Media Mentions

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.

Walter Dellinger, a renowned scholar of constitutional law and one of the top legal figures in the Clinton administration, which he served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel and later as acting solicitor general, died on Wednesday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 80. ... Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, advocated for that law and lobbied Mr. Dellinger to join him in supporting it. He failed, and Mr. Dellinger won the case. “No one could have been a worthier adversary,” Mr. Tribe said in a phone interview. “It was always a learning experience to grapple with Walter, and always exhilarating to have him on your side when you agreed.”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Feb. 10 enacted one of the most momentous workplace rights reforms in more than a decade, and Congress’ most significant legislation against sexual harassment and abuse since the #MeToo women’s movement began five years ago. ... Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program, told me the legislation is an “important first step,” and a major accomplishment, especially given the stark partisan divide in Congress and businesses’ strong interest in keeping disputes out of court. “I would not understate what a real accomplishment this is, and how meaningful it is to women who have faced harassment and assault,” Gerstein said. “It demonstrates a bipartisan recognition that forced arbitration is unfair to workers and that the secrecy is a problem.”

In Civil Rights Queen, author Tomiko Brown-Nagin profiles Motley, a Black woman who wrote the original complaint in Brown v. The Board of Education and was on Martin Luther King's legal team.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group of law professors and others on Wednesday urged the Eleventh Circuit to reject Apple's appeal of a lower court's decision that Corellium LLC's "virtual" version of the iPhone to detect potential bugs was protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. ... Several copyright professors, including Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School, filed their own briefs in support of Corellium on Wednesday, saying that the "public benefits when copyright owners do not have a monopoly on information about the potential flaws in their works."

An article written by Lawrence Lessig: The Supreme Court’s decision last week to reverse the finding of a three-judge panel that Alabama must redraw its 2022 Congressional map after violating the Voting Rights Act — a ruling the Supreme Court reached without the benefit of full briefing and argument—has raised again the question of what could be done about the court’s use of the “shadow docket.” Here’s one answer: Congress should give the justices a filibuster.

A group of voters in North Carolina is challenging Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn's eligibility to run for reelection, arguing his actions on Jan. 6 and support for overturning the election disqualifies him under a constitutional clause barring any federal official who has "engaged in insurrection" from holding office. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University, contends that, even if it's determined Cawthorn didn't "engage" in an insurrection, if the public focuses "on the words giving aid and comfort to an insurrection -- words in the 14th Amendment -- the evidence seems more than sufficient."

In recent months, the Supreme Court has stepped into one controversy after another—taking a case that threatens affirmative-action programs, creating a road map for states looking to copy Texas’s S.B. 8 and nullify constitutional rights, and using the shadow docket to signal major changes to abortion and voting-rights laws. In a matter of months, the Court seems poised to both dramatically expand gun rights and overrule Roe v. Wade. Polling demonstrates that the Court’s popularity has fallen to an all-time low, driven by perceptions that the justices are partisan. The Court’s conservative majority seems remarkably unconcerned about potential damage to its reputation. That may come as no surprise: Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure unless they are impeached. ... All of this makes it important to understand what we mean when we talk about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. As the Harvard Law professor Richard Fallon has shown, defining legitimacy takes some work. It can refer to the Court’s moral standing—a concern most acutely raised in legal systems, such as those of Nazi Germany, that sanction obvious human-rights violations. Legitimacy, too, can refer to the perceptions of the legal community—do lawyers, judges, and academics believe that the justices are using reasonable interpretive methods and applying them in good faith?

Only a few years ago, the federal agency that regulates the transmission of electricity, gas and other energy matters was looking into ways to prop up coal, in line with former President Donald Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. ... The long queues of projects awaiting a green light from PJM or other grid operators can be seen as good news, showing a strong interest in renewable energy, said Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School.

Nearly nine months ago, Andy De Leon was shot in the head in an ambush in West Miami-Dade. The man accused of the shooting, a jealous security guard who worked at a zoo featured on the Netflix “Tiger King” series, remains jailed awaiting trial. De Leon, 30, once a vibrant physical therapy assistant, remains in a bedridden “vegetative state,” awake and breathing on his own, but unable to speak or move. ... The family’s frustrations are not unusual, said Michael Ashley Stein, a professor and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. Because the health-care system and policies have been created piecemeal over time, he said, various agencies don’t always “interact well and people fall through the cracks.”

An article written by Catherine Grace Katz (JD '23): In 2014, six weeks after Russia invaded the Crimea, Google Maps took a major step, one that the United States, United Nations, and international community still refuse to take: it recognized the Crimea as Russian territory—but only on some versions of the product. While users in Ukraine still the saw the version of Google Maps everyone was used to seeing—no demarcated border between the Crimea and Russia, but a light gray line indicating an internal border within Ukraine—on the Russian version of Google Maps a solid line suddenly appeared between Ukraine and the Crimea. To users in Russia, this line reflected what the Russian state asserted with its armed invasion. The Crimea unequivocally belonged to Russia. Meanwhile, users of the standard .com version of Google Maps saw a third reality: a dashed line between the Crimea and Ukraine indicating that the border was now disputed.

Six couples who met at Harvard recall their first dates, first kisses and first impressions.

Nationwide, police agencies and prosecutors agree that the increased use of confidential informants, or ‘CI’s, has been a boon to fighting crime, especially when it comes to drug trafficking. They claim that informants can often go places and pierce certain social and criminal circles that an undercover officer can’t. Why? Because CIs are often known criminals who got ‘caught in the act’ and were offered a deal: Help make cases against others and you can stay out of jail. Using a known criminal in a key position of trust might sound like a ‘dicey’ proposition and in fact, many in law enforcement call CIs ‘a necessary evil’. ... Meet Alexandra Natapoff, a professor of law at Harvard University, a former Federal Public Defender, and widely considered to be the top expert on confidential informants and their impact on our legal system. Her take? “It results in wrongful convictions,” says Natapoff. “It results in often police corruption. It results in the wrong people being charged and convicted or punished for the wrong things.”

An op-ed written by Terri Gerstein: Finally, some good news came from Congress. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act passed in the Senate on Thursday and heads to President Joe Biden to be signed. The bill prevents employers from forcing their workers to bring sexual harassment or assault cases before secretive arbitrators paid by the boss, instead of before judges in open court.

As Republicans impose new restrictions on ballot access in multiple states, President Biden has no easy options for safeguarding voting rights despite rising pressure from frustrated activists. Unlike on other issues such as immigration or environmental protection, the White House has little leverage without congressional action as the November elections creep up. “If there were some sort of easily available presidential power on this, others would have done it,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor who researches election law. “There is no significant unilateral authority here.”