Media Mentions

An article by Christopher Fonzone, Joshua Geltzer and Laurence Tribe: With November fast approaching, here’s a recurring question that can’t easily be dismissed as alarmist fretting or grim humor: What if President Trump loses his bid for reelection but refuses to concede and instead clings to power? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed this concern last year, saying “we have to inoculate against that.” So did Trump’s prison-bound former lawyer Michael Cohen. Testifying before Congress, Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” Even Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival, doesn’t discount the possibility that Trump would make himself difficult to dislodge, but he suggested that others in government would get the job done: “I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced that they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” If Trump does try to hang on to a presidency he’s lost, however, he can’t actually do very much all by himself. Running the executive branch requires help. Thankfully, there are laws that stop others from using the authorities of the executive branch on behalf of anyone other than the legitimate president. If William P. Barr, for example, tried to exercise the powers of the attorney general after a Trump loss, he could be subject to criminal prosecution. The circumstances matter. If Trump legitimately wins on Election Day, he wins — so be it. And if he loses, well, American tradition calls for a peaceful transfer of power to one’s successor. But given Trump’s rampant tradition-busting, there’s more than a little reason to worry that he’ll continue to reassert baseless claims that there was election fraud via mail-in ballots or foreign election interference favoring the Democrats, even after he has failed to persuade lawfully constituted authorities of such fantasies.

An article by Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Until recently, litigation about voting during the COVID-19 crisis followed a predictable pattern. Voters would complain about states’ restrictive regulations, conservatives would rush to the laws’ defense, and courts would referee the disputes. Powerhouse right-wing lawyers, however, have now opened a troubling new front in the voting wars. They now claim that it’s unconstitutional for states to make it easier to vote while the pandemic rages. Relaxations of voting rules supposedly give rise to fraudulent votes that impermissibly dilute the ballots cast by law-abiding citizens. This novel argument should—but probably won’t—be laughed out of court. As it spreads across the country, it threatens to put states in an impossible position: exposed to liability not just if they ignore, but also if they try to alleviate, the pandemic’s effects on the electoral process. Before this new breed of cases began appearing, most suits about voting during the pandemic had the same setup. Some existing electoral regulation—an eligibility limit for voting absentee, say, or a requirement that mail-in ballots be notarized—would prevent certain people from voting. So they would go to court alleging an excessive burden on their constitutionally protected right to vote. In response, some state official would argue that the policy served an important interest, most often the prevention of fraud. In April, the Supreme Court decided one of the many such cases, involving the rules for absentee voting in Wisconsin’s primary election.

An article by Ashley Nunes: The pandemic isn’t even over, but the fight for more space is already on. As of July 1, both Air Canada and WestJet have stopped blocking access to adjacent seats on their planes. Previously, these carriers had embraced “seat distancing” policies, allowing passengers to sit farther away from one other because of potential COVID-19 transmission. Not any more. Instead, Canadians can now expect the usual tight squeeze onboard. Predictably, the move isn’t going over well. One couple, expecting an empty adjacent seat, likened the new policy to having “the rug pulled out from underneath” them. “I just thought that (the airlines) would want to take our safety more seriously,” the couple lamented to the CBC. Manitoba MP Niki Ashton shared their sentiment, calling for Ottawa to apply the same physical distancing rules that apply on land, in the air. According to Ms. Ashton, that airlines want to revert to the old ways of doing business “really speaks to (their) profit-driven agenda.” All of this criticism misses the mark. Let’s start with an airline’s “contract of carriage.” This document defines the rights of passengers and the responsibilities of the airline. It lays out in painstaking detail what happens if your flight is cancelled, your luggage is misplaced or you are denied boarding. What the contract of carriage doesn’t address are passenger rights when it comes to adjacent seats. The reason? You have none. In what should surprise few flyers, paying for one seat on a plane entitles you to, well, just one seat. To limit the spread of COVID-19, carriers like Air Canada offered passengers more space by limiting seating in adjacent seats. But the move only ever applied to cases “whenever possible.” In other words, it’s courtesy, not compulsory. If an airplane can seat 100 passengers and 100 passengers show up, the airline is well within its rights to accommodate them all. There’s a lesson here for flyers: it pays to read the fine print (or at the very least, the airline’s tweets) before buying a ticket.

There have been indications for a while now that some Massachusetts district attorneys do not like the way Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins does her job. Now they are trying to bully her. As for Rollins — let’s just say she’s not taking it. The district attorneys’ displeasure with Rollins burst into open battle last week, with a scorching crossfire of filings in a case with life-altering implications for some inmates: those who killed in their late teenage years and are now serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. District attorneys Michael O’Keefe, Jonathan Blodgett, Michael Morrissey, and Timothy Cruz correctly believe that Rollins will not take as hard a line in the case as they would, that she will seek to lift the the no-parole mandate for some inmates. So they filed an extraordinary motion to intervene in the case — to reach into her jurisdiction to head off an outcome they won’t like. In a rocket of a court filing, Rollins responded by accusing the four men of seeking to undermine her because she is a Black woman...So hard-liner Cape and Islands DA O’Keefe and his three colleagues sought to intervene in the Suffolk case — not to file amicus briefs arguing their case, which is the normal route for registering disagreement, but to actually join the case and argue in another district’s courthouse. Experts say that kind of intervention is unprecedented. “The four DAs have no basis to intervene in the criminal case of another DA. Period. None,” said retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. “That is insulting, and over the top.” To be fair, Rollins’s rejection of their attempts to interfere was over the top too, as official court filings go. But Rollins, who says the other DAs never gave her the courtesy of warning her about the unprecedented step they were taking, is right to be angry.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Does President Donald Trump want to deport everyone who is not an American citizen? Sometimes it seems that way. His administration recently announced that it may send home international students at colleges and universities that choose online learning in the fall, in an effort to reduce the risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic. The announcement is cruel. It’s also stupid. It is cruel to those students, many of whom are now living in the U.S., and who are suddenly threatened with deportation. It is stupid because one of the greatest U.S. strengths is its unparalleled institutions of higher education, which attract the world’s best students. Many international students go back to their own countries as friends of the U.S. and its people, keenly appreciative of the best American traditions and values. Many of them end up in positions of leadership at home, where they work closely and well with Americans. If you were an enemy of the U.S., and aimed to weaken it and to diminish its influence, you would be cheering steps to prevent international students from studying here. It’s no wonder that the new rule has prompted a lawsuit, filed on Wednesday by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But in some ways, the most fundamental problem lies elsewhere. The Department of Homeland Security announced its new policy on international students without using a process that guards against both cruelty and stupidity: public notice and comment.

An article by Noah Feldman: The Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns, have been fighting the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act since 2013. Today the Supreme Court gave them a victory — but not the final victory they sought, namely that they’re automatically entitled to an exemption from the ACA under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Nonetheless, this ruling — along with other key decisions this term — demonstrates that the conservative majority of the court has definitively entered the era of religious exemptions. If the idea of the Little Sisters before the Supreme Court rings a bell, congratulations on the acuity of your memory. After President Barack Obama signed the ACA, his Department of Health and Human Services gave an exemption to the contraceptive mandate to certain religious organizations like the Little Sisters, while still ensuring contraceptive care would reach their employees. The way the exemptions worked was essentially that an organization seeking not to pay for its employees’ contraceptive care would submit a certificate to HHS explaining that it was a nonprofit religious organization with conscientious objection to contraception. The religious entity would then provide a copy of the certificate to its health insurer — which would then itself pay for the contraceptive care, not charging the religious employer. The Little Sisters objected that even this process violated their religious liberty under RFRA. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 robbed them of what would almost certainly have been a win. Instead, in May of 2016, the justices (who presumably were deadlocked 4-4) tried ham-fistedly to order the Obama administration and the Little Sisters to work out a solution. Neither side was prepared to compromise in a way that would satisfy the other.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Neville Sanjana, a geneticist at the New York Genome Center and New York University, discusses his research into a coronavirus mutation that may be helping the virus spread faster. Plus, Noah discusses the Supreme Court ruling on robocalls.

In a major defeat for the Trump administration, one major pipeline project was canceled and two others shut down this week after years of sustained grassroots opposition. While the outcome for two of the pipelines remains uncertain, this week’s developments represent a major victory for a diverse coalition of community activists, volunteer residents, Tribal members, scientists, farmers and landowners, climate activists, and outdoor enthusiasts who spent years fighting to keep the pipelines off their lands... “This decision demonstrates the power and the importance of NEPA,” Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney with the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Sierra. “When you read the decision, you see the way the court talks about the importance of an agency considering all the impacts of a project before undertaking that project. The blame lies with the Army Corps of Engineers, which has been working for years to downplay the impacts of this pipeline when it was clear all along that there were significant impacts. Instead of taking the time to do the full EIS, there was a rush to get this project going as soon as possible.” The Trump administration and its Council of Environmental Quality are soon expected to announce a rollback of NEPA regulations in an attempt to limit the scope of what projects can trigger a NEPA review. Even if the administration does so, however, it will not affect the Dakota Access pipeline review, according to McCoy, as the judge has already indicated the court expects a full EIS under existing regulations and case law.

Nearly 10 years ago, Wilfred Dacier was told he would be a free man. But for Dacier, now 63, his view continued to be a little corner of the town of Gardner that changed only with the seasons. The positive vote he received from the Massachusetts Parole Board in 2010 did not result in his release from the North Central Correctional Institution. That’s nominally because Dacier has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and the parole board made his release conditional upon him moving to a secure facility run by the state Department of Mental Health, which repeatedly declined to give him housing. But Dacier’s incarceration for nearly a decade after being granted parole offers us Exhibit A of why many say the Massachusetts Parole Board is ripe for reform...That Dacier remained in prison at all after being granted parole, let alone for most of a decade, is “crazy,” says Joel Thompson, a managing attorney at the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project at Harvard Law School, who represents Dacier. “In 2010 you paroled him, and the only thing he has messed up since then is failing to get DMH to take him. Why aren’t we just hashing out a release plan together?” Dacier’s situation is not unusual, say prisoners’ rights advocates, citing both the parole board’s treatment of mentally ill prisoners and long delays in making decisions and releasing people to the community...Another prisoner, Richard Crowell, took his concerns that he was being refused parole because of a disabling brain injury to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court — and won...Crowell, now in his late 70s, went before the board again in October 2018. His lawyer, John Fitzpatrick, a supervising attorney at the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project, said in early June that “Richard remains in prison, largely, if not solely, because he is brain damaged and the state can’t figure out what else to do with him.” The parole board notified Crowell last week that he has been approved for release...Katy Naples-Mitchell, a legal fellow with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, says problems with the parole board, and oversight from the governor, are “antithetical to public health, community safety, good governance, and second chances.” She says this is particularly troubling for people of color who disproportionately populate the system. “The failure to hold commutation hearings for hundreds of pending petitions is a dereliction of duty,” she says, “and one of many ways in which the parole board actively perpetuates structural racism.”

An article by Jenny Liang '21: China has been mentioned in more than 60 FCPA corporate enforcement actions, including eight in 2019 alone. So FCPA practitioners have long been wary of potential problems there. And yet, with serious recent developments potentially impacting trade and on-the-ground operations, now is a good time to reassess China compliance risks. Here are some trends emerging from enforcement actions and legal developments, in both the United States and China, to be aware of: China-based executives as agents for U.S. parent companies. The 2019 “Jerry Li and Mary Yang” case was groundbreaking. It was the first time Chinese nationals working for subsidiaries of a U.S.-based company (Herbalife) were charged by the DOJ as agents of the issuer parent company, despite having no formal legal ties with it. The defendants were both Chinese citizens who entered into employment contracts only with Herbalife’s wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary and not with Herbalife itself. Such a broadened agency theory could bring numerous Chinese executives working in subsidiaries of U.S.-based firms under FCPA jurisdiction. This case stood in sharp contrast to the 2014 Avon FCPA enforcement action, which had many similar fact patterns, but no individuals were charged. That said, it remains to be seen whether this broad agency theory will survive after Judge Arterton dismissed FCPA charges based on agency against Alstom’s Lawrence Hoskins in February 2020.

An article by Noah Feldman: There’s more than meets the eye in today’s Supreme Court decision striking down a 2015 law that allows some robocalls to your mobile phone — namely, calls seeking to collect government debts. On the surface, the court straightforwardly said that if Congress bans robocalls across the board (as it did in the 1990s) it violates the First Amendment to make an exception for calls with certain content (as it did in 2015). Sensibly, the court didn’t re-allow all robocalls; it just eliminated the more recent debt collection exception. But underneath, the justices were engaged in an important, ongoing debate about how the First Amendment applies to government regulation. The court’s conservatives deepened their commitment to a rigid, formalistic view of free speech that says the government may never treat speech differently on the basis of its content. That doctrine could be used to attack the many forms of government regulation that arguably do exactly that — for example, by saying what information must or must not appear on a drug warning label. The court’s liberals responded by pointing out the looming threat to progressive regulation that may come from the conservatives’ attachment to the ban on content-based laws. Justice Stephen Breyer, in his partial dissent, made it clear that he views the conservatives as gathering their forces to stage a free-speech assault on the administrative state. The general ban on robocalls to your mobile device goes back to 1991.

Many people with underlying medical conditions are worried about what's going to happen at the end of the month. It's not currently safe for many of them to go back to work. The COVID-19 death rate is 12 times higher for people with underlying conditions. But an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits, which has been enabling them to pay their rent and other bills, will stop coming at the end of July...Democrats in Congress want to extend those expanded benefits. But Republicans have expressed concern that the extra money is keeping some people from going back to work in lower paying jobs. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. "It's absolutely critical that it's figured out before this expires in July," says Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a former senior Labor Department official. She says the need is particularly urgent "when you consider that we are in an expanding pandemic and not an ebbing one." Block says the added federal benefits are needed for unemployed workers in general — but especially for those with serious underlying health conditions...Beyond the unemployment issue, for these people at higher risk, the conditions their family members are working in can pose a threat, too. Alan is a manager at a real estate company in Alabama. He doesn't want his last name used because he fears repercussions at work. His wife has lupus, an autoimmune disease, and he says she takes medicine that suppresses her immune system...But Alan says he didn't feel comfortable pushing the issue too hard with his employer because he's afraid of losing his job in the pandemic and he has to support his family. Block says a lot of people are in that same situation. "They're very, very vulnerable to retaliation for speaking out when it's this kind of labor market," she says.

When pain radiated from Fred Thomas' neck down his arm and he couldn't feel his fingers anymore, he knew it was time to talk to a doctor. After getting an MRI ordered by his primary-care doctor, the 49-year-old land surveyor had several phone conversations with a Rothman Orthopedic Institute specialist he'd never met to discuss the problem and treatment options. He was scheduled for a cervical fusion to replace three damaged disks in his spine a couple weeks later...Months ago, few patients or doctors would have considered surgery without so much as an in-person consultation, but the coronavirus pandemic has forced the health-care system to embrace telemedicine like never before. With no other way to see a doctor as the virus shuttered all but the most essential health-care services, regulatory hurdles that hamstrung the growth of telemedicine for decades were wiped away: Private insurers, Medicare and Medicaid agreed to pay the same rates for telemedicine visits they would have for in-person appointments. The federal government loosened privacy regulations that had in the past restricted how patients and doctors communicate virtually...But the changes that made its widespread adoption possible were intended to be temporary. A permanent change will require more work. "It was a sensible thing in a pandemic to say just 'make it happen.' But it's not sensible to say 'there are no rules,'" said Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

In the months since Covid-19 convulsed the globe, the world's food system has undergone a stress test—and largely failed it. The pandemic disrupted global supply chains, induced panic buying and cleared supermarket shelves. It left perfectly edible produce rotting in fields, and left farmers no choice but to gas, shoot and bury their livestock because slaughter plants were shut down. It also revealed a glaring problem: Though researchers have known for decades that climate change will roil farming and food systems, there exists no clear global strategy for building resilience and managing risks in the world's food supply, nor a coherent way to tackle the challenge of feeding a growing global population, on a warming planet where food crises are projected to intensify. "We need to make sure food is safe, nutritious and sustainable, not just for today but for the future," said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. "There's growing acknowledgement that this has been something that's not been addressed in a coordinated way." Already, there are 820 million people in the world without adequate food, and Covid-19 is likely to push 130 million more to the brink of starvation, more than doubling that number to 265 million by the end of the year. Developing countries are not the only ones staring down a crisis: In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said food insecurity has also risen substantially in the United States.

When Amy Cooper, a white woman, called 911 from an isolated patch in Central Park where she was standing with her unleashed dog on Memorial Day, she said an “African-American man” was threatening her life, emphasizing his race to the operator. Moments before Ms. Cooper made the call, the man, Christian Cooper, an avid bird-watcher, had asked her to leash her dog, and she had refused. On Monday, Ms. Cooper was charged with filing a false report, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, the latest fallout from an encounter that resonated across the country and provoked intense discussions about how Black people are harmed when sham reports to the police are made about them by white people...People are rarely charged with filing a false police report, legal experts said, because the authorities do not want to discourage the reporting of crimes and because it can be difficult to prove that a person made a false report knowingly. But experts said that the evidence in the case against Ms. Cooper was strong and that it could have broader implications in other instances of white people making false police reports against Black people. “To the extent that this woman was arguably deploying racial stereotypes and weaponizing them, it will make people think twice,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and a retired federal judge. “It is a big deal.”

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can remove "faithless electors," who vote contrary to the people's wishes, four years after 10 members of the Electoral College broke ranks. The Court unanimously ruled that states can effectively prohibit Electoral College representatives from voting for someone whom they didn't pledge to support. The ruling came from a case in Washington state in which three electors challenged a law that allowed them to be fined for choosing how to cast their ballot...Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who is representing Chaifalo, denied it was a "good possibility" but said it was possible. "We agree that, of course, the possibility exists that you could flip electors. But look historically at the number of times that could have mattered," Lessig said. "In fact, in the history of electors, there has been one elector out of the 23,507 votes cast who have switched parties against the majority party in a way that could have mattered." Had all the "faithless electors" cast their ballots for Clinton, Trump still would have won the election by more than 60 Electoral College votes. However, swinging 10 electors in five previous presidential races could have changed the results, Lessig said in court papers, according to CNBC. Therefore, it was imperative that the court resolve the issue before November. In a statement to Newsweek, Lessig said that obviously his view (and that of the plaintiffs) of the Constitution differs from the Court's, but he noted he was happy that the question was answered before it created a "constitutional crisis." "But now that the Court has essentially removed 'electors' from the Constitution, it is time we think about why the Electoral College makes any sense at all anymore," Lessig said.

Biotech firm Moderna Inc could reap tens of billions of dollars in sales and stock appreciation if it wins the race for a COVID-19 vaccine. If it loses, the early-stage company’s value could crash. In the meantime, the firm’s chief executive is pocketing millions of dollars every month by selling shares that have tripled in price on news of Moderna’s development progress, a Reuters analysis of corporate filings shows. The sales - by CEO Stéphane Bancel, his childrens’ trust and companies he owns - amount to about $21 million between January 1 and June 26, including $6 million in May. The company’s chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, has cashed out the majority of his available stock and options, netting over $35 million since January, the filings show...Zaks sharply increased the pace of his sales with a new plan he put in place on March 13. That was three days before Moderna announced it had dosed the first human with a vaccine candidate, news that sent its stock price up 24% and signaled that future development milestones might push the shares higher. The sales give the firm’s executives an unusual opportunity to lock in big profits on what could be fleeting market optimism, said Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who wrote a book about executive compensation. “This may be their one shot at making a boatload of money if the vaccine doesn’t work out,” Fried said. Executives have wide discretion in releasing information, he said, and Moderna’s chiefs have a powerful motivation to “keep the stock price up.” Reuters found no evidence that Bancel, Zaks or Moderna has exaggerated the company’s vaccine progress.

A national advisory panel Wednesday concluded that most recent research involving dogs conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs was unnecessary and that the agency should do more to justify limited use of canines and improve the lives of those still used. The sweeping report underscored long-standing concerns from lawmakers about the canine experimentation. The report, written by an expert panel convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine — an independent agency that advises the government — found that dogs remain important models for four areas of cardiovascular and spinal cord research relevant to veterans’ health. But it strongly urged VA to work far harder at identifying alternatives to laboratory dogs, including trials involving pet dogs and methods and technologies that do not involve animals...But in its final recommendation, the panelists said VA could do much more to improve the dogs’ welfare, including by voluntarily submitting animal welfare inspections to the USDA... “This is one we felt really strongly about,” said committee member Chris Green, executive director of Harvard University’s Animal Law and Policy Program. “If it is absolutely vital that dogs are the only option to conduct an experiment that VA determines to be a valid, necessary biomedical experiment, then you make sure the dogs are treated as well as you possibly can.”

An article by Laurence Tribe: There is a silver lining, or perhaps just bronze, in the way Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court’s four liberal justices to strike down an absurdly burdensome and largely gratuitous abortion regulation. Although some advocates of abortion rights fear the chief justice’s approach will open the door to other restrictions on abortion, I believe that Roberts’s analysis, correctly applied, could end up being more protective of abortion rights, not less. At issue in June Medical Services v. Russo was a Louisiana law that required any doctor performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, a requirement that a lower court found would have resulted in only a single doctor at a single clinic being allowed to perform abortions in the state. Roberts did not approach the case, as his liberal colleagues did, by “balancing” the obstacle that regulation placed in women’s paths against the purported health benefits of the regulation. Such balancing was the approach taken by the court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016, which struck down a Texas law virtually identical to the Louisiana statute — a ruling from which Roberts dissented. In voting to strike down the Louisiana law, notwithstanding his dissent in the Texas case, Roberts emphasized the importance of precedent. And he said that the correct way to analyze abortion restrictions was the precedent established in 1992 by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a bright-line test in which the court focused solely on whether the regulation at issue imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose.

The Supreme Court issued two momentous opinions last week – but the press coverage only appreciated one of them. A phenomenal panel – Dahlia Lithwick, Ron Klain, and Larry Tribe – joins Harry to break down the Court’s abortion decision in June Medical and its executive power decision in Seila Law. They end with practical reflections on Chief Justice Roberts’s position as the most powerful Justice in a century. And a sidebar of 10 of Tribe’s most famous students toast the master’s retirement.

Pinduoduo (Nasdaq: PDD) is one of the fastest-growing internet companies in the world, nearly surpassing Alibaba and JD in gross merchandise value, active users, and revenue growth in just five years, but is much less well-known to global investors. It sprinted past the trillion yuan GMV mark after less than five years, shattering the 14-year and 20-year records set by Alibaba and JD respectively...Founder and ex-CEO Huang Zheng, a former Googler and serial entrepreneur, became China’s second richest person with a net worth of $45.4 billion dollars, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires Rankings on June 22. He has expressed his vision for the company as “an exemplification of a multi-dimensional space, seamlessly integrating cyberspace and the physical space. It would be a combination of ‘Costco’ and ‘Disneyland.’” On July 1, Huang unexpectedly announced he would give away nearly 14% of his PDD holdings and step down as CEO. According to a regulatory filing, Huang reduced his personal holdings in PDD from 43.3% to 29.4% that day, worth roughly $14 billion. He still holds near-complete control over PDD, however, as his voting power was only reduced from 88.4% to 80.7%. Additionally, the CEO role in Chinese startups is ambiguous; stepping down from the office is unlikely to have a big impact on Huang’s control, as long as he holds on to his voting power and position as chairman. Also worth mentioning is that PDD does not have a CFO. It constitutes a red flag for the company, according to Harvard Law School corporate governance expert Jesse Fried: “That’s true even if a corporate controller serves as board chair and CEO, but not CFO. But what’s unusual and particularly worrisome here is that the controller is also effectively the CFO.” PDD claims it is looking for a CFO, but has not hired one for years.