Media Mentions

An op-ed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Will anything be left of the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court finishes with it? It’s looking pretty grim. In 2013, the Supreme Court dismantled the part of the law that required states with a history of discrimination to get approval for changes to election rules. Last year, the court all but eliminated minority voters’ ability to use another part of the law to challenge discriminatory voting restrictions. Now, the court has signaled its interest in frustrating the law’s aim of ensuring that minority voters are adequately represented.

Usually, an A grade would be seen as a measure of a job well done. However, when it comes to progress toward hepatitis elimination, New York is only now getting back on track. The Empire State has work to do in order to regain our status as national leaders in this effort. As evaluated by Hep ElimiNATION, a joint project of  the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, New York’s A grade comes with caveats, specifically a lack of dedicated, sufficient funding for proactive case finding, linkage to care and harm reduction services for New Yorkers living with and at risk of developing viral hepatitis.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: President Biden has promised to nominate a Black woman to fill retiring Justice Stephen Breyer's seat on the Supreme Court. That historic first has Black women in the legal profession reflecting on how long it's taken to get this far. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports. ... TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: If we can get to a point where it's not so significant that a Black woman is appointed to some prestigious position, then we will have come closer to the dream of equality that so many civil rights activists and lawyers fought for for so many years.

Fair Districts GA and the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit over Georgia’s redistricting plans. The brief aims to demonstrate that it is not hard to draw Georgia legislative districts that respect lawmakers’ discretionary choices while complying with the Voting Rights Act. Plaintiffs in Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity v. Raffensperger argue that the Georgia General Assembly violated the Voting Rights Act by not drawing sufficient districts in the state House and Senate plans to protect Black voters’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.

Oregon would only allow the use of one mushroom species in its new psilocybin system and would ban chemically synthesized psilocybin. These are just two details in a release of new draft rules expected Tuesday from the Oregon Health Authority. The rules, crafted by an advisory board of doctors and other public health experts, will be used to create Oregon’s ground-breaking system for allowing the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic substance produced by many mushrooms. ... “It is kind of a landmark moment because Oregon is the very first state to have created such a system of regulation,” said Mason Marks, a member of Oregon’s psilocybin advisory board and a senior fellow on the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School. “These are the very first draft rules that we’re seeing, so it really is a kind of pivotal event.”

A U.S. appeals court will consider reviving a former federal judiciary employee’s sex discrimination claims in a case that could lower the bar for workers to win misconduct lawsuits against the nation’s judicial branch. ... Justice Department spokeswoman Danielle Blevins declined to comment. Roe’s attorney, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Neil young was five years old when, in 1951, he was partially paralysed by polio. Joni Mitchell was nine when she was hospitalised by the same illness around the same time. Both grew up to become famous singers—and, lately, prominent campaigners against anti-vaccine misinformation. The two musicians, followed by a handful of others, have withdrawn their music from the world’s biggest streaming service in protest at a podcast that gave airtime to anti-vaxxers. ... “It’s always been baffling to me how podcasts have flown under the content-moderation radar,” says Evelyn Douek of Harvard Law School. “It’s a massive blind-spot.” It could also prove to be a pricey one. As audio platforms host more user-generated content, the moderation task will expand. It will probably involve lots of human moderators; automating the process with artificial intelligence, as Facebook and others are doing, is even harder for audio than it is for text, images or video. Software firms’ valuations “have long been driven by the notion that there’s no marginal cost”, says Mr Page. “Content moderation might be their first.”

On a recent winter Tuesday just off Boston’s Southeast Expressway, dozens of aspiring carpenters were banging nails, sawing wood and hoisting heavy steel rails to other apprentices at the local union training site. One of them was Annisha Simpson, a 27-year-old from Boston. Simpson is Black and part of a growing number of minority construction workers in the state. ... Mark Erlich, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, said the only way to move the workforce needle is for state agencies to set ambitious goals and then hold their contractors accountable for making sure a larger percentage of minority workers get hired. “In the absence of that kind of intentional policy efforts,” he said, “the industry will continue to evolve very slowly in terms of becoming more diverse.”

Jane Goodall, the renowned naturalist who revolutionized views of animal behavior with her 60-year study of chimps, has turned her attention to a unique aspect of human nature: hope. ... What books are you recommending for Black History Month? “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality,” by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. “A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.,” edited by James M. Washington. “México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women,” by B. Christine Arce.

Racial tensions and injustices across the U.S. and the globe are unfortunately nothing new, neither are the responses they can elicit. For Randall Kennedy, Harvard scholar and law professor, this has long been a concern. For the majority of his life he has been studying and writing about U.S. law and order, culture, and race. On February 8, the 20th Anniversary edition of his book N-word: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word will hit the bookshelves loaded with a new introduction, where Kennedy stands by his original rejection of the eradication and excessive censorship of the n-word, claiming the word is here to stay "for good and for bad."

When the Rev. Kaeley McEvoy began at Westmoreland Congregational in 2018 she faced a question: Should she tell her new congregation she’d recently had an abortion? McEvoy was already a reproductive rights advocate, and to her the experience wasn’t in conflict with her faith. When the pastor and her then-boyfriend learned in 2016 that she was pregnant, the first place they went was to a cathedral, to pray — and to call doctors’ offices in search of one to do the abortion. ... Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who focuses on the legal history of reproduction said the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned and new state measures that include criminal penalties for doctors and civil fines for women “has made this more salient.”

The Saturday Night Live comedian appears in the condiment brand's 2022 Super Bowl commercial, which is aimed at driving awareness around the issue of wasted food at home by reminding viewers to tackle those leftovers and "make taste, not waste." ... Food waste is a global problem, with the United Nations setting a sustainable development goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent over the next eight years. In that effort, Hellmann's is working with Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic to help enact policy change at a federal level, including legislative policy for the standardization and clarity of food date labels (which they call "one of the most common drivers of at-home waste").

Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, has suggested that Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, may be "trying to hide" something after a report this week revealed phone records show that the GOP congressman spoke with former President Donald Trump for about 10 minutes on the morning of January 6, 2021. ... "Just a casual 10-minute chat with the president on the morning of the insurrection. Why would anyone expect Rep. Jordan to recall that—or care about what was said?" Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University, tweeted.

Since Gov. Janet Mills took office three years ago, the Maine Department of Labor has escalated its pursuit of illegal workplace practices including wage theft, child labor and false record keeping, a significant departure from past practices at the agency. ... "You leverage limited resources in ways that are going to have the greatest and longest-lasting impact leading toward employer compliance," [Terri] Gerstein said. "You could have a huge staff and collect penalties year after year from the same employers, but you are not moving the dial on compliance if they are still violating the law. You need both strategy and staffing."

Before I became a journalist, one of the best jobs I had was waiting tables at a barbecue restaurant atop a little bump on Snowmass Mountain called Sam’s Knob. My daily commute involved riding a high-speed chairlift, and I was guaranteed an hour and 15 minutes of snowboarding every morning before my shift. Tips were good, so I could afford to work four days a week, thus netting myself another three days to snowboard. Sam’s was where I learned that fresh snow made a sound when you were surfing through it: shhhh, softer than a whisper. ... There’s just one obvious catch: historically, work-life balance has largely been out of our hands. “Most people don’t have much of a choice about whether, or how much, to work, given the state of wage and benefit levels in the nation and the lack of government-provided social safety nets,” notes Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and a faculty codirector of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The power generally resides with the employer.”

Psychedelic mushrooms were touted as a panacea for Oregon’s mental health crisis in 2020, when voters passed a first-in-the-nation measure legalizing the supervised use of psilocybin in state-regulated settings. Backed by Portland-area therapists Tom and Sheri Eckert, the language of Measure 109 promised to improve the physical, mental and social well-being of Oregonians by teaching people about “the safety and efficacy of psilocybin in treating mental health conditions.” ... Psilocybin will mostly be administered instead by facilitators who commit to a 120-hour state-certified training program and apply for a state license. They’ll be trained in the “physical, psychological, and spiritual effects of psilocybin, along with education on ethics, equity, history, and culture,” writes Mason Marks, a law professor in Portland who leads the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School, and who also sits on the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board.

An op-ed by Adrian Vermeule: Justice Stephen Breyer last week announced that he will retire at the end of this Supreme Court term. If the recent past is any guide, whoever is nominated to replace him will face a barrage of attacks from political opponents. Every Supreme Court nomination is now a battleground, featuring slander and even angry demonstrations, as when protesters of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination invaded the Senate building and attacked the very doors of the court.

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein: Amazon and the Girl Scouts of America recently announced a partnership to “engage girls in STEM.” As part of the program, Amazon fulfillment centers in more than 20 U.S. cities will host “Girl Scout Amazon Tours.” There’s even a special cobranded Amazon-Girl Scouts patch participants will earn.

An article co-authored by Glenn Cohen: Personal (sometimes called “protected”) health information (PHI) is highly valued (1) and will become centrally important as big data and machine learning move to the forefront of health care and translational research. The current health information exchange (HIE) market is dominated by commercial and (to a lesser extent) not-for-profit entities and typically excludes patients. This can serve to undermine trust and create incentives for sharing data (2). Patients have limited agency in deciding which of their data is shared, with whom, and under what conditions. Within this context, new forms of digital ownership can inspire a digital marketplace for patient-controlled health data. We argue that nonfungible tokens (NFTs) or NFT-like frameworks can help incentivize a more democratized, transparent, and efficient system for HIE in which patients participate in decisions about how and with whom their PHI is shared.

An op-ed by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.: When Laura Coates was a federal prosecutor, she learned that the victim in a car theft case she was prosecuting had an outstanding immigration warrant. He had illegally crossed the border at 16, but in the 20 years since then had worked, started a family and lived a law-abiding life. Coates was instructed by her superiors to have the witness come in as planned for the trial, but, instead of testifying, he would be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis is asking the FBI for security assessment after former President Trump calls for protests. Interview with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Ireland`s newest folk hero Patrick Murphy publicly told Vladimir Putin and the Russian navy to stay away from Irish fishing grounds when conducting their war games at the end of this coming week. John Hume was a noble and brave politician. ... LAURENCE TRIBE, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR: He essentially confessed publicly, and openly, without any coercion, without any pressure, to having committed the crime of conspiracy to engage in sedition. Seditious conspiracy, because the United States government, punishable by 20 years in prison, because he quite specifically said that he thought he had a right to overturn the election, and that Vice President Pence had better straighten up and overturn the election for him.