Media Mentions

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."

Something could be brewing at Starbucks. Starbucks workers from three Buffalo, New York, stores are set to begin voting on unionization, and if successful, it could mark a major shift for the broader food industry, labor professors told Retail Brew. ... Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, told Retail Brew that splitting the vote does increase the odds in favor of the union supporters. “That seems like a small detail, but that’s probably going to be the difference between victory and loss [for the pro-union workers],” he said.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon surrendered to federal authorities on Monday, and was later released on his own recognizance after surrendering his passport. Bannon has been charged with two counts of contempt of Congress thanks to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s commitment to restoring the rule of law. By demonstrating that severe sanctions follow the flouting of subpoenas, whether from Congress or the courts, the Justice Department has sent a clear message to other witnesses that Bannon’s path of defiance can result in very real consequences — including possibly jail.

Kyle Rittenhouse took the stand in his own murder trial on Thursday, forced to answer why he shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest last year in Wisconsin. His trial coincides with that of the three men charged with the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law, and Dean Strang, a Loyola University-Chicago law professor and the attorney known from the "Making A Murderer" series, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss these cases of white vigilantism. ... The guests argued that defense in the Rittenhouse trial benefited from a pre-trial ruling that barred prosecutors from referring to any of the people shot as victims, while allowing for the defense to refer to them as looters or arsonists. Gertner said those decisions gave more power to the Rittenhouse defense's argument that he acted because he believed there was a crime being committed. "What that does is to imply it's OK to shoot people who are committing crimes when you're a civilian," she said.

On Jan. 28, 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine since 2015, came to one of our weekly ideas meetings with a very big idea. ... This book, which is called “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” arrives amid a prolonged debate over the version of the project we published two years ago. That project made a bold claim, which remains the central idea of the book: that the moment in August 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies that would become the United States could, in a sense, be considered the country’s origin. ... Much has changed in the past 25 years, as new research has transformed and expanded the field of American history yet again. ... Since then, a huge amount of scholarship has been published about the experience of enslaved women, including pathbreaking research like Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a woman who was one of the hundreds of people the third president enslaved. For many generations, some historians denied that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings or that she bore some of his children. Gordon-Reed’s work, along with DNA testing published in 1998 that confirmed Jefferson’s paternity, established the relationship beyond a doubt.

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT FOOD WASTE? Emily Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, discusses how to reduce food waste in the United States and abroad. Topics include the confusion caused by misleading date labels, the impact of COVID-19 on food waste, and the FLPC’s collaborations with governments and non-profit organizations to enact better food laws.  Read more about Emily Broad Leib in the pages of Harvard Magazine in “The Food Waste Problem.”

Steve Bannon, former President Donald Trump’s political strategist, was indicted by a grand jury Friday on two charges of criminal contempt for defying a House subpoena. ...Biden told reporters Oct. 15 he hoped the committee “goes after” people who defy subpoenas “and holds them accountable criminally.” Asked whether they should be prosecuted, Biden replied: “I do, yes.” Biden told a CNN town hall Oct. 21 that what he said wasn’t appropriate. He said the department would make its own decision about whether to prosecute. “I did not, have not, and will not pick up the phone and call the attorney general and tell him what he should or should not do in terms of who he should prosecute,” Biden said. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, tweeted that any prosecution of Bannon, which he considered legally justified, “will be tainted by Biden’s remark.”

Kyle Rittenhouse took the stand in his own murder trial on Thursday, forced to answer why he shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest last year in Wisconsin. His trial coincides with that of the three men charged with the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law, and Dean Strang, a Loyola University-Chicago law professor and the attorney known from the "Making A Murderer" series, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss these cases of white vigilantism. The guests argued that defense in the Rittenhouse trial benefited from a pre-trial ruling that barred prosecutors from referring to any of the people shot as victims, while allowing for the defense to refer to them as looters or arsonists. Gertner said those decisions gave more power to the Rittenhouse defense's argument that he acted because he believed there was a crime being committed.

... In the last year or so, people have been doing just that—more or less. According to the U.S. Labor Department, a staggering 4.4 million quit their jobs in September. And Harvard Business Review reports that employees between the ages of 30 and 45 saw the largest jump in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021. ... Given all that they’ve been through in the last 18 months or so, are they finally fed up enough with Big Law to jump ship? Yes, says Mark Weber, Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for career services. “We know it’s happening because we’re getting calls from alumni who are saying, ‘everyone around me has left and I’m drowning.’ Firms are paying enormous bonuses to retain associates because that’s still cheaper than leaving business on the table.” Despite all the monetary goodies, Weber says the workload is “not sustainable.” The big question, he adds, is whether lawyers will drop out permanently.

Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Ahmed Sesay never had a class in civics. When he graduated from high school in 2019, he had to teach himself how to vote and pay his taxes. Now 20 years old, Mr. Sesay is part of a lawsuit being decided by a Boston-based court of appeals this month that argues that students have a constitutional right to an adequate civics education. ... “The insurrection was part of a larger pattern of people showing a lack of understanding of how our system works,” says Martha Minow, a legal scholar at Harvard Law School who filed an amicus brief in the case. She pointed to surveys showing that close to half of Americans can’t name the three branches of government and nearly a third could imagine supporting a military coup.

Two days after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the United States, subjecting all Americans to the threat of military arrest and indefinite imprisonment without trial. These steps—one toward a “new birth of freedom,” the other toward a military dictatorship—are at the heart of Noah Feldman’s “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America.” The Constitution itself became a casualty in the war Lincoln waged to defend it, Mr. Feldman argues. “Civil war is the very definition of a failed constitution,” he writes. As Lincoln came to terms with this fact, he transformed the war into a struggle to establish an entirely new constitution on the moral principle of liberty for all.

Victims from Friday’s deadly disaster at Astroworld are now headed to court in droves, but what exactly will their attorneys need to prove in order to win their claims against Travis Scott, Live Nation and others? We asked top legal experts. ... That punk-rock persona was a big part of Scott's personal brand, but according to John Goldberg, a deputy dean at Harvard Law School who has written treatises on tort law, well-documented troubles with crowd control will help victims show that Live Nation and other organizers should have seen Friday coming. "If Astroworld was on notice that Scott's concerts tend to be more chaotic than other performers’ concerts," says Goldberg, "it would be required by negligence law to take the extra degree of danger or risk into account in deciding what sort of security measures to put into place."