Media Mentions

An op-ed by Catharine A. MacKinnon: We are living in the world pornography has made. For more than three decades, researchers have documented that it desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths and other lies about women’s sexuality. In doing so, it normalizes itself, becoming ever more pervasive, intrusive and dangerous, surrounding us ever more intimately, grooming the culture so that it becomes hard even to recognize its harms. ... “Sex work” implies that prostituted people really want to do what they have virtually no choice in doing. That their poverty, homelessness, prior sexual abuse as children, subjection to racism, exclusion from gainful occupations or unequal pay plays no role. That they are who the pornography says they are, valuable only for use in it.

Federal officials want to hear from citizens regarding the labeling of meat and poultry products that are made by using cultured cells. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service is looking for feedback ahead of proposed rulemaking regarding such products. According to a release, the FSIS is considering have meats cultured from the cells derived from animals under its jurisdiction. The service will be using comments it receives to inform its future regulatory requirements for the labeling of such food products. ... FSIS says it has already received thousands of comments on this topic following a joint public meeting with the FDA in 2018 as well as two petitions for rulemaking it received from the U.S. Cattleman's Association and the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic.

era of businesses being able to operate as apolitical entities — and the days when customers and employees expected them to do so — have passed. Over the past couple of years, corporate chiefs have become more vocal, and more emboldened in their opinions. CEOs have announced racial equity and diversity initiatives, condemned the Capitol riot, recognized Juneteenth as a holiday, opposed state-level voting legislation and “bathroom bills” targeting transgender individuals. ... “For years, corporate executives kind of perfected the art of getting involved in the political sphere for a very narrow purpose,” generally advocating for or against regulations that would impact their business operations,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

We asked staff members at Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, Frugal Bookstore, Brookline Booksmith, and Trident Booksellers & Café for the titles they’re most excited to dive into this season. ... “Say It Loud!” by Randall Kennedy (Sept. 7) Cropper said she is excited for the release of this collection of 29 essays from Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School. The book includes both previously published and new pieces that explore race and social justice in America. “It’s his thoughts on the realities and what he imagines on race in America,” Cropper said. “It’s his personal essays on race, on culture, on history, on law.”

An Oregon state panel charged with advising on the implementation of a legal psilocybin therapy program has cleared a team of researchers to produce a comprehensive report on the science, history and culture of the psychedelic as regulators prepare to license facilities to administer it. Members of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board released an initial report in July that reviewed hundreds of studies into psilocybin, as required under the state’s historic, voter-approved 2020 medical legalization initiative. But they were pressed for time and will now be working with a recently established psychedelic research center at Harvard Law School to more thoroughly cover the subject. ... “To the extent that the [Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications] Report can help inform their decision making, it should be  made available for that purpose,” [Mason] Marks, who is also the director of Harvard’s first-of-its-kind psychedelics policy center, said. “Hopefully, it can provide a bit of a roadmap for fruitful collaboration between states and the federal government.”

Book review: Randall Kennedy dismisses claims that American university campuses are racist. He assails the sanctification of Malcolm X, saying that his most prominent biographer, the late Columbia University professor Manning Marable, “accords his hero a stature in memory that he lacked in history.” Kennedy is against taking names off buildings because the person in question was a racist, and questions identity based on race rather than individuality. To those who decry the “respectability politics” of calling for Black people to maintain mainstream standards of behavior, Kennedy ripostes that this kind of discipline has indeed benefited Black people in the past — there was nothing “street” about most civil rights leaders of yore, for example, and they liked it that way. Why, then, is Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard Law School, not typically included on the list of Black conservatives or even “heterodox Black thinkers,” to use the currently fashionable term of art? The anthology “Say It Loud!” teaches us why. This collection of 29 of his essays lends us the fullest portrait yet between two covers of Kennedy’s thought, and just as much of it fits the mold of Black thought traditionally treated as “authentic” as does not.

A column by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt observed the early tendency of a totalitarian regime to draft private citizens to conduct “voluntary espionage,” so that “a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy than officially appointed police agents.” Echoes of this fear could be felt in the dissents from the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday not to block enforcement of a Texas law that prohibits abortion after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy. The statute, enacted in May, authorizes citizens to file a lawsuit against a party that performs or even unintentionally “aids or abets” such an abortion, and to exact damages of at least ten thousand dollars for each forbidden abortion from that defendant if they win the case. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissenting opinion, “The Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan also dissented; each penned dissenting opinions emphasizing the novel structure of the legislation, which delegates enforcement to members of the general populace.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: The Texas legislature and five Supreme Court justices have joined forces to eviscerate women’s abortion rights — the legislature by creating and the justices by leaving in place a system of private bounties designed to intimidate all who would help women exercise the right to choose. But the federal government has — and should use — its own powers, including criminal prosecution, to prevent the law from being enforced and to reduce its chilling effects. Of course, the best approach would be for Congress to codify the right to abortion in federal law, although Democrats likely lack the votes to make that happen — and there is a risk that this conservative Supreme Court would find that such a statute exceeded Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause.

A public university official in Massachusetts has been turning down all requests from Catholic students for a religious exemption from the school’s coronavirus vaccine requirement, based on his research into Catholic teachings. ...Laurence Tribe, a retired Harvard Law School professor who has frequently argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, said he believes UMass Boston “has clearly violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Tribe said the government is within its rights to make no exceptions for religion when it comes to rules governing health and safety — but that once it allows for religious exemptions to a rule, the government can’t be the decider on what the religion teaches. “It’s one thing to say that our general rules allow no religious exceptions and quite another to say, ‘If the Catholic faith truly taught what you say it does, then you’d be fine,’” Tribe said. “That’s a government official interpreting a religion. That’s clearly unconstitutional and deeply offensive.”

Big Four accountancy firms have abandoned plans to ‘be like law firms only bigger’, instead focusing on work that traditional City firms turn down in a drive to disrupt the market, a report has found. ...‘The Big Four can offer a far higher integration of technology, project management and process management; they employ a huge number of people across a huge range of specialties and they are way more global than even the most global law firm,' said report author David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School. 'This is why, for many kinds of issues that companies face, it’s a very attractive offering'.  

You've come to know retired federal judge Nancy Gertner here on the show over the years. We turn to her to help us comb out all things legal, and to be our guide through the morass that can sometimes be the criminal justice system. Well it turns out, she's been struggling with some legal demons herself, and she wound up turning to people she'd sentenced to help her sort them out. She tells that story in her upcoming book, Incomplete Sentences.

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe about the Texas anti-abortion bill that the Supreme Court refused to block.. ..."Well, it is truly stunning. ... But as Justice Sotomayor said, it simply cannot be the case. Although, five justices say they think it is. It cannot be the case that the state can pass a flagrantly unconstitutional law, unconstitutional unless and until Roe v. Wade is formally overturned, and then avoid any judicial review by deputizing strangers, total strangers. And they don`t have to be Texans. They can be from California. They can be from France. The law clearly allows anyone on the Planet Earth to come into Texas court during, as you say, that four-year period after an abortion and get $10,000 from anyone, friend, a neighbor, the ex-lover, the Uber driver, the person who funded the abortion, anybody who was involved in the abortion, unless somehow the evidence is accumulated that there was no heartbeat. That is not only stunning, it is abominable. It`s breathtaking."

In response to the Seattle City Council’s request for policy advice on how to curb overdose deaths, a local task force is recommending the widespread decriminalization of all drugs. Psychedelics in particular, the group said, could be a promising treatment to address substance use disorders and mental health issues....Mason Marks, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation and a member of Oregon’s official state advisory board for that state’s psilocybin therapy program, called the recommendations “an important step for Seattle to help address its overdose and mental health crisis.” “The City Council can now act confidently on this timely, evidence-based recommendation,” he added.

The USDA’s  Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) Thursday published an advance notice of a proposed rulemaking (ANPR) to solicit comments and information regarding the labeling of lab-grown “meat and poultry products ” made by using cultured cells derived from animals under FSIS jurisdiction. ...The FSIS already has received thousands of comments on the topic, in response to a 2018 joint public meeting with FDA and regarding two petitions for rulemaking — from the United States Cattlemen’s Association and Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic. The agency, however, needs specific types of comments and information that will inform the process of developing labeling regulations for meat and poultry products made using animal cell culture technology.

The Supreme Court late Wednesday night took a break from its summer recess to allow the most restrictive abortion law in the nation to take effect in Texas, raising alarm among people who support abortion rights — and even some who don’t. ... Supporters of abortion rights have noted that it is still within the Democratic Party’s power to enshrine abortion rights in law: After all, Democrats still control two branches of government, Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor, points out: Last year, candidate Biden promised that he would pass legislation to make Roe “the law of the land.” Now’s his chance. Congress has many, many options for overruling Texas and protecting reproductive justice nationwide—starting with the Women’s Health Protection Act.

Legal experts offered a variety of predictions Thursday on whether the US Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a woman’s constitutional right to get an abortion. At least five and maybe six of the justices on the nine-member court are “ready to overturn Roe and its legacy,” said Mark Tushnet, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor. “I think it was clear with the appointment of Justice [Amy Coney] Barrett that there was a firm majority to repudiate the court’s abortion-related jurisprudence.” But other experts were less sure of how the high court will rule or suggested it would move incrementally, rather than make a sweeping move.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: For years, as the supreme court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well. Observers have speculated how today’s new ultra-right court would commence the slicing: by chipping away slowly at Roe v Wade? Or by taking the political heat and overruling it outright? Few imagined that the court would let a statute everybody concedes is flagrantly unconstitutional under the legal regime of Roe not only go into effect without being judicially reviewed but become the centerpiece of a totally unique state scheme that puts a bounty of at least $10,000 on the head of every woman who is or might be pregnant.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A day after the Constitution-flouting Texas antiabortion law went into effect, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that it won’t block the law before it can grapple with a concrete case that tests it in practice. The five most conservative justices agreed to an unsigned, one-and-a-half-page opinion that said the law might or might not be unconstitutional, but that given its unusual form, which delegates enforcement to private citizens instead of state authorities, it was too legally complicated to issue an emergency injunction blocking the law. In four separate dissents, the three liberals plus Chief Justice John Roberts said the law should have been blocked anyway. Every nonlawyer on the planet — and no doubt a few lawyers, too — is likely to read this outcome as prefiguring a 5-to-4 vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent that made abortion a constitutional right. Later this year, the court will address a Mississippi antiabortion law that lacks the cleverly diabolical enforcement mechanism of the Texas law but is equally unconstitutional. Indeed, the day after the law went into effect and before the Supreme Court ruled, many non-lawyers who were so unfamiliar with court procedures that they didn’t know it would eventually issue a ruling on the Texas law had already concluded that they knew how the upcoming Mississippi case would come out.

A Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect on Wednesday after the United States Supreme Court chose not to enjoin it from being enforced. ... In the absence of Supreme Court intervention, many were urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to address the situation in Texas. “Last year, candidate Biden promised that he would pass legislation to make Roe ‘the law of the land.’ Now’s his chance,” said Niko Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School.

...Nationwide, Black parents are reporting their challenging experiences with their kids in public, private and charter schools, prompting many to reconsider their educational options. Data show that, facing racism at school, bias from some teachers and curriculums that parents deem inadequate, more Black families than ever are choosing to home-school their children. ...Still, some parents and educators criticize home schooling. For example, last year in the Arizona Law Review, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet warned that a “lack of regulation in the homeschooling system poses a threat to children and society.” However, advocates like Taylor said home schooling, if done with deliberation, can allow parents to help their children reach their full potential.

It’s the stuff Hollywood movies are made of: In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes created a startup with audacious claims that through a simple blood test, she could revolutionize medicine. The only problem? The technology did not work, and Holmes now faces trial for fraud. Here & Now‘s Tonya Mosley talks with retired Judge and current Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner about Holmes’ legal defense.