Media Mentions

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the early nineteen-nineties, I went to the university’s gymnasium one evening each week for a women’s self-defense class. We were instructed on how to fight off would-be rapists with physical force, using our knees, elbows, fingernails, and keys, being sure to mark an attacker’s face for police identification. Walking to my dorm in the dark, I was alert to not being a victim. It was part of the informal feminist curriculum that also included Take Back the Night marches and the slogan “No Means No,” one that dates me to an era when women were trying to defy vulnerability. As a rape counsellor in those days, I remember chuckling with feminist peers when we heard about a new Sexual Offense Prevention Policy at Antioch College. The rules said that consent had to be asked for and given at each new level of sexual activity, with silence conveying a lack of consent. Saturday Night Live mocked the policy: “May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks?” “Yes, you have my permission.” This stilted picture of how sex should proceed seemed absurdly unrealistic and made a small college’s policy a national punch line, despite its serious and understandable aim to prevent rape. At the time, even the category of “date rape,” on which I was trained to educate others, mostly envisioned a forcible act or one imposed on an incapacitated person.

While its billion-dollar basketball championships serve as a platform for players to voice their disapproval of its rules, the NCAA will polish and present its weathered case for amateurism to the U.S. Supreme Court this week in what legal experts describe as a crucial moment in the century-old journey toward athlete compensation. Attorneys in NCAA v. Alston are expected to make their oral arguments before the high court on Wednesday in a case that goes to the heart of the NCAA’s slow-to-evolve rules...All of the legal proceedings — the Supreme Court case, state laws and federal bills — create a very busy and confusing intersection of legislation. Among lawmaking bodies, who has the most power? Who trumps whom? If the Supreme Court rules for the NCAA, for example, could Congress still enact NIL reform? Yes, in fact, it can. “Congress can trump the Supreme Court,” said Peter Carfagna, a Harvard Law professor who is the faculty supervisor of the school’s sports law clinical program. “That’s unequivocal.” ... The Supreme Court “makes a lot of statements about the critical role the NCAA plays and the maintenance of the revered role of amateurism,” Carfagna said. The NCAA “holds on to that like a bulldog and it is still the crutch to this day.”

The murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, accused of killing 46-year-old Black man George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, began March 29. It comes 10 months after the killing sparked ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and a national reckoning over racial equality and the long history of police brutality, especially against non-white people, in America. Chauvin’s trial also takes place about 75 years after a similarly extreme case of police brutality that helped shape the modern civil rights movement, when a Black Army veteran was blinded in police custody after being beaten in the eye with a billy club. The incident, which resulted in a trial over whether excessive and unnecessary force was used, is the subject of a new American Experience documentary, The Blinding of Isaac Woodard, premiering Mar. 30 on PBS...Then, as now, police violence against Black Americans was “routine, unaddressed and overlooked,” and Black WWII veterans were often targets, as Kenneth Mack, a professor of law and history at Harvard University who appears in the PBS documentary, tells TIME.

Every 10 years, after the collection of census data, states are required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to ensure that they remain equal in population. The process — as readers of this newspaper know — is vulnerable to gerrymandering, in which districts are redrawn to give favored parties, office holders or constituencies an advantage in elections...As states await census data to guide redistricting, there is one wild card in the mix: the possible enactment of voting rights reform, HR 1 or the For the People Act of 2021 — the measure that passed the House on March 3 on a 220-210 vote, but faces the threat of a filibuster in the Senate. I asked Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard whose specialties include election law, about the bill. He emailed me to say that: “The voting legislation currently before Congress would revolutionize the redistricting process if it passed. It would require all states to use truly independent commissions, effective immediately. Separate from this structural reform, the bill would also include quantitative partisan bias thresholds that maps wouldn’t be allowed to exceed. These thresholds would have real teeth.” At the same time, Stephanopoulos continued, the legislation would put the brakes on voter suppression laws: “The bill affirmatively requires a series of participation-enhancing policies for congressional elections: automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, at least 15 days of early voting, expanded mail-in voting, restrictions on voter purges, restrictions on photo ID requirements, etc.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Alec MacGillis, award-winning ProPublica journalist and author of the new book “Fulfilment: Winning and Losing in One Click America,” explains Amazon’s role in deepening America’s regional wealth disparities. He also discusses the recent efforts to unionize some Amazon fulfillment centers and the threat that unionization poses to the company.

For years, Larry Nassar sexually abused female athletes under the guise of medical treatment while serving as the doctor for USA Gymnastics...If someone like Nassar were abusing children in Massachusetts, officials at a private athletic organization or a higher education institution would not be required under the state’s mandated reporter law to report him to the Department of Children and Families – because they are not considered “mandated reporters.” ... A 2018 report by a legislative committee recommended the state update its mandated reporter law to fix what it called a “glaring loophole” that puts youth athletes at higher risk for abuse...Michael Gregory, who teaches education law at Harvard Law School and is managing attorney at the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, which helps traumatized children succeed in school, said the proposed changes represent “a sweeping expansion” of the mandated reporter law. He worries that the law could “become a major source of surveillance” if, for example, a television repair person entering a home becomes a mandated reporter. “The more people you have participating in that surveillance, the greater the likelihood that racial disproportionality will increase, particularly when it’s non-professionals, those not trained in working with children, who would be rendering reports to DCF,” Gregory said.  Gregory also voiced concerns about removing the poverty and disability exemptions from the definition of neglect. “Nobody’s saying that families experiencing poverty, or where disability is a factor, shouldn’t be entitled to lots of support. They should,” he said. “But whether an agency that can take your children away from you is the place they should be getting support is another question.”

A first-of-its-kind study of Suffolk County criminal cases found that declining to prosecute some low-level offenses can actually lead to less crime. We discuss the results with Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who made this a central issue while running for the office in 2018. We also break down the study's findings with WBUR's Ally Jarmanning, and hear legal analysis from Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR Legal Analyst. Historian Tobey Pearl tells a deeply personal history of a 1638 murder trial in Providence. Her new book is: "Terror To The Wicked: America's First Trial By Jury That Ended A War And Helped To Form A Nation."

No sooner had Joe Biden won the Presidential election than Republican state legislatures began introducing measures to make voting more difficult in any number of ways, most of which will suppress Democratic turnout at the polls. Stacey Abrams, of Georgia, has called the measures “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Congress has introduced the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1. Jelani Cobb looks at how the bill goes beyond even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its breadth, and how it will likely fare in the Senate. And Jeannie Suk Gersen speaks with David Remnick about the Supreme Court’s views on voting rights. The Court is currently weighing an Arizona case that will help decide what really counts as discrimination in a voting restriction.

The pandemic has brought grinding frustrations for parents, educators and students across the country. But perhaps no place has matched San Francisco in its level of infighting, public outrage and halting efforts to reopen schools...Critics of San Francisco’s brand of liberal politics have long pointed to a disconnect between elected officials’ lofty rhetoric about social justice, and the reality of a city where fabulous wealth lives side by side with extreme poverty and despair, exemplified by the homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness on the city’s streets...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an alumnus of the San Francisco public school system, said the board had used “cultural distractions” as a way of covering up its inability to get schools reopened. “It’s clear,” he said, “that the internecine conflict among relatively privileged liberals sometimes leaves behind people that they genuinely believe they are concerned about.”

The state Ethics Commission has dropped its investigation into the alleged Christmas Eve road rage incident involving Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, telling the woman who filed the complaint that after “a careful review” the office has determined that “the matter doesn’t warrant further action by this office.” ... Ronald Sullivan, a private lawyer who represented Rollins in the investigations, said in a statement that the commission’s finding fully vindicated Rollins: “This few-second traffic encounter has been thoroughly reviewed and not a single criminal, civil rights, or ethical violation occurred. The District Attorney is not surprised by these outcomes, and sincerely hopes we can all return to the far more pressing matters facing the Commonwealth.”

In this episode of Third Degree, Elie Honig is joined by Harvard Law student and former Trump administration speechwriter Eli Nachmany ‘22 to discuss the conduct of former DC Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and the potential for sedition charges against the Capitol insurrectionists. Plus, Elie tells stories from the legal trenches of his former office, the Southern District of New York. Join Elie every Monday and Wednesday on Third Degree for a discussion of the urgent legal news making the headlines. Third Degree takes on a bit of a different flavor on Fridays, when Elie speaks with a rotating slate of America’s most impressive law school students, exclusively for members of CAFE Insider.

Harvard Law students and alums are working to battle gerrymandering and other bars to voting access throughout the United States.

Harvard Law School’s Carmel Shachar weighs in on the morality nuances of those who are cutting vaccine lines.

Lawrence Lessig, Sue Gardner and others explain how and why American broadcast news became increasingly polarized.

A study examining the effect of declining to prosecute lower-level nonviolent offenses — a signature policy adopted by Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins that has drawn both praise and scorn — suggests the approach leads to significantly less future involvement by those defendants in the criminal justice system. The new study, which looked at cases handled by the Suffolk County DA’s office going back to 2004, found that those defendants not prosecuted for lower-level misdemeanor cases were 58 percent less likely to face a criminal complaint over the following two years than those who faced prosecution for similar charges...Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has extensively studied the prosecution of misdemeanor offenses, said the study “gives empirical teeth to just how costly and counterproductive low-level misdemeanor arrests and court criminal convictions can be.” Natapoff, author of the 2018 book ‘Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal’, said we have paid far too little attention to the harmful impact on individuals and communities of prosecuting misdemeanors, which account for 80 percent of all criminal cases in the US.

The federal government's response to Covid-19 has allowed millions of Americans to defer payments on their mortgages, rent, student loans and utility bills. But as more people are vaccinated and the country sees a return to normal life on the horizon, payments on trillions of dollars of those debts could resume soon, even if debtors remain out of work or in financial distress because of the economic crisis the outbreak wrought... "As the pandemic winds down, there is a lot of debt overhang: deferred rent, deferred mortgages, deferred student loans. We've basically been living in suspended animation until the pandemic ends," said 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. "And at some point there is going to be an extraordinary number of people out there who are very vulnerable with debt, and we are going to have major debt collection issues," he said. "We have already seen issues during the pandemic with payday lenders." ... Jackson of Harvard said many debts also have statutes of limitation and become invalid after a certain period of time. "It's critical to make sure consumers know they have rights in this area," he said. "There are a lot of substantive protections in the debt collection space."

All eyes are on Facebook’s oversight board, which is expected to decide in the next few weeks if former President Donald Trump will be allowed back on Facebook. But some critics — and at least one member — of the independent decision-making group say the board has more important responsibilities than individual content moderation decisions like banning Trump. They want it to have oversight over Facebook’s core design and algorithms...When it comes to Facebook’s fundamental design and the content it prioritizes and promotes to users, all the board can do right now is make recommendations. Some say that’s a problem. “The jurisdiction that Facebook has currently given it is way too narrow,” Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who analyzes social media content moderation policies, told Recode. “If it’s going to have any meaningful impact at all and actually do any good, [the oversight board] needs to have a much broader remit and be able to look at the design of the platform and a bunch of those systems behind what leads to the individual pieces of content in question.”

The performer Derek DelGaudio—he’s a little uneasy with the label “magician”—talks with Michael Schulman about the nature of deception, onstage and in life. Jelani Cobb and Jeannie Suk Gersen discuss the most important measure on voting rights since 1965, and its uncertain fate in the Senate and possibly the Supreme Court. Plus, a scholar considers how trans rights look different through an African lens.

Planet Money listeners email, tweet, and DM us questions about the economy every day. Everything from big-hitter "what does it all mean" questions to everyday economic oddities. Today on the show, we call the experts, crunch the numbers, and come back with the answers to questions about vaccines, canned tuna, scrap metal, and every dollar in the world. Featuring Carmel Shachar.

Environmental policy has emerged as a primary target for conservative attorneys general looking to keep the Biden agenda in check, the latest battleground in a long-running conflict over the scope of federal regulation. Republican-led states have filed a half-dozen lawsuits against the administration so far, with the three biggest actions focused on the White House’s energy and climate policies...The latest of those cases arose Wednesday as Louisiana and 12 other states suedthe Biden administration over a federal oil and gas leasing pause, while Wyoming filed its own case. Earlier in the month, Texas led a 21-state coalition in a challenge to President Joe Biden’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, and Missouri and 11 others sued over the administration’s reworked metric for climate impacts. Those are the first multistate coalition lawsuits filed against Biden. “This is a strong indicator that we will see aggressive litigation from Republican AGs challenging the Biden administration’s climate and air regulations,” said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

He had already been banned from Twitter, but on his podcast he could give full voice to his hateful conspiracy theories...The remarks, emblematic of a longstanding online network of white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups, weren’t hidden in some dark corner of the internet, but could be found on Google Podcasts, the search giant’s official podcast app that was released for Android in 2018 and expanded to Apple devices last year. As leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter have taken some steps to limit hate speech, misinformation and incitements to violence in recent months, podcasts — historically fueled by a spirit of good-natured anarchy — stand as one of the last remaining platforms for the de-platformed...Jessica Fjeld, the assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said she was surprised that Google had taken such a “hard-line” posture against regulating its platform. She compared Google Podcasts’ positioning to that of Parler, the largely unregulated social network that was a hotbed for disinformation and extremist groups before the largest tech companies turned away from it. “Google is perfectly well aware of how to moderate content if it cares to,” said Ms. Fjeld. “It seems like they’ve made a decision to embrace an audience that wants more offensive content rather than constrain that content for the sake of safety and respect.”