Media Mentions

For the most part, public companies are controlled by the votes of common shareholders and the corporate directors they elect. But asset managers have significant sway. Harvard Law School’s John C. Coates extrapolates this concentration of ownership to “The Problem of Twelve.” In a working paper, he argued that “in the near future roughly twelve individuals will have practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.” He meant that asset managers like BlackRock Inc., BLK -2.64% Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments—primarily investing on behalf of retirement investors and savers—would essentially serve as a 12-headed corporate board, lording over all public companies.

Lani Guinier, a lawyer whose innovative and provocative writings on racial justice and voting rights were used to undermine her nomination to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division early in the presidency of Bill Clinton, died Jan. 7 at an assisted-living facility in Cambridge, Mass. She was 71.

Democrats, activists and historians have urged the president for months to take the fight to Republicans who continue to spread lies about the 2020 election and to shield democracy from ongoing threats. On Thursday, Joe Biden answered in his most direct and cogent speech on the matter to date. Biden not only addressed the violent acts of that day carried out by pro-Donald Trump rioters who sought to overturn the election, but detailed the sustained effort by Trump and his allies to subvert the nation’s electoral system in the future. ... Historian Laurence Tribe, who has known Biden since the 1980s and has at times advised the president, spoke to Klain after Biden’s address, relaying his belief that the speech was Biden at his best. “Equal to anything that JFK did or anything that Obama did,” Tribe recalled telling Klain. “There were no rose-colored glasses, the president was not covering the difficulty of challenges that we face,” Tribe added. Tribe, like others, has long wanted Biden to make such explicit remarks. “I've certainly been waiting, and I'm so glad that he finally did this.”

An article by Eli Y. Adashi and Glenn Cohen: On September 2, 2021, the White House released its long-awaited pandemic preparedness proposal titled American Pandemic Preparedness: Transforming Our Capabilities.1 Called for by presidential executive order 13987 and National Security Memorandum 1, the proposal, 8 months in the making, comprises a whole-of-government review and update of US national biopreparedness policies.2,3 The pandemic preparedness proposal is ambitious and all-encompassing and acknowledges that the transformation of “our medical defenses” will require “extensive scientific and technological efforts.”1 In this Viewpoint, we review the leading objectives of the pandemic preparedness proposal, discuss the outcome of comparable past federal efforts, and emphasize the imperative of intragovernmental coordination.

Another supreme battle at the U.S. Supreme Court Friday: In a special session, the justices are hearing expedited arguments in cases challenging two major Biden administration regulations aimed at increasing the number of vaccinated workers. The cases are in a preliminary posture, but how the court rules will very likely signal how these issues are ultimately resolved. ... "I think this is a case that's a test of how truly radical or conservative this court is or is not," says Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus. "The question is whether the Supreme Court is going to try to totally upend the ability of our national government to safeguard the nation's health and safety amidst a global pandemic sweeping the country."

From 2021: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) became nationally known earlier this year as the lead House impeachment manager seeking President Donald Trump’s conviction in the Senate for his role in the Capitol insurrection of January 6. “Senators, this cannot be our future,” he said during the trial. “This cannot be the future of America. We cannot have presidents inciting and mobilizing mob violence against our government and our institutions because they refuse to accept the will of the people under the Constitution of the United States.” While he pled the case, he was in mourning for his son, Tommy, a Harvard Law student who died on December 31. Raskin, who prior to being elected to Congress was a constitutional law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, spoke to Harvard Law Today on Friday, March 12, from his home in Maryland about Tommy, the day the Capitol was breached, the progressive politics that, he said, “run in my blood,” and how a fellow HLS student’s dream changed the course of his life.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has promised more charges to come against people who were part of the 2021 attack on the Capitol, while many continue to call for former President Donald Trump to be charged in the insurrection. Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss.

An article by Roberto Tallarita, lecturer on law and an associate director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School: Index funds own a large fraction of the US stock market. According to some estimates, the so-called “Big Three”—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the largest index fund managers in the world—are together the largest shareholders in 40 percent of the publicly listed companies in the United States and in 88 percent of the companies in the S&P 500. By 2039, they are projected to vote 41 percent of the shares in S&P 500 companies. Many experts are worried about such a massive concentration of ownership and voting power. Others, by contrast, believe that index fund managers will use their growing influence to persuade companies to reduce their carbon emissions and therefore mitigate the risk of climate change for society.

In the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a handful of Democrats, constitutional scholars and pro-democracy advocates have been quietly exploring how a post-Civil War amendment to the Constitution might be used to disqualify former President Trump from holding office again. ... “If anything, the idea has waxed and waned,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional expert at Harvard Law School. “I hear it being raised with considerable frequency these days both by media commentators and by members of Congress and their staffs, some of whom have sought my advice on how to implement Section 3.”

For over three decades, Randall Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, has made one bold intervention after another in the most pressing social issues of the day. Not only has he written at length on such subjects as interracial marriage, affirmative action, and crime and policing, but his work has touched off controversies regarding his nuanced defense of the “politics of Black respectability,” his thinking on racial nomenclature and the variety of ways for describing the collective identity of Black Americans, and his critiques of “anti-racism gone awry” on college campuses.

Video: Constitutional Scholar Laurence Tribe joins MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell to react to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s investigation into the January 6th insurrection. Tribe says the DOJ is focusing too much on January 6th and not enough on the larger plot to overturn the election by coercing state officials to manipulate the results. “The scary thing,” Tribe says, “is there is simply no indication that the department of justice is investigating that broader plot. I hope to heaven that it is, but there’s no indication of it.”

Only one president, before the current one, won a national election only to see a large proportion of the country outright refuse to participate in our democracy rather than accept the result. That president was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. He concluded that those who conspired in an illegal plan to undo the American experiment in democracy had to be permanently banished from politics. It is a lesson Lincoln's successors forgot, and arguably one that should be studied carefully today. ... With Lincoln's approval, Congress addressed this question directly. "The laws enacted by Congress to prevent former Confederate leaders from acquiring power after the Civil War provide an object lesson for our time," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote Salon by email. They have been enshrined in law as precedent for stopping those who would commit violence against a democratic government. Of the resulting statutes, Tribe identified this one as the "most pertinent."

A year on from the Capitol riots, is the US system of government in peril? Stephen Sackur speaks to Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University.

Former White House trade advisor Peter Navarro says he would prove that ex-President Donald Trump "is innocent" in the January 6 Capitol riot if he were to be criminally referred by the House Select Committee over his "Green Bay Sweep" strategy. ... Laurence H. Tribe, an American legal scholar and a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, told Newsweek that Navarro's strategy "wouldn't have been within the spirit, and probably not even the letter, of the U.S. Constitution." "Navarro's plans took the bare form of legal and constitutional vessels and poured the equivalent of poisonous fluid into them," Tribe said.

Defense attorneys and civil rights advocates say a Supreme Judicial Court decision upholding the patfrisk of a passenger who was ordered to exit a vehicle during a routine stop is a betrayal of the SJC’s stated commitment to confront racial bias in policing and the courts. ... Katharine Naples-Mitchell, a staff attorney with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, another amici in the case, said the ruling poses “serious ramifications” for people in communities of color, to which “lip service” was paid by the justices in the majority. She also said the SJC’s opinion betrayed a cognitive bias in its reasoning backward from the fact that the defendant admitted to being a gang member and that police happened to find a gun. “These judgments should not weigh into the question as to whether, at the time the officers were engaged in the stop, they had reasonable suspicion the defendant was armed and dangerous,” Naples-Mitchell said. She further asserted that, in the vast majority of stops, including those involving a patfrisk, police do not find contraband. “The court only sees a small pool of cases and naturally a bias is built in because they’re reviewing criminal appeals where something is found and charges are brought,” Naples-Mitchell said. “They don’t see the vast array of instances where police make a stop and a frisk and no criminal charges ever result. Particularly for communities of color, this is a regular experience.”

An article by Mark Roe and Michael Troege: Debates on the corporate tax are mostly about “how much"—not about “how.” The debate over recent corporate tax plans is no exception. Congress moves tax rates up or down, but the structural imbalances that have built up in the U.S. tax code because of the “how” are ignored. When Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) opposed any rise in the corporate tax rate, talk turned to other tax possibilities. With the budget scoring indicating that better enforcement and auditing will not produce the predicted bonanza, corporate tax reform may well come back into focus.

In his nine-page 2021 year-end Report on the Federal Judiciary, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has tried to meet head-on current criticism in Congress and the media that the Court finds itself, as Court analyst Linda Greenhouse succinctly puts it, “in a danger zone as a willing – and willful – participant in a war for the soul of the country.” ... Many see Roberts as an institutionalist and a moderate, but other Court watchers have a different take. Harvard law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe writes: “I wouldn’t call Chief Justice Roberts a ‘sly extremist,’ but he’s anything but a moderate. He’s very far right on voting rights, equal protection, money in politics, religious establishment, reproductive liberty, labor relations, corporate power, regulatory authority, you name it.”

A “purpose-driven company” is an enterprise “in which the shareholders commit to have a social and environmental impact besides the economic activity of the company,” Juan Diego Mujica Filippi LL.M. ’19 explains. “That’s a very simple definition. Some companies have a corporate responsibility goal which is not connected to their economic activity. Others decide to embed social or economic impact in what the company does to earn money. There are several ways in which purpose-driven companies can flourish.” Over the past eight years, Mujica Filippi’s enthusiasm for the concept — and what it could mean for countries in his native Latin America — has also flourished. When he was pursuing his first degree in law at the University of Lima, he spent a semester abroad at the University of Ottawa, where he explored benefit corporations — the legal model for purpose-driven companies most commonly used in the United States. When he returned to Lima, he drafted legislation to adopt the model in Peru. He has studied it, lobbied for it, and championed it ever since.

China has begun deploying robotic vehicles armed with machine guns along its border with India after Chinese troops struggled to handle the altitude and terrain, reports said last week. ... Human rights groups – including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic – have called for world leaders to cease developing war robots for nearly 10 years with little success.

When Troy Howlett collapsed and died in his bedroom in Charles City, Virginia, on the morning of July 30, 2018, his mother, Donna Watson, was on vacation. It was a Monday, and 31-year-old Howlett was starting a new job that day. Watson, knowing her son was nervous about it, kept checking in, growing more worried as she got no response. Later that evening, having run out of reasons why her son wouldn’t or couldn’t call or text back, she asked a friend to look for him. When the friend found her son’s body, he told her it looked like his hands were locked in prayer. ... While Watson has turned to the courts for restitution, she’s also looking to the Virginia state legislature. Some states have adopted legislation to address the problem of unreliability of informants and the wrongful convictions that often result from their misinformation, according to Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice. “But those reforms tended not to address the problem of the use of informants who have substance use disorders,” Natapoff told me, “either from the perspective of innocent people who were convicted on that basis or from the perspective of the vulnerable informants themselves, who were often pressured into becoming informants at risk to themselves or risk to their recovery, or had their addiction worsen in their performance of their jobs.”

Video: Laurence Tribe calls on his former student, Attorney General Garland, to take action over Trump’s role in the insurrection: “If Merrick Garland has not yet ginned up a full-blown investigation, he should do so yesterday.”