Media Mentions

Op-ed by Terri Gerstein, Director, State and Local Enforcement Project: One of the most interesting union campaigns in recent years is happening right now in Buffalo, New York. Workers in three Starbucks outlets started a union organizing effort over their concerns about seniority pay, scheduling, staffing levels, and safety and health during COVID (plus, at one store an infestation of bees was left festering for months). Earlier this month, the National Labor Relations Board mailed ballots to the workers in these stores, who will have four weeks to vote on whether to unionize with Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. If they do, these stores would be the first unionized locations among the ubiquitous chain’s thousands of U.S. locations.

Incoming mayor Eric Adams sought to distance himself Monday from a Brooklyn for-profit college president who was recently reinstated despite allegations of serial sexual misconduct as Gov. Hochul vowed an investigation into the “deeply disturbing situation.” An Adams spokesman promised to look into returning $4,000 in campaign contributions from ASA College president Alex Shchegol and his wife following a Daily News expose. At least 10 women have accused Shchegol of sexual misconduct... The News reported exclusively Saturday that Shchegol — forced out by the college’s board in 2018 when the misconduct allegations surfaced — is back in charge after using his power as owner to fire board members who opposed his reinstatement. ... Higher education experts warned that accreditors often move slowly and don’t have law enforcement power to compel colleges to produce or preserve documents. “Accreditors are notorious for never cutting anyone off,” said Eileen Connor, the director of the Predatory Lending Project at Harvard Law School.

Sidley Austin, taking a page from other professional service industries, recently announced that it is doling out new titles to associates based on seniority as a way to better reflect “where” associates are in their career. With indicators showing the the track to partnership only lengthening, is there value in providing more waypoints toward the coveted counsel or partnership promotion? “There is a long gap between associate and partner, so in some ways it makes sense to create and acknowledge with titles different levels of role. That can help with retention, assuming that the titles are meaningful,” Harvard Law professor Scott Westfahl said.

The first time the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig told computer scientists they were the unwitting regulators of the digital age — about 20 years ago — he made a coder cry. “I am not a politician. I’m a programmer,” Mr. Lessig recalls her protesting, horrified by the idea. Now, the notion that “code is law”— from Mr. Lessig’s 1999 book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” — does not shock young engineers or lawyers, the professor says. To digital natives it is “obvious” that technology dictates behavior with rules that are not value neutral.

Friday afternoon, the jury in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse came back to deliver the final verdict, not guilty. WORT Assistant News Director Nate Wegehaupt is joined by Harvard Law Professor Ron Sullivan to discuss the verdict, and the parallels to other cases here in Wisconsin.

Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture By Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law: This collection of essays offers a full portrait of Kennedy’s thinking as a law professor and public intellectual, demonstrating his commitment to reflection over partisanship, thinking over feeling.

Podcast featuring Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law: Will the Supreme Court Overturn Roe v. Wade? Critical cases on abortion rights are being heard by a 6–3 majority of conservative Justices. The decisions will have repercussions for everyone of childbearing age.

On Juneteenth, By Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor: In a book that is part memoir, part history, Gordon-Reed (who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses of Monticello”) recounts her continuing affection for her home state of Texas, despite its reputation for violence and racism, writing that “the things that happened there couldn’t have happened in other places.”

An op-ed by Ronald S. Sullivan, Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law: In a two-week trial that reignited debate over self-defense laws across the nation, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting three people, two fatally, during a racial justice protest in Kenosha. ... As a professor of criminal law, I teach my students that the law of self-defense in America proceeds from an important concept: Human life is sacred, and the law will justify the taking of human life only in narrowly defined circumstances. The law of self-defense holds that a person who is not the aggressor is justified in using deadly force against an adversary when he reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury. This is the standard that every state uses to define self-defense.

Book review by Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law: The civil rights activist and leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke truth to power with an authenticity that makes her words, her actions and even her singing seem to have immediate appeal to us. In 1962, Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper with little formal schooling when she decided to attend a voting rights organizing meeting at a local church. Two years later, she was facing down President Lyndon Johnson and the national civil rights leadership at the Democratic National Convention. ... The historian Keisha N. Blain’s “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America” employs “a blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history” to harness Hamer’s example for the present.

THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Noah Feldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Abraham Lincoln, Feldman contends, embraced a new, “moral Constitution” by purging the country’s original sin of slavery and re-establishing the nation on a more noble foundation. A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman is “a lucid, provocative stylist” as well as “a prolific scholar and commentator on current affairs … well equipped to assess Lincoln’s constitutional record,” Sean Wilentz writes in his review. “‘The Broken Constitution’ displays its author’s usual brilliance and boldness in his contrarianism, and a passionate engagement with the past.”

Questions regarding vaccination status may be more polarizing than talk about politics and religion at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner table. The TEN is here to help you navigate this tough table talk. [With Daniel Shapiro]

When Sangu Delle JD/MBA ’16 was a young boy growing up in Accra, Ghana, his mother would help him up onto the stool in the bathroom before his bedtime prayers. “Look in the mirror,” she’d tell him, “and ask yourself, ‘What have I done today? Was today better than yesterday? Did I make the world better? If you’re not satisfied with the answer, don’t sleep.” Delle laughs, “It was a crazy thing for a child to do, but it sets you on a path where you’re constantly pushing yourself to improve the world around you.” While Delle’s path may have changed along the way, his commitment to improving the world around him has been unyielding.

Willie Phillips, confirmed Tuesday night to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is poised to be the tie-breaking vote on two proceedings that will shape the future of the U.S. power grid, electric markets and the clean energy rollout. He could vote on a market pricing rule benefiting nuclear and renewable generators that took effect in PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest regional grid operator managing the flow of power to 65 million people in the eastern states. And he’s expected to weigh in on a proposed new wholesale market created by a group of large electric utilities in the Southeast, including Southern Co. and Duke Energy and Tennessee Valley Authority. Opponents say the new market could crowd out independent renewable generators. ...“It’s a huge set of issues on the plate for FERC,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School.

Contrary to what local leaders are telling you, building a new 150-bed “misdemeanor jail” is not going to make Jackson safer. In fact, it will make things worse. ... Further support for saying no to proponents of a new misdemeanor jail is found in Harvard Law School Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s recent book “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.”

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed. A Harvard law professor and author of The Hemingses of Monticello, which won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, Gordon-Reed is the textbook definition of public intellectual; and yet she gets personal in this slender, evocative memoir, blending textures from her small-town Texas girlhood with the unofficial celebration of slavery’s demise and the broader canvas of race in America, as when she integrated her public school: “My great-great-aunt…the one who lived in Houston and was also quite extravagant—bought boxes and boxes of dresses, tights, blouses, skirts, and hats from the most upscale department store in the city at the time, Sakowitz… Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.”

An article by Jill Lepore: Amicus briefs have been filed on Happy’s behalf by a legion of the country’s most respected lawyers, philosophers, and animal behavioralists, including Laurence Tribe, Martha Nussbaum, and the much-celebrated scientist Joyce Poole, who has studied elephants for nearly as long as Happy has been alive, and who co-directs ElephantVoices, a nonprofit research center that studies elephant communication, cognition, and social behavior. Briefs in support of the WCS, on the other hand, as Tribe pointed out to me in an email, have been filed instead by “groups with a strong economic self-interest,” such as the National Association for Biomedical Research, which claims that establishing personhood for Happy risks the future of all laboratory testing on all animals. ... In 2016, after the NhRP filed a second habeas corpus petition for Kiko, Harvard’s Laurence Tribe submitted an amicus brief, ​​disputing the court’s claim that Kiko could not be a person on the ground that persons bear both rights and duties. The court’s definition of personhood, he argued, “would appear on its face to exclude third-trimester fetuses, children, and comatose adults (among other entities whose rights as persons the law protects).”

In one of the poorest counties in America, at the core of the Deep South’s rural “Black Belt” where sharecroppers worked cotton fields long after Emancipation, sanitation conditions sometimes seem to belong in the antebellum South. With no municipal wastewater treatment for the predominantly Black communities, most residents devise their own septic systems, which may or may not work, and which can leave raw sewage accumulating in backyards. “Nineteenth-century” diseases like hookworm have been found in many residents. Now, the Biden administration is making Alabama’s Lowndes County a test case in environmental justice, applying a never-before-used provision from the 1964 Civil Rights Act that advocates say could lay the groundwork for how the federal government addresses some of the worst problems plaguing communities of color around the country. ... Just days after taking office, the White House issued an executive order titled Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, and one week later followed with another, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, noted Hannah Perls, a fellow at the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law. “There’s nothing different about the laws between Obama and Trump and now Biden, it’s just about having the political will to enforce them,” Perls told MarketWatch. Perls thinks the Justice Department, through its investigation, is likely to issue guidelines for how the Alabama and Lowndes agencies may come into compliance with what it determines to be necessary. It may also require measures to mitigate the harm done by the lack of adequate sewer system. That will likely take time and energy, she said.

An article by Jill Lepore: The subject of the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century was born in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Very soon after that, a tousle-haired baby, she became trapped in human history. She was captured, locked in a cage, trucked to the coast, and loaded onto a roaring 747 that soared across the Pacific until it made landfall in the United States. She spent her earliest years in Florida, not far from Disney World, before she was shipped to Texas. In 1977, when she was 5 or 6, more men hauled her onto another truck and shipped her to New York, to a spot about four miles north of Yankee Stadium: the Bronx Zoo. In the wild, barely weaned, she’d have been living with her family—her sisters, her cousins, her aunts, and her mother—touching and nuzzling and rubbing and smelling and calling to each other almost constantly. Instead, after she landed at the zoo and for years after, she gave rides to the schoolchildren of New York and performed tricks, sometimes wearing a blue-and-black polka-dotted dress. Today, in her 50s and retired, she lives alone in a one-acre enclosure in a bleak, bamboo-shrouded Bronx Zoo exhibit called, without irony, “Wild Asia.”

In January 2021, one of America’s most iconic automobile companies announced it was undergoing a huge transformation. General Motors said it would stop selling vehicles with internal combustion engines, and would go all electric by 2035. GM’s Zero Emissions plan is an enormous commitment that has the potential to impact the environment and the entire auto industry. But can GM pull it off? In this episode of Reinvent, hosts Geoff Colvin and Beth Kowitt ... talk to Harvard Law Professor Jody Freeman and Bank of America’s Lead Auto Analyst John Murphy to weigh the plan’s chances for success and what it may mean for our planet.

The judge in Kyle Rittenhouse's murder trial has been under fire for everything from yelling to making supposedly insensitive jokes. But getting him removed or recused is nearly impossible, legal experts say. ... Recusing or disqualifying a judge - which leads to replacement - typically happens when a judge is biased in favor of one side or another. Motions to recuse judges can come if one party feels the judge has a conflict of interest. ... To a casual viewer, it’s easy to wonder why Schroeder hasn’t been replaced. But Nancy Gertner, a retired judge who teaches at Harvard Law School, said it’s actually pretty simple: There’s virtually no way to do it. “The prosecutor would have to move to disqualify the judge, the judge would have to deny the motion, then the prosecutor would have to seek an emergency appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and that would delay the trial,” Gertner explained. “The whole thing is a very complicated strategic issue because if you challenge the judge and that challenge fails, you’re often in a worse situation than before." As a result, she said, lawyers basically never move to disqualify judges, many of whom they're likely to see at later trials. When alleged bias from a judge comes up "while [a trial] is going on, it's virtually impossible to remove him."