Media Mentions

A draft Supreme Court opinion obtained by Politico and published online Monday night indicates the justices are on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide, but a Harvard constitutional law scholar said opinions can change, and this document does not necessarily represent the court’s final ruling. “A draft opinion is only that: It’s a draft,” Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who teaches courses on constitutional law, told the Globe in a phone interview late Monday night. “Odds are this is not the latest opinion.” “Justices are all free to change their mind at any point before the final opinion is actually issued,” he added.

Democratic lawmakers and constitutional scholars say the leaked Supreme Court decision that appears to overturn abortion rights could lead to overturning the right to same-sex marriage and other civil rights. Part of the opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, explicitly references Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage, and Lawrence v. Texas, a decision that legalized sodomy. ... Legal scholar Laurence Tribe echoed Ocasio-Cortez's statement noting "predictable next steps" if the leaked opinion officially becomes law. "A nationwide abortion ban, followed by a push to roll back rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and the full array of textually unenumerated rights long taken for granted," Tribe tweeted.

Social media was quickly afire Monday night after an unprecedented leak showed the U.S. Supreme Court has circulated a draft opinion that would overturn two key abortion rights precedents. The draft acquired by Politico was written by Justice Samuel Alito, and would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The decision would cap off Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a case that eventually morphed into a call to overturn the two landmark decisions. ... >> Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School: “If the Alito opinion savaging Roe and Casey ends up being the Opinion of the Court, it will unravel many basic rights beyond abortion and will go further than returning the issue to the states: It will enable a GOP Congress to enact a nationwide ban on abortion and contraception.” (Twitter)

A complicated legal case has been reduced to a provocative headline: “Can a public high school coach pray publicly?” The takes were just as hot in reply. “Jesus said to pray in a ‘closet,’ not on the 50-yard line,” read an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times, while The Atlantic implored: “Let Coach Kennedy Pray.” ... “The court is moving in the direction of encouraging religion to enter the public square and to infuse government. And there never has been a period since the 19th century when the court was that willing to just let the wall of separation between church and state down,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said.

The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office could begin bringing criminal charges against employers who repeatedly or intentionally deprive workers of pay as early as this summer under a new agreement with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. ... Terri Gerstein, director of the state and local enforcement project at the Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, said criminal prosecution is an important instrument for government entities to use because agencies tasked with civil enforcement of wage laws can be hamstrung by limited resources. And, she said, certain cases warrant not only civil but criminal penalties. Gerstein, the former labor bureau chief in the New York State Attorney General’s Office, said she worked on a case in 2015 where a Papa John’s franchise owner in New York failed to pay overtime to workers. When he learned that the U.S. Department of Labor had opened a civil investigation into his company, he devised a scheme to create fictitious names of employees to continue to avoid paying overtime, Gerstein said. Ultimately, the attorney general’s office sought criminal charges and the franchise owner was sentenced to 60 days in jail and ordered to pay $230,000 in restitution on top of $280,000 in civil damages and penalties.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I feel bad for anyone not steeped in establishment clause jurisprudence who happened to listen to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the football coach prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. On the surface, the question is simple: Can the public high school coach kneel and pray silently on the 50-yard line after games? But the doctrine the court has created over the years is so complicated and confused that you would be hard-pressed to make any sense of the debates without a law school course on the First Amendment under your belt.

Republicans are planning to steal the 2024 presidential election a conservative judge has warned. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid on what he says, "is being bandied about as the technique that they hope to use if they get Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Alito and Thomas on board... to take the next election regardless of who wins."

Sixteen Harvard faculty are among the 261 American Academy of Arts and Sciences newly elected members, the academy  announced Thursday. “We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” said David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.” The Harvard inductees include: ... Guy-Uriel E. Charles Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law; Faculty Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Harvard Law School

“An institution entangled with American slavery and its legacies.” That was how a faculty committee described Harvard University in a landmark study documenting, in unflinching detail, the school’s extensive ties to slavery. The report detailed how enslaved people worked on the campus for more than 150 years, how the school benefited from deep financial connections to slavery and how its academics promoted racist theories. At a time when some are trying to whitewash U.S. history, this bracing honesty is most welcome. ... Harvard is not the first university to try to come to grips with its problematic past. Indeed, it has lagged behind others, such as Georgetown University and Brown University, and its efforts came under immediate criticism. Why did it take Harvard so long? Couldn’t $100 million be better spent directly helping the victims of bigotry and belittlement? The university expected this criticism. “We are not naive. This is an age of deep social divisions, and we know our efforts may be met with criticism and cynicism,” Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the scholar who led Harvard’s effort, wrote in The Post. The university can show its commitment to making amends by ensuring its money goes to causes that achieve maximum good for those still struggling under the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and racism.

President Joe Biden made waves last year when he tapped Gina McCarthy as his climate adviser, prompting concern among Republicans that she would lead an aggressive campaign to regulate emissions. Republican lawmakers who had waged war on past climate rules predicted the former Obama EPA administrator would seize the regulatory reins from Biden’s EPA chief, Michael Regan, and reinstate rules that were scrapped during the Trump administration or tied up in court. ... Jody Freeman, who founded the Harvard program, said McCarthy would know that the air office was “in very capable hands” when it comes to Clean Air Act regulation. Freeman worked with McCarthy as White House counselor on energy and climate issues under Obama, when McCarthy headed EPA. She said McCarthy would be aware of jurisdictional boundaries between the White House and EPA when it comes to regulation, and likely wouldn’t redraw those lines now that she’s on the other side of them. “I would expect they’d be working quite hand-in-glove and quite cooperatively, because they all know each other and they’re deeply experienced with these rules,” she said.

Just two days after he announced he would buy Twitter, Elon Musk sent out a deluge of tweets about his plans for the social media platform. One stood out for its broad appeal. "Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages," he wrote. ... Twitter's relatively smaller size — its global user base is a fraction of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — and the fact that it is not seen primarily as a messaging platform, may have allowed it to fly slightly under the radar, according to Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Twitter is used less for that kind of direct conversation than Signal, SMS, WhatsApp and Telegram," he said. "It's more semi-public."

The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond. Today's panelists are WAMC’s Alan Chartock, research professor and Stuart Rice Honorary Chair at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University Fran Berman, Siena College Professor of Comparative Politics Vera Eccarius-Kelly, and Associate Professor of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies; Co-Editor of the Journal of Equity & Excellence in Education; and Founding Co-director of Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research at University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education Keisha Green.

Sunlight glowed through Tristan Banwell's thick brown beard as he trudged through half-melted snowdrifts towards a herd of small brown cows chowing down on a hay bale one mid-February morning near Lillooet, B.C. Thick fog that had cloaked the Fraser Canyon earlier that morning lifted, revealing snow-capped mountains towering on the horizon. Banwell was smiling. After weeks on the road delivering soup bones and steaks across southern B.C. and picking up a new bull stateside, he was delighted to be back on the farm. ... "When you're talking about regenerative agriculture, it's really important to define the term itself and then define a set of constituent practices," said Harvard Law School fellow Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist who studies meat and climate change. "There's no single thing called regenerative agriculture."

President Joe Biden recently said that he's considering some level of broad-based student loan forgiveness in the coming weeks, and one Democrat who has repeatedly pushed for cancellation says that's major progress. "All we know is that the President has expressed an openness to to cancel some debt... that in its in and of itself, is a tremendous victory," Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) told Yahoo Finance in an exclusive interview (video above), later adding: "Any relief that we can provide people in the midst of unprecedented economic hardship as we begin to round the corner and head into a recovery from this pandemic induced recession would make a difference." ... The basic argument for broad cancellation, as detailed by the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, is that the Education Secretary has the power “to cancel existing student loan debt under a distinct statutory authority — the authority to modify existing loans found in 20 U.S.C. § 1082(a)(4).” (Toby Merrill, who founded the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School and co-authored the legal analysis, currently works for the Education Department.)

A new report urges Congress to make reducing food waste a priority in the 2023 farm bill in order to address climate change and hunger while benefiting the economy. The U.S. wastes more than one-third of the food it produces and imports, according to the report, published last week by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the Natural Resources Defense Council, ReFED and the World Wildlife Fund. ... The U.S. has set a goal of halving food loss and waste by 2030. The 2018 farm bill was the first to tackle food waste, by establishing new positions and programs at the USDA, updating food donation rules and funding community waste-reduction efforts. But much remains to be done, said Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic and a lead author of the report.

Michelle Wu ’12 has been selected by the Harvard College Class of 2022 to address the graduating seniors as part of the annual Class Day celebration on May 25.

Australia has become the second country after the United Kingdom to legalize a fertility procedure that mixes genetic material from three people. The technique is meant to prevent couples from having children with certain debilitating disorders caused by faulty mitochondria, the energy-generating structures in our cells. But it’s controversial because it involves a genetic change that can be passed to future generations, so its rollout in Australia will be extremely cautious. ... “There was a lot of excitement when the UK first legalized this several years ago, so it's surprising that there haven't been reports of failures or successes one way or the other,” says I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, who has been following the international landscape of mitochondrial donation closely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I feel bad for anyone not steeped in establishment clause jurisprudence who happened to listen to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the football coach prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. On the surface, the question is simple: Can the public high school coach kneel and pray silently on the 50-yard line after games? But the doctrine the court has created over the years is so complicated and confused that you would be hard-pressed to make any sense of the debates without a law school course on the First Amendment under your belt.

In 2020, former federal public defender Caryn Strickland filed a complaint alleging sexual harassment from a supervisor while she was a public defender in the Western District of North Carolina. The lawsuit further alleged that the judiciary’s Employment Dispute Resolution system is unconstitutional. ... Jeannie Suk Gersen, attorney for Strickland, noted the impact of the decision: “Today’s decision is a major victory. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Strickland’s constitutional claims for equal protection and due process violations can proceed, and made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination.”

President Biden proposed a $30 billion aid package to Ukraine, “a vast increase in America’s commitment to defeating Russia in Ukraine.” Biden said, The cost of this fight is not cheap. But caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen. We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country, or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine. ... But as Professor [Laurence] Tribe noted in an NYTimes op-ed last week (“$100 Billion. Russia’s Treasure in the US Should Be Turned Against Putin), the US has seized and liquidated assets of sovereign nations on several prior occasions and has the authority to do so here. Professor Tribe tweeted in response to Biden’s proposal, saying Biden’s proposal to let US authorities liquidate assets of Russian oligarchs and donate the proceeds to Ukraine seeks broad new legal powers that ironically aren’t needed to liquidate even more US dollars from Russia’s sovereign accounts in the US.

An appeals court is giving a former federal public defender another chance to take her sexual harassment claims to court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday revived a portion of Caryn Strickland’s lawsuit against the judiciary. Certain claims can move forward against several officials, including Roslynn Mauskopf, the chair of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and Roger Gregory, the Fourth Circuit’s chief judge. ... Strickland’s attorney, Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, called the decision a win for her client and others who may bring sex discrimination lawsuits against the courts. “Today’s decision is a major victory. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Strickland’s constitutional claims for equal protection and due process violations can proceed, and made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination,” Gersen said in a statement.