Media Mentions

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.

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it will consider a federal government request to reinstate the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reopening a case at the heart of one of the most terrifying and dramatic chapters in Boston history. It is the latest twist in a long legal battle, and experts on both sides of the court decisions say they hope to avoid retraumatizing the victims’ families and survivors of the deadly 2013 bombing...But Harvard Law School Professor and retired U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner argues the continued pursuit of the death penalty by the federal government in this case runs the same risk. “Given that Mr. Tsarnaev will never leave prison, the government should consider whether continuing to pursue a death sentence for him is unnecessarily traumatizing for the victims’ families and the City of Boston,” said Gertner in a statement. “The First Circuit carefully reviewed Mr. Tsarnaev’s case and concluded that the trial judge made errors that undermined the fairness of his death sentence.”

Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced Monday that their COVID-19 vaccine is 79% effective overall and 100% effective at preventing severe disease, according to preliminary results from U.S. clinical trials. The Biden administration said last week that it will send about 4 million doses of the vaccine to Canada and Mexico, but it’s holding on to several million more, even though the AstraZeneca vaccine is not yet authorized in the U.S. and the administration has already secured more than enough doses of COVID vaccine for everyone in the country... “In a world where COVID is running rampant across the world and not in the United States, unless we’re going to be a fortress nation that’s not going to let anybody travel here ever, you’re going to have variants emerge elsewhere in the world, in such a way that they pose a danger to the United States,” said Glenn Cohen, a professor of health law and bioethics at Harvard Law School. Both healthwise and economically. “If we’re living in a world where large parts of the world don’t get fully vaccinated until 2022 or 2023, those are people who can’t travel to our shores. There are people who will not be able to consume our goods. There are people who will be in situations of political instability and suffering, and there’s going to be major economic loss,” Cohen said.

The Biden administration is working to reassert the government's top consumer watchdog, which was sidelined by President Donald Trump, just as the U.S. economy is showing signs of revving up. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, hollowed out and politicized under Trump after his administration failed to eliminate it outright, is a regulatory agency created by former President Barack Obama in response to the last economic crisis. Democratic lawmakers, consumer finance experts and former CFPB employees say the groundwork is being laid for it to re-emerge as the aggressive enforcement entity it was originally envisioned to be, at a time when millions of Americans face unprecedented financial hurdles resulting from the pandemic...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, said aggressive enforcement of fair-lending statues is one area in which the agency can make a big difference. That would include making sure credit and equity are available to low-income consumers and minorities and ensuring that the emerging financial technology sector is working in a way that benefits those groups, he and other experts said.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: H.R. 1 is poised to be the most important democracy reform enacted by Congress since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in the wake of its passage in the House on a strict party-line vote on March 3, some anxious scholars and pundits worry it cannot pass the Senate and are urging Democrats to pull back. That advice is wholly misguided, both politically and morally. This is not the time to compromise on H.R. 1. It is not time for Democrats to negotiate against themselves. This is the time to make the argument for every facet of H.R. 1 even more strongly. H.R. 1 is an omnibus reform package that covers a wide range of flaws in our current representative democracy. Building on the work of the late representative John Lewis, the bill would assure that every qualified voter had equal freedom to vote, and that no state could deploy complex rules to suppress anyone’s right to participate. It would end the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, increase election security and, for the first time in U.S. history, give candidates for Congress a real opportunity to rely on small contributors alone to fund their campaigns. The bill would also impose substantial ethics regulations on Congress, the Supreme Court and the president. And it would be funded by fines, penalties and settlements from corporate tax, lobbying and financial fraud cases.

On Monday, the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing on H.R. 51, a bill that would grant statehood to the District of Columbia...On Friday, however, Biden’s Department of Justice underscored D.C.’s lack of authority over criminal prosecutions, a direct consequence of its lack of state sovereignty. In a court filing, the DOJ confirmed that it would continue the Trump administration’s policy of charging certain firearm offenses in federal court instead of D.C. court—exposing defendants to far lengthier prison sentences...Civil rights advocates were heartened when Biden named Channing Phillips, a proponent of home rule, as acting U.S. attorney for D.C. Their hopes were dashed on Friday, when Phillips informed a federal judge that he would maintain the program. Phillips suggested that his office had solved the racism problem by applying the policy District-wide, but there is no doubt that it will still reflect the broader racial disparities that infect D.C. policing. After all, Black people make up around 47 percent of the District’s population and 97 percent of those charged with being a felon in possession. Andrew Crespo, a Harvard Law professor and head of the school’s Impact Defense Initiative, speculated on Monday that Phillips’ position might be “a mistake,” pointing out that several key Biden nominees to the DOJ still haven’t won Senate confirmation. Crespo highlighted Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, two civil rights luminaries, are awaiting a vote; once they’re confirmed, they may reassess a broad range of criminal justice policies, including this one. A Justice Department fully staffed with Biden appointees may overrule Phillips and demand an end to this holdover policy from the Trump years.

About 72,000 people will have their federal loans fully canceled after Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday scrapped a plan to give partial debt relief to students defrauded by their colleges, ending a controversial policy instituted by his predecessor Betsy DeVos. The move — Cardona’s first major higher education announcement since being confirmed — amounts to roughly $1 billion in debt relief...“The previous administration turned borrower defense into a total sham that was rigged to deny claims without any true consideration,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing the borrowers. “The Biden-Harris administration must now address these failings or else perpetuate a system that is stacked against the very students they are supposed to protect.”

In 2016 Henri Blain owned property in three states, was the founder of a successful string of Massachusetts beauty schools that he'd sold to an expanding salon empire, and held an estate valued at roughly $40 million. The then 78-year-old bachelor also had dementia. It left him that year incapable of caring for himself or his fortune. The consequence has been four years of legal wrangling in Probate Court between Blain's court-appointed guardians and future heirs, contested probate orders appealed to Superior Court, quarrels over guardian and lawyer fees - and a judge questioning the validity of an unannounced marriage in 2018 between Blain and a longtime friend...Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, who specializes in trusts and estates, says cases like Blain's, where cognitive impairment is at the heart of the debate, can continue on for years - until the individual under guardianship recovers to run their own affairs, or dies. Sitkoff refers to the familiar case of pop star Britney Spears, whose father was appointed a "conservator," or guardian, of her well-being and her finances 13 years ago. Spears' attempt to have that guardianship lifted was the focus of a recent New York Times documentary, "Framing Britney Spears."

As vaccination efforts ramp up in many parts of the world, the cruise industry is making preparations to resume voyages. Current plans involve many of the major cruise lines resuming most of their operations this summer, though some routes are not expected to return until late 2021...Of the workers with plans to return to cruising, each had a different account of what it was like to be on board when the pandemic first began. Some were able to disembark and return to their home country within a matter of weeks, while others spent months at sea, waiting until they could dock at a port and return home. For essential cruise ship workers, such as engineers, the wait was particularly long as they had to maintain the ships and keep them operational, since cruise ships can’t be left unattended for months on end. One engineer told NBC News he remained on board a Norwegian Cruise Line ship from the start of the pandemic until September...The engineer told NBC News that after four months at home, he is again back on the ship, working to keep it ready for the resumption of cruises. He hasn’t received his Covid-19 vaccine yet but will soon be required to have it. “Ports may set any condition of entry that they like, and often they will bar certain persons from going ashore,” said James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at Harvard Law School. “During the pandemic, they have protocols in place to prevent people from going ashore. If the ship does not want to comply, then it is free to not visit the port.”

Cedar Point Nursery in far northern California, the birthplace of baby strawberry plants that feed a multi-billion dollar fruit industry, is leading a high-stakes legal battle over labor unions and property rights with potentially sweeping implications far beyond agriculture. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments in Cedar Point's challenge to a 45-year-old California law that authorizes union organizers to access farm property for 120 days a year, three hours a day, during non-work periods to meet with workers...Legal scholars say a decision that strikes down the California union access law could have potentially major implications for health and safety inspections, home visits by social workers and anti-discrimination rules nationwide. "I'm sure many restaurants would say the same thing about food inspectors and say, you know, we want to allow customers on our property, we just don't want to allow food inspectors to check to see if there are rats running around the kitchen," said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard Law School professor and expert in labor law. "That ultimately is what's at stake here."

Students who attended colleges that have misled them have the right under the law to have their federal student loans discharged, but over the past few years, accessing that relief has been nearly impossible, despite evidence of malfeasance by their schools, new documents suggest. More than 200 borrowers who attended a school where an admissions representative pled guilty to making a false statement in an application for federal student aid had their applications for relief denied by the Department of Education, according to the documents. At another school, more than 300 students made similar claims, alleging they were misled about their prospects for job placement, but it wasn’t enough to “establish a pattern or practice of this type of misconduct.” The result: Since December 2019, roughly 90% of borrowers who say they’ve been scammed by their schools have had their applications for student loan relief denied, according to an analysis of government data by Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending. The revelations about the challenges borrowers face accessing relief were contained in court documents filed Thursday evening as part of a class action lawsuit filed by The Project on Predatory Student Lending on behalf of 170,000 former students who’ve applied for borrower defense — the process borrowers can use to have their federal debt discharged if they’ve been misled by their school — but have had their applications stalled or denied.

Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe said on MSNBC Sunday that evidence appears to support sedition charges against former President Donald Trump regarding his role in the Capitol riot. While various financial cases against Trump are very strong, the Harvard University law professor said they won’t hold him accountable for the abuses he allegedly committed as president. However, far more serious for Trump was the Fulton County investigation into his efforts to overturn Georgia’s vote for Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election. If Trump is convicted of “conspiracy to commit sedition — which is a fancy way of talking about trying to prevent the government from functioning,” — Trump could get 20 years in prison, Tribe said. A conviction on another charge, which applies to “anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion,” would be punishable by up to 10 years and permanent disqualification from ever holding any state or federal office. It’s that second charge where the evidence “seems to point to the president’s guilt” concerning the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Tribe said.

A letter by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein: The Globe’s March 15 article — front page, above the fold — screams that 21 convicted murderers have been freed under the state’s compassionate release law (“Compassionate, but to whom?: As 21 murderers receive medical parole, critics and families demand change in law”). Quoting the law’s critics, it suggests that their release ignored their serious offenses, their real medical condition, and the victims’ concerns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even before the pandemic, medical parole reflected the Legislature’s recognition that compassionate release was critical. Why? Because we have the highest percentage of prisoners over 55 in the country. Because the cost of housing them is three times that of an average adult prisoner. Because keeping them in prison diverts resources from other programs. We have more older prisoners not because of an elderly crime wave, but because we lead the country in the percentage of sentences of life without parole. And racial disparities — a scandal throughout the system — are worse for lifers. The real story is not how many have been released but how few, especially now. Nineteen people have died in state prisons since the coronavirus pandemic’s start, not including those who died after release. The notion that paroling those so debilitated threatens public safety is absurd. Piling on, there was the gratuitous reference to the release from prison of former House speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi (disclosure: we both worked on DiMasi’s case). Battling two forms of cancer, DiMasi was released early on an eight-year sentence. The article adds, “More than four years later, DiMasi is now a registered lobbyist,” as if he had gamed the system. No one who saw him in prison, emaciated, barely able to stand, would believe that. Now, his cancers in remission, his prison term over, he is a lobbyist. Who for? The Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, working on housing for the homeless. Punishment is one thing; cruelty is another.

Students who were defrauded by their colleges and received only partial relief from their federal loans could now see them fully canceled, the Biden administration announced Thursday, reversing a Trump administration policy. The change could lead to $1 billion in loans being canceled for 72,000 borrowers, all of whom attended for-profit schools, the Education Department said...In addition to having their loans fully canceled, students will be reimbursed for any payments made on the loans and have their eligibility for federal student aid reinstated. The department said it also would ask credit bureaus to remove any negative ratings tied to the loans. “Abandoning partial relief is a strong start for a narrow subset of borrowers, but what we need from the Education Department is an overhaul of the current borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents former for-profit college students. "The previous administration turned borrower defense into a total sham that was rigged to deny claims without any true consideration," Merrill said. "The Biden-Harris administration must now address these failings or else perpetuate a system that is stacked against the very students they are supposed to protect.”

The San Francisco school board is on the ropes after a judge ordered it to vacate a resolution scrubbing 44 public schools of their historical namesakes, or explain why it should not be compelled to do so. It’s uncommon for a judge to rule so quickly, as public school alumni groups and the San Francisco Taxpayers Association just filed their petition seeking the decision’s repeal on the grounds that it was done without due process. In an interview Friday, attorney and constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe said the order from Judge Ethan Schulman bolstered his conviction that the petitioners he represents have a strong case that the school board’s renaming process was unlawful. “It vindicated my sense that this is an extremely strong and unambiguously correct case,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to become involved, because I thought the issues were so important.” ... “The whole process was poisoned from the beginning,” Tribe said. A Harvard Law School professor emeritus who has argued innumerable cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Tribe said this case piqued his interest for several reasons. “One of them is I’m very interested in the issue of how to achieve racial justice in a world where all sorts of things have been named after racists and Confederate soldiers, and much of that renaming happened not at the time of the Civil War, but as part of the opposition to racial progress in the 1960s,” he said. “So I’m not one of those people who say you should never take down a Robert E. Lee statue.” The issue is also personal for Tribe, a San Francisco native who graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School.

An essay by Jill Lepore: In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken. To prepare for his citizenship test, knowing that he’d be asked questions about the U.S. Constitution, Gödel had dedicated himself to the study of American history and constitutional law. Time and again, he’d phoned Morgenstern with rising panic about the exam. (Gödel, a paranoid recluse who later died of starvation, used the telephone to speak with people even when they were in the same room.) Morgenstern reassured him that “at most they might ask what sort of government we have.” But Gödel only grew more upset.

Last fall, two students from Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program volunteered to help city administrators think through concrete possibilities for how to change public-safety procedures.

The Navajo & Hopi Families Covid-19 Relief Fund has raised nearly $18 million, far exceeding the wildest expectations Ethel Branch ’08, former attorney general of the Navajo Nation, who began the fund in hopes of raising $5000 to assist struggling Navajo and Hopi communities.

Jury selection is now proceeding for the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, in a horrific incident that touched off nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. Many aspects of the process seem calculated to exclude not only potential jurors who have strong feelings about the specific case (and thus might be biased), but also those who have any kind of relevant background knowledge about criminal justice, scientific evidence, chokeholds, and other matters. In recently published articles, both Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman and The Week columnist Bonnie Kristian argue that this situation highlights the need to change selection policies that have the effect of dumbing down juries by excluding those with the greatest potential knowledge and insight...Feldman explains how this tendency undermines a key function of jurors in the Anglo-American legal tradition, which was in part to bring to bear the collective knowledge and insight of the community: “The logic [of current practices] is understandable. We don't want jurors to have made up their minds before hearing the evidence presented at trial. But the result is all too often the selection of jurors who are nominally neutral because they have their heads in the sand. Choosing jurors with no meaningful knowledge of public affairs has consequences. Among other things, it entails selecting jurors who might not be able to draw upon the moral intuitions of the community that we want jurors to embody.”