Media Mentions

An op-ed by Laurence H Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis Aftergut: Sadly, predictably and appallingly, on October 14, a three judge panel of the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit has allowed Texas’s “Bounty-Hunter” anti-abortion law to go back into effect while the court considers the case on the merits. Every day that the fifth circuit panel’s unlawful order keeps the statute in operation brings irreversible injury to women in Texas. US Attorney General Merrick Garland has properly decided to seek emergency relief from the US supreme court. The justice department is right to accuse the State of Texas of seeking to destroy not only abortion rights but also the foundation of our constitutional Republic. In a nation whose history is fraught with battles between states’ rights and national sovereignty, the case of United States v Texas raises issues basic to our national compact.

According to Emily Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), inconsistent labeling is just one of many ways the United States spurns simple rules that can greatly reduce food waste.

Harvard Law School’s new Institute to End Mass Incarceration (IEMI) proposes a new role for lawyers in the push to “decarcerate” America.

BlackRock’s co-founder and CEO has created a business with unprecedented power. So what, exactly, did it take for him to get this far? A new book explains all. ... Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School and Scott Hirst of Boston University estimated in a 2019 paper titled The Spectre of the Giant Three that the trio’s combined average stakes in the 500 biggest listed US companies had vaulted from about 5 per cent in 1998 to over 20 per cent. Their real power is even greater – and growing. Given that many shareholders don’t actually bother to vote at annual meetings, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street now account for about a quarter of all votes cast on average, which will rise to 41 per cent over the next two decades, the academics estimated. John Coates, a Harvard Law professor, has called this rising concentration of economic power “a legitimacy and accountability issue of the first order”.

IATSE isn’t working alone when it comes to pressing for better labor conditions. As Hollywood waits to see whether the union that represents thousands of technicians and craftspeople will go on strike as part of an effort to improve on-set working conditions, the rest of the country has already seen similar maneuvers from workers in a broad range of industries. ... “We are seeing what may be the biggest part of a new strike wave, in which workers are expressing their unwillingness to put up with intolerable conditions. That’s happening in health care. It’s happening in coal mines. It’s happening at Kellogg. It’s happening at Nabisco,” says Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies labor law and labor relations. “It’s really cutting across sectors.”

The fate of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev is now in the hands of the Supreme Court, which must decide whether his death sentence will be reinstated. Jim Braude was joined on Greater Boston by Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, to discuss. Gertner commented on the tricky spot that the Biden administration and the Department of Justice are in, given that Biden is personally opposed to the death penalty. “You see this a lot in the Merrick Garland administration of the Attorney General’s office — they see themselves as not the final word. They’ve only put a moratorium on the death penalty,” she said.

For one of the world's leading experts on food waste, visiting a grocery store can be frustrating. Stepping into her local Whole Foods, clinical professor of law Emily Broad Leib notices something awry in the store’s first produce display. The unbagged heads of broccoli lack date labels, but the bagged broccoli bears a “best by” date of August 12. “But that’s sort of picked out of thin air,” she points out. “There’s nothing going on with broccoli with no other ingredients. It doesn’t make any sense.” She reaches for a bag of grapefruits across the aisle—they don’t have a “best by” date. “That makes it even crazier,” she says. “Why would you put it on broccoli that’s no different than these things?” It’s a simple example, but for Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), this inconsistent labeling is just one of many ways the United States spurns simple rules that can greatly reduce food waste. It’s finding and fixing these inefficiencies that has driven her and her team not just to research and recommend new ways to promote effective food policies, but also to create the rapidly emerging field of law.

As she assumes her new role as organizing fellow for Harvard Law School’s new Institute to End Mass Incarceration (IEMI), community organizer Brittany White finds herself thinking of Bianca.  ... The institute proposes a new role for lawyers in the push to “decarcerate” America. “Lawyers think that power comes from law and permits, that the way liberal lawyers can make a difference is by going in and bringing power to clients. That’s not the way we think about it,” says faculty director and Wasserstein public interest professor of law Andrew Manuel Crespo. “We take our inspiration and our cues from movement work,” such as the civil-rights movement or labor organizing, because such things “have had the biggest impact on changing deep structural injustices in America.” The Institute, Crespo says, proposes that “power comes from the ground up,” and lawyers, in particular public defenders, should use their legal expertise to “help communities activate their power.” They want to teach the next generation of lawyers to be active partners with community organizers like White in the fight to end mass incarceration.

A book review by Primal Dharia:Early in “Redeeming Justice,” Jarrett Adams reflects on the power of storytelling and its role in criminal courtrooms across our country: “Who wins? In prison, I learned it’s not the lawyer who has amassed the most or the ‘best’ evidence. . . . The one who wins, I learned, is the one who tells the best story.” ... Adams’s story is a devastating one regardless of how it’s told. But the pages of this book deliver a gut punch, making every step along the way a visceral experience that readers are invited into. Wrongfully convicted by an all-White jury at the age of 17, Adams, a Black teenager charged with sexually assaulting a White teenager, served nearly 10 years of a 28-year prison sentence before being exonerated with the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Known as “Li’l Johnnie Cochran with the glasses” in prison, he delved into the law and fought for years to have his case reviewed while also helping countless others navigate their court cases from behind bars.

Workplace Covid-19 vaccination mandates have largely survived a first wave of legal challenges even as the number of lawsuits over them has soared with their expanded use. ...Two months later, regulators upgraded the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and its partner BioNTech SE from “Emergency Use Authorization” to full “Biologics License Application” approval. “Once the Pfizer vaccine made it from EUA to BLA, that took the winds out of the sails of an argument that seemed more rhetorically if not legally powerful,” said Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard University’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. “Without that card to play, the challengers have much weaker-sounding arguments.”

The January 6 Select Committee subpoenaed Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. A January 6th defendant who insisted he will defend himself on the court wound up admitting to two more felonies that he started out with. Today, President Biden gave a speech addressing the supply chain issue but also touting the fact that part of his Build Back Better agenda is an investment in ports, investment in infrastructure, investment in domestic manufacturing. Cheerleaders demand NFL release the full workplace inquiry. ...Nancy Gertner: ... The problem with judges chastising the Department of Justice is the Department of Justice is in a little bit of a pickle. There are what, so many hundreds of people that have been arrested. They really have to determine -- they have to allocate their resources.

The estate of Henrietta Lacks has filed a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, which sells a commercial line of HeLa tissue, accusing the corporation of profiting from Lacks' "stolen" cells. ... Yasmin Amer:: A spokesman for Thermo Fisher Scientific told NPR the company has no official response yet. What happened to Lacks became more widely known after Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book and an HBO movie starring Oprah. Glenn Cohen teaches law and bioethics at Harvard and says what happened to Lacks wasn't unusual. Glenn Cohen: Certainly historically, everybody agrees that what was done to Henrietta Lacks, as it was done to many Black women who sought hospital care at that time, was a moral wrong.  ... Cohen: There's a legal matter at the time in which the tissue was taken. It was not the ethical rules of the day to require informed consent.

OP26 president Alok Sharma has admitted that any agreement is still some way off and has called on every country to play its part. ... [ 12:21] Dr. Xi (Sisi) Hu, fellow at Harvard Law School's Labor Worklife Program, says technology is key to helping us reduce emissions and manage climate change.

Nearly two years after getting away with obstruction of Congress while he was president, Donald Trump may get away with it again, this time as a former president trying to block an investigation into the insurrection he incited. ... That history, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said, would go a long way toward proving the “corrupt intent” that prosecutors would need to show. “The former president’s corrupt and self-serving motive of concealing his role in the attempted coup and the ensuing insurrection by invoking an executive privilege that is no longer his to invoke should be possible to establish,” Tribe said. “With that motive established, there’d be a strong case for charging Trump’s interference with the special committee’s Jan. 6 inquiry as a criminal obstruction of Congress and of justice.”

Since Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in 2019, they have doggedly used Congress’s power to compel documents and testimony from Donald Trump and those in his orbit – and more often than not, they have butted up against a Trumpian wall of disparagement, denial, and delay. ... According to Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Laurence Tribe, executive privilege does not exist for former presidents. “We have only one president at a time,” Mr Tribe told The Independent, “and the constitutional presumption is that the incumbent president is the best judge of the factors bearing on whether and when to invoke executive privilege to withhold documents or testimony.”

For a long time, Chase Chewning had wanted to try a new type of psychotherapy that uses ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that’s shown promise as a mental health treatment. Chewning, a veteran who has had several recreational experiences with MDMA and psilocybin, hoped the drug could help him with his PTSD, so he made an appointment at a Los Angeles ketamine therapy clinic operated by Field Trip Health. ... “This is really the most promising development in mental health care to come along, literally, in many decades. And that’s one reason why you don’t want a few companies controlling it,” says Mason Marks, a project lead at Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center who focuses on psychedelics regulation.

Republican lawmakers redrawing states’ political lines are adopting a “colorblind” redistricting strategy aimed at inoculating maps against Democratic lawsuits that argue they dilute minority voting power. ... Democrats may now sue at their own peril, said Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a Harvard Law School Professor. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court has pared back the power of the Voting Rights Act, and in future litigation it could support the Republican argument, making federal law mostly useless in challenging racial gerrymandering. “Once the Republicans have confirmation from the Supreme Court that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is only violated where there’s intentional use of race to violate the voting power of voters of color, then you’re home free,” he said.

The Supreme Court is supposed to rule by the law alone. But Harvard’s Randall Kennedy says that doesn't always happen. “A very common misconception is that the Supreme Court is above politics," he says. "With all the marble palace and the robes and the funny words and all of that, beneath all of that is a political struggle.” So let's stop pretending that the court is a magisterial, impartial arbiter of the law. The law, Kennedy says, is a distillation of our politics. Top ACLU lawer David Cole disagrees.

...But last week, new regulations took effect in New Jersey allowing home bakers to sell their wares. It is the last state in the country to give up its ban on “cottage food,” products such as baked goods and jams made in home kitchens and sold at farmers markets and by hand delivery, and advertised though online portals, social media or simply word of mouth. ...The rollback of such restrictions across the country is due in part to the disparate political forces that it brings together. “I think that’s the magic sauce that has gotten a lot of these bills passed,” says Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. “It’s a unique opportunity to cut across traditional lines.”

...Yet they and others affected by the attack that killed three people and wounded 264 more disagree about whether convicted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be executed - a question the U.S. Supreme Court will consider on Wednesday when the justices hear the U.S. government's bid to reinstate his death sentence. ...Politically, Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker says, "the position that Joe Biden took on the death penalty is not a super popular one."

Marcella Alsan was in Professor Allan M. Brandt’s undergraduate class on the history of medicine and public health in America when she first learned about the infamous Tuskegee study, the federal government’s 40-year experiment observing the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men without their knowledge....Reaching out to scholars and practitioners in different disciplines to get at difficult questions in a “holistic” way is a hallmark of Alsan’s approach, said Crystal S. Yang, a Harvard Law School professor and Harvard-trained economist researching COVID-related health conditions in the criminal justice system with Alsan. ... “She’s the hardest-working person I know and is always pushing people to be better,” said Yang. “She’s always trying to teach the students about the right types of questions to ask, or how to do a certain type of analysis for randomized controlled trials. She’s just such a good role model for younger folks who are interested in doing this type of work.”