Media Mentions

Michelle Wu ’12 has been selected by the Harvard College Class of 2022 to address the graduating seniors as part of the annual Class Day celebration on May 25.

Australia has become the second country after the United Kingdom to legalize a fertility procedure that mixes genetic material from three people. The technique is meant to prevent couples from having children with certain debilitating disorders caused by faulty mitochondria, the energy-generating structures in our cells. But it’s controversial because it involves a genetic change that can be passed to future generations, so its rollout in Australia will be extremely cautious. ... “There was a lot of excitement when the UK first legalized this several years ago, so it's surprising that there haven't been reports of failures or successes one way or the other,” says I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, who has been following the international landscape of mitochondrial donation closely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I feel bad for anyone not steeped in establishment clause jurisprudence who happened to listen to the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the football coach prayer case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. On the surface, the question is simple: Can the public high school coach kneel and pray silently on the 50-yard line after games? But the doctrine the court has created over the years is so complicated and confused that you would be hard-pressed to make any sense of the debates without a law school course on the First Amendment under your belt.

In 2020, former federal public defender Caryn Strickland filed a complaint alleging sexual harassment from a supervisor while she was a public defender in the Western District of North Carolina. The lawsuit further alleged that the judiciary’s Employment Dispute Resolution system is unconstitutional. ... Jeannie Suk Gersen, attorney for Strickland, noted the impact of the decision: “Today’s decision is a major victory. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Strickland’s constitutional claims for equal protection and due process violations can proceed, and made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination.”

President Biden proposed a $30 billion aid package to Ukraine, “a vast increase in America’s commitment to defeating Russia in Ukraine.” Biden said, The cost of this fight is not cheap. But caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen. We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country, or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine. ... But as Professor [Laurence] Tribe noted in an NYTimes op-ed last week (“$100 Billion. Russia’s Treasure in the US Should Be Turned Against Putin), the US has seized and liquidated assets of sovereign nations on several prior occasions and has the authority to do so here. Professor Tribe tweeted in response to Biden’s proposal, saying Biden’s proposal to let US authorities liquidate assets of Russian oligarchs and donate the proceeds to Ukraine seeks broad new legal powers that ironically aren’t needed to liquidate even more US dollars from Russia’s sovereign accounts in the US.

An appeals court is giving a former federal public defender another chance to take her sexual harassment claims to court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Tuesday revived a portion of Caryn Strickland’s lawsuit against the judiciary. Certain claims can move forward against several officials, including Roslynn Mauskopf, the chair of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and Roger Gregory, the Fourth Circuit’s chief judge. ... Strickland’s attorney, Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, called the decision a win for her client and others who may bring sex discrimination lawsuits against the courts. “Today’s decision is a major victory. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Strickland’s constitutional claims for equal protection and due process violations can proceed, and made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination,” Gersen said in a statement.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a former assistant federal public defender in North Carolina can sue court officials for constitutional violations stemming from an alleged faulty investigation of sexual harassment. ... Strickland was represented by Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, who called the decision “a major victory” in a statement published by Law.com and other publications. The unanimous decision “made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination,” Gersen said.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a former public defender’s lawsuit challenging the federal judiciary’s handling of her sexual harassment and discrimination claims about a supervisor’s unwelcome attention at work. ... Strickland’s lawyer, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, characterized Tuesday’s decision as a landmark ruling because it makes “crystal clear” that the federal judiciary, as an employer, “can be held accountable based on its constitutional obligations” by judiciary employees who experience discrimination.

A designated Fourth Circuit panel on Tuesday reinstated some claims in a sexual harassment suit brought by a former North Carolina assistant federal public defender accusing federal judiciary officials of mishandling her complaints, but declined to rule that internal procedures designed to redress workplace misconduct claims are unconstitutional. The three-judge panel said former assistant federal public defender Caryn Devins Strickland can proceed with certain allegations that the Judicial Conference, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the Fourth Circuit and its leaders violated her constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. A district judge dismissed the entire case in December 2020. ... Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, who is representing Strickland, said the panel's decision "made clear that the federal judiciary as an employer is not immune from suits for sex discrimination."

An op-ed by Philippe Sands: President Biden’s accusation that Russia is committing genocide resonated with those appalled by the images of apparent slaughter in Bucha, Mariupol and other parts of Ukraine. “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank — none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away,” Mr. Biden declared, although he later qualified his remarks, recognizing the need for more evidence. “We’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.”

The recent deluge of union elections at Starbucks Corp. stores is pushing the federal labor board to its limit, reflecting a broader influx in labor action as the pandemic winds down. Flat funding and a restless labor force have created a near perfect storm for the National Labor Relations Board, charged with overseeing every private-sector union election. Election petitions have already swelled by 57% in the first half of the 2021 fiscal year as unfair labor practice charges rose by 14%. At the same time, ballooning inflation and long-term staff declines have made the agency less equipped to fulfill its statutory mission of overseeing union elections, current and former officials say. “The board certainly has been in a funding crisis for awhile,” said Sharon Block, who served on it during the Obama administration and more recently as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Joe Biden.

Harvard University leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 individuals during the 17th and 18th centuries when slavery was legal in Massachusetts, according to a report chronicling the university’s deep ties to wealth generated from slave labor in the South and Caribbean — and its significant role in the nation’s long history of racial discrimination. ... Laurence H. Tribe, emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote on social media that the report, “while over a century late, represents an important and valuable start.” In a phone interview, he said the country is engaged in a meaningful dialogue on this subject. But there are people who want to suppress such efforts at a national reckoning, and “have the view that the less we talk about race, the faster we’ll get over the problems of race,” as seen in recent voting-rights and affirmative-action cases. “There’s a different view that says that we can’t really get past where we are without coming more fully to terms with how we got here.”

Harvard University is publicly facing some brutally hard truths. A massive report, years in the making, was released this week detailing the institution’s ties to and enrichment from the enslavement of Black people. It’s full of gut-wrenching details, from the more than 70 human beings who were owned by faculty, staff, and even presidents of the university, to the remains of 15 Black people from the antebellum era found among the holdings of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, to the fact that a third of the university’s endowment from the first half of the 19th century came from donors whose fortunes were fueled by the slave trade. ... “It will bring us closer together as a community, and create deeper bonds among us,” [Tomiko Brown-Nagin] said. “I do know, obviously there are some very difficult things in the report.” But, she added, it’s also vital to note the immeasurable contributions Black and brown alumni have made to the university, Boston, and the world. “It’s important to me — I’m a civil rights historian — to have that be a theme of the report, because it’s a way of truth-telling as well, and ensuring that a broader array of graduates and individuals and communities represent Harvard,” Brown-Nagin said.

The case involved an Austin ordinance that classified signs differently depending on whether they had some connection to the site where they were located — that is, “on-premise” or “off-premise” signs. That distinction prompted two outdoor advertising companies (Reagan National Advertising of Austin and the Lamar Advantage Outdoor Co. Austin) to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds when their permits to digitize some of their off-premises billboard signs were denied. The case thus involved a First Amendment content-discrimination issue and whether strict scrutiny analysis should apply. ... → That said, Professor Laurence Tribe agreed with the spirit of the Thomas dissent as evidenced by a tweet he released commenting on the case: “SCOTUS made a total mess of 1st Am law. Only the 3 dissenters, pointing to the agreement of scholars as far apart as Michael McConnell and me on the key legal point, came close to offering coherent guidance.”

Since FERC in 2011 issued its Order 1000, partly to open transmission development to competition, SPP has completed solicitations for three regional transmission projects, including the just-selected NextEra project, which is designed to reduce congestion in the Oklahoma City area. Besides being the least expensive proposal, NextEra Energy Transmission Southwest’s project has a range of benefits compared with the other bids, according to SPP’s panel that reviewed the solicitation. ... “It’d be hard for me to imagine that the utilities wouldn’t basically carve this up amongst themselves,” [Ari] Peskoe said. “They’d have some sort of understanding of who partners up with who on certain projects.”

Harvard University leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 individuals during the 17th and 18th centuries when slavery was legal in Massachusetts, according to a report chronicling the university’s deep ties to wealth generated from slave labor in the South and Caribbean — and its significant role in the nation’s long history of racial discrimination. ... The report was produced by a faculty committee convened by Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow in 2019. Many who read the report will find it “disturbing and even shocking,” Bacow said in a statement. “Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow said. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

New York Democrats made a last-ditch appeal to the state’s highest court on Tuesday to overturn a pair of lower-court rulings and salvage newly drawn congressional districts that overwhelmingly favor their party. In oral arguments before the New York State Court of Appeals, lawyers for the governor and top legislative leaders said that Republicans challenging the lines had fallen short of proving that the state’s new congressional map violated a state ban on gerrymandering. ... Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor who studies redistricting, said New York’s map was not “remotely” as skewed as maps adopted by Republicans in Florida or Democrats in Illinois. And he cautioned that striking down New York’s maps while allowing other Republican-drawn gerrymanders to stand across the country would only further bias the national map toward one party. Still, Mr. Stephanopoulos said the litigation in New York and other states this year offered some reason for optimism in a decades-long fight by public interest groups to curb the influence of gerrymandering. “The fact that both sides are now willing to bring partisan gerrymandering claims, and state courts have struck down both Republican and Democratic maps, I think that is encouraging in terms of sweeping national reform in the future,” he said.

For nearly 400 years, Harvard’s most famous motto has been a single word, Veritas, or truth. In the spirit of that slogan, university officials said, Harvard on Tuesday published the first full accounting of the institution’s historical ties to slavery. In a sweeping report, the university also acknowledged its complicity in 19th-century “race science” and 20th-century racial discrimination, and announced the creation of a $100 million fund to address the legacies of slavery, including inequalities in educational outcomes, that persist to this day. “Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Harvard president Lawrence Bacow wrote in a letter to the university community about the report. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

In one column are the names of more than 70 enslaved people at Harvard: Venus, Juba, Cesar, Cicely. They are only first names, or sometimes no name at all — “the Moor” or “a little boy” — of people and stories that have been all but forgotten. In another column are the names of the ministers and presidents and donors of Harvard who enslaved them in the 17th and 18th centuries: Increase Mather, Gov. John Winthrop, William Brattle. These full names are so powerful and revered they still adorn buildings today. The contrasting lists are arguably the most poignant part of a 134-page report on Harvard University’s four centuries of ties to slavery and its legacy. ... Reparations “means different things to different people, so fixating on that term, I think, can be counterproductive,” Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the committee chair, a professor of both law and history, and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said in an interview.

Twitter is “the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” a triumphant Elon Musk proclaimed in announcing his deal to buy the social media platform. In other words, Twitter is no ordinary corporation. It serves as something akin to a public utility, a unique global means of communication. ... “Corporate leaders and practitioners have been increasingly pledging to pay close attention to the interests of stakeholders, such as customers or society in the case of Twitter, and not only shareholders,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even so, a study of more than 100 recent $1 billion-plus deals that Mr. Bebchuk recently completed found that there had been little impact, with “large gains” for shareholders and corporate leaders and little or nothing for other constituencies.

A new report shows that Harvard’s ties to slavery were transformative in the University’s rise to global prominence, and included enslaved individuals on campus, funding from donors engaged in the slave trade, and intellectual leadership that obstructed efforts to achieve racial equality. The report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, released Tuesday, describes a history that began with a Colonial-era embrace of slavery that saw 79 people enslaved by Harvard presidents and other leaders, faculty, and staff. The report offers a series of recommendations — already accepted by Harvard President Larry Bacow — that amounts to a reckoning with the University’s history. A $100 million fund established by the Harvard Corporation to implement the recommendations includes resources for current use and to establish an endowment to sustain the work in perpetuity. ... “The committee thought that it was important to lay bare the difficult aspects of Harvard’s history, but also speak to the resistance that is very much a part of Harvard’s legacy,” [Tomiko] Brown-Nagin said. “I am aware that the history we trace in this report is deeply troubling. But it would be a great disservice to our community if the only message that we took away was one of shame. We must acknowledge the harm that Harvard has done. But it is also important that we do not — as has been done in the past — bury stories of Black resistance, excellence, and leadership. These women and men are also part of our history — also part of our legacy.”