Media Mentions

In response to the Seattle City Council’s request for policy advice on how to curb overdose deaths, a local task force is recommending the widespread decriminalization of all drugs. Psychedelics in particular, the group said, could be a promising treatment to address substance use disorders and mental health issues....Mason Marks, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation and a member of Oregon’s official state advisory board for that state’s psilocybin therapy program, called the recommendations “an important step for Seattle to help address its overdose and mental health crisis.” “The City Council can now act confidently on this timely, evidence-based recommendation,” he added.

The USDA’s  Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) Thursday published an advance notice of a proposed rulemaking (ANPR) to solicit comments and information regarding the labeling of lab-grown “meat and poultry products ” made by using cultured cells derived from animals under FSIS jurisdiction. ...The FSIS already has received thousands of comments on the topic, in response to a 2018 joint public meeting with FDA and regarding two petitions for rulemaking — from the United States Cattlemen’s Association and Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic. The agency, however, needs specific types of comments and information that will inform the process of developing labeling regulations for meat and poultry products made using animal cell culture technology.

The Supreme Court late Wednesday night took a break from its summer recess to allow the most restrictive abortion law in the nation to take effect in Texas, raising alarm among people who support abortion rights — and even some who don’t. ... Supporters of abortion rights have noted that it is still within the Democratic Party’s power to enshrine abortion rights in law: After all, Democrats still control two branches of government, Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor, points out: Last year, candidate Biden promised that he would pass legislation to make Roe “the law of the land.” Now’s his chance. Congress has many, many options for overruling Texas and protecting reproductive justice nationwide—starting with the Women’s Health Protection Act.

Legal experts offered a variety of predictions Thursday on whether the US Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a woman’s constitutional right to get an abortion. At least five and maybe six of the justices on the nine-member court are “ready to overturn Roe and its legacy,” said Mark Tushnet, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor. “I think it was clear with the appointment of Justice [Amy Coney] Barrett that there was a firm majority to repudiate the court’s abortion-related jurisprudence.” But other experts were less sure of how the high court will rule or suggested it would move incrementally, rather than make a sweeping move.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: For years, as the supreme court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well. Observers have speculated how today’s new ultra-right court would commence the slicing: by chipping away slowly at Roe v Wade? Or by taking the political heat and overruling it outright? Few imagined that the court would let a statute everybody concedes is flagrantly unconstitutional under the legal regime of Roe not only go into effect without being judicially reviewed but become the centerpiece of a totally unique state scheme that puts a bounty of at least $10,000 on the head of every woman who is or might be pregnant.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A day after the Constitution-flouting Texas antiabortion law went into effect, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that it won’t block the law before it can grapple with a concrete case that tests it in practice. The five most conservative justices agreed to an unsigned, one-and-a-half-page opinion that said the law might or might not be unconstitutional, but that given its unusual form, which delegates enforcement to private citizens instead of state authorities, it was too legally complicated to issue an emergency injunction blocking the law. In four separate dissents, the three liberals plus Chief Justice John Roberts said the law should have been blocked anyway. Every nonlawyer on the planet — and no doubt a few lawyers, too — is likely to read this outcome as prefiguring a 5-to-4 vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent that made abortion a constitutional right. Later this year, the court will address a Mississippi antiabortion law that lacks the cleverly diabolical enforcement mechanism of the Texas law but is equally unconstitutional. Indeed, the day after the law went into effect and before the Supreme Court ruled, many non-lawyers who were so unfamiliar with court procedures that they didn’t know it would eventually issue a ruling on the Texas law had already concluded that they knew how the upcoming Mississippi case would come out.

A Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect on Wednesday after the United States Supreme Court chose not to enjoin it from being enforced. ... In the absence of Supreme Court intervention, many were urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to address the situation in Texas. “Last year, candidate Biden promised that he would pass legislation to make Roe ‘the law of the land.’ Now’s his chance,” said Niko Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School.

...Nationwide, Black parents are reporting their challenging experiences with their kids in public, private and charter schools, prompting many to reconsider their educational options. Data show that, facing racism at school, bias from some teachers and curriculums that parents deem inadequate, more Black families than ever are choosing to home-school their children. ...Still, some parents and educators criticize home schooling. For example, last year in the Arizona Law Review, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet warned that a “lack of regulation in the homeschooling system poses a threat to children and society.” However, advocates like Taylor said home schooling, if done with deliberation, can allow parents to help their children reach their full potential.

It’s the stuff Hollywood movies are made of: In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes created a startup with audacious claims that through a simple blood test, she could revolutionize medicine. The only problem? The technology did not work, and Holmes now faces trial for fraud. Here & Now‘s Tonya Mosley talks with retired Judge and current Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner about Holmes’ legal defense.

A Texas law that bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy took effect at midnight on Wednesday after the Supreme Court failed to act on emergency requests from abortion providers. ... “The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals,” says Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional law expert at Harvard. “That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights.”

For weeks this spring, Trey Reeves did not ignore a phone call from a number he didn’t recognize. He even answered obvious spam calls. The anticipation was nearly too much. Which law school acceptance would arrive each day? Virginia did. Chicago did. Name a top school and it likely accepted the former Oklahoma State basketball walk-on. But on this day, Harvard — arguably the best of the best — called to offer Reeves a chance to attend its prestigious law school. “When you get a phone call from Harvard, it’s hard to turn that one down,” Reeves said.

The historic drought in Marin County continues to affect a rare species of elk. Last weekend, nearly a hundred people carried water to replenish the drinking supply for tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore that are dying in the drought conditions. Volunteers hiked six miles round trip on Saturday, carrying gallon jugs of water to provide the animals at Tomales Point with more to drink. ... In June, the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic filed a lawsuit saying the National Park Service is being negligent by keeping the Tomales Point elk in an enclosure. The NPS has not commented publicly about this weekend's water drop, citing the lawsuit.

Mark Roe, corporate law professor at Harvard University, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the Liberal party’s plans to hike corporate taxes for banks and insurers. He notes that taxing bottom line profits (instead of gross profit before deducting interest on debt) would result in less equity for the Banks should a downturn arise, because debt is tax-favoured. But he notes it’s likely not enough a tax increase for institutions to move money into other parts of the business.

Tom's guest on this archived edition of Midday is the author and historian Annette Gordon Reed. She is best-known for her study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest book is a beautiful peroration on the meaning of the holiday known as Juneteenth, which marks the anniversary of a significant historical event: on June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, declaring that all slaves were free, two months after General Robert E Lee had surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S Grant in Appomattox, Virginia. Juneteenth celebrations of this belated emancipation originated among African American communities in Texas, and now take place around the country.

In a move that may indicate easing drug policies, Thailand has decriminalized a plant used to relieve pain, a decision expected to lessen crowding in prisons and impact thousands of people facing charges for its use or possession.... Drug policy expert Mason Marks, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, told VICE World News that the U.S. states that have criminalized kratom should walk it back, and that the FDA should not back a federal or international ban. “Supporting a global ban undermines the autonomy of nations that do not wish to criminalize kratom, including Thailand,” he said.

... In support of a lawsuit filed by a former public defender in North Carolina, more than 20 current and former law clerks and employees of federally funded public defender’s offices and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington offered firsthand accounts of a system that they say still lacks protections and procedures to hold officials accountable. ... On appeal at the 4th Circuit, Roe is represented by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and has the backing of more than 40 public-interest and civil rights organizations, in addition to constitutional scholars. Gersen said in a court filing last week that the judiciary’s internal complaint system was rife with conflicts of interest and failed to provide meaningful review or to stop the harassment. The system “facilitated and aggravated the hostile work environment, which became so intolerable that Roe was forced to resign and lose her career as a federal public defender.”

‘Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture,’ by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon, Sept. 7) Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, takes up everything from Frederick Douglass to George Floyd’s legacy in this collection of new and previously published essays.

... For all its routine violence, the American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for the American side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other. Today, there are more and more legal obligations to make war more humane – meaning, above all, the aim of minimising collateral harm. ...Written in 2012, the PPG was only publicly released two years later. Harvard Law professor Naz Modirzadeh cuttingly described the document as mixing together a number of “legal-ish” standards. The optics of humane behaviour, Modirzadeh suggested, were “being used to give an international law-like gloss” to “an approach that most allies see as violating” other parts of international law, most of all the rules controlling force.

... Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. ...Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky. The Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen has written that her students “seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.”

"Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal" by Alexandra Natapoff, so beautifully tells the story of what tiny things people get dragged into the system for," says Rahman. This highly technical book looks at how misdemeanors create massive inequalities and drag non-dangerous members of the public into prisons.

A week or so ago, Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they complained that the notorious (my description, not theirs) redefinition of the purpose of a corporation contained in a statement by the Business Roundtable (BRT) in August 2019 was something of a sham. By introducing the new definition, the BRT abandoned its earlier support for shareholder primacy — the idea that a company should be run, above all, for the benefit, shockingly, of the shareholders who own it — in favor of the assertion that a company should be managed in a way that takes proper account of the interests of various “stakeholders” of which shareholders were only one category. Despite this, Bebchuk and Tallarita maintained that very little had really changed: "Corporate leaders have been busy presenting themselves as guardians of the interests of “stakeholders,” such as customers, employees, suppliers and communities as well as shareholders. Our recent research, however, casts serious doubt on whether corporations are matching the talk with action . . .We’ve identified almost 100 signatory companies that updated their corporate governance guidelines by the end of 2020. We found that the companies that made updates generally didn’t add any language that elevates the status of stakeholders, and most of them reaffirmed governance principles supporting shareholder primacy."