Media Mentions

Within hours of the publication of a New York Post article on October 14th, Twitter users began receiving strange messages. If they tried to share the story—a dubious “exposé” of emails supposedly from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential nominee—they were told that their tweet could not be sent, as the link had been identified as harmful. Many Facebook users were not seeing the story at all: the social network had demoted it in the news feed of its 2.7bn users while its fact-checkers reviewed it. If the companies had hoped that by burying or blocking the story they would stop people from reading it, the bet did not pay off. The article ended up being the most-discussed story of the week on both platforms—and the second-most talked-about story was the fact that the social networks had tried to block it...For now, the social networks have to get through perhaps the hardest fortnight in their short history. They face the possibility of having to deploy content-moderation tools developed for fragile, emerging democracies in their home country. Facebook removed 120,000 pieces of content aimed at voter suppression in America in the past quarter. The New York Post affair does not bode well for how the companies might handle the fallout from a contested election. “When they appeared to depart from their policies they opened themselves up to the very charges of bias that followed,” says Evelyn Douek of Harvard Law School. As the election approaches, they need to “tie themselves to a mast” of clear rules, she says. A storm is coming.

An article by Vivek Wadhwa: No country will contribute more to the rise in global carbon emissions than India. Energy consumption among its 1.4 billion people is rising fast, with 65 percent of the country’s electrical power currently generated from coal. The world’s filthiest fossil fuel—of which India consumes more than the United States and Japan combined—will “remain ingrained under the fingernails of the nation” because of “politics, economics, and the complications of generating electricity.” So said the Economist in a 2018 briefing. The British magazine’s briefing perfectly encapsulates the widespread view of India as climate policy’s problem child. But the conventional wisdom couldn’t be more wrong. Little noticed in the West, India is undergoing a green-energy revolution—exceeding targets, breaking records, and quickly making the age of cheap clean energy a reality. Because of the dominance of India’s coal industry, few experts ever expected India to be on track to significantly exceed two key commitments to the Paris Agreement. One is India’s pledge to increase the share of power-generation capacity that doesn’t use fossil fuels to 40 percent by 2030; today, generation capacity from renewable, hydroelectric, and nuclear sources already reaches 38 percent, putting India on track to comfortably exceed its target. The other commitment is to reduce carbon emissions by 33 to 35 percent (from 2005 levels) by 2030. Today, India looks likely to reduce emissions by as much as 45 percent by 2030, far surpassing its Paris target.

President Donald Trump won the White House — and is trying to do it again — in large part by railing against “sanctuary cities,” refugees and other immigrants. His “great, great wall,” funded by taxpayers, not Mexico, is progressing slowly though recently sullied by a scandal involving his former campaign chief, Steve Bannon. He has sharply increased fees for asylum seekers and green-card applicants and torn apart families at the border...For 17 years, former Bolivian President Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada and his defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzain, have faced accusations that they authorized the military to use deadly force against civilians, a majority of them indigenous Aymara. Sixty-seven people were killed and hundreds injured in October 2003, according to news reports, although Sánchez Berzain has disputed the number and whether he directed the military’s actions. The pro-American Sánchez de Lozada resigned and left for the United States around the same time as Sánchez Berzain, aided by the U.S. State Department, documents show. They have lived in Maryland and South Florida, respectively, since 2003. Sánchez Berzain filed for asylum in 2006, stating he would be tortured by henchmen of then-President Evo Morales. His request was approved in May 2007...Sánchez Berzain and Sánchez de Lozada have prospered in their new country. Together with his brother-in-law, Sánchez Berzain is associated with several LLCs through which various properties have been purchased. He has also carved a niche as an anti-Communist crusader among exiled Cubans and Venezuelans, opening a political center called the Interamerican Institute for Democracy and has regularly written op-eds that inveigh against 21st Century socialism, which he calls “Castrochavism.” He has faced legal headwinds since Harvard Law’s International Human Rights Clinic filed a civil complaint under the 1992 Torture Victims Protection Act that permits civil suits in the United States against individuals who, acting in an official capacity for any foreign nation, committed torture and/or extrajudicial killings.

Barring a minor miracle, Republican senators will narrowly vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court next week, just eight days before an election that likely will sweep many of their members and President Trump out of office. Leaving aside the prospect that Republican-appointed justices would try to “steal” the election for Trump, Congress will retain the power to protect Democratic policy preferences on several hot-button issues. And it can do so without adding seats to the Supreme Court or curtailing its jurisdiction. Take, for example, the Affordable Care Act. The ACA is before the Supreme Court only because Congress reduced the law’s individual mandate penalty to zero in 2017...Then there is gay marriage, which the Supreme Court by a 5-4 majority ruled is protected by the 14th Amendment in Obergefell v. Hodges. It is not clear whether the Supreme Court, after hundreds of thousands of Americans took advantage of the decision to get married, would sweep it away or invalidate current marriages. However, if it took that step, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe opines, “In my view, Congress would have power to pass a Defense of All Marriage Act mandating recognition of other states’ marriages” under Article IV of the Constitution. Senate Republicans might seek to block such a measure, but Democrats could break through their opposition by getting rid of the filibuster. Finally, abortion is where we will see just how determined Barrett and her conservative cohorts are to pursue their social agenda. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973; Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which established the undue burden test, was decided in 1992. If Barrett is as much of an activist, pro-life judge as she seems, she could well invalidate these decades-old precedents.

If you’re a parent, especially to school-aged kids, chances are this has been one of the most trying years of your life. With all of us doing just about everything from home these days, the lines can get blurry and the days can be daunting. Whether you’re barely hanging on as your kid is having a meltdown or having a great family afternoon out at the park, if you’re anything like us, social media has likely become a place to share even more of the highs and lows you’re experiencing day to day. And if you’re someone who has kids, chances are that what you’re sharing online likely involves your children from time to time. Sharing updates about your kids on social media may seem harmless, but Detroit Today speaks with an expert who says there are real consequences to this aspect of parenting in the digital age. Leah Plunkett is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The Ann Arbor native is also the author of the book, “Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk about Our Kids Online.”Plunkett’s book came out last year, but with all of us spending more time than ever in front of our screens, it feels especially timely to talk with her at this moment. In simple terms, Plunkett says “sharenting” is all the ways that parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, coaches and other trusted adults share private information about kids digitally. She says the most cited example of sharenting is when parents share on social media. As far as drawing the lines around what’s safe to share about your kids online, Plunkett says ”there are a couple of very bright lines. Never ever share anything with exact precision [about] where your child is at an exact moment or your child’s full identifying information.” She also says to not share any photos of a child in any state of undress, such as a day at the beach or in the bath, even if it seem innocuous. ”Outside of those bright lines,” says Plunkett, “it gets a little harder and here is where I would say we all need to be having this discussion within our homes and schools and try to come up with a value-based plan.”

It started as rumor: farmers in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley were dying after drinking unchlorinated water from the Artibonite River, becoming dehydrated and suffering severe diarrhea. Haiti’s health ministry, on guard for an outbreak after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake left more than 300,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless nine months earlier, suspected it could be cholera, the deadly waterborne disease. The representative of the Pan American Health Organization, however, dismissed the possibility. The mortality rate, he told journalists, was too high. Specimens were eventually taken on Oct. 18 and 19 from rice farmers who drank from the river and Haiti’s National Public Health Laboratory confirmed that cholera — a disease that had never been reported in the country — was now in Haiti. The government made the official announcement on Oct. 21, 2010, nine days after the first cholera case was detected near Mirebalais...Haiti has now gone 21 consecutive months without a recorded case of the disease — an indication that cholera may be close to eradication in the poverty-stricken nation. But victims, their lawyers and advocates continue to criticize the U.N. and successive Haitian governments for the disease’s mishandling. They note that 10 years after cholera’s introduction into Haiti, there still has been no justice for the victims, and the U.N.’s member states still refuse to adequately contribute to a victims’ support fund...Beatrice Lindstrom, the former legal director for the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, agrees with Clermont’s sentiments. “We thankfully are at a point where the epidemic seems like it’s under control. It may be possible to eliminate it,” Lindstrom said. “But when it comes to the lives that were lost, the families that were impacted, we really haven’t seen anything meaningful happen for them.”

Months after vowing to process a backlog of 160,000 requests for loan forgiveness from students who say they were defrauded by their schools, the U.S. Education Department has rejected 94% of claims it has reviewed, according to a federal judge who is demanding justification for the “blistering pace” of denials. In a biting decision issued Monday in California, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the department has been denying claims using template letters that are “alarmingly curt." Alsup threatened to suspend the agency from rejecting further requests, saying its approach “hangs borrowers out to dry.” He said that although Education Secretary Betsy DeVos blamed the backlog on the hard work that goes into processing claims, she has now “charged out of the gate, issuing perfunctory denial notices utterly devoid of meaningful explanation at a blistering pace.” The Education Department said it is studying the ruling...Rejections were delivered through standardized letters that included information on how to appeal the decision, but Alsup said the letters fail to explain the decision. It leaves borrowers in a “disturbingly Kafkaesque" situation, he wrote. Alsup said he is considering whether to forbid the department from issuing any further rejections until the case is decided. He has asked both sides to submit arguments around the question. Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents borrowers in the suit, said it looks forward to deposing agency officials to get an explanation for their actions. “The class members in this case have suffered harm at every turn, but in this court order they are finally seeing a change in the tides after years of waiting for justice,” said Eileen Connor, the group's legal director.

A Harvard Law School environmental initiative has released a comprehensive road map to guide a potential Biden administration overhaul at the Interior Department, including calls for reversing a Trump-era reorganization and empowering career employees. Combining myriad policy recommendations with sharp if familiar critiques of the Trump administration's alleged shortcomings, the new Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program study illuminates dozens of green new routes Democrats might take. "If a Biden administration takes office, DOI will need to reverse some of the Trump administration's management decisions in order to back away from the energy dominance agenda and restore Interior's capacities," the study said. The recommendations range from the broad, like "reintegrating and valuing the work of career staff," to the administratively technical, like reforming the makeup of the Executive Resources Board, which assists in managing many of the department's senior employees. The study's four lead authors urge the hiring of more career staff to clear the Freedom of Information Act backlog and "reduce the influence" of political appointees in the FOIA process. The Fish and Wildlife Service should provide "adequate resources to scientists including time, materials, and professional development opportunities." The report focuses on departmentwide issues as well as on the Bureau of Land Management, FWS and the National Park Service. It does not address offshore activities managed by Interior. The report is based on document research; prior coverage by E&E News and other media outlets; and 25 interviews with former Interior Department career staff, former political appointees from the Clinton and Obama administrations, and natural resources and American Indian law experts.

An article by Jody Freeman: Amy Coney Barrett’s likely confirmation to the Supreme Court to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a Monday Senate vote will add a conservative sixth vote to an already-conservative majority, with potentially far-reaching implications for American law. Barrett’s confirmation will scramble the current distribution of power on the Court, displacing the chief justice as its putative center and pulling it rightward. Most legal commentators expect that Barrett’s judicial philosophy of originalism and her advocacy of a more “flexible” approach to precedent will make her more likely to vote to overturn precedents like Roe v. Wade. Barrett also believes that judges should interpret statutes in accord with their “original public meaning,” a strict brand of textualism that tends to constrain agency regulatory power. What can we predict about Barrett’s likely attitude toward environmental regulation, and climate change in particular? Would she vote to overturn Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court’s 2007 landmark holding that the Environmental Protection Agency may regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act? Would she vote to uphold the Trump administration’s rescission of the Obama-era greenhouse gas standards for the power sector, and its ambitious greenhouse gas and fuel efficiency standards for cars, and uphold the administration’s far weaker rules? What of the administration’s legal theory that when setting power plant standards, EPA cannot consider grid-wide strategies like substituting natural gas for coal, even though Congress told the agency to use the “best system” of emission reduction? Or the administration’s theory that federal law preempts California from setting its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards, and, separately, that EPA can revoke California’s current waiver to set those standards? Would it be more difficult for a new Biden administration to adopt ambitious greenhouse gas rules with Barrett on the Court?

An article by Eli Nachmany ‘22: From the military to the technology sector, various American institutions and industries play a role in maintaining U.S. economic and national security. While the finished products associated with defense and technology, like aircraft engines and LED TVs, capture the public eye, the supply chains for the materials needed to produce these goods often garner little attention. A set of minerals, known as critical minerals, constitute a key part of the supply chains for these important sectors. In recent years, however, U.S. competitors such as China have come to control supply chains for the critical minerals themselves—raising questions about the effects of critical mineral supply chain insecurity on U.S. national security. Critical minerals are key in the manufacture of all kinds of important items, like armored vehicles, precision-guided weapons, batteries and night-vision goggles for the U.S. military. An inability to develop these minerals domestically creates a reliance on foreign nations that can hamstring a country in a pinch. In the early 2010s, for example, China placed export quotas on a subset of critical minerals known as rare earth elements, which sharply increased prices and disrupted global supply chains for various minerals. The U.S. responded by bringing a World Trade Organization dispute resolution case against China about the issue, ultimately winning before the global arbitrator. In recent months, critical shortages during the coronavirus pandemic have prompted lawmakers to reconsider the strength of the U.S. medical supply chain—but the robustness of the supply chain for critical minerals has also come into question. In September, Senate Republicans included critical minerals-related provisions in their coronavirus relief bill proposal. These provisions were adopted from the bipartisan American Mineral Security Act, introduced in 2019 by Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Joe Manchin and others; the bill would have promoted mining of critical minerals in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to address the vulnerabilities in U.S. critical minerals supply chains.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Chief Justice John Roberts is bending over backwards to try and show that the Supreme Court is nonpartisan when it comes to the 2020 election. The latest evidence is his vote in a 4-4 decision that, because it was a tie, upheld a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extending the deadline for counting mail-in ballots for three days after Election Day. In my view, Roberts got the law right. And it is certainly true that the 4-4 tie shows how the court’s election decisions could potentially be affected by the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. But there is another takeaway, one that liberals and conservatives would do well to keep in view: An alternative decision overturning the Pennsylvania ruling would not have been crazy. That’s because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision could itself be interpreted as partisan. It interpreted Pennsylvania law against its plain meaning. To be clear, I think Roberts was right not to revisit the Pennsylvania court’s judgment. It was a state court decision interpreting a state statute, and the Supreme Court is supposed to accept a state court’s interpretation of its own law. But the alternate view, namely that the Pennsylvania decision violated federal law by deviating from the requirement that votes be cast by Election Day, was plausible, even if it wasn’t the best interpretation of what was going on. I realize — all too well — that in the heat of the election season, no one wants to hear the message that Roberts was correct but that the alternative would also have been defensible. Democrats just want to fret over the possibility that the Supreme Court will give the election to Trump. Republicans just want to declaim on the outrageousness of Roberts’s apparent defection to the left, driven by his desire to maintain the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. The reasonable middle position has exactly zero friends in the pre-election frenzy.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Anthony Salvanto, CBS News’ director of Elections and Surveys, discusses the latest polling data and how to make sense of it.

President Donald Trump has made the possibility of widespread voter fraud -- an unsubstantiated assertion that even members of law enforcement in his administration have not supported -- a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. Out on the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly described ballot irregularities to illustrate what he said is a grave risk of election fraud during the COVID pandemic, when record numbers are turning to mail-in ballots. He even suggested that if he does not win the election, the contest is "rigged." But records and interviews with parties involved in the episodes Trump has cited show he has taken small, often innocuous events and exaggerated or embellished them to fit his narrative. Trump made similar unsubstantiated claims about widespread fraud in 2016, claiming millions had voted illegally, but his election integrity commission shut down without finding evidence of that...Election officials in Democrat and Republican states alike have been clear that they have confidence in their election process, and experts agree that the risk of fraud is very low. Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an expert on election law and constitutional law and a professor at Harvard Law School, said “all available evidence indicates that mail-in voting in the United States is safe and secure. In states that use mail-in voting, there are infinitesimal rates of problems. More importantly, in these states, there are more people who vote; turnout is higher and so democracy is more robust.”

We live in an era of unprecedented political polarization, to the point where it seems unimaginable that liberals and conservatives could unite around any issue. Yet as a House Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday illustrated, there are many conservatives who join liberals in arguing that we should strengthen antitrust laws against Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon — although they sometimes have very different reasons for wanting to do so. The House Judiciary Committee hearing was chaired by Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., who is in charge of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. The hearing, dubbed "Proposals to Strengthen the Antitrust Laws and Restore Competition Online," was a rare display of bipartisanship even though the two sides on some occasions still talked past each other. The hearing was also unusual because antitrust action is rare nowadays, a testament perhaps to how big business has essentially captured government. In general, the Democrats and Republicans seemed united in their desire to rein in big technology companies...As Salon has previously covered, President Donald Trump has used measures like Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from being liable for the content posted by their users, to try to retaliate against social media platforms that he claims are hostile to him... "The threat by Donald Trump to shut down social media platforms that he finds objectionable is a dangerous overreaction by a thin-skinned president. Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email at the time. "That doesn't make the threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run."

After the twin traumas of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal came a period of change in the nation’s capital. The system set about reinventing itself to realign the balance of power, establish new guardrails for those in high office and try to enforce greater accountability. Two weeks before an election that will determine whether President Trump wins another term or is repudiated by voters, some in both parties are already looking beyond him to map out a similar rewriting of the rules. After four years in which the old post-Watergate norms have been shattered, the would-be reformers anticipate a counterreaction to establish new ones. “It’s pretty obvious that Trump has, through his actions and words, exposed a number of weaknesses in the normative and legal restraints on the presidency,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor. “He has revealed that there are a lot of gaps in presidential accountability and that norms are not as solid as we thought. He has revealed that the presidency is due for an overhaul for accountability akin to the 1974 reforms.” Mr. Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, has teamed up with Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, to produce what they hope could be a bipartisan blueprint for what such an overhaul would look like. Among their ideas are empowering future special counsels; restricting a president’s pardon power and private business interests; and protecting journalists from government intimidation. They are not the only ones looking ahead.

An article by Daniel Shapiro and Lucas Woodley: Are your relationships feeling strained these days? If so, you are not alone. In this unprecedented era, nearly all of us are feeling some degree of emotional imbalance. Restricted from carefree socializing with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers, it’s like we’re all in a global pressure cooker, and the temperature just keeps rising. This stir-crazy feeling has spread to politics.  If you’ve broached a conversation with someone who holds opposing views on racial issues, health economics, or the political election, you’ve likely felt the effects of polarization. Things quickly can spiral out of control—leaving each of you frustrated, more entrenched in your views, and more divided. If you think these problems are getting worse, you might be right. Some scholars argue that the current levels of polarization threaten to unravel the social and political fabric of our democratic system (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). It’s not hard to see why: If having a political conversation across partisan lines enflames conflict, how can we expect diverse communities to work together toward the common good? One of the most potent obstacles to good relations is vertigo (Shapiro, 2017). Unlike the medical syndrome of the same name, this type of vertigo refers to the everyday emotional experience of getting fully consumed in conflict, unable to think of anything beyond that situation. It’s like you’re at the center of a tornado, stuck in the conflict, and cannot see the world beyond the swirling walls around you. Conflict vertigo is a useful concept to remember the next time you find yourself edging toward a fight with a loved one or colleague, but what does it actually look like in practice?

President Trump on Tuesday called on William P. Barr, the attorney general, to take action before Election Day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcement to help him politically. The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox + Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Mr. Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the news media and, increasingly, Mr. Barr. He recently said the attorney general would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Democrats like Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama...Critics have accused Mr. Barr on a number of occasions of intervening on issues to help Mr. Trump politically. But for the president to publicly call on him to take action against a political opponent was remarkable, especially two weeks before a presidential election. On Monday, Mr. Trump repeatedly called Mr. Biden “a criminal.” “He is sounding desperate,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “He’s been urging the attorney general in several ways to investigate his political opponents and to somehow validate his preposterous charges of criminality.” “And even as loyal a henchman as Barr seems to have been able to draw the line somewhere — and it’s driving Trump crazy,” added Mr. Fried.

In a strongly worded order, a federal judge in California is signaling that he may put a stop to the Education Department’s nearly universal denials of requests by those who have been defrauded by for-profit colleges to have their student debts canceled. Attorneys representing more than 200,000 borrowers sued the U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last year, saying that the department stopped processing the claims between June 2018 and December 2019, leaving some in limbo for as long as four years. The sides seemed to reach an agreement in May, when the department agreed to process the remaining claims within a year and a half. But since then, attorneys representing the borrowers said, the department has denied 89 percent of the claims as of last August, sending borrowers a curt form letter with no explanation of why it was issuing a denial. In comparison, the department under the Obama administration had granted 99.2 percent of the requests, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup noted. Saying the borrowers had likely not intended for the department to process the waiting claims by denying them, Alsup on Monday denied approval of the May settlement. Instead, he ordered attorneys representing the borrowers to depose department officials to learn to what extent it has been denying the claims of those defrauded by for-profits found by the department to have acted improperly and whether the form denials are different from how the Obama administration handled rejections...Eileen Connor, legal director at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which is representing the borrowers, took heart in the order. “The class members in this case have suffered harm at every turn, but in this court order they are finally seeing a change in the tides after years of waiting for justice,” she said in a statement.

"I want crystal clean water and air." That's what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden. But there is scant evidence of that desire in the actions of his administration, which has spent nearly four years systematically dismantling core environmental protections, some of which stretch back decades. Experts agree that the climate crisis's most destructive manifestations, on display in a particularly difficult year for the US, barely scratch the surface of the catastrophes to come. Yet the president appears unmoved by the enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes, widespread water problems and persistent air pollution that disproportionately blights black and Latino communities. His administration has scrapped climate regulations, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards. Protections for public land and threatened species have been shrunk while new oil pipelines and coal mining have been encouraged. The legacy of these changes will stretch well beyond Trump’s presidency. Here is a list of some of the key rollbacks of the Trump era. This list was adapted from the Harvard Law School's Regulatory Rollback Tracker.

The Supreme Court agreed to review whether law enforcement can enter a home without a warrant in hot pursuit of someone suspected of committing a misdemeanor...The court has ruled that officers can conduct such pursuits without warrants when investigating felonies but not minor traffic violations. This case presents something in the middle: misdemeanor pursuits. The dispute will be argued later this term and likely decided by sometime in June...Misdemeanors are “by far the most common basis for arrest,” Arthur Lange said in his petition to the justices, filed by the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, a successful repeat player at the court. Lange was convicted of DUI after an officer followed him into his Sonoma, Calif., driveway. The officer stuck his foot under the garage door to stop it from closing and entered Lange’s garage. Lange’s motion to suppress was denied. He wants the court to reject a categorical rule allowing such pursuits for misdemeanors, which he said in his petition “contradicts the Court’s exigent-circumstances precedent, ignores traditional common-law limits on warrantless entries, and allows officers investigating trivial offenses to invade the privacy of all occupants of a home even when no emergency prevents them from seeking a warrant.” The case is significant on a number of fronts, said Harvard Law School professor Alexandra Natapoff, whose book on misdemeanors and the criminal justice system was cited in Lange’s petition. “It’s important because the privacy interests at stake are enormous,” she said. “It’s also extremely important because it represents the court turning its attention to an underappreciated area of criminal law enforcement that is enormous.”

A new appeal of a court ruling over tax-advantaged land deals is the latest in what is expected to be a growing trend of lawsuits testing whether old tax regulations can survive modern legal scrutiny. A notice of appeal filed Friday signals that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will be asked to overturn a U.S. Tax Court ruling in Oakbrook Land Holdings, LLC v. Comm’r, in which a divided court upheld 34-year-old regulations under the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA requires federal agencies to give notice and respond to significant comments for certain rules. The case is one of a growing set of lawsuits challenging the Treasury Department’s older regulations—issued at a time when the department wasn’t doing as much to protect its rules from administrative law scrutiny. Over roughly the last decade, the department has increasingly written extensive preambles alongside its regulations to explain the logic behind regulatory decisions, potentially warding off challenges...Although it can be difficult to pinpoint a single moment at which Treasury began to face a heightened threat of administrative law challenges, tax specialists often point to a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mayo Found. for Med. Educ. and Research v. United States as a major development. The high court said it wasn’t inclined “to carve out an approach to administrative review good for tax law only” without justification...While Treasury has responded to the growing challenges by beefing up its preambles, it can’t do that with older regulations that have already been issued. “As a practical matter, if we don’t put a little bit of a finger on the scale for the older regs, I think we create huge problems for the system,” said Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and former Treasury official.