Media Mentions

Republican lawmakers redrawing states’ political lines are adopting a “colorblind” redistricting strategy aimed at inoculating maps against Democratic lawsuits that argue they dilute minority voting power. ... Democrats may now sue at their own peril, said Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a Harvard Law School Professor. The conservative U.S. Supreme Court has pared back the power of the Voting Rights Act, and in future litigation it could support the Republican argument, making federal law mostly useless in challenging racial gerrymandering. “Once the Republicans have confirmation from the Supreme Court that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is only violated where there’s intentional use of race to violate the voting power of voters of color, then you’re home free,” he said.

The Supreme Court is supposed to rule by the law alone. But Harvard’s Randall Kennedy says that doesn't always happen. “A very common misconception is that the Supreme Court is above politics," he says. "With all the marble palace and the robes and the funny words and all of that, beneath all of that is a political struggle.” So let's stop pretending that the court is a magisterial, impartial arbiter of the law. The law, Kennedy says, is a distillation of our politics. Top ACLU lawer David Cole disagrees.

...But last week, new regulations took effect in New Jersey allowing home bakers to sell their wares. It is the last state in the country to give up its ban on “cottage food,” products such as baked goods and jams made in home kitchens and sold at farmers markets and by hand delivery, and advertised though online portals, social media or simply word of mouth. ...The rollback of such restrictions across the country is due in part to the disparate political forces that it brings together. “I think that’s the magic sauce that has gotten a lot of these bills passed,” says Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. “It’s a unique opportunity to cut across traditional lines.”

...Yet they and others affected by the attack that killed three people and wounded 264 more disagree about whether convicted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be executed - a question the U.S. Supreme Court will consider on Wednesday when the justices hear the U.S. government's bid to reinstate his death sentence. ...Politically, Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker says, "the position that Joe Biden took on the death penalty is not a super popular one."

Marcella Alsan was in Professor Allan M. Brandt’s undergraduate class on the history of medicine and public health in America when she first learned about the infamous Tuskegee study, the federal government’s 40-year experiment observing the effects of untreated syphilis on Black men without their knowledge....Reaching out to scholars and practitioners in different disciplines to get at difficult questions in a “holistic” way is a hallmark of Alsan’s approach, said Crystal S. Yang, a Harvard Law School professor and Harvard-trained economist researching COVID-related health conditions in the criminal justice system with Alsan. ... “She’s the hardest-working person I know and is always pushing people to be better,” said Yang. “She’s always trying to teach the students about the right types of questions to ask, or how to do a certain type of analysis for randomized controlled trials. She’s just such a good role model for younger folks who are interested in doing this type of work.”

“But you could look at food safety as being more about long term health impacts--so, diet-related disease or the cumulative impacts over a period of years, or a lifetime, of eating certain things.” This week on our show, a conversation with Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. She argues that our narrowly focused food safety regulations are failing to address the most important factors in our food system. We talk about what it might look like to include worker safety, environmental impacts and long term health and nutrition when we look at the safety of our food system.

An op-ed by Mason Marks: Public and scientific interest in psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA is expanding. Once off-limits because of federal prohibition, a trickle of research from the 1990s has grown into a stream. But despite increasing acceptance by the public, and commercial investment in psychedelic therapies, aging federal laws stem the flow of vital research. Psilocybin, a compound produced by many species of fungi, is one of the most well-studied psychedelics. To acknowledge its impressive safety record and potential for treating depression more effectively than existing therapies, the Food and Drug Administration designated psilocybin a breakthrough therapy in 2018 and 2019 for treating drug-resistant depression and major depressive disorder.

The science is clear: COVID-19 vaccines drastically reduce the chance of hospitalization or death from the disease and will help us get out of the pandemic that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. But even so, months after the shots became available for all adults in the country, tens of millions remained unvaccinated. ... Though school and healthcare workers have long been required to get vaccinated for a number of diseases—like measles, mumps, and rubella (the MMR vaccination) or even the flu—the upcoming COVID requirements are much more extensive in nature. “We’ve had vaccine mandates before, but they haven’t been quite as broadly applied,” says Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Because of this, it’s not immediately clear how they’ll work.

For decades, scholar Randall Kennedy has been writing about race, culture and the law. “We are certainly much further from the racial promised land than I had thought that we were," he says. "The forces of racism are deeper, stronger, more influential than one would like.” And yet, Kennedy doesn't think today's young activists have a winning strategy. “You need a big tent to advance your political agenda. You need to bring on board people who are not already on your side," he adds. "Do not needlessly alienate people. If that's respectability politics, count me in.” Today, On Point: Randall Kennedy on race, culture and the law across generations.

If there was a glimmer of optimism last week that Texas’s authoritarian new abortion law would soon be overturned in the courts, the hope was swiftly dashed. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law known as S.B. 8 — the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country, a de facto abortion ban — as part of a lawsuit the Justice Department has brought against the state of Texas. ... “The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe. “If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?”

An article by Evelyn Douek: Many people think of TikTok as a dance app. And although it is an app full of dancing, it’s also a juggernaut experiencing astronomical growth. In July, TikTok—a short-form video-sharing app powered by an uncannily goodrecommendation algorithm and owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—became the only social-media mobile app other than those from Facebook to ever pass 3 billion downloads. At the end of last month, TikTok announcedit had more than 1 billion monthly users. It was, by some counts, the most downloaded app in 2020 and remained so into 2021. Not bad for an app launched only in 2016! Of the social-media platforms around today, TikTok is the likeliest to represent the future. Its user base is mostly young people. But if you look for TikTok in news coverage, you’re more likely to find it in the lifestyle, culture, or even food section than you are on the front page. It’s not that social-media platforms aren’t newsworthy—Facebook consistentlydominates headlines. But TikTok is all too often regarded as an unserious thing to write or read about. That’s a mistake, and it’s one that Congress is making as well.

Last year, George Washington's presidential administration became surprisingly relevant to today's politics — not only because of his prescience with regards to so many of America's current political ills, or his founding father status. Rather Washington, like Trump and now Biden, had to fight a raging pandemic. ..."I'm looking hard, but I have yet to see a vaccination or mask mandate relating to COVID-19 from the Biden administration that I think comes even close to the line of unconstitutionality or lack of executive authority," Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar at Harvard University who specializes in constitutional law, told Salon by email.

Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus, recently spoke to the Harvard Gazette about findings in a recent Senate Judiciary Committee report that former president Donald Trump and his allies pressured the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s redistricting time in North Carolina. That’s when lawmakers will slice and dice our state into election districts that account for population shifts. How those lines are drawn can tip the balance of power here and in Congress. In a limited-run podcast from Under the Dome, we explore how lawmakers draw these maps, their impact on power in North Carolina’s political landscape and how new tools are changing the fight against gerrymandering. Part 3, Math on the front lines, is now available for streaming. Ruth Greenwood featured in Part 3.

Investment giant BlackRock Inc. is giving institutional investors such as pensions and endowments the option to cast shareholder votes tied to their investments. When investors buy a fund from an asset manager, the money manager typically votes on shareholder proposals on behalf of the investors. Starting in 2022, BlackRock says its large investors can vote themselves on everything from who sits on boards to executive pay to what companies should disclose on greenhouse gas emissions. The change allows those BlackRock clients to lay claim to voting power on some $2 trillion in investments tied to index-tracking assets BlackRock manages in institutional accounts. This is about 40% of roughly $4.8 trillion of indexed equities managed by BlackRock. ... In 2018, in response to the index fund boom, Harvard Law School professor John Coates warned that voting power would be controlled by a small group of people with “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.”

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) want to impose a new tax on stock buybacks. This proposal is based on the flawed assumption that buybacks only benefit CEOs and corporate executives and comes at the expense of R&D and workers. If passed into law, it would hamstring an important tool public companies use to provide equity to shareholders, like Americans with retirement accounts, and potentially smaller companies. The Stock Buyback Accountability Act would apply a 2 percent tax of the “value of any securities” involved repurchases starting in 2022. ... Additionally, shareholder payouts via buybacks are not draining companies’ investment in R&D. In fact, according to an article by Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang in the Harvard Business Review, R&D as a percentage of revenue is now at levels “not seen since the late 1990s.

Both the NYSE and Nasdaq require the boards of listed companies to have a majority of independent directors and audit committees that are composed solely of independent board members. But there is an argument about what makes a board member independent. Technically, independence means that the director has no “material relationship” to the business that could present a conflict of interest in performing their duty to represent all stakeholders. Those relationships include being an employee of the company or a partner of the company (distributor, supplier, etc.). ... Similarly, Lucian Bebchuk, the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics and Finance and director of the program on corporate governance at Harvard Law School, says that directors nominated by institutional investors may bow to the goals of those shareholders. “In companies with a controlling shareholder, our corporate law system places excessive reliance on the mechanism of nominally independent directors,” Bebchuk says. “It is important to recognize that effective oversight requires alternative or supplemental mechanisms.” In order to distance a director from relying on management or institutional investors to get or keep a seat on the boards, Bebchuk proposes “enhanced independence.”

From teachers to airlines workers, some employees who have faced termination for not complying with their company's COVID-19 vaccine mandates have gone to court to fight the decisions. Some of the plaintiffs, such as New York City Department of Education employees, a handful of Los Angeles county public employees and United Airlines workers, have argued that the mandates should be removed, questioning the rules' constitutionality and some contending their religious rights weren't observed. ... Glenn Cohen, a health law and bioethics professor at Harvard Law School, told ABC News that strong legal precedent dating back to the early 20th century gives businesses and governments the legal backing to enforce the mandates. "They're pretty weak," Cohen said of the lawsuits. "The judges that have denied them have come from across the political spectrum, and from across the country, because the plaintiffs' arguments don't have any weight."

Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a 394-page interim report Thursday that details efforts by the Trump White House to pressure senior officials in the Department of Justice to help promote false claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud in order to undo results in states where Donald Trump had lost, including Georgia and Pennsylvania. ... Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, is one of the nation’s pre-eminent constitutional scholars. He advised House managers during Trump’s first and second impeachment and has been highly critical of his administration. Tribe spoke to the Gazette about the report’s early findings and what effect it could have on the Department of Justice. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A congressman said on Wednesday that he intends to help bring the psychedelics reform movement to Capitol Hill “this year.” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a longstanding champion of marijuana reform in Congress, made the comments at a symposium on psychedelics policy that was hosted by Harvard Law School’s newly established research institute, the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR).

Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, 10/6/21 ... Tonight, new progress from the select committee as Trump aides defy subpoenas. Stacey Abrams on today's big hearing for voting rights and Laurence Tribe on a threat to democracy no one is talking about. ... HAYES: Laurence, I feel like we've all learned a lot about the plumbing of the Electoral College and the complicated system by which under both the United States constitution, the 12th Amendment, and the electoral count act as well as state law, you get this sort of transmission from the votes go in and the president comes out over here. And it does seem like that is subject to a lot of hanky-panky they tried last time but is still vulnerable. LAURENCE TRIBE, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Absolutely. And Stacey Abrams is right on the front lines of trying to reduce the vulnerability and it's important to do that. But even if voting rights are fully protected and people get to vote and their votes are not audited out of existence, we still have a lot of plumbing to go through. And after people vote, there are a lot of processes by which those who really have no respect for law or for the constitution can turn the system inside out and upside down. And that's why people like me are quite vigilant about making sure that we do everything we can to prevent a bloodless coup from taking place even before another insurrection.