Media Mentions

On a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting...Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy. Facebook promised to change that with the Oversight Board...The idea for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution. In 2018, Feldman was staying with his college friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at her home in Menlo Park, California. One day, Feldman was riding a bike in the neighboring hills when, he said, “it suddenly hit me: Facebook needs a Supreme Court.” ... Currently, users can appeal cases in which Facebook has removed a post, called “take-downs,” but not those in which it has left one up, or “keep-ups.” The problem is that many of Facebook’s most pressing issues—conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech—involve keep-ups...“This is a big change from what you promised,” Evelyn Douek, a Harvard graduate student who consulted with the team, fumed, during one meeting. “This is the opposite of what was promised.” Users also currently can’t appeal cases on such issues as political advertising, the company’s algorithms, or the deplatforming of users or group pages. The board can take cases on these matters, including keep-ups, only if they are referred by Facebook, a system that, Douek told me, “stacks the deck” in Facebook’s favor.

Constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman says Republicans are clinging to the constitutionality argument to avoid convicting Trump.

Perry Connelly quickly noticed that something was off when he began working at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, last spring. Managers were unfriendly to the point of not acknowledging employees when they walked past, and they were quick to write people up for infractions that seemed minuscule or made-up, such as too much time “off-task.” “The main thing was just the disrespect,” the 58-year-old told The Daily Beast. Any concern, even one related to safety, went unattended unless it was an emergency, he said...Nearly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer warehouse began a vote this week to determine whether they will become the first Amazon employees in the country to form a union...Just like the town of Bessemer, a large portion of the warehouse employees are Black. “It’s significant that it’s a movement of primarily Black workers and women—the workers that have been most impacted by the pandemic,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, told The Daily Beast. A win at the Bessemer warehouse would be a “huge victory for economic and racial justice,” Sachs said, and workers with positive experiences with unions often go on to unionize other workplaces.

Multiple members of Boston's delegation in the Masachusetts statehouse said Monday that state approval looks likely for the cancellation of a special mayoral election that after Mayor Marty Walsh’s resigns to become U.S. labor secretary. If the current election schedule goes forward, the city would potentially hold four contests — a special election, the regularly scheduled November contest, and preliminary elections preceding each — within five months. But unless the legislature approves Boston's request, the city can't do away with a special election. That got us here at GBH's Curiosity Desk to ask why...Here in Massachusetts, home rule became the law of the land in the 1940s. "Home rule, it sounds great," said Gerald Frug, a professor at Harvard Law School. "You can do what you want. But there’s less there than meets the eye." "There’s a home rule grant to cities that allows them to do certain things without going to the legislature every time. But that’s a limited set. It’s more limited than people think," Frug added. The upshot is that even with home rule, cities and towns still must still seek approval from the legislature for all sorts of things — including, but not limited to, elections.

The young plaintiffs behind an ambitious climate lawsuit are taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite warnings from environmental lawyers that the attempt could backfire. Lawyers for the 21 children and young adults in Juliana v. United States quickly announced plans Wednesday to file a Supreme Court petition after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to revive their claims that the federal government has violated their constitutional right to a stable climate system. Julia Olson, who represents the plaintiffs, said she and her clients were unmoved by detractors who worry a Supreme Court fight would undermine broader environmental litigation...Outside lawyers, many of whom are sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ novel claims, say taking the issue to the high court could spell disaster for environmental interests if the justices agree to review the case. The Ninth Circuit’s rehearing denial is “no doubt enormously disappointing” to the plaintiffs after their more than five-year effort to make the government take action “urgently needed to avoid the truly catastrophic consequences of climate change that the entire planet now faces,” Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus said. “For making clear the depth of the government’s past decades-long lapses in the face of industry malfeasance, the plaintiffs and their lawyers deserve the nation’s thanks,” he said. But Lazarus cautioned that seeking Supreme Court review would be “a serious strategic mistake” for those who care about climate issues. “The result would far more likely be the establishment of binding legal precedent by the Supreme Court that sets back critically important efforts to address the climate issue rather than a Supreme Court ruling that promotes those efforts,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The opening of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial highlighted three realities: The breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a horrific episode that both mainstream political parties reject. Trump’s lawyers are woefully unprepared. And enough Republican senators will claim the trial is unconstitutional to assure that Trump won’t be convicted. So, what’s the point of the rest of the trial? The trial still matters because the theater of impeachment has a deadly serious purpose. In fact, Trump’s lawyers have already begun to fulfill one of its central functions: They are admitting, in a way that Trump himself has not, that the Jan. 6 attempt to disrupt the democratic process was a serious threat to democracy itself. Impeachment is designed to color in the red lines on the map of constitutional democracy. The lines have a purpose and a message: Stay inside them, and you may be voted out of office or otherwise held accountable by the voters. Cross them, and the system is supposed to stand up and take extraordinary steps to punish you. If it doesn’t, the system itself is profoundly weakened. Seen for what it is, the impeachment is an object lesson in delineating the fundamental, unbreakable rules of democracy. It offers civic education in the deepest sense to the entire country, and indeed the world.

From ridesharing to electric cars to self-driving vehicles the line between application, potential and promise is often very blurry. In this episode we take a reality check on the future direction of the automotive industry. Guests: Dr. Wulf Stolle – partner with Kearney (Europe); Dr. Ashley Nunes – senior Research Associate, Harvard Law School; Professor Shirley Meng – Director of Sustainable Power and Energy centre, University of California, San Diego; Nick Kilvert – ABC science reporter.

Megyn Kelly is joined by two legal titans, Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, to talk about all the angles to Trump impeachment #2. They discuss and debate whether it's even legal to impeach a president who is no longer in office, whether Trump has a First Amendment defense, whether Trump can be found guilty of inciting an insurrection, whether he could be charged with dereliction of duty, the push to take Harvard degrees away and disbar Senators Cruz and Hawley, and more.

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are finally here, employers have begun looking ahead to an eventual full return to the workplace in the coming months. But even though their offices may look exactly as they did last spring when most white-collar organizations shifted to remote operations, they will find that things will be very different, say Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty who study the work world. The pandemic has sped up macro trends in consumer behavior, business management, and hiring. That, along with insights gained by months of adjustments to work roles, schedules, routines, and priorities, have prompted employers and employees to reconsider many default assumptions about what they do along with how and why they do it...One year into the pandemic, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal regulatory agency that oversees private sector workplace safety in all 50 states, had not established national COVID safety standards under President Trump, leaving individual companies and industries, like meatpacking, to set their own protocols and policies. “It’s bananas to entrust our public health decisions to disaggregated, atomized employers making their own decisions about what’s good enough and what’s not,” said Terri Ellen Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “With OSHA abdicating its responsibility, that’s been happening in too many places.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Monika Bickert, Vice President of Content Policy at Facebook, takes us inside the decision to indefinitely suspend former President Donald Trump’s account. Host Noah Feldman details what this move means for free expression in the United States and what it tells us about Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968, and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000. In this exclusive briefing organized by the Club of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, Professor Tribe will provide his insights on the current Trump’s Impeachment Trial. Allan Dodds Frank, former president of the Overseas Press Club contributed his expertise to the moderation of this briefing.

Donald Trump is now on trial in the Senate for inciting a violent insurrection. But what about his collaborators? Fox “News,” Newsmax, One American News, and other right-wing outlets relentlessly pushed the “Big Lie” that led to this attack. On Jan. 4, for example, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson accused “virtually every power center on Earth” of working “tirelessly … to bypass voters and get Joe Biden to the White House.” “If that’s not rigging an election,” he thundered, “there’s no meaning to that phrase.” Where is the accountability for right-wing propagandists like Carlson, who recklessly splashed around the lighter fluid that ignited on Jan. 6? There is, alas, little that can be done to punish their egregious lies — or to make them stop inciting hatred and violence in the future...I also suggested reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC stopped enforcing in 1987, and I still think it’s a good idea, but it may not be possible. The original Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcasters based on the rationale that they were using scarce publicly owned airwaves. It would be much harder under the Supreme Court’s precedents to extend it to cable channels even though fiber-optic cables rely on public rights of way. “The odds that the current Court would permit the revival of the Fairness Doctrine or anything like it are extremely low,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me.

An op-ed by Maria Smith ‘22: For four years, the Trump administration rode roughshod over bedrock values of our democracy, eschewing foundational principles like transparency and accountability. Whether it was obstructing the Mueller investigation or interfering with inspectors general, the consequences of these ethical lapses cannot be overstated. What’s more, there are concerns that during its final months in power, the administration tried to cover its tracks by destroying official records in violation of the Presidential Records Act, or PRA. Now that there is a new administration, President Biden must restore the executive branch’s commitment to a government that is committed to transparency and accountability. He can start by ensuring compliance with the Presidential Records Act by signing an executive order on the issue. Congress passed the PRA in 1978 in response to the Watergate scandal, establishing public ownership of presidential records. (Before then, these records were considered the property of the officeholder.) The law requires the president to document and preserve records related to an administration’s “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies.” Regrettably, it lacks defined enforcement mechanisms, so it in effect operates “as an honor system,” and past presidents have not always fully complied with the it.

An op-ed by Sheila Paylan and Anoush Baghdassarian ‘22: Since the Capitol riots, Twitter has taken more precautions to stop hate speech and incitement to violence, including a purge of more than 70,000 accounts it found were engaged in sharing harmful content. It also permanently suspended President Trump’s account for the risk of further incitement to violence, referencing Twitter’s “public interest framework” which outlines its guidelines towards the profiles of world leaders on its platform. Twitter asserts it will not tolerate “clear and direct threats of violence against an individual” and recently updated its policy to prohibit the “dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, or ethnicity.” On Jan. 21, 2021, it locked the account of China’s US embassy for a tweet defending China’s persecutory policies towards Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. By enacting stricter rules, Twitter thus acknowledges that dehumanizing speech can lead to real-world harm. However, if Twitter does not stop such rhetoric in time, can it face liability for violence incited or enabled through inaction, or atrocity crimes committed in distant wars by despotic regimes that rely on social media to spread violence? Regulations and precedents argue yes. A number of new regulations, from Europe in particular, concern social media giants.

In a Monday interview on Boston Public Radio, constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe said the coming Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump will be “completely devastating for the country to watch” and predicted that a handful of Trump’s Republican supporters in the Senate will be “shaken” toward a conviction vote. "I believe that the presentations will be spell-binding, and I believe they will be terrifying,” he said. The Senate impeachment trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday. Should all Democrats vote to convict Trump, a total of 17 Republicans will need to cross party lines to meet the two-thirds threshold for a full conviction. Currently, only a handful of Senate Republicans are expected to side with Democrats. At the moment, the two dominant Republican arguments against conviction are that the Constitution doesn’t allow for the impeachment of a president who’s already left office and that Trump’s call for supporters to “fight like hell” on Jan. 6 falls under First Amendment protections. The Harvard Law School professor emeritus, however, said neither of those arguments hold much water. "There are almost no serious people saying that the Senate doesn’t have the power” to convict Trump, he said. To the question of whether the president’s calls to action consititute protected speech, Tribe cited the oft-used example of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen discusses potential arguments and precedents in the trial of former President Donald J. Trump Tuesday on charges that he incited the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

With the Senate’s impeachment trial starting oral arguments on Tuesday, Donald Trump now faces the possibility of real consequences for his role in inciting the Capitol siege of Jan. 6. But the apparatus that fed him much of his power — the conservative news media — is facing a test of its own. This might ultimately have a much bigger impact on the future of American politics than anything that happens to Mr. Trump as an individual. In recent weeks, two voting-technology companies have each filed 10-figure lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his allies in the media, claiming they spread falsehoods that did tangible harm. This comes amid an already-raging debate over whether to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevents online companies from being held liable for the views expressed on their platforms...Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor who studies digital media, sees a sea change coming. In the early decades of the internet, he said, most legal discussions were guided by a question of “rights,” particularly the right to free speech under the First Amendment. But in recent years, a new interest in what he called “the public health framework” has taken hold. “Misinformation and extremism — particularly extremism that’s tied to violence — can result in harm,” Mr. Zittrain said. “Given that there are compelling things in both the rights framework and the health framework, there’s going to be a balance struck.”

More than half of workers in the state’s Department of Correction— about 3,000 — have refused a coronavirus vaccine, according to state data. The workers are part of the more than 5,400 correctional personnel and contracted healthcare staff employed across the state prison system. Corrections officials say some of the employees may have been vaccinated elsewhere and that the department is working to educate employees about the benefits of the vaccine. But prisoners advocates say the significant number of refusals reflect a weaknesses in a system that has contributed to the deaths of at least 19 people in the state’s prisons, with a population of about 6,500...Katy Naples-Mitchell, a staff attorney with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, says correctional staff should be required to be vaccinated as part of their employment. At the same time, she says because of the lackluster number of vaccinations and an increase in COVID-19 variants, government officials should focus on reducing prison populations to stop the spread. Currently, there are more than 350 active cases of COVID-19 among prisoners statewide. “The state has a responsibility to make sure that people in its custody are safe,’’ she said.

Laurence Tribe explained what’s likely to could happen at former President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, including possible First Amendment defense arguments from GOP senators and what Trump could actually end up being charged with. Tribe is the a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The extended trial brief filed by Donald Trump’s lawyers advances three defenses: that Trump did not incite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; that the Senate can’t try a president who is no longer in office; and that the First Amendment protects Trump from being impeached for words that, they say, don’t meet the requirements for criminal incitement conviction laid down by the Supreme Court. The factual defense is highly unconvincing, as anyone who watched Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 and saw the attack can attest. The argument that the Senate lacks jurisdiction over a president who is out of office is disproven by history and Senate precedent. The free speech argument is also wrong in a basic sense: The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law abridging freedom of speech. But this doesn’t apply in impeachments any more than the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial would apply to the Senate impeachment trial. Yet the First Amendment defense requires deeper engagement than the other two, if only because it is less absurd. If it did apply to impeachments, the Supreme Court’s incitement jurisprudence contained in the famous 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohioprobably would have protected Trump’s speech.

The World Mental Health Coalition held a National Town Hall, where all panelists agreed it is vitally important to the nation that the Senate convict Donald Trump. As never before in our 231-year history, a president has been impeached for incitement of insurrection. It is imperative the Senate convict former president Donald Trump. Failure to do so would be an unforgivable dereliction of responsibility. Failure to do so would devastate the health of our nation. For these reasons, this extraordinary group of our country’s great legal, psychiatric, and historian minds came together at this moment of historical reckoning. The prestigious panel of speakers included: Laurence Tribe - Constitutional Scholar at the Harvard Law School and one of the country’s most influential Constitutional Law experts.