Media Mentions

An op-ed by Norman Eisen and Kenneth W. Mack: Some of our largest businesses are having a political awakening. From Bank of America to Apple to Coca-Cola to Delta Air Lines, corporate boardrooms are speaking out against new laws in Georgia and elsewhere that will disproportionately make it harder for Black voters to participate in elections. As companies decide how to respond to such laws, they would do well to look for inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 20th century. The evidence suggests that weighing in on the side of justice was not only the right thing to do — in many cases, it was also the profitable thing, serving a double bottom line. Recent work by the economist and historian Gavin Wright has documented the substantial, albeit unequal, gains that accrued to Southerners and the businesses that served them, due to the fall of the Jim Crow system. The numbers are striking: “[S]outhern retail business lagged the nation throughout the years of sit-ins and mass boycotts.” But after the businesses desegregated, Wright found, Dallas department stores saw sales increase by over 80 percent just seven years later (from desegregation in 1961 to 1968), while during the same time span a decade before, sales had been flat or slow in growth.

An op-ed by Ashley Nunes: America is going green. Recently, President Joe Biden unveiled plans to accelerate the transition toward electric cars. The move — neatly packaged as the American Jobs Plan — is being sold as a way to “unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.” In recent years, Beijing has fared well in the race to build, and sell, green technology. No more. Instead, expect the American Jobs Plan to help us “out-compete China" and, more important, “reduce the impacts of climate change for our kids.” Victory won’t come cheap of course. The White House pegs the total cost of the plan at $2 trillion. Then again, with more than $28 trillion in national debt, $2 trillion seems like a bargain. The White House wants $174 billion of that directed toward boosting electric car sales. Fossil fuel use in transportation is significant, and gas-guzzling autos are one reason why. Electric cars — admittedly cleaner by almost every metric — offer relief. Well, they would if people could actually afford them. Forgoing gas is pricy, preserving the status quo less so. Which explains why only 2% of autos soldannually are powered by electricity.

Local advocates are calling for continued police accountability after Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the murder of George Floyd. Featuring Harvard Law Professor Kenneth Mack.

Virtual Hearing. Member Statements: Ron Wyden (D - OR); Mike Crapo (R - ID). Witnesses: Dorothy Brown, Asa Griggs Candler Professor Of Law, Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, GA; Dr. Mihir A. Desai, Mizuho Financial Group, Professor Of Finance and Professor Of Law, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Himalaya Rao-Potlapally, Managing Director, Black Founders Matter Fund, Salem, OR; Shay Hawkins, President And CEO, Opportunity Funds Association, Washington, DC.

Joe Biden’s promise to nominate an African American woman to the supreme court for the first time holds broad symbolic significance for Darlene McDonald, an activist and police reform commissioner in Salt Lake City, Utah...Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a civil rights historian, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and professor of constitutional law, said having qualified federal judges who “reflect the broad makeup of the American public” would strengthen democracy and faith in the courts. “It’s an important historical moment that signifies equal opportunity,” Brown-Nagin said. “That anyone who is qualified has the chance to be considered for nomination, notwithstanding race, notwithstanding gender. That is where we are. In some ways, we shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves, right?” Brown-Nagin pointed out that a campaign was advanced in the 1960s to nominate Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to sit as a federal judge, but some Democratic allies of President Lyndon Johnson opposed such a nomination because they saw it as too politically risky. “This moment could have happened 50 years ago,” Brown-Nagin said.

Apple Inc. plans to make the social-media app Parler available through its App Store again, the computer and smartphone company said in a letter to lawmakers on Monday. Apple removed Parler from its app store in January, citing objectionable content. In a letter to Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, both Republicans, Apple said Monday that a revised version of the Parler app with improved content moderation would be approved for release to Apple users...Apple had previously denied an earlier attempt by Parler to seek reinstatement. Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law School lecturer who studies content moderation, said that tech platforms, including Apple, need to provide clearer guidelines as to what content is acceptable. “If Apple wants to get into the game of playing gatekeeper on the basis of content, it should be a lot more transparent about its requirements,” Ms. Douek said.

Throughout 2020, Big Law firms were said to be “cleaning house”: pushing out unproductive partners so they could pay top earners more and tidy up their expense sheet as the pandemic raged and business development costs promised to return in 2021. Yet the nonequity tier, long viewed as a common target in these efforts in part because of the fixed costs and salaries of an income partner, grew roughly 6% last year among the Am Law 100...Harvard Law professor Scott Westfahl, who runs an executive training program for Milbank and other Big Law firms, says the law firm up-or-out model, while historically effective, leaves out many people with substantial expertise. It creates no space for good attorneys who simply want to practice law and not devote a significant portion of their time to generating business. Firms that don’t want to lose this expertise, he says, should look to McKinsey + Co.’s “grow or go” model, wherein an employee doesn’t have to strive for McKinsey’s version of equity partnership if they instead consistently look to expand on their expertise and diffuse it throughout the firm. Law firms can still retain the up-or-out model while including “branches” for attorneys who don’t want to make equity partner, Westfahl suggests.

This week on Hold Your Fire!, Richard Atwood and Naz Modirzadeh talk to Crisis Group’s Senior Adviser for the Middle East and North Africa, Dina Esfandiary, about what drove Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among other Gulf states, to cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in 2017, why the Gulf Arab countries announced an end to the crisis in January 2021 and whether the rift is truly over. They reflect on what this means for the foreign policies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and how their leaders see their priorities and challenges in the region. They also discuss what the spat has meant for crises across the region where the GCC countries are involved.

In May 2008, the Buffalo Police Department fired Cariol Horne just months shy of her pension for 20 years of service vesting after she intervened when a fellow officer applied a chokehold to an unarmed Black man. This week a litigation team led by lawyers from Kirkland + Ellis and Harvard Law School won a ruling from a state court judge in New York awarding Horne back pay and benefits that she had previously been denied in another legal challenge to her firing more than a decade ago...Ronald Sullivan: “At stake was not only Cariol’s pension and her ability to support herself, but also the message being sent to other officers. She fulfilled her duty to protect and serve, but her first trip to court in 2010, where the court confirmed her termination, created a chilling effect on an officer’s duty to intervene. Despite what the official policy was, a court decision that terminated a fellow officer and denied her a pension did not encourage officers to follow Cariol’s lead—even though her behavior is what the nation was calling for and requiring.” ... Intisar Rabb: “Cariol presented a model for what we the people expect police officers to do when another officer is using excessive force against an unarmed civilian: She intervened to save a life and was punished for it. We thought it imperative that she get not only her pension, but that our laws are correct that led to the injustice of her losing it.”

Some companies are using persuasion, insisting that employees who don’t get a COVID-19 vaccine wear a mask at all times once they return to the workplace. A growing number of colleges are taking a firmer stance, saying they will require shots for all students. Many sports and entertainment venues, however, are taking a wait-and-see approach about requiring patrons to prove they’re vaccinated...States have long had the legal right to mandate vaccinations, such as for enrolling children in school. But the ability to carry around digital proof of vaccination status is new. And now the push to return to a more normal life has triggered a lot of discussion about vaccine passports, in which users can upload proof of vaccination on a smartphone app for potential entry into work, school, or other venues. That phenomenon has sparked a debate about equity, security, and privacy. “Not everybody has smartphone access, so how do you build a system without smartphone access to still prove someone has been vaccinated or it’s not appropriate for them to be vaccinated,” said Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

CEOs are frustrated. They seek greater transparency from their legal departments to understand and control their risk management programs. General counsel are frustrated in turn: they say they do not have the technology or data to do so, according to an Ernst + Young report published earlier this month. Sixty-one percent of the CEOs interviewed for the report said they would like their legal departments to take a more data-driven approach to their legal department’s risk management practices. David Wilkins, professor of law and faculty director at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the number of risks CEOs have to worry about is growing. At the outset of the pandemic, for example, legal departments struggled to go through contracts to find force majeure clauses and pull out the necessary information that could prevent litigation flowing from business disruption. Those pandemic-related risks are coupled with cybersecurity and data privacy risks. On top of it all, comes a patchwork of state and international laws governing how consumer data can be used.

An op-ed by Dean A. Strang and Nancy Gertner: Caron Nazario had a newly purchased SUV with a temporary plate taped to the back of the vehicle, properly and lawfully, until his new plates arrived. Daunte Wright had an expired license plate and an air freshener hanging from his rear view mirror. Police officers in both situations said that’s why they were stopped. Nazario was held at gun point and pepper sprayed, but survived. Wright, who had an open arrest warrant for missing a court appearance on a misdemeanor charge, was fatally shot by police. Although Nazario’s stop happened last December, in rural Virginia, and Wright’s last Sunday, in suburban Minnesota, the patterns are clear. Both are Black men. Both were stopped for minor traffic offenses, or for no offense at all. Of course, we don’t know the actual intentions of the police officers who stopped both men. We don’t know what racial attitudes or suspicions or anger they harbored, if any. But that is the point: According to the Supreme Court, the real reason for the stop — even if it was blatant racism — doesn’t matter. The court’s 1996 decision in Whren v. United States held that a traffic stop is lawful if police can come up with some traffic infraction to justify it, however trivial. The subjective intentions of the police — which could be the real reasons for the stop — are irrelevant.

In this sample from Third Degree, Elie Honig and Harvard Law student Eli Nachmany ‘22 discuss Derek Chauvin’s decision not to testify in his own murder trial.

On this episode of Conversations with Jim Zirin, renowned Harvard constitutional law Professor Laurence H. Tribe discusses all the civil suits and potential criminal charges targeting Donald Trump. He tells Jim Zirin that Trump has some interesting defenses in the possible criminal cases, but, at the end of the day, he will be held accountable.

About a dozen colleges have said they will require students to receive a Covid-19 vaccine before returning for in-person instruction this fall. The mandate from this small but growing number of schools inserts them into the increasingly politically charged debate over whether businesses and other institutions should be able to make inoculation a condition of participating in events in person. Here’s what we know about colleges and student Covid-19 vaccinations. ... Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, said some schools are likely getting tripped up by legal language requiring the federal government to inform people they have the right to refuse a vaccine approved under an emergency-use authorization. The three vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration—manufactured by Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Johnson & Johnson — were only approved for emergency use.

A Latina law school professor has been tasked with examining the future of one of the country's three branches of government. President Joe Biden has signed an executive order creating a presidential commission to study whether the Supreme Court should be overhauled, and he has named Yale Law School professor Cristina M. Rodríguez as its co-chair. Rodríguez and Bob Bauer, a professor at the New York University School of Law, will head the bipartisan commission to examine arguments both for and against a reform. ... The commission includes some of the nation’s best-known legal scholars and experts: Laurence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School, Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Andrew Crespo, also of the Harvard Law School. Crespo, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, was the first Latino president of the Harvard Law Review.

As we mark a year of remote work, some organizations are trying to regulate the look of virtual communications and offering branded templates. Before the Zoom background becomes policed by corporate branding cops, it’s time to peer into the creativity and diversity on people’s screens. ... 45: Number of ready-to-use virtual backgrounds Harvard Law School offers to its students.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer told the ABA's International Law Section on Wednesday that his court will continue its recent trend of looking to overseas legal authorities and briefs from foreign interests as it weighs cases with worldwide implications. ... Swartz referred participants to Breyer’s two-hour speech to Harvard Law School last week in which the 82-year-old justice argued that public trust in the court rests on a public perception that “the court is guided by legal principle, not politics” and that such trust would be eroded if the court’s structure were changed in response to concerns about the influence of politics on the Supreme Court.

Yogurt was everywhere as volunteers opened boxes of fruit, frozen meat and dairy products that had shifted and spilled in transit to a food bank in Walworth County, Wis. They rushed to clean and transfer the packages of frozen meatballs, apples, milk and yogurt into cars for needy families to take home before they spoiled. The food came from The Farmers to Families Food Box program that the Trump administration launched to feed out-of-work Americans with food rescued from farmers who would otherwise throw it away as the coronavirus pandemic upended food supply chains. ... The USDA specified food boxes delivered in 2021 to the continental U.S. cost between $27 and $48 per box. But cheaper boxes presented new challenges and put additional burdens on food banks, said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic. The lower-cost boxes contained lower quality food, and food companies at times refused to deliver them to smaller pantries, leaving local organizations scrambling to find extra money for delivery, she said.

A small but growing number of colleges will require students to receive a Covid-19 vaccine, saying it is the most assured way of returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic campus life. ... Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, said schools are likely getting tripped up by legal language requiring the federal government to inform people they have the right to refuse a vaccine approved under an emergency-use authorization.

Loeb University Professor Annette Gordon-Reed is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Her slender new book, On Juneteenth (Liveright / W.W. Norton, $15.95), is part history, part memoir and meditation on her own growing up in Texas, the original home to Juneteenth — the commemoration of the June 19, 1865, proclamation that slavery had ended in that state, and of late, a nationally recognized and now Harvard official holiday. She sets the stage with a brisk overview of the historical state.