Media Mentions

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a former assistant federal public defender in North Carolina can sue court officials for constitutional violations stemming from an alleged faulty investigation of sexual harassment. ... Strickland was represented by Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, who called the decision “a major victory” in a statement published by Law.com and other publications. The unanimous decision “made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination,” Gersen said.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a former public defender’s lawsuit challenging the federal judiciary’s handling of her sexual harassment and discrimination claims about a supervisor’s unwelcome attention at work. ... Strickland’s lawyer, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, characterized Tuesday’s decision as a landmark ruling because it makes “crystal clear” that the federal judiciary, as an employer, “can be held accountable based on its constitutional obligations” by judiciary employees who experience discrimination.

A designated Fourth Circuit panel on Tuesday reinstated some claims in a sexual harassment suit brought by a former North Carolina assistant federal public defender accusing federal judiciary officials of mishandling her complaints, but declined to rule that internal procedures designed to redress workplace misconduct claims are unconstitutional. The three-judge panel said former assistant federal public defender Caryn Devins Strickland can proceed with certain allegations that the Judicial Conference, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the Fourth Circuit and its leaders violated her constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. A district judge dismissed the entire case in December 2020. ... Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, who is representing Strickland, said the panel's decision "made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination."

An op-ed by Philippe Sands: President Biden’s accusation that Russia is committing genocide resonated with those appalled by the images of apparent slaughter in Bucha, Mariupol and other parts of Ukraine. “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank — none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away,” Mr. Biden declared, although he later qualified his remarks, recognizing the need for more evidence. “We’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.”

The recent deluge of union elections at Starbucks Corp. stores is pushing the federal labor board to its limit, reflecting a broader influx in labor action as the pandemic winds down. Flat funding and a restless labor force have created a near perfect storm for the National Labor Relations Board, charged with overseeing every private-sector union election. Election petitions have already swelled by 57% in the first half of the 2021 fiscal year as unfair labor practice charges rose by 14%. At the same time, ballooning inflation and long-term staff declines have made the agency less equipped to fulfill its statutory mission of overseeing union elections, current and former officials say. “The board certainly has been in a funding crisis for awhile,” said Sharon Block, who served on it during the Obama administration and more recently as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden.

Harvard University leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 individuals during the 17th and 18th centuries when slavery was legal in Massachusetts, according to a report chronicling the university’s deep ties to wealth generated from slave labor in the South and Caribbean — and its significant role in the nation’s long history of racial discrimination. ... Laurence H. Tribe, emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote on social media that the report, “while over a century late, represents an important and valuable start.” In a phone interview, he said the country is engaged in a meaningful dialogue on this subject. But there are people who want to suppress such efforts at a national reckoning, and “have the view that the less we talk about race, the faster we’ll get over the problems of race,” as seen in recent voting-rights and affirmative-action cases. “There’s a different view that says that we can’t really get past where we are without coming more fully to terms with how we got here.”

Harvard University is publicly facing some brutally hard truths. A massive report, years in the making, was released this week detailing the institution’s ties to and enrichment from the enslavement of Black people. It’s full of gut-wrenching details, from the more than 70 human beings who were owned by faculty, staff, and even presidents of the university, to the remains of 15 Black people from the antebellum era found among the holdings of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, to the fact that a third of the university’s endowment from the first half of the 19th century came from donors whose fortunes were fueled by the slave trade. ... “It will bring us closer together as a community, and create deeper bonds among us,” [Tomiko Brown-Nagin] said. “I do know, obviously there are some very difficult things in the report.” But, she added, it’s also vital to note the immeasurable contributions Black and brown alumni have made to the university, Boston, and the world. “It’s important to me — I’m a civil rights historian — to have that be a theme of the report, because it’s a way of truth-telling as well, and ensuring that a broader array of graduates and individuals and communities represent Harvard,” Brown-Nagin said.

The case involved an Austin ordinance that classified signs differently depending on whether they had some connection to the site where they were located — that is, “on-premise” or “off-premise” signs. That distinction prompted two outdoor advertising companies (Reagan National Advertising of Austin and the Lamar Advantage Outdoor Co. Austin) to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds when their permits to digitize some of their off-premises billboard signs were denied. The case thus involved a First Amendment content-discrimination issue and whether strict scrutiny analysis should apply. ... → That said, Professor Laurence Tribe agreed with the spirit of the Thomas dissent as evidenced by a tweet he released commenting on the case: “SCOTUS made a total mess of 1st Am law. Only the 3 dissenters, pointing to the agreement of scholars as far apart as Michael McConnell and me on the key legal point, came close to offering coherent guidance.”

Since FERC in 2011 issued its Order 1000, partly to open transmission development to competition, SPP has completed solicitations for three regional transmission projects, including the just-selected NextEra project, which is designed to reduce congestion in the Oklahoma City area. Besides being the least expensive proposal, NextEra Energy Transmission Southwest’s project has a range of benefits compared with the other bids, according to SPP’s panel that reviewed the solicitation. ... “It’d be hard for me to imagine that the utilities wouldn’t basically carve this up amongst themselves,” [Ari] Peskoe said. “They’d have some sort of understanding of who partners up with who on certain projects.”

Harvard University leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 individuals during the 17th and 18th centuries when slavery was legal in Massachusetts, according to a report chronicling the university’s deep ties to wealth generated from slave labor in the South and Caribbean — and its significant role in the nation’s long history of racial discrimination. ... The report was produced by a faculty committee convened by Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow in 2019. Many who read the report will find it “disturbing and even shocking,” Bacow said in a statement. “Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow said. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

New York Democrats made a last-ditch appeal to the state’s highest court on Tuesday to overturn a pair of lower-court rulings and salvage newly drawn congressional districts that overwhelmingly favor their party. In oral arguments before the New York State Court of Appeals, lawyers for the governor and top legislative leaders said that Republicans challenging the lines had fallen short of proving that the state’s new congressional map violated a state ban on gerrymandering. ... Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor who studies redistricting, said New York’s map was not “remotely” as skewed as maps adopted by Republicans in Florida or Democrats in Illinois. And he cautioned that striking down New York’s maps while allowing other Republican-drawn gerrymanders to stand across the country would only further bias the national map toward one party. Still, Mr. Stephanopoulos said the litigation in New York and other states this year offered some reason for optimism in a decades-long fight by public interest groups to curb the influence of gerrymandering. “The fact that both sides are now willing to bring partisan gerrymandering claims, and state courts have struck down both Republican and Democratic maps, I think that is encouraging in terms of sweeping national reform in the future,” he said.

For nearly 400 years, Harvard’s most famous motto has been a single word, Veritas, or truth. In the spirit of that slogan, university officials said, Harvard on Tuesday published the first full accounting of the institution’s historical ties to slavery. In a sweeping report, the university also acknowledged its complicity in 19th-century “race science” and 20th-century racial discrimination, and announced the creation of a $100 million fund to address the legacies of slavery, including inequalities in educational outcomes, that persist to this day. “Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Harvard president Lawrence Bacow wrote in a letter to the university community about the report. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

In one column are the names of more than 70 enslaved people at Harvard: Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicely. They are only first names, or sometimes no name at all — “the Moor” or “a little boy” — of people and stories that have been all but forgotten. In another column are the names of the ministers and presidents and donors of Harvard who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries: Increase Mather, Gov. John Winthrop, William Brattle. These full names are so powerful and revered they still adorn buildings today. The contrasting lists are arguably the most poignant part of a 134-page report on Harvard University’s four centuries of ties to slavery and its legacy. ... Reparations “means different things to different people, so fixating on that term, I think, can be counterproductive,” Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the committee chair, a professor of both law and history, and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said in an interview.

Twitter is “the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” a triumphant Elon Musk proclaimed in announcing his deal to buy the social media platform. In other words, Twitter is no ordinary corporation. It serves as something akin to a public utility, a unique global means of communication. ... “Corporate leaders and practitioners have been increasingly pledging to pay close attention to the interests of stakeholders, such as customers or society in the case of Twitter, and not only shareholders,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even so, a study of more than 100 recent $1 billion-plus deals that Mr. Bebchuk recently completed found that there had been little impact, with “large gains” for shareholders and corporate leaders and little or nothing for other constituencies.

A new report shows that Harvard’s ties to slavery were transformative in the University’s rise to global prominence, and included enslaved individuals on campus, funding from donors engaged in the slave trade, and intellectual leadership that obstructed efforts to achieve racial equality. The report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, released Tuesday, describes a history that began with a Colonial-era embrace of slavery that saw 79 people enslaved by Harvard presidents and other leaders, faculty, and staff. The report offers a series of recommendations — already accepted by Harvard President Larry Bacow — that amounts to a reckoning with the University’s history. A $100 million fund established by the Harvard Corporation to implement the recommendations includes resources for current use and to establish an endowment to sustain the work in perpetuity. ... “The committee thought that it was important to lay bare the difficult aspects of Harvard’s history, but also speak to the resistance that is very much a part of Harvard’s legacy,” [Tomiko] Brown-Nagin said. “I am aware that the history we trace in this report is deeply troubling. But it would be a great disservice to our community if the only message that we took away was one of shame. We must acknowledge the harm that Harvard has done. But it is also important that we do not — as has been done in the past — bury stories of Black resistance, excellence, and leadership. These women and men are also part of our history — also part of our legacy.”

“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.”