Media Mentions

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday called for the prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes over the discovery in Bucha, Ukraine, of mass graves and bodies of bound civilians shot at close range, but various challenges stand in the way. ... Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said the latest images will make the case easier to prosecute. “The question then becomes, who’s responsible and how high up does it go?” he said. Cases will be easier to build against soldiers and commanders but they can also pursue heads of state, experts said.

The nonprofit ReFED, in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), recently updated and relaunched the Food Waste Policy Finder. This online tool provides a comprehensive database of legislative and regulatory policy at the federal, state, and local levels pertaining to food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling. Aiming to serve as an educational platform, the database highlights the role policy plays in supporting food waste reduction goals. Policymakers and advocates can find regular updates of policies, read about best practices in supporting food waste reduction goals, and search for case studies. The relaunch of the database follows the publication of the U.S. Food Loss & Waste Policy Action Plan for Congress and the Administration, which ReFED co-authored along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Harvard Law School FLPC.

President Biden has called Vladimir Putin a "war criminal," and said Monday the Russian leader should face a trial over the alleged atrocities in Ukrainian city of Bucha. Yes, but: While similar calls have echoed worldwide, Putin is unlikely to be held criminally accountable, at least as long as he remains in power. The big picture: War crimes have been historically hard to investigate and often even more challenging to prosecute. This is especially true when prosecutors seek to hold leaders or former leaders accountable. For clear cases of war crimes, often the main challenges are determining who is responsible, and what evidence exists that can establish culpability, according to Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School visiting professor and deputy specialist prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague.

A conversation featuring Professor Laurence Tribe and Congressman Adam Schiff.

This week on Under the Radar with Callie Crossley: The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Two million people are in the nation’s prisons and jails. According to The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy center, that’s a 500% increase over the last 40 years at an annual cost of $80 billion. That reality has helped drive a movement for criminal justice reform which is now front and center in the national conversation. The cause has drawn together a motley group of advocates, from grassroots organizers to celebrities like Kim Kardashian and the conservative Koch brothers, where they are part of a roiling debate about systemic racism, reformative justice, no-knock warrants and sentencing policies. More recently, the formerly incarcerated have become major voices in the reform movement. How can their leadership help shape the effort to fix the broken system? Guests: John Valverde is the president and CEO of the global nonprofit YouthBuild USA. Dehlia Umunna is a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and the Faculty Deputy Director of the law school’s Criminal Justice Institute.

Amazon workers have voted to unionize for the first time in the company's history in the United States, securing a sweeping and unexpected victory in a National Labor Relations Board election for a group of around 8,000 workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Amazon Labor Union secured 2,654 "yes" votes to Amazon's 2,131 "no" votes. The union won the election with 55% of the vote, a lead of 523 votes. The union and Bloomberg both declared victory for unionization Friday morning. ... "Amazon is a corporation with massive essentially unlimited resources which it has deployed to stop workers from exercising their right to organize, and that nonetheless the workers have been able to do it. And they deserve enormous credit for that," Benjamin Sachs, a labor and industry professor at Harvard Law School, told Protocol immediately after the Staten Island victory was announced.

With a judge declaring that Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed a felony in his attempt to overturn the Presidential election, the congressional committee investigating January 6th is racing to finish its work before the looming midterm elections. Amy Davidson Sorkin and the legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen talk with David Remnick about the law and the politics of holding Trump accountable. Ben McGrath explores the troubled but remarkable life of Dick Conant, the subject of his new book, “Riverman: An American Odyssey.” And the music writer Sheldon Pearce shares three artists who didn’t get their due in the Grammy nominations.

Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage. In a 288-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked provisions of Florida’s Senate Bill 90, a massive attack on voting rights signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020. The law empowers partisan poll watchers, imposes strict voter ID requirements, criminalizes so-called “ballot harvesting,” limits ballot drop boxes, and bans advocacy groups from handing out food or water to voters waiting in long lines. ... “We’ve seen other district courts do aggressive things in election law cases, and we’ve seen a lot of those decisions get reversed by appellate courts or the Supreme Court,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and election law expert, told The New York Times.” I wouldn’t be shocked if this litigation falls into that pattern.”

The decor of the Nushama Psychedelic Wellness Clinic was designed to look like bliss. "It doesn't feel like a hospital or a clinic, but more like a journey," said Jay Godfrey, the former fashion designer who co-founded the space with Richard Meloff, a lawyer turned cannabis entrepreneur. The "journey", in this instance, is brought on by ketamine, administered intravenously, as a treatment for mental health disorders, albeit one that has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). ... "There's nothing suspicious" about off-label prescription use in general, said Mason Marks, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School specialising in the regulations around psychedelics, but ketamine providers need to be careful about over-promising the drug's benefits, particularly when there's limited evidence of its efficacy.

After Texas passed its restrictive abortion law last fall, Democrats started talking more about abortion than they had in decades. House Democrats coalesced around a bill to turn into law the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing most abortions, Roe v. Wade, voicing their support for the landmark precedent in tweets and public statements. A few days later, three congresswomen shared their abortion stories on the House floor. And when he delivered his State of the Union address in March, President Biden became the first Democratic president since Roe to use that platform to call for action on abortion rights. ... When they addressed abortion in other statements and speeches in the 1990s, Democrats generally tried to appeal to the largest possible cross-section of voters, said Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University’s College of Law and Harvard Law School who specializes in the history of abortion. Democratic leaders at the time emphasized that being “pro-choice” was not being “pro-abortion.” As he campaigned for president in 1992, Bill Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” coining a phrase that defined the party’s position on abortion for years.

A federal judge in Florida ruled on Thursday that sections of the state’s year-old election law were unconstitutional and racially motivated, and barred the state from making similar changes to its laws in the next decade without the approval of the federal government. The sharply worded 288-page order, issued by Judge Mark E. Walker of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, was the first time a federal court had struck down major elements of the wave of voting laws enacted by Republicans since the 2020 election. Finding a pattern of racial bias, Walker in his ruling relied on a little-used legal provision to impose unusual federal restrictions on how a state legislates. ... “From a realistic perspective, it’s unlikely that the 11th Circuit or the Supreme Court would agree with the district court that there was racially discriminatory intent in Florida,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and an expert on election law. “There’s a lurking fear that the same court that decided Shelby County might decide that bail-in is unconstitutional.”

A new partnership between George Washington University Law School and the Animal Legal Defense Fund aims to transform animal law from a niche specialty into a widely taught discipline by developing a cadre of faculty trained in the subject. The Fund has already raised money to hire an executive director for George Washington’s new Animal Legal Education Initiative and hopes to have the program up and running in the fall. ... “Anything any law school can do to foster interest in animal law and help further the field and scholarship is only a good thing,” said Chris Green, executive director of Harvard Law’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program.

The news that the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation is reaching beyond the Capitol rioters has added fuel to a long-running debate about the pace of the investigation.  One side has criticized the Justice Department for not investigating Donald Trump and his inner circle for subverting the 2020 election. The lack of any public signs of a broader, more aggressive investigation for over a year, they say, shows a troubling lack of urgency. ... To Laurence Tribe, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, the recent reports of Trump-adjacent investigations brought welcome news — if slightly belated. “It’s obviously better late than never,” he said, acknowledging that the grand jury activity reported by The Washington Post and New York Times may have started sooner than the reports let on. “Memories can fade, people can adjust their testimony in light of interim discoveries,” Tribe said. “It would be ideal if this had not waited as long as it apparently has.”

War crimes happen whenever there is war, but seldom have they been investigated in real time and within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, as is happening with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. After a brief initial hesitation to publicly brand the architects of the Ukraine invasion as war criminals, the United States and its European allies began issuing explicit statements about what they were seeing before the war was one month old. ... U.S. laws even limit the ways the U.S. can support ICC investigations, according to Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. "The U.S. has actually taken the position that there are different ways to hold alleged Russian perpetrators to account, citing Ukrainian law and the possibility of prosecutions under that law, prosecutions by third states with jurisdiction, and then finally the ICC," Whiting told VOA.

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.