Media Mentions

In a new survey, the majority of corporate legal departments say they are facing rising challenges over environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues, but they are without clear guidance from regulators and lack the expertise, resources and support from the C-suite to handle the risks. As the range of ESG risks expands, a whopping 99% of general counsel respondents said they expect a sharp increase in volumes of work, according to a study released today by EY Law and the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. ... Professor David Wilkins, vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession and faculty director of the Harvard Center, said in a Law360 interview that he shares Grossman's view of the general counsel's predicament. "A lot of these issues are ending up on the general counsel's desk in the form of a crisis," Wilkins explained, such as an employee walkout at Disney World last month, or investor demands for leadership change, as happened at ExxonMobil last year when several directors were ousted.

Germany’s foreign intelligence service claims to have intercepted radio communications in which Russian soldiers discuss carrying out indiscriminate killings in Ukraine. In two separate communications, Russian soldiers described questioning Ukrainian soldiers as well as civilians and then shooting them, according to an intelligence official familiar with the findings who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. ... Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who previously coordinated investigations at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, said the key question to discern from intercepted communications is whether soldiers were “acting pursuant to some plan or some general direction.” “Just the fact that they would be talking to each other about these killings would indicate that and would disprove any suggestion that these were kind of spontaneous, random events,” he added.

On Tuesday (April 5), the Harvard Law School Animal Law & Policy Clinic filed a suit against the United States Department of Agriculture for, it says, evading “its statutory obligation to conduct full annual inspections of research facilities as required under the Animal Welfare Act.” ... “There are a lot of facilities that maintain AAALAC accreditation, even where the USDA has found severe AWA violations,” Max Hantel (JD '23), a law student at the Harvard Clinic who’s working on the lawsuit, tells The Scientist. And while AAALAC International can put research sites on probation, he says, those institutions’ statuses aren’t disclosed. “It’s all secret. We don’t know who’s on probation, and the USDA treats it all as accredited.”

Four of Justice Stephen Breyer's former clerks examine his impact on the Supreme Court — and on them.

Just as the Supreme Court is poised to achieve many of the stated aims of the conservative legal movement, including overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down affirmative action, leading conservative thinkers are hotly debating alternative approaches to interpreting the Constitution. Originalism—the notion that the words of the Constitution should be read according to some version of their original historical meaning—has been the standard-bearer for decades, promoted initially as a strategy to undermine national economic regulation and limit the protection of civil rights. But a conservative competitor to originalism has recently emerged in “common good constitutionalism.” For its leading proponent, Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, the point of constitutional interpretation isn’t to discern what the Founders thought or what some legal text meant to ordinary readers when it was enacted. Instead, the aim is to promote the “common good.” Vermeule claims that within the “classical legal tradition”—which extended from the Roman Empire through early modern Europe—political officials, including judges, understood that the purpose of the state is to secure the goods of “peace, justice, and abundance,” which he translates now into “health, safety, and economic security.” But in Vermeule’s telling, American conservatives have lost sight of that tradition and its influence on our own legal system. They have been blinded by originalism, which has become a stultifying obstacle to promoting a “robust, substantively conservative approach.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Despite the toxic partisan politics displayed during the confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month, her likely ascension to the US Supreme Court – as an eminently qualified jurist and the first African American woman justice – marks a profound and positive change in the nation’s history. In 2022, we are closer than ever to the aspiration of equal protection promised in the US Constitution and our laws, even as race and gender inequities endure in many areas of American life. This is a moment worthy of celebration. But it also invites reflection on how individual success relates to the ideal of opportunity for all.  

Oklahoma lawmakers have approved a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony except in the case of a medical emergency. It's the latest conservative legislature to approve a new restriction on abortion, as Republican-led states across the country push to limit reproductive rights. ... "I think that this is just a reflection of the fact that lawmakers in Oklahoma, as in much of the country, are pretty confident that the Supreme Court is going to overrule Roe and that it's just a matter of time until a law like this can go into effect," Mary Ziegler, visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told NPR. Ziegler said the law may even be blocked from being enforced in the short term, but that Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma are likely counting on the Supreme Court to toss out Roe in the summer, clearing the way for such a law to take effect.

On the March morning she officially became the chair of the board of directors of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, Martha Minow sat on a couch in the handsomely appointed apartment of her father and remembered the past. “In the summer after my freshman year at college, I worked as a copy clerk for the Sun-Times and Daily News,” she says, talking about the building that housed both newspapers, now the site of Trump Tower. “It was fascinating, carrying papers, learning layout. I was able to write a couple of obituaries. And I met so many great people, Lois Wille among them. And I used to get coffee for Mike Royko. He was fine but I think I did hear him growl once.”

To many of the women who belong to the Harvard Black Law Students Association, the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court has felt deeply personal. Judge Jackson, an alumna of both Harvard Law School and the association, is poised to become the first Black female justice in the court’s 233-year history when the Senate votes on her confirmation as soon as Thursday. ... [Featuring: Brianna Banks, Christina Coleburn, Catherine Crevecoeur, Regina Fairfax, Gwendolyn Gissendanner, Abigail Hall, Zarinah Mustafa, Aiyanna Sanders, Virginia Thomas, Mariah K. Watson.] 

Stock-market short-termism is that rare enemy that unites left and right, management and employees, and some of the world’s biggest fund managers and consultants. On the left, “quarterly capitalism” is shorthand for venal executives and greedy shareholders abusing workers and the environment in pursuit of unsustainable profits. On the right, critics fear short-term-oriented stockholders pressure management to make dumb decisions, depressing investment and the economy. Neither is correct, as a compelling short book from Harvard Law School Professor Mark Roe shows. And that matters for public policy, lawmakers and the dominant narrative in how America’s corporations are run. There are plenty of problems, but they need different fixes.

A major presidential scandal isn’t complete without missing evidence, though Donald Trump seems to have been the first president to swallow his own words, literally. The former president had a habit of tearing drafts and signed documents into small pieces to be thrown away—or flushing them down a toilet. And there have even been reports that, on occasion, he consumed them. ... The comparisons to Richard Nixon were immediate and inevitable—but they missed a key difference: What happened in those seven hours should ultimately be knowable, at least at some level. The Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted that the gap in the record made “the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes look like nothing in comparison.” While that brazen presidential manipulation of the historical record ultimately didn’t help Nixon stave off the collapse of his presidency—indeed it likely backfired by creating skepticism toward the president among elite Republicans after its revelation—the gap in a crucial White House tape to this day remains stubbornly difficult to fill in. By contrast, the newly reported Trumpian gap may actually be easier to fill in, and therefore less of a threat to the historical record than Nixon’s.

On March 31, Washington became the first state in the US to guarantee rideshare drivers receive a minimum wage. The bill, signed into law by governor Jay Inslee, ensures all drivers in the state will earn at least $1.17 per mile and $0.34 per minute, including a minimum pay of $3.00 per trip with benefits such as paid sick leave and workers’ compensation insurance. The new law takes effect in January 2023. ... Terri Gerstein,  director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law’s Labor and Worklife Program, is concerned about the precedent that this could set for other state-level governments to thwart local attempts to enact labor protections, especially in the gig economy. “Seattle has been a leader nationally in regulating gig worker companies. And now, instead of celebrating the leadership and innovation of Seattle, the state is tamping down on them,” says Gerstein. “Maybe it will be limited to this one industry, but I think people are fooling themselves if they think other industries won’t come to state legislatures with similar proposals to preempt local regulatory power.”

Back during the height of the novel coronavirus pandemic, online gaming platform and creation system Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) fit almost perfectly in the new normal. But as the global health crisis fades into the rearview mirror, investors are getting down to the financial brass tacks — putting RBLX stock in an uncomfortable light due to executive compensation information that a securities filing revealed. ... Still, other research regarding the return on investment on CEO compensation is mixed, according to Harvard Law School. “Prior studies conclude that CEOs are responsible for as little as 4 percent and as much as 36 percent of company performance. Corporate directors estimate that CEOs are responsible for 40 percent of performance.”

Amazon (AMZN) warehouse workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., facility on Friday established the first U.S. union in the company's 28-year history, delivering a blow to the e-commerce giant and intensifying a wave of labor organizing nationwide. The astonishing victory of a worker-led, crowdfunded union over the nation's second-largest employer became an immediate symbol for resurgent worker strength. But for now, a symbol is just about all that it is. ... Federal law requires employers to bargain with representatives of unionized employees in "good faith," but the penalties for violating the law are "negligible at best," said Sharon Block, a former Biden administration official and the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

Two years ago, on the day Christian Smalls led a walkout demanding better Covid safety protections at his Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in New York City, the company fired him, saying he himself violated safety rules. There were some copycat protests scattered around the country shortly afterward, and the company’s public relations took a hit, but its grip on its labor relations appeared very much intact. For longtime labor advocates, Smalls’s firing seemed like one more example of a targeted dismissal that achieves its goal of scaring other workers away from organizing, even if it gets reversed. ... ALU could still fail to get any further with Amazon, and the company could prevail in the rematch slated to occur at a second Staten Island warehouse later in April. Overall U.S. unionization declined last year, despite 2021’s wave of prominent strike authorizations, mass resignations, and other organizing efforts. But Smalls’s win signals that there’s an opening for workers, one that many others are now more likely to explore. “The psychological and symbolic importance of a win can’t be overstated,” says Sharon Block, a former Obama Labor Department policy chief who now directs Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The wonderful thing about the beginning of a wave is that you don’t know that it’s a wave.” —With Michael Tobin and Matt Day

Perhaps it was the way the lifeless bodies, bloodied by bullets, and some with hands bound, had been left strewn about or shoveled into makeshift mass graves. Or the reality of seeing them up close in widely circulated photographs and videos. There have been other atrocities in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, concentrating much of its firepower on the dwellings and gathering spots of ordinary Ukrainians, but the international outrage they provoked has been eclipsed by the reaction to revelations that retreating Russian soldiers left many slain civilians behind near the Ukrainian capital. ... “What’s different here is that you have images of civilians with their hands bound and executed — that’s a completely different kind of crime,” said Alex Whiting, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who has worked on international war crimes prosecutions. “This very much looks like a crime.”

An article co-written by Ashley Nunes: Procurement incentives are a widely leveraged policy lever to stimulate electric vehicle (EV) sales. However, their effectiveness in reducing transportation emissions depends on the behavioural characteristics of EV adopters. When an EV is used, under what conditions and by whom dictates whether or not these vehicles can deliver emissions reductions. Here, we document that replacing gasoline powered vehicles with EVs may—depending on behavioural characteristics—increase, not decrease, emissions. We further show that counterfactual vehicle inventory—how many vehicles a household would own absent an EV purchase—is an important influencer of these effects. We conclude that achieving emissions reductions using EVs requires redesigning procurement incentive programmes in a manner that (re)distributes incentives towards the second-hand EV market. Doing so would not only facilitate emissions reductions but also address fiscal prudency and regressivity concerns associated with these programmes.

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.