Media Mentions

A Texas law that bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy took effect at midnight on Wednesday after the Supreme Court failed to act on emergency requests from abortion providers. ... “The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals,” says Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional law expert at Harvard. “That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights.”

For weeks this spring, Trey Reeves did not ignore a phone call from a number he didn’t recognize. He even answered obvious spam calls. The anticipation was nearly too much. Which law school acceptance would arrive each day? Virginia did. Chicago did. Name a top school and it likely accepted the former Oklahoma State basketball walk-on. But on this day, Harvard — arguably the best of the best — called to offer Reeves a chance to attend its prestigious law school. “When you get a phone call from Harvard, it’s hard to turn that one down,” Reeves said.

The historic drought in Marin County continues to affect a rare species of elk. Last weekend, nearly a hundred people carried water to replenish the drinking supply for tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore that are dying in the drought conditions. Volunteers hiked six miles round trip on Saturday, carrying gallon jugs of water to provide the animals at Tomales Point with more to drink. ... In June, the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic filed a lawsuit saying the National Park Service is being negligent by keeping the Tomales Point elk in an enclosure. The NPS has not commented publicly about this weekend's water drop, citing the lawsuit.

Mark Roe, corporate law professor at Harvard University, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the Liberal party’s plans to hike corporate taxes for banks and insurers. He notes that taxing bottom line profits (instead of gross profit before deducting interest on debt) would result in less equity for the Banks should a downturn arise, because debt is tax-favoured. But he notes it’s likely not enough a tax increase for institutions to move money into other parts of the business.

Tom's guest on this archived edition of Midday is the author and historian Annette Gordon Reed. She is best-known for her study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest book is a beautiful peroration on the meaning of the holiday known as Juneteenth, which marks the anniversary of a significant historical event: on June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, declaring that all slaves were free, two months after General Robert E Lee had surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S Grant in Appomattox, Virginia. Juneteenth celebrations of this belated emancipation originated among African American communities in Texas, and now take place around the country.

In a move that may indicate easing drug policies, Thailand has decriminalized a plant used to relieve pain, a decision expected to lessen crowding in prisons and impact thousands of people facing charges for its use or possession.... Drug policy expert Mason Marks, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, told VICE World News that the U.S. states that have criminalized kratom should walk it back, and that the FDA should not back a federal or international ban. “Supporting a global ban undermines the autonomy of nations that do not wish to criminalize kratom, including Thailand,” he said.

... In support of a lawsuit filed by a former public defender in North Carolina, more than 20 current and former law clerks and employees of federally funded public defender’s offices and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington offered firsthand accounts of a system that they say still lacks protections and procedures to hold officials accountable. ... On appeal at the 4th Circuit, Roe is represented by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and has the backing of more than 40 public-interest and civil rights organizations, in addition to constitutional scholars. Gersen said in a court filing last week that the judiciary’s internal complaint system was rife with conflicts of interest and failed to provide meaningful review or to stop the harassment. The system “facilitated and aggravated the hostile work environment, which became so intolerable that Roe was forced to resign and lose her career as a federal public defender.”

‘Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture,’ by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon, Sept. 7) Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, takes up everything from Frederick Douglass to George Floyd’s legacy in this collection of new and previously published essays.

... For all its routine violence, the American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for the American side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other. Today, there are more and more legal obligations to make war more humane – meaning, above all, the aim of minimising collateral harm. ...Written in 2012, the PPG was only publicly released two years later. Harvard Law professor Naz Modirzadeh cuttingly described the document as mixing together a number of “legal-ish” standards. The optics of humane behaviour, Modirzadeh suggested, were “being used to give an international law-like gloss” to “an approach that most allies see as violating” other parts of international law, most of all the rules controlling force.

... Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. ...Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky. The Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen has written that her students “seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.”

"Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal" by Alexandra Natapoff, so beautifully tells the story of what tiny things people get dragged into the system for," says Rahman. This highly technical book looks at how misdemeanors create massive inequalities and drag non-dangerous members of the public into prisons.

A week or so ago, Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they complained that the notorious (my description, not theirs) redefinition of the purpose of a corporation contained in a statement by the Business Roundtable (BRT) in August 2019 was something of a sham. By introducing the new definition, the BRT abandoned its earlier support for shareholder primacy — the idea that a company should be run, above all, for the benefit, shockingly, of the shareholders who own it — in favor of the assertion that a company should be managed in a way that takes proper account of the interests of various “stakeholders” of which shareholders were only one category. Despite this, Bebchuk and Tallarita maintained that very little had really changed: "Corporate leaders have been busy presenting themselves as guardians of the interests of “stakeholders,” such as customers, employees, suppliers and communities as well as shareholders. Our recent research, however, casts serious doubt on whether corporations are matching the talk with action . . .We’ve identified almost 100 signatory companies that updated their corporate governance guidelines by the end of 2020. We found that the companies that made updates generally didn’t add any language that elevates the status of stakeholders, and most of them reaffirmed governance principles supporting shareholder primacy."

Annette Gordon-Reed, interviewed by Nawal Arjini: “Writing, teaching, activism, organizing—he did everything. And I feel a responsibility, or desire, to reach as many people as I can with my writing that grows out of my interest in the Black struggle.”

For years, we’ve been told that electric autonomous taxis can help fight climate change by reducing air pollution. But new research from Harvard Law School suggests these supposedly “zero emissions” vehicles could actually exacerbate many of the problems we are facing today. A new study led by Ashley Nunes, a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, concluded that fleets of electric autonomous taxis could “dramatically increase energy consumption and emissions that contribute to climate change — not reduce them.” “While electric vehicles themselves have lower emissions than traditional gasoline-powered ones, our work shows that deploying electric robocabs en masse on America’s streets could actually increase the number of trips, miles driven, and overall emissions,” Nunes said in a release.

During the first few months of 2021, President Biden seemed overly reluctant to go after GOP governors over their approach to the spread of covid-19 in their states. The thinking appeared in part to be that this would polarize masks and vaccines, making GOP voters more reluctant to utilize both, setting us back further. ... Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, who had previously advocated for moves like this, notes that what’s at issue is “the rights of America’s children to a safe classroom environment.” “That legal strategy holds great promise of circumventing gubernatorial obstruction of vital local initiatives,” Tribe told us. Tribe added that this is “essential in states whose governors are evidently more concerned with towing the ideological Trump line on vaccines and masks than they are with the health and survival of our kids.”

If American democracy were a hospital patient, the diagnosis would be "critical".  ... In response to the dagger being pointed at the heart of American democracy by Donald Trump, his followers and the Jim Crow Republican Party, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are not acting with the necessary urgency. In a new op-ed for the Boston Globe, Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard, offers this warning:  "We need to begin with the fundamental precept that not all crimes are created equal. Those crimes — regardless of who allegedly commits them — whose very aim is to overturn a fair election whereby our tradition of peaceful, lawful succession from one administration to the next takes place — a tradition begun by George Washington, continued by John Adams, and preserved by every president since except Donald Trump — are impossible to tolerate if we are to survive as a constitutional republic."

When 181 CEOs pledged to run their companies to benefit customers, workers and communities as well as shareholders, it was hailed as a breakthrough moment for capitalism. Two years later, two Harvard Law School researchers find that the companies have done little to act on the pledge. Most of their key documents, such as bylaws and corporate governance guidelines, still emphasize running the company for the benefit of shareholders.... The two Harvard Law professors, Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, found only two companies that place other stakeholders on a par with shareholders. Both firms, Cummins and International Paper, had their guidelines in place before the Business Roundtable statement was written.

Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita’s op-ed “‘Stakeholder’ Talk Proves Empty Again” (Aug. 19) is probably correct, as far as it goes. On its face, the Business Roundtable’s statement is far from having been meaningfully implemented. Market pressures from investors to sustain profits are substantial. On the other hand, progress, while glacial, is occurring and the Business Roundtable’s statement may have been a pull. Institutional investors are now rattling the cage in favor of recognizing stakeholder values such as wages, working conditions and environment. Major investors are now with policy positions of their own, making it clear that they will, in the future, take account of what companies may or may not be doing regarding stakeholders. Public pressure from consumers to rectify some of the problems and inequalities of the past is also mounting.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Afghanistan wasn’t the only majority Muslim country that the Joe Biden administration lost in the last week. Establishing a functioning democracy in Afghanistan was hard — so hard it turned out to be impossible. Tunisia, which on Monday passed from the status of functioning democracy to effective autocracy, would have been an easy win for Biden’s nominal commitment to sustain democracy around the world — if the administration had bothered to pay meaningful attention to it. Instead, the administration stood by and did nothing while the elected president of the Arab world’s only democracy suspended parliament in violation of the Tunisian constitution and announced that the members of the parliament would henceforth be subject to arrest.

... Gersh’s experience is emblematic of a type of harassment called doxing. Slang for doc-dropping, doxing is the process of making someone’s address, contact information, identity, or other information public, usually in order to intimidate, harass, or incite public outrage. ... This approach comes with some advantages, says Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. You don’t need law enforcement or a prosecutor to buy into the fact you’ve been doxed, and the burden of proving you’ve been doxed is lighter than it would be in criminal court. However, when you’re being doxed by hundreds of people (some of whom may use anonymous accounts), it can be hard to identify just one person to sue. “These laws are based primarily on the idea that you’re suing one individual, which may not be very helpful if what’s happening is a huge mob of people or multiple people are sharing the information,” Albert said.

The Biden administration has nearly completed a policy to govern counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, but the abrupt collapse of the Afghan government and a recent flurry of strikes in Somalia have raised new problems, according to current and former officials. ... But creating any bureaucratic system and planning for drone strikes cut against Mr. Biden’s repeated statements that he wants to end the forever war, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who frequently writes about national security legal policy. “I don’t blame them because I think real threats persist,” he added. “It’s better to have a system for dealing with them than just letting the Pentagon do whatever it wants. But creating a system for drone strikes doesn’t sound like the path to winding down the forever war.”