Media Mentions

An op-ed by Jowei Chen and Nicholas Stephanopoulos: The gerrymandering wars are about to resume. Over the next year, every state in the country will have to redraw its congressional and legislative districts. In anticipation of redistricting, Republicans are eyeing a new tactic: For decades, states have equalized the numbers of people their districts contain. But the GOP is now pushing to equalize districts’ citizen voting-age populations instead. Under this approach, noncitizens and children would be invisible for remapping purposes. Only adult citizens would count. Republicans think that by omitting non-adult citizens from districts’ populations, they would slash the representation of minorities and Democrats. Their logic goes like this: At present, many districts with non-White or Democratic legislators have relatively low proportions of adult citizens. So these districts would have to grow in size — and shrink in number — to acquire enough adult citizens to hit their new population targets. Conversely, many districts with White or Republican legislators have higher shares of adult citizens. These districts would shed some of their residents into adjacent districts in a world where adult citizens, not people, had to be equalized. These dispersed voters would tilt their new districts in a conservative direction.

The Network is a group of high-level digital security experts from across government, the private sector and security research community invited by The Washington Post to vote in surveys on the most pressing issues in the field. Our regular surveys will highlight insights from some of the most influential people in cybersecurity...Camille Francois is the research and analysis director at Graphika, where she leads a data science and analysis team focused on analyzing social media manipulations...Francois is a cybersecurity fellow at the New America Foundation and an affiliate at the Harvard-Klein Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she pursues her work on mechanisms to establish peace and security in the face of cyber conflict...Matthew Olsen is the president and chief revenue officer at IronNet Cybersecurity. He previously served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, general counsel for the National Security Agency and in a number of leadership positions at the Justice Department. Olsen teaches at Harvard Law School...Jonathan Zittrain: Harvard law and computer science professor and co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Zittrain’s research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing and the deployment of technology in education.

In early February, politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party started signing up for a social network that almost nobody had heard of...The timing wasn’t coincidental. For days, India’s government had been locked in a fierce tug-of-war with Twitter, which defied a legal order to block accounts critical of India’s Hindu nationalist government, including those belonging to journalists and an investigative news magazine. In response, India’s IT ministry threatened to send Twitter officials to jail. Amid the standoff, government officials promoted Koo as a nationalist alternative, free from American influence...As the global internet splinters, and mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter square off against nation states and fitfully crack down on hate speech, nationalist alternatives are springing up to host it, something that experts say is a growing trend. “This content wants to find new homes,” evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies global regulation of online speech, told BuzzFeed News. Hate speech, disinformation, harassment, and incitement that mainstream platforms have been grappling with for years are particularly problematic on platforms like Koo, she said, because those sites come under less scrutiny. “These problems come to every platform in the end,” douek said, “but with the proliferation of these alternatives, there’s likely to be far less attention and pressure on them. It also creates the possibility that there will be a global internet that has one kind of discourse, and completely alternative conversations happening on national platforms in parallel.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: There wasn’t much President Joe Biden could have done about this month’s Texas energy disaster. Ditto the slow-moving vaccine rollout. The reason is the same: federalism, a system dating back to the 1780s and only seriously overhauled once. Although federalism still has some benefits, its obsolescence is increasingly obvious when the U.S. faces crises that, like climate change and Covid-19, don’t respect state boundaries. Energy and health care are only two of the crucial infrastructure systems that remain state-regulated or state-run. And many of those systems are in need of updating everywhere — not piecemeal, as federalism tends to support. Federalism was, in important ways, an American invention — the brainchild of James Madison. It was a product of political necessity for 13 states that had been separately administered as British colonies and that had already tried and failed to function as a loose confederation between 1776 and 1787. Unifying into a single nation would have been practical for the early United States. At the Philadelphia constitutional convention, big-state representatives, including Madison, favored a heavily national model of government to replace the failing decentralized system created by the Articles of Confederation.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform...Alexandra Natapoff, Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism. “Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.” ... Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons... “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.” ... At Harvard Law School, students have been studying how an alternate 911-response team might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

Chances are it is the most influential amendment to the US constitution that you aren’t familiar with. Given its impact, it is astonishing how little the 14th amendment is discussed in public life. Americans can’t rattle it off like the first and second amendments – but its words have fundamentally shaped the modern definition of US citizenship and the principles of equality and freedom entitled to those within the country’s borders...The amendment is a lodestar for all claiming the constitutional right to be treated fairly. Women, with the help of then attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, convinced the court in the 1970s that the 14th’s equal protection clause should apply to gender in the same way it is applied to race, both being immutable characteristics that don’t affect one’s ability. But women’s equality depends on control over their own bodies and the choice of when and whether to have children. In 1965, the right to privacy was established, founded on the 14th amendment’s due process clause, and this new concept was applied to Roe v Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion by determining that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman, not the state. “It’s an unfolding process,” said Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, of the 14th amendment extending to the right to abortion. “It may not seem obvious as a path, but that is the process of constitutional law.”

Arthur Lange was 100 feet from his driveway when the California patrol officer behind him flipped on his flashing lights. Rather than stop, Lange turned toward his Sonoma County home, pulled into his garage and closed the door. What happened over the next few seconds prompted years of litigation and a case to be argued Wednesday at the Supreme Court with sweeping implications for police power...Lange's case comes to the court at a moment of tension between police and communities of color after the police killing last year of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. The incident, and others like it, prompted nationwide protests and some riots over the summer, forcing a national discussion about racism and police use of force. One of those incidents was the 2020 shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, which occurred after police entered her Louisville, Ky., apartment during a drug investigation. Police had obtained a "no-knock" warrant, allowing them to conduct a search without notification. The city subsequently banned no-knock warrants. Some observers said expanding the circumstances under which a police officer may enter a home without a warrant could exacerbate the fraught relationship. "It wouldn't open the door, it would open the flood gates to police entry into a home," said Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who has written widely on the proliferation of misdemeanor crimes. "It would seem to be exactly the backward response to everything we have learned from George Floyd and Black Lives Matter."

An op-ed by Michael Klarman: Supporters of donald trump assaulted the capitol on January 6, 2021, but American democracy has been under siege for far longer—from both former President Trump and the Republican Party. Trump’s transgressions against democracy are well known: They include having attacked the press as the “enemy of the people,” assailed sitting judges, politicized the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies, undermined transparency in government, encouraged political violence, and delegitimized elections. The Republican Party’s undermining of democracy began much earlier. Since about 2000, the party has tried to suppress Democratic votes through stringent voter-identification laws and purges of voter rolls. In addition, Republican legislatures have grotesquely gerrymandered legislative districts, enabling Republicans to maintain control of state legislatures and, at times, the House of Representatives, while failing to win majorities of the vote. Republicans have also erected obstaclesto college students’ voting, delayed elections that they anticipated they would lose, and eviscerated the powers of Democratic governors. Republican state legislators have also rejected the results of voter initiatives and imposed obstacles to putting such initiatives on the ballot in the first place.

Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, says Judge Merrick Garland's would be "one of the greatest attorneys general in American history." Tribe spoke with CBSN's Anne-Marie Green and Vladimir Duthiers about why Garland is right for the job and what he can do to fight extremism and racism.

The race to vaccinate as many people as possible while more contagious coronavirus variants march across America is colliding with lagging efforts to steer shots to people of color and underserved communities bearing the brunt of the pandemic. Though the Biden administration has prioritized equitable vaccine distribution, putting that goal into practice is difficult. Local public health officials are under pressure to quickly distribute their limited supplies and reach high-risk groups first in line. So far, limited data continues to show that people in hard-hit minority communities are getting vaccinated at a much slower pace than people in wealthier white ones... After the initial slow vaccine rollout, many states with Washington’s encouragement began offering vaccines to people from age 65, rather than limiting eligibility to people 75-plus and frontline workers as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention originally recommended. That meant millions more were seeking shots than were available. States and the Biden administration have set up megasites to help pick up the vaccination pace, but those aren’t all easily accessible for people who don’t have cars or internet connections to make appointments. Disparities in the vaccine rollout remain stark...The variants do likely mean more cases — and more deaths. While new infections and hospitalizations have been declining for weeks, case counts remain high. Health experts have warned that the variants could bring a new surge as they gain a foothold across the country. “Every day that somebody doesn’t have the vaccine they are that much more vulnerable,” said Carmel Shachar, who heads Harvard Law School’s bioethics center. “We’ve lost some of the cushion,” she said. “And we didn’t have a great cushion.”

We live in an age of competing economic narratives. President Biden tells the story that a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill will help the economy, while Republicans tell the story that the bill is too big and will cause inflation. As the Nobel-prize winning economist, Robert Shiller, points out his wonderful book, Narrative Economics(Yale, 2019), mega-narratives drive public discourse and our lives. Nowhere is this more true than in management, which for the last hundred years has been driven by competing mega-narratives...In August 2019, big-business CEOs could no longer take the political heat. Shareholder value was renounced by the CEOs of more than 200 of the largest corporations who signed a new formal declaration of the BRT. The new declaration foreshadowed a supposed return to an older mega-narrative stakeholder capitalism—an approach that had already been tried and discredited in the mid-20th century. In the period since the 2019 declaration was issued, research by Harvard Law Professor Lucian Bebchuk and his colleagues have been unable to detect evidence of any significant change in corporate behavior. Few of the signatory CEOs obtained the approval of their boards to sign the announcement. Bebchukconcludes that shareholder value remains the guiding narrative for most big business. In effect, the declaration was done “mostly for show.” Shareholder value is still the dominant mega-narrative of American business.

A fundamental flaw in the freewheeling Texas electricity market left millions powerless and freezing in the dark this week during a historic cold snap. The core problem: Power providers can reap rewards by supplying electricity to Texas customers, but they aren’t required to do it and face no penalties for failing to deliver during a lengthy emergency. That led to the fiasco that left millions of people in the nation’s second-most-populous state without power for days. A severe storm paralyzed almost every energy source, from power plants to wind turbines, because their owners hadn’t made the investments needed to produce electricity in subfreezing temperatures...Within the competitive Texas power market, there is a strong incentive for generators to keep costs down to recoup their investments. The rapid buildout of wind and solar power, which are now among the cheapest sources of electricity, have pushed prices even lower in recent years, making it more difficult for gas and coal plants to compete. For plant owners, that presents a paradox: Should they add to their capital costs by preparing for severe cold snaps that occur only occasionally, or skip the preparation and risk tripping offline, missing out on high prices and exacerbating a potential supply shortage? “With everything there is a trade-off,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “More resilience is potentially more expensive, but electricity is an essential service. These are hard decisions.”

Federal investigators have signaled some of the defendants in the attack on the U.S. Capitol could be charged with seditious conspiracy, a law enacted to target those who attacked the federal government during the Reconstruction era. An indictment filed on Jan. 27 charges three of the riot suspects with conspiring to impede Congress' certification of the Electoral College vote for the 2020 presidential election...Many attorneys say it would be appropriate to charge some of the Capitol rioters with seditious conspiracy or with violating another federal law that criminalizes insurrection and rebellion against the United States. Those laws “seem tailor-made to cover the precise course of conduct engaged in by a number of the defendants who either have been or might still be charged in the attack on the Capitol,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School...Other court documents show that two suspects charged with conspiracy were seen that day with leaders of the Proud Boys, an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. Tribe said it is difficult for outsiders, even legal experts, to forecast the appropriate charges against riot suspects “without knowing the detailed evidence that a thorough Justice Department investigation is likely to uncover.”

Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen ’02 on the law, trauma, and “the rhetoric of believing.”

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Jesse Fried, Harvard Law School Professor, discuss lawmakers grilling Robinhood’s CEO amid Congress’ probe into the GameStop trading frenzy.

Former president Donald Trump made the rounds of conservative media on Wednesday, declining to say whether he plans to run for president again. But in his return to the spotlight, Trump lacked one of his largest megaphones: Facebook (FB), where a decision about whether to reactivate his account sits with the company's oversight board. In a new interview, Laurence Tribe — one of the nation's top constitutional law scholars, who briefly served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration — assailed the purportedly independent oversight board as "a dangerous idea" and warned that allowing Trump back on the platform "would be a terrible mistake." But Tribe said the board may very well rule in favor of reactivating Trump's account, since welcoming back someone of his cultural prominence would reaffirm the platform as a central institution, akin to a government entity. "I wouldn't be surprised if they held that it was wrong to kick Trump off of Facebook," says Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School who taught there for more than 50 years. "Because Facebook is sufficiently like the government as a public entity, that they really need to put Trump back."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Former president Donald Trump’s lawyers defended him during his second impeachment trial in part by arguing that his January 6 speech was protected by the First Amendment. That defense was legally irrelevant to the high crimes and misdemeanors charge, and wasn’t settled by his acquittal. But Trump’s free-speech defense may now get its day in court. Representative Bennie Thompson, a  Democrat from Mississippi, has filed a civil lawsuit against Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys for unlawfully conspiring to interfere with Congress in the Capitol attack in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. And while the First Amendment doesn’t apply to impeachable offenses, it does apply in cases of civil liability. Trump’s best argument to get the case dismissed would be that he can’t held liable for conspiring with those who attacked the Capitol if all he did was express his First Amendment-protected political views. To decide that, a federal court would have to determine whether Trump’s speech was protected under the standard set by Brandenburg v. Ohio, the controlling precedent in incitement cases. The statute that forms the basis of Thompson’s lawsuit establishes liability when two or more persons conspire “by force, intimidation, or threat” to prevent any officer of the U.S. from the “lawful discharge of the duties of his office.” On its face, the law covers the January 6 attacks. There is no doubt that the rioters forcefully interfered with Congress’s discharge of its duties, and that Thompson was one of the people who was affected.

An article by Sean Quirk ‘21: The U.S. and Chinese militaries have continued to confront one another near Taiwan and in the South China Sea in the early weeks of the Biden administration. Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft conducted a simulated strike against a U.S. aircraft carrier in January 2021, while Taiwan has experienced near-daily incursions into its airspace by Chinese aircraft. The U.S. Navy’s persistent operations in the South China Sea and diplomatic pronouncements from senior U.S. officials indicate that the Biden administration is largely staying the course in confronting Chinese intimidation in the region. Yet, unlike the Trump administration, Biden and his team appear keen to bring U.S. allies alongside to form a “united front” on military, economic and diplomatic dimensions of the U.S.-China relationship. On Jan. 23, Chinese military aircraft simulated an attack on the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) Carrier Strike Group as it entered the South China Sea through the Bashi Channel, south of Taiwan. Thirteen Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and People’s Liberation Army Air Force Navy (PLAN) aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) when the simulated attack occurred. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported the Chinese aircraft consisted of eight H-6K bombers, four J-16 fighter jets and one Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft. The PLA aircraft remained more than 250 nautical miles away from the Theodore Roosevelt but were heard confirming orders for the simulated release of anti-ship missiles against the carrier. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command stated that the carrier strike group was conducting routine maritime security operations in the South China Sea and the Chinese aircraft “at no time” posed a threat.

While the coronavirus pandemic has infected millions and underscored the importance of quality health care, the Supreme Court has weighed a challenge to Obamacare that, if successful, would add 21 million to the ranks of the uninsured, according to a report released last October by the Urban Institute. The case drew renewed attention last week, when the Biden administration issued a letter in opposition to the Obamacare challenge, reversing the Trump administration's position on the case. In a new interview, Laurence Tribe — one of the nation's top constitutional law scholars, who briefly served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration — told Yahoo Finance that the case stands "no chance at all" of striking down the law, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He described the case against the law as "outlandish" and "extreme," assuring that even a conservative-majority court would keep Obamacare intact. "I don't think there is a chance at all that the law will be invalidated," says Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School who taught there for more than 50 years. The Supreme Court will "get rid of the case," he adds. "Now that the Justice Department under Biden has reversed the position that the Trump administration took against the law."

A Beautiful Resistance — a special project from the Globe's culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt — is celebrating Black History Month by amplifying local stories of change-makers and the people inspired by them...“My name is Daniel Oyolu ‘21 and I want to celebrate New England Black History by honoring and acknowledging the fact that Martin Luther King met Coretta Scott while they were both studying in Boston: Martin at Boston University and Coretta at the New England Conservatory. The two were really different. Coretta came from rural Alabama and was reserved whereas Martin hailed from urban Atlanta and was quite gregarious (no surprise). At the end of the first date, Martin told Coretta she had all the qualities he wanted in a wife. Meanwhile, Coretta thought Martin was so short! But they did eventually grow close while in Boston. They were both serious individuals, politically active, and decided together to dedicate their lives and union to changing the world.” Celebrating Black love is essential. Oyolu is a Harvard Law student with a commitment to community and culture.

IBM said it was getting out of the facial recognition business last year. Then, Amazon and Microsoft announced prohibitions on law enforcement using their facial recognition tech. Nationwide protests last summer opened the door for a conversation around how these systems should be used by police, amid growing evidence of gender and racial bias baked into the algorithms. On today's encore episode, Short Wave host Maddie Sofia and reporter Emily Kwong speak with AI policy analyst Mutale Nkonde about algorithmic bias — how facial recognition software can discriminate and reflect the biases of society. Nkonde is the CEO of AI For the People, fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University.