Media Mentions

Australian advertisers say they are considering pulling their advertising from Facebook amid a growing global backlash over hate speech on social media. Starbucks, Coca-Cola and consumer goods giant Unilever are among the big names who've joined the boycott, prompting Facebook's share price to tumble by more than 8 per cent. The company's founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has since announced updates to the company's advertising standards. Guest: Evelyn Doeuk, lecturer on law and a Doctoral Candidate with Harvard Law School and an expert in the regulation of online speech.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Tara Lachapelle, Bloomberg Opinion media columnist: "AMC’s Wrong. Requiring Masks Isn’t Political." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "DACA Ruling Shows Roberts Is Done Trusting Trump." Toby Harshaw, a national security writer and editor for Bloomberg Opinion: "U.S. Allies Can't Face Four More Years of Trump." Sarah Green Carmichael, Bloomberg Opinion editor: "Beat Remote-Work Burnout as a Team." Brooke Sutherland, Bloomberg Opinion industrials columnist: "Is Your AC Keeping You Safe From Covid?"

As he prepares to retire, Laurence Tribe retraces his path from teen immigrant math whiz to leading constitutional law scholar and admired professor.

Pressure is mounting for Kansas State University to expel a student whose insensitive tweets about George Floyd last week sparked a national uproar. But a critical question looms: Can the university legally kick out a student for exercising his First Amendment rights? “A student at a public university making an extremely offensive statement on social media is almost quintessentially the kind of thing that should be protected against sanctioning by public authorities,” said Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor. “And sanctioning would include expulsion from a public university. On the face of it, it seems to me that taking action directly against the student would be a violation of the First Amendment.” Jaden McNeil, a junior in political science and head of K-State’s America First Students chapter — a controversial group he formed earlier this year — posted the tweets Thursday afternoon...Tushnet of Harvard Law said if K-State does expel McNeil and he files a lawsuit, his chances of success would depend on the kind of remedy he was seeking. “If he wanted to be readmitted, then he’d have a pretty good chance of winning,” he said. “If he wanted damages for injury to his career or something like that, it would be a closer question.” Tushnet acknowledged that the incident puts university officials in a difficult position. “That’s why you hire good administrators,” he said. “I can imagine a very good administrator, president, deans, figuring out a way to work with the athletic teams in a way that would leave them satisfied without expelling the student. But that depends on the president’s ability and local circumstances, all of which I don’t know.”

The top attorneys for the District of Columbia and Minnesota last week launched major lawsuits against the oil and gas industry, adding to a growing swell of climate battles focused on consumer protection. Legal experts say climate litigators facing off against the fossil fuel industry's major players are getting more creative in their use of state statutes and common law, which could help them avoid prolonged procedural battles over whether the cases belong in state or federal court — a problem that has plagued local challengers seeking industry compensation for climate impacts. By strengthening their arguments for state venues, state challengers could move more quickly to the meat of their cases...These cases — and a similar lawsuit filed last year by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) — are distinct from climate nuisance lawsuits brought by cities, counties and one state that seek to hold oil and gas companies financially accountable for rising sea levels and other effects of climate change...Experts like Hana Vizcarra, staff attorney at Harvard Law School, said the states' consumer protection cases also move away from claims rooted in securities law. The New York attorney general's office last year lost its bid to hold Exxon accountable under the state's Martin Act, an anti-fraud law. "It's noticeable that there's been this common shift to consumer protection, but it's also not super surprising because nobody else has the Martin Act," Vizcarra said. "It's harder to bring securities fraud claims, and they're just really dependent on the state laws." Prohibitions against deceptive corporate practices are more widespread, she said. "You see those kinds of authorities in laws across the country in every state," Vizcarra said.

Every Supreme Court decision seems to confirm Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s pivotal role at the center of the court, and Monday’s ruling on abortion showed that restrictions on a woman’s right to the procedure for now will go only as far as the chief justice allows. In a remarkable stretch of decisions over the past two weeks, Roberts has dismayed conservatives and the Trump administration by finding that federal anti-discrimination law protects gay, bisexual and transgender workers and stopping the president from ending the federal program that protects undocumented immigrants brought here as children...Roberts’s admirers speculate he was turned off by the attempt to have the court’s 2016 decision overturned because the court’s membership had changed with Trump’s two appointments. Too soon, said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor who has known Roberts since law school days and who has taught summer courses with the chief justice. “The chief’s clear message is that is not how justices do their work,” Lazarus said in an email. “It is a shot across the bow at presidential candidates who campaign with lists of nominees based on the assumption that, if confirmed, they will of course necessarily vote based on the preferences of the majority who supported that candidate.”

Here's the Radio Boston rundown for June 29. Tiziana Dearing is our host. The Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges to nearby hospitals. We're joined by a retired federal judge and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner. According to a new report from MIT and City Life/Vida Urbana, communities of color in Boston are disproportionately impacted by evictions in Boston — and it could get worse with the pandemic. We dig into the report and its implications. In an effort to show how executives of color can lead on eliminating racial inequities, a group of Black and brown business leaders in Boston has come together to create the "New Commonwealth Racial Equity And Social Justice Fund." We speak with one of the women behind the effort. We "Check The Score" and dig into Cam Newton's move to the New England Patriots.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled on a major abortion case to start the week. The court struck down a Louisiana law that required doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges to nearby hospitals — the effects of which could have left the state with a single abortion clinic. We discuss with Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR's legal analyst.

It took a global pandemic and stay-at-home orders for 1.5 billion people worldwide, but something is finally occurring to us: The future we thought we expected may not be the one we get. We know that things will change; how they’ll change is a mystery. To envision a future altered by coronavirus, Quartz asked dozens of experts for their best predictions on how the world will be different in five years. Below is an answer from Bruce Schneier, a security expert focused on technology. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the author of more than a dozen books—his latest, Click Here to Kill Everybody, was published in 2018. "For decades, we have prized efficiency in our economy. We strive for it. We reward it. In normal times, that’s a good thing.  Running just at the margins is efficient. A single just-in-time global supply chain is efficient. Consolidation is efficient. And that’s all profitable. Inefficiency, on the other hand, is waste. Extra inventory is inefficient. Overcapacity is inefficient. Using many small suppliers is inefficient. Inefficiency is unprofitable. But inefficiency is essential security, as the Covid-19 pandemic is teaching us. All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our health care system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains—not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains."

Each year, the United States deports over 100,000 noncitizens through “expedited removal,” a fast-tracked deportation process. In creating the system, Congress intentionally limited procedural protections for certain immigrants, allowing judges reviewing these removal orders to consider only three narrow questions: whether the immigrant is a noncitizen, has been ordered removed, or is a lawful permanent resident, refugee or asylum seeker. Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, a Sri Lankan national who sought asylum in the United States, challenged that limit, arguing that it was an unconstitutional barrier to habeas corpus, a right that allows a judge to review whether someone is legally detained. On Thursday, the Supreme Court disagreed, issuing a sweeping ruling in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam...Boumediene found that the Constitution guarantees habeas corpus rights even to detainees the Bush administration held as “enemy combatants.” That was true even though the detainees weren’t citizens. In fact, as legal scholar Gerald Neuman put it, Boumediene “confirmed and held that the Suspension Clause constitutionally guarantees habeas corpus to noncitizens” (emphasis original). The Thuraissigiam majority opinion, however, characterizes Boumediene as “forming ‘no certain conclusions’ ” on whether habeas rights extend to “alien[s] who lack … any allegiance to the country.”

An article by Cass Sunstein: The year: 1964. The location: the Oval Office. President Lyndon Johnson, an improbable advocate for civil rights, was meeting with Governor George Wallace, an implacable foe of civil rights. Wallace had requested the meeting. The specific topic was voting rights and the ongoing demonstrations on their behalf. He wanted the president to help stop them. After a little small talk, the governor began the conversation by alleging that many of the “malcontents” had been “trained in Moscow.” Johnson responded that all the protesters wanted was the right to vote. He added that “you can’t stop a fever by putting an icepack on your head. You’ve got to use antibiotics and get to the cause of the fever.” Wallace was disdainful. He said that it was impossible to “deal with street revolutionaries,” who could never be satisfied. You might give them the right to vote, but “then it’s jobs; then it’s distribution of wealth without work.” Increasingly frustrated, Johnson asked Wallace to think about the verdict of history, not about the current moment. He asked: "George, what do you want left behind? Do you want a great big marble monument that says 'George Wallace: He Built'? Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine lying there along that hot caliche soil that says 'George Wallace: He Hated'?" Wallace was shaken. Later he said to an aide, “Hell, if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.” Johnson’s key distinction — between the builders and the haters — is keenly relevant today, of course. Most important, it captures the split between those who are working for racial justice, including voting rights (and jobs), and the modern-day Wallaces, who in various forms are complaining of “street revolutionaries,” doubting the patriotism of the protesters, and emphasizing looting and acts of violence, as if they are all that matter.

An article by Noah Feldman: Chief Justice John Roberts has drawn his line in the sand.  In what may well come to be his most famous opinion ever, a solo concurrence in today’s Louisiana abortion case, Roberts voted to uphold Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 decision in which Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter declined to overturn Roe v. Wade. The basis was stare decisis — the doctrine of precedent which, he said, instructs us “to treat like cases alike” rather than changing the rules and reversing course. Roberts made it clear that he reads the Casey decision very narrowly, to allow restrictions on abortion that don’t impose an “undue burden” on reproductive freedom. He signaled that he is still open to upholding laws that chip away at the existing abortion rights framework, which has been his approach in the past. Roberts hasn’t had some transformative epiphany that made him into a staunch defender of abortion rights. But crucially, Roberts also made it as clear as he could that, so long as he is the swing vote on the court, he isn’t open to overturning Roe or Casey. He doesn’t want the Roberts Court to be remembered as a reactionary body that reversed nearly 50 years of settled law on abortion rights. This is a massive setback for legal conservatives. It means that to overturn Roe and Casey, they need President Donald Trump to be re-elected and to get at least one more conservative on the court to replace a liberal justice.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley argued, in their classic essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” that critics interpreting a literary work should cast aside pursuit of the author’s intent. “The poem belongs to the public,” they wrote, because “it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public.” The New Criticism, a movement that dominated the academic study of literature in mid-century, asserted that only close analysis of the words and structure of the text—not external knowledge about the author, politics, morality, or a reader’s feelings—was the key to understanding its meaning. Salvatore Eugene Scalia, a professor of Italian literature at Brooklyn College, was an adherent of this theory. He also advocated for “literalness” in reading and translation, to avoid “yielding to the temptation” to follow one’s own language’s conventions in interpreting the words of the text. The New Criticism fell from prominence in the nineteen-eighties, but its impact became discernible in another field, through Professor Scalia’s only child, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, the same year that the elder Scalia died. Justice Antonin Scalia became the country’s most important expositor of textualism, the influential method of legal interpretation wherein “the text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed,” regardless of what lawmakers may have intended in passing the law. Since the nineteen-eighties, textualism has been favored by legal conservatives—but, in more recent decades, its focus on the words of a text has become influential with liberal judges, too. Last Monday, under the shadow of Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, the current conservative Justices aired their strife over his textualist legacy in Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark gay-and-transgender-rights case.

An article by Samantha Power: In 1944, two priests arrived at the Kennedy home to inform Joseph Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy that their oldest son had been killed in World War II. Sixteen-year-old Jean, the eighth of their nine children, was devastated. After riding her bicycle to church to pray, she went next to the local hospital–to volunteer. Jean later recalled this as an obvious choice, asking, “What else could I do?” To spend time with Jean Kennedy Smith, who died on June 17 at 92, was to be bowled over by the sheer quantity of positive energy she brought to this world. When I saw her after I became U.S. ambassador to the U.N., she was firm (and wise) in her direction: “Don’t waste any time, and find the people who actually want to do things.” Conscious of her privilege, Jean dedicated much of her life to providing arts programming to children with disabilities. And whatever pain she carried inside, she projected a permanent twinkle and an eagerness to conspire. Her matchmaking gifts were legendary–she not only set up brothers John, Bobby and Teddy with their wives, but as ambassador to Ireland in the 1990s, she also convinced a skeptical Clinton Administration to work with shunned Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. In so doing, she made a significant contribution to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which would end the deadly conflict in Northern Ireland. Asked how she’d like to be remembered, she evoked Abraham Lincoln: “I have planted a rose where only thistles grew.” Jean Kennedy Smith did that and so much more.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo and Kristy Parker: On Wednesday, two accounts of the Department of Justice — one grounded in fact, the other in fiction — were on display in the nation’s capital. The first occurred before the House Judiciary Committee, where Andrew Zelinksy, a career prosecutor currently working at the Justice Department, took the extraordinary step of testifying about political interference in criminal cases from “the highest levels of the Department,” namely by Attorney General William Barr. Zelinsky described career officials being overridden and departmental sentencing practices violated, all to give “a break” to President Trump’s close associate Roger Stone, who has been convicted of conduct that threatened our country’s national security. At virtually the same moment, a divided three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued an opinion in the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Barr intervened in that case to give a break to yet another close Trump associate, by filing a highly unusual motion to dismiss the case even though Flynn had already twice pleaded guilty. Under the governing federal rules, such a dismissal requires “leave of court,” and the judge overseeing Flynn’s case, Emmet Sullivan, was preparing to hold a hearing on the government’s request. But in an unprecedented move, the Appeals Court stepped in before Sullivan had even considered the government’s motion and ordered him to grant it.

It was the death of a salesman. With tie undone and crumpled “Make America great again” cap in hand, Donald Trump cut a forlorn figure shambling across the White House south lawn on his return from his failed comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Some observers likened him to Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist of Arthur Miller’s benchmark drama. The US president, critics say, has spent years selling a bill of goods to the American people. Now they are no longer buying...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said: “He could announce, perhaps without any basis at all, in mid-October that a new vaccine has been found, and he could pressure the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]to approve it and that could mess with the vote. He could get help of the sort he has already asked for from China and Russia to interfere with the vote.” “He could engage in conspiratorial vote suppression in which a number of people are prevented from voting by a sudden announcement that there is a spike in the coronavirus in certain jurisdictions. The power that he has as president to both manipulate the votes actually cast, and in addition to that, to launch challenges where his manipulation has not been sufficiently successful is enormously broad.” Tribe added: “If we know nothing else about this man, we know that his priorities are entirely personal and narcissistic. We know that he is not worried about the stability or the safety of the country and, given that set of psychological realities, it would take a much more ironclad process than we have to warrant any degree of confidence that we will have a smooth and peaceful transition to a new president next January.”

Four major automakers will remain neutral in a legal standoff over the Trump administration’s plan to substantially weaken federal fuel economy standards developed under the Obama White House, according to early media reports. Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and BMW plan to file a joint motion today in a Washington, DC., appeals court that will give the companies a say on final auto rules should courts reject the Trump administration’s proposed change, but that will not take a position on the proposed change itself, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters. In March, the Trump administration rolled out a long-awaited rule change that would require automakers to improve fuel economy standards by only around 1.5% per year. That would be much lower than the roughly 5% per year improvement that a rule issued by the Obama administration in 2009 and updated in 2012 has required...Experts who have followed the legal tug-of-war over whose standards should prevail were not surprised by today’s news that the four automakers had chosen to remain neutral. "I think most people watching these cases expected the companies to either support the challengers [California, the other states, and energy companies]...or to intervene the way they have neutrally to protect their interests. I don’t think anyone was expecting these four companies to side with the Trump administration," said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental Law and Energy Program. "That said, I assume that California, the other states and energy companies challenging these rules hoped that these four companies would side with them rather than remaining neutral because it would send a message to the court about the feasibility of complying with more ambitious standards and the willingness of the industry to be subject to higher standards. Perhaps the companies feel that their agreement with California sends that message and so they don’t need to side with the challengers in the case to demonstrate that," said McCoy.

An article by David J. Harris: It is becoming increasingly clear that we, as a nation, have arrived at a crossroads.  Between the coronavirus and the private and state-sanctioned lynchings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd sandwiched around the white lives matter moment of Amy Cooper, we seem to be approaching a reckoning of sorts.  That reckoning will be essential if we are to move forward from this place of pain and anguish. And any such movement will certainly require deep and broad reflection and action.  An essential aspect of our reckoning will be interrogating the language we use to describe the social forces we confront.  For several years I have been advocating that we eliminate the term “criminal justice system” from our lexicon. It is a term fraught with powerful negative associations and one that corrupts the meaning of justice. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a system that begins with “criminal” as a pathway to anything but criminalization. As with breaking any habit, withdrawing from “criminal justice” can be painful. It is, after all, accepted as a term of trade. The phrase is used to capture a whole range of activities from policing to prosecution, from charging to conviction, from trial to sentencing and (mass) incarceration. On the front end it captures police, bail, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges. On the back end, it describes all who function within prisons, parole, probation. This is not an exhaustive list, but it makes the point: however dysfunctional it may be, it certainly has enough components to look like a system.  But, let’s call that system what it is: a law enforcement system.

A federal judge has ordered US Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to cancel the student loan debt of more than 7,200 Massachusetts students who attended Everest Institute, part of Corinthian Colleges’ defunct national chain of for-profit schools, capping a prolonged legal battle. In a 73-page decision, US District Judge Leo T. Sorokin ruled that the Department of Education must approve a 2015 application by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey seeking a discharge of the students’ federal loans based on allegations of widespread illegal conduct and deception by Corinthian. The order also applies to Parent Plus loans obtained on the students’ behalf. “Thousands of Massachusetts students cheated by Corinthian have finally had their day in court, and they have won,” Healey said in a statement Friday. “This landmark victory for students will cancel the federal loans for thousands of defrauded borrowers, mostly Black and Latinx students, targeted by a predatory for-profit school and abandoned by Secretary DeVos and the Trump Administration. For five years, our office and the Project on Predatory Student Lending have fought to win students the relief they deserve and today we have won decisively.” ...The ruling was issued in a case the Project on Predatory Student Lending Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School had filed on behalf of five students who had attended Everest Institute, which had campuses in Brighton and Chelsea. It went bankrupt in 2015 after running afoul of state and federal regulators. In his ruling, Sorokin granted the plaintiffs’ request for class-action status, expanding his order to include more than 7,200 students who attended the school. “This ruling is a clear and powerful statement of the rights of student borrowers, and a resounding rejection of the Department of Education’s ongoing and across-the-board refusal to recognize these rights and cancel fraudulent student loans,” said Toby Merrill, who directs the Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Could a slaveholder also be an advocate for equality for all? That is the riddle left behind by one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Jon Meacham join Walter Isaacson to discuss Jefferson's monuments and whether or not they should come down.

An article by Charles Fried and Edward J. Larson: Many observers breathed a sigh of relief when Bill Barr was confirmed as attorney general. Here was a respected professional who had served in the post once before in an honorable administration. Now, just a year and a half later, what a disappointment he has proved. The man cannot be trusted. Think of the intentionally misleading account he gave of the Mueller report, at a time when the public and Congress had only Barr’s word to go by. Or the brief he allowed his Justice Department to file with the Supreme Court in the case about including a citizenship question on the 2020 census, whose rationale the Court later characterized as “contrived” and “pretextual.” Or his false account of the use of armed forces to clear Lafayette Square for the president’s photo op. Or his statement that U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman asked to step down, when Berman had done no such thing. And now we have damning testimony this week about the politicization of the Department of Justice in the prosecution of the Trump ally Roger Stone. The attorney general is entitled to his opinion on the policies underlying these matters, and to argue forcefully for them. But as a lawyer, as a high official, as an officer of the court, he must not misrepresent the facts or the authorities. Americans need not agree with the attorney general’s arguments or conclusions, but they must have absolute confidence that he will not try to deceive them.