Media Mentions

Weeks into the war in Ukraine, Facebook's parent company Meta is poised to tap its oversight board for guidance about a policy shift allowing users in Ukraine to post some calls for violence against Russian invaders. It would mark the first time the panel has formally weighed in on the tech giant's flurry of actions in response to the war, and it could shape its rules on violent rhetoric moving forward. ... The oversight board has effectively been unable to weigh in on any of the tech giant's massive policy shifts in recent weeks, and now that it will, it's on "a very small slice of what Facebook's doing," said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

The media have been quick to rubbish Attorney General Merrick Garland for his failure so far to indict former President Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have tarred him with epithets worthy of Trump himself, such as “Merrick the Mild” and “Merrick the Meek.” And a host of former prosecutors and law professors have criticized his inaction, saying that Garland needs to indict Trump to vindicate the rule of law. ... Frustrated at the inaction, the redoubtable Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has called on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Tribe argues that a special counsel is “the best way to reassure the country that no one is above the law, justice is nonpartisan and fears of political fallout will not determine the decision on whether to bring charges.” Tribe says that such an appointment is “imperative.”

An article written by Jill Lepore: In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.

The unprecedented sanctions the West imposed on Russia have hobbled its economy and are hurting the global system, too. But their primary purpose, arguably, is to stop the fighting. And that's not yet happening. Why it matters: Sanctions are increasingly one of the go-to tools in American foreign policy, all over the world — that doesn't mean they always work. ... "Sanctions allow you to feel like you’re doing something. It doesn’t necessarily accomplish what you want to accomplish in practical terms,"said Elena Chachko, a fellow at Harvard Law School who's written extensively about this strategy.

In a small Polish town in September last year, a 30-year-old woman named Izabela checked into the hospital. She was 22 weeks pregnant with her second child, and her water had just broken prematurely. Her life was in danger, but instead of aborting her pregnancy, the doctors stalled. ... “It’s a slow, iterative process on the ground in building [reproductive rights] up,” said Alicia Ely Yamin, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy at Harvard Law School. “On the other hand, tearing them down seems quite easy.”

After hours of debate over a controversial plan by Democrats to push dense housing developments near train stations, a Greenwich Republican staunchly opposing the bill asked a pointed question. Rep. Kim Fiorello’s target: a 20-year-old supporter of the proposal, who had just testified that many people his age are leaving the state because it’s too expensive to live here. “Is housing a right?” Fiorello asked Alan Cavagnaro, a sophomore at Manchester Community College and a Planning & Zoning commissioner for South Windsor. “Are you entitled to have the housing that you want?” ... Nick Abbott (JD '22), of Greenwich, a student at Harvard Law School and deputy director at Desegregate CT, said Fiorello’s comments made it seem as if “people from my generation were asking for handouts” when in reality they are looking for more reasonably priced housing options, including in the communities where they grew up.

Anjum Rahman knows more than most about the harmful effects of media content. Over the years, Rahman - an accountant by trade, who also founded the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono and acts as spokesperson for the Islamic Women’s Council - has been a leading voice from the Muslim community speaking about the harms caused by online extremism. She’s received a fair deal of pushback for this, ranging from fairly civil to downright abusive. ... As Harvard Law School’s Evelyn Douek puts it, regulators should be wary of building content moderation policy on the assumption that techies at online media platforms can simply “nerd harder” and stop the spread of all harmful content, without any trade-offs, if they just put their mind to it.

The Fairfax County School Board is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that invalidated the recently revised admissions system for the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology magnet school. ... It is unclear when the 4th Circuit will weigh in on the TJ case, although it could take months. The Supreme Court’s ruling in its next term on use of race in admissions could have ramifications for how the TJ case is ultimately decided, according to Harvard law professor Richard H. Fallon Jr. He said it has historically been harder, under Supreme Court precedent, to justify racial preferences in the K-12 arena than in higher education. “When the Harvard case is decided, it will undoubtedly have ripple effects,” Fallon said, “because what happens in postsecondary education is obviously not wholly unrelated to what happens in the K-12 context.”

As the psychedelics industry continues to pursue a pharmaceutical business model, the conversation surrounding intellectual property is gaining traction. The business of psychedelic drugs has gained a serious air of legitimacy by modeling itself after the pharmaceutical market. But with this benchmark comes the question of how the industry will marry its goodwill intentions with the hard-nosed business of intellectual property (IP). ... Mason Marks, a senior fellow and project lead with the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School, said in order to patent a psychedelic substance there needs to be genetic manipulation so that there is a new aspect to the actual substance. “Whether or not you modify the mushroom, you could also patent various methods of growing it and utilizing it, because in those instances, you aren’t patenting the product of nature itself, but a method of producing or using it,” he explained.

The number of hunting trophies brought into the United States increased during the early years of the Trump administration before falling off amid the Covid-19 pandemic, newly released Fish and Wildlife Service data shows. All told, hunters imported more than 700,000 trophy specimens taken from giraffes, rhinos and other species from 2016 to 2020, according to the data provided to the Center for Biological Diversity following a lawsuit filed on its behalf by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic. ... “That the [Fish and Wildlife Service] is now releasing these data after years of refusal shows the importance of the Freedom of Information Act to conservation advocacy,” said Ben Rankin (JD '23), a second-year student at Harvard Law School, who led the case for the law clinic.

The décor 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. ... “There’s nothing suspicious” about off-label prescription use in general, said Mason Marks, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School specializing 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. According to Dr. Dan Iosifescu, a psychiatrist at N.Y.U. Langone, ketamine is also potentially addictive, heightening the risk of using the drug, even in a therapeutic setting.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Partisan gerrymandering in the computer age has undermined majoritarian democracy — that much is clear. Using algorithms to give one party a numeric advantage over another is more effective than old-fashioned gerrymandering done by hand, and reduces the number of competitive districts for the House of Representatives. It’s equally clear that no solution to the problem is in sight. As statistical modeling becomes more sophisticated, things could conceivably even get worse. The Supreme Court flirted with ruling that partisan gerrymanders were unconstitutional, but ultimately opted against intervening. It won’t take up the issue again under the court’s current composition.

An op-ed co-written by Laurence Tribe: Earlier this month, a federal district judge in North Carolina stopped the effort by North Carolina voters to hold Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn accountable for his role in organizing and promoting the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by disqualifying him from running for reelection. As stunning as this decision was, the reasoning the court used to get there is more so. It held that the Amnesty Act of 1872, which granted amnesty to former Confederates, applies to Cawthorn and overrides an explicit constitutional prohibition in the 14th Amendment barring those who “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office. This decision is at odds with the text, history, and logic both of that statute and of the Constitution itself, and cannot be allowed to stand.

An article co-written by Lucian Bebchuk: Companies have increasingly pledged support for stakeholder capitalism, but these pledges have been met with significant skepticism by some observers. The main criticism, which we have laid out in previous work, is that corporate leaders lack incentives to take into account the interests of employees, suppliers, the environment, or other stakeholders; therefore, relying on managerial discretion will not create value for stakeholders.

A new book by Rohan J. Alva, counsel at the Supreme Court, gives an eye-opening account on the origins of the most important fundamental right in the Indian Constitution — the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. Titled ‘Liberty after Freedom’, the book explores Article 21 that has, in recent years, made the right to privacy as well as the decriminalisation of homosexuality possible. ... Michael Klarman, professor at Harvard Law, called the book an ambitious and fascinating account, adding that “Alva sheds interesting historical and comparative light on the well-nigh irresolvable conflict between a society’s commitment to protecting the fundamental rights of individuals and constraining the power of unrepresentative and politically less-accountable judges”.

Harvard Law School professor and former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission official John Coates wants regulators to be more forthright in debunking legal myths that he argues contributed to the boom in special purpose acquisition companies. Coates told Law360 in an interview that regulators should be "more aggressive" in countering myths that he believes SPAC industry promoters and their advisers have circulated that make SPACs appear more legally advantageous than is justified.

Joe Biden is trying to get a historic Supreme Court Justice nominee confirmed while managing the worst military crisis in Europe since World War II. Those around him say he’s more at ease than at other points during his presidency. His Senate tenure, they add, is the reason why. ... Those who’ve known Biden since his early Senate days say he’s not naive about the modern Republican party. “I don’t think he’s living in the past,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar and Biden confidante. “He would love to have as much bipartisan support as possible but he has no illusions.”

Though Florida may seem like a distant state with very little in common with Massachusetts, Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law school, says Florida’s most recent anti-LGBTQ legislation isn’t an isolated instance. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill has garnered a lot of media attention and has dominated conversations about LGBTQ rights lately. The bill, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by opponents, is actually titled “Parental Rights in Education.” It seeks to ban certain instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom and is now awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature. He is expected to sign it. “This has just been an unprecedented attack on LGBT rights,” Caraballo said.

Randall Kennedy is a Harvard law professor and author. He recently talked with Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, about his new book Say It Out Loud : On Race, Law, History, and Culture. Here is a taste of their exchange

Stephen Ball’s educational and career exploits have taken him from his hometown of Southfield to places far and wide, culminating in his current position as the new dean of students at Harvard Law School. ... “I view the value of the role as helping students optimize their experience at HLS while also positioning them to succeed in their life after law school,” Ball said. “Although I enjoyed aspects of my student experience at HLS, there were many times when the environment felt foreign, even though I had succeeded at U of M, another elite academic setting. I understand that things probably have not changed too much for today’s students, so I want to do all that I can to enrich their experience by ensuring they are able to leverage HLS’s abundance of resources, help them feel more connected to the HLS community, support them in navigating mental health challenges, and come away thinking fondly of their time in Cambridge.”

For three days in July, Jeneesa Barnes was haunted by voices. It was as if people were just out of sight discussing her flaws, picking her apart, even when she was home alone. The morning of the third day she retreated to her car, thinking she might feel safer in a small, enclosed space. But the voices remained. Something was going horribly wrong. She turned on some foreign-language pop music, trying to drown out the voices amid lyrics she couldn’t understand. She started driving. ... Seven former nurses for the company say they worried that Cerebral wasn’t merely meeting a demand but was also, by making access so easy, effectively creating it; they described a fear that they were fueling a new addiction crisis. One researcher, Stephen Wood, an acute-care nurse practitioner who worked in Massachusetts at the height of the opioid crisis, is even more blunt. Looking at the Cerebral website, he notes in particular that nurse practitioners are referred to as prescribers rather than providers or caregivers. “It doesn’t sound like they care about your well-being,” says Wood, now a visiting researcher at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It sounds like they care about prescribing you these medications.” The company said it uses the term prescriber to minimize confusion among the varied services it provides.