Media Mentions

An article by Noah Feldman: The theory that Kamala Harris is ineligible to be vice president because her parents were not U.S. citizens is xenophobic and false. But it's not exactly the same as the birther conspiracy theory that said President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States at all. Birtherism was a conspiracy theory based on a factual lie. Even debunking that kind of theory can be a bad idea because it tends to help the falsehood reach more people — some of whom then believe the lie. The anti-Harris theory, in contrast, is based on a fringe constitutional claim about the meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment. When it comes to constitutional claims, even extreme ones, it's important to explain why they are wrong in order to refute them. It’s therefore both valuable and necessary to explain carefully why this theory is incorrect as a matter of constitutional law. To do that, you need to start with the theory itself. It starts with the constitutional provision of Article II that says, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” (To be vice president, you have to meet the eligibility requirements to be president.) According to the attack theory, the meaning of “natural born” should be derived from the 14th amendment, which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The attack on Harris’s eligibility focuses on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The basic idea is supposed to be that those words modify the words “born in … the United States.” The theory asserts that children of non-citizens aren't subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. If that is so, runs the argument, they aren't citizens.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The intense debates over school openings are missing something crucial: numbers. Without them, it’s essentially impossible to know what to do, or to evaluate what is being proposed. Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the Food and Drug Administration is contemplating a new food safety regulation, or that the Department of Transportation is considering new restrictions on railroads. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is supposed to require it to identify the gains and the losses — the benefits and the costs. Those numbers might not be decisive, but they’re needed. In their absence, the decision whether to proceed, or not to proceed, is essentially a stab in the dark. To be sure, some numbers might be hard to specify. The agencies might not know enough to provide them. But officials have well-established techniques for dealing with that problem. For example, agencies might be asked to disclose the ranges, including the best and worst cases, and their respective likelihoods. It’s true that politics might intervene, and you might not be able to trust the numbers. But when the system is working well, they are checked and rechecked by people who know what they are doing, and aren’t affected by political considerations. The decision whether and how to reopen schools is being made by states and localities, not by Washington, and numbers need to inform those choices. The problem is that for school openings (and much more), we’re mostly hearing abstractions and generalities — expressions of agitation and fear. On the one hand, reasonable people are pointing to the immense strain on parents of having young kids at home and the many problems with online learning. On the other hand, reasonable people (including teachers’ unions) are pointing to the risk of an outbreak and a spike in deaths.

A post on Facebook claims Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., cannot serve as president because of her parents' citizenship...Harris is a citizen of the United States and has been since birth. She was born in Oakland, California, on Oct. 20, 1964, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Her parents were both immigrants — her father from Jamaica and her mother from India. By virtue of her birth in California, Harris is a natural-born U.S. citizen. The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment provides that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." And that's not dependent on their parents' citizenship. "Anyone born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction is a natural born citizen, regardless of parental citizenship," according to the Cornell Legal Information Institute. Parental citizenship is relevant to an individual's citizenship status only if the individual is born outside of the United States...When Harris ran for president, similar claims about her citizenship and eligibility circulated online. At the time, Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, condemned the notion. “I can’t believe people are making this idiotic comment,” Tribe told the Associated Press in 2019. “She is a natural born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run."

President Trump on Thursday encouraged a racist conspiracy theory that is rampant among some of his followers: that Senator Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential nominee born in California, was not eligible for the vice presidency or presidency because her parents were immigrants. That assertion is false. Ms. Harris is eligible to serve. Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters on Thursday, nevertheless pushed forward with the attack, reminiscent of the lie he perpetrated for years that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya...Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a widely discredited op-ed article published in Newsweek by John C. Eastman, a conservative lawyer who has long argued that the United States Constitution does not grant birthright citizenship. Ms. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was born in 1964 in Oakland, Calif., several years after her parents arrived in the United States...In an interview on Thursday, Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, compared Mr. Eastman’s idea to the “flat earth theory” and called it “total B.S.” “I hadn’t wanted to comment on this because it’s such an idiotic theory,” Mr. Tribe said, “There is nothing to it.” Mr. Tribe pointed out that the theory still quickly landed in the hands of a president who has used his pulpit to spread a number of conspiracies against his political enemies, particularly those who do not have white or European backgrounds.

The Trump administration on Thursday rolled back regulations aimed at reducing emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas operations, its latest move to unwind environmental rules ahead of November’s presidential election. During a visit to election swing state Pennsylvania, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler formally rescinded 2016 Obama administration limits on oil and gas industry emissions of methane, a move criticized by environmentalists when initially proposed last August. Wheeler said in Pittsburgh that new rules would save $100 million a year between 2021 and 2030. The rules will “fulfill President (Donald) Trump’s promise to cut burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy industry,” he said. Methane is the main component of natural gas. It is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but does not remain in the atmosphere as long...In addition to the rollbacks, the EPA also set up hurdles for a future administration to regulate methane by requiring the agency to make a finding that methane contributes significantly to air pollution before proposing new requirements. Joe Goffman, former EPA senior counsel and director at Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, said reducing methane from oil and gas is necessary to combat climate change. “The purpose of this rule is simply to strew baseless legal obstacles across that path, ensuring that after Trump and Wheeler are finally gone, their successors will have to struggle to achieve urgently needed methane reductions,” he said.

An article by Randall Kennedy: It is no surprise that universities have become targets of the activism erupting in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. University police forces have been implicated in racist malfeasance. Universities oversee labor forces which reflect the class and racial divisions partitioning society at large. Universities are the site of cultural battles over iconography (Calhoun College at Yale, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Washington and Lee), and the propriety of taking race into account in admissions. At a time when racial reckonings have visited the NFL and Nascar, The New York Times and Vogue, Minneapolis and Mississippi, it was inevitable that they would visit campuses, too. And they have. Recently, chairs of African American studies departments at Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and other Catholic universities and colleges asserted that “systemic racism and white supremacy are problems” at their campuses. “Symbolic statements, marches, token town halls, or other typical measures to pacify our campus communities,” they warned, are insufficient “while grave inequities persist.” A letter to the trustees and president of Dartmouth from professors and staff there called for the dismantling of “structures that implicitly or explicitly work against and devalue Black, Brown, and other people of color at Dartmouth.” Faculty and staff members at the University of Chicago set forth “a set of specific and immediate actions the [university] must take to begin to repair and redress its long history of willingly enabling and directly contributing to structural racism.” If their requirements remain unmet, they said, they will decline to participate in university affairs, urge colleagues at other institutions to boycott the university, and prevent the university from using their accomplishments to launder the “neglect and derision of people of color and scholarship and teaching on race.”

Top U.S. Department of Justice officials recently made the case for updating a decades-old law that dictates the process for making federal regulations, saying the cost and amount of rules has spiraled out of control, but the changes they seek appear to lack the bipartisan support they'd need in Congress. Several DOJ leaders, including Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Solicitor General Noel Francisco, said in a department report published this week that the Administrative Procedure Act should be amended to better control the activities of the "administrative state," which they criticized as having grown in size and effect far beyond what the drafters of the 1946 law could have envisioned. Republicans in recent years have failed in several attempts at legislation that would do some of what's been endorsed by the DOJ leaders, from giving Congress more oversight power to codifying stricter procedures for rulemaking...And while there may be some bipartisan support for changes to the APA at some level, the fact that it has become a political issue may make it more difficult to move legislation through Congress, Harvard Law School professor Matthew Stephenson said. "There are some pieces of the Regulatory Accountability Act and some of these other pieces of legislation that might attract some degree of bipartisan support, but at this point, my read of the politics on this is that as soon as Jeffrey Rosen and Noel Francisco and the president wrap their arms around this, it becomes toxic to Democrats," Stephenson said. He said some Democrats are convinced the APA reform effort isn't really about good governance but rather a "not-so-hidden agenda" of reducing regulation and regulatory costs for businesses. Even so, he said Republicans may be playing a long game by trying to keep the ideas in circulation until the GOP holds sufficient power to push the effort forward.

On May 8, Prager University, a nonprofit conservative media outlet, published a video on Facebook that incorrectly claimed “there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor” in climate change. Within days, Climate Feedback, a nonpartisan network of scientists and a member of Facebook’s global fact-checking partnership, rated the content as false — a designation that was supposed to result in serious consequences. It was PragerU’s second strike for false content that month, which under Facebook’s own policies should have triggered “repeat offender” penalties including the revocation of advertising privileges and the specter of possible deletion. But it didn't. As first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, a Facebook employee intervened on PragerU’s behalf and asked for a reexamination of the judgment, citing “partner sensitivity” and the amount of money the organization had spent on ads. Eventually, while the false labels on PragerU’s posts remained, Facebook disappeared the strikes from its internal record and no one — not the public, the fact-checkers, or Facebook’s own employees — was informed of the decision...Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said that even though Facebook doesn’t want to be in the business of declaring what is true and false, it still makes a lot of choices in how it structures its policies and fact-checking program that leave it “in the driver seat.” “There will be a pretty big reckoning around fact-checking,” she said. “People don’t really understand it either and they see it as a panacea for problems on social media platforms.”

An article by Tomiko Brown-Nagin: As he forced his knee into George Floyd’s neck, Officer Derek Chauvin appeared chillingly indifferent to both the law and the life hanging in the balance, even when Floyd cried out, “I can’t breathe.” And why would he worry? During his 19 years with the Minneapolis Police Department, Chauvin received numerous complaints. Despite these incidents, his career continued. He never suffered the consequences that might have prevented George Floyd’s death. The protests against police brutality triggered by Floyd’s killing are unlike anything we have seen in this country since the civil rights movement. As in the 1960s, demonstrators, and the nation, face daunting barriers to reform. Today, one such impediment is qualified immunity — a doctrine created by the US Supreme Court in 1967 to prevent frivolous litigation against government officials. It provides broad protection from civil lawsuits, including suits brought against police who violate constitutional rights. Law enforcement officers cannot be held liable for civil rights violations — including death — unless the underlying conduct “clearly” disregards the law. But the degree of clarity that courts require to permit suits for civil rights violations to proceed is excessive to the point of absurdity. The doctrine, continually expanded by the court over time, sets far too high a bar for efforts to hold officers accountable for actions that intimidate, injure, and kill. It excuses conduct, however outrageous, merely because no prior court has ruled on the precise behavior in question. The decision just two weeks ago by US District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves, in Jamison v. McClendon, captured it all. Reeves wrote that while the civil rights of the Black plaintiff, Clarence Jamison, had been violated by white Mississippi officer Nick McClendon, “Jamison’s claim cannot proceed.”

An article by Ashley Nunes: Uber and Lyft drivers are employees, not contractors. That’s according to a court ruling issued Tuesday. The ride-hailing giants had argued they shouldn’t be considered “hiring entities”. Ethan Schulman disagreed. Schulman, a judge for San Francisco’s superior court, said “substantial public harm will result” from preserving the status quo which deprives ride-hailing drivers of “the panoply of basic rights to which employees are entitled under California law.”  For the gig economy, it seems the jig is up. The ruling isn’t surprising. Ride-hailing companies have long tried to have it both ways; one moment arguing that drivers aren’t employees and the next, saying drivers should get government-sponsored coronavirus relief handouts typically reserved for full time workers. Last year, Uber argued its drivers weren’t employees because they weren’t ‘core’ to Uber’s business. After the pandemic hit, the company asked President Trump to provide, “support for independent workers”. It’s all about conserving cash of course. Employees are pricier than contractors and fiscal relief for workers (employees or not) makes sense as long as someone else picks up the tab. The court ruling will stunt the profitability aspirations of the ride-hailing companies. Uber chief Dara Khrowsrashahi had expected his company losses to not only taper in the near future but be vanquished altogether. That’s unlikely if Uber has to pony up to cover driver costs. Yet the real issue is that even before yesterday’s ruling, ride-hailing fares were heftier than personal car ownership. And that’s a big problem.

A California court Monday ruled that Uber and Lyft must reclassify drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Employee status comes with many important benefits, like paid sick leave, unemployment insurance and subsidized health insurance. But Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi argued in a New York Times op-ed that it comes at the expense of flexibility, the lifeblood of the gig economy. He called for a new “third way” to classify and provide benefits to workers who fall somewhere between employee and independent contractor. Under existing labor law, workers in America have to be classified as either an employee or an independent contractor. Paul Oyer, an economist at Stanford University, said that binary system goes back to the early 20th century when work looked pretty different. “So the law isn’t perfect,” he said. “There’s a spectrum of possible work relationships. And we want to both protect workers along that spectrum, but also allow some amount of flexibility.” While the pandemic has highlighted the need for better protections for gig workers, most still prefer to be independent, according to one survey, so they can set their own hours. Gig platforms have argued that won’t be possible if workers are employees. “That is just untrue,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard University. “You can be an employee and have an entirely flexible work arrangement.” Many workers already do, especially now.

Law firm partners are taking a larger share of available work during the pandemic, driven by client demand and anxiety about billable hours, and associates are paying the price. A recent peer monitor index by Reuters highlighted the downturn in overall work for law firms in Q2 of 2020 (-5.9%), while the average billed rate increased (+5.2%), showing how higher-rate partners are taking work formerly done by associates and paralegals. Experts agree that, while this has happened before, the industrywide trend has consequences both short- and long-term...Some of that shift is, in fact, due to partners wanting to hold onto work, and in a zero sum game of billable hours that has consequences for those missing out on said work.  “In the short term, it is anxiety-producing for associates as their hours are reduced,” Scott Westfahl, director of Harvard Law School’s executive education program, said. “And most associates are smart enough to notice.” Westfahl said that, longer term, there is what he called “associate lag,” where they are not given sufficiently challenging work in order to develop and grow professionally, which means that, although their total years in the profession indicate one thing, their actual experience level is that of someone more junior. “One of two things will happen: Either they get stuck as their rates rise each year and they don’t have the experience to handle it and their performance rating goes down, or they get bored out of their minds,” he said. The end result is lack of knowledge for certain classes of associates and an increase in the associate’s desire to seek employment elsewhere once economic conditions are ripe for a move to another firm.

It was late afternoon on February 2, the eve of the Iowa caucuses. We were jammed into a high-school gymnasium in Des Moines, the state capital, for Joe Biden’s closing rally. No one thought he would win the primary season’s talismanic opening contest the following day. Nor was he expected to come close to beating Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermonter, in New Hampshire the next week. Though he was still ahead in the national polls, the 77-year-old former vice-president was treated as yesterday’s news...Should he make it to the White House, Biden would have completed the longest marathon in US political history. No other serious figure has tried this long to make it over the finishing line in recent history. A majority of Americans were not born when Biden first entered national politics. At 30, he was the fifth youngest senator in the country’s history after he won office in 1972. Biden’s 48-year political career is older than John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when they were elected...In another cycle, Biden’s lachrymosity might have been an albatross. During coronavirus, his emotional antennae look like a virtue. More than 165,000 Americans have now died in the pandemic. That toll is likely to be approaching a quarter of a million by early November. Trump’s inability to express condolences for America’s grieving families could not be further apart from Biden’s. In 2016, anger was the dominant political emotion. In 2020, it feels more like sadness. “If Trump were matter, then Biden is anti-matter — their characters are opposites,” says Laurence Tribe, a ­Harvard law professor who has been advising Biden on ­constitutional matters since the mid-1980s.

Chicago teachers piled into hundreds of cars on the first Monday of August and rolled their way to City Hall. No strangers to large demonstrations, the teachers spent hours protesting Chicago Public Schools' plan to mix in-school and at-home learning this fall to reduce crowding in buildings amid the coronavirus pandemic. Staff didn't feel safe teaching in person, the educators said, especially given rising rates of positive COVID-19 cases in Illinois. The demonstration had hallmarks of the massive strike the Chicago Teachers Union waged 10 months prior during a contract dispute with the city. As union members murmured about potentially striking again for their safety, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced Chicago's near 400,000 students would start the year online-only on Sept. 8. That means almost all of America's biggest districts will start the school year with online learning — a move largely driven by local teachers unions...How long they can hold the line on at-home learning is unclear. Even if coronavirus cases remain high, parents' tolerance for managing their children's education while trying to work from home may wane again. Will unions risk losing public support if they continue to advocate for virtual education? How will they ensure the experience is more productive than in spring — especially since many unions have mere weeks to negotiate work rules related to online learning? "If unions message this properly, it will carry the concern to parents: 'There’s no plan. There are no resources. Nobody is helping us out,'" said Linda Kaboolian, a fellow at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program. "If they don’t position it properly, it will look selfish."

Last October, a neo-Nazi livestreamed his attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany. The video of the shooting, which killed two people, stayed on Twitch for more than an hour before it was removed. That’s long enough for a recording to go viral—but it never did. While users downloaded it and passed it around less moderated platforms, such as Telegram, the recording was stopped in its tracks on the major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. The reason, Vice reported, is that Twitch was quick to share digital fingerprints, or hashes, of the video and its copies with these platforms and others. All Twitch had to do was upload the hashes to the database of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or, as it’s been called, “the most underrated project in the future of free speech.” The GIFCT has gone largely unnoticed by the public since it was established in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube...The GIFCT’s structure typifies what Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School and affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, has termed content cartels, or “arrangements between platforms to work together to remove content or actors from their services without adequate oversight.” Many of the problems with the GIFCT’s arrangement lie in its opacity. None of the content decisions are transparent, and researchers don’t have access to the hash database. As Keller recently laid out, the GIFCT sets the rules for “violent extremist” speech in private, so it defines what is and isn’t terrorist content without accountability. That’s a serious problem, in part because content moderation mistakes and biases are inevitable. The GIFCT may very well be blocking satire, reporting on terrorism, and documentation of human rights abuses.

If Joe Biden wins the presidency, his Justice Department will face a decision with huge legal and political implications: whether to investigate and prosecute President Trump. So far, the candidate is approaching that question very carefully...Based on those remarks, Biden seems to be on the way to adopting the position of former President Barack Obama. Back in 2009, the newly elected Obama said he didn't want to get hung up on prosecuting wrongdoers. He was referring to people who had engaged in torture and warrantless wiretapping during the previous administration. Instead, Obama told ABC News at the time, his instinct was to make sure those practices never happened again. "I don't believe that anybody is above the law," he said, "On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards." ..."It's not at all clear that looking forward and not looking backward is an available option," Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith said. Goldsmith said most people aren't talking about how a Biden Justice Department might handle Trump but said he thinks they should be...But the Justice Department twice has opined that prosecutors can't seek an indictment against a sitting president. That's left open the question about whether he might face prosecution once he leaves office. It's never happened before, and it's a political time bomb. Bringing a criminal case against a former president could widen the divide in the country. "Whether that's good for the country is a very hard question that's going to be very messy," Goldsmith said. "Whether it's good for the Biden administration, whether it wants to be, you know, absorbed in being the first administration to ever prosecute a prior president — those are very hard questions."

By the end of April, Olivier Griss knew he had a problem. Coke Farm, the San Juan Bautista, Calif. business his stepfather started in 1981 where Griss now works as sales manager, was awash in a leafy salad ingredient: chicory. Specifically, treviso and castelfranco varieties that end up on plates in high-end restaurants. But high-end restaurants were largely closed, due to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the world...The coronavirus pandemic has cut greenhouse gases in some key ways, as people are flying and driving less. But food waste accounts for one reason why the drops likely won’t fall as low as hoped during the pandemic. And as the virus ebbs and flows, it will likely lead to more waste...If these organizations can tap into the shock engendered by images of scuttled harvests and dairy products during the early days of the pandemic, they could drive lasting transformation in food waste and climate change... “Certainly, it has made some things that were invisible more visible,” says Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of Harvard University’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, speaking about the pandemic. Among them: the inflexibility of the food chain, the large numbers of Americans on the edge of hunger, the risky roles of workers in food processing, the incentives set up to deliver food in set ways, the damage food waste does to the environment. “My hope is that will lead to changes in how we use our natural resources.” ...Some key steps would help solve the problems of excess food going to waste on farms in crisis rather than finding its way to hungry people. Leib of Harvard advocates for tailoring tax incentives for donated food so it is easier for farmers to claim deductions. She would also like to see a tax benefit, either for farmers or transportation companies, so they can get the food where needed. “It’s not free to take food that is not going to be sold,” she says. “Someone needs to come get it.” She is talking with members of Congress to get such provisions written into law.

An article by Noah Feldman: Joe Biden has fulfilled his promise to choose a woman as his running mate. Let’s turn our attention to another promise he made: to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court. A number of women with different kinds of legal experience have been suggested by NGOs and journalists. But to legal insiders, Biden’s options narrow down very quickly to two names: Justice Leondra Kruger of the California Supreme Court, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. Both are extremely accomplished, with gold-plated resumes that are reminiscent of the justices picked by President Barack Obama, and for that matter by President Donald Trump. Both are also super-smart and well-liked. And realistically, they are the only two Black women who are young enough to serve for the long haul and have the relevant judicial experience to make their confirmation straightforward, even boring — which is just what a nominating president wants. To be clear, there are many more than two Black women qualified to sit on the court. They include legal activists, law professors, judges and government officials with experience at all levels. And in prior decades, it wasn’t unheard of for justices to come from the Senate, the cabinet, or even private corporate law firms. They didn’t all have fancy educational backgrounds, either. But that’s changed in recent years, partly as a product of bruising confirmation battles and partly as an effect of elite consensus on what a nominee’s record should look like. Today’s nominees tend to have attended an Ivy League law school; clerked for a Supreme Court justice themselves; and served as a high-level judge by a relatively young age. That’s one reason the possible Biden nominees are, in reality, so few. There are just not that many Black women who both fit that incredibly narrow mold. With a Democratic Senate — likely the only way Biden could get any nominee confirmed — Biden could try to change the norms and push through someone with a different resume. Yet that sort of risk-taking seems unlikely from Biden, who has just made his VP pick according to the most conventional of conventional wisdom.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Nadine Strossen, a former president of the ACLU and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship, explains what the left needs to know about free speech.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses workplace harassment, racial discrimination, and the First Amendment.

A government watchdog said in a report out Tuesday that the Labor Department “significantly broadened” an exemption allowing millions of health-care workers to be denied paid sick leave as part of the law Congress passed in March to help workers during the coronavirus pandemic. Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in March to ensure workers at small- and medium-size companies were able to take paid leave if they or a family member became sick with the coronavirus. The law exempts health-care providers as well as companies with more than 500 employees. But an Office of the Inspector General report noted that a move by the Labor Department to more broadly expand how they categorize health-care providers ended up leaving far more workers without a guarantee of paid sick leave than the agency’s estimate of 9 million...Actions taken to enforce the sick-leave provisions in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act have skewed even further away from investigations: 85 percent have been resolved through conciliations. The agency’s Wage and Hour Division responded to the OIG’s findings, noting that they were “developing and sharing models for conducting virtual investigations,” and that they also pledged to maintain a backlog of delayed on-site investigations to be tackled when it was safer to conduct those reviews. But critics suggest the pandemic alone is not a sufficient excuse for the drop-off in investigations, some aspects of which could be done remotely. “These numbers just look so different than the numbers that I’m used to seeing in terms of conciliations versus investigations,” said Sharon Block, a senior Obama administration labor department official. “It really does jump out. That 85 percent is just a really big number.”