Media Mentions

An op-ed co-written by Kenneth W. Mack: As President Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, it’s worth pausing to consider the story of Constance Baker Motley, the first African American woman appointed to the federal bench. In 1975, Motley presided over a case in which a White woman, Diane Blank, had filed a class-action suit against the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell for sex discrimination.

An article by Mark Roe: Stock market short-termism is said to drive ESG and CSR shortfalls, worsening environmental quality and global warming in particular, making the corporation less responsible. A stock market of rapid traders is not a stock market, in the conventional view, that can think about sustainability and climate catastrophe. The recent EU initiative on sustainable capitalism (such as via this study)  strongly asserts this proposition, and it is one that is widely believed on both sides of the Atlantic. “The short-term payback periods of financial markets take precedent over the long-term time horizons of ecological and social systems,” says one analysis. “The finance world’s short-termism will destroy our communities, economies and the planet,” the World Economic Forum was told in Davos.

San Diego teacher Amy Glancy thought she’d prepared her fourth-grade students for the day’s language arts lesson. She knew there was a land mine in the poem she planned to read, but she considered it essential to what she was trying to teach. The reading Glancy chose was Countee Cullen’s iconic Harlem Renaissance poem “Incident,” which poignantly renders a Black child’s painful encounter with racism, when a white boy calls him the N-word. ... I wanted to understand that, so I called Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, whose 2002 book, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word” examines the word’s endurance and the shifting boundaries on its use.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for. Is Thomas Jefferson to be deplored as a slave-owner who had a family with a young woman he owned or is he to be celebrated as one of the country’s most essential and gifted founders? Or, should he be both—condemned and revered? That is the question Annette Gordon-Reed, the brilliant Harvard law professor, historian, and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, has long wrestled with.

Lawyers and voters behind a push to label Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) an insurrectionist, and therefore ineligible to run for re-election under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, can’t intervene in his federal lawsuit seeking to have the effort ruled unconstitutional, a judge ruled. ... “They certainly have the right to depose him,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who supports the action in North Carolina, said in an interview before the ruling. He called Cawthorn’s rhetoric, including his speech during a Jan. 6 rally, “the very definition of an insurrection.”

Legislation aimed at curtailing conversations relating to LGBTQ issues in Florida classrooms may become more restrictive than originally planned, as the bill’s author has placed an amendment on the proposal that would require teachers to “out” their students to their parents if they discover their sexual orientation is anything but heterosexual — even if doing so produces predictable harms to a child’s well-being. ... Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, also noted that the bill as proposed could result in a new way for bullies to harass their peers in the hallways, without a way for LGBTQ students to tell school staff about it, lest they get outed to their parents, too.

The supreme court has formally rejected Donald Trump’s request to block the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack from accessing White House records related to the events of 6 January 2021. The court announced on Tuesday in its latest list of orders that it would not take up Trump’s appeal to a lower-court ruling allowing the select committee access to the documents. ... Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter: “Trump’s baseless and brazen attempt to keep the January 6 select committee from obtaining his White House records has now been turned down by the supreme court of the United States. No surprise there, but with this court one never knows until one knows …”

Major pork producers — a big part of Big Meat, as the livestock industry is often known — have been pulling out the stops recently to eviscerate a California law regulating how they treat pregnant sows. They've asked the Supreme Court to overturn the state's regulations. (The justices may issue a decision on whether they'll take the case as soon as Monday.) ... These practices may have been tacitly accepted by the public because pigs weren't seen as they are — as intelligent animals that prefer room to roam. "The sows can't move, they're biting at the bars," says Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School. "There are massive, massive psychological welfare issues."

It was a shocker. Katie Dykes, Connecticut’s commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, earlier this month got onboard with a two-year delay for a key component of her pet project — reforming the New England electric grid. ... Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said FERC was unlikely to just say no. “It could find the current approach unjust and unreasonable under federal law and tell ISO-New England what the just and reasonable approach must be and then order ISO-New England to comply,” Peskoe said. “All that would take more time, but there is a path for FERC to reject what is going to be filed and effectively order ISO to file what was narrowly rejected.”

CFOs aiming to take their companies public by merging with a SPAC have more choices of partners than ever before. As of today, 602 SPACs are searching for companies to combine with in an initial public offering, according to SPACInsider. “Investors should be aware that competition is fierce,” the CFA Institute said. SPACs in 2021 brought to market a record 613 offerings and raised more than $162 billion, a total exceeding all previous years combined, SPACInsider data show. The pace has recently slowed, with just 41 SPAC IPOs so far this year. ... SPACs pose several hazards to investors, according to John Coates, acting director of the SEC’s Corporation Finance Division from February until October 2021.

When Thurgood Marshall arrived at the Capitol for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on a July day in 1967, the 58-year-old lawyer was the most celebrated legal advocate in the civil rights movement. He had braved death threats and successfully argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including decisions that ensured Black voters could cast primary ballots in Texas and ended government-mandated segregation in public schools. ... The esoteric probing was Thurmond’s way of hinting that “Marshall wasn’t intellectually up to the job,” said Harvard Law School professor Mark Victor Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall and has written two books on him.

When recruiters from the nation’s top law firms come to Harvard Law School, they often boast about their pro bono work and efforts to promote environmental sustainability. But all too often, as they try to lure the coveted hires, they don’t discuss their clientele. That’s a problem for law students like Amelia Keyes who worry about climate change and don’t want to work for a firm that represents the fossil fuel industry. “Most of my classmates would pause at taking a job at Exxon, but they’ll go and work for law firms that help Exxon or similar companies avoid regulations and accountability,” said Keyes, a second-year law student at Harvard. “There’s a big disconnect there. Law firms are the enablers and supporters of that harm.” ... In a blog post on the firm’s website, David Hoffman, who is also a lecturer at Harvard Law School, compared the students’ campaign to the efforts to stop the Vietnam War and urged fellow lawyers to use their access to power to do “far more to counteract this existential threat to humanity.” Hoffman also hosted a Zoom webinar this month to discuss how colleagues in the industry could help. “I’m embarrassed I didn’t do this sooner,” he said during the webinar. “What we do can promote change.”

Legal experts say Donald Trump is running out of options after a judge ruled on Thursday that the former president and two of his adult children—Ivanka and Donald Jr.—must answer questions under oath as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' investigation into his business practices. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, suggested that the Trumps would have difficulty getting out of testifying after the New York judge's ruling. "Watch the Three Trumpketeers try to wiggle out of this order!" Tribe tweeted. "Civil contempt would land them in jail, with cooperation being their only key to get out of those ugly orange prison suits—not the Trump idea of high fashion."

Some 69 States around the world currently criminalise homosexual relations between consenting adults. This means that in just this one area of human rights violations, two billion people are being discriminated against on a daily basis – a third of the world's population. This criminalisation has measurable consequences in terms of public health and access to education, says Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN’s independent human rights expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In September, 2020, when the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opened up a seat on the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump said that he expected to name a nominee soon, and specified, “It will be a woman—a very talented, very brilliant woman.” A number of female jurists were discussed as top contenders, and he chose Amy Coney Barrett as the nominee. Neither Democrats nor Republicans objected to the stated intention to nominate a woman. Indeed, many would have taken issue with the idea of Ginsburg being replaced by a man—which would have decreased the number of women on the Court from three to two.

On Tuesday, the Joint Committee on the Judiciary heard testimony and took questions from lawmakers regarding Gov. Charlie Baker’s recent filing of an act to modernize Massachusetts’s wiretap laws (H.4347). The more than two hour hearing featured both supporters and opponents of the bill. ... Opponents also brought up that the new proposal opens the door for surveillance for any number of crimes that they don’t believe warrant the invasion of privacy. Others, like Harvard Law School professor Kendra Albert, pointed out the plethora of other tools at law enforcement’s disposal for collecting information without a change to the wiretap rules, including access to GPS data from cellphones and the placement of cameras outside a suspect’s home with a warrant. “I understand that law enforcement would prefer to have more tools at their disposal and that there will always be cases where the ability to gather wiretap evidence would seem to have made the difference between a successful prosecution and a defendant that walked or maybe was never charged,” Albert said. “Nonetheless, Massachusetts wiretap laws stand as it is, as it strikes a compromise between a uniquely invasive form of surveillance and the need to gather evidence.”

Jack Goldsmith, who served in Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, says laws regulating presidents must be reformed before Trump can be reelected.

As President Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, we revisit another historic first. Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary and the first to argue before the Supreme Court. Harvard law professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin joins Nicole Ellis to discuss her new book on Motley's life and legacy called, "Civil Rights Queen."

Miami-Dade County Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officers in Florida degraded, humiliated and abused three Trans people after being arrested at racial justice protests in 2020, a federal lawsuit accuses. The complaint, filed in a U.S. District Court in Miami, claims correctional officers at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center (TGK) “abused and harassed” two Trans women and a Trans man based on their sex, disability and Transgender status after they were arrested on “minor charges” during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. All charges against the three were later dropped. ... The plaintiffs – Gabriela Amaya Cruz, Christian Pallidine, and Ángel Jae Torres Bucci – named Miami-Dade County, MDCR director Daniel Junior and several jail employees in their complaint. The three plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF), the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

When you’re 98 years old you can say things others can’t, so bravo to Charlie Munger for daring to speak an important but too muffled truth about today’s financial markets. “We have a new bunch of emperors, and they’re the people who vote the shares in the index funds,” Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway partner said Wednesday. “I think the world of Larry Fink, but I’m not sure I want him to be my emperor.” Many CEOs no doubt privately agree. ... “Many savvy governance observers were paying close attention to how Exxon’s top three investors—Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, in that order—voted,” a Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance article noted. “The Big Three, which own roughly twenty percent of the S&P 500’s outstanding shares, had made significant climate commitments over the past several years.”

For Harley Moyer ’23, being part of Harvard Law School’s Government Lawyering: Attorney General Clinic meant an opportunity to spread awareness in the consumer protection field about the impact fraudulent practices have on historically disenfranchised communities.