Media Mentions

“What’s the real value of my work?” It’s a question many of us wonder privately when negotiating salaries. Now, that information is becoming more public. Workers across a number of industries are creating their own widely shared salary databases, with employees anonymously entering their earnings for all to see. In 2019, there were organized efforts to capture industry-wide salary information for arts and museum workers, media workers, baristas in different cities, workers at Jewish nonprofits, academics, design interns, workers in publishing, staff at creative agencies, and paralegals, just to name a few. ...“People who are employees, treated as employees, have been able to assert their right as employees. In circulating this spreadsheet, they are acting concertedly, they are joining with their co-workers to say we think pay transparency is important,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “They cannot be fired for that. The law says they have a right to act concertedly.”

A Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP recruitment event Wednesday was interrupted by a group of Harvard Law students, who sang, chanted and threatened the global firm with losing future recruits if it continues to represent ExxonMobil Corp. ... The group said the move represents a "new front" in the campaign by young people against the fossil fuel industry. One of the protest's organizers, first-year Harvard law student and former Rhode Island state Rep. Aaron Regunberg called it "a do-or-die moment in human history." "We have just a few years left to rein in corporate polluters and address the climate crisis," Regunberg said. "This firm's enabling of corporations like Exxon to continue blocking climate action and evading accountability for their malfeasance is, simply put, not compatible with a livable future."

As the 2020 race heats up, the Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a dispute involving the complex U.S. presidential election system focusing on whether Electoral College electors are free to break their pledges to back the candidate who wins their state's popular vote, an act that could upend an election. ..."We are glad the Supreme Court has recognized the paramount importance of clearly determining the rules of the road for presidential electors for the upcoming election and all future elections," said Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer for the faithless electors sanctioned in Washington and Colorado.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging state attempts to penalize Electoral College delegates who fail to vote for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support. ..."This court should resolve this conflict now, before it arises within the context of a contested election," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who is the attorney for the Washington state electors, said. "As the demographics of the United States indicate that contests will become even closer, there is a significant probability that such swings could force this court to resolve the question of electoral freedom within the context of an ongoing contest."

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe looks at Alan Dershowitz’s likely defense of Trump ahead of the Senate impeachment trial: “Alan is completely wacko on this.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The president’s lawyers have made the sweeping assertion that the articles of impeachment against President Trump must be dismissed because they fail to allege that he committed a crime — and are, therefore, as they said in a filing with the Senate, “constitutionally invalid on their face.” Another of his lawyers, my former Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz, claiming to represent the Constitution rather than the president as such, makes the backup argument that the articles must be dismissed because neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress can count as impeachable offenses. Both of these arguments are baseless. Senators weighing the articles of impeachment shouldn’t think that they offer an excuse for not performing their constitutional duty.

QUESTION: Senators who have already said how they are going to vote, and have expressed a bias, are they automatically guilty of perjury when they take their 'impartiality' oath? ANSWER: No, thanks to special protections the Founding Fathers gave to Congress. ... Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University, referred our researchers to an Opinion piece he penned in The Washington Post. "To swear a false oath is perjury — the crime President Bill Clinton was charged with in his impeachment," Lessig wrote in the Washington Post. "Yet given the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, a senator likely could not be charged with perjury for swearing falsely on the Senate floor. Instead, it is the Senate itself that must police members’ oaths — as it has in the past."

California was the first state to challenge tech companies such as Uber and Lyft with bold laws meant to reshape the gig economy by converting workers into employees. And now a handful of other states are following its lead. ...“It’s a moment in our politics, where people are understanding, especially in progressive states, these tensions between big corporations and corporate money and ordinary people,” Terri Gerstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School. “These work issues and issues of economic inequality have come to such a fever pitch.”

The Supreme Court on Friday said it will consider whether states may punish or replace “faithless” presidential electors who refuse to support the winner of their state’s popular vote, or whether the Constitution forbids dictating how such officials cast their ballots. ...Challengers say the Constitution leaves up to states the appointment of electors, but that is all. “There is no mechanism for state officials to monitor, control, or dictate electoral votes,” said a brief filed by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and his group Equal Citizens. “Instead, the right to vote in the Constitution and federal law is personal to the electors, and it is supervised by the electors themselves.”

We speak with Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who said he will present oral arguments during President Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate. Plus, WBUR Legal Analyst, retired federal judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School Nancy Gertner provides analysis.

Ten years after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, one of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, admitted that “sometimes you lose sleep at night” while working as a defense attorney. ...After months of fiercely defending the president on Fox News, Dershowitz said he will argue constitutional issues on the Senate floor. Dershowitz said his goal is to “defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent” by removing the president from office. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who supports Trump’s impeachment, said Dershowitz is an “aggressive, persistent, fairly knowledgeable, quite imaginative and generally creative” lawyer who will bring “an unrealistic and unwarranted degree of self-certitude” to the trial. “He tends to be self-righteous in a way that convinces him, but not those whom he needs to persuade, that everyone but him is a hypocrite,” Tribe said.

Caitlin McCoy, the Climate, Clean Air, & Energy Fellow for Harvard Law School's Environmental & Energy Law Program was on KPFA’s The Talkies with Kris Welch [at 31:00]. They discussed HLS's Regulatory Rollback Tracker and the environmental rollbacks to watch right now as we head into the 2020 elections.

Alan Dershowitz will be presenting oral arguments before the U.S. Senate at the impeachment trial for President Donald Trump. In a brief cell phone conversation Friday morning, Dershowitz said, “I can confirm that I’ll be presenting oral arguments.” Then he cut the conversation short and referred to his statement on Twitter. ...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a frequent Island visitor, also weighed in. “My former colleague Alan Dershowitz knows a lot about criminal law but not much about constitutional law. He’s flashy but not all that substantive. But flashiness isn’t exactly lacking on Team Trump,” Tribe wrote in an email to The Times. “So adding Dershowitz to the defense  team suggests that Trump intends to push the argument that impeachable offenses have to be statutory crimes like blackmail or robbery, but that’s definitely wrong and reflects serious ignorance about how the US Constitution works. For constitutional expertise and legal acumen, I’d pit my own former student Adam Schiff against Alan Dershowitz any day.”

The man who taught Constitutional Law to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts expects him to vote to allow witnesses if he needs to cast a tie-breaking vote while presiding over President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. Prof. Laurence Tribe was interviewed by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday. ...“Well, he was very smart,” Tribe replied. “He’s very thoughtful, he cares about the institution.” Tribe, who has reportedly advised House Democrats on impeachment, then offered a major prediction. “If he is asked to issue a subpoena, I think he will use his power to do it,” Tribe said.

Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that after hearing the new evidence revealed by Lev Parnas, the Senate trial must have witnesses because senators are not “free to take a solemn oath to do impartial justice and then shut their eyes, shut their ears, refuse to listen to obviously relevant facts.”

Republicans have often said in the course of the impeachment process that President Trump has never been accused of breaking any laws. Beside the fact that Framers did not require a violation of statute for the grounds of impeachment, this is wrong. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The GAO finding that President Trump’s decision to withhold from Ukraine the military aid appropriated by Congress was illegal under the Impoundment Control Act gives the lie to the claim that the Articles of Impeachment charge no illegal act.” As Tribe points out, “It was an irrelevant claim to boot, because a ‘high Crime and Misdemeanor’ needn’t be conduct that is illegal under any federal statute.”

ears ago, students chatting during the precious breaks in on-campus interviewing cattle calls would ponder who among them would really be interviewing with Chadbourne & Parke. The now-deceased firm — sucked up into the Norton Rose Fulbright megalith — was on everyone’s radar as one of the firms representing big tobacco against allegations that the company had willfully deceived the public about health risks for decades. Everyone may deserve an attorney, but not everyone deserves you as an attorney, and for law students at elite schools back then, future lawyers that every law firm would love to have, this was an opportunity to exert some social pressure on a firm tying its bottom line to a public health crisis of the client’s own making. A couple of decades down the road, law students are taking a page from the past and upping the ante. Last night, law students at HLS staged a protest at a Paul Weiss recruiting event demanding the firm drop Exxon as a client, arguing that Paul Weiss attorneys have facilitated Exxon’s efforts to undermine climate change action.

Harvard law students have disrupted a recruiting event for Paul Weiss, the law firm representing ExxonMobil in climate lawsuits, in an escalation the protesters hope will open a new front in climate activism in the legal world. The oil giant is facing a series of lawsuits in the US related to claims that it knew petroleum products were heating the planet and sought to persuade the public otherwise. The students say Paul Weiss has cultivated a reputation as a liberal corporate law firm, despite representing oil companies, tobacco and big banks. Ted Wells Jr, a partner at the New York firm, is a prominent Democratic donor.

FERC’s December order to exclude wind, solar and nuclear power from part of its largest electricity market is drawing support from several largely fossil fuel power producers that argue the decision won’t hobble the growth of renewable energy even as it boosts coal and gas plants. FERC last month voted to set a price floor that will effectively exclude renewable and nuclear sources that receive state support from the PJM capacity market. Environmentalists lambasted the order as an attack on clean energy and a bailout for fossil fuels, but its supporters say the effects on wind and solar — which were only about 1 percent of the capacity cleared in PJM’s last auction — will be minimal...Regardless of whether FERC grants a rehearing, renewable energy companies and environmentalists are likely to challenge the order in court, arguing it violates state jurisdiction over power plant siting and contending that FERC acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner because it did not consider the potential costs to consumers when crafting the order. “There are lots of opportunities for 'arbitrary and capricious' challenges,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative, including FERC’s broad definition of which subsidies will qualify for the price floor, and why FERC did not include an option for individual plants to opt out of the capacity market. “Rehearing request deadline is next Tuesday. We’ll have a better picture of the legal arguments then.”

It was 1970. Congress was wrestling with whether to give the right-of-way necessary to build a huge, 800-mile oil pipeline across Alaska, when a district judge blocked the project, using a brand new law requiring federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of projects...Exactly 50 years later, that law – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – is under attack. The Trump administration last week announced proposed reforms to the act that would significantly reduce its scope. It’s the latest move in an unprecedented effort to roll back not only recent Obama-era environmental regulations but also some of the bedrock laws that have shaped federal environment policy since the 1970s...Whittling away the government’s regulatory structures has always been part of Mr. Trump’s agenda, but his dismantling of the EPA is unique, says Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks such changes. Changing NEPA is the latest sign that the administration wants to undermine the statutory foundations of the EPA. “They’re trying to take away the very things that the agency relies upon to do its job and to really severely damage its legal authority to function,” she says. “With other agencies, it’s similar, like, yes, we’re relaxing some of these tax rates, but it’s not like we’re trying to keep the IRS from doing audits.”

The House voted 231-180 to overturn new regulations introduced by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that critics argue limit student loan forgiveness when a college closes due to fraud. The Obama-era rules, known as borrower defense to repayment, allow students to have their federal student loans forgiven if a school employed illegal or deceptive practices to encourage the students to borrow debt to attend the school. Without these rules, students are potentially on the hook to repay federal student loans even if they didn’t find gainful employment or finish their degree before their school closed...Attorneys general from 19 states, plus the District of Columbia, sued DeVos and the Education Department for delaying the borrower protection rule that was scheduled to take effect beginning July 1. A federal judge previously ordered DeVos to comply with the borrower defense rule. However, rather than comply with the judge’s order, the Education Department instead did the following, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School: “The Department demanded incorrect loan payment from 16,034 students. Of those students, 3,289 student borrowers made one or more loan payments because of these demands, which they were not actually supposed to pay..."