Media Mentions

Elizabeth Holmes and the US government are set to face off in a San Jose federal courtroom in the long-awaited criminal trial of the founder and former CEO of Theranos. ... The defense has more of a tightrope to walk with jurors with its opening statement, according to legal experts. Holmes' camp will seek to "balance their desire to surprise the government ... and their desire to let the jury know that there is another side to the government's story," according to Nancy Gertner, a former US federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law, emeritus, at Harvard Law School, talks with Rachel Maddow about past Supreme Court decisions that Attorney General Merrick Garland could cite in a challenge to the new Texas abortion ban.

A patchwork of state and federal laws can be used to prosecute the people behind a barrage of personal attacks and intimidating messages that are being sent to America’s election administrators. But legal scholars and current and former prosecutors say authorities must walk a fine line between America’s laws against criminal threats and its constitutional protections on political speech. Some prosecutors hesitate to take on such cases, said Kendra Albert, who teaches at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “They may see some of these suggestions of violence as political speech,” Albert said. “Courts are going to really heavily scrutinize these prosecutions under the First Amendment.”

Author and Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy joins us to talk about his new book, a collection of essays titled, "Say It Loud: On Race, Law, History and Culture."

As the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the United States, many businesses and cities have been rethinking their COVID-19 vaccination requirements. In August, New York City became the first major U.S. city to announce that people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 need to show proof of vaccination in order to dine indoors, work out at the gym or go see a movie. Can private businesses ask customers for proof of COVID-19 vaccination? ... Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, told VERIFY that private businesses asking for proof of vaccination is not a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.  According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HIPAA only applies to covered entities, such as health care providers and health insurers, and their business associates. “Because the average business is not a covered entity or a business associate of a covered entity within the meaning of HIPAA, the statute does not prohibit them from asking them about vaccination status,” said Cohen.

James H. Stock, a Harvard professor and economist known for his expertise on energy and environmental policy, has been named the University’s inaugural vice provost for climate and sustainability, Provost Alan M. Garber announced today. ... “Jim has been deeply committed in his own research to developing solutions to climate change and is uniquely positioned to build collaborations across the university,” said Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program, and co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Sustainability.

Ahead of its self-imposed deadline to become fossil fuel-neutral by 2026, the University has engaged its researchers and industry climate leaders to identify and invest in projects that demonstrate how to credibly reduce emissions while also benefiting human health, social equity, and the planet, such as large-scale solar or wind renewable energy, according to the Harvard Presidential Committee on Sustainability. ... The Presidential Committee on Sustainability was co-chaired by Professor John Holdren and Professor Rebecca Henderson, the Harvard Business School John and Natty McArthur University Professor, and Katie Lapp, Harvard University Executive Vice President since its inception through academic year 2021. This academic year the faculty co-chairs have been succeeded by Professors Mike Toffel and Jody Freeman, the Harvard Law School Archibald Cox Professor of Law.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and David Rosenberg: The Supreme Court’s Whole Woman’s Health decision not to block the Texas post-six-week abortion ban has caused terrified abortion providers to shut down despite the ban’s flagrant violation of Roe v. Wade. A particularly chilling aspect of the Texas law empowers any civilian anywhere to sue Texans who aid in an abortion and to collect a bounty of at least $10,000 if they win in court. To respond to the ban’s violation, Attorney General Merrick Garland should treat bounty hunting under SB-8 as a criminal deprivation of civil rights, leading to possible federal prosecutions under two sections of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That law was passed to protect the civil rights of previously enslaved Americans who were targeted for extrajudicial violence by white supremacist vigilantes.

For nearly half a century, Americans have lived in a country in which safe, legal abortions were generally accessible to those needing them. The constitutional protection established in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was firm and secure. That fact, paradoxically, worked to the political advantage of activists who reject abortion rights. ... But the new Texas abortion law should dispel any illusions about their real, and immoderate, purpose. What they want is to deprive all women of the liberty to decide whether to carry pregnancies to term. They favor a regime of compulsory motherhood from which there is no escape. ... You may assume the effects will be confined to the Lone Star State. Women with money may figure they can always drive to New Mexico or fly to Chicago to terminate a pregnancy. But as Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told me, the law has an unlimited reach.

An op-ed by Catharine A. MacKinnon: We are living in the world pornography has made. For more than three decades, researchers have documented that it desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths and other lies about women’s sexuality. In doing so, it normalizes itself, becoming ever more pervasive, intrusive and dangerous, surrounding us ever more intimately, grooming the culture so that it becomes hard even to recognize its harms. ... “Sex work” implies that prostituted people really want to do what they have virtually no choice in doing. That their poverty, homelessness, prior sexual abuse as children, subjection to racism, exclusion from gainful occupations or unequal pay plays no role. That they are who the pornography says they are, valuable only for use in it.

Federal officials want to hear from citizens regarding the labeling of meat and poultry products that are made by using cultured cells. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service is looking for feedback ahead of proposed rulemaking regarding such products. According to a release, the FSIS is considering have meats cultured from the cells derived from animals under its jurisdiction. The service will be using comments it receives to inform its future regulatory requirements for the labeling of such food products. ... FSIS says it has already received thousands of comments on this topic following a joint public meeting with the FDA in 2018 as well as two petitions for rulemaking it received from the U.S. Cattleman's Association and the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic.

era of businesses being able to operate as apolitical entities — and the days when customers and employees expected them to do so — have passed. Over the past couple of years, corporate chiefs have become more vocal, and more emboldened in their opinions. CEOs have announced racial equity and diversity initiatives, condemned the Capitol riot, recognized Juneteenth as a holiday, opposed state-level voting legislation and “bathroom bills” targeting transgender individuals. ... “For years, corporate executives kind of perfected the art of getting involved in the political sphere for a very narrow purpose,” generally advocating for or against regulations that would impact their business operations,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

We asked staff members at Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, Frugal Bookstore, Brookline Booksmith, and Trident Booksellers & Café for the titles they’re most excited to dive into this season. ... “Say It Loud!” by Randall Kennedy (Sept. 7) Cropper said she is excited for the release of this collection of 29 essays from Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School. The book includes both previously published and new pieces that explore race and social justice in America. “It’s his thoughts on the realities and what he imagines on race in America,” Cropper said. “It’s his personal essays on race, on culture, on history, on law.”

An Oregon state panel charged with advising on the implementation of a legal psilocybin therapy program has cleared a team of researchers to produce a comprehensive report on the science, history and culture of the psychedelic as regulators prepare to license facilities to administer it. Members of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board released an initial report in July that reviewed hundreds of studies into psilocybin, as required under the state’s historic, voter-approved 2020 medical legalization initiative. But they were pressed for time and will now be working with a recently established psychedelic research center at Harvard Law School to more thoroughly cover the subject. ... “To the extent that the [Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications] Report can help inform their decision making, it should be  made available for that purpose,” [Mason] Marks, who is also the director of Harvard’s first-of-its-kind psychedelics policy center, said. “Hopefully, it can provide a bit of a roadmap for fruitful collaboration between states and the federal government.”

Book review: Randall Kennedy dismisses claims that American university campuses are racist. He assails the sanctification of Malcolm X, saying that his most prominent biographer, the late Columbia University professor Manning Marable, “accords his hero a stature in memory that he lacked in history.” Kennedy is against taking names off buildings because the person in question was a racist, and questions identity based on race rather than individuality. To those who decry the “respectability politics” of calling for Black people to maintain mainstream standards of behavior, Kennedy ripostes that this kind of discipline has indeed benefited Black people in the past — there was nothing “street” about most civil rights leaders of yore, for example, and they liked it that way. Why, then, is Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard Law School, not typically included on the list of Black conservatives or even “heterodox Black thinkers,” to use the currently fashionable term of art? The anthology “Say It Loud!” teaches us why. This collection of 29 of his essays lends us the fullest portrait yet between two covers of Kennedy’s thought, and just as much of it fits the mold of Black thought traditionally treated as “authentic” as does not.

A column by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt observed the early tendency of a totalitarian regime to draft private citizens to conduct “voluntary espionage,” so that “a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy than officially appointed police agents.” Echoes of this fear could be felt in the dissents from the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday not to block enforcement of a Texas law that prohibits abortion after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy. The statute, enacted in May, authorizes citizens to file a lawsuit against a party that performs or even unintentionally “aids or abets” such an abortion, and to exact damages of at least ten thousand dollars for each forbidden abortion from that defendant if they win the case. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissenting opinion, “The Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan also dissented; each penned dissenting opinions emphasizing the novel structure of the legislation, which delegates enforcement to members of the general populace.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: The Texas legislature and five Supreme Court justices have joined forces to eviscerate women’s abortion rights — the legislature by creating and the justices by leaving in place a system of private bounties designed to intimidate all who would help women exercise the right to choose. But the federal government has — and should use — its own powers, including criminal prosecution, to prevent the law from being enforced and to reduce its chilling effects. Of course, the best approach would be for Congress to codify the right to abortion in federal law, although Democrats likely lack the votes to make that happen — and there is a risk that this conservative Supreme Court would find that such a statute exceeded Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause.

A public university official in Massachusetts has been turning down all requests from Catholic students for a religious exemption from the school’s coronavirus vaccine requirement, based on his research into Catholic teachings. ...Laurence Tribe, a retired Harvard Law School professor who has frequently argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, said he believes UMass Boston “has clearly violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Tribe said the government is within its rights to make no exceptions for religion when it comes to rules governing health and safety — but that once it allows for religious exemptions to a rule, the government can’t be the decider on what the religion teaches. “It’s one thing to say that our general rules allow no religious exceptions and quite another to say, ‘If the Catholic faith truly taught what you say it does, then you’d be fine,’” Tribe said. “That’s a government official interpreting a religion. That’s clearly unconstitutional and deeply offensive.”

Big Four accountancy firms have abandoned plans to ‘be like law firms only bigger’, instead focusing on work that traditional City firms turn down in a drive to disrupt the market, a report has found. ...‘The Big Four can offer a far higher integration of technology, project management and process management; they employ a huge number of people across a huge range of specialties and they are way more global than even the most global law firm,' said report author David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School. 'This is why, for many kinds of issues that companies face, it’s a very attractive offering'.  

You've come to know retired federal judge Nancy Gertner here on the show over the years. We turn to her to help us comb out all things legal, and to be our guide through the morass that can sometimes be the criminal justice system. Well it turns out, she's been struggling with some legal demons herself, and she wound up turning to people she'd sentenced to help her sort them out. She tells that story in her upcoming book, Incomplete Sentences.

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe about the Texas anti-abortion bill that the Supreme Court refused to block.. ..."Well, it is truly stunning. ... But as Justice Sotomayor said, it simply cannot be the case. Although, five justices say they think it is. It cannot be the case that the state can pass a flagrantly unconstitutional law, unconstitutional unless and until Roe v. Wade is formally overturned, and then avoid any judicial review by deputizing strangers, total strangers. And they don`t have to be Texans. They can be from California. They can be from France. The law clearly allows anyone on the Planet Earth to come into Texas court during, as you say, that four-year period after an abortion and get $10,000 from anyone, friend, a neighbor, the ex-lover, the Uber driver, the person who funded the abortion, anybody who was involved in the abortion, unless somehow the evidence is accumulated that there was no heartbeat. That is not only stunning, it is abominable. It`s breathtaking."