Media Mentions

An article co-written by Lucian Bebchuk: Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, corporate leaders pledged to look after all stakeholders, not just deliver value to shareholders. Did they live up to these promises? A new empirical study examines more than 100 major public company acquisitions that were announced during the pandemic and shows that corporate leaders failed to look after stakeholder interests.

Andy Parker, the father of Alison Parker, the television reporter who was shot and killed in 2015 by a former colleague, created an NFT of the video of the fatal shooting in hopes it will give him power to remove clips from social media, The Washington Post reported. ... Dr. Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School whose work focuses on copyright, trademark and false advertising law, told Insider she believed "there's a 0% chance that this will work." "I see no path forward through NFTs for this person who suffered an unspeakable tragedy," Tushnet said. "I don't know who encouraged this, but it is not going to give him what he wants."

In an old joke, a secular Jew sits down on a park bench next to a man with a large black hat and a long black coat. The secular Jew turns to the darkly garbed man and says, “What’s the matter with you Hasids? This isn’t the Old Country—it’s the modern world. You people are an embarrassment to the rest of us.” The man turns around and says, “Hasid? I’m Amish.” The secular Jew immediately replies, “It’s so wonderful the way you’ve held on to your traditions!” ... They will be regarded as ‘options’ within the liberal frame, and while suspect in the broader culture, largely permitted to exist so long as they are nonthreatening to the liberal order’s main business.” [Adrian] Vermeule, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School, agrees with Deneen’s assessment but considers his prescription altogether too quietist, proposing instead the cultivation of clandestine agents who might “come to occupy the commanding heights of the administrative state,” where they “may have a great deal of discretion to further human dignity and the common good, defined entirely in substantive rather than procedural-technical terms.” (One can’t help but think of jurists like Amy Coney Barrett.) Brooks, a commentator, has fewer qualms about liberalism per se, and thinks the focus ought to be on the renewal of a culture of civic righteousness.

An article co-written by Laurence Tribe: Barbara McQuade, the former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan just raised the bar for ingenious ways for speaking truth to power . . . in this case, the power of the Attorney General of the United States. On February 22 in Just Security, McQuade published an exhaustively detailed model prosecution memo for indicting former President Donald Trump for his unrelenting criminal actions in pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to take lawless steps to delay the electoral count on Jan. 6.

This is the rundown for Radio Boston for February 23. Tiziana Dearing is our host. Curry College in Milton, MA is going remote for the rest of the week after swastikas and threatening messages targeting Black students were found on campus. This has become a fairly common occurrence at schools and universities. We speak with State Senator Barry Finegold and Sarah Granoff, VP of Simmons University Hillel, about how to talk about anti-Semitism with young people. Harvard Law Professor and author Randall Kennedy joins us to talk about the twentieth anniversary re-release of his book, which examines our nation's most abhorred racial slur, chronicling the word's history, the law and litigation around it and its cultural relevance.

It is deeply illiberal to accuse those who criticize the president of treason. It’s un-American. It is, in fact, the kind of rhetoric that exists in tyrannies. Yet numerous liberals have accused those critical of Joe Biden’s impotent handling of the Ukrainian crisis of sedition. Harvard prof Laurence Tribe, a favorite of the “resistance” — back when dissent was still patriotic — recently argued that Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other Republicans he claims are praising Russian President Vladimir Putin have provided “aid and comfort” to an “enemy” and thus would meet the definition of “treason” under Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution.

An article by co-written by Ben Waldman (JD '23): ​​This past fall, a series of reports, principally from the New York Times, revealed that the United States’ air war against the Islamic State may have been more indiscriminate than U.S. officials have previously acknowledged. The Times reported in November 2021 that a March 18, 2018, single strike indiscriminately killed dozens of civilians during the Islamic State’s last stand in Baghuz, Syria. And in late January, the Times reported that another strike in 2017 on the Tabqa Dam—a massive structure on the Euphrates River in Eastern Syria—caused the dam to fail so catastrophically that it provoked a momentary truce among the Syrian government, the Islamic State, and U.S.-backed forces so that engineers could prevent the loss of tens of thousands of civilian lives due to flooding.

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.