Media Mentions

For 14 years, Cariol Holloman-Horne has held firm that she did the right thing when she tried to stop a fellow Buffalo cop who she says was choking a man he was trying to arrest. Horne lost her job and also her full police pension. She's worked odd jobs, mostly recently as a truck driver. At times, she has lived out of her car. She tried numerous times and through numerous avenues to try to get her pension and also pass laws to require police to intervene when another one is going too far...The cellphone video of George Floyd dying under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer set off a firestorm of outrage, not just at Derek Chauvin but also the three other police officers who are seen standing by and doing nothing to stop Chauvin. Suddenly, Horne’s story has new resonance...Horne recently gained powerful new allies: She is represented by a legal team that includes Ronald Sullivan and Intisar Rabb of Harvard Law School. Sullivan and his team represented the family of Michael Brown, a Black teenager whose shooting death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., sparked unrest there in 2014. “Honored to now represent @CariolHorne – former Buffalo police officer terminated after she intervened when a fellow officer employed a chokehold against an unarmed black man,” he tweeted July 10. The Common Council appears poised to enact at least part of Horne's proposal by making the duty to intervene a law and not just a police department policy, as it is now.

For the most part, fictional characters rarely recognize when they’re trapped in a dystopia...To them, that dystopia is just life. Which suggests that—were we, at this moment, living in a dystopia ourselves—we might not even notice it...Is this, right here, the tech-dystopia we were worried about? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts with differing opinions...Jonathan Zittrain: "Yes, in the sense that so many of us feel rightly that instead of empowering us, technology is used against us—most especially when it presents itself as merely here to help. I’ve started thinking of some of our most promising tech, including machine learning, as like asbestos: it’s baked wholesale into other products and services so we don’t even know we’re using it; it becomes pervasive because it seems to work so well, and without any overlay of public interest on its installation; it’s really hard to account for, much less remove, once it’s in place; and it carries with it the possibility of deep injury both now and down the line. I’m not anti-tech. But I worry greatly about the deployment of such power with so little thought given to, and so few boundaries against, its misuse, whether now or later. More care and public-minded oversight goes into someone’s plans for an addition to a house than to what can be or become a multi-billion dollar, multi-billion-user online platform. And while thanks to their power, and the trust placed in them by their clients, we recognize structural engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors as members of learned professions—with duties to their clients and to the public that transcend a mere business agreement—we have yet to see that applied to people in data science, software engineering, and related fields who might be in a position to recognize and prevent harm as it coalesces. There are ways out of this. But it first requires abandoning the resignation that so many have come to about business as usual."

An article by Ifeoma Ajunwa: With the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, many organizations have found themselves examining issues of racial equity in the workplace. Just yesterday, President Trump called for federal government agencies to stop all anti-racism training sessions and called anti-racism training, “un-American.” About a month ago, an article in the New York Times magazine also questioned the efficacy of antiracism training for organizations. The central premise of this article seemed to be that antiracism was a scam. Prior to this, a Forbes article from earlier this year, also explicitly asked if organizational diversity and inclusion programs were scams. While the term “scam” seems to imply willful duplicity on the part of the antiracist training programs, I want to identify the actual organizational reasons why antiracism training might fail and what organizations can do about it. First, it’s important to understand that the problem of racial disparities in the workplace is organizational and not just a matter of a few bad apples or just changing the mindsets of bigoted employees. The sociologist Victor Ray has done important work theorizing the role of race in organizations as embedded in both the rules and resource allocation of the organization. That work builds upon the work of sociologists like Eduardo Bonilla Silva, who argues that racism is not just a matter of personal views, rather it’s about systemic practice. Given that racism can be entrenched in both the structure and culture of organizations, antiracism training alone can never be enough to change things. Rather, it is important to identify the organizational issues that could enable racial inequity within organizations. Here are some of those issues.

An article by Terri Gerstein: These are tough times for workers, with COVID-related risks layered atop a grossly distorted power disparity that has long enabled businesses to degrade working conditions and violate labor laws. Workers and unions have been fighting back with strikes, lawsuits, walkouts, and more. But they shouldn’t have to do it alone. One basic function of government is keeping people safe. Another is enforcing the law. Unfortunately, President Trump’s labor team has barely lifted a finger to help workers. Enter state attorneys general. In recent years, a number of them have been increasingly involved in workers’ rights, as documented in an Economic Policy Institute and Harvard Labor and Worklife Program report issued last month. State attorneys general (AGs) represent their states in court when they’re sued, and also bring legal cases to protect the general public. They’ve taken on heroic battles—fighting Big Tobacco in the 1990s and the opioid industry today—and also stopped more-prosaic consumer frauds and scams. Historically, protecting workers hasn’t been on their menu. But in the past several years, state AGs have begun bringing cases to protect working people, from big-headline lawsuits against Uber and Lyft, to more local cases involving a juice bar, a cleaning company, and a security guard business. They’ve fought wage theft by restaurants and home health agencies, the sexual harassment of women farmworkers and hard hats, and the misclassification of workers as independent contractors, rather than employees, by construction, education, and other companies. State AGs have also acted to preserve job mobility by fighting against the use of noncompete agreements, which prevent people from being able to take a job with their bosses’ competitors. In consequence, Jimmy John’s sandwich shops, the co-working company WeWork, and others curtailed their use of such agreements.

On a June afternoon in 2019, in front of a statue of George Washington at Federal Hall in New York City’s financial district, more than 100 construction workers and activists gathered for a First Amendment rally...The challenge to these workers came from a seemingly unlikely quarter: the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing labor law...But with management-side lawyers dominating the agency, which is run by a five-seat board and a general counsel, labor advocates say the NLRB is more stridently anti-labor than ever before and is sabotaging its own mission. Not only has Trump’s board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB’s regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff...Sharon Block, the director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and an NLRB member under Obama, said that during the pandemic, it was “incumbent on worker protection agencies like the [NLRB]…to be exceptionally vigilant on behalf of workers and attuned to violations of their rights, because it is so hard to feel secure enough to speak out. [But] this is a board that we watched operate for three years in a way that would not give that kind of security to workers.” Nonetheless, she added, the systemic problems with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act go beyond the Trump administration. “Even with board members…and a general counsel with the best of intentions who really believe in the spirit and the purpose of the act, it’s just a tool that doesn’t work anymore.” The Labor and Worklife Program wants to overhaul labor law and extend protections to domestic and undocumented workers. It also advocates for sectoral bargaining, which would enable workers in an industry to negotiate en masse.

An article by Noah Feldman: With each passing day, there is more reason to think that President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration may issue an emergency use authorization for two or more Covid-19 vaccines in late October. In an ideal world, this would be terrific news. We are, after all, in the grip of a major global emergency. Roughly 1,000 Americans die from the virus every day, or roughly one every 80 seconds. A vaccine would save lives. Yet an emergency use authorization, or EUA, is likely to be met with pervasive skepticism by many Americans, and not only Democrats. The reason isn’t hard to see. Trump has tried over the last four years to politicize nearly every aspect of independent judgment by government officials. He has delegitimized agencies like the Department of Justice and the FBI, which he sees as threats, and attacked institutions from the judiciary to the post office when it has suited his political purposes. Now, Trump (and the rest of us) are about to inherit the whirlwind. At precisely the moment when we could benefit massively from public trust in independent agency judgment, our trust is shot. Trump critics have become accustomed to distrusting Trump’s agencies, much as Trump himself has somewhat successfully convinced his own supporters that there is no such thing as governmental objectivity or independence, but only politics all the way down. Even if there is good reason for the EUA to be issued and for people who have the opportunity to receive the vaccines to do so, some — perhaps many — rational people aren’t going to trust the FDA enough to make that choice.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The White House has powerful reasons to fear the electoral repercussions of reported comments by President Donald Trump in which he is alleged to have described fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” Those comments threaten his most important political advantage. To see why, we need to back up a bit. Jonathan Haidt, a social scientist at New York University, has specified some of the central differences between conservatives and liberals. He identified five foundations for moral judgments: harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Both the right and the left care about harm and fairness, even if they do not understand them the same way. But the right cares far more about loyalty, authority and sanctity. A mountain of evidence supports this conclusion. If, for example, people have been disloyal to their nation or their family, shown disrespect to their superiors, or done something disgusting, conservatives will be far more likely to show outrage. If you ask Americans how much they would have to be paid to burn their nation’s flag, or to curse their parents to their face, people on the left might demand a lot of money. But people on the right will demand more, and they might say that no amount is high enough. Building on Haidt’s work, Harvard economist Benjamin Enke has studied the rhetoric of numerous recent presidential candidates, and found that one has done better than all others in emphasizing loyalty, authority and sanctity: Trump. On the same scales, Hillary Clinton was especially bad. (Barack Obama was far better.) Enke also found that Trump’s emphasis on these values mattered to many voters, and attracted them to his side.

Soon after learning that “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman had died at age 43, fans urged Marvel Studios not to recast the role, setting up a dilemma for the studio planning a sequel to Hollywood’s first major superhero film with a predominantly Black cast. Writers, academics and activists - speaking to Reuters about the film’s cultural impact and Boseman’s performance - believe Marvel and its parent company, Walt Disney Co, should honor Boseman’s legacy with a storyline that anoints a new Black Panther from the film’s existing cast or elsewhere in the Marvel Universe... “‘Black Panther’ the film was a huge cultural landmark,” said Alan Jenkins, a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. “One part of what made the film so important was the world of Wakanda and the idea of an African nation unchained by colonialism, slave trade, exploitation. It had dignity, brilliance and technology.” Today “Black Panther” is even more relevant, as Black Americans disproportionately suffer from COVID-19 and die at the hands of police, cultural experts say. The aspirational Wakanda provides an antidote to that suffering. “The film certainly didn’t cause the activism of today - that was from the tragic killing of George Floyd and others,” said Jenkins. “But it contributed to an environment where we can see new realities and imagine a world that is more just and equitable than the one in which we live.”

Donald Trump signed a memo on Wednesday that threatened to cut funding to Democratic-led cities that the administration has characterized as “lawless” and “anarchist jurisdictions”, using his office to launch an extraordinary – if legally ineffective – attack on his political opponents ahead of the November election. “My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” the memorandum reads. “It is imperative that the federal government review the use of federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.” The document compels William Barr, the attorney general, to develop a list of jurisdictions that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities” within the next fortnight. It also instructs Russell Vought, the White House budget director, to issue guidance in the next month on how federal agencies can restrict or disfavor “anarchist jurisdictions” in providing federal grants...Even if federal agencies are able to find justification to reduce funding to certain cities, perhaps via grants linked to law enforcement, any funding restrictions are unlikely to hold up to legal challenges, he added. “The president obviously has no power to pick and choose which cities to cut off from congressionally appropriated funding,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard, and recently the co-author of To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. Trump “has no defunding spigot. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the Executive. Donald Trump must have slept through high school civics,” Tribe said in an email.

Oregon law professor who rose to national prominence as an Oregon Supreme Court justice, died Monday. He was 96. Linde was regarded as a prolific legal scholar who made groundbreaking arguments in the role that state constitutions could play in protecting civil liberties. “Hans Linde was one of the giants of the American judiciary,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said. “His brilliant work both as a law professor, and for a little over a dozen years as a justice on Oregon’s highest court, addressed not just important issues of state law but also unsettled questions of federal constitutional law in a series of opinions, articles and books that were justly influential throughout the nation and ultimately the world.” Linde became an associate law professor at UO in 1954, spent the next four years as a legislative assistant to Oregon Sen. Richard Neuberger and returned to the UO law school as a professor in 1959...Tribe, the Harvard law professor, said Linde's work to ensure civil liberties is as important today as ever. "In a time when the very survival of our constitutional republic is under threat," Tribe said, "work that he did decades ago is likely to come to the fore and provide a fertile resource for scholars, lawyers and judges struggling to save constitutionalism and the rule of law."

An initiative cracking down on gun crimes in the District targeted three predominantly Black wards and was not enforced citywide as announced, U.S. prosecutors acknowledged in court records, drawing attacks that the policy disproportionately subjected African American defendants to lengthier prison terms. The geographic targeting of the program launched in February 2019 — under which felons caught illegally possessing guns are charged under federal statutes — was recently disclosed after a defendant challenged the program backed by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)...The initiative’s original scope was disclosed by prosecutors in litigation with defendant John Victor Reed, who moved this March to dismiss his one-count indictment from March 2019 of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. Represented by federal defenders and Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo, Reed argues the program unlawfully nullifies the authority of local gun statues and courts, is arbitrary and capricious and retaliates against defendants who sought pretrial release in D.C. Superior Court... “It’s bad enough that D.C. is the only city in the country without any control over its local prosecutor,” Crespo said. “At a minimum, it deserves honesty and transparency from its U.S. attorney.” Crespo declined to comment on the U.S. attorney's office reported modification of the program, saying the change has not been reported to the court.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency argued Thursday that the Trump administration, which has aggressively rolled back environmental regulations in recent years, has done more to help vulnerable communities deal with pollution than the “misdirected policies” and “misused resources” of its predecessors. Fifty years after President Richard M. Nixon created the EPA, its current leader, Andrew Wheeler, traveled to his presidential library in California on Thursday to outline a vision for the future that emphasizes economic development instead of tackling climate change...The Obama administration led the effort to craft the global compact, making climate a top priority as it created regulations to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage a shift to solar, wind and other cleaner sources of energy...Under Trump, the EPA has sought to reverse a slew of Obama-era policies, while continuing to implement programs mandated by Congress to spend tens of billions of dollars on water infrastructure upgrades. Lawmakers also have refused to go along with Trump’s efforts to gut the agency’s budget. According to the regulatory rollback tracker by the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, the EPA has eliminated or repealed 19 existing rules, though most of these are being challenged in court. The changes affect a slew of policies, from which waterways the federal government must safeguard from pollution to the sort of toxic waste power plants can discharge.

An article by Noah Feldman: Lawyers for Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year old charged with murdering two peaceful protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, say they are going to raise a Second Amendment defense to one of the six criminal charges he faces — that of unlawful possession of a firearm by a person under the age of 18. As reported in some outlets, the defense would claim that the law doesn’t apply to Rittenhouse because he was a member of a “well regulated militia” under the Second Amendment. Framed that way, the defense is genuinely wacko. The militias contemplated by the Second Amendment were state-controlled units, not armed vigilantes. Ever so slightly more plausible, however, is the related argument that the right to bear arms should treat 17-year olds the same as 18-year olds. Although this argument won’t win in court, it does raise the issue of which constitutional rights should belong to underage teenagers and which kick in at the age of majority. To dispense with the truly crazy part first, rest assured that no court has ever found or will ever find that self-organized vigilante militias are specifically protected by the second amendment. The amendment reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” What the framers had in mind was their deep, small-r republican distrust of standing armies. Drawing on the example of ancient Rome, the framers feared that the generals at the head of standing armies would use their troops’ loyalty as a tool to subvert elected leaders and become dictators. Instead of a standing army, they preferred citizen-militias: official, state-organized and controlled military units made up of ordinary people who held day jobs, ideally as hearty yeoman farmers. The right to “keep and bear arms” in the Second Amendment was, in the original understanding, a collective right of the “people” to belong to these state-run units.

El Paso County, Texas, and an immigration advocacy group urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to take up their challenge to President Donald Trump's diversion of billions in defense dollars to border wall construction before the Fifth Circuit weighs in. El Paso and the Border Network for Human Rights request to leapfrog over the Fifth Circuit contends that their challenge to the border wall transfers poses different legal questions than the ones the Sierra Club used to convince a California court to put a nationwide bar on the funding diversions. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the California injunction order, which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit. But El Paso argued that the high court must hear all the border wall challenges at once to fully resolve the issue...Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard University Law Professor and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, pointed out that the Supreme Court has allowed the government to skip the court of appeals and bring a case right to nation's justices. "[The Supreme Court] should certainly grant El Paso County's request to have the issues in its case heard now," he said in a statement. The Supreme Court granted two "cert before judgment" petitions over the Trump administration's rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program at the request of the solicitor general, according to the instant petition...El Paso and the border group are represented by Kristy Parker, Justine Florence and Deana K. El-Mallawany of The Protect Democracy Project Inc., Richard Mancino and Shaimaa M. Hussein of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, Anton Metlitsky, Bradley N. Garcia and Ephraim McDowell of O'Melveny & Myers LLP, Stuart Gerson of Epstein Becker Green, David Bookbinder of Niskanen Center and Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School.

Hans A. Linde, a prolific legal scholar who served on the Oregon Supreme Court and made groundbreaking arguments about the role that state constitutions can play in guarding civil liberties, died on Monday in Portland. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his son, David, the chief executive of the film and television production company Participant...In the early 1970s, as the U.S. Supreme Court grew more conservative following President Richard M. Nixon’s appointment of four justices, Justice Linde published articles urging lawyers to bring civil rights cases in state courts and to make arguments grounded in the provisions of state constitutions. Those provisions often offered protections beyond those guaranteed by the federal Bill of Rights, he wrote, and decisions made on purely state-law grounds are generally not subject to review by the U.S. Supreme Court “Much of the stuff that goes to the Supreme Court would never have to go there,” Justice Linde said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990, the year he retired from the bench, “if lawyers abandoned this notion that the federal courts are the big leagues and the state courts are the farm teams.” Lawyers listened. Many of the gay rights movement’s early judicial victories, for instance, were won in state courts...Indeed, Justice Linde’s scholarly and judicial work was wide-ranging and penetrating, touching on free expression, the death penalty, contracts, torts and criminal law. “Hans Linde was one of the giants of the American judiciary,” the Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe said by email. “His brilliant work both as a law professor, and for a little over a dozen years as a justice on Oregon’s highest court, addressed not just important issues of state law but also unsettled questions of federal constitutional law in a series of opinions, articles and books that were justly influential throughout the nation and ultimately the world.”

“Purpose” is trending. In the past couple weeks alone, major business journals including McKinsey Quarterly, Knowledge@Wharton, and strategy+business have spotlighted the importance of corporate purpose. If you’re a business leader, it’s clear you need to be thinking about the purpose of your enterprise now more than ever. But having a purpose statement doesn’t automatically translate into leading an organization purposefully — and your purpose is at risk of being pointless if you don’t: use a single overarching purpose; ensure stakeholders buy into it; implement strategies for operationalizing it...To power your purpose, ensure key stakeholder groups – especially customers, employees, board members – embrace and endorse it. It isn’t necessary or even appropriate to “test” your purpose among customers because it should be derived from the aspirations and vision of the company’s leaders. But you should ensure your purpose is grounded in a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, desires, and expectations. And if and when you share your purpose with customers, they should find it strongly compelling and resonating...Right now, it doesn’t seem like many of your counterparts understand the importance of board buy-in on purpose. According to an analysis published in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, the vast majority of signatures of CEOs on the Business Roundtable statement were not approved by the companies’ board of directors. The researchers conclude, “The most plausible explanation for the lack of board approval is that…CEOs didn’t regard the statement as a commitment to make a major change in how their companies treat stakeholders. In the absence of a major change, they thought that there was no need for a formal board approval.”

An article by Noah Feldman: It’s big news that an El Al flight carrying Israeli officials, Jared Kushner, and his negotiating team flew from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi in three hours and forty minutes. The reason it didn’t take seven hours is that Saudi Arabia allowed the Israeli flight to go through its airspace- the first time that has ever happened. On its own, the overflight is a signal that the Saudi kingdom is prepared to give some more-than-passive validation to the Israel-united Arab Emirates peace deal that is close to being inked. On a deeper level, the subtle Saudi signal raises two all-important questions about the peace deal: Will other Arab states sign on? And will the Gulf states’ willingness to consider peace with Israel without movement toward an Israel-Palestine peace agreement lead to changes in the Palestinian strategy for trying to get a functioning state? To be clear, the Israel-UAE deal is a meaningful foreign policy achievement even if no other Arab state follows the lead of the Gulf confederation. This is the first peace deal between Israel and any Arab state in a diplomatic generation. Achieving it took skill and persistence, especially against the backdrop of the constant drumbeat of criticism that Kushner’s initiative in the region would never bear fruit. Yet it is also true that the UAE is uniquely positioned to make a deal with Israel. Roughly 10 million people live spread out across the seven members of the confederated monarchy, and of these perhaps as few 1.4 million are citizens. That means that Emirati citizens aren’t a cohesive popular force capable of exerting significant influence on the rulership. Put more simply, the rulers can do pretty much what they want regarding Israel without worrying about it making them too unpopular. The conditions in other Arab states, even Saudi Arabia, require rulers to be more attuned to public opinion, which tends to favor the Palestinian cause.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Dr. Walid Gellad, the Director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses a misleading statement from the FDA about convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19. Plus, he lays out a worrisome vaccine announcement scenario.

In response to reports of tule elk dying amid an ongoing drought, the Center for Biological Diversity and Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic on Monday demanded that the National Park Service remove a fence from Tomales Point in northern Point Reyes National Seashore that confines elk on a peninsula with inadequate water...Tomales Point elk are prevented from naturally migrating to reliable water sources by an eight-foot fence erected and maintained by the Park Service to benefit cattle ranchers with grazing leases in the park. Cattle directly south of the fence have access to plentiful water sources, including naturally flowing streams. Tule elk in the fenced Tomales Point Elk Reserve depend largely on water in former cattle stock ponds to survive the dry summer and fall seasons. All but one of these ponds are dry or nearly dry. Conditions are similar to 2012-2014, when more than 250 elk — nearly half of the Tomales Point elk population — died from a lack of water. It appears that at least six elk have recently died on Tomales Point, with the causes of death not yet disclosed. While the Park Service posted a recent update stating that water is still available for elk in two seeps and springs on the peninsula, in a creek at McClures Beach and in a large pond, conservationists on Monday called for more information on whether adequate water exists to maintain the fenced elk throughout the remainder of the dry season. The National Park Service Act and the California Tule Elk Preservation Act require the Park Service to conserve, protect and maintain the elk in the national park. The Park Service is close to finalizing a ranch-management plan that, at the request of ranchers, would allow the agency to regularly kill a portion of the free-roaming Drakes Beach elk herd to limit their population growth.

When Scott Westfahl was a boy, he watched as his father climbed the ranks of the U.S. Navy. Every few years he’d get a new stripe, denoting a new level of leadership and responsibility. Each time, he was put through rigorous training to prepare him for his new role and give him the skills to succeed. By the time Westfahl’s father was ready to captain his own submarine, the Navy put him through prospective commanding officer school, an intense six-month stretch that taught him about tactics and operations, understanding and guiding strategy and, perhaps most important, how to lead. Years later, after the younger Westfahl graduated law school and took a job at Foley + Lardner, he moved through a series of leadership roles himself. But the only training he received was substantive. What he learned about leadership, he learned by doing. “There was no organized thought about it at all,” he says. “And that really hasn’t changed much.” It wasn’t until Westfahl left the law to work in professional development at McKinsey + Co. that he realized the legal industry set itself apart from not just the military and consultancies but most of the professional world by failing to devote significant resources to leadership training and development. Now, as the director of executive education at Harvard Law School, he’s working, one cohort of lawyers at a time, to change that. “In the law firm world, the word leadership just isn’t used except at the top levels,” Westfahl says. Instead, industry consultants and observers say, many firms pay scant attention to developing leaders throughout their organizations, keeping a tight focus on the daily pressures of operating what for many is a billion-dollar business. In many cases, a lawyer might receive only fleeting opportunities to think or learn about leadership until the moment they assume a role that demands exactly the experience that has thus far eluded them.

This simple and important question does not get anywhere near the attention it deserves. And, just to be clear, I don’t mean are they worth $20 million in any moral sense. I am asking a simple economics question; does the typical CEO of a major company add $20 million of value to the company that employs them or could they hire someone at, say one-tenth of this price ($2 million a year) who would do just as much for the company’s bottom line? This matters not only because a thousand or so top executives of major corporations might be grossly overpaid. The excessive pay of CEOs has a huge impact on pay structures throughout the economy. If the CEO is getting $20 million it is likely the chief financial officer (CFO) and other top tier executives are getting in the neighborhood of $8-12 million. The third echelon may then be getting paid in the neighborhood of $2 million. And these pay structures carry over into other sectors...If we want to raise pay for the bottom in a big way, we have to drive down pay at the top. This would be a problem if we actually had to pay the CEOs $20 million to get them to perform well, from the standpoint of producing profits for the company or returns to shareholders, but the evidence is that we don’t. The best place to start on the evidence is the great book by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, Pay Without Performance...It compiles much of the literature available at the time on the relationship of CEO pay to returns to shareholders. It includes many studies that show CEOs pay often bear little resemblance to what they do for shareholders. For example, the pay of oil executives skyrockets when the world price of oil rises, an event for which they presumably are not responsible. Another study found that CEOs tend to get big pay increases when they appear on the cover of a major business magazine, even though returns to shareholders generally lag the overall market.