Media Mentions

Is now the time to invest in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE:BABA)? Shares in the company have had a rocky ride in 2020, but that’s true of most stocks. Despite the havoc cause by the novel coronavirus and escalating tensions with China, Alibaba stock has now virtually bounced back. Before the markets tanked earlier this year, BABA had increased in value by 142% in just the past four years. After riding out the pandemic, I think this A-rated stock is back on the growth path...The coronavirus pandemic is one thing, but there’s potentially a bigger threat to American investors in Chinese stocks — including Alibaba. When the trade war between the U.S. and China flared up again last fall, President Donald Trump’s administration floated the idea of delisting Chinese stocks. In May 2020, Trump once again raised the prospect of delisting Chinese companies. If they don’t adhere to the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, they could lose their Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange listing. That would not be good news for investors in Alibaba stock. However, it’s not time to hit the panic button yet. In order for the delisting to take place, legislation would need to pass a vote in the House of Representatives. And significant effort is being put into ensuring it doesn’t even get that far. Speaking to CNBC, Harvard law professor Jesse Fried noted: “Wall Street will be lobbying to try to block it, because it makes a lot of money off of listings of Chinese companies in the United States. They will probably be asserting pressure on people in the House to block the legislation from being put to a vote.” Professor Fried also makes the point that while Trump is a frequent China-basher, he likely has mixed feelings about actually following through with delisting: “…Trump is very interested in maintaining the primacy of our exchanges and he’s not going to want to see these companies flee to Hong Kong or London or mainland Chinese exchanges.”

A report by Ryen Bani-Hashemi '22, David Dapaah-Afriyie '22, Adira Levine '22, and Jessica Li '22: Social media companies have occupied particularly critical roles in the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in disseminating information or providing new entertainment options while billions of individuals are social distancing, the largest platforms have been stepping up in both predictable and novel ways. There are dozens of technology companies that could be analyzed in the scope of this report. However, because resource constraints inform the range of content moderation options available to smaller companies, this report instead focuses primarily on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube and their steps to combat coronavirus-related abuse on their platforms. As the pandemic pushes more users to online spaces, a concurrent infodemic is pushing waves of false content to those same platforms. The dramatic rise in posts about miracle cures, virus conspiracy theories, and fake reports of draconian government action have led platforms to adopt new products and policies to combat misinformation. These interventions represent a substantial new assumption of responsibility for the accuracy of the content on their sites. This report contains two sections. The first section aims to create a taxonomy of misinformation, detailing its forms, spread, and effects. The second section documents and compares how platforms have responded to misinformation during the pandemic, and proposes changes to improve platform responses to the infodemic.

Featuring Elizabeth Bartholet, Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Child Advocacy Program, Harvard University...Long before COVID-19 forced almost all children to receive education at home, homeschooling—a parental decision to educate their children at home—was growing. For advocates, its purpose and value is to open space for diversity, enabling families to provide education different from what any school offers. Critics fear that it isolates children from the myriad people and ideas in society and can enable child abuse to go unchecked. These positions have recently come into high‐​profile conflict and seem irreconcilable. Are they? Or do both sides have legitimate concerns that can be resolved through compromise? Join us for this timely discussion.

An article by Cass Sunstein: In the early 1980s, I was one of four law clerks for Justice Thurgood Marshall, probably the greatest civil rights lawyer in U.S. history and the first African American to be appointed to the Supreme Court. In a discussion with our boss, we expressed concern that the high court might overrule its Miranda decision, which requires police officers to provide the famous warnings to people in custody. We thought that the Miranda warnings were an essential means of preventing official abuse in general and of protecting African Americans in particular. Marshall looked at us with amusement. This is what he said: “Miranda? I like Miranda well enough. But not all that much. When I lived in New York City, a long time ago, I had a nice, long talk with head of a local precinct about police misconduct and the United States Constitution. Here’s what he did the next week. He got all his cops in a big room, and said, ‘If I hear that any of you has mistreated anyone in New York – beaten him up, knocked him down, violated his civil rights, targeted him because of his race, anything like that – you’re fired. Immediately. On the day.’” Marshall took a long pause. And then he thundered: “And that’s a lot better than Miranda!” In the 1990s, I lived on the south side of Chicago, and my car was stolen. A police officer recovered it. As we talked about what had happened, he asked me, “And what do you do for a living?” I responded, “I teach constitutional law.” He looked displeased. I thought I knew why, and asked, “Oh, does the Fourth Amendment give you any trouble?” (The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures.) His answer: “Oh, no, not at all. I didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment unless I say that I violated the Fourth Amendment, and I never say that I violated the Fourth Amendment.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: William Eskridge, a professor at Yale Law School and author of the forthcoming book "Marriage Equality: From Outlaws to In-Laws," discusses this week's historic Supreme Court ruling that protects gay and transgender rights in the workplace.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: I first saw the “Hospital Arraignment” shift listed on my schedule as a rookie prosecutor in Manhattan, in 2004. I soon learned that criminal arraignments routinely took place around a hospital bed, because it was common for a person to be seriously injured during his or her arrest. A judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and court reporter would travel in a car to a local hospital, where the person lay handcuffed to the bed, and proceed to conduct the court hearing, stating the crime charged, asking for the defendant’s plea, and sometimes setting bail. My first time, the defendant, a middle-aged African-American man who was arrested for a misdemeanor, was bloodied from head wounds and was moaning in pain. The police claimed, incredibly, that the man had put his own head through the window of a police car. We all knew that police officers’ use of force was common, that they commonly tacked on an accusation of “resisting arrest” to misdemeanor charges in order to justify it, and that the legal system would believe an officer’s account over an arrestee’s claim of excessive force. My questioning of police accounts of arrests quickly led to my having an unfavorable reputation among cops I worked with. I left the job only six months after I started. George Floyd, of course, did not make it to a hospital arraignment in Minneapolis on May 25th. He was killed by a white officer, Derek Chauvin, in the course of an arrest on suspicion of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to buy cigarettes. Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd pleaded, “Please, I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s death, in the light of day, as three other officers looked on or helped restrain him, was captured on video by a teen-age bystander.

Harvard faculty—including Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Randall Kennedy—offer recommendations of books on race everyone should read.

Gerald Neuman ’80 and Laurence Tribe ’66 weigh in on Monday's Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers.

The penultimate chapter of sociologist Roberto Gonzales’s book Lives in Limbo—the chapter he calls the most painful and gripping to read, the one that would be its climax, if the book were a work of fiction—opens with a story about two factory workers on an auto-parts assembly line. The men are friends, both in their late twenties, and both undocumented immigrants. Like everyone else in Gonzales’s book, they’ve spent most of their lives in the United States. One of them, Jonathan, never finished high school, while the other, Ricardo, has a college degree in political science and a master’s in management...An ethnographer as well as a sociologist, Gonzales is a professor of education and director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. He studies the lives of young undocumented immigrants like Jonathan and Ricardo, people who were brought, or sent, or smuggled into the United States as children, often before they were old enough to remember, and who then grew up here, in a state of perpetual in-between...Some colleges, especially those with larger DACA populations, have stand-alone campus centers for immigrant students, with full-time staff to help the undocumented navigate immigration laws and to connect students to other resources. At Harvard, undocumented students receive assistance from the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Law Clinic at the Law School, and a training program called UndocuAllies works to educate faculty about the basics of helping undocumented students, but that exists only at the GSE, and is run by students, who cycle in and out.

A petition in front of federal regulators to effectively overturn net metering policies nationwide faced overwhelming bipartisan opposition on Monday from state regulators, members of Congress, public power groups and others. Though several utilities filed to intervene on the petition, including Pacific Gas and Electric, Xcel Energy and Duke Energy, none filed comments by the June 15 deadline, so it remains unclear where utilities fall on the issue. Investor-owned utility group Edison Electric Institute (EEI) has said it finds net metering to be a "regressive and poor public policy tool," but the group ultimately decided against filing comments during this initial period. Opponents of the petition decried the move as an affront to states' rights and legally questionable on a number of grounds. Others were also critical of the group that introduced the petition and urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require it to disclose its backers. State regulators, the renewable energy industry, environmentalists, members of Congress and others have been openly opposed to the New England Ratepayers Association (NERA) petition from the start, but observers have been less sure of where utility interests would fall, particularly after EEI declined to file comment. "The wild card here will be the number of utilities that have already declared their intent to file something here, and I don't know which side of this they're going to come down on," Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, told reporters last week.

More than 80 Harvard-trained lawyers petitioned the US and Chinese governments for the release of Ekpar Asat, a Uyghur entrepreneur who disappeared upon returning to China from a State Department program in the US. His sister Rayhan Asat attended Harvard. Their two letters, both dated Tuesday, come as President Donald Trump is said to be expected to sign legislation aimed at holding Chinese officials accountable for crimes committed against Uyghurs and other minority ethnic communities in Xinjiang. Rayhan Asat, Ekpar's sister and main advocate in the US, told CNN she hoped, "as (the) leader of the free world," Trump would speak out about her brother's alleged enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention at the hands of the Chinese government. In 2016, Ekpar Asat participated in the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). During the program, he traveled around the US, even visiting CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. It had been "a moment of triumph" for him to be selected to participate in the prestigious professional exchange program, his sister Rayhan Asat told CNN...In the letter to the Chinese government and the Chinese ambassador to the US, the lawyers -- who hail from more than 50 countries -- said Ekpar Asat's "ordeal has touched and outraged us personally." "Like Mr. Asat, most of us travelled to the United States to further our education and training as leaders. We returned safely to our families in our home countries. We are devastated that Mr. Asat did not. We are deeply disturbed by the arbitrary nature of his detention, secret trial, and the lack of any basic sense of justice," they wrote, calling for Ekpar Asat's unconditional release. Rayhan Asat said she does not know why her brother would have been targeted except for his participation in the State Department program, telling CNN that Ekpar Asat was an active community member who hosted events that were well-received by the government in Xinjiang.

It was a far cry from “defund the police,” but the response was severe anyway. In 2019, Steve Fletcher, a first-term member of the Minneapolis City Council, decided to oppose a budget proposal to add more officers to the Police Department. Business owners soon started calling Fletcher, who represents part of downtown, complaining of slow police responses to 911 calls about shoplifting...But after a Minneapolis officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes, killing him — unleashing a national protest movement that has yielded criminal charges against him and the other three officers on the scene — the police union, like many others, has become a target for otherwise labor-friendly liberals like Fletcher who see them as major obstacles to reform...The labor movement in the U.S. is facing questions about what its relationship should be with the hundreds of thousands of police officers who make up a major portion of unionized public-sector workers. The AFL-CIO has faced growing calls to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Assns., and some liberal activists have started calling for Democratic politicians to reject campaign contributions from police unions. “Even for people who have a deep long-standing genuine commitment to the labor movement ... there’s a recognition that the power of unionization, the power of collective bargaining is being abused in indefensible ways by police unions,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and faculty director of the school’s labor and work-life program, which will be studying potential legal reforms to collective bargaining by police.

In a landmark ruling Monday, the Supreme Court said the worker language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also protects LGBTQ Americans from discrimination. We dig into this ruling and what it means for workers and employers with WBUR senior news correspondent Kimberly Atkins and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner. We also touch on other news from SCOTUS today, as well as cases still pending.

The margin of the ruling and the author of the opinion were as stunning as the result. On Monday, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote in a 6-3 ruling (joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer) that the ban on sex-based discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity...The decision quite closely adheres to an amicus brief filed by constitutional scholars Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz submitted on behalf of several former solicitors general, including Ted Olson and Seth Waxman, and former acting solicitors general Walter Dellinger and Neal Katyal. Tribe tells me that “the decision is a rare shining moment in the midst of all too much darkness," pointing out the concrete impact on millions of Americans and marking “the first victory ever for transgender rights at the Supreme Court — as well as the first clear recognition that discriminating against individuals because of their sexual orientation constitutes sex discrimination pure and simple even if those who wrote the relevant statutes might not have anticipated that reading.” There are several main takeaways. First, Gorsuch’s opinion should remind Republicans that a true textualist who gives an honest reading of a statute or the provision of the Constitution at hand is not simply a vessel for evangelical Christians and other right-wingers to impose their views on a pluralistic society. As Tribe puts it, the decision shows that “applying legal texts in accord with their meaning can sometimes triumph over efforts to read the minds of the authors and that at least some Justices, including Justice Gorsuch, are consistent in their textualism even if others, including it seems Justices [Brett M.] Kavanaugh and [Samuel A.] Alito [Jr.] and [Clarence] Thomas, are not.”

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, a Twitter storm blew in about bots, those little automatic programs that talk to us in the digital dimension as if they were human. What first caught the attention of Darius Kazemi was the headline on an article from NPR, “Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots” — which Hillary Clinton retweeted to her 27.9 million followers — and a similar headline from CNN. Mr. Kazemi thought, “That seems like a lot.” An independent researcher and internet artist in Portland, Ore., and a 2018 Mozilla Fellow, Mr. Kazemi has spent considerable time studying the nature and behavior of bots...Motivated by the headlines, Mr. Kazemi, in the intervening days, began a bot audit, manually inspecting data sets of suspected bots and verifying their existence in the wild. He focused on data used to train the machine learning algorithm that drives Botometer, a bot-detection tool by the Network Science Institute and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, which “checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot.” A score of 0 is most humanlike, a score of 5 is most bot-like...Jonas Kaiser, of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and Adrian Rauchfleisch, of National Taiwan University, audited Botometer for their preprint paper, “The False Positive Problem of Automatic Bot Detection in Social Science Research.” Dr. Kaiser noted that algorithms are only as good as their training sets and generally perform worse when applied on unknown data. “We found that the tool that is generally understood to be the ‘gold standard’ of the field is unreliable with its detection of bots, and it gets worse when tracking the bot classifications over time as well as for other languages,” Dr. Kaiser said.

An article by Noah Feldman: In one of its most important decisions in years, the Supreme Court has interpreted federal anti-discrimination law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status. In a surprise to most observers, the decision was 6 to 3, and written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of Donald Trump's appointees. The decision marks Gorsuch’s most significant move thus far to take on the mantle of the late Justice Antonin Scalia as the intellectual leader of the conservative wing of the court. That may sound strange and counter-intuitive: After all, Scalia harshly opposed landmark decisions expanding gay rights, and it's difficult to imagine him having joined the Gorsuch opinion. And indeed, Justice Samuel Alito explicitly made Scalia the linchpin of his dissent, insisting (not implausibly) that Scalia could not possibly have been on board with a decision like this one. “The court's opinion is like a pirate ship,” Alito memorably wrote. “It sails under [Scalia’s] flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Scalia excoriated.” Gorsuch’s ploy might well work. Conservatives may be briefly frustrated by the outcome of this case. But it is liberals — mostly liberal law professors — who make or break judicial reputations. And liberal legal scholars, who have not liked Gorsuch much thus far, are now going to have to hold him up as a model of judicial honesty. He has applied his method to produce a result against his presumed political preferences. That makes him a hero of legal principle, at least for the moment.

On CNN, Michael Smerconish talks to Professor Randall Kennedy about using the n-word in academic settings.

The police killings of George Floyd, Eric Garner and other black men and women began with allegations of a minor offense, such as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or selling individual, untaxed cigarettes. Misdemeanors — these types of low-level criminal offenses — account for about 80% of all arrests and 80% of state criminal dockets, says Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime. "It's surprising to many people to realize that misdemeanors — these low-level, often chump-change offenses that many of us commit routinely without even noticing it — make up the vast majority of what our criminal system does," Natapoff tells NPR's Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered. "The offenses can include everything from traffic offenses to spitting, loitering, trespassing, all the way up to more serious offenses like DUI or many domestic violence offenses," she says. "It's ... the vast majority of ways that individuals interact with police." Natapoff says the misdemeanor system has "not gotten its fair share of blame" for the racism of the U.S. criminal justice system and how it disproportionately affects people of color. "This is the beginning of how we sweep people of color, and African Americans in particular, into our criminal system," she says, through over-policing black neighborhoods, racial profiling and practices like stop-and-frisk.

A controversial petition urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to assert exclusive jurisdiction over state programs that pay homeowners for solar power they generate and put on the grid has spurred the latest tug of war between state and federal electricity authority. A group known as the New England Ratepayers Association wants FERC to find that "behind the meter" electricity sales, currently treated as retail electricity sales and priced by state utility regulators in programs known as net metering, are wholesale power sales subject to FERC's exclusive jurisdiction. The petition also wants FERC to declare any state retail net metering laws unlawful...A declaratory order from FERC doesn't carry any force of law, so states wouldn't be forced to scuttle their net metering programs if the agency grants NERA's petition. But experts say it would give opponents of net metering a powerful piece of ammunition to launch legal challenges to net metering programs at both the state and federal level. "It would trigger a wave of proceedings at the state public utility commission level to try and change the rules," said Ari Peskoe, who directs the electricity law initiative at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. "It's possible that it would trigger a wave of litigation in federal court with entities saying net metering is illegal under federal law and bringing FERC's order as a legal opinion supporting the lawsuit." Even if a state voluntarily ends its net metering program and starts pricing the sales according to PURPA, the flood of new PURPA facilities would only further drag out what's already a lengthy, highly contentious process at the state level to set rates, experts say. It could also see FERC increasingly fielding complaints that states aren't implementing PURPA properly. "FERC could have a real administrative burden on its hands with a surge in complaints," Peskoe said.

More than 100 liberal activists, leaders and celebrities signed a letter urging Joe Biden to select Sen. Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, intensifying pressure on the presumptive Democratic nominee from the left as he faces competing demands to pick a black woman. The letter portrays Warren (D-Mass.) as the best prepared prospect to serve as president and one uniquely capable of helping Biden politically in the November election. It asserts that he is “already strong” among nonwhite voters but could use help winning over disaffected voters who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the primary — even as some of them have soured on Warren...The letter, sent to Biden’s campaign on Friday, underlines the dueling pressures the former vice president is facing as he weighs his choices. While many on the left favor Warren, the nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted growing calls for Biden to choose an African American woman. This has added a challenge for white candidates such as Warren, who lack deep ties to African American communities, some Biden allies believe. As a candidate for president, Warren attracted mostly white crowds to her events and struggled to break through with black voters. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, where Warren once taught, said that there would be some “symbolic ways in which some people would be disappointed” if Biden does not choose an African American woman, and that disappointment should count. But Warren’s record, he said, makes her the strongest choice. “I think African Americans above all would be the first to say they are more interested in results than cosmetics,” said Tribe, who signed the letter.

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed: A few years back, I was on my way to an appearance at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, in Vermont. My coauthor, Peter S. Onuf, and I had decided to rent a car and drive up from New York, taking the scenic route. The weather was great, and it would be an adventure. Night fell as we drove through Massachusetts, and we were in the middle of a conversation when I noticed lights flashing behind us. Peter saw them too, and immediately pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Perhaps because we were on the highway, and it was dark, the officer came to the passenger side of the car, where I was sitting. He motioned for me to open my window. I complied. He asked if we knew why we had been pulled over, and we were at a total loss. He said Peter had veered over the center line on the road. The problem with that explanation was that there was no line on that stretch of road. There had been some construction, and workers were in the process of putting a new lines down, as we could see looking farther ahead. He asked our names, which we gave. He asked Peter for his license. And then he asked me for my ID. I was sitting there calmly, wearing my seat belt; I doubt seriously that the officer would have asked Peter’s wife, who is white, for her identification under these circumstances. The thing that was unusual about the two of us—and which, I believe, made the officer “suspicious” of us—was that Peter is white and I am black. We were an incongruous couple and had no reason to be together unless we were up to no good. Aside from writing works of history, I teach Criminal Procedure at Harvard Law School. But the intricacies of the law at that moment in the car were the furthest thing from my mind. What mattered was my deep awareness of the raw power of the person who had a gun and who had pulled us over for crossing a line that did not exist.