maura Healey vowed to fight him in court. In a November 2016 fund-raising appeal to supporters,…

In May 2007, fanfiction and traditionally published author Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. “We are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and…

Retired Judge Nancy Gertner shared her thoughts on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s address on the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, unpacking some of the legal statutes involved…

Grocery stores are reducing their use of labels such as “best by” and “sell by,” which many customers don’t understand, in an effort meant to…

A Massachusetts police officer and his brother, an electrical contractor, were indicted last week for exchanging cash bribes and gifts for more than $36 million in contracts from an energy efficiency program in Massachusetts. Energy consumers in the state pay mandatory surcharges to fund Mass Save, a public-private program that is sponsored by gas and electric companies in partnership with the state’s Department of Energy Resources. Those funds help to cover the costs of energy efficiency upgrades to residential and commercial buildings. ... Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, said that the alleged fraud scheme did not seem to be the result of an inherent aspect of the Mass Save public-private partnership. “These things happen in the utility world as they do in other sectors,” Peskoe told E&E News. “That’s not a reason to do these programs, it’s just the nature of this criminal activity that folks are looking for opportunities.

An article by Ashley Nunes: With the midterm elections coming, Democrats are trying to push through key legislative priorities — including renewing the child tax credit (CTC), which gives working parents a credit for each child and will expire in December 2025. No one doubts that it will be renewed; the credit has broad bipartisan public support. But what will it look like? That’s less clear. In general, Democrats want an expansive version that sends funds to parents in poverty, as was true briefly during the pandemic; Republicans want to return to a more restrictive version that gives working parents a lower tax bill — which means that people who don’t owe taxes don’t get the benefit. But in January, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) refused to support the expanded version in the Build Back Better social spending bill, which meant the bill couldn’t pass an evenly divided Senate.

Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court’s best-known decision of the last 50 years, is also its most endangered precedent. It gave women nationwide the legal right to choose abortion, but the backlash reshaped the country’s politics. The landmark ruling may well be overturned by conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents to do just that. What went wrong with Roe? Why did the court’s effort to resolve the abortion controversy in 1973 lead instead to decades of division? ... “The first-trimester/second-trimester dividing line is a big deal,” said Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman. “It’s why ‘partial-birth’ abortion laws were such a political gold mine for Republicans. Roe created such a broad abortion right that it probably pushed some of the many Americans in the middle of the spectrum on this issue into the opposition.”

An op-ed by Mary Ziegler: Something fundamental about the Supreme Court has changed in recent months. It is not simply that the Court has a conservative supermajority, although that is true enough. What is really striking is just how emboldened that conservative supermajority is—how willing to take on a number of deeply divisive culture-war issues; how blasé about making major decisions via the Court’s shadow docket; how open to making rapid, profound changes to long-standing precedent. Last night, when Politico released a leaked February draft of an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, the public got its most arresting taste thus far of just what this conservative bloc could do.

For nearly half a century, Republicans have railed against “unelected judges” making rulings that they claim disenfranchise voters from deciding for themselves what laws should govern hot-button issues. But since the release this week of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the long-standing constitutional right to abortion, Democrats have been the ones embracing that complaint, flipping the script as the party vents its frustration with elements of the U.S. system that have empowered a minority of the country’s voters to elect lawmakers who have successfully reshaped the high court. ... “Through most of U.S. history, there has been a shared stake among elite political actors in preserving the Supreme Court as an institution that is held out as being separate from and above politics,” said Richard H. Fallon Jr., a Harvard Law School professor. He said he sees that tradition eroding. “Certainly at no point in my lifetime,” Fallon said, “has the Supreme Court been more vulnerable than it is right now.”

The leak of a draft majority opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, was an unprecedented breach in a process typically shrouded in secrecy and a blow to the nation’s highest court, which in recent years has been plagued by questions about its impartiality from both the left and the right. In a statement released Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, but insisted that it was not final. He called the leak a “singular and egregious breach” and said that he has directed the marshal of the court to investigate its source. The Gazette spoke with Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, about the leak, how it might have happened, and what it could mean for the court’s reputation and the outcome of the case. The interview was edited for clarity and length.