Media Mentions

It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine. The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate. It is a document that has existed for more than two centuries, but it has rarely promised to hold so much power over culture and commerce. Many versions of these certificates now come with a digital twist. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a pandemic that has impacted every facet of society so thoroughly, and then a vaccine,” said Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “There is no precedent since 1918, and we definitely didn’t have smartphones in 1918.” Ramesh Raskar, a professor at M.I.T. Media Lab, has been leading an effort to develop a solution that includes both a paper certificate that anyone can easily carry as well as a free digital pass that works even without cell service.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: On Monday, the Supreme Court grappled with a genuinely tough First Amendment issue: Should California be able to make charities that speak on matters of public concern disclose to the state the names of their big donors? The issue reveals something about the way that conservatives and liberals currently differ on free speech issues. On the one hand, states might need the information to combat fraud. Moreover, California says that it will keep the information confidential. The IRS already gets this information from tax-exempt charities, and has so far done a good job of protecting it. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has long held that the names of members of civic organizations like the NAACP are confidential, protected by the freedom of association. It isn’t implausible to think that if the justices uphold the California law, other states might pass laws requiring that donors be made fully public. When the justices were deciding whether to hear the case, Trump’s Department of Justice filed a friend of the court brief saying it thought the law was unconstitutional. This matched the instinct of most legal conservatives, who today tend to support a First Amendment that is highly protective of absolute free speech, including protection of anonymity.

The Supreme Judicial Court in recent years has gone to great lengths to adjust the lens through which police interactions with people of color should be viewed. But the Appeals Court has not gotten the message, a coalition of criminal defense and community groups argue in a series of letters urging the SJC to grant further...The case bears at least a couple of the hallmarks of cases involving dubious pat frisks, according to the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, the New England Innocence Project, the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others...But whether it is conscious or subconscious, the police tend to muddy the waters with the language they use, said Katharine Naples-Mitchell, counsel for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute. In both Garner and Karen K., part of what the Appeals Court found justified the search was the defendants’ “bladed” stances as they walked away from police. That was interpreted as an attempt to shield a firearm in their waistbands. But the groups note in their letter that the police jargon “blading” “sounds far more intimidating, aggressive, dangerous, and intentional than the alternate descriptor, ‘turning away from.’”

The Harvard Law School Environmental & Energy Legal Program, also known as EELP, tracks and analyzes federal environmental regulation and policy and relies on significant support from its student research assistants. As the program moves from tracking rollbacks from the Trump administration that limited government action on climate change to focusing on the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to climate action, HLS students have dug into how the prior administration’s actions will impact the new administration’s goals and analyzed environmental regulatory changes that have real impacts on people’s lives. Almost 30 students worked with EELP this academic year. Twelve of them and their research are highlighted below. They represent just a small fraction of  the students who have worked with the program over the past few years. Sungjoo Ahn ’21, Lia Cattaneo ’22, Peter Daniels ’21, Daniel Eyal ’23, Jake Hummer ’22, Cole Jermyn ’21, Peter Kalicki ’22, David Kidd ’23, Ozzy Rodriguez ’22, Ari Sillman ’21, Annalise Wagner ’23, Lindsay Williams ’23.

North Carolina is one of the nation’s largest producers of pork. The industry is primarily centered in agricultural portions of Eastern North Carolina, home to a number of Black and Indigenous communities, and a surging Latinx population...The coexistence of air pollutants and communities of color isn’t an anomaly, says Hannah Perls, J.D. ’20, but is representative of the environmental injustices that many communities of color across America live with... “There’s that great saying – the system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as it was designed,” she says. “Often environmental justice communities live at the intersection of several inequitable and interlocking systems and ideologies: racism, capitalism, and white supremacy, among others.” ... “Environmental justice means that you need involvement and participation of peoples of all colors and all income levels in the development, implementation, and enforcement of our protection laws,” says Richard Lazarus, the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law. “This is not supposed to be top-down.” Lazarus, who leads the EELP alongside Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law, has spent much of the past 30 years of his legal career studying and trying to solve the environmental disparities faced by communities of color, and most recently worked on the Biden administration’s transition team and helped elevate the issue to be a top priority for the president.

An article by Tyler Giannini and Emily Ray ‘21: On Feb. 1, 2021, the Myanmar military – the Tatmadaw – shattered the all too brief effort to transition to democracy in Myanmar. Over the past two and a half months, the Tatmadaw has continued its illegitimate effort to undermine the democratic elections from last year and prevent the elected government from taking power. In the face of mass popular opposition and international condemnation, the military has only escalated its use of violence against its own population – systematically stripping away rights and violently attacking protestors and dissidents, reportedly killing over 700 civilians as of Apr. 20, 2021, and detaining more than 3,000. Despite the continued threats and extreme violence, the people of Myanmar have stood their ground and refused to be silenced. On Apr. 16, opponents of the coup from across the political spectrum announced the formation of a National Unity Government (NUG) to resist the military. Just as importantly, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), a grassroots movement aimed at disrupting state functions and crippling the economy in order to undermine the military’s attempt to rule, has been hugely successful in galvanizing collective action since early February.

During the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, journalists were among those leading the charge to eradicate slavery. Two centuries later, they’re continuing to inspire change, with leaders at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and the Boston Globe teaming up to apply the same pressure to ongoing racial injustice. The result: The Emancipator, a platform cofounded by author, historian and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research director Ibram X. Kendi and Boston Globe editorial page editor Bina Venkataraman that will spotlight antiracism practices through the multimedia work of journalists, historians and scholars. Content will include written stories, research and interactive events like roundtables...The team has also recruited an advisory board of journalists and scholars, including the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, Harvard historian and author Annette Gordon-Reed, journalist and immigration rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas and The 19th CEO and editor-in-chief Emily Ramshaw. Members of the founding team also include Dr. Monica Wang, associate director of narrative for the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, and Kimberly Atkins, Boston Globe columnist and MSNBC contributor.

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.