Media Mentions

... Crump is an attorney of our times, as much a creature of the green room as the courtroom. In a nation lousy with lawyers, he has become the go-to advocate for families who have lost relatives to police brutality, as though his is the only name on the list. ... Police brutality in America, Crump argues, dates its origins to colonial slave patrols in the early 18th century. But “videos have changed everything. They’ve shifted believability,” says Kenneth Mack of Harvard Law School. Generating publicity in advance of trial has a history among civil rights attorneys, including Marshall, Mack says. “Crump’s engaged in multimedia advocacy,” he says. “Putting pressure on state authorities to investigate cases that otherwise would not be investigated.”

Today, the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic (HLAC) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights published a first-of-its-kind legal resource guide for transgender youth in the United States. The newly-released Trans Youth Handbook serves as a comprehensive legal resource guide that covers the rights of trans youth across a wide spectrum of situations, including identity documents, school, health care, non-affirming care environments, and work. ...“Study after study shows that trans youth thrive when they are respected for who they are and affirmed in their gender identities,” said Alexander Chen, Esq., Founding Director of the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic. “I am delighted that this important resource will be available to trans youth and their families who are seeking to understand their legal rights.”

At Harvard Law School, Professor Sabrineh Ardalan ’02 broke down the decision, saying that the court found the administration hadn’t adequately explained why DACA was unlawful.

David Harris and Ken Mack and other members of the Harvard community reflect on the significance of Juneteenth and what the holiday means to them.

... Members of the community, including students and alumni who are protected under DACA praised the Court’s ruling, among them Mitchell Santos Toledo, J.D. ’20, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who arrived in Cambridge not long after President Donald Trump announced his plans in 2017 to cancel the program, which had been instituted by President Barack Obama in 2012. “It was rough. You’re talking about moving across the country, starting this huge academic journey at a School at Harvard, and then having the only semblance of protection that you’ve known for the past five, six years sort of just yanked from underneath you,” said Toledo, whose name was listed in the documents submitted to the court in support of DACA. ... At Harvard Law School, Professor Sabrineh Ardalan broke down the decision, saying that the court found the administration hadn’t adequately explained why DACA was unlawful. “The court says that if the administration wanted to end DACA, it would have had to engage in a much more rigorous analysis, including of the reliance interests at stake, and it didn’t provide a reasoned explanation for its decision. And so, its decision to end the program was arbitrary and capricious because it didn’t go through those steps,” said Ardalan, who directs the Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Harvard Law School, which helps hundreds of people with undocumented status through a range of programs.

In a Q&A, Radcliffe Dean and Harvard Law Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin reflects on the history and relevance of June 19, 1865:  "The antecedent historical event is the Emancipation Proclamation, which [President Abraham] Lincoln had signed in 1863, as the nation entered the third year of a civil war, declaring that persons held as slaves within the rebellious states were henceforth free. ...It is significant, in my view, for making a point that many civil rights scholars and scholars of social change and legal change often have made—and that is that freedom is a constant struggle. There’s no one moment in time that that would stand for the proposition that people are in fact free. It takes action over time. And every generation struggles to achieve freedom anew. But as they were in Texas, the vestiges of bondage and segregation remain intact.

In a major setback for President Trump, the US Supreme Court blocked the administration’s attempt to end a federal program that protects 700,000 immigrants nationwide and more than 5,600 in Massachusetts from being deported. ...“Given the tough questions asked at oral argument, it wasn’t at all clear which way the court would come out,” said Sabrineh Ardalan, director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, which provides legal help to immigrants. “This is such a critically important victory and recognition that the Trump administration’s efforts to end DACA were unlawful.”

An op-ed by Lecturer on Law Alex Chen ’15: Since the start of the modern LGBT movement in the 1960s, some members of the community have questioned the degree of common interest between lesbian, gay, and bisexual people on the one hand and transgender people on the other. Notwithstanding similar experiences of discrimination and a shared history of activism, members of both communities have sometimes viewed one another with mutual suspicion. LGB people, protective of hard-won legal, political, and societal victories, have worried that association with an even more unfamiliar and stigmatized minority group would imperil those advances. Trans people, weary of advocates prioritizing gay rights over trans rights, have worried that LGB people might achieve greater equality and then abandon the field without extending a hand to transgender people. But the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Monday in Bostock v. Clayton County provides the strongest possible counterargument that when LGBT people band together to press for rights for the entire community, they can achieve momentous victories that would not have been possible working on their own.

In yet another blow to the right’s extreme and mean-spirited agenda, the Supreme Court on Thursday held that President Trump had not lawfully pulled the plug on President Barack Obama’s executive order instituting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me, “This was an important victory not just for the Dreamers, who now become a campaign issue in light of the limbo in which their status was left by the Court’s 5-4 decision, but for the rule of law.” He explained, “The majority’s refusal to accept the administration’s post-hoc rationalization for DACA’s rescission — a rationalization that, as the Chief Justice’s opinion made clear, failed to explain, let alone justify, invalidating the forbearance part of the DACA policy and addressed only the benefits part — was an important vindication for the principle that agency decisions that are arbitrary and capricious when issued cannot be rescued by some after-the-fact suggestions of alternative grounds on which the decisions might have been reached.”

... To understand the significance of Juneteenth, a blending of the words June and 19th, we asked some members of the Harvard community what the holiday means to them. ...David Harris, Ph.D.’92, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School: "Juneteenth is a defining day. However empty the promise of freedom often appears to have been, Juneteenth has remained a day uniquely celebrated by the descendants of the formerly enslaved." ...Kenneth Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; affiliate professor of history at Harvard University: .".. We commemorate Abraham Lincoln in various ways, but we don’t have a national commemoration of the triumph over slavery, which has to be one of the most important moments in American history. One should consider Juneteenth in that context. The best case to be made for Juneteenth would be as a commemoration of both the legacy of slavery and the success of the movement to abolish formal slavery in the United States."

As the nation deals with civil unrest and the global pandemic, the Trump administration quietly continues to roll back environmental regulations. Trump came into office promising to rid the nation of what he called unnecessary and burdensome rules on the fossil fuel industry and others. Environmental regulation trackers like those run by Harvard and Columbia Law Schools find that he’s made good on that promise, so far dismantling 100 major climate and environmental policies. The Trump administration has weakened efforts to reduce climate-changing carbon emissions from power plants, rolled back mileage standards on cars and trucks, reduced Clean Water Act protections, and shrunk the size of two national monuments by millions of acres. We've examined many of these moves on this podcast since Trump took office in January 2017. Today, Trump on Earth’s Julie Grant talks with Hana Vizcarra staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program, who helps run its environmental rollback tracker to get an idea of the scope of this legacy.

While the U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a bill to delist Chinese companies trading on American bourses, the legalization must clear the House of Representatives before signed into law by President Donald Trump. If the bill does indeed become law, the real loser here is the U.S. stock exchanges and investment banks. According to a Bloomberg report today, the NYSE and Nasdaq would lose millions of dollars in fees that the Chinese firms pay to be listed on their bourses. On the other hand, the new law, proponents argue, would help protect American investors from widespread fraud and safeguard national security. The Luckin Coffee Inc. (Nasdaq: LK) scandal, in which the company allegedly fabricated $314 million in sales and hurt investors, will likely be seen as the straw that broke the regulators' back...Assuming the bill does pass, China must allow PCAOB inspections to avoid delistings. However, Jesse Fried, a professor of law at the Harvard Law School, told CapitalWatch he is skeptical that China will allow them to do so. "So if the law is passed, I expect to see a migration of Chinese firms from our [U.S.] exchanges," Fried told CapitalWatch on Tuesday. He added, "They will either be taken private, probably with the objective of relisting in Hong Kong or elsewhere after a year or two, or they will transition to trading on another exchange."

After the near murder of a 75-year-old man on a sidewalk in Buffalo, New York, the city’s police union, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, responded with organized demonstrations of support for the officers who shoved the elderly man to the ground. After the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis Police Officers Federation was defiant, with President Bob Kroll, who had recently defended his role in three police shootings, attacking Floyd as a criminal, and lashing out at local politicians for not allowing the police to be rougher on protesters. The Sergeants Benevolent Association in New York City, which has attracted reprobation for doxxing NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter Chiara, has also moved to a furious war footing. The Louisville Metro Police Union in Kentucky rallied around the killers of Breonna Taylor, as the officers involved haven’t been fired, let alone charged...Ben Sachs, a labor and industry professor at Harvard Law who recently launched a project to reform police union collective bargaining to end police abuses, understands the concerns of union leaders and others that a push to reform police union collective bargaining could endanger a broader subset of workers. “It is absolutely critical that any reforms remain tightly focused on the actual problem here, which is police violence. Any changes to police collective bargaining law should apply only to collective bargaining practices that directly implicate police violence. We can’t allow changes to police collective bargaining to become a stalking horse for those with a political agenda to undermine other public sector unions,” Sachs said. “At the same time, this is an immediate and enormous crisis. That has to be dealt with in a robust way. If that means that being open to some changes to police collective bargaining laws, it’s incumbent on us to be open to that.”

In March, as colleges and universities shuttered campuses under a nationwide lockdown, Strayer University updated its website with a simple message: “Great things can happen at home.” Capella University, owned by the same company as Strayer, has run ads promoting its flexibility in “uncertain times” and promising would-be transfer students that they can earn a bachelor’s degree in as little as a year. Online for-profit colleges like these have seen an opportunity to increase enrollment during the coronavirus pandemic. Their flexible programs may be newly attractive to the many workers who have lost their jobs, to college students whose campuses are closed, and to those now seeking to change careers. The colleges’ parent companies often have substantial cash reserves that they can pump into tuition discounts and marketing at a time when public universities and nonprofit colleges are seeing their budgets disintegrate...Eileen Connor, the legal director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said she was worried by the prospect of a resurgence for online, for-profit schools. “In times of economic downturn, that’s when the for-profit colleges start to thrive,” she said. Online colleges “have a running start, especially now, when there’s an economic downturn keeping people in their homes,” she added. “That is a perfect storm for the thing that they’re trying to do.” These schools often attract low-income, nontraditional college students who tend to have lower completion rates than those who enroll straight from high school and attend full time. Many have family pressures that interfere with study.

A landmark Supreme Court decision this week that affirmed protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees in the workplace could provide powerful ammunition for climate litigators. In a 6-3 opinion Monday, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects "all persons" from discrimination based on sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity. Employees, the court found, can therefore not be fired from their jobs simply for being gay or transgender. The case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., could serve as key precedent for lawyers pushing for more stringent regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act...Gorsuch's decision in Bostock follows a similar logic path to the opinion in the watershed climate case Massachusetts v. EPA, said Joe Goffman, executive director of Harvard University's environmental law program. In the 2004 case, the Supreme Court acknowledged that Congress crafted the Clean Air Act with "unknown unknowns" in mind and said that the plain text of the statute left room for EPA to make decisions, such as whether to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as air pollutants, based on new scientific understanding. Something similar happened in Gorsuch's reading of the Civil Rights Act, said Goffman, a former EPA official. "The language of the statute was crafted in a way so that it could accommodate situations that were not necessarily anticipated by Congress at the time the language was crafted, but which the statue could still cover as, in this case, society's understanding of the issue evolved," Goffman said.

Victor Madrigal-Borloz, UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, called the ruling a “very significant step towards breaking the cycle of discrimination that often condemns lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender-diverse persons to social exclusion, and ultimately, to poverty." The ruling clarifies that Title VII of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which bans discrimination based on sex – is applicable to sexual orientation and gender identity...In most UN Member States, national laws do not provide adequate protection from employment-related discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, Mr. Madrigal-Borloz said. In the absence of such laws, employers may fire or refuse to hire or promote people, simply because they are – or thought to be – gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans or gender-diverse... “The judgement will have an extremely positive impact in addressing stigma, promoting sociocultural and economic inclusion, and furthering legal recognition of gender identity – all of which have been identified by my mandate as fundamental to address the root causes of violence and discrimination,” Madrigal-Borloz said. The case also illustrates the vital role that victims can play in furthering justice. “It is sad to note that two of the victims in these cases did not live to see the outcome of their struggle, but uplifting to know that their resolve, their resilience and their determination will now benefit millions of LGBT persons,” he added. Victor Madrigal-Borloz (Costa Rica) assumed the role of UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity on 1 January 2018, for a three-year term. He is a senior visiting researcher at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Programme.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said she would agree to become Joe Biden’s running mate if he asks her to join him on the Democratic ticket for November’s election. Warren, who turns 71 on Monday, may well end up there, taking on President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, as she has emerged as a leader on Biden’s short list. In the buildup to Biden’s choice, expected by early August, and during the crises stemming from the coronavirus and racial injustice, Warren has been a leading voice for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She recently found a middle ground with some of her Republican colleagues in agreeing that Confederate names and statues on military bases should be taken down..Progressives also think Warren could push Biden more to the left on a wide range of issues. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, who is urging Warren’s selection on the ticket, told CNBC that while he believes Biden’s instincts are progressive, the Massachusetts lawmaker could counsel him on some liberal policies. “While [Biden] has deep convictions he’s also a good and serious listener, so there’s every reason to think that he’d be open to persuasion by Warren on any of a number of economic issues — especially those affecting the lives of ordinary consumers and creditors, students and others, who have been squeezed mercilessly by the structure of our tax and bankruptcy laws and the maldistribution of wealth and the political power it currently wields throughout the system,” Tribe said in an email.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Barry Ritholtz, founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Too Much Uncertainty? It’s Always Been Like This." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Trump, Barr Violated Free Speech by Clearing Park." Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Maybe Sheryl Sandberg Should Be Leaning Out." Tara Lachapelle, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Kylie Jenner Has Something Else to Pout About." Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "What Will Republicans Look Like After Trump."

An article by Cass Sunstein: Does the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, forbidding employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, also spell the end to affirmative action? That may sound like a crazy question. But Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion, emphasizing the need to follow the “original public meaning” of legal texts, gives a real boost to opponents of affirmative action. In fact, a passage in that opinion seems as if it was explicitly meant to provide that boost. Here’s the background. The key provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it: "unlawful . . . for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." That provision was the governing text in Bostock. It is also the foundation for legal challenges to racial preferences in employment, even if they take the form of voluntary affirmative-action programs. According to those who challenge racial preferences, discrimination is discrimination — period.

An article by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s administration is suing former national security adviser John Bolton in a last-ditch effort to block publication of his forthcoming memoir, which contains damaging allegations about Trump’s attempts to get China’s President Xi to help him win re-election. The Trump administration apparently understands that directly asking the court to bar publication would fail. So instead, government lawyers have invented a series of extraordinarily weak legal claims based on the nondisclosure agreement that all national security officials must sign. The case should be dismissed posthaste by the U.S. District Court. It is a frivolous lawsuit, in lawyer’s jargon. Worse, it attempts an end-run around clearly established First Amendment law. If I were Bolton’s lawyer, I would seek not merely dismissal but sanctions against the government and legal fees. To be clear, I have no great sympathy for Bolton personally. He should have testified before the House of Representatives during last year’s impeachment inquiry, when what he has to say would have mattered. As you may recall, Bolton engaged in an elaborate fan dance at that time. When the House seemed poised to call him, he said he would not testify. He changed his mind at just the moment when the impeachment trial shifted to the Senate, where Republicans were in control — and never going to call him. Somewhere along the way, Bolton announced that he intended to write a book. It wasn’t a good look. Nevertheless, law is law, and free speech is free speech. There are important principles at stake here. As is often the case, when the government comes after a citizen’s free speech, the citizen isn’t a model one.

Harvard faculty members in law and gender issues declared Monday’s Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers a landmark for LGBT rights... “It’s based in textual reasoning and rather persuasive in those terms,” said Gerald Neuman, co-director of the Human Rights Program at HLS. “It is written in a way that may be more persuasive to members of the public. The people who are in favor of this kind of discrimination, who are vehemently opposed to this interpretation — I don’t think it will be persuasive to them. But people who might say, ‘I’m not in favor of this kind of discrimination, but I don’t think that the law itself addresses it’ … could be persuaded.” ... In a series of tweets, HLS Professor Laurence Tribe also praised Gorsuch’s work. “Today’s 6-3 triumph for the rights of homosexual and transgender people is a victory for justice and for reading laws as they were written rather than as some assumed or intended them to operate,” he wrote. “Justice Gorsuch conducted a master class in interpreting legal texts when he patiently explained why the unexpressed intentions of a law’s authors or the conversational conventions of its users cannot be permitted to trump its unambiguous meaning…Of course progressives don’t always welcome textual analyses and might worry that this Gorsuch majority will complicate their lives in other contexts. To be sure, this remains a very conservative Court. But I say: Be glad for just outcomes when they come your way.”