Media Mentions

Workplace Covid-19 vaccination mandates have largely survived a first wave of legal challenges even as the number of lawsuits over them has soared with their expanded use. ...Two months later, regulators upgraded the vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and its partner BioNTech SE from “Emergency Use Authorization” to full “Biologics License Application” approval. “Once the Pfizer vaccine made it from EUA to BLA, that took the winds out of the sails of an argument that seemed more rhetorically if not legally powerful,” said Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard University’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. “Without that card to play, the challengers have much weaker-sounding arguments.”

The January 6 Select Committee subpoenaed Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. A January 6th defendant who insisted he will defend himself on the court wound up admitting to two more felonies that he started out with. Today, President Biden gave a speech addressing the supply chain issue but also touting the fact that part of his Build Back Better agenda is an investment in ports, investment in infrastructure, investment in domestic manufacturing. Cheerleaders demand NFL release the full workplace inquiry. ...Nancy Gertner: ... The problem with judges chastising the Department of Justice is the Department of Justice is in a little bit of a pickle. There are what, so many hundreds of people that have been arrested. They really have to determine -- they have to allocate their resources.

The estate of Henrietta Lacks has filed a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, which sells a commercial line of HeLa tissue, accusing the corporation of profiting from Lacks' "stolen" cells. ... Yasmin Amer:: A spokesman for Thermo Fisher Scientific told NPR the company has no official response yet. What happened to Lacks became more widely known after Rebecca Skloot's 2010 book and an HBO movie starring Oprah. Glenn Cohen teaches law and bioethics at Harvard and says what happened to Lacks wasn't unusual. Glenn Cohen: Certainly historically, everybody agrees that what was done to Henrietta Lacks, as it was done to many Black women who sought hospital care at that time, was a moral wrong.  ... Cohen: There's a legal matter at the time in which the tissue was taken. It was not the ethical rules of the day to require informed consent.

OP26 president Alok Sharma has admitted that any agreement is still some way off and has called on every country to play its part. ... [ 12:21] Dr. Xi (Sisi) Hu, fellow at Harvard Law School's Labor Worklife Program, says technology is key to helping us reduce emissions and manage climate change.

Nearly two years after getting away with obstruction of Congress while he was president, Donald Trump may get away with it again, this time as a former president trying to block an investigation into the insurrection he incited. ... That history, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said, would go a long way toward proving the “corrupt intent” that prosecutors would need to show. “The former president’s corrupt and self-serving motive of concealing his role in the attempted coup and the ensuing insurrection by invoking an executive privilege that is no longer his to invoke should be possible to establish,” Tribe said. “With that motive established, there’d be a strong case for charging Trump’s interference with the special committee’s Jan. 6 inquiry as a criminal obstruction of Congress and of justice.”

Since Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in 2019, they have doggedly used Congress’s power to compel documents and testimony from Donald Trump and those in his orbit – and more often than not, they have butted up against a Trumpian wall of disparagement, denial, and delay. ... According to Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Laurence Tribe, executive privilege does not exist for former presidents. “We have only one president at a time,” Mr Tribe told The Independent, “and the constitutional presumption is that the incumbent president is the best judge of the factors bearing on whether and when to invoke executive privilege to withhold documents or testimony.”

For a long time, Chase Chewning had wanted to try a new type of psychotherapy that uses ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that’s shown promise as a mental health treatment. Chewning, a veteran who has had several recreational experiences with MDMA and psilocybin, hoped the drug could help him with his PTSD, so he made an appointment at a Los Angeles ketamine therapy clinic operated by Field Trip Health. ... “This is really the most promising development in mental health care to come along, literally, in many decades. And that’s one reason why you don’t want a few companies controlling it,” says Mason Marks, a project lead at Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center who focuses on psychedelics regulation.

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.