Media Mentions

The Biden administration’s aggressive timeline for vetting potential judges while seeking nominees who would bring experiential, racial, and gender diversity to the federal bench is proving difficult for several Democratic senators to meet. Senators from at least six states represented by two Democrats, including California, Virginia, and Massachusetts, have missed deadlines set by White House counsel Dana Remus. She had asked senators from states with vacant district court seats to submit recommendations by Jan. 19—the day before President Joe Biden’s inauguration—and within 45 days of the announcement of a new vacancy. “We said we couldn’t do that—that if you want a more diverse pool, and to tell people who never envisioned they could apply that they should apply, we needed more time,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal district judge and chair of Massachusetts’ vetting commission set up by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. The administration wants to speed the pace of nominations compared to prior Democratic presidents and make sure there’s enough time to fill what’s already grown to 100 district and circuit court vacancies before midterm elections threaten the party’s narrow Senate majority.

It has been five years since April Reign kicked off the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, calling out the Academy Awards for overlooking professionals of color in the entertainment industry. But Sunday's awards ceremony may turn out to be a banner year for representation, with nominees including Steven Yeun, the first ever Asian American nominated for best actor, and Chloé Zhao, the first Asian woman nominated for Best Director. They are just two among many other nominees of color, seen in the chart below. Guests: Jenny Korn - research affiliate and founder and coordinator of the race, tech and media working group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Elena Creef - professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College. She specializes in Asian American visual history in photography, film and popular culture.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s decision to stop prosecuting people for taking money in exchange for sex marks a turning point in the long and fascinating history of sex work in New York City. The city once considered “the prostitution capitol of the United States” and “the Gomorrah of the New World” has now followed the lead of a few other major American cities in adopting what’s sometimes called the “Nordic model” — continuing to outlaw paying for sex but not punishing the sex workers themselves. This change largely stems from two factors: changing moral beliefs about who the victims of sex work are, and the new realities of Manhattan real estate. Start with morality. Without a transformation in public perceptions of what is wrong with sex work and who is to blame for its social costs, it would have been impossible for an elected official like a district attorney to announce a policy of no longer enforcing anti-prostitution laws that have, in some cases, been on the books for centuries. Sexual morality from the early modern period into recent decades tended to condemn the people — especially women — who accepted money in exchange for sexual services, depicting them as morally corrupt.

An article by Sean Quirk ‘21: A political standoff between China and the Philippines over a reef in the South China Sea has begun to subside, while Taiwan reacts to a new normal of continuous Chinese military activity around the island nation. In the background of both developments, the Biden administration is coordinating with its treaty allies—the Philippines and Japan—to confront an aggressive maritime posture from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). On April 8, a China Coast Guard vessel and two Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy Type-22 Houbei missile boats chased Philippine ABS-CBN journalists out of the Spratly Islands (Malay: Kepulauan Spratly; Mandarin: Nansha Qundao; Philippines: Kapuluan ng Kalayaan; Vietnamese: Quần đảo Trường Sa). The news team was in a civilian motor boat en route to Philippine-occupied Second Thomas Shoal (Mandarin: Ren'ai Jiao; Tagalog: Ayungin Shoal; Vietnamese: Bãi Cỏ Mây) in the Spratlys. The journalists maintain that they were about to reach Second Thomas Shoal and were well within the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Philippines when the PRC vessels arrived. An hour-long chase ensued. The China Coast Guard vessel turned away when the news crew was around 80 nautical miles from the Philippines’ mainland Palawan island, only to be replaced by two PLA Navy Houbeis.

The claim: Derek Chauvin did not get a fair trial for the killing of George Floyd. After weeks of jury selection, arguments, testimony and 10 hours of jury deliberation, former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd...In some cases, Chauvin’s defense attorneys and prosecutors didn’t need a reason to strike a juror from the pool, as long as it was not based on race. Typically, defense attorneys in similar cases get five “peremptory” strikes, while prosecutors receive three, according to the Associated Press. In Chauvin’s case, defense attorneys were given 15 strikes compared with nine for prosecutors. “It shows the judge bent over backwards to give the defense more opportunities to exclude potentially bad jurors even if the juror didn’t meet the technical criteria for a challenge,” said Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law...All three experts interviewed by USA TODAY agreed that Chauvin received a fair trial. Harvard Law's Sullivan said an appellate court would have to determine if any of Chauvin’s challenges were “outcome determinative,” meaning that if those scenarios were different during the trial, it would have led to a different conclusion. While the defense might be able to argue, for example, that the judge gave prosecutors too much latitude in allowing lay witnesses to testify as experts, Sullivan said, it’s unlikely to succeed. “I think it was a clean trial,” said Sullivan.

Professor Emily Broad Leib reads the statistics about the 1 billion people going hungry every year—and 1.3 billion tons of food going unused—and shakes her head. It’s not that the numbers are especially surprising. As the faculty director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, Broad Leib is well versed in the eye-popping facts: In the U.S. alone, 35 percent of the 229 million tons of food available go unsold or uneaten—that’s $408 billion worth of food, according to ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste. Uneaten food is also responsible for 18 percent of all cropland use, 14 percent of all fresh water use, 24 percent of landfill inputs, and 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas. “The scale of this problem is huge—and it’s actually a really stupid problem,” says Broad Leib. “The fact that there are so many people in this country going without food and at the same time, we are wasting so much? It needs to change.”

Here is the Radio Boston rundown for April 21. Tiziana Dearing is our host. Today we spend the hour discussing police accountability and reform, and how the guilty verdict in the murder trial of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, for killing George Floyd is resonating in our community...We touch on the legal implications of the guilty verdict against Derek Chauvin with Kimberly Atkins, senior opinion writer for The Boston Globe, and Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR Legal Analyst. Listener callers join Imari Paris Jeffries, Executive Director of King Boston, and Kimberly Atkins, senior opinion writer for The Boston Globe, to discuss how this verdict is resonating around our community, and what it means for police reform locally and nationally.

After a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty on three charges of murder and manslaughter, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged Wednesday to investigate the entire Minneapolis, Minnesota, police department. Meanwhile, an Ohio officer’s fatal shooting of a 16-year-old-girl Black girl on Tuesday spurred more nationwide debate over policing. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins and Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan joined Jim Braude to discuss.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A group of House conservatives have been discussing an “America First Caucus” that would aim to protect and advance what they call “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” On the surface, the words “Anglo-Saxon” seem like a euphemism for “White.” Read this way, the words aren’t a racist dog whistle that can be heard only by some. They’re just a plain old whistle, obviously racist to anyone who has ears. But as it turns out, the idea of specifically Saxon political traditions also has a deeper history. This one is connected to an enduring myth about the American constitutional tradition: that it ultimately traces its roots to an ancient Saxon — that is, German — tradition of hardy self-government by unruly tribes. In the 19th century, the idea of the Saxon constitution acquired a shameful association not only with so-called scientific racism but also with anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant xenophobia. It is true that English constitutional development after the Norman conquest of England in 1066 had some continuity with what came before. For centuries, scholars have debated how much of medieval constitutional thought survived the major political changes that accompanied Norman rule by French speakers.

For the April meeting of The Diane Rehm Book Club, Diane and guests discuss "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," by Isabel Wilkerson. She is joined by Kenneth Mack, professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University and author of "Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer"; Suraj Yengde, author of the "Caste Matters" and co-editor of the anthology "The Radical in Ambedkar" and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Dwight Garner, book critic for The New York Times.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: The jury trial as we know it evolved from a medieval English practice in which jurors were people in the neighborhood who were already familiar with the parties or the events at issue. They were chosen precisely because they represented the local community’s knowledge of the case. Today, a “jury of one’s peers” consists of fellow-citizens whom we instead ask, ideally, to serve as blank slates: they are chosen for their lack of connection to the events and the ability to put prior views and influences aside in examining the evidence that is presented, and sometimes even dramatized, at trial. On Tuesday, after ten hours of deliberation over the course of two days, a Minneapolis jury found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter, for killing George Floyd, last May. In many ways, it was a conventional trial, in which eyewitnesses testified and experts weighed in on the disputed facts. Yet it called to mind a bygone mode in which the jury’s role was grounded in the act of witnessing.

The historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s “On Juneteenth” is an unexpected book. She’s best known for her work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson had multiple children — a once controversial thesis that’s now accepted as historical fact in large part because of Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. She has written before about the need for historians to maintain a certain distance from the people they write about, to see “the complexity and contradictions” that might otherwise get crushed in an overzealous embrace. In “On Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed identifies quite closely with her subject — and only a sliver of the book is directly about Juneteenth itself. But if this book is a departure for her, it’s still guided by the humane skepticism that has animated her previous work. In a series of short, moving essays, she explores “the long road” to June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in Texas, the state where Gordon-Reed was born and raised.

Former police Officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on Tuesday for murdering George Floyd. But the verdict did little more than save George Floyd's family from suffering more injustice, says Harvard law professor Alan Jenkins. "The absence of injustice is not the same as justice," Jenkins tells CBSN's Elaine Quijano.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Noah Feldman has a lot of questions about cryptocurrency. Is it currency or is it an asset? How should governments regulate it? Is it sustainable? Crypto pioneer Bobby Lee, co-founder and former CEO of China’s first bitcoin exchange and current CEO of Ballet, a startup that helps people securely store their crypto assets, weights in on the most pressing questions about crypto.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The jury that convicted Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd got it right. In the wake of a verdict like this one, it is almost instinctual to suggest that the jury spoke on behalf of the American people, striking a blow for racial justice. But although jury verdicts are often infused with meaning, this kind of interpretation ought to be approached with caution. We won’t know whether this moment marks a turning point for many years to come. The temptation to treat a jury verdict in a big case as symbolic stems, I think, from our powerful human tendency to use individual stories as metaphors in order to make sense of the world around us. Faced with a nationally prominent incident like the murder of George Floyd, our inclination is to say that the jury’s decision is a leading indicator of where our nation is going. And it’s true that as an institution, a jury can be understood to express popular sentiment. Yet any specific jury isn’t a cross-section of the American public. It’s just 12 people, asked to render a verdict on the facts and law presented to them.

An op-ed by Evelyn Douek: On Monday, Facebook vowed that its staff was “working around the clock” to identify and restrict posts that could lead to unrest or violence after a verdict was announced in the murder trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In a blog post, the company promised to remove “content that praises, celebrates or mocks” the death of George Floyd. Most of the company’s statement amounted to pinky-swearing to really, really enforce its existing community standards, which have long prohibited bullying, hate speech, and incitements to violence. Buried in the post was something less humdrum, though: “As we have done in emergency situations in the past,” declared Monika Bickert, the company’s vice president of content policy, “we may also limit the spread of content that our systems predict is likely to violate our Community Standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.” Translation: Facebook might turn down the dial on toxic content for a little while. Which raises some questions: Facebook has a toxic-content dial? If so, which level is it set at on a typical day? On a scale of one to 10, is the toxicity level usually a five—or does it go all the way up to 11?

The non-fungible token (NFT) craze, which took off in 2020, appears to continue unabated. NFTs are digital “certificates of authenticity” that attach to creations like songs, photos and sports clips, and they can command hefty prices. An NFT of digital artist Beeple’s work brought in $69 million at auction last month, and other NFTs are being sold for similarly eyebrow-raising sums. And demand is showing no sign of declining despite what law professor Jonathan Zittrain in a recent Atlantic piece calls “their abstraction, their seemingly arbitrary valuation, and...the paltriness of the privileges they convey to their owners.” We talk to Zittrain about the future of NFTs.

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.