Media Mentions

Students from Harvard University recently traded in their classroom in Massachusetts for a free stall barn in Wisconsin. Six students from the prestigious institution, which is located just outside of Boston, visited America’s Dairyland to conduct research. As Wisconsin-based researcher Bill Oemichen, one of the trip’s organizers, explained, “a number of these students work for the U.S. Congress, work for federal agencies, and they want to look at our typical practices on a Wisconsin dairy farm.” ... Dairy farmers Art and Lori Meinholz hosted the students on their farm in Middleton, proudly showing them around their operation and answering any question that was asked. Art admitted that the thought of having Harvard students on his farm was a little intimidating at first, but considers the visit a huge success. “In today’s world we need to help out wherever we can to try to educate people,” Meinholz said. The Harvard students themselves were equally excited about the opportunity. One student explained that after visiting the farm he has a newfound respect for all of the hats farmers have to wear. “Your farmer here is a machinist, an agronomist, an environmental scientist (increasingly), a financial wizard,” the student said.

An article by Hana Vizcarra: In recent years, the drumbeat for more expansive climate-related corporate disclosures has grown louder and more consistent within a broader swath of the financial community. This intensifying call argues for considering more climate-related information legally material under existing U.S. securities disclosure law. A key component of materiality as defined in U.S. securities law—who is a “reasonable investor”—is evolving when it comes to climate-related information. This evolution may soon impact what climate-related information courts consider material. There are myriad articles on corporate responsibility and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues across multiple disciplines. U.S. securities law and its disclosure regime, including the meaning of “materiality” as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in TSC Industries, Inc. v. Northway, Inc., have likewise been the subject of much discussion. Recent papers have also considered the materiality of ESG issues for purposes of disclosure under U.S. securities law. Fewer have considered how courts view the materiality of sustainability and ESG issues or the materiality of climate-related information specifically.

A podcast by Matthew Stephenson: A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode features my interview with Roberto de Michele and Francesco De Simone, who work as the state modernization specialists at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In our conversation, we discuss the work that the IDB does on anticorruption, transparency, and related issues, and also how the IDB (or any other entity working in this area) can assess the impact of its projects. We further discuss the relationship between grand and petty corruption, and closely associated questions concerning incremental versus disruptive anticorruption reform strategies. (This discussion includes some discussions of the recommendations of the report prepared by an outside expert advisory group commissioned by the IDB, which Rick discussed shortly after it came out.) Toward the end of the interview, we talk about the impact that scholarly research has had on Roberto and Francesco’s thinking on anticorruption-related topics, and we conclude the interview with a discussion of the current state of corruption in the Americas–considering both the optimistic and pessimistic views of where things are going in the region.

An article by Noah Feldman: Don’t let the appearance of a split verdict in the Harvey Weinstein case mislead you: the prosecutors’ decision to charge Weinstein with being a serial sexual predator was a success despite the jury’s decision to acquit on those charges — even as it convicted him of two felony sex crimes, including rape. The strategic advantage of charging Weinstein as a predator was always that it would enable the prosecution to introduce more evidence, including evidence of sexual assaults from women who were not the primary victims in this case. That extra testimony very likely contributed to the jury’s decision to convict Weinstein on two felony charges. It bolstered the primary victims’ testimony, notwithstanding the absence of physical evidence and other challenges associated with their cases. The important legal background here is that, in a criminal case — including in a case of sexual assault — testimony is ordinarily limited to evidence about the specific criminal conduct alleged. If the prosecution wants to introduce evidence of other bad acts by the defendant, it needs to have a valid legal reason to do so — such as a pattern of conduct. We want juries to convict on the actual criminal charge, not because they think the defendant is generally an immoral person or prone to crimes in the abstract.

An article by Emma Broches '20 and Julia Solomon-Strauss '20: A recent U.N. report warned about both the continued threat posed by Islamic State fighters and the challenges related to the effective prosecution of returned fighters and those who are financing terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice continues to prosecute individuals involved in terrorism in a number of ways. These new proceedings included charges against an individual who is already incarcerated and a successful push to denaturalize a man convicted of terror charges in advance of his release late this year. More broadly, the Justice Department continues to lodge new complaints against Americans who have supported the Islamic State, and courts continue to sentence or convict these individuals. In one case, this included an individual who was sentenced to 30 years on a material support charge—substantially more than 13.5 years, the average sentence for material support in 2019. Here, we provide an update on recent international terrorism prosecutions in the U.S. and highlight new and ongoing cases, both of individuals allegedly associated with the Islamic State and of those with ties to other groups.

At the midpoint of the Supreme Court's current term, the justices have now heard arguments in some of the biggest environmental cases in years, but decisions in those disputes are still pending. By this summer, the justices will have decided a case that could more clearly establish the scope of the Clean Water Act and a challenge that could more firmly define states' role in federal Superfund cleanups. The court has so far been slow to issue opinions while Chief Justice John Roberts was spending half of his days at impeachment trial proceedings across the street on Capitol Hill. The most consequential environment and energy case that remains on the court's calendar this term is a dispute over the Atlantic Coast pipeline's crossing of the Appalachian Trail. The justices will decide whether the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appropriately reached a decision in favor of conservation groups that the Forest Service did not have the power to authorize the natural gas project to pass beneath the trail. "It's going to press some of the justices on the textual question, and the environmentalists are pushing textualism front and center in this case," Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said during a recent conference organized by the Environmental Law Institute and the American Law Institute. "It will be a fascinating case to watch," he said.

In January, Google announced its Chrome browser would begin phasing out support for third-party cookies. Chrome is by far the most popular browser in the world, and its elimination of cookies will effectively kill off this key advertising and data-tracking tool for good. While this looks like a win for privacy on some level, what happens next could end up being much worse for everyone’s privacy, said Elizabeth Renieris, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein center and a data protection and privacy lawyer. “They’re not really changing underlying tactics [of how they track us], they’re just channeling it all through Google,” Renieris told Digital Trends. “How privacy-preserving is this, actually? What’s Google’s motivation for doing this? Is it to preserve privacy? Potentially, but probably not.” ... Renieris confirmed that cookie tracking is still very fragmented: there are a lot of black boxes, false impressions, and fraud, she said. Mobile tracking is different than browser tracking, and a lot gets lost in translation right now. “The downside to this is that it’s hard to trace who has your data,” she said. The upside though, is no one really has a full picture of who you are. A consumer’s privacy is accidentally protected in this way.

Carl Tebell finally received word in December that he had been granted an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy nearly 70 years after he was drummed out for being gay. He is still waiting to receive his newly issued DD 214 discharge paperwork in the mail so he can access medical care at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facility in San Francisco…Advocates for LGBT veterans estimate that roughly 114,000 U.S. service members were “involuntarily separated” from the military due to their sexual orientation between the end of World War II and the repeal in 2011 of the homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that barred LGBT people from serving openly in the military. While many of those veterans could likely qualify to correct or upgrade their discharges, just 8% had done so as of 2018, according to a report presented that April at a conference held at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.

The years of almost unfettered enthusiasm about the benefits of the internet have been followed by a period of techlash as users worry about the actors who exploit the speed, reach and complexity of the internet for harmful purposes. Over the past four years – a time of the Brexit decision in the United Kingdom, the American presidential election and a variety of other elections – the digital disruption of democracy has been a leading concern...In light of this furor, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center canvassed technology experts in the summer of 2019 to gain their insights about the potential future effects of people’s use of technology on democracy...One of the most extensive and thoughtful answers to the canvassing question came from Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center currently writing a book about technology, trust and deception and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She chose not to select any of the three possible choices offered in this canvassing, instead sharing two possible scenarios for 2030 and beyond. In one scenario, she said, “democracy is in tatters.” Disasters created or abetted by technology spark the “ancient response” – the public’s fear-driven turn toward authoritarianism. In the second scenario, “Post-capitalist democracy prevails. Fairness and equal opportunity are recognized to benefit all. The wealth from automation is shared among the whole population. Investments in education foster critical thinking and artistic, scientific and technological creativity. … New voting methods increasingly feature direct democracy – AI translates voter preferences into policy.” Her full mini-essay can be read here.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved four separate orders to narrow exemptions of buyer-side mitigation (BSM) market rules in the New York Independent System Operator's (NYISO) capacity zones during Thursday's public meeting, which critics say will stifle the competitiveness of clean energy resources. The decisions would make it more difficult for new clean energy projects expected in the state to clear NYISO's capacity auction. Clean energy advocates say bidding into NYISO's capacity market is critical to the financial viability of projects like offshore wind and energy storage...Critics of the BSM have accused such subsidy-reducing actions of enabling fossil fuel plants to remain open despite plans for retirements. Within ISO-NE, the 448 MW Merrimack coal plant recently got an extended lease on life by clearing the capacity auction without trading, to get replaced by cleaner resources, in the substitution auction, also referred to as the CASPR secondary auction. "I think the fact that this old coal plant that barely operates is still in the market and didn't come out through the substitution auction highlights a deficiency in how the system is operating right now," Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School told Utility Dive regarding the ISO-NE auction results.

In August 1992, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, nearly 2 million books went up in flames. Fragile, 500-hundred-year-old pamphlets and vibrant Ottoman-era manuscripts disintegrated into ash as the building holding them, the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was shelled and burned. It was not the first act of cultural destruction by Serbian forces against other ethnic groups in the Balkans, and it certainly wasn’t the last: Over the next seven years, Serb nationalists led by dictator Slobodan Milosevic would wreak havoc across the Balkan region. ... Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former prosecutor for the ICTY, credits Riedlmayer’s thorough documentation with lasting change in how cultural heritage destruction is viewed. “In cases where thousands of people have been brutalized, driven from their homes, tortured, and murdered, trying to get the court to focus on destruction of churches or monuments can be hard,” Whiting said. “[Riedlmayer’s] work showed this was more than just destruction of buildings … cultural genocide is a people being attacked.”

Following his lackluster performance in Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tweeted out a doctored video that made it look like he had a hugely successful moment on the debate stage, even though he didn’t. ... Take what happened earlier this month: Trump tweeted out a video that had been edited to make it look like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was ripping up the president’s State of the Union speech during touching moments, such as the introduction of a Tuskegee airman. That’s not what transpired: Pelosi did rip up the speech, but only at the end of the full address. Jonathan Zittrain, a legal expert at Harvard, argues that tweet shouldn’t be taken down, even though it’s misleading, because it’s protected by free speech. “It’s political expression that could be said to be rearranging the video sequence in order to make a point that ripping up the speech at the end was, in effect, ripping up every topic that the speech had covered,” he wrote on Medium on February 10. “And to show it in a video conveys a message far more powerful than just saying it — something First Amendment values protect and celebrate, at least if people aren’t mistakenly thinking it is real,” Zittrain wrote.

An interview with Jane McAlevey, labor and environmental organizer, post doctoral fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (Ecco, 2020), talks about labor’s influence in the Nevada caucuses and how labor issues are playing out among the 2020 field;

Massachusetts officials suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement over warrantless arrests at state courthouses got a boost Thursday from Harvard Law School's immigrant and refugee clinic, whose leadership said state courts are being illegally forced to carry out a federal agenda not enumerated in the Constitution and to sideline Sixth Amendment trial rights. The HLS Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and its leaders, alongside professor Nikolas Bowie, filed the amicus brief Thursday in support of two Boston-area district attorneys, a community organization and a public defender group jointly suing ICE over its warrantless arrests at courthouses where noncitizens have gone for various reasons, including to serve as witnesses in criminal trials. They are currently fighting ICE's motion for dismissal. "The federal government's asserted power to conduct warrantless courthouse arrests is not reasonably necessary for exercising any enumerated power, and the resulting disruption of state court proceedings and interference with the commonwealth's duty to provide access to its courts fails to properly accommodate state interests," the clinic wrote.

An op-ed by Todd Carney ’21: Last month, a dual American and Egyptian citizen named Moustafa Kassem, who had been arrested in Egypt, died in an Egyptian prison. Kassem’s death occurred despite the fact that paperwork had been provided to Egyptian prison authorities that should have secured Kassem’s release. Prior to Kassem’s death, the US had been making diplomatic overtures from levels as high as Vice President Mike Pence, but these overtures went nowhere. While there is a significant political controversy around the failure to release Kassem, it also raises interesting legal questions in terms of whether Egypt violated international law and if so what can be done to hold Egypt accountable. This post seeks to answer those questions.  

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson began life in a monarchy, under the reign of George II, in one of Britain’s North American colonies—Virginia. In this monarchical system everyone knew his or her place, with little expectation of being able to move very far outside of it. Though the American provincials were not on a par with the aristocrats in the mother country, they had developed their own version of hierarchy. Jefferson, by dint of his family ties, was born at the top, and there would have been no reason to suspect that he would ever come to be associated with the idea of equality. This is especially so given that he was born into a slave society, and his family fully participated in the institution of slavery. From an early age, he would have understood what unequal status meant, with his lifelong involvement in the most extreme version of it as a slave owner. The equality of humankind was simply not an expectation in his world.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: When Department of Justice prosecutors told the judge in Roger Stone’s case that their sentencing recommendation — consistent with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines — was seven to nine years following Stone’s November conviction on seven felonies related to obstruction, witness tampering, and lying and investigators, President Trump tweeted that this was a miscarriage of justice coming from “rogue prosecutors.” The next day Attorney General William Barr apparently directed his office to file an amended memo to the court, undercutting the first, recommending less time. (The four prosecutors quickly resigned from the case, one from the Justice Department entirely.) The memo reflects the DOJ’s empathy for Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone, 78, who had been facing substantial prison time.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  Bernie Sanders has said that he will support the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, no matter who he or she is. But some Democrats worry that a lot of his supporters will not work or even vote for any other candidate, whereas the backers of his Democratic rivals will enthusiastically work or vote for anyone the party nominates, including Sanders. It is too soon to know whether this worry is justified. But we do know that in 2016, many of Sanders’s supporters were extremely angry that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, and they refused to support her.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Maybe you’ve heard: Boy Scouts of America is filing for bankruptcy to put an end to the sexual abuse lawsuits it is facing. On one level, it’s business as usual. From makers of IUDs in the 1980s to opioid manufacturers today, it’s become standard for corporations liable for harm on a large scale to take advantage of the protection of bankruptcy. The victims get some compensation while the organization gets legal clarity and finality. Yet on closer examination, there’s something strange, even troubling about using laws designed to resolve business meltdowns to address the social ills caused by nonprofit entities that are meant to do good, yet in fact impose egregious harm.  

Amy Berman Jackson is no stranger to working under pressure. As a federal prosecutor three decades ago, she was in the final hours of a momentous murder trial when prospective jurors for her next trial — an armed robbery case against three defendants — showed up in the same courthouse. ... “No judge should have to face this kind of pressure,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal judge. She described Mr. Trump’s criticism of Judge Jackson as “preposterous.” But “nobody who knows her thinks she cannot handle it,” Ms. Gertner said. “She is tough and independent and very smart. She will steel herself against political influence and focus on the facts and the law.”

A lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that new Department of Education rules, set to take effect in July, will make it more difficult for scammed students to write off their student loans. ... The lawsuit was filed by the student-advocacy nonprofit, the Project on Predatory Student Lending and Public Citizen Litigation Group, on behalf of the New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG), which provides free legal services, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. NYLAG is represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, the legal arm of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, and the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.