Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Here come the psychedelics. A striking new study published in Nature Medicine argues that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy represents “a potential breakthrough treatment” for post-traumatic stress disorder. Other studies are in the works considering the potential therapeutic applications of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD and cannabinoids. These follow well-received books on different forms of psychedelic use by such mainstream figures as food writer Michael Pollan, novelist Ayelet Waldman, and columnist Ezra Klein. If you’re a reader of mainstream news media, expect to hear more and more about this topic over the next few years. And even if you are a buttoned-down rule-follower, expect to hear an increasing number of your friends and acquaintances expressing interest in psychedelics — and maybe even experimenting with them. None of this is happenstance. It’s the product of a sophisticated, loosely coordinated effort to encourage the gradual re-legalization of psychedelics via medicalization and cultural normalization. The movement doesn’t seem to be motivated mainly by money, although there is doubtless money to be made. Instead, the psychedelic community is broadly motivated by a genuine belief that these substances — “medicines,” as many refer to them — contribute meaningfully to human well-being and are not addictive or dangerous when properly used.

A book review by Kenneth Mack: Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840” is the rarest of things — a constitutional romance. Amar, an eminent professor of law and political science at Yale, has great affection for his subject as a text that is worthy of loving engagement by scholars and the public at large. His 700-page narrative covers the “main constitutional episodes” that Americans faced as they revolted against Britain, created a Constitution and Bill of Rights, and built a new nation. Amar argues that the rebellious British subjects sparked a decades-long “constitutional conversation,” which eventually drew in men such as John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall. His book appears at a time when the Constitution has been criticized for its suppression of the revolution’s popular impulses, its undemocratic features such as the electoral college, its embeddedness in slavery and its deliberate exclusion of so many from its iconic invocation of “We the People.” Amar’s story is more celebratory, but the strength of his argument depends on whether his central metaphor of a conversation accurately captures what is at stake in this book.

Defense attorneys hope the Supreme Judicial Court’s recent decision on the constitutionality of a virtual suppression hearing winds up as just a footnote in history given the court’s concession that even the most fundamental of rights may be curtailed in response to the exigencies of a public health crisis...Katharine Naples-Mitchell, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, pointed out that the SJC was careful to narrow the scope of its ruling. “It’s a complex decision that I think is really limited to the moment that we are in. The court has built in a lot of qualifiers throughout the opinion, noting explicitly that it’s just limited to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Naples-Mitchell, who co-authored an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the institute, Boston Bar Association and Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

A recent decision from the Supreme Judicial Court weighed in on the fraught issue of how to ensure defendants’ rights are not being put at risk by public safety measures implemented to address the coronavirus pandemic. The defendant in the case, John Vazquez Diaz, was charged with trafficking in more than 200 grams of cocaine, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years in state prison. He filed a motion to suppress evidence obtained as part of a controlled delivery of a package to his home. Due to court closures required by COVID-19, the trial judge sought to move forward with a virtual hearing...As an amicus brief filed by the Boston Bar Association, Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School noted, any abrogation of the right to confront witnesses is likely to fall disproportionately on people of color. That’s because suppression motions are most often filed in narcotics or weapons possession cases, which disproportionately involve Black and Hispanic defendants.

A startup called Orchid is offering a spit test that tells a couple the odds that their children will grow up to have certain conditions...It’s sending the message that people affected by these diseases are not desired by society, says Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School who specialises in bioethics. “What the company is really saying is, we're going to help determine if your child has schizophrenia, and then we’re going to affirm your view that having a child who has some risk of schizophrenia is not a child you want to have, and we're going to empower you to replace it with a child you prefer.” Cohen refers to this as “liberal eugenics” – the idea that individuals are empowered to voluntarily choose what kind of children they want to have. “If you're really concerned about what the life of a person with schizophrenia looks like in America or the UK, the solution is not to empower more parents to avoid children with schizophrenia – the solution ought to be to find ways to improve the lives of people with schizophrenia,” Cohen says. “I would love to hear what kind of work the company is doing to contextualise these polygenic risk scores in a way that actually helps people understand the disorders in question, rather than merely says, here's your number – good luck.” Siddiqui and Orchid failed to respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment. The company does have a number of blog posts on its website that feature the perspective of people whose loved ones suffered from some of these conditions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: On New Year’s Eve of 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance premiered, featuring lovable corsairs relegated to the eponymous Cornish seaside resort. It marked quite an image makeover from the beginning of the century, when — in 1801 and again in 1815 — the U.S. fought two naval wars in the Mediterranean against piracy, known as the Barbary wars. How piracy went from menacing seaborne threat to charming comic opera over the course of the 19th century should give policymakers some clue about how to prevent attacks by cyber pirates, like the ransomware attack that crippled the Colonial Pipeline this week. Whether the pirates are in Russia or North Korea or elsewhere, the U.S. is going to have to engage in some old-fashioned hard-power geopolitics to change those government’s incentives. It’s no exaggeration to say that ransomware attacks have quietly become an industry. But it’s one that’s managed to maintain a low profile until now, because neither victims nor pirates are eager to share information on the scale or frequency of hacks. (That reticence could be one reason the FBI reports numbers that are almost laughably low.) Now, with the latest attack causing a pipeline shut-down and raising east coast gas prices, the national security side of the phenomenon is front and center.

Early in the morning of April 1, Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who represents a rural district in the northeast part of the state, posted a video to Twitter from the Capitol in Austin... “It’s a little after 2:30 in the morning and the Texas Senate has just recessed,” he said. “The Senate passed Senate Bill 7, which is an omnibus election integrity bill. This bill is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” ... The For the People Act faces its own anti-democratic hurdle to passage—not one concocted by the Republican Party, but the legislative filibuster, a long-standing feature of the Senate that the Democratic caucus has the power to eliminate or change...Jonathan Gould of the University of California Berkeley School of Law and Harvard’s Kenneth Shepsle and Matthew Stephenson have been working on a fix for the filibuster that might unshackle Democrats while preserving their ability to resist minority rule if they lose power in Washington. “The essence of the proposal is to use the same tool that has given us the dysfunctional current filibuster—that is, the Senate power to determine its own rules of proceedings under Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution—to move the Senate in a pro-democratic direction,” Stephenson said. “And that would be by replacing the current supermajority filibuster rule with what we call a popular majoritarian cloture rule, under which debate in the Senate on a measure could end only with the support of a majority of senators who collectively represent a majority of the population—or, more accurately, a larger share of the population than those senators in opposition.”

Guest: Michael J. Klarman is Kirkland + Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, and his latest, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.

The man accused in the Atlanta spa shootings was indicted on murder charges, yesterday. The prosecution says it will be pursuing a hate crime penalty. We recently sat down with our resident legal scholar, Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, to help us understand the complexity of defining and prosecuting hate.

States eager to use federal coronavirus relief money won some leeway from the Treasury Department in how they may deploy it without violating a prohibition on cutting taxes with it. But the guidance isn’t enough to end Republican state lawsuits against the ban. Interim final rules released by the Treasury Department on Monday permit states to issue tax relief under their own tax authorities as long as the relief amounts to no more than 1% of a state’s 2019 reporting year’s total revenue. It also allows them to adjust for inflation. But for larger tax changes states must show how they plan to offset any potential net revenue changes without using the $350 billion sent to them in the latest relief law...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, expressed skepticism about states’ ability to win their challenges following Treasury’s latest rules. “This interim guidance seems to me sufficient to overcome any legitimate red state constitutional objections,” he said.

Helen Shaw, theater critic at New York Magazine, joins us to discuss the return of Broadway ticket sales in anticipation of September’s reopening. WNYC planning editor Kate Hinds joins us to discuss the stories that the newsroom is covering this week. Laurie Woolever joins us to discuss World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, the final book Anthony Bourdain worked on, completed almost entirely after his death in 2018. Woolever, who was Bourdain's assistant and friend, served as co-author for this entertaining and practical guide to travelling to, eating at, and staying in some of Bourdain’s favorite places. The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case that could determine public school's abilities to police student's speech off campus. The case began when a young woman named Brandi Levy sent out an curse-laden Snapchat expressing her frustration at not making the Varsity cheerleading squad, and was suspended from the JV team. Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and New Yorker contributing writer, joins us to discuss the case, known as Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.

Top law firms are building out practice groups focused on state attorneys general, whose aggressive moves on everything from workers’ rights to Big Tech have clients looking for lawyers with a deep understanding of the process. The latest entrant is DLA Piper, which unveiled its new practice Tuesday, led by veterans of the New York and California state attorneys general offices. Other big firms with similar practices include Jones Day, O’Melveny + Myers LLP, and Crowell + Moring LLP. Companies face scrutiny from state attorneys general on all sides...Harvard Law School’s State and Local Enforcement Project director Terri Gerstein, former head of the Labor Bureau in the New York attorney general’s office, cautioned private practice lawyers against relying too heavily on relationships formed during their past work in state offices. “As with any kind of a government advocacy work, it’s always helpful to have someone who understands how that office works, who has relationships,” she said. “That doesn’t substitute for substantive knowledge of that area of law or just being a courteous adversary who takes the investigation extremely seriously.”

As the country slowly climbs out of the pandemic, the Biden administration is ending a program that delivered nearly 167 million boxes of fresh food to families in need and helped farmers sell their produce at a time when supply chain disruptions forced them to dump milk and destroy their crops. It's one of many emergency federal aid programs that the government must decide how to wind down in a way that doesn't create more problems for those still in need...The Farmers to Families Food Box program was brand new, created by the USDA last April using funds provided by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act... "This was revolutionary for USDA to actually be able to purchase and distribute everything so quickly," said Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. A report she helped write on the program found that many farmers and distributors were pleased, yet offered recommendations to make the distribution more equitable, help more small- and mid-sized farmers and reduce food waste. Sometimes food banks had to unpack the combo boxes in order to keep dairy and meat refrigerated and then repack them again.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Dr. Marc Lipsitch explains why it’s unlikely the United States will hit the threshold for herd immunity, and what that might mean for the future of the pandemic. He also weighs in on the possibility of lab-grown COVID variants and the surging variants abroad.

In the historic Black neighborhood where I grew up in Dallas, a parade would roll off the lot of New Mount Zion Baptist Church on June 19, or the Saturday closest to it, and wend its way through a community where many of the streets were named for institutions and people central to Black history: Oberlin and Ebony. Bellafonte and Dandridge. Bunche and Campanella...Growing up, though, I heard many people—relatives from Out West, recent transplants from Up North, Black elites eager to distance themselves from supposedly backward cousins—mock our parades and picnics as sad testimonials to being late and last...The answer, as the historian Annette Gordon-Reed explains in her new book On Juneteenth (Liveright/W. W. Norton + Company), is that Juneteenth was never about commemorating a delayed proclamation but about celebrating a people’s enduring spirit, before and after General Granger’s decree... In On Juneteenth, Gordon-Reed, an East Texas native, confesses to feeling slightly annoyed to discover that people outside Texas celebrate the holiday. For her, the “twinge of possessiveness” grew from a belief in Texas exceptionalism drummed into natives at birth. “Non-Texans could never really understand what the events that took place in Texas actually meant,” she writes. Her “proprietary attitude” passed soon enough. After all, Black Texans such as Fort Worth activist Opal Lee have campaigned to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, and East Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act in February.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Privately owned social media platforms like Facebook have exploded with wealth and influence. These companies have thrived on an opaque business model that weaponizes a fantasy version of the First Amendment to justify offering users temptingly convenient forms of personalized information-sharing. Of course, we know now these services often end up manipulating the appetites of ordinary people, mining their habits and exploiting the resulting profiles by targeting what amounts to propaganda at those most likely to soak it up, spread it and end up being harmed by it. The recent brouhaha over Facebook’s exile of President Trump and its use of a self-appointed panel of overseers to duck responsibilityfor the harmful lies Trump and his followers propagated on its platform — and the deadly insurrection they used it to pull off — seems likely to be only the first of a series of showdowns with the likes of Trump, who is bound to keep trying to get back onto Facebook. The controversy over Facebook’s actions (or lack thereof) may well be just the latest in what look to be a series of close encounters with the death of democracy.

Facebook can keep blocking former President Donald Trump from using its platform but must revisit the decision within six months, the social network's court-like Oversight Board said Wednesday. The landmark decision affirmed the company's decision to issue the suspension after the January 6 US Capitol riots. The board said it concluded that Trump's posts on January 6, which praised the rioters, "severely violated" Facebook's policies and "created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible." ... The decision to bar Trump from Facebook, if made permanent, could have vast implications, wrote Evelyn Douek, a researcher of online speech and platform moderation at Harvard Law School. "There is no greater question in content moderation right now than whether Trump's deplatforming represents the start of a new era in how companies police their platforms, or whether it will be merely an aberration," Douek wrote in January. "What one platform does can ripple across the internet, as other platforms draft in the wake of first movers and fall like dominoes in banning the same accounts or content. For all these reasons, the board's decision on Trump's case could affect far more than one Facebook page."

The federal government will begin enforcing protections for LGBT Americans in health care again, reversing a ban put in place by the Trump administration, the Health and Human Services Department said Monday. The decision to do so was made in light of the Supreme Court’s findingin Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that LGBT people are protected from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil of the Civil Rights Act of 1964... Obamacare’s anti-discrimination protections are based on Title IX, which bans discrimination in education and programs that receive federal funding, but courts typically look to Title VII when interpreting Title IX. “It’s very logical and clear that the interpretation the Supreme Court used in Bostock is going to apply to every single federal civil rights statute that bars sex discrimination,” Alexander Chen, founding director of Harvard Law School’s LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, previously told Bloomberg Law.

Five fellows for the 2020-21 Black List and Google Assistant Storytelling Fellowship were announced Monday. The program will provide financial and creative support to five writers in the development and execution of a new original feature film script or TV pilot under the condition that the project tells a contemporary story from the perspective of historically underrepresented communities...Alan Jenkins, a law professor, writer, and advocate who has devoted his career to the intersection of storytelling and social justice. Descended from African-American migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean, the Black experience is central to much of his storytelling. Jenkins seeks to engage broad audiences with shared values and new ideas and believes diverse and inclusive storytelling is especially important at this critical time in our nation’s history. He has worked as a Supreme Court law clerk, civil rights lawyer, human rights grantmaker, and non-profit communications strategist.

Almost every memoir could fairly be subtitled “The Education of.…” Some explicitly embrace the formulation; “The Education of Henry Adams” is the second most influential memoir in American letters, after Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “On Juneteenth,” Annette Gordon-Reed’s insightful, often touching reflection on the Black experience in Texas, starting with her own, lands between these two: less arch than Adams, more historical than Franklin. Gordon-Reed’s historical emphasis, like Adams’s, is partly a professional matter. Adams was a distinguished historian at the beginning of the 20th century. Gordon-Reed has earned acclaim as one of the most important American historians of our time. Her 2008 “The Hemingses of Monticello” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Gordon-Reed’s education included an awakening to the complexity of human existence. Many people look to history for lessons applicable to the present; they seek a “usable past,” in the words of Van Wyck Brooks. The simpler the lessons — that is, the more reducible to adage or slogan — the more usable they are. But simplicity comes at a cost to historical accuracy. Historians recognize this; for them the appeal is in the complexity. Time and again in this slim volume, Gordon-Reed notes her discovery that the past is more complicated than she had imagined.

Pfizer and BioNTech began the process of applying for full FDA approval of their Covid-19 vaccine Friday, an expected move that could force the issue of whether vaccine mandates—proposed for schools, colleges and even some workplaces—will be a legal way to combat the virus...A full license adds a new dimension to the debate over whether organizations, schools and universities are allowed to require vaccination, with many opponents arguing that people cannot be required to get a vaccine licensed under an emergency use authorization. Legally speaking, there hasn’t really been a test as to whether a temporarily authorized vaccine can be mandated, Carmel Shachar, executive director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center, told Forbes, though a fully licensed vaccine would certainly “be less controversial to mandate.” While any mandate would have to take account of legally protected medical and religious exemptions, Shachar said any further accommodations—such as an opposition to vaccination—would be decided by the organization implementing it and relevant local laws. Shachar added that it “would not be that much of a stretch” to add a Covid-19 vaccine to the “long list” of vaccines children need to get in order to attend school or daycare.