Media Mentions

We did not get a full accounting of the violent insurrection of Jan. 6 during the second impeachment of the president who instigated it. We did not get a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot, because Republicans blocked it. We do not yet see signs of an exhaustive Justice Department criminal inquiry into the effort to deny the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. But now, we just might get the investigation we need by way of the House. ... “The sweeping demand for executive branch records is good news with respect to the scope of the hearing and the ambition of the select committee in getting to the bottom of who did or knew what — and when they did or knew it and with whom — in the long lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection and in the surrounding events,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “My hope is that the Justice Department will take a cue from the breadth of what the select committee is doing.”

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder and former CEO of Theranos, is set to go to trial this week, more than three years after being indicted on multiple federal fraud and conspiracy charges over allegations she knowingly misrepresented the capabilities of her company's proprietary blood testing technology. ... Legal experts say central to the trial will be questions about what Holmes knew, when she knew it, and whether she intended to deceive. "Either she had a device that could never work, or that couldn't work yet. The latter is a more murky situation," said Nancy Gertner, a former US federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

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 the move might result in less equity for the Banks should a downturn arise, but notes it’s likely not enough a tax increase for institutions to move money into other parts of the business.

Full overview of the new HLS shield.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos was a second-year law student when the Supreme Court ruled — unsatisfactorily, he believed — on the Pennsylvania gerrymandering case Vieth v. Jubelirer. For Stephanopoulos, it was a game-changer: election law, democratic theory, and the American electoral system have since come to dominate his career.

Emily M. Broad Leib ’08, faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic, examines legal and other hurdles to reducing waste.

In a new book, “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech,” Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, looks at ways government can combat disinformation.

An op-ed by Jonathan S. Gould and Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Democracy in America is under attack. Red states are churning out laws that make it harder to vote and easier for partisans to subvert elections. A round of ruthless gerrymandering is set to begin later this year. The influence of money in politics is greater than ever. A pair of congressional bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—would tackle these challenges head-on, but they are stuck as long as the filibuster remains in place. And the filibuster doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen: The COVID-19 pandemic not over for the U.S., but the Delta variant means the “war has changed,” as leaked CDC slides made clear. The development and production of COVID-19 vaccines are an achievement on the scale of the Manhattan Project, but unless and until more of the U.S. public is vaccinated infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are likely to increase in scale across much of the country. After an impressive roll out, our vaccination rates have stalled. Canada, which faced challenges early on getting enough doses and thus started later than the U.S., by mid-July had surpassed the U.S. both in first-dose and full vaccinated and enters August much better poised to confront Delta.

Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) is launching an ambitious three-year “pop-up” research initiative, the Institute for Rebooting Social Media.

An op-ed by Jennifer Mnookin and Robert Mnookin: Last week, Pfizer announced that it plans to request an emergency use authorization for a booster vaccine shot for COVID-19. Within hours, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement asserting, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.” The Department of Health and Human Services reiterated this after it and senior U.S. scientists met with top Pfizer representatives this week. Immunologists, health policy experts, the director of the World Health Organization and pundits have criticized Pfizer for planning to request this approval. Some suggest that it’s a cash grab for the vaccine maker and others assert simply that more data are needed. What these responses ignore is growing evidence that a third shot may provide lifesaving protection to immunocompromised people (including organ transplant patients), who represent approximately 3% to 4% of our adult population.

Launched by former U.S. attorney Harry Litman in the spring of 2019, "Talking Feds" welcomes a rotating cast of expert guests such as Juliette Kayyem ’95 and Laurence Tribe ’66 to a lively roundtable, where they discuss legal-political issues in depth.

In a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, Giang Nguyen, executive director of Harvard University Health Services, discusses the University's new COVID-19 policies and looks ahead to the fall.

An op-ed by Guy-Uriel E. Charles and Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer: The Voting Rights Act regime as we knew it is gone, and it’s not coming back. Once thought of as the crown jewel of the Second Reconstruction, the VRA has lost its luster. For the past decade or so, the Supreme Court has systematically reduced the scope and reach of the law. The Court’s decision last week in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee is only the latest case, and certainly will not be the last, to interpret the act in a manner that will sideline it—permanently.

On June 23, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to organized labor. In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the court ruled that a California regulation that enabled labor organizers to meet with workers on large farms violated farm owners’ property rights. ... Legal academics like Niko Bowie of Harvard Law School point out that the Supreme Court’s reasoning could compromise anti-discrimination laws, fair housing laws and health and safety regulations of businesses. Bowie shows how White segregationists in the 1960s used the same legal reasoning the Supreme Court does in Cedar Point Nursery.

In other news, we spoke with Harvard Law Professor Benjamin Sachs on a recent Supreme Court ruling that puts property rights above farmworkers’ rights and Elizabeth Lalasz about the Chicago nurses strike last week. And we discuss Black TikTok withholding their labor and a bill to protect workers from ageism, with recommended reading on a radical union on the high seas and socialism at Buffalo’s grassroots.

The Supreme Court delivered their two final rulings of the term today: in a case examining Arizona voting restrictions, the six conservative justices found that two laws relating to provisional and absentee ballots did not violate the federal Voting Rights Act, and the court also struck down a California law requiring non-profits to file a list of their large donors with the state, arguing that identifying large donors limits their free speech protections by exposing them to potential harassment. We talk about the significance of these rulings with Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR Legal Analyst, and Michael Curry, head of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, former president of the Boston branch of NAACP, and a member of the NAACP's board of directors.

An op-ed by Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Today’s conservative judges pride themselves on being textualists. When interpreting a statute, they always start with the law’s text. Unless the law is ambiguous, they end with the text, too. As Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. put it just last year, the courts’ focus must never waver from what a statute’s “words were understood to mean at the time of enactment.” Any other approach, even one that “sails under a textualist flag,” Alito lectured, is “like a pirate ship” — inappropriate and illegitimate. So it was a shock to see the Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by none other than Alito, stacking one extra-textual constraint after another onto Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision prohibits any “standard, practice, or procedure” that makes it disproportionately harder for minority citizens to vote. In that situation, voting isn’t “equally open” to citizens of all races, and minority citizens “have less opportunity” to vote.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe:  The Justice Department has begun arresting those who assaulted journalists during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — a series of actions whose importance to our democracy is hard to overstate. Newspeople are front-line defenders of our republic, much as the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officials were on Jan. 6. While all who attacked the Capitol six months ago should be held accountable, prioritizing prosecution of individuals who assault the press or police is paramount. Without the work of both, our security and democracy are at existential risk.

Six months after their leader tried to overturn the election he had lost by more than 7 million votes, Republicans have settled on a message about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol: Insurrection? What insurrection?... Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who believes the country barely dodged a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6, said many Americans simply would rather not think about that day. “It’s human nature to suppress terrible forebodings that don’t quite materialize,” he said, adding that the barrage of Trump-inspired crises during his term likely laid the groundwork. “The cascade of terrible events and near-misses over the past four years has desensitized people if not entirely anesthetized them.”

... At no point in its history, perhaps, has the mission of the Department of Justice been so difficult, so polarizing, and so critical to democratic stability. President Donald Trump had given his supporters the deluded hope that the department might use its powers to substantiate his fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen. ...The day before the Senate voted on Garland’s nomination, Laurence Tribe expressed the hope of many liberals, telling me that as disappointed as he had been to see his former student denied the Supreme Court seat, he was now happy to see him poised to play an even more “historically significant role.” More recently, Tribe, who continues to talk to Garland, said that the attorney general had come to a crossroads. “I think if he continues to disappoint in a way that many people think he has thus far and does not appear to see the bigger picture,” Tribe said, “that will be terribly significant but profoundly dismaying. But if he does what I think he is capable of doing, he will have moved the country in a dramatic way past the terrible cliff that would have spelled the end of the democratic experiment.”