Media Mentions

China appears to have complicated efforts to sell TikTok to an American company by introducing new rules that could allow Beijing to veto any potential deal. The twist in the TikTok saga stems from notices published by the Chinese government on Friday, when officials revised rules that govern the sale of certain kinds of technology to foreign buyers. The updated list includes data processing, speech and text recognition — the kind of tech that experts say is used by the popular short-form video app. The announcement marked the first time those rules have been revised since 2008. China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology said the changes were meant to "formalize the management of technology export" and "protect national security." The notices did not name TikTok or its Beijing-based owner ByteDance, but experts have pointed out that the rule change would likely require ByteDance to obtain government permission before it could sell TikTok to a foreign company...China has repeatedly pushed back against the Trump administration's treatment of TikTok, calling it "blatant bullying" in the name of national security. The latest move could be posturing by Beijing, said Elena Chachko, lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, who added that the government may be engaging in "a tit-for-tat dynamic." But China is also "making clear that the United States doesn't have full control over the future of US TikTok operations and a potential TikTok sale," she added.

From the untouched far-reaches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the sprawling old growth stands of the Tongass National Forest, the Trump administration has taken a shot-gun blast approach to pushing through extraction projects on federal lands in Alaska. There are no fewer than six major projects in the inital stages on federal lands in the state—operations that indigenous groups say would dramatically alter their longstanding way of life, and that environmental groups say would have a devastating impact on the environment...The Trump administration plans to hold the first-ever lease sale on the coastal plain of the refuge before the year's end, according to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. Earlier this month, the Interior Department completed the last regulatory hurdle—the publication of a "record of decision"—and now a lease sale can be held. The plan is to make available the entire coastal plain, 1.6 million acres along Alaska's north-eastern coast that are a home to the Porcupine caribou herd and a denning location for polar bears. The area is considered sacred to the native Gwich'in people...But because opening the refuge was included in the 2017 tax bill, Congress must also be involved in undoing it. "Without Congress's help, I think there's less flexibility for a Biden administration to stop the project," said Laura Bloomer, a fellow at Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program, who has been tracking regulatory rollbacks. "But there's enormous flexibility for a Biden administration to change how they do it," she added, noting that they could apply more environmentally rigorous standards that might make drilling there even less appealing. (Industry experts say it remains to be seen just how appealing it will be, given the price of oil, and the technical challenges of drilling there).

As protests for racial justice take to the streets, we remember one of the most important civil rights lawyers of the mid-20th century: Loren Miller. Miller worked on landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, like Shelley v. Kraemer, which resulted in racially restrictive housing covenants being ruled unconstitutional, and Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in public schools. He was also an influential writer and activist. Host Giovana Romano Sanchez interviews writer and researcher Dr. Amina Hassan and Harvard professor Kenneth Mack about Miller’s life, work, and significance in today’s racial politics.

Agile management began as a work of passion and as a desire to set things right. It continues excite passion in its advocates and its critics. My article “What Good Agile Looks Like” has generated many excellent questions and suggestions. Perhaps the most unintentionally illuminating came from my long-time colleague, Dave Snowden, who wrote: “Utopia on the left, dystopia on the right and little or no truth in either - why do people do this?” ...Agile management as presented here is not utopian in the sense of “an impractically ideal social and political scheme.” It is the reality in many organizations around the world, including the most financially valuable firms on the planet. It only sounds unrealistic if you have suffered under constraints of bureaucracy for your whole working life and never learned that other ways of working are possible. But for those who have experienced Agile management, or who have observed it first hand, Agile management often unfits you for working in any other way. When workers have a clear line of sight to those for whom the work is being done, work becomes meaningful in a way that isn’t possible in a bureaucracy...Principles reflect the underlying assumptions that drive decision-making throughout an organization. Principles reflect what the firm is actually doing, not necessarily with what the management says it is doing. For instance, important research by Harvard Law professor Lucian Bebchuk and colleagues shows that firms that profess to be acting in the interests of all the stakeholders are mostly acting in the interest of the shareholders and the executives. The professed support for stakeholder capitalism, says Bebchuk, “is mostly for show.” In effect, the principles that are really driving behavior in those firms are quite different from the professed goals. Understanding a firm’s principles means going “inside the engine room” and finding out what’s actually driving behavior.

They say they are family, that they will die for each other. And so they do, young men in Boston street gangs who for decades have arrived at hospital emergency rooms, felled by gunfire. Some have worn tattoos that read like commentaries on the social and economic deprivations that have shaped their short lives. “Born to be hated.” “Dying to be loved.” “Death is nothing. But to live defeated is to die every day.” The images are “burned into my consciousness,” Dr. Thea James, the director of Boston Medical Center’s violence intervention advocacy program, says in a penetrating documentary film, “This Ain’t Normal,” about the causes of gang affiliations in Boston and the possible solutions. The film is produced by Dennis Wilson, an acclaimed history teacher, basketball coach, and football coach at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury, who for 40 years has witnessed and tried to curb the deadly toll of street violence. Wilson said he produced the documentary with a friend, Rudy Hypolite, to shine a light on the systemic and institutional racism they hold responsible for the long reign of Boston’s urban gang culture. Some of Wilson’s former student-athletes are among the dead. “It’s all about trying to open eyes and save lives,” he said... “This Ain’t Normal” won an Audience Choice Award at the Orlando Film Festival and has been presented twice at Harvard University, first by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, then as part of the Harvard Library’s “Anti-Black Racism Documentary Film Series.” David Harris, the institute’s managing director, said, “The film is a powerful antidote to the way people think about our young people and our communities. Every elected official should have to see it and ponder and wrestle with its lessons.”

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the crime bill, was sponsored by Joe Biden 26 years ago. It is often blamed for extending tough-on-crime policies that overly criminalized Black Americans. Is this narrative warranted? The issue is complicated, but we’ll do our best to make some sense of it...Former Vice President Joe Biden has been asked repeatedly about his role in creating this bill. It came up during his vice-presidential selection when Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chair Karen Bass, who was under consideration as his running-mate, responded with a shrewd history lesson. Although Bass reported that she would have opposed the bill if she had been in Congress at the time, she said, “I understand very well why elected officials did what they did, because the masses of the people in these communities were demanding it.” ...As Yale law professor James Forman Jr. wrote in his much-cited 2017 book, Locking Up Our Own, “At the height of the [crack] epidemic, Black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered.” Writing twenty years earlier, another prominent African American scholar, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, argued that “Blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants” (“Unprotected or under-protected” are interesting and important choice of words, to which we’ll return)...Let’s return to the “unprotected or under-protected” comment from Prof. Kennedy. Members of the CBC claim they want better policing for Black communities rather than more. This is complicated for people to interpret, especially when polls show that over 80% of Blacks want more police presence, not less. Often, surveys don’t ask the right type of questions about policing—questions that would get at complexity and nuance.

Before the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association announced Friday that the postseason would resume with players and the league working collectively toward social justice goals, we reached out to more than a dozen leaders to ask how they would advise NBA players to use their influence to translate political passions into tangible results...The Milwaukee Bucks spent part of Wednesday on the phone not with federal office-holders or national leaders, but with their state's attorney general and lieutenant governor. Many of the laws that govern criminal justice originate at the local and state levels, and many of the grassroots organizations and local interests that can compel reform from those with power reside in local communities. There are no simple answers to the most serious questions, and no singular route to progress. Our panel of experts offers a range of ideas to this generation of NBA players who are looking toward the next phase of their activism, excerpted below from longer conversations...How deeply do NBA players need to educate themselves in the intricacies of criminal justice reform? Randall Kennedy (Michael R. Klein professor of law, Harvard Law School): One should not expect athletes to be experts in problems involving the administration of criminal justice. There are people who have a demonstrated history of being involved in legislative activity, in litigation, in public education the way these elite players work on their games. The players have stature and some degree of financial resource, and what they are doing has been fantastic. They should link up with those who are knowledgeable and have a track record -- and who could use the help.

With about two months to go until Election Day, President Trump has abandoned any pretense of following, let alone enforcing, the laws he has sworn to uphold. He directed government employees to assist him in putting on a political extravaganza at the White House. His secretary of state dialed in from Jerusalem for a purely political role as Trump’s cheerleader at the Republican National Convention, in violation of both the Hatch Act and his own departmental guidelines. Trump instructed his director of national intelligence to refuse to brief members of Congress in person on efforts to disrupt the 2020 election, a choice House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) declared “a shocking abdication of its lawful responsibility to keep the Congress currently informed, and a betrayal of the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy.” And Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has instituted measures that have slowed the mail, even as more Americans will rely on the Postal Service to cast their ballots. The way to handle Trump is to beat him at the polls. But what about the aides who participate in illegal activities or block Congress from performing oversight? ... “It’s well past time for Congress to lose its subpoena inhibitions, now that the Roberts court has unanimously rejected the administration’s claims of absolute presidential immunity in a ringing reaffirmation of the principle that no executive official is above the law,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “The White House participants who engaged in flagrant Hatch Act violations should all be held in contempt if they defy facially valid congressional subpoenas, and there’s no legitimate basis for the new administration to give such participants a bye just because the president personally isn’t covered by the Hatch Act.”

State attorneys general have stepped up their workplace enforcement efforts in recent years by suing employers that short workers on pay, fighting job misclassification and challenging noncompete agreements binding low-wage workers, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal think tank's Aug. 27 report runs down dozens such actions taken since 2018 by state attorneys general offices, some of which have recently formed units dedicated to prosecuting employment violations. These new efforts comprise another layer of protection for vulnerable workers in an especially precarious time, said report author Terri Gerstein, who heads the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program. "Offices that have done this work have really had an impact and done really great work," said Gerstein, a veteran of the New York State Office of the Attorney General and that state's Department of Labor. "These issues are so important right now. They were before the pandemic and now even more so, and they should really be top-line issues for leaders in all of our states and cities." Gerstein's report charts increased efforts by attorneys general to curb several workplace abuses, including wage theft, which occurs when employers short workers on overtime and minimum wage. Attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York, West Virginia and other states have filed numerous such actions, securing millions of dollars in combined pay for construction, health care, grocery, car wash and other workers, according to the report...Historically, the attorneys general offices of California, Massachusetts and New York — which have long had dedicated workers' rights units — have been the most active in the employment space. But others have recently caught up amid growing awareness of income inequality and the precarity of low-wage work, Gerstein said.

Americans who watched the political conventions on television opted for news networks with partisan fan bases to a degree unseen in recent years, another sign of an increasingly divided electorate as the nation hurtles toward the November election...Television viewers’ turn to perceived safe spaces raises questions about the ability of political conventions — which reached a broader TV audience in the pre-internet era — to persuade undecided voters. And it underscores fears about a polarized information environment where Americans can receive little exposure to political ideas that run counter to their own...On MSNBC, three Trump critics — Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Nicolle Wallace — lambasted the president’s address and interrupted the convention for several fact-checking segments. The channel’s ratings for the Republican convention were among its lowest prime-time weeks of the year. For the Democratic convention, the picture was sharply reversed. MSNBC clocked its highest-rated prime-time week in the network’s 24-year history, with a 10 p.m. average of 5.7 million viewers. Fox News’s viewership fell far below its usual prime-time average. “What we saw in the last presidential election was that Clinton supporters distributed their attention much more evenly among a broader range of outlets, and Trump supporters concentrated much more heavily on Fox News,” said Yochai Benkler, a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The fact you have such a high proportion of viewers of the Democratic convention on MSNBC does suggest, to some extent, a gravitation on the Democratic side toward a more partisan, viewpoint-reinforcing network,” Mr. Benkler said.

Among the blessings that NBA players possess and most mortals lack—lots of money, little body fat—here’s another that was highlighted this week: They belong to a union. As teams abandoned the hardwood Wednesday to focus on how best to respond to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, they knew where to turn for guidance: the National Basketball Players Association. On Thursday, the players agreed to continue with their season, reportedly at the urging of their union leaders, Oklahoma City Thunder star Chris Paul and the Miami Heat’s Andre Iguodala, who persuaded them that they will have more leverage to battle deep-seated racism and push for change if they don’t walk out...The fight they are taking up is over broader social concerns, not their own wages or working conditions. And despite the prospect of a huge financial hit, team owners and management have been supportive of the players’ actions, which technically began as a wildcat strike by those on the Milwaukee Bucks. Still, the basic point shouldn’t be overlooked: The players were able to mobilize quickly and take a stand, in large measure, because they are organized. Very few others are, however. A mere 6% of private-sector workers in the United States today are part of a union—a position of weakness that has translated into stagnant wages and shrunken benefits across the American labor force...Yet there is ample evidence that one factor, above all, is to blame for the fall of unions: a fierce and relentless effort by businesses to bust them, abetted by their political allies in Washington and in so-called right-to-work states. When it comes to turning back union organizers, “companies will use any and all means they can get away with,” says Larry Beeferman, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. Many executives have demonstrated that they’ll even violate the law to thwart collective bargaining.

An article by Beatrice Lindstrom, Mario Joseph and Brian Concannon: If UN Secretary-General António Guterres is serious about his clarion call for “a strong, coordinated and coherent multilateral response” to COVID-19 that is based on solidarity, he should start by keeping his promises to victims of the UN-caused cholera epidemic in Haiti. Providing cholera victims the justice they have sought for a decade would restore the credibility the UN needs to lead the fight against COVID-19, and set an example of an effective human rights-based response to global health threats.  Cholera broke out in Haiti in 2010 as a result of the reckless disposal of contaminated waste from a UN base into Haiti’s largest river system. Unlike COVID-19, cholera is easily preventable with clean water. But Haiti’s epidemic has killed more than 10,000 people and sickened over 800,000—a per capita infection rate that exceeds the confirmed prevalence of COVID-19 in any country to date. The UN responded to the epidemic by withholding information, denying its obvious responsibility and blaming victims for their poverty-generated underlying vulnerability to the disease—a template now being used by some governments in unsuccessful COVID-19 responses. The UN also refused to provide the victims a fair hearing on their claims for justice, in violation of international law. In 2016, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Phillip Alston, called this response “morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating.” Later that year, facing an extraordinary mobilization by the victims and their allies, the UN issued an unprecedented public apology and announced a “new approach” that was to “place victims at the center” and deliver a concrete expression of the UN’s regret through material assistance for victims.

An article by Cass Sunstein: After Nov. 3 — Election Day — there is a chance of constitutional chaos. It could take the form of acute uncertainty, not only about who won the election but also about the process by which that question will be settled. We might have a perfect storm: close contests in key states, issues with mail-in voting, allegations of voter suppression and fraud, and an incumbent president who is unwilling to accept a loss (and who is already paving the way toward contesting the results as “rigged”). To see the problem, it is essential to understand that Nov. 3 is only the first of three defining days. The second is Dec. 14, when members of the Electoral College cast their votes. The third is Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress meets in joint session to declare the winner. What happens on Nov. 3 is almost always enough to decide the presidential election. That isn’t because victory goes to the candidate with the most votes nationally, but because the popular vote, within the states, settles the outcome in the Electoral College. In nearly every state, the candidate who receives the most votes statewide is entitled to the vote of all of the state’s electors. Suppose, for example, that President Donald Trump receives 47.3% of the vote in Ohio, and that former Vice President Joe Biden receives 47.2% of the vote there. All of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes would be allocated to Trump. But what if we don’t know on Nov. 3, or even a month later, who won Ohio? Or Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida? What if it takes a long time to count the votes, and what if the results are disputed?

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker dialed up the heat on Exelon Corp. last week with an energy plan that rejected the Chicago company's call for policy changes to prop up its nuclear fleet. Yesterday, Exelon pushed back on Pritzker and Illinois legislators, threatening to close two nuclear plants in the northern half of the state that the company had previously warned were at risk. Besides the loss of an additional 1,500 jobs if the plants close and millions of dollars in local taxes for governments challenged by an economic downturn from COVID-19, the closures would mean the loss of 4,300 megawatts of Illinois' carbon-free energy at a time when the governor has promised to cut carbon emissions (Greenwire, Aug. 27). Nuclear industry supporters say there's no getting around the fact that the closure of the two plants would lead to an increase in carbon emissions, at least in the short run. And no matter their view of Exelon, elected officials in Illinois, including Pritzker, don't want to see the reactors shut down, costing local jobs and tax revenue...That's especially true if Exelon is looking for help outside the Statehouse, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. At the federal level, Democrats in Congress have discussed a federal clean energy standard. But that would be on the table only if the party can take control of the Senate this fall and former Vice President Joe Biden defeats President Trump (Climatewire, Aug. 26). Even then, passing and implementing such a bill wouldn't be quick or easy. Regulators led by a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman under a Biden administration could also seek changes to PJM market rules (Energywire, Aug. 24). Such a process can take years to work through. "There's a lot of things the state or Congress or FERC could do, but those would take time," Peskoe said. Even if Biden and the Democrats win big in November, "it's not going to happen on Jan. 21."

The widely acclaimed pledge that 181 CEOs signed last year to redefine the purpose of corporations was “largely a public-relations move,” according to Lucian Bebchuk, one of the country’s best-known academics on corporate governance and founder of the influential blog the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. More importantly, writes Bebchuk, most CEOs who joined the pledge never planned to shift from the current model of shareholder primacy. Board directors and governance experts run the gamut in reacting to Bebchuk’s appraisal. What they do agree upon, however, is that the topic requires every board to take a more nuanced approach than the academic chose to in his recent pronouncement. “I believe that boards and CEOs understand that stakeholder capitalism is really a ‘thing’ and they understandably want to figure out how it will work,” writes Howard Brod Brownstein, director at P&F Industries, in an e-mail. “[B]oard directors should rightfully require management to explain fully how interests of non-shareholder stakeholders are being taken into account, and at what cost, if any, to shareholders.” On the other hand, Henry D. Wolfe, the founder and chairman of private equity firm De La Vega Occidental & Oriental Holdings, responds that he doubts that many boards and CEOs are in favor of the stakeholder model of governance. “And, yes, I think it is terrible for shareholders if by stakeholder capitalism the intent is to treat all stakeholders ‘equal.’” Bebchuk is a professor of law, economics, and finance at Harvard Law School and directs its corporate governance program. He was also a director of mining and metals company Norilsk Nickel of Russia, which trades on the Moscow and London stock exchanges.

When the Milwaukee Bucks announced Wednesday that they would not be playing their NBA playoff game due to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the media couldn’t agree on what to call this extraordinary thing that was unfolding. Were the players mounting a protest? Were they initiating a boycott? Or were they carrying out a strike or work stoppage? Other teams in the NBA, WNBA and Major League Baseball followed the Bucks’ lead by refusing to suit up and play in solidarity, calling for an end to police brutality against Black people. Professional athletes across sports are throwing their collective weight around in historic fashion, and it’s good to call these actions what they really are: They’re strikes...Workers typically carry out strikes against their employers, and they usually do it for economic reasons. Here, the players’ beef is not with their leagues or their teams’ ownership. They are not trying to win raises or better health care coverage. They are demanding an end to social injustice. But what’s happening is still a strike, for the same reason it doesn’t fit the definition of a boycott: Workers, not consumers, are applying the real pressure here. NBA fans did not decide to halt the playoffs; the players did. And that matters because it could inspire other workers to push for social justice through their workplaces...Sharon Block, director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said the situation brought to mind the walkout led by employees of Wayfair, the online home furnishings retailer, because the company was supplying beds to U.S. detention centers for migrant children. The dispute was about social injustice ― not working conditions ― and the workers were asking the broader community to stand by them in condemning it. “Whatever the label is, this is about solidarity,” Block said of the athletes’ move. “It’s not just to advance their own interest, but to lead on a bigger public policy issue...They’re asking the public to join them in saying there’s something more important going on than sports.”

The front of the New York Times sports section on Thursday commemorated a historic day in sports, when three NBA playoff games, along with games across Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the WNBA, were postponed because athletes refused to play, in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man in Kenosha, Wisc. The image was simple: an empty court in the NBA bubble in Orlando. The headline was one word: “Boycott.” And the backlash, once the Times tweeted the image Wednesday night, came quickly. “You need to change it to STRIKE,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, wrote on Twitter. Ocasio-Cortez spread her frustration around the media, responding to a tweet by The Washington Post that also called the action a “boycott," though the story itself used “strike." "NBA players are courageously on strike (withholding labor), NOT boycotting (withholding their $ /purchase),” she wrote. "The diff is important bc it shows their power as *workers*.” Others piled on. In New York magazine, Sarah Jones and Chas Danner offered their own critique of sportswriters who referred to the day’s events as a boycott. “The term,” they wrote, "is inaccurate, and dampens the political thrust of the Bucks’ protest.” ...Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, [says] labeling what happened may be less important than describing what happened, and why. “We tend to think about strikes as about wages and benefits," Sachs said. "Those are very important, but this was about something much bigger than that, something involving the character and future of the country. So you can call it whatever you want, but the name seems less important than the meaning of what happened.”

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s western-style democracy appeared ascendant and inevitable.  U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush hailed events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as heralding a New World Order, based on democracy and global capitalism.  But the last thirty years have seen, not an expansion of democracy, but a rebirth of authoritarianism.   Across the globe,  electoral fraud, political corruption, disenfranchisement of political minorities and the specter of fascism now seem the rule rather than the exception.  In 2017, the London-based Economist Democracy Index hit its lowest score ever, including the downgrading of the United States from a “Full Democracy” to a “Flawed Democracy.”  Today, we start a three-part series, Democracy in Crisis, which will explore the failures of our current electoral system and perhaps, provide some hope for an alternative model.  Joining WORT host Brian Standing...Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons. His books include: They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy, Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, America, Compromised and  Republic, Lost v2.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro brought criminal charges last September against a Centre County mechanical contractor for allegedly underpaying its workers by more than $64,000 over at least five years. The charges against Goodco Mechanical and its owner, Scott Good, were just one part of the attorney general’s strategy to crack down on scofflaw employers — a strategy that, according to a new report, places Pennsylvania on the forefront of a trend of state attorneys general using their powers to protect workers’ rights. In the last five years, several state attorney general offices — including those in Pennsylvania and New Jersey — have launched units focused on defending workers, transforming their offices into what report author Terri Gerstein describes as a rarity: a high-profile government entity that’s willing to hold employers accountable. Previously, only three states had such units; now, there are nine, according to Gerstein’s Economic Policy Institute report published Thursday. The trend marks a major shift, as attorneys general have not traditionally taken action on worker-related issues, said Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program. The shift comes as workers have faced increasingly precarious working conditions, and the percent of the workforce represented by a union has dropped to a historic low. It’s also part of a local worker protection movement, as cities and states attempt to fill the void left by the Trump administration, which has not prioritized workers’ rights. But perhaps most of all, worker issues have found footing in the national consciousness: “If you go back to 2008,” Gerstein said, “[these issues] were not in the newspaper headlines. It wasn’t a matter of such intense, focused, public concern.” In most states, including Pennsylvania, the attorney general is an elected position. Voters, she said, care about these issues.

Two primary drivers for deal activity, company market valuations and overall economic conditions, are diverging more than ever. That’s creating opportunities for both law firms and their corporate clients—and challenges for others. M+A lawyers are increasingly talking about “the winner and the losers” in the market. That’s reinforcing the need for law firms to have a diversified range of clients, including clients that are more resilient and buoyant in today’s economy, some observers say. Brian Richards, chair of Paul Hastings’ global private equity practice, said deal flow in his practice has seen an increase in August, which he said is normally a down time for deals...During the initial phases of the pandemic, the U.S. economy and the markets took a unified downturn, effectively halting large deals and providing a level of uncertainty that put even smaller deals on hold. But the stock market has rebounded, and with authority...The economy, on the other hand, has not fared near as well...John Coates, a professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School, said most law firms are probably not in a terrible spot. “As a general matter, compared to say most professional services industries, the legal services for M+A work is very fragmented,” Coates said. “Individual firms don’t tend to have a significant share of overall M+A work, so one firm isn’t necessarily being hit harder than another.” Firms that have specialized their M+A work around industries hit hard by the pandemic, like real estate or hospitality, he said, could end up in that loser bin for the time being, but most firms are geared to handle that impact as well. “Well-run firms pay attention to not letting any one client generate a large percentage of their revenues, and there aren’t too many firms that are too dependent on that,” he said. “Regardless of how the market and the economy affect companies, law firms are normally sufficiently diversified.”

Today, Kate Klonick is back as the guest host. She is an assistant professor at St. John’s Law School, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and researcher of the intersection between law and tech. She’s also co-host of a daily YouTube series called In Lieu of Fun. On the Gist, in 2020, every online company has a community of standards and manually reviews user content. In the interview, Kate talks to Harvard law professor Noah Feldman about his idea for Facebook to create a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes over speech. They discuss how he came up with the idea and pitched it to Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, the influences it draws from political systems, and the size of the case it should choose as its first. Feldman hosts the podcast Deep Background. In the spiel, Facebook’s oversight board could be the start of something revolutionary within big tech.