Media Mentions

The isolation can be terrifying and tragic. The stress can exacerbate mental illness and other health problems. Add the loss of mobility and independence, the disruption of routines: the beloved caregiver who doesn't come, the day program that doesn't open, the concern that lack of support will give families no choice but to institutionalize. In the hospital, people who can't speak are left with no one to communicate for them, vulnerable to the fear medical care will be rationed, given to someone deemed more worthy or valuable than themselves. Though everyone has been suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic, people with disabilities have perhaps been the most disadvantaged, their lives the most disrupted...The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush, guarantees equal protection for people with a wide range of disabilities, from mental health issues to physical challenges. It was modeled after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, providing equal access to government services, schools, buildings, private employers and commercial facilities. "We are in a much better place in 2020 than we were in 1990. Dramatically better," said Michael Ashley Stein, co-founder and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Although the ADA has made a profound difference, it hasn't removed all prejudice against people with disabilities – any more than the Civil Rights Act resolved all bias against Black people. “Other than rare instances of overt animus, most of the discrimination we see towards people with disabilities in this country tends to be from what we call ‘malign neglect,’” Stein said. "It's not that we're trying to exclude them from opportunity, it's that we didn't even bother to consider them eligible or worthy of opportunities." The ADA, like other civil rights laws, Stein said, "puts the burden on the oppressed to make changes," requiring an endless fight to protect those rights.

The Justice Department celebrates its 150th anniversary this month, but thousands of agency veterans aren’t really feeling the love these days. Instead, they worry President Trump has demolished the norms that were supposed to insulate prosecutions from politics. At the center of the debate is Attorney General Bill Barr, who’s scheduled to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill. Barr has become a lightning rod for critics who argue he’s not an independent officer in the way the boss of the Justice Department should be, but acting too much like a sympathetic counselor for the president...Barr also has complained publicly about the appearances created by Trump’s public comments and posts on Twitter and sought to make it known that he had contemplated resigning. For skeptics, those kinds of statements have become meaningless as Trump keeps tweeting, encouraging Justice to go easy on his allies and target his enemies. The problem of perception endures even if political interference actually isn’t taking place, department veterans said. “It does look like something untoward is going on at the Justice Department, there’s no doubt about that,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who worked at the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. “The problem is that he seems to be acting as the bag-man for the president who has been attacking these prosecutions for years,” Goldsmith said. “And whether there’s the reality of carrying the president’s water, there’s clearly the appearance of it, and it has a terrible effect, I think, on the Justice Department’s legitimacy and everything it does.” In September, Goldsmith and former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer plan to publish “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” a book about how the country might move on after Trump, whenever that time comes.

An article by Noah Feldman: The news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for a recurrence of cancer is striking terror in the hearts of liberals. As long as she is physically able, the resolute, gutsy Ginsburg will stay on the Supreme Court until there is a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the Senate. But what if, in the worst-case scenario, Ginsburg’s health forces her out before President Donald Trump’s term in office is over? Worried liberals have been asking me if there’s anything Senate Democrats can do to prevent Trump from getting a third Supreme Court pick in his four years in office. I can’t give them a very comforting answer. If Ginsburg should leave while Trump is still president, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Trump would nominate a replacement more or less immediately — and that the replacement would be a staunch conservative. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would likely act quickly to get that person confirmed. Once the president nominates a justice, it falls to the Senate to confirm the nominee according to its own discretionary timetable. As we all know, McConnell exercised that discretion on behalf of his caucus by refusing to hold hearings for a vote when President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacancy after his sudden death. As a result, Trump got to fill that seat. Now, one would expect McConnell to go to the opposite extreme and push for a rapid confirmation of Trump’s nominee. We are accustomed, in our current era, to somewhat lengthy confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices. But these are in no way required by the Constitution, which merely says the Senate has the power to advise and consent on Supreme Court nominees.

In May, just days after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, Lieutenant Bob Kroll, the bellicose leader of the city’s police union, described Floyd as a violent criminal, said that the protesters who had gathered to lament his death were terrorists, and complained that they weren’t being treated more roughly by police. Kroll, who has spoken unsentimentally about being involved in three shootings himself, said that he was fighting to get the accused officers reinstated. In the following days, the Kentucky police union rallied around officers who had fatally shot an E.M.T. worker named Breonna Taylor in her home...The list goes on. Along with everything else about American society that was thrown into appalling relief by Floyd’s killing, there has been the peculiar militancy of many police unions. Law enforcement kills more than a thousand Americans a year...Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, points to new data showing that, when police have greater access to collective bargaining, it correlates with a long-term increase in police killing of civilians, specifically nonwhite civilians. Strong union towns like Chicago often have a more dangerous police culture than cities with weak labor laws do. In Dallas, for instance, the main police union is not the sole bargaining agent. Several different groups, including fraternal organizations of African-American and Latino officers, sign off on union contracts. The result is both more transparent and markedly less violent policing...Sachs agrees that there is an urgent need for reform, but he suggests considering more procedural steps: limiting collective bargaining to non-disciplinary matters; opening bargaining sessions to the public; encouraging departments to have multiple unions, representing more diverse views. Many analysts emphasize the need for new use-of-force protocols that are known to save lives but that the unions reject.

An article by Daniel Pessar '20: When real estate investors sell property, they often defer any capital gains using the like-kind, tax deferred exchange, provided for in Internal Revenue Code Section 1031. As explained in the tax regulations: [A] deferred exchange is defined as an exchange in which, pursuant to an agreement, the taxpayer transfers property held for productive use in a trade or business or for investment (the “relinquished property”) and subsequently receives property to be held either for productive use in a trade or business or for investment (the “replacement property”). Although this provision was long available for use with a broad array of property types, since the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it is only available for real estate. To qualify for nonrecognition of gain or loss under Section 1031, a taxpayer must follow quite a few rules, including many time-sensitive requirements. For example, a taxpayer must identify replacement property within 45 days of transferring the relinquished property, and receive the replacement property within 180 days of transferring the relinquished property. The regulations allow replacement properties to be identified in three ways:  Three properties can be identified, without regard to the value of the properties; Any number of properties can be identified as long as their value does not exceed 200% of the value of the relinquished properties; or Any number of properties can be identified as long as the exchanger receives, before the end of the exchange period, 95% of those properties, measured by fair market value. The taxpayer is not required to defer all of the capital gains, however. It is possible to defer part of the gains by receiving qualified replacement property in addition to nonqualified property, triggering capital gains taxes on a part of the sale and deferring taxes on another part of the sale.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo: This past week, the Department of Homeland Security held a news conference to clear up a few things about the federal paramilitary police force grabbing protesters on the streets of Portland, Ore. If the goal was to reassure everyone that these armor-clad agents were acting lawfully, it did not go well. Instead the conference revealed, with painstaking clarity, a very big problem: The deputy director of President Trump’s new federal police force does not know what the word “arrest” means. This isn’t just semantics. In our legal system, the definition of the word “arrest” is critical because it marks an important dividing line under the Fourth Amendment. For an arrest to be legal, it must be supported by probable cause. That means the arresting officer must be able to point to specific facts that would make a reasonable person think that the person being arrested committed a specific criminal offense. By contrast, if the police have a noncoercive, consensual interaction with a civilian (sometimes called a “contact” or an “engagement” in law enforcement lingo), then the person has not been “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes, and the police do not need to explain or justify why they approached the suspect in the first place. In other words, you can think of the word “arrest” as an on-off switch for the Fourth Amendment’s essential protections. When the police arrest someone, they are constrained by the Constitution. Before then, the Constitution’s protections are substantially weaker — if they exist at all. Given the central importance of the word “arrest” in the constitutional law of policing, it is chilling to see a commanding officer of a law enforcement agency demonstrate a basic misunderstanding of its meaning.

The wireless industry urged a California federal judge Thursday to find the city of Berkeley, California's wireless disclosure ordinance violates the First Amendment, saying the Federal Communications Commission supports the trade group's view that cellphone retailers need not warn customers about potential harm from radiofrequency emissions. CTIA – The Wireless Association, a trade association composed of U.S. wireless communications companies including AT+T, Verizon, Samsung and Apple, urged U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to grant its bid for judgment on the pleadings that Berkeley's ordinance violates free speech laws and is preempted by federal regulations...An attorney for Berkeley, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School, brushed aside the FCC's letter of interest, saying that it merely reflects the views of the FCC's general counsel, who is appointed by the FCC chairman, who in turn is appointed by the president. Lessig said that the FCC's general counsel clearly has views about what the policy is and voices those views, but that they are not necessarily the agency's. Lessig told Law360 after the hearing that the FCC's general counsel had become "extremely activist" and "extremely aggressive" in his pursuit of his policy preferences. But Lessig said this case calls into question to what extent the general counsel can establish policy for the FCC. The lawsuit stems from a 2015 ordinance requiring phone sellers to inform customers that holding an internet-connected mobile phone close to their skin — such as "in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra" — could expose users to too much radiofrequency radiation.

There’s no dispute that the federal government’s decision to dispatch officers to Portland, Ore., has exacerbated protests in the city. The Department of Homeland Security pointed to weeks of vandalism at the federal courthouse as a rationale for the deployment, but the presence of the DHS officers and their often heavy-handed tactics has resulted in an expansion of the size of the protests and the number of conflicts...Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo, on Twitter earlier this week, outlined a significant constitutional problem with the Portland detention captured on video. He pointed out that the official excuse for seizing the demonstrator was that he had been in an area where another person was pointing a laser device at officers’ eyes. But that isn’t sufficient for probable cause, Crespo noted, meaning that the arrest violated the protester’s Fourth Amendment rights. In a phone call with The Post, though, Crespo highlighted a more significant part of the incident. Instead of charging the protester with something, they simply let him go. The same thing happened to Pettibone. To a layperson, that seems like good news. But from an accountability standpoint, it's problematic. “If you push them out the back door of the station house and they never get charged, there’s not a case,” Crespo said. “They’re not going to be a defendant who can to raise the Fourth Amendment issues in a protective posture by trying to suppress any evidence.” “Which means that if there’s going to be judicial review,” he said, “it’s got to come the other way: That person has to go out and sue these agents or the department.” “It’s much harder to bring that sort of suit as a plaintiff,” he said, “than to raise these questions as a defendant. And the government gets to control who’s going to be a defendant or not by deciding who to charge or not.”

Unidentified federal officers in Portland  — and soon, in Chicago and Albuquerque —have been arresting and detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles, sometimes far away from the federal buildings they're purportedly there to protect. In one notable instance, two federal officers grabbed a man off the sidewalk and, without identifying themselves or giving a reason, put him in an unmarked van and drove off to question him. The Department of Homeland Security claims the officers' tactics here are lawful. Harvard Law professor Andrew Manuel Crespo says they are decidedly not. "The person in charge of this newly beefed-up, paramilitary federal police force doesn't know what an arrest is," he says of Federal Protective Services Deputy Director Chris Cline. "It means he doesn't know when they're violating the fourth amendment — like they unquestionably did." Listen to Professor Crespo explain why the officers' conduct is unconstitutional — and why he finds it frightening that authorities seem to think otherwise.

A local environmental group believes that Indiana’s Right to Farm Act violates the federal constitution, and they are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. The Hoosier Environmental Council has teamed up with a Harvard Law School Clinic and together they filed a petition with the nation’s highest court on July 17 asking it to review the case. This petition comes nearly 5 years after this case first began in an Indiana trial court, and roughly 7 years after an 8,000-hog factory farm moved in next to two Hendricks County couples and allegedly began causing harm...Right-to-farm laws started to grow in prominence around the nation in the 1970s and 1980s, and Indiana’s was enacted in 1981. These laws were enacted as a way to protect existing farmers from urban sprawl as city-dwellers moved to the countryside unprepared for the smells of agriculture. Such newcomers could not sue for nuisance as they moved to or “came to the nuisance,” said Andy Stawasz '21, a Harvard Law student who worked on the petition to the Supreme Court...Prior to starting the CAFO, the land did undergo a change: In 2013 it was rezoned from “agriculture residential” to ”agriculture intense.” And prior to the 2005 amendment, Katherine Meyer feels confident that this change would have been grounds for nuisance claims under the law. “It would have been cut and dry because they were there first and then the nuisance came in,” said Meyer, the executive director of Harvard’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic that worked on the petition with Ferraro. “Now they can’t sue for damages and they can’t get the value out of their house. It just doesn’t seem fair, let alone the legal and constitutional issues.”

This Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the day the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, making it illegal to discriminate against people living with disabilities in regard to employment and access to government services. The Gazette spoke with Michael Ashley Stein, J.D. ’88, co-founder and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, to learn more about the significance of the ADA and what it has meant for the people it protects over the past 30 years. Stein also addressed what Harvard has done since then to expand accessibility on its campuses, and provided perspective on what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Roxane Gay, the best-selling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger and the co-host of the podcast Hear to Slay, discusses her new short story "String Theory."

An article by Noah Feldman: If there really is a law enforcement problem in American cities, why hasn’t President Donald Trump sent the FBI to fight crime in Portland, Oregon? Or the DEA to fight violence connected to drug trafficking in Chicago? Why is he sending in special, paramilitary units from the Department of Homeland Security whose job is to enforce immigration laws? A closer look shows why Trump’s use of these officers is so troubling. Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and DEA have well defined responsibilities and are institutionally committed to carrying them out, not exceeding them. FBI agents are trained to understand that their job is to investigate federal crimes. DEA agents are trained to know that their job is to investigate federal drug crimes. Agents in both institutions are accustomed to working closely with federal prosecutors. The DHS units that Trump is deploying are something else again. According to the DHS, it has deployed officers from several paramilitary units in Portland, including the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue and Special Response teams. These units, from the DHS departments of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have nothing to do with policing ordinary street crimes. Yet that is what they are doing in Portland. The reason these units are part of CBP and ICE is that their job is to target non-citizens. There’s no reason to think they have the relevant training, experience, institutional knowledge or expertise to deal with citizens, protests or street crime. Nor is there any reason to think that these units are accustomed to working closely with federal prosecutors who could be expected (in theory at least) to make sure that their activities complied with relevant federal law.

Professor Michael A. Stein, executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, details advances nationally and at the University.

An article by Laurence Tribe: We are being confronted in city after city with a nationwide paramilitary force, its troops unidentifiable and its vehicles unmarked, directed in deliberately vague terms to protect property and preserve domestic order. It began in Portland, Oregon where chilling video shows men in combat gear seizing unarmed protestors, packing them into rented minivans and driving off. Some victims of these kidnappings remain in the dark about their abductors even after being freed. In one dystopian scene, a Portland man was seized, blindfolded, transported, imprisoned and finally released — without once being told who had abducted him and why. Widespread criticism of these secretive police has not cowed the president. Instead, egged on by his lackeys, Trump plans to expand this paramilitary force. He has mobilized 2,000 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Coast Guard, placing them on standby to quickly deploy domestically. If Trump’s words are to be believed, these troops are staring down the barrel at Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and more. This astonishing federal takeover of public streets and spaces previously devoted to peaceful protest has targeted jurisdictions and individuals selected specifically (and at times admittedly) for their dissent from the policies of the incumbent national regime. Portland has seen 54 consecutive days of protests -- the vast majority peaceful — in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Chicago, Trump’s next target, has seen similar dissatisfaction. Boston, a city with Democratic leadership that proudly proclaims “Black Lives Matter,” could be next on the list. If the militia descends on Boston, our city’s leaders can and should arrest and prosecute anyone who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps civilians. The district attorney of Philadelphia has already promised as much.

“Dump potatoes in the rivers. … Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth,” John Steinbeck wrote in “The Grapes of Wrath.” “There is a failure here that topples all our success.” Steinbeck’s lament against food waste is eerily relevant today, as supply-chain disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic have continued to force farmers to euthanize hogs they can’t sell and bury excess potatoes. Even before COVID-19, Americans, on average, were tossing away more than a pound of uneaten food per person each day, amounting to some 400 pounds of food thrown out annually. That’s far more than any other wealthy country — about 50% more food waste per capita than France and nearly double that of the U.K...Lawmakers also need to clear up confusion around expiration dates on perishable foods, which vary wildly from state to state. “Date label confusion wastes massive amounts of food,” said Emily Broad Leib, who directs the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “Supermarkets lose about $1 billion a year from food that expires in theory — but not in reality — before it’s sold.” There is currently a bill pending in the House (H.R.3981) that would clear up such confusion and cut down on waste. Introduced by Maine Democrat Chellie Pingree and Washington Republican Dan Newhouse in 2019, it would standardize dozens of different date-labeling laws and give consumers a clearer understanding of how long their fresh foods are safe to eat. According to Leib, the act has been shelved during the pandemic, because standardizing data is time consuming and the benefits would not be realized immediately. Legislators can also think bigger: One idea being pushed by Leib and other advocates is to allow farmers to receive a tax credit, rather than deduction, for donating their surplus to food banks. Enacting such a measure would quickly help move the mountains of uneaten produce, now rotting on farms, to the hundreds of food banks and pantries reporting surges in demand.

Mutale Nkonde is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she researches the intersection of race and technology. She shares what she expects from Facebook's actions.

Jana Alexander was furloughed from her job at The Container Store when the pandemic began in early spring. With the economy reopening, the company recently invited her back to her old position at her store in Southlake, Texas. But there was a catch. Alexander would have to sign an arbitration agreement, giving up her right to sue The Container Store in court if she was mistreated. Her welcome-back letter made clear she had little choice in the matter if she wanted to draw a paycheck: “This job offer is contingent upon agreeing to our Mutual Agreement to Arbitrate which we will ask you to sign on your first day on the Payroll website.” Alexander, 61, refused to return to work because her husband has lung cancer and is at high risk of contracting the coronavirus. But she said her colleagues, many of them women in their 60s, would have little choice but to sign away their legal rights to avoid financial ruin...But Terri Gerstein, a labor law expert at Harvard Law School, said the situation at The Container Store underscores an absurd assumption in that ruling: that such agreements are mutually agreed upon and not coercive. “Arbitration agreements aren’t agreements in any sense of the word, because workers don’t have a choice about signing them: If you don’t sign, you can’t get the job,” Gerstein said in an email. “What options do workers have but to sign, especially now, in light of high unemployment rates, as well as the likelihood of losing unemployment insurance if they turn down a job.” She added, “Employers shouldn’t use ... the post-furlough return to work as an opportunity to impose unfair new conditions on workers.”

The private data mining company Palantir is best known for its work with law enforcement agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police departments, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. It has received considerable criticism for helping the Trump administration track immigrants. But in recent months and with the debut of its stock on public markets approaching, Palantir has a new focus: tracking the fast-spreading coronavirus. According to U.S. procurement records reviewed by NBC News, Palantir has been awarded contracts worth more than $42 million with federal agencies on the pandemic response. That includes two contracts in April worth $24.9 million with the Department of Health and Human Services to build a new platform, HHS Protect, which will aid the White House coronavirus task force's efforts to track the spread of the virus. HHS awarded Palantir an additional $2 million in May...In April, Palantir’s president, Shyam Sankar, called the pandemic the new “driving thrust” of the company. Robert Greenwald, a professor and the director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said that turning to a firm known for its work in deportation will discourage immigrants from getting the health care they need. “Companies like Palantir have made their choices and they have gone in a direction that does not make them appropriate for sensitive public health projects,” Greenwald said.

Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf and one of his subordinates  appear to have admitted their agents have been making unconstitutional arrests of Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during a series of public appearances. Here’s the exact comment. “Anytime that you attack a federal facility such as a courthouse in Portland that is a federal crime,” Wolf told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night. “Attacking federal police officers–law enforcement officers–which they have done for 52 nights in a row is a federal crime. So, the Department, because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable.” Anticipatory arrests, of course, are prohibited under the U.S. Constitution...Harvard Law Professor Andrew Crespo summed up the constitutional issues with the Kline-Wolf approach. “I don’t know if shining a laser at someone is a federal crime,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter. The police do not have probable cause to arrest you just because you are standing near someone else who may have committed a crime.” The U.S. Supreme Court, Crespo noted, weighed in on this issue in a landmark Fourth Amendment case from 1979. In Ybarra v. Illinois, a 6-3 majority of justices concluded that a state statute allowing police to search people on the premises of a location where a valid search warrant is executed violates both the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Due Process...Eventually, Cline said, the protester was released “because [DHS] did not have what they needed.” “Translation: They did not have probable cause,” Crespo stated.

Judy Heumann remembers the day she went to register for kindergarten in 1952. She’d gotten dressed up and her mother had pulled her wheelchair up a flight of stairs before the principal intervened. Her disability, he said, meant she was not allowed to attend the school. Heumann had polio as a child, and it left her legs paralyzed and limited her use of her hands and arms. Throughout her time in the educational system, and after she graduated and became a teacher and activist, she had to fight for access at every turn...The ADA was designed to protect people with disabilities against discrimination and to ensure that they can participate fully in employment, state and local government services, public accommodations, transportation and telecommunications. The results today are powerful: most public buses have lifts for wheelchairs; disabled children attend school alongside their nondisabled peers; and employers are generally aware that people with disabilities have civil rights they cannot violate. But if the 61 million Americans with disabilities are now less likely to confront the same problems that Heumann did decades ago, their fight for true equality is far from over. “The ADA is ultimately a promise that has been tremendously impactful in some areas and has yet to be fulfilled in other areas,” says Ari Ne’eman, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and the co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network... Ne’eman, who is writing a book about the history of American disability advocacy, says the increase in people publicly embracing their disability as part of their identity has played an important role in shaping new public attitudes.