Media Mentions

Amazon.com Inc. is facing a unionization effort at a fulfillment center in Canada, just months after defeating a similar drive in the U.S. ...Amazon will have less time and less discretion to carry out an anti-union campaign in Alberta than it did in Alabama, said David Doorey, an associate professor at York University in Toronto. Authorities in Alberta are more likely to deem an onslaught of mandatory anti-union meetings illegally coercive, he said in an email. “Canadian labor law has less tolerance for aggressive anti-union campaigning by employers than the U.S. model,” said Doorey, who is also a research associate at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and former attorney for the United Steelworkers.

The National Park Service issued a record of decision Monday in response to reports of tule elk dying at Point Reyes National Seashore, allowing the continuation of commercial cattle ranching on park lands while making “improvements” to the elk population’s management...Environmental and animal rights activists have criticized the National Park Service over the last year for its handling of the tule elk population, arguing that more than 150 elk have died on park lands since last year, amounting to more than one-third of the species’ population. At the root of the criticism, underscored in a lawsuit filed in June by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, is a fence on park service land that prevents the elk from grazing in the southern portion of their habitat, which is leased to private commercial ranchers.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy: A string of professors have been condemned, disciplined, even fired for saying the N-word in full.

Small businesses in Massachusetts employ more than 1.5 million people here. Some of those employers will now have to require their employees to be vaccinated, or test negative for COVID once a week, under new rules issued last week by President Joe Biden. Governor Baker has also mandated that more than 40,000 public sector employees in the commonwealth be vaccinated, with no testing option. In the face of more mandates, some are turning to religious exemptions: citing faith as a way to skip the shots...We turn to Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR's Legal Analyst.

An op-ed by Mark Roe and Michael Troege: The Liberal party announced its plan to raise the corporate tax rate on large banks and insurance companies from 15 per cent to 18 per cent. Maybe the banks should pay more taxes; maybe not. But if banks need to be taxed more, this is not the right way to do it. It will incentivize them to take on more debt, creating unnecessary dangers if an economic crisis hits the Canadian banking system.

An unusual coalition is banding together in a petition to release an 84-year-old former Black Panther convicted for his role in the killing of a police officer. Sundiata Acoli was sentenced in 1974 to life without the possibility of parole until after 25 years for the first-degree murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster...Acoli’s supporters include the ACLU of New Jersey, the Center for Constitutional Rights and even four Black law enforcement organizations, including the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice and the Blacks in Law Enforcement of America. That group filed a brief last month in the case co-authored by lawyers at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and David H. Webber: Since Unilever subsidiary Ben and Jerry's announced an Israel boycott last month, triggering numerous state anti-boycott laws, Unilever's market capitalization has fallen by almost $14 billion. Unilever's contractual rights give it a strong basis for overturning the boycott. Its puzzling failure to do so shows immense disregard for its own investors.

Rachel Maddow tells the story of how Cambridge, Massachusetts bar, Grendel's Den, whose case to obtain a liquor license over the objections of a neighboring church was argued before the Supreme Court and won by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, setting a precedent that could put an end to the new Texas abortion ban. ... Tribe: The whole case arose because of this arbitrary power that was given to a private entity. It happened to be a church. But the issue is the same whether it's a church or not. There are cases in which the Supreme Court said you cannot give governmental power over peoples' lives or liberty to private bodies, that have no public accountability.

Republican candidates and conservative activists are planning to attack President Joe Biden's COVID vaccine mandates in court and on the campaign trail, but they face uphill battles in trying to block the plan. ... Laurence H. Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said the threatened lawsuits reflect "ideological commitments rather than genuine constitutional analysis." The threatened lawsuits are more political than legal, he said, adding that Republican comments on the Biden plan are in sharp contrast to "the far greater willingness to support unilateral executive actions by former President (Donald) Trump."

On Thursday, the Biden administration delivered some long-anticipated tough talk on behalf of America’s sane majority. It came from President Biden directly on covid-19 mandates, and from the Justice Department on constitutional order. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “By emphasizing the affront to federal supremacy and the rule of law inherent in S.B. 8’s intentional blockage of women’s ability to vindicate their own rights, the complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law.” In laymen’s terms: Enough is enough. Texas simply cannot do this.

In any large firm today, top management usually includes two groups. One group is committed transform the firm digitally, as a key to survival, let alone thrival. The other group treats the need for digital transformation as a sideshow of the status quo...But within the firm, little has changed, as researchers like Harvard Law professor, Lucian Bebchuk, have noted.

AFTER A DELAY of several months, the Department of Correction has entered into a contract with the University of Massachusetts Medical School to create an ombudsman’s office within the department. But critics – including prisoners’ rights advocates and some lawmakers – are raising concerns about the appointment process and worry that the ombudsman’s office will not be truly independent...According to a statement from a group of prisoners’ rights groups – Black and Pink Massachusetts, the Building Up People Not Prisons Coalition, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, and Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts – epidemiologist Monik Jimenez was vetted for the position by the attorney general’s office and the Department of Public Health and put forward for the role in March. She was never hired, however, which the groups attribute to the Department of Correction not offering Jimenez the resources and hiring autonomy necessary to create an independent office.

An Israeli defense contractor on Monday unveiled a remote-controlled armed robot it says can patrol battle zones, track infiltrators and open fire. The unmanned vehicle is the latest addition to the world of drone technology, which is rapidly reshaping the modern battlefield....Bonnie Docherty, a senior researcher from the arms division of Human Rights Watch, said such weapons are worrisome because they can’t be trusted to distinguish between combatants and civilians or make proper calls about the harm attacks may do to nearby civilians. “Machines cannot understand the value of human life, which in essence undermines human dignity and violates human rights laws,” Docherty said. In a 2012 report, Docherty, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, called for fully automated weapons to be banned by international law.

When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a restrictive new abortion law in Texas to take effect, pro-abortion advocates turned to the U.S. Department of Justice as a potential last hope of challenging a law they viewed as an existential threat to Roe v. Wade. On Thursday, the Justice Department decided to step in. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department filed a lawsuit against Texas, calling the abortion law a “statutory scheme” that is “clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.” ... “It seems to me that although the FACE Act is useful for physical interference with access to clinics, it’s not a particularly helpful statute when it comes to a law like this,” said Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “It does no good to protect the entrance to a clinic that has been forced to shut down by the threat posed by this law.”

The Justice Department sued Texas on Thursday over its recently enacted law that prohibits nearly all abortions in the state, the first significant step by the Biden administration to fight the nation’s most restrictive ban on abortion and a move that could once again put the statute before the Supreme Court. ... It is not a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court would again allow the Texas law to stand, said Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and leading liberal constitutional scholar. “The complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law,” Mr. Tribe said. The law’s structure, he argued, is an end run around seminal cases like Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which established the Supreme Court’s power to determine whether legislation and executive acts are consistent with the Constitution.

A Texas nonprofit wants a federal court to reverse a rule approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission that requires more than 3,000 companies on Nasdaq’s U.S. stock exchange list to meet board diversity quotas. The Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment (AFFBR) filed a petition for review in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that argues the rule is discriminatory and the SEC‘s approval violates constitutional equal protection rights. ... Mr. Blum, however, said in a press release that the rule will not fulfill its promised benefits. He cited a paper published in April by Harvard Law professor Jesse M. Fried, who said studies show “stock returns suffer when firms are pressured to hire new directors for diversity reasons.”

President Joe Biden said he’d order all executive branch employees, federal contractors and millions of health-care workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, and that his administration would issue rules requiring large private employers to mandate shots or testing. ... The executive branch is on strong footing to require staff vaccinations, particularly since the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech vaccine received full approval, rather than just emergency authorization, according to Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard Law School. The OSHA rule is likely to face the most legal challenges, with likely litigation over whether the agency is exceeding its authority.

The Gazette asked some Harvard affiliates from across the University where they were when the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks took place, and how they think about that day two decades later. ... Annette Gordon-Reed Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University: I was in the concourse of the south tower in Sam Goody’s record store to buy a new Walkman radio/cassette player. I had just returned from taking my kids to school, having come up from the subway. I heard a loud “whump,” and things began to fall around us. I ran out with everyone else and ended up in an area that gave me a view of the north tower, which had been struck. Horrific. Things were falling down from the collision. We were told to stay put. I remembered something my father told me when I was a little girl: “If you come upon a scene where there are lots of ambulances and evidence of a disturbance, go the opposite way.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s vow to protect women’s right to choose abortion while officials explore challenging a Texas law that severely restricts the procedure offers more bark than bite, legal analysts say, with abortion rights proponents pressing for more aggressive steps. ... Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert, said Garland’s emphasis on the use of the Face Act seemed “quite irrelevant.” “I did not think that was a particularly helpful thing for him to announce. The threats to the women who seek abortions in Texas are not physical threats to them or the property of the clinics,” Tribe said. “They are threatened with bankruptcy. It’s ironic that the Face Act would be helpful if someone were to knock the door down, but not if they were to bring the whole house down.”

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, fellow and director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program: A few years ago, a part-time minimum wage worker at an upstate New York McDonald’s suspected a gas leak. When he alerted his supervisors, they told him to ignore it or he’d be fired. Instead, he called the fire department, and two things happened. Firefighters found the leak and shut the restaurant for the rest of the day. And the worker was fired. I enforced workplace laws in New York State for the better part of two decades, and this case stands out to me, because it so clearly exemplifies why all of us should care about workers’ rights. When people have bad working conditions and no voice on the job, it’s obviously bad for them. But the impact of rotten jobs — those with low pay, long hours, bad treatment, or no worker voice — radiates far beyond the workers themselves. Other people’s rotten jobs affect our collective health, safety and well-being.

Faculty and staff from across Harvard University reflect on September 11, 2001 and the aftermath.