Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: New York Attorney General Letitia James is playing major league poker with former president Donald Trump — and she just raised the stakes. The AG’s office announced that its civil investigation of the Trump Organization for filing false tax returns has now become an active criminal investigation. In response, Trump issued a 900-word statement denouncing the investigation as politically motivated. Trump despisers may be tempted to take some heart from the news of the investigation, which will proceed alongside the until-now separate criminal investigation being conducted by the district attorney of New York County, Cyrus Vance Jr. But this is a high-risk move by James. Trump’s opponents would do well to remember the sizable risk that would come with prosecuting the one-term president: He could be acquitted. And if that happened, Trump could use the bounce-back as a highly effective tool to support a presidential bid in 2024. The announcement by James’s office was brief and opaque — and it didn’t mention the president by name. It said simply that the AG’s office had “informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature” and that it was “now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan D.A.”

Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin are locked in a voting rights standoff. Senate Majority Leader Schumer, D-N.Y., shot down an effort from Sens. Manchin, D-W.Va., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to focus narrowly on reauthorizing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, instead championing the For the People Act as the more immediate fix for systemic problems in the U.S. electoral system...Democracy reform advocates say using this moment only to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would squander an opportunity...Worse yet, said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, a dangerous possibility could be that Manchin actually does manage to get Republicans to cynically co-sponsor his approach. “The reason you see Republicans supporting HR4 is that they believe that this bill will be passed by Congress and kill HR1 but then be struck down by the Supreme Court and lead us back to where we are right now,” said Lessig, author of “They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy.” “The reality is, bipartisanship is not possible with the Republican leadership on voting rights reform because they are convinced the only way they maintain power is by preserving the ability of the states to make it harder for Democrats to vote.”

It was such an unlikely hit. A quiet nature documentary shot by naturalist and filmmaker Craig Foster in his backyard — a lush kelp forest in False Bay, South Africa, teeming with marine life — and depicting his yearlong encounter with a cephalopod. The 2020 Netflix release “My Octopus Teacher” became a viral sensation, a critical darling, and an Oscar winner...That persistence and his ability to track and follow an animal in the wild, particularly in a marine environment, struck neuroscientist David Edelman, a visiting scholar at Dartmouth who is researching visual perception, cognition, and their neural bases in the octopus. Edelman offered his comments during a wide-ranging discussion about the film on Monday, sponsored by Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative and moderated by Harvard Law School Professor Kristen Stilt, who also directs the School’s Animal Law and Policy Program...Stilt is working with the Animal Law and Policy Clinic to get octopuses protected under the Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the treatment of animals in research.

Some ballots in New York City’s mayoral race are four legal pages long. The system to fill it out is so confusing that the city is running ads urging New Yorkers to go online to practice before primary day on June 22. The winner will face the challenge of leading the city’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, in which more than 33,000 residents died from the virus and thousands of businesses closed. The primary is also the largest U.S. election to use a new ranked-choice voting system that lets voters list their favorite candidate and four runners-up...Good-government groups who pushed for the new ranked-choice system say it gives voters greater say in who gets elected. But many voters say the new system and the sheer number of candidates in the mayor’s race and in other citywide and local contests being held June 22 has left them overwhelmed... “One of the things that the proponents have always said about ranked-choice voting is it should lead to a softening of the political rhetoric,” said Peter Brann, a lawyer and visiting lecturer in law at Harvard Law School who is an expert on the voting system. “I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.”

Colorado on Tuesday made it illegal to share the personal information of public health workers and their families online so that it can be used for purposes of harassment, responding to an increase in threats to such workers during the pandemic...Violators of Colorado’s new law face up to 18 months in jail and a $5,000 fine. The state had already made it a crime to dox law enforcement officers or workers who provide child welfare and adult protective services. Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert and a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, welcomed the legislation but questioned why its protections were extended only to public health workers. “What about the people who faced a lot of doxxing and harassment before the pandemic?” Mr. Schneier said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s like saying it’s illegal to rob truck drivers but it’s OK to rob everybody else. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Legal battles from the city of Boston to the Supreme Court could affect our future here in the Commonwealth. We'll get caught up on what's happening with retired federal judge and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Dr. Heidi Larson, founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, discusses the complicated relationship between vaccine hesitancy, choice, and democracy. Dr. Larson is the author of the recent book, “Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away.”

President Biden embraced a pro-labor stance during his campaign. He has underlined his ambition to support workers’ interests by nominating as his future labor secretary Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who was strongly backed by the AFL-CIO and major labor unions. While there should be no disagreements with the goal of improving the situation of the labor force in the United States, there could be some merit in taking a closer look at possible side effects...A Harvard Law School paper published by professors Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita warned of the consequences and showed that such stakeholderism would impose substantial costs both on stakeholders and society. It would also hurt the owners—namely the investors. This is exactly the result we see in Germany. Only 16% of Germans own equity-based investments, and only 7% directly own stocks; in the U.S., in contrast, 55% of people own stocks (either directly or through instruments like mutual funds).

Humans throw away about 1.3 billion tons of food a year, or—at the very least—one third of all food in the world...According to Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, these new habits create an opportunity: “People are being more thoughtful about their food now, looking at food as a crucible for a bunch of different concerns: local and regional food, farm to school, discrimination in those systems. And once you start looking at food, you come to an understanding of how much is going to waste.” ... Date labeling is another critical step the government could take in the fight against food waste...The confusing nomenclature “is a driver of so much of the food that’s wasted in the household and by grocery stores and retailers,” Broad Leib says, as grocers and home cooks toss perfectly good food with approaching “best by” dates. Creating national standards for date labels would be “an easy win” and the single most cost-effective way to reduce food waste, she says.

State and local prosecutors across the United States are increasingly bringing criminal charges against employers who violate their workers’ rights by stealing wages or providing unsafe work environments, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive, Washington DC-based think-tank. “This is happening now in large part because worker organisations – like unions and advocacy groups – have pushed for it in many instances. This is happening now also because we have in our country a growing understanding of how extreme workplace violations have become,” Terri Gerstein, a senior fellow at EPI and the report’s author, told Al Jazeera. Prosecutors are also reconsidering their roles and thinking of ways they could use their prosecutorial power to pursue economic and social justice by holding bosses who violate the law to account, Gerstein added. Gerstein’s paper is the second in EPI’s New Enforcers series, which focuses on players at the state and local levels working to uphold and promote employee rights. The firstreport released last year, also authored by Gerstein, argued for increased state and local enforcement of workers’ rights.

Three transgender protesters who were arrested last year and taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center (TGK) in Miami-Dade County say they faced gender discrimination and severe mistreatment from officers. Now represented by a host of nonprofit advocacy groups, the three are seeking an overhaul of jail policies and compensation for their experiences. Christian Pallidine, Gabriela Amaya Cruz, and Jae Bucci were arrested at separate Black Lives Matter protests in Miami last summer and detained at TGK, where they allege that officers with the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) subjected them to genital inspections and humiliation because of their gender identities. In an April 28 letter to County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, lawyers from the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic asked the mayor to enter into a structured negotiation, an alternative to a lawsuit wherein both parties try to resolve a claim without going to court. The advocacy groups want to discuss holding the officers responsible for violating MDCR's own policies on transgender people.

Several states, including Illinois and Nebraska, recently put in place restrictions that cap interest rates at 36% on consumer loans, including payday loans. Advocates claim these restrictions protect consumers from getting in over their heads with these traditionally high-cost loans, but opponents maintain that these types of laws will reduce access to credit by forcing lenders out of business with unsustainable rates, leaving people nowhere to turn when they’re short on cash... “In our estimation, banning payday loans harms consumers on net, but regulations that allow payday lending, but limit repeat borrowing, can help consumers,” says Hunt Allcott, one of the study’s lead researchers and a visiting professor of law at Harvard University...Implementing a 30-day “cooling off period” for payday loans allows consumers access to credit when they need it, but it also forces them to pay back the loan sooner (rather than continue reborrowing the loan), which is in line with what borrowers say they want for themselves in the long run, Allcott says. The cooling off period has to be at least a month because it has be long enough to actually force borrowers to go a pay cycle without getting a payday loan, Allcott says. “Most people, in the days after they’ve gotten paid, have a lot of money in their bank account. It’s not until you get within a few days of your next paycheck that you’re actually short of cash and need a loan to make ends meet,” Allcott says.

Parler, the conservative-friendly “free speech” social media app, is back in the Apple App Store. But like anything involving social media and free speech, its return is complicated. Beginning on Monday, Parler is available for download on iPhones and iPads. This comes around four months after Parler was banned or limited by Apple, Amazon, Google, and virtually every other major tech company for allowing some of its users to openly organize violence following the 2020 US election — namely at the January 6 US Capitol insurrection... “It’s going to be an interesting story to watch in a number of ways,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies content moderation online. “There’s the story of what happens with Parler itself, whether it does get more serious about policing hate speech and violent content, and then what does it mean for Apple to get into the content moderation game.”

A podcast by Jill Lepore: During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally. She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting to turn them against their country and the American war effort.

In her new book, “On Juneteenth,” Annette Gordon-Reed explores the complexities of the past and how we think of them.

While the story of her home state is a large part of the focus of historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s latest work, “On Juneteenth,” it is also a very personal project. Gordon-Reed’s new, 144-page book is named for the holiday commemorating the moment when news of legalized slavery’s end in the U.S. finally reached African Americans in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — about 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation. A blend of history and memoir, it shines a light on some of her early experiences in the segregationist South — she became the first Black student to attend a white school in her town — and how the country’s largest state “has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.” Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor, is famed for her groundbreaking “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997), in which she showed that the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, had fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved. Her 2008 follow-up, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” chronicled the lives of Hemings and her children, earned her a Pulitzer Prize in history and a National Book Award. The Gazette recently spoke with Gordon-Reed about her latest work.

Amanda Kulka expected her six-year fight for student loan cancellation would be over by now. Powerful allies, including a state attorney general and a federal judge, agreed that she and other students in Massachusetts had been defrauded by the defunct for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges. The courts even granted all 7,200 of them a full discharge of their debt in June, rebuking former education secretary Betsy DeVos’s attempt to block their request for relief. The Trump administration appealed the decision, bringing the order to a standstill. But with the arrival of a new administration, one with a keen interest in consumer rights, Kulka believed the case would soon be over. She was wrong... “I’m shocked that more than 100 days in we’re still in an active appeal on something that is so opposed to what the Biden administration claims it’s about,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing borrowers in multiple Trump-era cases, including the class-action lawsuit in which Kulka is involved. She added: “We won the case so all they have to do is follow the law. It’s incredibly frustrating to our clients who have been waiting for so long for someone to do the right thing.”

Dozens of colleges and universities across the country have announced COVID-19 vaccine mandates for returning students...The question: Can colleges and universities legally require students to get vaccinated for COVID-19? The answer: In general yes, with a few exceptions for medical and religious exemptions...Our experts say that federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require that schools make reasonable accommodations for those with medical conditions. There are also some arguments for religious exemptions, but that’s going to depend on the state and how courts apply existing statutes. "Some colleges and universities may say, all right, if you don't want the vaccine, we have a reasonable accommodation, which is you will continue to be on Zoom every day," Carmel Shachar said. Shachar and David Bloomfield said that even though the vaccines are only authorized under emergency use, rather than full FDA approval, it shouldn't change much legally.

For years, Facebook has grappled with the thorny question of who should be the ultimate “arbiter of truth” when it comes to moderating content on its near ubiquitous social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and ultimate decision maker, has agreed that it should not be him — semi-outsourcing the problem to a group of his own making, called the Facebook Oversight Board...It is currently funded — through a $130m trust — by Facebook. And it has binding authority over a very narrow type of case: whether a removed piece of content should be reinstated or an offensive post should come down, and whether users should remain banned. It only hears a handful of these a year. “It’s still looking at that very narrow slice of what content moderation is, namely how Facebook treats individual posts,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It doesn’t look at things like groups, pages, down-ranking decisions, how the news feed works in terms of prioritisation, how Facebook treats entire accounts.”

Norfolk Southern Corp. shareholders yesterday approved a resolution calling on the coal-reliant railroad company to report on how its lobbying aligns with the Paris Agreement. The resolution was the fifth political influence-related proposal at a Fortune 250 firm to gain a majority of shareholder support this annual meeting season, according to data compiled by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. The string of shareholder victories comes as banking giant JPMorgan Chase and Co., oil major Exxon Mobil Corp. and tech titan Amazon.com Inc. are set to face similar resolutions later this month. Experts think momentum is building in favor of greater disclosure of corporate spending on lobbying and politics...Shareholders rarely approve public-interest proposals, according to a new research paper from Roberto Tallarita, the associate director of Harvard Law School's program on corporate governance. He defines those as ones focused on political, social and environmental issues. In Tallarita's review of more than 2,400 resolutions presented to S+P 500 companies over the past decade, "only a minuscule fraction of public-interest proposals obtain a majority of votes (about 1% in my 10-year sample)," he wrote in an email. In that context, a handful of successful political influence resolutions already this year is remarkable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on May 13 updated its guidance regarding mask-wearing for people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19...The question: Is a business asking a customer about their vaccination status a violation of HIPAA? No, most businesses would not violate HIPAA by asking about a customer’s vaccination status...HHS says protected health information under HIPAA includes information that relates to a person’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition. HHS has a list of what information is protected on its website. While HIPAA rules apply to covered entities and specific business associates, the rules don’t extend to most businesses, according to Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Because the average business is not a covered entity or a business associate of a covered entity within the meaning of HIPAA, the statute does not prohibit them asking them about vaccination status,” Cohen said in an email to the VERIFY team.