Media Mentions

Longtime war crimes prosecutor Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, speaks to reporter Karen Sloan from The Hague about the outlook for indictments by the International Criminal Court.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Ashley Nunes during a Newsweek podcast debate about EVs being the future of transportation. ... Electric vehicles seem like a good idea, because we are often told that they're cleaner to drive and cheaper to own. But when you dig a little deeper, a different truth emerges. Are EVs cleaner than existing alternatives? Not in China, or the United States — where major auto markets derive the bulk of their power from coal. Are EVs cheaper to operate? Yes, but only if you hold onto those cars for a longer period of time, because they have higher upfront costs. Proponents of EVs say that things will get better over time, because they've become cleaner, and costs have dropped. But past performance is certainly no guarantee of future return. I'm not saying that driving gas guzzlers is the way to go; I just think that we should be honest with the public about what EVs can and cannot do, particularly when public funds are used to back climate policies.

The hype around special purpose acquisition companies — and the investor losses that have resulted since the SPAC boom began to fizzle a year ago — has led the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue harsh new SPAC rules and amendments that go beyond what many originally envisioned. The changes are so onerous that Hester Peirce, the lone commissioner who opposed them, said in a hearing Wednesday that they “seem designed to stop SPACs in their tracks.” (Peirce is the only Republican commissioner at the SEC.) ... This change addresses the criticism of SPACs being able to make overly optimistic forward-looking statements in a deSPAC because they are entitled to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Act — something IPOs do not have. Last year, the SEC’s acting director of the division of corporation finance, John Coates, indicated that the SEC was prepared to challenge those protections.

Advocates for a digital dollar in the U.S. point to many possible benefits of such a currency, saying it would lead to greater financial inclusion, allow for a more efficient distribution of government benefits and provide a faster and cheaper way to send money overseas. But the issue of whether to have a digital dollar is far from settled, although it may have received a boost earlier this month when President Joe Biden issued an executive order that asked federal agencies to study the issue. ... A report earlier this month from the Brookings Institution written by Tim Massad, a former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Howell Jackson, a Harvard Law School professor, said that instead of getting the Fed involved, “the Treasury Department could, relatively quickly, create digital accounts to provide payment services that would be especially valuable to unbanked and underbanked individuals.”

Nine people who blocked access to an abortion clinic in Washington in October 2020 have been charged with federal civil rights offenses, prosecutors said on Wednesday, about six months after the Justice Department signaled it would use a 1994 law to prosecute such cases across the country. Prosecutors said the nine had used their bodies, furniture, chains and ropes to block clinic doors and had livestreamed their actions on Facebook. ... Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University College of Law, and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said the FACE Act had fallen into disuse during the Trump administration, leading to criticism from abortion rights supporters that it had become a “paper tiger” that was encouraging more aggressive actions outside abortion clinics. “It is significant that they’re actually using the FACE Act again in a fairly prominent way,” Professor Ziegler said, adding that the charges send a signal to those who would block clinics that “there will be consequences as long as Biden is in office.”

Cass R. Sunstein ’78, Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, argues that as great as they were, the early Beatles needed some “serendipity” to break through. 

The Biden administration is throwing its weight behind efforts to boost antitrust enforcement as federal agencies take on the market power of tech giants. President Biden's $5.8 trillion budget proposal requests $227 million in increased funding for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) combined - a bump advocates and agency leaders say is needed to tackle cases against the nation's wealthiest companies. ... "It would represent a serious step toward closing the huge funding gap that the agencies confront today," said Daniel Francis, a Harvard Law School lecturer and former deputy director of the FTC competition bureau. "It would go a long way to help the agencies complete timely evaluations of proposed deals, giving consumers comfort that their interests are being protected, and giving businesses comfort that the agencies have been able to take a real look at transactions before they close," he added.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell speaks to Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe about the mounting pressure that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing after text messages his wife sent in the lead-up to the January 6th Capitol riot were made public.

Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville opens with the death of Conrad Roy III (Colton Ryan). The 18-year-old’s body is discovered in his pickup truck in a Kmart parking lot. He has died by suicide. But questions soon emerge about the role a young woman named Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning) might have played in Conrad’s decision to end his life. ... “Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, told the Times. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

A retired Marine brigadier general will replace the top federal public defender for the Western District of North Carolina after the prior office holder became a defendant in a closely watched sexual discrimination lawsuit against the judiciary. ... Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School who represents Strickland, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department endorsed House and Senate bills Monday that would keep the biggest digital platforms like Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon from giving preferential treatment to their own products. Why it matters: Support from the Biden Administration's DOJ gives the bipartisan bills a boost, and shows that the department thinks they can be enforced and help boost tech competition in the U.S. The big picture: "The fact that the DOJ’s regulatory goals are consistent with the Hill show the seriousness of the DOJ’s antitrust concerns in the technology sector," Jeffrey Jacobovitz, senior counsel at law firm Arnall Golden Gregory LLP and former Federal Trade Commission attorney, told Axios. Driving the news: The Senate Judiciary Committee approved its bill, the American Competition and Innovation Act, in January. A companion bill awaits full House approval. News of the DOJ letter was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Yes, but: The bills still have to pass the full Senate and House, and face a packed congressional agenda along with bitter partisanship. “It’s always helpful to know where the DOJ stands on competition legislation, but it’s not obvious that this letter will change the legislative dynamics in Congress around the bill," Daniel Francis, former deputy director of the FTC competition bureau and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, told Axios.

Peter Monsini, who died in a tragic accident at a Boston construction site Saturday, was not the first worker to be seriously injured on a JDC Demolition Co. worksite. The Brockton-based company has paid large settlements in recent years in at least three lawsuits brought by workers who got hurt on the job and blamed JDC and other contractors. ... Mark Erlich, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program and a retired officer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, said big job sites like these are supposed to have many checks on safety protocols. But things don't always go right. "Every now and then, there will be one of these tragic incidents," he said, "that reminds people why construction is so dangerous."

The Justice Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 includes $34 million to hire 80 attorneys for the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection. The department has already brought more than 750 cases, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made clear at a news briefing on Monday that the department is not stopping there. ... The Justice Department will need to make good on its vow to follow the facts wherever they lead. As constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, there is no “honorable way for [Attorney General] Merrick Garland to avoid pursuing the path Judge Carter has not only clearly marked but blazingly illuminated. Short of klieg lights, Carter has pointed the way to criminal investigation and prosecution of the former president as forcefully as a federal judge properly can.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear the pork industry’s challenge to California’s Proposition 12, a law that restricts certain confinement practices in industrial animal agriculture. The law, passed by nearly 63 percent of voters in a 2018 ballot measure, effectively bans “gestation crates”—narrow, metal enclosures with slatted floors that confine pregnant sows to only sitting and standing, and restrict them from turning around. The industry argues the crates, which have been used in large-scale hog farming for more than 30 years, minimize aggression and prevent competition for food. ... But it only takes four of the justices—not a majority—to agree to hear a case, and the pork industry’s legal argument is considered weak by many legal scholars because Prop 12 applies the same standard to products raised in California as it does to those in any other state. “I think the odds are not great for Prop 12, but I wouldn’t give up at all,” said Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. “The Supreme Court’s decisions in this area—going all the way back to the 1920s—I think strongly support California.”

Cooking Practices “can open a window into the lives of enslaved people and help us understand slavery and its legacies,” said Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin on Thursday, introducing a talk by chef and culinary historian Michael Twitty on the intertwined history of slavery and American foodways. The event was part of the initiative on Harvard’s ties to slavery, launched by President Lawrence Bacow in 2019 and headed by Brown-Nagin. The initiative’s faculty committee will be releasing a report of its findings and recommendations next month.

Wild animals possess distinct legal rights, including to exist, to develop their innate instincts and to be free from disproportionate cruelty, fear and distress, Ecuador’s top court ruled in a landmark decision interpreting the country’s “rights of nature” constitutional laws. ... “What makes this decision so important is that now the rights of nature can be used to benefit small groups or individual animals,” Kristen A. Stilt, a Harvard law professor and Faculty Director of the school’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program, said. “That makes rights of nature a far more powerful tool than perhaps we have seen before.”

An article by Elena Chachko: The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of diplomatic, political, economic and military responses. But more than in previous geopolitical crises, tech giants’ policies and sanctions have played a major role in the Ukraine conflict, alongside those of states and international organizations. Companies like Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter and even TikTok increasingly recognize that they cannot afford to sit geopolitical crises out.

You won’t find Red Pill News or the X22 Report on YouTube anymore. The far-right online shows were taken down in the fall of 2020 after the major social media and tech companies started purging accounts that spread the QAnon conspiracy theory. But you will find both of them on a video-sharing platform called Rumble, where their content ranks among the most popular on the site. ... “It’s an intensely engaged population,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who is a co-author of a book about the ways conservative outlets reinforce their messages through repetition and shut down dissent. For an individual platform like Rumble, he added, the audience is likely to be larger than whatever the size is on paper.

Conservative activists have lodged a record number of shareholder proposals at US annual meetings this year, setting up a highly politicised proxy season as they take advantage of new regulatory guidelines and borrow topics and tactics from their liberal foes. ... Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor who studies shareholder resolutions, said that sharply worded proposals sometimes draw attention but their impact may be limited. “The pressure [chief executives] are facing is not so much the number of proposals but what percentage of support they think the proposals will get,” he said. “When they think a proposal will not get many votes, it is not a source of pressure that would lead them to do anything different.”

Washington obsesses over how many Republicans will vote for the eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, or Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) latest attention-getting move, or the forever tribulations of Vice President Kamala Harris. There's a lot more real action out in the states, at least in the red states. They are shredding rights for voting, minorities, women, gays and people with disabilities. ... “This is political demagoguery,” says Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, an expert on the subject. It's used mainly, he told me, by right-wingers to “smear any liberal who advances a progressive race agenda.” There are, he adds, critical race theorists who “spout implausible and sometimes downright ugly theories,” which serve to give “oxygen to the right-wing campaign of repression.”

Occasionally a Supreme Court case puts its dominant block of Justices in the difficult position of having to choose between two deeply held policy goals. How they resolve this conflict offers a glimpse of their cultural and political values and interpretive commitments in action. This political quandary was visible last week when the Court released its decision in Ramirez v Collier. Ramirez required the current conservative majority to choose between its longstanding desire to expedite executions and its commitment to offering expansive protections to religious freedom. ... Writing about such interest balancing almost sixty years ago, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried said that it did little to constrain judges. Interest balancing, Fried said, “neither compels a precise solution nor even precludes one.”