Media Mentions

The coronavirus pandemic has put on indefinite hold a major portion of the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket, including a multibillion-dollar clash between software giants Google and Oracle Corp. and cases that could affect President Donald Trump’s re-election chances. What was supposed to have been a drama-filled spring at the high court has instead become a season of waiting, especially for the lawyers and litigants in 20 arguments that had been scheduled for March and April. The court has postponed 11 of those cases and could do the same soon for the remaining nine...Similarly, the court had been aiming to resolve clashes over the Electoral College, the body that will formally select the next president, before any election controversies may arise. At issue in cases scheduled for argument April 28 is whether states can stop “faithless electors” who try to cast a vote for someone other the candidate who won their state’s balloting. “We’ve gotten no indication about whether it’s going forward,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and the lawyer for two groups of electors who say they have the right to vote as they please. But “we’re preparing as if it is.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Laurie Santos, a Professor of Psychology at Yale, shares tips for dealing with coronavirus-induced anxiety. For further listening, check out Laurie’s podcast “The Happiness Lab,” also from Pushkin Industries.

An article by Cass Sunstein: I have long been an enthusiastic defender of quantitative cost-benefit analysis, and recently wrote a book about it. I have also long been a critic of the precautionary principle, which calls for potentially expensive precautions against bad outcomes in the face of scientific uncertainty. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s unusually challenging to engage in quantitative cost-benefit analysis. But the best available estimates, released within the last few days, suggest that the U.S. should continue with expensive precautions, even if they take a major economic toll. Back to normal by Easter, as President Donald Trump suggested? The new estimates show that that would be reckless. To adapt Patrick Henry, “Give me precautions, or give me death.” It should be acknowledged that Trump, and many others, have been right to emphasize the importance of balancing a range of considerations, and not focusing only on one. Some people in the public-health community like to look only at one side of the ledger. But a zero-risk mentality makes no sense.

Today on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani interviews Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School & Director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law & Policy Clinic, about protecting and promoting better wages for food workers in the COVID-19 crisis. “If part of what comes from this is that we realize all the people who are handling the food from the beginning on the farm to the end of the chain are really vital. We need to treat them better, pay them better, give them benefits,” says Broad Leib.

Food waste experts are slowly assessing the short and long-term impacts of the new coronavirus, which remain murky. With the fallout likely stretching into coming months, some are worried about supply chain impacts — including food recovery for donation — as well as a future uptick in waste amid dramatic lifestyle alterations. Initial volume shifts are unclear at the moment, but a major surge in grocery purchases appears to be driving a decline in food waste associated with retail. Higher education and entertainment venue closures, however, are generating greater amounts than usual, while the shuttering of farmer's markets is also expected to drive an increase in discarded products. One concern is public demand for food may lead to an uptick in waste, not only through organics, but through packaging as people shift to takeout and delivery. "I think waste is very low priority [for people right now], but food is very high priority," Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, told Waste Dive. Her organization and the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) are sharing resources aimed at connecting those issues.

They say if you do a thing for 14 days, it will become a habit. If they’re right, a lot more of us are washing our hands and keeping them out of our faces. That’s a good thing...The questions that linger for me, at least, are will this new way of doing things last and, more importantly, how will it impact our relationships with one another long term? Whatever happens, David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and a pioneering thought leader about the internet’s effect on our lives, businesses and ideas, told me this is going to be a clarifying moment for many fields that, no doubt, will soon discover that the price we pay for physical proximity is higher than we thought, and the deprivations we assumed intrinsic to digital social interactions are lower than we thought. This, he said, is not entirely unlike what email did to business meetings in the 1990s. “We thought we all had to get in the same room to work through issues and coordinate our efforts,” Weinberger said. “But as soon as email became common throughout organizations, the cost of having to get everyone in the same room became clear: The flow of work was put on hold until everybody had an open time and was in the same place.” At meetings, for instance, he said everyone had to pay attention to conversations that merited the time of only some. Anybody remember those days?

President Trump's aggressive timeline for reopening the economy could set the White House on a collision course with governors and mayors who seem intent on maintaining social distancing policies beyond the president’s Easter target date if necessary. Trump's proposal on Tuesday to ease restrictions by mid-April came as a number of state and local governments have moved in the opposite direction, heeding the advice of public health officials to implement stay-at-home orders and close non-essential businesses to stem the rising number of coronavirus infections...While the president has clear authority to rescind or alter federal health guidelines, legal experts say state and local officials are not required to follow them if their jurisdiction's health situation warrants stricter measures. Analysts believe that if federal and local governments begin to move in dramatically different directions in response to the outbreak, it could trigger a political fight, or perhaps a legal standoff, with implications for the fall elections. A majority of Americans, 58 percent are optimistic that the economy will recover quickly after the coronavirus abates. But if economic reality fails to match the rosier predictions, Trump could blame the weak recovery on state and local governments’ more stringent public health restrictions. “I think his biggest leverage is going to be political, to say ‘these people are ruining your local economy for no reason and I tried to stop them,’ ” said Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen.

Olivia Warren’s testimony before the House Judiciary’s courts subcommittee was kept under wraps until the last moment. It wasn’t until minutes before the 8:30 a.m. hearing that her name appeared on the list of witnesses and her testimony was made available. That testimony revealed bombshell allegations of sexual harassment by the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who Warren clerked for on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But she made it clear she was not primarily there to make her claims about Reinhardt. Instead, she wanted to draw attention to the issues she had in reporting the revered judge’s conduct...Student group leaders who spoke with The National Law Journal raised concerns about what situations they could face if they chose to enter the judiciary, through a clerkship or otherwise, and how exactly they could go about reporting the issues. And they’re pushing for reforms to be implemented now. They drew particular attention to the possibility of retaliation if they file a complaint against a prominent judge or staffer in their circuit, and the lasting impact that could have on their careers. “The person responsible for investigating their complaint is the chief judge of their circuit, who is inevitably going to have a close and professional relationship with whoever the accused judge is,” said Emma Janger '20, a Harvard Law School student and co-founder of the People’s Parity Project, a nonprofit that pushes for more protections for judiciary staff.

An article by Noah Feldman: One of the noteworthy aspects of our current coronavirus moment is the rapid proliferation of self-appointed data analysts. These armchair epidemiologists seem to believe they can project the trajectory of Covid-19 better than actual epidemiologists who have spent their whole careers studying the spread of disease. You know who I’m talking about: It’s not just the guy on Medium whose post gets 35 million pageviews. It’s your uncle and your co-worker (funnily enough, many of them are men) who are trying their hand at beating the pros. And of course, it includes our president. Donald Trump has said in his daily press conferences that he’s “a smart guy” who “feel[s] good about” his own predictions and has “been right a lot.” There are several possible explanations for why so many of us are trying to make our own predictions. What they all have in common is that they are based on conceptual errors. As anyone with any kind of subject matter expertise — whether in construction or constitutional law — knows, there’s a difference between actually knowing what you’re talking about and winging it.

An article by Urs Gasser: As the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic worsens, understanding the effectiveness of public messaging and large-scale social distancing interventions is critical. The research and public health response communities can and should use population mobility data collected by private companies, with appropriate legal, organizational, and computational safeguards in place. When aggregated, these data can help refine interventions by providing near real-time information about changes in patterns of human movement. Research groups and nonprofit humanitarian agencies have refined data use agreements to stipulate clear guidelines that ensure responsible data practices (1). Tools for specifying different levels of privacy for different users, such as the OpenDP platform (2), can effectively manage data access, and aggregation steps have been carefully reviewed on a legal and methodological basis to ensure that the analyses follow ethical guidelines for human participants (3). To monitor social distancing interventions, for example, rather than showing individual travel or behavior patterns, information from multiple devices is aggregated in space and time, so that the data reflects an approximation of population-level mobility (4).

One of the most moving responses to coronavirus has come from home-quarantined Italians singing together from their balconies. They were belting out Il Canto della Verbena or Volare. The subtext was that interdependence is the only defence humans have against their own fragility. For postwar individualist philosophers like Ayn Rand — cheerleader for the primacy of private capital — the jig is well and truly up. Witness the extraordinary efforts by governments to stabilise their economies and forestall the collapse of business. The US signed off on a $2tn aid package in the early hours of Wednesday morning and the global bailout — central bank liquidity support included — will have a sticker price of more than $4.5tn. That is a big number, even by the standards of recommended takeovers...Whole sectors — notably airlines, hotels and cruise lines — will lack a raison d'être for months. For many companies, revenues will fall short of overheads. But state support, and the quid pro quos that go with it, are preferable to going bust. “This is analogous to a war we have to mobilise to deal with,” says Jesse Fried, an economist and Harvard law professor. “It is not part of the normal boom and bust cycle.”

An article by Todd Carney '21: In February, the US and the Taliban reached an agreement to put the two sides on a path to ending the Afghan War. Despite concerns over the feasibility of the deal, some praised it as a new way to finally bring an end to almost two decades of violence. One component missing from the agreement was any discussion of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) In the past, the Taliban has disregarded IHL. The ability to incorporate IHL could have spared Afghan citizens from terror, even if the fighting did not cease. This piece evaluates how IHL could have been a part of the deal.

When Rosalind Chou was on a flight at the end of February, she saw a woman in front of her raise her phone up high, as if taking a selfie. The woman snapped a picture and sent it to a friend, whose reply showed up in big font on the woman’s phone: “Oh no, is he Chinese?” Across the aisle from Chou was a man she later learned is Korean American and a woman sitting next to him, also of Asian descent. The woman quickly replied to her friend: “There’s a lot of them. Pray for me.” Chou knows her experience was not an anomaly. Across the US, Chinese Americans, and other Asians, are increasingly living in fear as the coronavirus spreads across the country amid racial prejudice that the outbreak is somehow the fault of China. It is a fear grounded in racism, but also promoted from the White House as Donald Trump – and his close advisers – insist on calling it “the Chinese virus” ...There is also a history of leaders painting those in an outsider group as diseased, evoking fear and often violence in their followers toward that group of people, said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Security at Harvard. Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech”: rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another... “It’s not really hatred that is the most operative in motion regarding [dangerous speech], it’s fear. Fear is what makes people turn violently against another group of people more than hatred,” Benesch said. “The level of fear is so great around this epidemic.”

More than 150 academics, scholars and tenured faculty from colleges across the country have signed an open letter that names and shames colleges for using facial recognition technology on campus. They include a renowned cryptographer, prominent gender theorist and the popularizer of intersectionality. There’s just one problem: Some of those colleges told The College Fix they aren’t using the technology. Another college, meanwhile, passed the buck to its students, saying they choose to use it...Cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, told The Fix in a phone call that there is a difference between “campus security” and “social control.” The first name on the open letter noted that facial recognition technology is used by “authoritarian governments” such as the Chinese Communist Party, and it gives them “awesome” power over their citizens. Schneier also warned that universities are “unprepared” to handle high levels of biometric data, leaving their students’ personal information vulnerable to cyber-penetration by ill-intended actors...Cryptographer Schneier, who also lectures at Harvard, says that the technology has “no place” in an American college campus. He told The Fix that China’s use of facial recognition works in conjunction with video surveillance and artificial intelligence to evaluate citizens in the Communist Party’s “social credit” systems. More often than not, this kind of technology is used “without consent.”

President Donald Trump has said he wants to curtail the strict social distancing guidelines his administration put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic because of the potential impact on the U.S. economy. But Trump is not the only executive to take action in the hope of "flattening the curve," the term medical experts use to describe a slow and steady rise in the number of cases of COVID-19 rather than a sharp spike that could overwhelm the nation's healthcare system. As the president weighs loosening the federal guidance, he does so against a backdrop of governors who have implemented their own statewide – and independent – restrictions, from curfews to lockdowns to sweeping school and business closures...The country's public health law is a patchwork of responsibilities divided up between the federal and state governments, but typically states are in control of "police powers," according to Professor Glenn Cohen, faculty director for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Some states even delegate those powers to individual localities. But if Trump decides to lift the federal guidance, states like California or New York that have issued stay-at-home orders "may decide to follow suit or not, but typically have significant discretion as to what to do," he said.

An article by Noah Feldman: As more U.S. states roll out stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of coronavirus, it’s now possible to identify an emerging American model of such restrictions. The approach is notably less strict than Covid-19 measures adopted in other affected countries, not only autocratic China, but even democratic Italy. And although the model is sufficiently restrictive that it will have massive effects on the economy, it does not come close to a complete shutdown of economic activity. The emerging American model has several distinctive elements. The first is that, while its contours are being specified in emergency orders issued first by local governments and now by state governments, it isn’t particularly coercive. Indeed, at least in this first iteration, the American model depends mostly on voluntary compliance. To be sure, governors are issuing what they are calling “orders,” not mere recommendations. Some governors, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, have made a point of saying that the orders are meant to be taken seriously, and hinted that police could issue fines to violators. Yet even if police enforcement is mentioned, there is little practical possibility of systematically implementing it. There just aren’t enough law enforcement officers. The legal basis for such enforcements would be shaky given the language of the orders thus far drafted.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Dire as the coronavirus pandemic has become, it’s worth remembering that there are other severe public health threats that can’t be ignored. That’s a reason to applaud the Food and Drug Administration for issuing, even in this period, a tough new tobacco regulation that should save lives: It has required graphic warnings on cigarette packages. Whenever customers buy a pack of cigarettes, or stop to contemplate buying one, they will see one of 11 gruesome images, accompanied by a grim verbal message. The image might be a woman with a large neck tumor, alongside these words: “Smoking causes head and neck cancer.” Or it might be a diseased lung, with these words: “Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers.” Or it might be an obviously diseased body of a patient, with these words: “Smoking can cause heart disease and strokes by clogging arteries.” The images cannot be small: “The new required warnings must appear prominently on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements, occupying the top 50 percent of the front and rear panels of cigarette packages and at least 20 percent of the area at the top of advertisements,” the FDA states.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Farzad Mostashari, the former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Department of Health and Human Services, says we need to collect better data to effectively fight the spread of the virus.

An article by Shane Fowler '21: The novel coronavirus has shone a spotlight on seemingly incongruous pairings: Healthcare with employment, children’s nutrition with school attendance, and corporate size with access to government assistance. So too should we examine the relationship between internet access and geographic residence. Millions of rural Americans are digitally excluded from an information-rich world. This exclusion is significant for students returning to their rural homes as universities across the country move to online learning. In doing so, the response to coronavirus exposes the nation’s uneven distribution of high-speed internet access and marginalizes students from rural America. “Digital divide” refers to the growing disparity of access to high-speed internet between underprivileged members of society, specifically those living in rural areas, and wealthier, middle-class Americans living in urban or suburban areas. According to the Federal Communication Commission and Microsoft, Kentucky is one of the worst states for access to high-speed internet and cellular data. But the state is not unique in its short-comings, around 27% of people living in rural America do not have access to minimum speed broadband internet.

An article by Mark Roe: As the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the world’s economies, stock markets plummet, and unemployment rises, policymakers will be forced to figure out how to contain the outbreak while preventing financial and economic collapse. Most economic proposals in developed countries focus on cash payments to people, deferred tax payments, and business bailouts. But biomedicine is critical to saving the economy, and of the three major biomedical channels now in play, the least important medically is the one that could impede an economic Armageddon. It’s a test to check whether a person has had, recovered from, and thus become immune to COVID-19. Scientists say that low-symptom and symptomless cases exceed the symptomatic. When these asymptomatic people are over the infection, they could go to work – they will not infect those with whom they come into contact. But we need to know who they are.

An article by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein: Prisons are Petri dishes for disease in the best of times, but they could become incubators for COVID-19 now. Prisoners sleep, eat, and shower in enclosed quarters with limited ventilation. Social distancing is impossible. Prison populations also have greater rates of serious health problems than the general population. Many are elderly, and have diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and cancer, conditions that, if they become infected with COVID-19, make them more likely to require intensive care and especially vulnerable to dying of the disease. On Saturday, officials announced the first case of COVID-19 at the Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater. An inmate serving a life sentence and his roommate have been quarantined from each other and the rest of the inmate population. We don’t have to speculate about what will happen as the disease hits the general prison system. We have seen it.