Media Mentions

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.”

President Biden’s commission to study structural revisions to the Supreme Court found one potential change both Democrats and Republicans have said they could support: implementing term limits for the justices, who currently have lifetime tenure. Yet the bipartisan support among legal experts and the public for term limits isn’t catching on among elected officials on Capitol Hill who would be the starting point on any alterations to the makeup of the Supreme Court. ... Laurence Tribe, the longtime constitutional law expert at Harvard University and a member of Biden’s Supreme Court commission, said he went into the panel’s work thinking that he supported term limits but changed his mind “because of the complexity and the enormous time period it would take to implement a term limits proposal.” Though Tribe said he thinks life tenure for justices is “dramatically incompatible” with a government designed not to afford lifetime power to individuals, he said any federal law that tries to impose term limits would face constitutional challenges and would likely be struck down.

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program: The victory of the Buffalo Starbucks baristas last week in their vote to join a union offers concrete proof that workers can win, and that even a Fortune 500 corporation—one of the nation’s wealthiest—is not unbeatable. While there are still questions about what the union’s win means for the labor movement nationally, it’s clear that the campaign is already catalyzing worker organizing in other cities across the nation, from Boston to Arizona. But even in Buffalo, the battle is far from over. Thursday’s union victory marked perhaps the end of the beginning. Serious challenges remain, including bargaining a first contract. Unfortunately, there are too many ways employers can try to destroy a union even after an election. We need better laws to stop these subtler forms of thwarting workers’ collective will. And until that happens, we need continued and focused public pressure on Starbucks to seriously negotiate with the people who make and pour the coffee.

New York City must provide dedicated, separate housing for homeless trans and gender non-conforming people in city shelters in four boroughs, according to the terms of a recent legal settlement with Mariah Lopez, an activist with the Strategic Transgender Alliance for Radical Reform or STARR. By December 2022, the city has agreed to make at least 30 beds for trans people available across the city with locations in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan. The beds, which must have access to single-stall toilets and showers or private bathrooms, can either be located in new dedicated shelters or in separate units within existing shelter locations. ... Lopez and her legal team at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Harvard Law’s LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, which stepped in to help her during the settlement phase, will monitor Department of Homeless Services progress on their commitments for the next five years under the terms of the agreement.

Chemay Morales-James founded the homeschooling collective My Reflection Matters in 2016, to provide resources and connections for parents raising children of color, like her two biracial sons. Initially, the Connecticut mom kept her organization small and local, but that changed during the pandemic, when public schools across the country closed their doors and held classes online. “We had an influx of families,” says Morales-James. “They saw things they didn’t like over Zoom. They felt the education was cookie-cutter, making everyone fit into this box, whether it’s going to work for you or not. The camera revealed a lot, from racial nuances — how Black and brown children are policed — to just the lack of creativity.” ... The homeschooling trend might push schools to try new things, but some argue that it also comes with serious hazards. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies child welfare, supports “a presumptive ban on homeschooling” with exceptions only for parents who can demonstrate a legitimate need. At present, few US states have testing requirements, teacher certification, or even required subjects for homeschoolers. Bartholet credits the lack of oversight to a long-running lobbying campaign that Christian conservatives launched in the wake of mid-20th century efforts to desegregate and remove religion from public schools.

The great divergence is rapidly expanding—and President Joe Biden’s window to reverse it is narrowing. Since the 1960s, Congress and federal courts have acted mostly to strengthen the floor of basic civil rights available to citizens in all 50 states, a pattern visible on issues from the dismantling of Jim Crow racial segregation to the right to abortion to the authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, offensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those common standards across an array of issues. The result through the 2020s could be a dramatic erosion of common national rights and a widening gulf—a “great divergence”—between the liberties of Americans in blue states and those in red states. ... The movement toward more uniform national rights has hardly proceeded in a straight line, particularly since appointments by Republican presidents have established a conservative Court majority since the 1970s. But the expansion of rights has been the general movement of federal policy since at least the height of the civil-rights era. That trajectory included the landmark civil-rights and voting-rights acts of the mid-1960s; the approval of Title IX barring sex discrimination in higher education; and the Court decisions invalidating state bans on contraception, inter-racial marriage, and abortion, as well as the Court’s rulings establishing the principle of “one person, one vote” in redistricting. “The civil-rights movement underscored the idea that there is a baseline of rights that should be available to everybody in every state,” Noah Feldman, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, told me.

Imagine the angst and anger among Democrats if Republicans take control of the House after next year’s midterm elections and Nancy Pelosi has to hand over the speaker’s gavel to the other party. Now imagine she’s handing it to Donald Trump. In what could be the ultimate trolling of Democrats, some prominent Trump allies are suggesting House Republicans should elect him speaker if they hold the majority, a move that would place him second to the vice president in the line of succession for the presidency and allow him to preside over a chamber that an angry mob of supporters tried to forcibly enter during the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection. ... “It’s hard to imagine a more self-destructive thing for the House of Representatives to do than to elect a twice-impeached, deeply unprincipled, psychologically unstable, emotionally immature, and manifestly corrupt private citizen like former president Trump to the position of speaker of the House,” Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar, said in an e-mail. “But the Constitution doesn’t rule out novel actions just because they’re self-destructive, unprecedented, and obviously stupid.”

A management strategy known as the results-only work environment (ROWE) has seen a surge in interest during the pandemic, says one of the architects of the system. "I think based on the pandemic … companies are more ready now to look at something bold, look at something progressive," said Jody Thompson, who first developed the concept in 2004 with co-founder Cali Ressler when they both worked for electronics giant Best Buy. ... Ashley Nunes, a Harvard Law School research fellow who focuses on work life, said workplaces "should move increasingly toward a product-oriented outcome versus a time-based outcome." "The reality is that you are actually not getting paid to sit at your desk from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. You're getting paid to actually get a job done during that time," said Nunes, who is also policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based research institute R Street.

Watch: Harvard law professors Randall Kennedy and Noah Feldman join Fareed to examine the conversation around critical race theory in America today.

It may have seemed like an obscure United Nations conclave, but a meeting this week in Geneva was followed intently by experts in artificial intelligence, military strategy, disarmament and humanitarian law. The reason for the interest? Killer robots — drones, guns and bombs that decide on their own, with artificial brains, whether to attack and kill — and what should be done, if anything, to regulate or ban them. ... In advance of the conference, Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic called for steps toward a legally binding agreement that requires human control at all times. “Robots lack the compassion, empathy, mercy, and judgment necessary to treat humans humanely, and they cannot understand the inherent worth of human life,” the groups argued in a briefing paper to support their recommendations.

Courts in the United States and abroad served as flashpoints on climate change this year as governments struggled to address the growing threat. U.S. climate litigation is expected to gain velocity in 2022, following a pair of unrelated Supreme Court actions concerning EPA’s carbon rules for power plants and local governments’ climate liability lawsuits. The legal battles have attracted heightened attention as the Biden administration fights to enact an ambitious climate change agenda amid congressional wrangling. “At the moment, this litigation is a sign of being stuck with second and third best options,“ said Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former Obama White House adviser. “It’s a sign of the times: It’s a grind even with an administration that is doing its best, that cares about the issue. It’s a grind because Congress is only prepared to spend some money but not impose any kind of regulations or standards.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime – one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights. So everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people’s confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president. A year has passed since Trump’s attempted coup and his supporters’ violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of US democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic. In the tumultuous year since, the immediacy of that sensation has waned – and the magnitude of the stakes has receded from memory.  

When his contract renewal was in doubt four years ago, Lawrence O’Donnell begged his viewers to help keep him on the air at MSNBC. Now, as the left-leaning network’s prime-time lineup is at its most unstable point in a decade, the 70-year-old anchor has inadvertently become MSNBC’s most valuable star; or, at least, its most dependable one, owing to the rare, direct line he enjoys into the Biden White House. ... "This is going to be an important time for him, but I thought about him as a very important player at MSNBC for a long time," said Laurence Tribe, the famed Harvard law professor and regular Last Word guest. "He knows more about the Senate than almost anyone else on television."

The brilliance of award-winning historian and Harvard law professor Annette Gordon-Reed is her ability to tell the stories of those whose voices and experiences have been marginalized. In her groundbreaking scholarship on Thomas Jefferson and enslaved Sally Hemings, Gordon-Reed debunked conventional historical narratives, revealing complex, instructive truths about the relationship. Now, in On Juneteenth, a collection of essays about Texas, Gordon-Reed’s family and the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned of their emancipation, the historian whose Texas family tree extends on her mother’s side to the 1820s and on her father’s side at least to the 1860s, speaks truth to Texas lore with incisive clarity. She’s a worthy finalist for 2021 Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year.

The past few years have initiated many challenging conversations. We’ve sparred with loved ones over how to live during these difficult times. Businesses have struggled to communicate plans against a mutable compliance landscape. Communities have fractured along the fault lines of hot-button issues. And these don’t even touch the smoldering discourse crater that is the social media landscape. ... Another potential source of disconnect is blind spots. These are the signals that are visible to everyone except you. According to Sheila Heen, founder of Triad Consulting and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, there are three main blind spots: facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. ... “And that’s the nature of blind spots; you don’t even know where to begin or what it is about yourself that you’re not seeing,” Heen says. “I know what I look like when I’m looking at myself standing still in the mirror, but I don’t know what I look like in action, in life.”