Media Mentions

Just months after the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the country was devastated by an epidemic of cholera, a bacterial disease spread through contaminated water. A group of United Nations peacekeepers was later found to be the likely source when sewage from a UN peacekeeping mission's base contaminated a major water supply. The resulting cholera epidemic killed over 10,000 Haitians. Nine months prior, a catastrophic earthquake had killed over 200,000 people and displaced at least a million. Beatrice Lindstrom, a human rights attorney who was in Haiti in 2010 to help earthquake survivors, told The World's host Marco Werman that “cholera hit when Haiti was already in a state of immense crisis.” Yet, the UN “responded by denying responsibility by refusing to engage with the evidence that was clearly available to the public eye,” Lindstrom says. She has been helping Haitians to call the United Nations to account ever since and has filed a lawsuit against the UN. It took six years of advocacy for the UN to admit it played a role in the outbreak, Lindstrom said. “I'm afraid that the way that the UN has handled this so far has amounted to an inadequate act of charity,” Lindstrom told The World. “The families who lost loved ones to cholera who continue to suffer both living in poverty and struggling with the ongoing impacts of cholera really have not received any meaningful assistance from the United Nations.” In 2016, the outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued an apology for the UN's role in the cholera outbreak and committed to raising $400 million in assistance to victims and their families. But so far, they've only raised 5% of this fund, Lindstrom says. The entire situation has led to a “loss of trust" between Haitians and the UN, she adds.

Ships carrying live animals are at least twice as likely to suffer a “total loss” from sinking or grounding as standard cargo vessels, the Guardian has found. In the past year alone there have been two disasters involving animals in transit. Last November, at least 14,000 sheep drowned after the Queen Hindcapsized en route to Saudi Arabia from Romania. And last month, Gulf Livestock 1, a carrier transporting almost 6,000 cattle, sank off the Japanese coast en route to China from New Zealand. Forty crew members remain missing and are presumed dead. “With the Guardian’s shocking findings … [it’s] time for an open and honest assessment of an industry that has caused one crisis after another,” said Prof Kristen Stilt, director of Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Program, currently writing a book about the transport of live animals. “That assessment should recognise that the transport of chilled and frozen meat is the way that nearly all meat travels in commerce today. The idea of sending live animals is a holdover from a bygone era.” The global live export trade is worth nearly £16bn. For decades, campaigners have been calling on the EU to provide better protections for animals in transit, and an inquiry into the regulatory system is under way. According to Guardian analysis, between January 2010 and December 2019 five livestock vessels were recorded as lost to sinking or irrevocable grounding, killing crew and animals. The total equates to just over 3% of the estimated 150 livestock carriers above 100 gross tonnes (GT) known to operate worldwide. The 100 GT measurement is used by the shipping industry to separate smaller vessels, often owned for pleasure, from larger, more probably commercial, ones.

Four Harvard professors have criticised a recent European Commission report that proposes reforms to encourage long-term strategic thinking. The commission’s report aims to tackle short-term management of companies and make them more sustainable. The wince-inducing conclusion of four Harvard academics is that the commission report contains “deep flaws”, “mistakenly conflates” key factors, fails to engage with alternative sources of evidence and “touts cures” backed by “little evidentiary support”. Some of the cures proposed by the report, the four argue, could be “counterproductive and costly”. Amounting to a brutal comment on the complexity of sustainability, The European Commission’s Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique, illustrates the difficulty governments may encounter when attempting to legislate for long-term strategic thinking in large listed companies. The European Commission’s report, written by the business advisory firm EY, concludes that far too many company directors across the EU continue to think short term instead of acting in the long-term interests of their stakeholders. It presents evidence and then sets about detailing the remedies. The Harvard professors—Mark Roe, Holger Spamann and Jesse Fried of Harvard Law School, and Charles Wang of the university’s business school—say it’s mostly wrong. First, the academics argue, the report confuses the definition of the problem. In focusing on the issue of “short-term” business thinking, they say the report “conflates” timeframes with problems stemming from “externalities” and the “distribution” of benefits. That’s three topics probably needing different cures, they say. “For policy analysis, however, the conflation is seriously debilitating. Real world companies will often fall short on all three dimensions, but cures for one may exacerbate another,” they write. Then there is the issue of flawed evidence of short-termism.

The rapid evolution of the power grid will require the attention of one critical agency —  the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And observers say no matter what happens Nov. 3, the agency will have no choice but to address the industry's transition, even if it means backing away from some of its more controversial policies. Over the past four years, the commission has been accused of trampling on state efforts to move away from fossil fuels and toward zero-carbon, renewable resources...The Biden Administration has an ambitious plan to bring the grid to zero-carbon electricity by 2035, an ambitious target that exceeds the goals of utilities' mid-century decarbonization plans, already considered aggressive by some in the industry. Getting that type of plan through Congress will be difficult in itself, dependent, in part, on which party secures the majority in the Senate. "FERC's role could really hinge on whether Congress does enact any clean energy legislation, even if that energy legislation doesn't specifically task FERC with anything," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. For example, if Congress were to pass any sort of clean energy standard, FERC would be beholden to that law, regardless of who was in charge of the commission. FERC's efforts over the past few years have been centered around "leveling the playing field" for energy resources, much of it said by NGOs and others to be aimed at state clean energy policies and subsidies, which Chatterjee and fellow conservative Republican-appointed commissioners have characterized as "distorting" the markets by giving renewable or zero carbon resources an advantage over fossil fuel generators. But under a federal clean energy standard, "everybody is under the same obligation," said Peskoe. "I don't think FERC could ignore that."

It started with a tweet from a conservative media personality, accompanied by photos, claiming that more than 1000 mail-in ballots had been discovered in a dumpster in Sonoma county in California. Within hours on the morning of 25 September, a popular far-right news website ran the photos with an “exclusive” story suggesting thousands of uncounted ballots had been dumped by the county and workers had tried to cover it up. In fact, according to Sonoma county officals, the photos showed empty envelopes from the 2018 election that had been gathered for recycling. Ballots for this year’s general election had not yet been mailed. Even so, within a single day, more than 25,000 Twitter users had shared a version of the false ballot-dumping story, including Donald Trump Jr., who has 5.7 million followers...Not all election disinformation is coming from the bottom up, however. Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and colleagues recently examined how claims of potential fraud associated with mail-in ballots entered public discourse. The researchers analyzed more than 55,000 online news stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 posts on public Facebook pages between March and August. They found that most spikes in media coverage and social media activity on the topic were driven by Trump himself—either through his own hyperactive Twitter account, press briefings, or appearances on the Fox TV network. “Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and reinforce his disinformation campaign,” the researchers write in a preprint posted earlier this month.

As Election 2020 looms, the next Congress will have another important decision to make - what is permitted, and what is not, when it comes to human genetic editing of the gamete (sperm and eggs). Currently, a ban on federal funding of genetic editing of the human embryo is in place. This rider, dating from 2015 and renewed annually, prohibits approval or funding to go to any research project that intentionally creates or destroys a genetically modified human embryo. This ban disallows the FDA approving any drug or other biological products created from such an experiment. However, the rider is unclear if this ban on funding and research applies to genetically modifying sperm and eggs. In a recent article in The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Professor I. Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School, Professor Jacob Sherkow of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Professor Eli Y. Adashi of Brown University state that the next Congress will need to address the question and ethics of gamete editing - that is - editing of the sperm and egg...There are many ethical issues when it comes to editing the embryo, yet some of these do not necessarily apply to the editing of the gamete. This is where Cohen, Sherkow, and Adashi step in. They argue that the ethical issues of editing an embryo are quite different from editing gametes. The coming Congress will need to decide if the current ban should include - or exclude - the editing of sperms and eggs... “Sperm and egg editing occurs before that moment [the moment that the sperm and egg meet and the genetic code is set], upending the claim that editing alters ‘a person.’ The activity is more like selecting a sperm or an egg donor,” say the authors.

Barring any major surprises, the Senate is set to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett Monday night. She'll fill the Supreme Court seat that had been held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman is known as a liberal, but he's vouched for the conservative Barrett, with whom he once clerked on the Supreme Court back in the 1990s. Feldman spoke with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath ahead of Barrett's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he checked in again with Arun ahead of Monday's vote. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen:  Throughout the past four years, there has been chatter about Donald Trump’s mental health and stability, but little political will to make use of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which allows Congress to deem a President “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and remove him from power. The discussion resurfaced more seriously this month, however, in light of Trump’s hospitalization for covid-19 and the White House’s lack of transparency around his treatment. The news that he was medicated with the steroid dexamethasone, used for seriously ill covid-19 patients, also alarmed many because its known side effects include aggression, agitation, and “grandiose delusions”—behaviors that, judging from the President’s Twitter account, at least, he already seemed to exhibit. On October 9th, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled a new bill to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office, which would help carry out the Twenty-fifth Amendment process in the event that the President becomes incapable of doing his job. (Sponsored by the Democratic representative and former constitutional-law professor Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, the House bill is similar to one he introduced in 2017.) Announcing the bill only a week after disclosure of the President’s covid-19 diagnosis and three weeks before the election, Pelosi invoked the Amendment as a “path for preserving stability if a President suffers a crippling physical or mental problem.” She added, “This is not about President Trump. He will face the judgment of the voters, but he shows the need for us to create a process for future Presidents.” Section four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment provides two distinct avenues for removing a President against his will. In one, the Vice-President joins with a majority of the Cabinet to send Congress a written declaration that the President is unable to serve. In the other, the Vice-President does so along with a majority of “such other body as Congress may by law provide.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: For the next few weeks on Deep Background, in addition to our regular show, we’re bringing you a special five-part series about the Supreme Court's dramatic rightward turn. In this fourth installment of Deep Bench, how Donald Trump and the Federalist Society forged an alliance that played a role in helping him win the presidency and changed the makeup of our courts.

In the middle of a coronavirus pandemic, it is another, more deadly disease that keeps 20-year-old Haitian Loubean Jean up at night - cholera. Jean was about to celebrate his 11th birthday in 2011 when his father was struck with cholera and died aged 49, leaving five children behind. Jean’s mother, who was also sickened by the waterborne disease that ravaged Haiti a decade ago, survived but still suffers from cramps and blurred vision...Haiti was cholera-free until October 2010, when infected sewage from United Nations peacekeepers sent to the Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake contaminated a river. Since then about 10,000 Haitians have died of the disease, which can cause profuse diarrhea and fluid loss that can kill within hours. More than 800,000 have fallen ill...The U.N. has not accepted legal responsibility for the outbreak, which human rights lawyers and former officials have said would have likely meant the organisation paying large amounts of compensation to affected individuals. Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologised to Haiti for the organisation’s role in 2016, saying it had a “moral responsibility” to help affected Haitians. The U.N. also pledged to eliminate cholera from the Caribbean nation, set up a $400 million trust fund to help victims and live up to its “moral responsibility” to those most directly affected and provide material assistance... “For the at least 10,000 people who have lost loved ones, the only thing that has happened is a handful of community projects in a couple of the most affected communities in Haiti,” said Beatrice Lindstrom, who was lead counsel in IJDH’s class action lawsuit. “But these projects don’t go to actually addressing directly the injuries that people suffered,” said Lindstrom, who now teaches at Harvard Law School.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: For the next few weeks on Deep Background, in addition to our regular show, we’re bringing you a special five-part series about the Supreme Court's dramatic rightward turn. In this third installment of Deep Bench, how the Federalist Society network influenced a historic 2012 Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act.

In a world with too many disengaged, dissatisfied, and disaffected employees, as well as bumbling governments unable to deal with destabilizing change, and too many people putting misplaced trust in populist leaders, it’s sad to note that even leadership experts concede that the multi-billion-dollar leadership industry has been of little help. The never-ending array of conferences, books, workshops, and training programs on the theme of leadership has not only failed to generate appropriate leadership behavior, or even agreement on the concept of leadership: they have often made things worse. A different, more pragmatic, and more agile concept of leadership is needed to cope with the complex, rapidly changing world of the 21st century...Meanwhile, the goal of maximizing shareholder value—which even Jack Welch called “the world’s dumbest idea”—eventually came under such heavy fire that, in August 2019, more than 200 chief executives of major corporations signed a statement of the Business Round Table (BRT) publicly renouncing it. The BRT declaration stated, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.” Yet since the declaration was issued, researchers have found no indication of significant change in corporate behavior. Harvard Law Professor Lucian Bebchuk and colleagues found that few of the signatories obtained the approval of their boards to sign the announcement. Nor has there been any apparent effort to change the many processes and practices that reinforce the goal of maximizing shareholder value. And in cases where the firm has had to make a clear choice between shareholders and other stakeholders, these firms have invariably chosen shareholders ahead of other stakeholders. Massive share buybacks that benefit shareholders, particularly executives, continue to flourish, even where there has been a collapse in profits. Bebchuk concludes that the BRT statement was signed “mostly for show.”

An op-ed by David Benger and Mike Shum: We write this Op-Ed as representatives of two professions (law and journalism) that venerate objectivity and value dispassionate observation and analysis. We write this because journalism was once considered a safe profession within America’s borders, but that is becoming increasingly untrue. We have worked all over the world, including China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cambodia, and we are concerned by the familiar attacks against truth and facts we see here in the U.S. One of us (Mike) was struck by rubber-bullet fire while covering the Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The free press has been under siege in this country since the election of President Donald Trump. Since Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. has become increasingly hostile to journalists. Traditional news outlets are disparaged, derided as “fake news” and ignored in favor of sources that offer “alternate facts.” Even now, journalists are fighting multiple legal battles to maintain their freedom to report the facts on the ground. Take, for example, the lawsuit that Index Newspapers (Portland Mercury) has filed to protect its reporters in Portland. According to its complaint (and multiple secondary sources), the journalists “were not engaging in unlawful activity or protesting, were not standing near protesters, and yet were subject to violence by federal agents.” In July, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon agreed that this was unjust. He ruled that federal law enforcement officers cannot threaten violence or arrest anyone whom they “know or reasonably should know” is a journalist or legal observer, unless officers have probable cause to believe that individual is guilty of a crime. Moreover, Simon ruled that journalists would not be subject to law enforcement’s dispersal order, ensuring that reporters would have the freedom to stay and report on whether dispersal was carried out peacefully and correctly.

President Trump has more at stake in this election than whether he remains in the White House. Holding the highest office in the land grants him effective immunity from federal criminal prosecution and gives him wide powers to stymie lawsuits against him and his business. That all changes once he becomes an ordinary citizen again. “Whatever shelters he has had as an occupant of the White House would vanish,” says Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and frequent Trump critic. “His ability to throw his weight around in terms of the deference that judges exercise—all of that is gone.” A federal prosecution of Trump would be political dynamite, and a President Joe Biden may choose not to detonate it. But a new administration could decide to revive Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice by Trump or launch a new probe into the questionable tax deductions the New York Times revealed in a recent investigative report. Trump is also facing an active investigation by the Manhattan district attorney that could result in state criminal charges...Here are the major legal threats facing Trump, and how a defeat in November would affect them...Trump has long been able to argue that he’s too busy as president to deal with lawsuits, and courts have generally given him broad deference as head of the federal government’s executive branch. He would not get that deference as a former president and could be forced to sit for a deposition. Like Vance, James would probably find it easier to get information or cooperation from others. “The hesitation on the part of third parties who are the holders of potentially very incriminating information will evaporate once he’s no longer president,” Tribe says.

The almost certain confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court on Monday represents a “power grab” by Republicans facing possible wipeout at the ballot box, activists and analysts say. Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee shrugged off a Democratic boycott on Thursday to advance Barrett’s nomination to the full Senate, which will vote little more than a week before the presidential election. If confirmed, Barrett could be sworn in as a justice almost immediately. To critics, the rushed process represents one of the most naked power plays yet by a party which, confronting dismal opinion polls, is weaponizing unelected judges to compensate for setbacks in elections. Even as they contemplate the loss of political power, Republicans are poised to cement judicial power for generations...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, described Barrett’s probable confirmation as a “‘power grab’ in every relevant sense of the term, especially in light of President Trump’s open concession that he appointed judge Coney Barrett in part to ensure her ability to vote in his favour should his re-election as president end up turning on a case the supreme court would need to resolve in order to give him an electoral college victory in the face of a national popular defeat.” Trump has appointed more than 200 federal judges, likely to be his most lasting legacy whether he serves one term or two. Critics suggest the courts represent the last bulwark of Republican minority rule and the Barrett episode is starkly indicative of a party that has lost its ideological and ethical moorings and now treats power as an end in itself.

Weber County, a majority-Republican community of 260,000 on the eastern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, held its first by-mail election in 2013. The process gained such widespread confidence that by June of this year, more than 99 percent of ballots cast in the primary were placed in the mail or deposited in a drop box. But something has changed in Weber County, which now requires three full-time phone operators to field calls from residents “suddenly worried about voting by mail,” said Ricky Hatch, the county clerk and auditor... In many cases, the worries can be traced to baseless or alarmist statements by President Trump and posts on his Twitter feed. Others have been fed by headlines stripped of context and misleading reporting in the mainstream media, according to election administrators, voting rights advocates and experts in online communication...A study released this month by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society offered fresh evidence of the dangers posed by homegrown misinformation. For months, Trump has generated entire news cycles that serve to cast doubt about mail-in voting, which mainstream outlets have at times covered uncritically, the report found. The president’s influential allies have eagerly shared these and other stories with their vast online audiences, enhancing their reach and fomenting fresh doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 vote. “With respect to mail-in voter fraud, the driver of the disinformation campaign has been Trump, as president, supported by his campaign and Republican elites,” said Yochai Benkler, who leads the center and co-wrote the report. In these and other cases, ­Benkler said, misconceptions and hoaxes that take root in the White House come to frame reporting in mainstream and partisan news sources alike. Any development related to the process of voting becomes fodder in a competition for narrative control. “The question is, who picks up that formal announcement and reframes it, or retells it, as a narrative of rampant fraud,” he said.

At least nine times since April, the Supreme Court has issued rulings in election disputes. Or perhaps “rulings” is too generous a word for those unsigned orders, which addressed matters as consequential as absentee voting during the pandemic in Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, and the potential disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people with felony convictions in Florida. Most of the orders, issued on what scholars call the court’s “shadow docket,” did not bother to supply even a whisper of reasoning. “This idea of unexplained, unreasoned court orders seems so contrary to what courts are supposed to be all about,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard. “If courts don’t have to defend their decisions, then they’re just acts of will, of power. They’re not even pretending to be legal decisions.” The orders were responses to emergency applications, and they were issued quickly, without full briefing or oral arguments (hence the “shadow docket”)...More recently, emergency applications in voting cases have spiked. Lower courts have struggled to make sense of the court’s orders, which are something less than precedents but nonetheless cannot be ignored by responsible judges. Is it possible to trace some themes in the court’s election orders? Sure. One is that Republicans tend to win. Another, as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion this month, speaking only for himself, is that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.” He cited the 2006 ruling that has come to stand for that proposition, Purcell v. Gonzalez. Or perhaps “ruling” is too generous a word, as Purcell itself was an unsigned, cryptic, tentative and equivocal product of the court’s shadow docket. It has given rise to a “shadow doctrine,” Professor Stephanopoulos wrote last month in an essayon Take Care, a legal blog.

An article by Daniel Judd and Maxwell Ulin ‘22: With less than two weeks to Election Day and early voting already underway, Joe Biden’s campaign is finally resuming in-person canvassing in battleground states. It’s about time. The Biden team’s decision earlier this year to impose a moratorium on door-knocking—a party line that local candidates, too, felt pressure to follow—and opt instead for an “invisible campaign” of ads, calls, and texts was a costly blunder. In-person canvassing is one of the most effective tools a campaign has at its disposal: It motivates volunteers, persuades undecided voters and increases turnout up and down the ballot. Which may be why the Trump campaign—and state GOP organizations—never stopped knocking. So it’s welcome news that, after months of condemning canvassing as both dangerous and ineffective, top Democratic operatives have suddenly changed their tone. The challenge now, especially in the midst of a spike in Covid cases across Midwest battleground states, will be to canvass responsibly—to protect voters’ and canvassers’ health. That will take careful planning and a rigorous set of safety protocols, but it can be done. We know, because we’re doing it. For the past month, we have been knocking on doors for Democrats in Arizona with CASE Action, a political advocacy group affiliated with the hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE Local 11. When the pandemic hit in March, more than 85 percent of UNITE HERE members lost their jobs. At the same time, CASE Action halted its in-person campaigning. But as the summer wore on, union members remained jobless—and phone-banking proved inadequate.

An op-ed by Alexandra Natapoff: The novel coronavirus pandemic is making many Americans poorer and hungrier. Parents and children across the country report going to bed hungry. In California, tens of thousands of people now depend on food banks from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, where the lines of waiting cars stretch for miles. In the face of this global crisis, the state should be protecting the vulnerable, not cracking down on the desperate. But by Nov. 3 in this election, California voters may ratchet up the punishment for stealing food and other necessities. Proposition 20would, among other things, elevate certain types of thefts from misdemeanors into potential felonies with longer sentences. It would create harsher shoplifting penalties for people with criminal records. It would also create harsher penalties for people who shoplift with someone else more than once — for example, if two parents were to steal diapers on two occasions. Prop. 20 is a broad tough-on-crime bill with numerous provisions, and its new theft rules do not explicitly mention food. But grocery retailers clearly expect it to affect people who steal food, diapers and other necessities. Supermarket chains such as Albertsons Safeway, Ralphs and Costco have contributed $100,000, $91,800 and $50,000 to the “Yes on 20” campaign, respectively. High-end gourmet grocery stores like Bristol Farms and Gelson’s contributed $12,600. Prop. 20 represents a kind of punitive backslide for California. For the past few years, the state has been a national leader in working to empty its prisons and reduce penalties for low-level crimes. Prop. 20 would undo some of that progress at a moment of extraordinary social vulnerability.

For more than two decades, Black residents of Rhode Island have argued that the official name of their state, “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” connotes slavery and should be changed. It’s a “hurtful term” that “conjures extremely painful images for many Rhode Islanders,” said Democratic state Sen. Harold Metts, who traces his family lineage to a plantation in Virginia and is the only Black man in the Senate. Metts sponsored a bill to amend the state constitution to remove “Providence Plantations” from the official state name. Rhode Island voters will decide in November, but Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo already has issued an executive order removing the phrase from official state documents, websites and paystubs. Citing the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, Raimondo said Rhode Island must do more to fight racial injustice...Faneuil Hall, also called the Cradle of Liberty for the many historic events there, is owned by the city and has a visitors’ center operated by the National Park Service. Peter Faneuil, one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants in the 18th century, proposed a marketplace in 1740 and paid for the building. He was a slaveholder and slave trader. Renaming Faneuil Hall is “metaphor for addressing cultural racism in the city,” said Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, an advocacy group focusing on civic education and electoral justice. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a Democrat, said in June he opposes the name change...To David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, “Keeping these names is a way of normalizing the horrors of our history.” Visitors to Faneuil Hall “don’t even know it’s named for a person. That’s how deeply buried our troubled past is,” Harris said in an interview. He co-wrote an essay calling for a public conversation about renaming Faneuil Hall but stopped short of endorsing a change. The headline erroneously said the authors were calling for a name change. “We said we need to have this conversation. By having a conversation, the public has a voice in the decision,” he said. “I don’t want to pretend it’s as important to change a name as to change a policy,” Harris said, adding, “but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do both.”

An op-ed by Charles Fried: Joe Biden got it exactly right in expressing an ambivalent openness to pushing for legislation — entirely constitutional — enlarging the number of Supreme Court justices, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate in November. Such a move would make blazingly clear what some of us hope is not quite true: that the court is a partisan political institution, a conception that would invite further rounds of enlargement in a different political moment. But to paraphrase Churchill, such a maneuver is a bad idea, except for all the alternatives. Here the alternatives boil down to just one: a predictable, reactionary majority on the Supreme Court for perhaps as long as another generation. I write reactionary, not conservative, because true conservative judges like John Marshall Harlan II are incrementalists, not averse to change, respectful of precedent and unlikely to come into the grips of radical fantasies like eliminating or remaking the modern regulatory-administrative state. But with the seemingly inevitable rise of Amy Coney Barrett to the court, this impending six- person majority is poised to take a constitutional wrecking ball to generations of Supreme Court doctrine — and not just in matters of reproductive choice. Just look at the record. In the 2018 Janus labor law case, Justice Samuel Alito took the first long step to undoing years of legislation that allowed majority unions to compel not membership, but payment of dues — an arrangement first found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1977. And his decision was based on constitutional grounds — protecting First Amendment freedoms — so a legislative remedy is no longer possible.