Media Mentions

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.

In his latest book, “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, And Culture,” Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy discusses everything from why he thinks Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a “sellout” to how the election of Donald Trump left his optimism for a racially equitable nation “profoundly shaken.” He joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss all that and more. Kennedy responded to a recent wave of Supreme Court justices lamenting the politicization of the Court. He called the claims “ridiculous.” “The Supreme Court is inevitably political,” he said. “Clearly it matters who these people are. Clearly our law is largely dependent on the personnel that make it to these seats on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the U.S. Department of Education urged the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to quash her deposition subpoena in a lawsuit by student borrowers seeking forgiveness from "predatory" for-profit college loans, but panelists indicated they were struggling to see how the lower court "clearly erred" issuing it. ... The plaintiffs' attorney, Margaret E. O'Grady of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School, said she believes the student borrowers can get relief on the existing record, but said just because they have a strong case, they shouldn't be prevented from obtaining DeVos' deposition. “The law is clear that depositions of Cabinet secretaries are permissible, but reserved for extraordinary circumstances. And the court below found those rare, extraordinary circumstances present here,” O'Grady said.

On April 5, 2020, Christopher Charles Perez posted a message on Facebook about an H-E-B grocery store in San Antonio, federal prosecutors said. “My homeboys cousin has covid19 and has licked everything for past two days cause we paid him too,” Mr. Perez wrote. “YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.” The claim was not true, and the post came down after 16 minutes, according to court documents. ... This past June, Mr. Perez, 40, of San Antonio, was found guilty of disseminating false information and hoaxes related to biological weapons. On Monday, a federal judge sentenced him to 15 months in federal prison. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Boston, said that since federal sentencing guidelines went into effect in 1987, judges have sentenced defendants to prison time on charges that once led to probation. “I’m sure the judge was intending to send a message to people who would be involved in like hoaxes, which is important,” said Ms. Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “The question is whether he needed to impose a sentence of this length to send that message.”

New White House guidance on a landmark environmental law may ease uncertainty about the federal review process for energy projects, even as it leaves unanswered questions about legal cases and how agencies analyze climate and environmental justice, observers say. The Council on Environmental Quality announced a proposed rule to revise regulations for how federal agencies should implement reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The plan will affect the assessment of projects ranging from pipelines and compressor stations to oil and gas leases on public lands. ... Agencies have since been in a "holding pattern" as they have needed to move forward with permitting but were simultaneously waiting for the Biden administration to clarify its guidelines for how they should comply, said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program. Vizcarra said the lack of CEQ regulations had been creating “a lot of uncertainty for anyone coming before those agencies, as well as the agencies themselves, on how they are supposed to be operating, at a time when the administration is really pushing for a lot of action.”

An article by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith: At the top of the list of those responsible for executive branch accountability in the 21st century are the statutory inspectors general that now populate every major executive branch agency. On Wednesday, Oct. 6, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs will consider three bills—the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2021, the IG Testimonial Subpoena Authority Act and the IG Independence and Empowerment Act—that would expand the independence and power of inspectors general in important respects. This post reviews the central reforms, urges the passage of one of them, and assesses the others.

In the late nineteen-thirties, Gonzálo Segura, known to his friends as Tony, enrolled at Emory University to study biochemistry. He graduated in 1942, and subsequently took a job at Foster D. Snell, a New York-based engineering and chemical-consulting company that the United States Army hired to run radiation tests. Under strict secrecy, Segura tested which cleaning agents removed radiation most effectively from human hands. As his career in radiochemistry progressed, he kept quiet about his growing attraction to other men. “I learned very early in life, when I was a child really, that that and all sexuality were things to be kept to myself,” he told the historian Jonathan Ned Katz, in 1977. He’d always assumed that, by the time he entered his twenties, he would develop desires for women, then marry and have kids. ... In some states, when queer people were arrested on morals charges, “police departments would often notify bar associations or medical licensing boards or especially schools,” Anna Lvovsky, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, told me. “The real shadow that hung over these arrests was the threat of collateral consequences such as the loss of employment.”

The Supreme Court is back on the bench this week for a new term. And it could be a momentous one — as the court is set to take up cases related to abortion, gun rights, and affirmative action. We speak with our legal analyst, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School Nancy Gertner.

For a few hours inside the ransacked Capitol on January 6, then–Vice President Mike Pence helped to preserve the democratic order by insisting that he was powerless to change the outcome of the election. On January 6, 2025, that responsibility could fall to Vice President Kamala Harris, but the task of preventing a stolen presidential election won’t be that simple. ... Should Trump or his acolytes try to subvert the 2024 election, the last Democrat with any power to stop the steal—or at least try to—would be Harris. “She’s certainly going to have quite a job on her hands on January 6, 2025,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and liberal constitutional scholar, told me. Nine months ago, Tribe and other Democrats praised Pence for interpreting his authority narrowly, but the next time around, they might ask Harris to wield the same gavel more forcefully.

The challenge in providing government assistance to ease the local news crisis is to find ways of helping those who really need it while keeping the bad actors out. Which is why Martha Minow said this week that she’s “hopeful” but “fearful” about a federal bill that would create tax credits to subsidize subscribers, advertisers and news organizations. “What I’m troubled about is: What’s local news, who defines it and how do we prevent the manipulation of this by multinational corporations?” she said. “That’s a problem, and I don’t know anyone who’s come up with an answer for that.”

James E. Bowers ’70 is one of six recipients of the 2021 Harvard Alumni Association Award, given each year to alumni who demonstrate exceptional service to Harvard University through leadership and engagement activities.

Facebook Inc blamed a "faulty configuration change " for a nearly six-hour outage on Monday that prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The company in a late Monday blog post did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned. Several Facebook employees who declined to be named had told Reuters earlier that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal mistake in how internet traffic is routed to its systems. ... “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

A group of prominent lawyers, including former governors and judges, urged the California bar on Monday to launch an investigation into John C. Eastman’s role in advising President Trump on how he could overturn his election defeat, including by having his vice president refuse to count the electoral votes in seven states won by President Biden. ... The letter was sent to George S. Cardona, chief trial counsel at the Los Angeles office of the State Bar of California. The signers include former governors Christine Todd Whitman, a New Jersey Republican, and Steve Bullock, a Montana Democrat; retired California Supreme Court Justices Kathryn Werdegar and Joseph Grodin; retired California federal judges Thelton Henderson, Fern M. Smith and Lowell Jensen; and UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

Seattle’s city council voted unanimously to relax its rules against naturally occurring drugs, joining a handful of other cities that have decriminalized psilocybin and similar substances since Denver kicked off a wave of such changes three years ago. ... Some high-profile researchers are now calling for federal change. Separately on Monday, the head of Harvard Law School’s Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation, Mason Marks, advocated for relaxation of laws around psychedelic drugs in order to spur mental health-care innovation. His article, published in peer-review journal Nature Medicine, points out that the current status of psilocybin makes it hard to get federal funding for research, which means that private companies currently fund most research and therefore shape public policy. ... As a Schedule I controlled substance, psilocybin falls in the same category as hard drugs such as heroin. Marks said moving it to a less-restrictive category would help create “more-inclusive clinical trials and unbiased regulatory review” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Basically, our position is that rescheduling is the best approach. It will solve many problems,” Marks said in an interview.

After a consultant told Michigan’s redistricting commission that its current draft maps for legislative districts would still largely favor Republicans, advocates who pushed to reform the state’s redistricting process say it’s imperative for the commission to land on competitively balanced maps. ... During Monday’s briefing, Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, highlighted several draft maps that would achieve desired efficiency ratings. Given Michigan’s traditionally competitive statewide races, Greenwood said it’s possible to draw competitive legislative lines while still respecting communities of interest, which refers to groups with historical similarities in close proximity to one another. “I think that it would just be naive to say that the political geography of Michigan doesn't allow for partisan fairness to be enforced,” Greenwood said.