Media Mentions

An article co-written by Emma Svoboda (JD '23): Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have escalated significantly in the past month, with reports of Russian troop buildups and recent U.S. and NATO deployments to the area. Speaking in Berlin in late January, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cautioned that Russia was “poised” to take aggressive military action and warned that Russia may stage a provocation as a pretense for military intervention. Russian representatives have denied Blinken’s allegations and accused the United States of fomenting a crisis. With tensions mounting, Russia’s intentions—and whether it will mount a large-scale attack—remain unclear.

After the new year, when an Amazon warehouse worker showed up to the sprawling facility where he works in Rialto, Calif., he noticed a lot of colleagues seemed to be missing. Stations were empty, he said, and workers were constantly moved around to fill in for those gone. It seemed like everyone was working mandatory overtime. ... “It’s a very serious matter when you have a state attorney general suing a major international corporation for violating a law that is so clearly important and relevant to what is happening to workers on the ground right now,” said Terri Gerstein, fellow at both Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and the Economic Policy Institute. “This isn’t a mom-and-pop. This is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.”

A contentious decision from the US Supreme Court in a Voting Rights Act case from Alabama this week previewed what could be a momentous legal battle over the 1965 law, which over the past several years has been repeatedly whittled down by the conservative justices. ... "Alabama's proposal would turn the VRA into a race-blind statute that only looks into what this hypothetical race-blind process would produce," said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law professor who specializes in election law. "And so the consequence would be just substantially less minority representation in America."

A book review by Laurence Tribe: From Plato’s Republic to Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, from Pascal’s Pensées to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, writers have pondered the Noble Lie—the morality of resorting to falsehood and delusion to conceal, usually from the masses but sometimes from oneself, truths whose revelation would wreak havoc, or at least do more harm than good. It is a question that Justice Stephen Breyer, the dean of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing and its fiercest proponent of the Enlightenment values of truth and reason, might have taken up in his latest book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics, published a few months before his recent announcement that he intends to retire from the Court.

The Supreme Court appears ready to strike another blow at the Voting Rights Act. In a 5-4 decision Monday night, they upheld a congressional map a lower court had tossed out. Host Scott Tong discusses the implications with Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles.

On Jan. 27, President Biden made history by announcing that he would nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court by the end of February. “While I’ve been studying candidates’ backgrounds and writings, I’ve made no decision except one,” Biden said in remarks made at a White House event to formally announce the retirement of 83-year-old liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. “The person I will nominate will be someone of extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity. And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue.” ... “African American women have historically operated under the disabilities of being women and Black, particularly during times when those groups had less power,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, told Yahoo News. “To fight through, that has often required great resilience and creativity.”

When three federal judges last month blocked Alabama’s new Republican-backed map of US congressional districts as likely discriminatory against Black voters, they said they were applying “settled law” and that the outcome was not even close. An increasingly assertive conservative-majority US Supreme Court disagreed. The justices froze the lower court’s ruling and allowed Alabama to use the contested map of the state’s seven US House of Representatives districts for the November 8 midterm elections in which Republicans are seeking to regain control of Congress from President Joe Biden’s fellow Democrats. ... “If the court accepted Alabama’s argument, that would be the end of Section 2 as we know it,” said Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an expert in redistricting. “It would become far harder for plaintiffs to win Section 2 cases, and states could eliminate many existing minority opportunity districts without violating the statute,” Stephanopoulos said, referring to districts in which minorities have a better chance of electing lawmakers of their choice.

President Joe Biden’s first U.S. Supreme Court appointment won’t alter the 6-3 conservative majority, but her presence could spawn subtle changes on both the left and right sides of the bench. Adding the court’s first Black woman to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer, as Biden has said he intends to do, could prompt conservative justices to adjust how they approach cases involving race and gender. ... The potential impact of a new justice might depend a lot on “personality and background,” said Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles.

When President Biden announced that he would nominate a Black woman—the Supreme Court's first—to the seat that will be vacated by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, criticism from some on the right began almost immediately. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said it was "racist" to consider only Black women for the post, and Biden's decision was "insulting to African-American women." The conversation about identity and qualifications echoes some of the questions that arose when another breakthrough appointment was announced more than 50 years ago. ... Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle For Equality, discusses Motley's nomination and her career. She says Motley supported the appointment of women and people of color to the federal judiciary as a way to strengthen the institution.

Payments on federal student loans have been on pause for nearly two years to give borrowers a financial break during the pandemic. After several extensions, though, borrowers will be on the hook to start making payments again in less than 100 days. Currently, there are about 43 million federal student loan borrowers who hold a collective $1.6 trillion federal student loan debt, according to the Federal Student Aid office. “It’s important to remember that the payment pause is a response to a specific emergency and not a panacea,” Eileen Connor, director of litigation for the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, tells Fortune. “Pausing repayment on federal student loans—and preventing interest from accumulating—is humane.”

MS. COLVIN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Rhonda Colvin, one of our Capitol Hill reporters. And today we're speaking with Tomiko Brown‑Nagin. She just authored a book on Constance Baker Motley, and the title of that book is "Civil Rights Queen:"‑‑the story of‑‑"Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality." And this is part of our series and the contribution that Black women have made to American history. So we thank you, Tomiko, for joining us today. MS. BROWN‑NAGIN: Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Current and former HLS students reflect on the impact their work with the Employment Law Clinic had on their education and careers.

Chief executives love to talk about “stakeholder capitalism.” But when they face a final choice to sell a company and divide the spoils between workers and shareholders, guess who gets the money? You got it: Shareholders are the winners—along with the executives themselves. An analysis of takeover deals during the pandemic by academics at Harvard Law School reveals the priorities of America’s corporate leaders. In public, they talk about the importance of employees, communities, the environment and other stakeholders in the business. In private, they negotiate deals they know will lead to job losses and closed offices but don’t demand compensation for the losers. ... “The enthusiasm for the Business Roundtable and Davos visions was because people can read into them whatever they like,” says Prof. Lucian Bebchuk, director of Harvard Law School’s program on corporate governance and co-author of the research. “They avoid the difficult trade-off questions.”

An op-ed co-authored by Laurence Tribe: It’s as if we are back again in 1965 in Selma before “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state police violently attacked peaceful demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, leading Congress to enact the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Only this time, it’s five Supreme Court justices effectively blocking the path of Black Alabamians seeking to protect their right to vote. On Feb. 8, in Merrill v. Milligan, in an emergency docket ruling, the reactionary 5-4 Supreme Court majority shredded a three-judge panel’s painstaking and convincing Jan. 24 decision enjoining Alabama from using its new, racially discriminatory congressional map in future elections.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Democrats have been frustrated in their hopes to pass a comprehensive voting rights bill. But with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on board, things are looking up for the most important voting rights legislation that is actually possible right now: the Electoral Count Modernization Act.

Last month, Entergy New Orleans revealed it was pulling funding from a vital city project to shore up the city’s flood defenses. Citing the massive cost of recovering from Hurricane Ida, the company said it could no longer fulfill its commitment to loan $30 million to the Sewerage and Water Board. Four days later, the utility’s parent company, Entergy Corp. announced quarterly shareholder dividend payments at $1.01 per share, totaling $202 million. ... But Entergy is not a typical company. It’s a government-backed monopoly, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “It’s just a classic case of the company’s owners doing well at the expense of their captive customers,” Peskoe said. “That’s the important thing here that differentiates it from other businesses. Customers are just completely captive to Entergy.”

The history of Black women and the law is, until relatively recently, "a history of impressive firsts," according to Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of law and history at Harvard. There's Charlotte Ray, the first Black woman lawyer and a graduate of Howard law school. There's Jane Bolin, the first Black woman judge in the United States. There's Pauli Murray, who coined the term Jane Crow, and whose legal arguments laid the groundwork for desegregating public schools and extending the rights of women and LGQTB people. Murray was the first Black person to earn a JSD from Yale Law, and the first Black person perceived as a woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.

A former federal public defender is asking an appellate panel to either vacate a lower court’s ruling against her, or disqualify itself from deciding her sexual harassment claims against the judiciary, citing a conflict of interest stemming from the selection of judges. ... Roe’s attorneys, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Cooper Strickland, said records and information the government released related to the assignment process show the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and Judicial Conference participated in selecting judges to hear the lawsuit, even though they’re named defendants. Roe’s lawyers are urging the panel to either vacate U.S. District Judge William Young’s dismissal of the lawsuit, or reassign the case to a new panel that would vacate the lower court’s order.

One reliable strategy for Democrats in gerrymandering battles over the past decade has been to sue Republicans for racial gerrymandering — arguing that Republicans illegally packed minority voters into districts so these voters had less power to elect additional representatives. ... But “race-blind” policies would probably still benefit Republicans by diluting minority voters. The University of Michigan’s Jowei Chen and Harvard Law’s Nicholas Stephanopoulos did an analysis of “race-blind” redistricting in all of the nation’s state House districts. They found that there would be “substantially fewer” minority-majority districts, and those that remained would have smaller minority populations in them. In the South in particular, Republicans would benefit from this by picking up more districts.

Chief Justice John Roberts was once in the vanguard as the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act. But as his more conservative colleagues showed Monday in restoring a Republican-drawn Alabama congressional map, Roberts is no longer in control. ... “Not even Chief Justice Roberts, author of the infamous Shelby County decision, could bring himself to join the radical right majority in draining the Voting Rights Act of all meaning and leaving it a hollow shell,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe tweeted.

In the early 21st century, the internet—and the social internet, in particular—has enabled a more connected world. But it’s also enabled and amplified some of humanity’s worst behaviors. Fringy, toxic opinions and outright disinformation proliferate. Antisocial behavior is normalized. Facts—when they can be recognized—are used to bolster preexisting opinions, not to challenge assumptions. Kids (and adults) measure their self-worth by their Instagram comments and follower count. Expecting the huge tech companies that operate the platforms to proactively fix the problems gets more unworkable as online communities grow into the billions. ... Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and Special Assistant to the President for science, technology, and innovation policy in the Obama administration “Someday, we’ll cease to differentiate between on- and offline, just as we have stopped talking about ‘electrified’ life. Much that we now treasure will disappear. But the human spirit is creative and playful—we’ll be up to new augmented shenanigans that we cannot now imagine.”