Media Mentions

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.”

We’ve seen it all before: A congressional panel is hauling the CEOs of some of the world’s most influential tech companies to answer for their purported misdeeds. But House Energy and Commerce leaders say this time, things will be different: They are serious about legislating around issues of online extremism, including by targeting tech’s liability shield, Section 230...Roughly one month out from the Facebook Oversight Board’s ruling on whether to let Trump back onto the platform, a wider battle is already swirling around the group of outside experts: Can they create a global standard for free speech on the world’s largest social network? ... “The Board is applying international human rights law to Facebook as if it was a country. That’s impossible,” Evelyn Douek, an online content expert at Harvard, told Mark. “It’s the first body that’s using international human rights law to make content decisions. Now that we’re getting down to brass tacks, it’s difficult.”

Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual and provocateur—and he has been pondering a timely issue: public lying. A longtime Harvard law professor and an expert on behavioral economics, Sunstein has written a slew of books, including volumes on cost-benefit analysis, conspiracy theories, animal rights, authoritarianism in the United States, decision-making, and Star Wars. He was recently named senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, where he will oversee the Biden administration’s rollback of Donald Trump’s policies. But right before he rejoined the federal government, he released his latest work: Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. The book is certainly a product of the Trump era, a stretch in which the “former guy” made 30,583 false or misleading claims while serving as president, according to the Washington Post. All his lying kind of worked. Donald Trump was elected despite—or because—of his serial falsehood-flinging. He nearly won reelection after his tsunami of truth-trashing. And after the election, Trump promoted the Big Lie that victory had been stolen from him, and his crusade triggered an insurrectionist raid on the Capitol that threatened the certification of the electoral vote count. After all that—and after Trump’s misleading statements about the COVID-19 pandemic led to the preventable of deaths hundreds of thousands of Americans—Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and a hero for tens of millions of Americans.

Insurance companies have spent $17 million to defeat proposals to weaken or abolish the for-profit bail industry in the United States, a system that brings insurers $15 billion in business a year, according to a Reuters analysis of campaign contributions, company financial statements and interviews with more than three dozens experts on criminal justice, campaign finance or bail. The spending has jumped more than 10-fold since 2010 as insurers have led the industry’s lobbying effort, targeting laws in more than a dozen states, the analysis shows. The industry opposition comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats have renewed calls to dismantle what they describe as a biased system that harms mostly low-income people...The coalition’s most recent success was in California, the nation’s biggest bail market, home to 3,200 bail agents and 21 bail insurers. In 2018, the state passed a law, known as SB-10, to replace cash bail with a system that would give judges - aided by a computer algorithm - discretion to decide which defendants posed a danger or flight risk. Most minor offenses would not require the assessment. Such minor offenses, known as misdemeanors, account for about 80% of U.S. criminal cases filed annually - and thus the bulk of detention and bail decisions, said Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied the extent and impact of such arrests.

Tesla Inc. repeatedly violated U.S. labor law, including by firing a union activist, and must make Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk delete a threatening tweet from his account, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Thursday. The ruling, issued by two Republican and one Democratic member of the agency, states that the electric-car makermust offer to reinstate the fired employee. The board members also ruled that Tesla broke the law by retaliating against another union activist, “coercively interrogating” union supporters and restricting employees from talking to reporters...The administrative law judge ruled that Musk should be required to attend a meeting at which either he or a labor board representative would read employees a notice about their rights, but in Thursday’s decision the agency rejected that remedy and said instead that posting a written notice would be sufficient...Posting a written notice sends a much weaker signal to employees than making executives read it aloud, said Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, who suggested that forcing Musk to post the notice on his Twitter account would also have been a more fitting remedy. When executives have to read the notice to employees, he said, it shows workers “that the boss is not the only authority in the world -- that the law is a higher authority than the boss.”