Media Mentions

“But you could look at food safety as being more about long term health impacts--so, diet-related disease or the cumulative impacts over a period of years, or a lifetime, of eating certain things.” This week on our show, a conversation with Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. She argues that our narrowly focused food safety regulations are failing to address the most important factors in our food system. We talk about what it might look like to include worker safety, environmental impacts and long term health and nutrition when we look at the safety of our food system.

An op-ed by Mason Marks: Public and scientific interest in psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA is expanding. Once off-limits because of federal prohibition, a trickle of research from the 1990s has grown into a stream. But despite increasing acceptance by the public, and commercial investment in psychedelic therapies, aging federal laws stem the flow of vital research. Psilocybin, a compound produced by many species of fungi, is one of the most well-studied psychedelics. To acknowledge its impressive safety record and potential for treating depression more effectively than existing therapies, the Food and Drug Administration designated psilocybin a breakthrough therapy in 2018 and 2019 for treating drug-resistant depression and major depressive disorder.

The science is clear: COVID-19 vaccines drastically reduce the chance of hospitalization or death from the disease and will help us get out of the pandemic that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. But even so, months after the shots became available for all adults in the country, tens of millions remained unvaccinated. ... Though school and healthcare workers have long been required to get vaccinated for a number of diseases—like measles, mumps, and rubella (the MMR vaccination) or even the flu—the upcoming COVID requirements are much more extensive in nature. “We’ve had vaccine mandates before, but they haven’t been quite as broadly applied,” says Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Because of this, it’s not immediately clear how they’ll work.

For decades, scholar Randall Kennedy has been writing about race, culture and the law. “We are certainly much further from the racial promised land than I had thought that we were," he says. "The forces of racism are deeper, stronger, more influential than one would like.” And yet, Kennedy doesn't think today's young activists have a winning strategy. “You need a big tent to advance your political agenda. You need to bring on board people who are not already on your side," he adds. "Do not needlessly alienate people. If that's respectability politics, count me in.” Today, On Point: Randall Kennedy on race, culture and the law across generations.

If there was a glimmer of optimism last week that Texas’s authoritarian new abortion law would soon be overturned in the courts, the hope was swiftly dashed. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law known as S.B. 8 — the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country, a de facto abortion ban — as part of a lawsuit the Justice Department has brought against the state of Texas. ... “The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe. “If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?”

An article by Evelyn Douek: Many people think of TikTok as a dance app. And although it is an app full of dancing, it’s also a juggernaut experiencing astronomical growth. In July, TikTok—a short-form video-sharing app powered by an uncannily goodrecommendation algorithm and owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—became the only social-media mobile app other than those from Facebook to ever pass 3 billion downloads. At the end of last month, TikTok announcedit had more than 1 billion monthly users. It was, by some counts, the most downloaded app in 2020 and remained so into 2021. Not bad for an app launched only in 2016! Of the social-media platforms around today, TikTok is the likeliest to represent the future. Its user base is mostly young people. But if you look for TikTok in news coverage, you’re more likely to find it in the lifestyle, culture, or even food section than you are on the front page. It’s not that social-media platforms aren’t newsworthy—Facebook consistentlydominates headlines. But TikTok is all too often regarded as an unserious thing to write or read about. That’s a mistake, and it’s one that Congress is making as well.

Last year, George Washington's presidential administration became surprisingly relevant to today's politics — not only because of his prescience with regards to so many of America's current political ills, or his founding father status. Rather Washington, like Trump and now Biden, had to fight a raging pandemic. ..."I'm looking hard, but I have yet to see a vaccination or mask mandate relating to COVID-19 from the Biden administration that I think comes even close to the line of unconstitutionality or lack of executive authority," Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar at Harvard University who specializes in constitutional law, told Salon by email.

Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus, recently spoke to the Harvard Gazette about findings in a recent Senate Judiciary Committee report that former president Donald Trump and his allies pressured the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s redistricting time in North Carolina. That’s when lawmakers will slice and dice our state into election districts that account for population shifts. How those lines are drawn can tip the balance of power here and in Congress. In a limited-run podcast from Under the Dome, we explore how lawmakers draw these maps, their impact on power in North Carolina’s political landscape and how new tools are changing the fight against gerrymandering. Part 3, Math on the front lines, is now available for streaming. Ruth Greenwood featured in Part 3.

Investment giant BlackRock Inc. is giving institutional investors such as pensions and endowments the option to cast shareholder votes tied to their investments. When investors buy a fund from an asset manager, the money manager typically votes on shareholder proposals on behalf of the investors. Starting in 2022, BlackRock says its large investors can vote themselves on everything from who sits on boards to executive pay to what companies should disclose on greenhouse gas emissions. The change allows those BlackRock clients to lay claim to voting power on some $2 trillion in investments tied to index-tracking assets BlackRock manages in institutional accounts. This is about 40% of roughly $4.8 trillion of indexed equities managed by BlackRock. ... In 2018, in response to the index fund boom, Harvard Law School professor John Coates warned that voting power would be controlled by a small group of people with “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.”

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) want to impose a new tax on stock buybacks. This proposal is based on the flawed assumption that buybacks only benefit CEOs and corporate executives and comes at the expense of R&D and workers. If passed into law, it would hamstring an important tool public companies use to provide equity to shareholders, like Americans with retirement accounts, and potentially smaller companies. The Stock Buyback Accountability Act would apply a 2 percent tax of the “value of any securities” involved repurchases starting in 2022. ... Additionally, shareholder payouts via buybacks are not draining companies’ investment in R&D. In fact, according to an article by Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang in the Harvard Business Review, R&D as a percentage of revenue is now at levels “not seen since the late 1990s.

Both the NYSE and Nasdaq require the boards of listed companies to have a majority of independent directors and audit committees that are composed solely of independent board members. But there is an argument about what makes a board member independent. Technically, independence means that the director has no “material relationship” to the business that could present a conflict of interest in performing their duty to represent all stakeholders. Those relationships include being an employee of the company or a partner of the company (distributor, supplier, etc.). ... Similarly, Lucian Bebchuk, the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics and Finance and director of the program on corporate governance at Harvard Law School, says that directors nominated by institutional investors may bow to the goals of those shareholders. “In companies with a controlling shareholder, our corporate law system places excessive reliance on the mechanism of nominally independent directors,” Bebchuk says. “It is important to recognize that effective oversight requires alternative or supplemental mechanisms.” In order to distance a director from relying on management or institutional investors to get or keep a seat on the boards, Bebchuk proposes “enhanced independence.”

From teachers to airlines workers, some employees who have faced termination for not complying with their company's COVID-19 vaccine mandates have gone to court to fight the decisions. Some of the plaintiffs, such as New York City Department of Education employees, a handful of Los Angeles county public employees and United Airlines workers, have argued that the mandates should be removed, questioning the rules' constitutionality and some contending their religious rights weren't observed. ... Glenn Cohen, a health law and bioethics professor at Harvard Law School, told ABC News that strong legal precedent dating back to the early 20th century gives businesses and governments the legal backing to enforce the mandates. "They're pretty weak," Cohen said of the lawsuits. "The judges that have denied them have come from across the political spectrum, and from across the country, because the plaintiffs' arguments don't have any weight."

Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a 394-page interim report Thursday that details efforts by the Trump White House to pressure senior officials in the Department of Justice to help promote false claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud in order to undo results in states where Donald Trump had lost, including Georgia and Pennsylvania. ... Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, is one of the nation’s pre-eminent constitutional scholars. He advised House managers during Trump’s first and second impeachment and has been highly critical of his administration. Tribe spoke to the Gazette about the report’s early findings and what effect it could have on the Department of Justice. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A congressman said on Wednesday that he intends to help bring the psychedelics reform movement to Capitol Hill “this year.” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a longstanding champion of marijuana reform in Congress, made the comments at a symposium on psychedelics policy that was hosted by Harvard Law School’s newly established research institute, the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR).

Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, 10/6/21 ... Tonight, new progress from the select committee as Trump aides defy subpoenas. Stacey Abrams on today's big hearing for voting rights and Laurence Tribe on a threat to democracy no one is talking about. ... HAYES: Laurence, I feel like we've all learned a lot about the plumbing of the Electoral College and the complicated system by which under both the United States constitution, the 12th Amendment, and the electoral count act as well as state law, you get this sort of transmission from the votes go in and the president comes out over here. And it does seem like that is subject to a lot of hanky-panky they tried last time but is still vulnerable. LAURENCE TRIBE, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Absolutely. And Stacey Abrams is right on the front lines of trying to reduce the vulnerability and it's important to do that. But even if voting rights are fully protected and people get to vote and their votes are not audited out of existence, we still have a lot of plumbing to go through. And after people vote, there are a lot of processes by which those who really have no respect for law or for the constitution can turn the system inside out and upside down. And that's why people like me are quite vigilant about making sure that we do everything we can to prevent a bloodless coup from taking place even before another insurrection.

In his latest book, “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, And Culture,” Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy discusses everything from why he thinks Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a “sellout” to how the election of Donald Trump left his optimism for a racially equitable nation “profoundly shaken.” He joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss all that and more. Kennedy responded to a recent wave of Supreme Court justices lamenting the politicization of the Court. He called the claims “ridiculous.” “The Supreme Court is inevitably political,” he said. “Clearly it matters who these people are. Clearly our law is largely dependent on the personnel that make it to these seats on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the U.S. Department of Education urged the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to quash her deposition subpoena in a lawsuit by student borrowers seeking forgiveness from "predatory" for-profit college loans, but panelists indicated they were struggling to see how the lower court "clearly erred" issuing it. ... The plaintiffs' attorney, Margaret E. O'Grady of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School, said she believes the student borrowers can get relief on the existing record, but said just because they have a strong case, they shouldn't be prevented from obtaining DeVos' deposition. “The law is clear that depositions of Cabinet secretaries are permissible, but reserved for extraordinary circumstances. And the court below found those rare, extraordinary circumstances present here,” O'Grady said.

On April 5, 2020, Christopher Charles Perez posted a message on Facebook about an H-E-B grocery store in San Antonio, federal prosecutors said. “My homeboys cousin has covid19 and has licked everything for past two days cause we paid him too,” Mr. Perez wrote. “YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.” The claim was not true, and the post came down after 16 minutes, according to court documents. ... This past June, Mr. Perez, 40, of San Antonio, was found guilty of disseminating false information and hoaxes related to biological weapons. On Monday, a federal judge sentenced him to 15 months in federal prison. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Boston, said that since federal sentencing guidelines went into effect in 1987, judges have sentenced defendants to prison time on charges that once led to probation. “I’m sure the judge was intending to send a message to people who would be involved in like hoaxes, which is important,” said Ms. Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “The question is whether he needed to impose a sentence of this length to send that message.”

New White House guidance on a landmark environmental law may ease uncertainty about the federal review process for energy projects, even as it leaves unanswered questions about legal cases and how agencies analyze climate and environmental justice, observers say. The Council on Environmental Quality announced a proposed rule to revise regulations for how federal agencies should implement reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The plan will affect the assessment of projects ranging from pipelines and compressor stations to oil and gas leases on public lands. ... Agencies have since been in a "holding pattern" as they have needed to move forward with permitting but were simultaneously waiting for the Biden administration to clarify its guidelines for how they should comply, said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program. Vizcarra said the lack of CEQ regulations had been creating “a lot of uncertainty for anyone coming before those agencies, as well as the agencies themselves, on how they are supposed to be operating, at a time when the administration is really pushing for a lot of action.”

An article by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith: At the top of the list of those responsible for executive branch accountability in the 21st century are the statutory inspectors general that now populate every major executive branch agency. On Wednesday, Oct. 6, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs will consider three bills—the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2021, the IG Testimonial Subpoena Authority Act and the IG Independence and Empowerment Act—that would expand the independence and power of inspectors general in important respects. This post reviews the central reforms, urges the passage of one of them, and assesses the others.