Media Mentions

Lawrence Lessig, Sue Gardner and others explain how and why American broadcast news became increasingly polarized.

A study examining the effect of declining to prosecute lower-level nonviolent offenses — a signature policy adopted by Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins that has drawn both praise and scorn — suggests the approach leads to significantly less future involvement by those defendants in the criminal justice system. The new study, which looked at cases handled by the Suffolk County DA’s office going back to 2004, found that those defendants not prosecuted for lower-level misdemeanor cases were 58 percent less likely to face a criminal complaint over the following two years than those who faced prosecution for similar charges...Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has extensively studied the prosecution of misdemeanor offenses, said the study “gives empirical teeth to just how costly and counterproductive low-level misdemeanor arrests and court criminal convictions can be.” Natapoff, author of the 2018 book ‘Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal’, said we have paid far too little attention to the harmful impact on individuals and communities of prosecuting misdemeanors, which account for 80 percent of all criminal cases in the US.

The federal government's response to Covid-19 has allowed millions of Americans to defer payments on their mortgages, rent, student loans and utility bills. But as more people are vaccinated and the country sees a return to normal life on the horizon, payments on trillions of dollars of those debts could resume soon, even if debtors remain out of work or in financial distress because of the economic crisis the outbreak wrought... "As the pandemic winds down, there is a lot of debt overhang: deferred rent, deferred mortgages, deferred student loans. We've basically been living in suspended animation until the pandemic ends," said Harvard Law School professor Howell Jackson, an expert on financial regulation and consumer protection who was a visiting scholar at the CFPB from 2013 to 2015. "And at some point there is going to be an extraordinary number of people out there who are very vulnerable with debt, and we are going to have major debt collection issues," he said. "We have already seen issues during the pandemic with payday lenders." ... Jackson of Harvard said many debts also have statutes of limitation and become invalid after a certain period of time. "It's critical to make sure consumers know they have rights in this area," he said. "There are a lot of substantive protections in the debt collection space."

All eyes are on Facebook’s oversight board, which is expected to decide in the next few weeks if former President Donald Trump will be allowed back on Facebook. But some critics — and at least one member — of the independent decision-making group say the board has more important responsibilities than individual content moderation decisions like banning Trump. They want it to have oversight over Facebook’s core design and algorithms...When it comes to Facebook’s fundamental design and the content it prioritizes and promotes to users, all the board can do right now is make recommendations. Some say that’s a problem. “The jurisdiction that Facebook has currently given it is way too narrow,” Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who analyzes social media content moderation policies, told Recode. “If it’s going to have any meaningful impact at all and actually do any good, [the oversight board] needs to have a much broader remit and be able to look at the design of the platform and a bunch of those systems behind what leads to the individual pieces of content in question.”

The performer Derek DelGaudio—he’s a little uneasy with the label “magician”—talks with Michael Schulman about the nature of deception, onstage and in life. Jelani Cobb and Jeannie Suk Gersen discuss the most important measure on voting rights since 1965, and its uncertain fate in the Senate and possibly the Supreme Court. Plus, a scholar considers how trans rights look different through an African lens.

Planet Money listeners email, tweet, and DM us questions about the economy every day. Everything from big-hitter "what does it all mean" questions to everyday economic oddities. Today on the show, we call the experts, crunch the numbers, and come back with the answers to questions about vaccines, canned tuna, scrap metal, and every dollar in the world. Featuring Carmel Shachar.

Environmental policy has emerged as a primary target for conservative attorneys general looking to keep the Biden agenda in check, the latest battleground in a long-running conflict over the scope of federal regulation. Republican-led states have filed a half-dozen lawsuits against the administration so far, with the three biggest actions focused on the White House’s energy and climate policies...The latest of those cases arose Wednesday as Louisiana and 12 other states suedthe Biden administration over a federal oil and gas leasing pause, while Wyoming filed its own case. Earlier in the month, Texas led a 21-state coalition in a challenge to President Joe Biden’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, and Missouri and 11 others sued over the administration’s reworked metric for climate impacts. Those are the first multistate coalition lawsuits filed against Biden. “This is a strong indicator that we will see aggressive litigation from Republican AGs challenging the Biden administration’s climate and air regulations,” said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

He had already been banned from Twitter, but on his podcast he could give full voice to his hateful conspiracy theories...The remarks, emblematic of a longstanding online network of white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups, weren’t hidden in some dark corner of the internet, but could be found on Google Podcasts, the search giant’s official podcast app that was released for Android in 2018 and expanded to Apple devices last year. As leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter have taken some steps to limit hate speech, misinformation and incitements to violence in recent months, podcasts — historically fueled by a spirit of good-natured anarchy — stand as one of the last remaining platforms for the de-platformed...Jessica Fjeld, the assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said she was surprised that Google had taken such a “hard-line” posture against regulating its platform. She compared Google Podcasts’ positioning to that of Parler, the largely unregulated social network that was a hotbed for disinformation and extremist groups before the largest tech companies turned away from it. “Google is perfectly well aware of how to moderate content if it cares to,” said Ms. Fjeld. “It seems like they’ve made a decision to embrace an audience that wants more offensive content rather than constrain that content for the sake of safety and respect.”

We’ve seen it all before: A congressional panel is hauling the CEOs of some of the world’s most influential tech companies to answer for their purported misdeeds. But House Energy and Commerce leaders say this time, things will be different: They are serious about legislating around issues of online extremism, including by targeting tech’s liability shield, Section 230...Roughly one month out from the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on whether to let Trump back onto the platform, a wider battle is already swirling around the group of outside experts: Can they create a global standard for free speech on the world’s largest social network? ... “The Board is applying international human rights law to Facebook as if it was a country. That’s impossible,” Evelyn Douek, an online content expert at Harvard, told Mark. “It’s the first body that’s using international human rights law to make content decisions. Now that we’re getting down to brass tacks, it’s difficult.”

Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual and provocateur—and he has been pondering a timely issue: public lying. A longtime Harvard law professor and an expert on behavioral economics, Sunstein has written a slew of books, including volumes on cost-benefit analysis, conspiracy theories, animal rights, authoritarianism in the United States, decision-making, and Star Wars. He was recently named senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he will oversee the Biden administration’s rollback of Donald Trump’s policies. But right before he rejoined the federal government, he released his latest work: Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. The book is certainly a product of the Trump era, a stretch in which the “former guy” made 30,583 false or misleading claims while serving as president, according to the Washington Post. All his lying kind of worked. Donald Trump was elected despite—or because—of his serial falsehood-flinging. He nearly won reelection after his tsunami of truth-trashing. And after the election, Trump promoted the Big Lie that victory had been stolen from him, and his crusade triggered an insurrectionist raid on the Capitol that threatened the certification of the electoral vote count. After all that—and after Trump’s misleading statements about the COVID-19 pandemic led to the preventable of deaths hundreds of thousands of Americans—Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and a hero for tens of millions of Americans.

Insurance companies have spent $17 million to defeat proposals to weaken or abolish the for-profit bail industry in the United States, a system that brings insurers $15 billion in business a year, according to a Reuters analysis of campaign contributions, company financial statements and interviews with more than three dozens experts on criminal justice, campaign finance or bail. The spending has jumped more than 10-fold since 2010 as insurers have led the industry’s lobbying effort, targeting laws in more than a dozen states, the analysis shows. The industry opposition comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats have renewed calls to dismantle what they describe as a biased system that harms mostly low-income people...The coalition’s most recent success was in California, the nation’s biggest bail market, home to 3,200 bail agents and 21 bail insurers. In 2018, the state passed a law, known as SB-10, to replace cash bail with a system that would give judges - aided by a computer algorithm - discretion to decide which defendants posed a danger or flight risk. Most minor offenses would not require the assessment. Such minor offenses, known as misdemeanors, account for about 80% of U.S. criminal cases filed annually - and thus the bulk of detention and bail decisions, said Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied the extent and impact of such arrests.

Tesla Inc. repeatedly violated U.S. labor law, including by firing a union activist, and must make Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk delete a threatening tweet from his account, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Thursday. The ruling, issued by two Republican and one Democratic member of the agency, states that the electric-car makermust offer to reinstate the fired employee. The board members also ruled that Tesla broke the law by retaliating against another union activist, “coercively interrogating” union supporters and restricting employees from talking to reporters...The administrative law judge ruled that Musk should be required to attend a meeting at which either he or a labor board representative would read employees a notice about their rights, but in Thursday’s decision the agency rejected that remedy and said instead that posting a written notice would be sufficient...Posting a written notice sends a much weaker signal to employees than making executives read it aloud, said Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, who suggested that forcing Musk to post the notice on his Twitter account would also have been a more fitting remedy. When executives have to read the notice to employees, he said, it shows workers “that the boss is not the only authority in the world -- that the law is a higher authority than the boss.”

As soon as she tapped the link, Kristin Thornburg knew something was amiss. It was earlier this month, and Thornburg, 31, had been strategizing with a friend via text to try to get leftover doses of the coronavirus vaccine...The friend sent over a link to an unfamiliar page and said she had signed up there. An acquaintance had gotten a vaccine that way, the friend said. Perhaps Thornburg should sign up, too. But it was not just a way to get leftovers. “At first I thought I had gotten it wrong, because it was obviously an appointment sign-up page,” said Thornburg, a business manager at a start-up. After her name, the form asked her to identify which qualifying condition or occupation she had...The blame for some of the heartache should land partly on the vaccine distribution system, according to Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Certainly, those perfectly healthy people who lie on their intake forms “should not feel good about themselves,” Shachar said. “Ultimately, the prioritization schemes are well-intentioned and do serve a valuable purpose, in that we’re trying to find people who are uniquely vulnerable.” But Shachar does sympathize with those tempted to fib about a health problem or use an old address to qualify for a vaccine — especially when different areas have different rules. “The more you finely slice and dice prioritization categories and do certain occupations but not others, the more you risk somebody saying, ‘Well, there’s no benefit to me for waiting, and the system is not looking out for my interest,’ ” Shachar said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: House Democrats are poised to vote for Washington, D.C. statehood. As in the past, the proposal is being met with total Republican opposition. What’s different this time is that a growing number of Democrats aren’t ready to accept the Republican “no” as final. If Senate Democrats kill the filibuster, the party could admit D.C. as a state and thus seat two new, presumably Democratic senators. The filibuster lets Republicans block D.C. statehood even if, as Senator Joe Manchin has suggested, the rule is tweaked so that a senator actually has to keep talking — like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The prospect of D.C. statehood would certainly motivate Republicans to new levels of verbal stamina. That means that for D.C. to become a state, either Manchin would have to drop his opposition to eliminating the filibuster entirely, or Democrats would have to pick up more seats in 2022. Say one of those things happened, and D.C. became a state. What’s to stop Republicans from seeking to add Senate seats when they return to power — for example, by sub-dividing solidly red states? If it sounds crazy, it shouldn’t. The admission of new states has a turbulent history in the U.S.

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made no secret of her disdain for a program intended to forgive the federal student loans of borrowers who were ripped off by schools that defrauded their students...Nearly 95 percent of the borrowers in the case whose claims were decided were rejected, according to court filings. Most — if not all — of the claims that were approved involved applications that the agency was compelled to grant because of precedents created before Ms. DeVos took office... Reviewers were under significant pressure to quickly process claims, the new documents show. To clear its backlog, the agency hired dozens of employees and contract lawyers. Their assigned goal was to review at least five cases per hour. Those who did more could earn extra cash and time off. Those who did less were placed on “heightened monitoring” by their managers and subject to remedial action, including termination. Officially, that system remains in place, said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation for the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents the borrowers in the class-action case. Applicants will have no hope of prevailing until the department dismantles its assembly-line approach and gives applications the consideration they deserve, she said. “There was this whole infrastructure set up to process claims without really contending with them,” Ms. Connor said.

Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system? Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, argues in a series of essays and a book, “Unstable Majorities,” that it is the structure of the two-party system that prevents the center — the moderate majority of American voters — from asserting their dominion over national politics...Fiorina has many allies and many critics in the academic community. Those in general agreement include Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard and a contributing writer to The New Yorker, who wrote in an email: “The fact that Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee and won the presidency in 2020, when there were many great candidates left of him, is evidence that a political center is not only viable but desired by the public.” For a centrist candidate, Gersen argued, “the main principle is compromise rather than all or nothing.” In the case of abortion, for example, the principle of compromise recognizes that the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal, but also favor some limits on abortion. Retaining a core right of abortion that respects both autonomy of adult individuals to make reproductive decisions and the value of potential fetal life is the approach that will seem acceptable to the majority of Americans and consistent with the Constitution.”

YouTube videos are a critical source of online misinformation, yet they often get a pass in broader discussions about the dangers of social media. Even in Congress. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has never had to appear alongside other social media executives for a Capitol Hill grilling, and she will not be in attendance on Thursday when Congress questions top tech executives for the first time since the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks... “There have been hearings where you can’t count on one hand the number of questions about YouTube, which is ridiculous given the level of impact,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who researches online speech...YouTube has massive influence over Americans' media consumption. YouTube has the highest reach of any platform among American adults, with 73 percent of Americans reporting they use the platform in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Facebook is the only social network that comes even close to YouTube's reach, with 69 percent of Americans reporting they use it...That's problematic because YouTube faces unique challenges in detecting and removing disinformation and extremism from its platform. It's technically more challenging and time- consuming to comb through videos than to simply search for terms in text. “I do not understand why she hasn’t been called,” Douek said. “There is no question that Jack Dorsey should have to answer that she shouldn’t.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation. Her lawyers have entered a truly astonishing defense: that her statements alleging the Democratic Party stole the election using the company’s vote counting software can’t be defamation because no reasonable person would have believed them. The defense is legally wrong. Her statements were clearly assertions of fact — and they were believed by many members of the public. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating argument — an acknowledgement that any claim associated with Trump could be considered mere bluster, even when framed in factual terms. In short, Powell’s defense is to throw Trump under the bus. The basic idea: He is such a known liar that any assertion made on his behalf in an election can’t be taken as remotely plausible. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, for statements to count as defamation, they must be susceptible of being proven true or false. Opinion statements are protected by the First Amendment from being made subject to libel law. Political opinion is especially protected.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Britney Spears’ former lawyer Adam Streisand goes deep into the details of Britney’s conservatorship. He discusses his role in her case and his concerns about how her conservatorship. He also explains the potential conflicts inherent to the conservatorship system and ways it can be misused.

The US Supreme Court said Monday it will consider restoring the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, granting a petition by the Trump administration and creating a dilemma for President Biden, who has pledged to seek an end to federal executions. The high court’s decision to review the case, likely in the fall, evoked painful memories of the deadly terrorist attack and renewed the wrenching debate over whether Tsarnaev should be put to death...In taking up the case, the Supreme Court could affirm the appellate court ruling, which ordered a new trial to determine whether Tsarnaev, 27, will be put to death or spend the rest of his life in prison, or reinstate the original death sentence. “The judges always have the same two options: affirm or reverse,” Carol S. Steiker, a Harvard Law professor who co-directs the law school’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, wrote in an e-mail. “They could affirm the Court of Appeals, in which case the order for a new sentencing trial would stand. Or they could reverse, in which case, Tsarnaev’s death sentence would remain undisturbed.” Steiker, the co-author of “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” said federal prosecutors could abandon the Trump administration request and concede in court papers that the Appeals Court ruling was correct. Biden could also commute Tsarnaev’s death sentence, which would render any ruling by the Supreme Court moot.

A judge has sided with opponents of the renaming of 44 San Francisco schools in a lawsuit that has drawn Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe to help represent them. San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman, in a Thursday decision, ordered the school board to rescind its resolution ordering 44 city schools renamed. The school board vote in January said the schools, named after historical figures or locations, have connections to slavery, racism or oppression...Tribe, who attended Lincoln High School, said the resolution has the effect of “branding alumni of schools as racist” and said it was “absurd” to brand President Abraham Lincoln as a racist. “To say Abraham Lincoln, we will just revile him from now on, is just bogus,” Tribe added in a phone interview Friday. The board’s action not only violates the state Brown Act but also the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, he said. Tribe conceded the claim was “an unusual application of the Brown Act” and said the resolution would have been “silly but not illegal” if adequate notice had been given.