Media Mentions

Michigan’s redistricting commission will soon decide whether it wants to heed the calls it heard during its statewide tour to make wholesale changes to how it drew Black voters in its draft congressional and legislative districts. Some of the loudest criticism the commission received targeted the draft districts it drew in Detroit that would pair predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city with whiter suburban communities. ... Voting rights experts say there is no target share of minority voters that should be assigned to a district to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and creating a racial target would expose the commission to legal challenges. ... And the commission is not beholden to how the current lines divvy up minority voters, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in election law. The Voting Rights Act "doesn't require 50% districts, it doesn't require freezing the status quo. It requires performing districts for minority voters," he said.

Few people have made their names in Washington more differently than Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Republican political operative Steve Bannon. ... In the days and weeks ahead, Garland must decide whether to criminally prosecute Bannon, a step that could result in one of Trump’s top allies being sent to jail. Last Thursday, the House held Bannon in contempt for refusing to testify before its select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection. ... Until now, the Justice Department has generally declined to prosecute former Administration officials who defied Congressional subpoenas... Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served as a senior Justice Department official during the George W. Bush Administration, predicted that Garland will be criticized for whatever action he takes, saying, “Both prosecuting contempt and not doing so have downsides and will invite criticism.”

“The Ruin stirs, and the Five Realms rumble,” a now-archived web announcement read on Thursday morning. “You are cordially invited to join New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors Marie Lu, Tahereh Mafi, Ransom Riggs, Adam Silvera, David Yoon, and Nicola Yoon in Realms of Ruin, a collaborative fantasy epic filled with dark magic, intrigue, and unique characters -- launched online in a thrilling new way.” ... As the catalyst for this collaborative fantasy epic, these authors would post twelve initial origin stories about their fictional universe, to which they owned the copyright. ... Within hours, fans confronted the authors in the Discord server with their concerns about the project. Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, summed the situation up aptly. “It’s a turducken of things people don’t understand,” she said. In other words, on top of the usual NFT concerns, the team would also be facing copyright questions and confronting the historical hesitancy from fan fiction writers over monetization of their works in a commercial environment.

Tensions are reaching a boiling point as large swaths of prison guards continue to refuse COVID-19 vaccines despite mandates in some states for public sector employees. ... Recognizing prisons and jails as a threat to public health during the pandemic, Massachusetts passed legislation to create an ombudsman’s office within the Department of Corrections tasked with ensuring the state’s prisons were complying with health and safety practices in 2020. Yet, the department has dragged its feet every step of the way, according to Katy Naples-Mitchell, staff attorney at Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. “The Department of Corrections has for months and months been defying a legislative mandate to appoint an independent public health expert to oversee COVID mitigation efforts,” she said. “So with that outstanding, it is no surprise, frankly, that the Department of Corrections has not taken steps to ensure the safety of incarcerated people or to create a culture of compliance with public health vaccination among its staff.”

One of the leading companies racing to develop psychedelics as legal medicines was granted a patent last week for a formulation of psilocybin — the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms — a decision that highlights the increasingly intense battle around intellectual property for potential medicines in this rapidly growing sector. This is Compass Pathways’ fourth U.S. patent, but its first for a form of psilocybin the company isn’t using in its clinical trials on treatment-resistant depression. The patent works to “expand their intellectual property kingdom,” said Mason Marks, senior fellow and project lead on the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at Harvard Law School: “Like a landlord would want to expand and buy more properties, they’re trying to lock up as much IP as they can to solidify their position in the market.”

EPA is preparing to release two new draft rules this week that could dramatically reduce the role that oil and gas production plays in driving climate change. ... President Biden, who is preparing to leave Thursday for a European trip that includes an appearance next week at the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, known as COP 26, has not made a specific emissions reduction commitment for the U.S. petroleum sector. But greens say his pledge to cut overall emissions between 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 hinges on strong new rules for oil and gas production. “They’re relying heavily on their intention to crack down on methane from oil and gas operations in their diplomacy for COP with their methane pledge,” said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney with Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program. “I think that’s absolutely crucial for their credibility and their ability to lead and push action forward during COP.”

TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, all social media sites popular with teens and young adults, will answer to Congress on Tuesday about how well they protect kids online. It’s the first time testifying before the legislative body for both TikTok and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, despite their popularity and Congress’s increasing focus on tech industry practices. By contrast, Facebook representatives have testified 30 times in the past four years, and Twitter executives including CEO Jack Dorsey have testified on Capitol Hill 18 times total. ... “Facebook is just not the only game in town,” said Harvard Law School lecturer Evelyn Douek, who studies the regulation of online speech. “If we’re going to talk about teen users, we should talk about the platforms that teens actually use. Which is TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.”

Facebook has confronted whistleblowers, PR firestorms and Congressional inquiries in recent years. But now it faces a combination of all three at once in what could be the most intense and wide-ranging crisis in the company's 17-year history. ... "The most interesting thing I discovered as I read these documents is how extraordinary the company is," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and strategic legal adviser to Haugen, told CNN. "The company is filled with thousands of thousands of Frances Haugens ... who are just trying to do their job. They are trying to make Facebook safe and useful and the best platform for communication that they can."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law: If a conservative majority of the Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, it won’t only be a disaster for people who need abortions. It will be a watershed moment in the history of the court. A body that has gained public legitimacy in the post-World War II era by making Americans freer would suddenly be making them less so.

Corporate adaptation measures, carbon offset policy and new U.S. regulatory responses are among the top issues attorneys say they’re tracking at the upcoming United Nations climate talks. ... The Biden administration could use the summit as a springboard to make new commitments affecting domestic regulations. ... Without congressional support for the climate goals the White House will present at the summit, the U.S. credibility to make good on them will erode. So the White House is expected to announce stricter emissions regulations instead. “They’ll make commitments on what the president has control over,” said Hana Vizcarra, staff attorney at Harvard Law’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

Long before President Trump earned widespread bans across social media, Snap enacted one of the earliest measures to curb his reach, booting him from its Discover feed of curated content in June 2020. ... On YouTube, though, the former president faced a different outcome. Six days after the riot, the site “temporarily suspended” him and has since said it would allow him to return at some point. And he never gave TikTok the chance to punish him... Each app’s unique reaction to Trump reflects their disparate approaches to moderating their sites, as well as their different relationships with U.S. politics—dynamics that will go under the spotlight on Tuesday morning when the three companies appear in Congress. ... Extending the investigation beyond Facebook could indicate that politicians may finally renew efforts to draft new regulations for social media. “There’s real political momentum,” says Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law School lecturer who studies online speech and misinformation. “And that inevitably means you have to go to the other platforms, particularly to where the teens are,” she says, making Snap, TikTok and YouTube “the natural choices.”

The fatal shooting incident involving Alec Baldwin has shocked Hollywood and sparked a series of questions about where the actor stands legally. ... The tragic accident has led to questions over whether Baldwin stands to face any criminal charges. Legal experts believe this is unlikely—though not impossible. "In order for there to be criminal charges, one would really have to show that he intentionally killed this woman, which seems unlikely on the facts as we know them," the Honorable Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Law School, told Newsweek.

At a recent Petrie-Flom Center Book Talk, Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter discussed the updated edition of his influential 2001 book, “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.”

If you've seen many political ads this fall, you may have the impression that Virginia is experiencing a crime wave. But, criminal justice advocates say the numbers tell a different story. ... They're worried that fears of rising crime might undermine efforts to bring back a parole system or abolish solitary confinement or defelonize drugs. They're particularly concerned about the narrative of rising crime because, well, they say it's just not true. ... Premal Dharia at the Institute to End Mass Incarceration says the long-term trend about what's been happening behind bars is one that remains troubling. "We lead the world in incarcerating people, and we disproportionately incarcerate Black and brown people," Dharia says. And now that advocates for criminal justice reform are finally seeing some measure of success, she says efforts at addressing that disparity behind bars are imperiled by misinformation and fear. "An important if not central structural obstacle is the creation and proliferation of often misleading narratives that stoke fear, that play into old political tactics and that are often not grounded in actual needs and desires of our communities," explains Dharia.

Republican legislative leaders unveiled their proposed redistricting maps Wednesday, as did the People’s Maps Commission, which provided updated versions of draft maps it had previously released. Both the GOP and the commission — formed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers but made up of a diverse group of community members who drew on extensive public input — say their maps are fair and nonpartisan. Democrats jumped on Republicans’ maps, put forward in a redistricting bill, as being overtly partisan and even more gerrymandered than the maps that have been in place for the last decade. Over the past 10 years, Republicans in the Assembly, who received less than half of the total votes statewide, secured around two-thirds of the districts thanks to the maps they drew after the last census. ... Ruth Greenwood, director of Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic and a self-declared “map enthusiast” and “political junkie” used the PlanScore and said that the Legislature’s maps “would almost certainly ensure a GOP majority in the Legislature for another decade.” Greenwood ran the GOP-drawn maps through PlanScore — a program that predicts precinct-level votes for districts based on past election results and U.S. Census data — and labeled the maps as unfair. PlanScore uses four metrics, and the Wisconsin GOP’s legislative maps in all four categories were labeled as having “a Republican skew.”

Since 1998, the IRS has been prohibited from assessing penalties against a taxpayer unless the initial determination that the penalties should be assessed was personally approved, in writing, by the examiner’s immediate supervisor. The rule requiring written supervisory approval, 26 U.S.C. § 6751(b), was largely ignored by the IRS and the tax practitioner community until 2016, when a pair of cases in the United States Tax Court, Graev v. Commissioner and Chai v. Commissioner, raised the issue. Since then, hundreds of cases have held that the IRS failed to follow the rules set forth in section 6751(b) because written supervisory approval was not obtained prior to an initial determination by the examining agent’s immediate supervisor, invalidating hundreds of penalties as a result. But Representative Richard Neal (D- Mass ), the powerful chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, has introduced legislation that, if enacted, would retroactively repeal section 6751(b) and its important taxpayer protections. ... The proposed legislation Neal has introduced would retroactively repeal 6751(b) and instead, require quarterly certification of compliance with procedural requirements. Keith Fogg, the director of the Federal Tax Clinic at the Harvard Law Legal Services Center, recently wrote about the proposed repeal in Procedurally Taxing, a tax professional’s blog. Fogg opposes the proposed repeal, explaining, “Some taxpayers who deserved penalties have received windfalls because the IRS failed to pay attention to IRC 6751(b) for the first 15 years of its existence and because the Tax Court created rules regarding the timing of the required supervisory signature that the IRS might not have anticipated. The litigation over the past several years has educated the IRS and those types of windfalls should rarely occur going forward.”

President Joe Biden said on Thursday he would be open to doing away with the filibuster in pursuit of protecting Americans’ voting rights, bolstering voting rights’ advocates calls to abolish the controversial rule after Republicans blocked federal voting legislation from advancing for the third time this year. Wednesday’s 49-51 Senate vote barred any debate from occurring on the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that would have enacted automatic voter registration, guaranteed at least 15 consecutive days of early in-person voting and allowed for no-excuse mail voting in federal elections among other measures. ... “This is further confirmation that paring down the bill isn’t going to make a difference,” says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in election law. “[Democrats] haven’t come close to getting the vote of a single Republican Senator—let alone 10 Republican senators—so we’re nowhere near anything like a 60-vote supermajority.”

Some six months after a Boston-based youth advocacy group released a critical report alleging the city’s police department over-polices Black people and youth in the city, the department announced a new policy for policing gangs and identifying members or affiliates. ... The New Bedford Police Department, like others, uses a “criteria list” to determine whether an individual is a gang member. Each criterion has a specific point value, and if individuals meet a certain number of points, they will be labeled by law enforcement as a gang member or affiliate. ... The new policy increases the minimum points needed to 20, which can be reached from 17 possible criteria, to be “verified as gang affiliated.” Some of the criteria have new point values that are at least half the value from those on the original list. ... Katy Naples-Mitchell, an attorney with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, said the Boston Police Department also amended its policy in 2021 and now uses the term “associate.” Boston police currently use a 10-point threshold to verify someone as a gang associate, according to a policy document.

Two days before his deployment to the Middle East in 2019, Air Force Technical Sergeant Charles Cornacchio was in uniform when movers came to his home at Hanscom Air Force Base to pack up his belongings and take them to a storage facility. ... As the 18-wheeler drove away, Cornacchio said he remembered thinking, “Man that’s everything I own, but my dog.” Soon, all of it would be gone. ... The unauthorized sale triggered a lawsuit against the company last year filed by the Justice Department for violating a law that prohibits storage companies from selling the possessions of military members on active duty, unless they obtain an order from a federal judge. Last month, Father & Son agreed to pay $60,000 to Cornacchio, along with a $5,000 fine to the government, to settle the allegations that it violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. ... Jack Regan, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic who represents Cornacchio, said the law provides important protections for military members so they don’t have to worry about economic issues back home while on active duty. He said it was “just astonishing” that a storage company located less than 7 miles from Hanscom Air Force Base was unaware of it.

Republican leaders on Wednesday unveiled their proposal for legislative and congressional district maps, which received immediate criticism for being based largely on existing GOP-drawn districts that have helped Republicans hold strong majorities in both chambers. As Republicans had promised, the GOP proposal would largely align with existing boundaries for legislative and congressional districts, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. The Legislature must redraw political lines every decade based on the latest population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. The mapmaking process can provide an advantage for the majority party based on how district lines are drawn. ... The proposed maps would almost certainly ensure a GOP majority in the Legislature for another decade, said Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School. Greenwood ran the GOP-drawn maps through PlanScore — a program that predicts precinct-level votes for districts based on past election results and U.S. Census data. “I’d say it’s as extreme as the gerrymander for the last 10 years,” Greenwood said. “It essentially bakes in almost the same level of partisan advantage and so we would expect to see another decade where it wouldn’t matter whether more people voted for Democrats than Republicans, Republicans would still maintain control.”

TikTok and Snapchat will testify before Congress next week for the first time, spokespeople for the companies confirmed Wednesday, as Senate lawmakers broaden their investigation into how social media platforms are affecting kids’ safety. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being called by the same panel to appear on Capitol Hill for what would be his eighth time in four years, and the 31st time for any Facebook executive in that same time span, spokesman Andy Stone confirmed. The disparity highlights how lawmakers’ oversight of Silicon Valley companies has fixated on a few major platforms, most notably Facebook. ... But some researchers such as Harvard Law School lecturer Evelyn Douek have argued that Congress’ myopic focus has made it all but turn a blind eye to several of the world’s most influential sites, including TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, which will also testify next week. Douek, who has challenged lawmakers to summon YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in particular to testify for the first time, celebrated the lineup for the next hearing.