Media Mentions

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described Russia's missile strikes in civilian areas of Kharkiv as "war crimes." Tuesday, Zelenskyy accused Russia of engaging in terrorism, a day after Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said he would open an investigation into potential war crimes. ... "From an international law perspective, a war crime is any conduct – whether an act or an omission – that fulfills two cumulative criteria," Dustin Lewis, research director for the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, told USA TODAY. "First, the conduct must be committed with a sufficient connection to an armed conflict. Second, the conduct must constitute a serious violation of the laws and customs of international humanitarian law that has been criminalized by international treaty or customary law."

An article co-written by Robert Greenwald: As the United States heads into its third year in the fight against COVID-19, Americans have seen firsthand the importance of a robust and comprehensive response to public health emergencies and epidemics. The same is true for chronic viral hepatitis, a condition that impacts an estimated 3.3 million Americans. Without comprehensive plans to eliminate viral hepatitis, the US will fall short of reaching the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) goal of fully eliminating the virus by 2030. We call on policy makers at the state level to advance comprehensive, equity-focused proposals that will adequately address and meet the WHO’s goal of eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030.

Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine has drawn condemnation from Russians all around the world — including from those at home, who are protesting at great risk. As the deadly conflict in Ukraine continues to unfold more than 4,500 miles away, the Klebanov family is watching from afar and joining the chorus of Russian Americans who are condemning Putin's war. Sam Klebanov is originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, but immigrated to the United States when he was 6. Now an adult, his family owns Petropol, a small bookstore in Newton, Massachusetts, that specializes in Russian literature. ... "[For] A lot of Russian people, this war is not being fought in their name," said Ariella Katz (JD '23). The Katz family have long been at odds with the way Putin has run Russia. But this time, they say he's gone too far. "I feel embarrassed, I feel embarrassed. Because what else can I feel? What else can one feel when Russians are waging war?" questioned Katz's mother, Irena. Many miles away, Ariella Katz's friends held the same "no to war" signs during protests in Russia. The 23-year-old Harvard student has often visited Russia and is involved in grassroots activism. She's determined to show the world that most Russians are against the war. Police in cities like Moscow have clamped down on protests in recent days, trying to silence some of Katz's friends. "I'm really afraid for their safety," she said. "Some of my friends have been detained. I know of people who have been beaten up."

An article written by Amre Metwally: As I watch the videos and images pouring out of Ukraine, I am reminded of a conversation I had once with a colleague while I worked at YouTube. My job entailed writing the platform’s policies for political extremism and graphic violence, and during high-profile conflicts in war zones, terrorist attacks, and other sensitive moments, I had to help decide what content would stay up and what would not. After one particularly tense day involving state violence on separatist fighters, I turned, exhausted, to a colleague and asked, “What would we have done if YouTube existed at the start of the Iraq war?” We paused, considering the gravity of the question, and then turned back to the mountain of work in front of us. I knew it was only a matter of time before a full-scale ground conflict would erupt and be recorded from start to finish for us all to consume. (Of course, since its founding two years after the war began, YouTube has had countless videos documenting the American-induced tragedy in Iraq.)

An article co-written by Laurence Tribe: Granting a petition by several states and coal companies, the supreme court on 28 February will address what appears to be a technical legal question: does the Environmental Protection Agency have authority to calculate CO2 emissions targets for power plants based on mitigation techniques involving steps “beyond the fence-line” of individual plants? In truth, the matter the court is considering implicates –and imperils – the federal government’s power to fashion flexible solutions not only to global warming but to all manner of complex problems.

Ketanji Brown Jackson closed her remarks at the White House ceremony for her Supreme Court nomination by paying tribute to Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman federal judge in U.S. history. Jackson, 51, who would make history as the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, noted she and Motley share a coincidental connection: They were born the same day 49 years apart. ... “One can see perhaps a parallel in the way that some are criticizing Judge Jackson’s career as a public defender–-or really her two-year stint as a public defender–-somehow implying that she is not suited to the judiciary because of that experience representing criminal defendants,” said [Tomiko] Brown-Nagin, who is dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman: With Congress doing little on climate change, President Biden must use his executive authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across the U.S. economy. The Supreme Court appears determined to thwart him. In a case to be argued on Feb. 28, the court seems poised to restrict the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority to limit carbon pollution from power plants and, by doing so, frustrate the country’s efforts to slow the pace of climate change.

President Biden’s ambitious plans to combat climate change, blocked by an uncooperative Congress, face an equally tough test next week at the Supreme Court. With the court’s conservative justices increasingly suspicious that agencies are overstepping their powers, the case’s outcome could not only reshape U.S. environmental policy but also call into question the authority of regulators to tackle the nation’s most pressing problems. ... Biden’s team has yet to issue its own plan for the power sector. For that reason, environmentalists took it as an “earthquake” when the Supreme Court accepted the case last fall, said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus. It appeared to signal a move on the part of the court’s conservatives to delineate — and probably trim — the EPA’s powers before there were even regulations to review. ... The policy that sparked this battle — the Clean Power Plan — is now moot, since the market has done what regulators could not. “The targets were achieved way in advance, more than a decade before they would have been required,” said Carrie Jenks, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program.

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy has been known for decades as a critic of Critical Race Theory, which was developed in part by his late colleague Derrick Bell. But Kennedy's critiques come from a position of intellectual respect, and over the years he has become more sympathetic to some of the central claims CRT makes about the pervasive and intractable nature of American racism. His new book Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture collects his essays from the past several decades, many of which deal with the question of how American racism has functioned historically, how it has morphed over time, and what a rational way to think about it is.

To the list of obvious firsts, a Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would add another: the first former public defender to sit on the United States Supreme Court. It’s an entry on her résumé that a few years ago might have been politically unthinkable for a nominee to the highest court but is now, thanks to years of work by the progressive legal movement and criminal-justice reformers, a boon. ... Indeed, she would join a Supreme Court that, on criminal cases, “consists largely of arguments by expert prosecutors, offered to former expert prosecutors, about cases potentially channeled to the Court by prosecutors,” as Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo put it in a 2016 Minnesota Law Review article. They may idealize the system and not understand how arbitrary or unfair it can be in practice. Thurgood Marshall, who retired over 30 years ago, was the last justice with “direct familiarity of modern-day policing and prosecution, as they are so often experienced by the stopped, the frisked, the arrested and the accused,” Crespo added.

This is your Tech News Briefing for Monday, February 28th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Big tech companies are facing more scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators than ever. An astonishing amount of the tech that plays an integral role in our lives is being run by just a handful of companies. And the question hanging over many congressional hearings and regulatory investigations is, are the current rules enough, or do new ones need to be made? On today's show, we'll bring you a conversation from the WSJ pro team with experts discussing how we should rethink the rules around tech, and the impact any changes could have on the everyday user. ... The WSJ Pro team recently brought together a panel of experts to discuss some of the most pressing issues that regulators and tech businesses are grappling with. Steve Rosenbush, Bureau Chief for WSJ Pro Enterprise tech spoke with Rob Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that promotes innovation and has several tech companies on its board. Lawrence Lessig, a Professor of Law currently at Harvard law school who studies the interplay of tech and policy, and Barry Lynn, Executive Director of the Open Markets Institute, which focuses on threats from business monopolies and the concentration of power. Here are some highlights from their conversation, starting with Steve.

In the most important environmental case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments in a dispute that could restrict or even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to control the pollution that is heating the planet. ... “If the court were to require the E.P.A. to have very specific, narrow direction to address greenhouse gases, as a practical matter it could be devastating for other agencies’ abilities to enact rules that safeguard the public health and welfare of the nation,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “It would restrict the enactment of regulations under any host of federal statutes — OSHA, the Clean Water Act, hazardous waste regulation. In theory it even could limit the Fed’s authority to set interest rates.” ... “The regulated industry itself is saying that they are not fighting the authority of E.P.A.,” said Jody Freeman, a lawyer at Harvard and former climate official in the Obama White House. “The court will be attentive, I think, to what the industry says,” she said, noting that in a recent case over the Biden administration’s Covid vaccine mandate for large employers, the Supreme Court blocked the mandate except in the case of health care workers, who requested the regulation.

President Biden announced Friday the nomination of federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer, a historic choice that fulfills the president’s pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court and would make Jackson, 51, just the third African American in the high court’s 233-year history. ... “If you have represented people who have gone through that system, you understand its injustices because you have seen them up close,” said [Andrew] Crespo, who was a law clerk to Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan. “Someone who comes to the bench with those perspectives will be not just a welcome addition to the bench, but someone who moves the court in a welcome direction.”

According to the civil-law code of the state of New York, a writ of habeas corpus may be obtained by any “person” who has been illegally detained. In Bronx County, most such claims arrive on behalf of prisoners on Rikers Island. Habeas petitions are not often heard in court, which was only one reason that the case before New York Supreme Court Justice Alison Y. Tuitt—Nonhuman Rights Project v. James Breheny, et al.—was extraordinary. The subject of the petition was Happy, an Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo. American law treats all animals as “things”—the same category as rocks or roller skates. However, if the Justice granted the habeas petition to move Happy from the zoo to a sanctuary, in the eyes of the law she would be a person. She would have rights. … Having lost the chimpanzee cases in New York, Wise and his team armed themselves with dozens of friend-of-the-court briefs in support of personhood for Happy. One of them came from Laurence Tribe, the Harvard legal scholar. “It cannot pass notice that African Americans who had been enslaved famously used the common law writ of habeas corpus in New York to challenge their bondage and to proclaim their humanity, even when the law otherwise treated them as mere things,” Tribe wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: On a day when the world's eyes are rightly focused on a brazen challenge to the post-Cold War international order, Americans can rightly celebrate a domestic change that should make us proud: the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black female justice of the Supreme Court.

Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court fulfills a promise President Biden made while running for office: to nominate the first Black woman for the highest court. Critics said he was prioritizing identity over qualifications, but many have praised Jackson for being well equipped for what could be a historic appointment. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, wrote a book about the first Black woman to ever become a federal judge, Constance Baker Motley. She explains how that, and much more, paved the way for this nomination.

Today the long-awaited federal trial over Oklahoma’s execution protocols and drug cocktail will begin. Following the United States Supreme Court’s twisted rulings in Baze v. Rees in 2008 and Glossip v. Gross (2015), a crucial issue in the Oklahoma case will be whether death row inmates and their lawyers can identify a readily available method of execution that would be preferable to the state’s current method. According to Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker the essential meaning of Baze and Glossip is best summarized as follows: “We the Supreme Court have held the death penalty to be constitutional so there has to be a way to carry it out. If defendants don’t like the method used by the state, those defendants have to point to another readily available method to execute them.”

As President Biden considered a handful of Black women for the Supreme Court, two things drew him to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, according to those familiar with his decision making process. Jackson was molded by her predecessor, the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer; and, like Biden, she came with a rounded resume bolstered by her work as a public defender. ... “It spoke to him in an important way,” retired Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe said of Jackson’s public defender years. “He understood in a way that a president who had not himself been a public defender might not have been able to understand just what that meant and why it gave her a distinctive perspective.”

President Biden on Friday nominated federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill Justice Stephen Breyer’s pending vacancy. If confirmed, she would be the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice. We speak with Harvard constitutional law professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin about the nomination of the 51-year-old federal judge and the parallels between her and the first Black woman federal judge and civil rights legal icon Constance Baker Motley, who was at one point eyed for a Supreme Court nomination.

At an event sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, officials, health policy experts, and legal scholars discussed the landmark suit targeting American gun manufacturers.

The nation's premier tool to protect voting rights is in mortal danger, threatened on multiple fronts by the Supreme Court and lower-ranking federal judges, scholars and civil rights advocates say. The latest blow to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 came this week in Arkansas, where a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump dismissed a case over new statehouse maps. The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the maps diluted the power of Black voters. But the judge said he found no way for the outside advocates to proceed. ... "They are teeing up statutory and constitutional questions for the Court with the justifiable belief that the Court will welcome the narrow interpretation and the opportunity to further narrow the statute," said Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law professor at Harvard Law School.