Media Mentions

Historian, professor, and author Annette Gordon-Reed has been awarded the 2021 Governor’s Award in the Humanities from Mass Humanities. Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her 2008 book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (Norton). She’s also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among other prizes and awards. Mass Humanities awards the prize each year, recognizing the recipients’ “public actions, grounded in an appreciation of the humanities, to enhance civic life in the Commonwealth.” Gordon-Reed will be honored, alongside three other recipients — John Burgess, Sonia Nieto, and Heather Cox Richardson — in a virtual awards ceremony on October 24 at 5 p.m. For more information, visit masshumanities.org.

On March 11 of this year, one of the most important auctions in recent years took place at Christie’s – in complete silence. There was no heated bidding, and nothing went under a noisy hammer, but large sums were still changing hands: the artist known as Beeple sold his work “First 5000 Days” for $69.3 million. ... Before making history at Christie’s, the average value of a Beeple work hovered around $100. “Digital artists couldn’t sell their art like those working in the physical world. NFTs have ended that discrimination,” explained Primavera De Filippi, a researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society and the French National Center for Scientific Research. De Filippi has an optimistic view of the technology, and believes that it has enhanced the work of artists such as Beeple by replicating the limitations of the physical world to drive up prices: “NFTs have artificially created a form of digital scarcity and this enhances the value of a work,” she said. NFTs have introduced new artists to the art market, she believes, and also introduced new buyers.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Earlier this year, Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center released a “Suggested Language List,” developed by “students who have been impacted by violence and students who have sought out advanced training for intervening in potentially violent situations.” The students’ purpose, they wrote, was “to remove language that may hurt those who have experienced violence from our everyday use.” They proposed avoiding the idioms “killing it,” “take a stab at,” and “beating a dead horse.” I was struck that one of the phrases they recommended avoiding was “trigger warning,” and that the proffered explanation was sensible: “ ‘warning’ can signify that something is imminent or guaranteed to happen, which may cause additional stress about the content to be covered. We can also never guarantee that someone will not be triggered during a conversation or training; people’s triggers vary widely.”

YouTube said on Wednesday that it was banning the accounts of several prominent anti-vaccine activists from its platform, including those of Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as part of an effort to remove all content that falsely claims that approved vaccines are dangerous. ...“One platform’s policies affect enforcement across all the others because of the way networks work across services,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who focuses on online speech and misinformation. “YouTube is one of the most highly linked domains on Facebook, for example.”

... I’ve been writing a lot recently about the price you face as a consumer and a citizen for being trapped in a Big Tech economy. Here’s one it’s not too late to stop: Letting tech giants make your smart home more dumb. Their monopolistic mind-set makes your home more complicated, leaves you less choice and less privacy, and already resulted in less-capable smart speakers. ... Asking the most powerful companies in history just to have “elbows that are less sharp” isn’t going to work, said Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain during the Senate’s June hearing. “They’re trying to compete and they owe their shareholders that duty. Let’s set up the rules so that they know how to play to the chalk, but not go beyond it.”

In the United States, “The primary way we define ‘food safety’ is, ‘If I eat this product today, will I be in the hospital in 24 to 72 hours?’” says clinical professor of law Emily Broad Leib. “But this doesn’t account for other ways that the food system produces health risks for members of the public,” including the lifelong risks of, say, developing type 2 diabetes after consuming sugary foods for decades, or the environmental effects of industrial farming, such as fertilizer runoff in waterways, which creates oxygen-free dead zones inhospitable to aquatic life. The single-minded emphasis on microbes like salmonella and E. coli, Broad Leib asserts, “means we’re under-regulating a bunch of other risks that have bigger health impacts.” As director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, she engages law students in projects that investigate how U.S. law intersects with the broader food system, “from the first seed going into the ground, to someone’s plate or perhaps to a trashcan.” Her purview encompasses environmental impacts, worker safety, and even immigration as factors in food production.

... Legal scholars say that if Democrats don't make big changes to limit presidential authority, there's every reason to believe a future White House occupant will try to again push the boundaries of executive power. The consequences, some say, could be dire."Unless Congress soon reasserts some of its power to check the executive branch, the odds that our democracy will last more than another decade or so seem, to me, depressingly low," said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law professor at Harvard. The legislation from Schiff and other House Democrats, Tribe said, would "restore the system of checks and balances that has kept our republic afloat through the most turbulent times."

An article by Bailey Kennedy ’22: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has announced its intention to file suit against a Georgia school district under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, on the basis of the district's decision not to require certain COVID-19 precautions. The SPLC argues that children with certain disabilities, who are especially vulnerable to the virus, might not be able to safely access an education in an environment where masking is optional. Therefore, even if most children are at little risk of serious harm from COVID-19, it argues that in order to ensure all children have the ability to attend school, schools must take every available precaution.

An article by Jill Lepore: When Deidre Barnes was a kid in North Carolina, horsing around in the back seat of the car with her little brother, her grandfather drove by the woods in a white neighborhood in Durham. “You got cousins up in there,” he called back from the driver’s seat, nodding at a stand of loblolly pines in a tangle of kudzu. Barnes and her brother exchanged wide-eyed glances: they had cousins who were wild people? Only later, looking hard, did they spy a headstone: “Oh, it’s a cemetery.” A few years ago, Barnes read in the newspaper that the place was called Geer. “My grandmother’s maiden name is Geer,” she told me. “And so I asked her, ‘Do we have people buried there?’ ” I met Barnes at the cemetery on a warm, cicada night, with Debra Gonzalez-Garcia, the president of the Friends of Geer Cemetery.

As lawmakers on Capitol Hill make their ways through the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion spending bill, two potential scenarios are haunting the negotiations. ... Those at the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department probably are scrambling to prepare what-if scenarios, according to Harvard law professor Howell Jackson — like prioritizing debt or paying everyone really slowly. “But I should emphasize that we really don’t know how it would work and whether they should do it,” Jackson said. “And I think it’s important for everyone to recognize that this is very dangerous territory.”

Members of the Mt. Washington Commission had a chance at its meeting last Friday to see Harvard Law School third-year student Erin Savoie in action. Two other law students—Seorae Ko and Lowry Yankwich—who work with Erin on a three-member team from the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program were not present.

When President Joe Biden directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on Sept. 9 to impose strict COVID-19 vaccination and testing protocols on large businesses, the OSHA employees were ready. ... Public opinion may not have been behind the original ETS, either. Support for a widespread federal response is higher now than it was at the start of Biden’s term, says N’dea Moore-Petinak, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the book Coronavirus Politics. And businesses may be more open to a vaccine and testing mandate than they would be to a masking mandate like the one included in the original ETS, says Glenn Cohen, an expert on health law and bioethics at Harvard Law School. “While I think masking is terrific, politically it’s a harder sell and the compliance rates may be lower,” he says. “With vaccination, it’s easier to ensure compliance.”

 An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe, Neil H. Buchanan, and Michael C. Dorf ’90: At the Jan. 6 rally preceding the assault on the Capitol, Rudolph Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” The next speaker was John Eastman. He praised Giuliani’s remarks and then made fantastic claims of voter fraud, including that “secret folders” of ballots were deployed to deny Donald Trump reelection. Who is John Eastman? Like Giuliani, he was once a respected lawyer. Eastman is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the former dean of Chapman Law School. At the time of the insurrection, he remained a tenured professor there. Within weeks, Chapman and Eastman cut ties. Soon he would also forfeit his position as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado.

Facebook’s Oversight Board styles itself as a crucial check on one of the world’s most powerful companies, but its efficacy is in doubt. While Facebook would like its $130 million corporate high court to have that legitimacy, the board is questioning whether Facebook has been honest about its own content moderation practices. ... “It’s becoming clear that when the board asks Facebook questions, it is not getting complete information,” said Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow at Yale Law School and an affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society.

Chloe Clem did not intend to be an Internet sensation. She didn’t know her facial expression would resonate with fans for years to come. And she certainly didn’t know it would make her family more than $74,000. .... Eight years later, a non-fungible token (NFT) of the meme was sold Friday to 3F Music, a music production company based in Dubai, for 25 Ether — the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network — which was worth more than $74,000 around the time of the sale. ... NFTs generally represent specific versions of digital files, though an NFT could also be assigned to an object, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of intellectual property law at Harvard Law School. “It is a way of saying, ‘I have a unique instance of a thing that is in fact infinitely replicable,’” she said. “It is basically artificially created uniqueness.”

Treasury officials face an unusually difficult task this fall in projecting precisely when the federal government will no longer be able to pay its bills, a lapse that could trigger a default and plunge America into an economic recession. ... “Yes, it may be a violation of the Constitution for the president to simply ignore the debt ceiling. But it’s even more serious for him to obey the debt ceiling and have default in violation of Section 4,” said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, whose legal advice the administration has repeatedly sought, in an interview.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:Neil Gorsuch has big ambitions. Every Supreme Court justice wants to do good work, write good opinions and influence the trajectory of American law. Justice Gorsuch wants more: intellectual leadership of the conservative legal movement. That would make him the heir to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he replaced in 2017 after the Senate refused to vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. Gorsuch’s aspiration to intellectual leadership fairly bursts from his votes and opinions and seems to have formed early in his career. He might accomplish it if emerging splits within the close-knit family of conservative legal thinkers break his way.

Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to hide his actions from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which he incited, would need the cooperation of Joe Biden, the man he claims is not the legitimate president ― and that cooperation will not be coming. ... “The compelling interest of both Congress and the Justice Department in investigating attempted coups, failed insurrections and criminal violations of federal election laws would suffice to overcome even an applicable claim of executive privilege,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s new book, “Say It Loud!,” collects 29 of his essays. Kennedy’s opinions about the subjects listed in the book’s subtitle — race, law, history and culture — tend to be complex, and he’s not afraid to change his mind. He says on the podcast that there’s “no shame” in admitting you’re wrong, and that he does just that in the book when he finds it appropriate. “I thought that the United States was much further down the road to racial decency than it is,” Kennedy says. “Donald Trump obviously trafficked in racial resentment, racial prejudice in a way that I thought was securely locked in the past. This has had a big influence on me. I used to be a quite confident racial optimist. I am not any longer. I’m still in the optimistic camp — I do think that we shall overcome — but I’m uneasy. I’m uneasy in a way that was simply not the case, let’s say, 10 years ago.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Retweets are not endorsements, goes the formula. But is a tweet linking to an existing article a republication of the article, legally speaking? A federal appeals court said last week that the answer may be yes, and on that basis revived a libel lawsuit filed by U.S. Representative Devin Nunes against the journalist Ryan Lizza. The consequences are significant, opening the door to a raft of lawsuits against people who post links on social media platforms or anywhere else.

Like many ravaging storms that came before it, Hurricane Ida exposed the fragility of Louisiana’s power grid, knocking out electricity to hundreds of thousands of…