Media Mentions

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Siddhartha Mukherjee, physician, researcher, and author of the 2011 Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Emperor of All Maladies, discusses what we know about how coronavirus spreads and what we don’t know.

A book review by Samantha Power: In September 2015, in my capacity as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I sat in the House chamber listening to Pope Francis deliver a joint address to Congress. In remarks that touched on religious fundamentalism, immigration and the death penalty, the pope said he intended “to dialogue” with Americans and their elected representatives. To do so, he drew on the lives of four national figures: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., the Catholic Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, and “servant of God” Dorothy Day, whom the pope hailed for “her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.” When I heard Day’s name, I looked around the chamber, wondering if anybody else was struck that he had included her.

One Supreme Court decision sparked some of the most significant actions taken by the U.S. government to deal with climate change. Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency was decided in a 5 to 4 ruling in 2007. It laid the groundwork for many of former President Obama’s climate policies, including the Clean Power Plan. It all began in 1999 when a man named Joe Mendelson, an environmental lawyer who worked for a small public interest group, delivered a petition to the EPA urging them to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, says Richard Lazarus, author of a new book about the case called, "The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court."

Imagine getting raped by your commander or shot in the jungles of Vietnam, seeking care at a VA hospital, and being turned away. Told you’re not a veteran. As a veteran attorney, this happened to my clients — many of whom were in crisis — time and again. The VA’s denial of their identity and right to care was devastating. A report released yesterday by Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic shows that my clients’ awful experiences are not unique. The VA has done this to many thousands of veterans across the country. And roughly 400,000 more are currently at risk of being denied critical care. Why in the world is this happening?

When Gabriel Fernandez was wheeled into a local Palmdale, CA hospital in 2013, first responders said that they had never before seen such extreme injuries on a child. Their unconscious patient had a cracked skull and broken ribs into addition to numerous BB gun pellets lodged into different parts of his body. Gabriel's guardians, Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre, were to blame for the abhorrent physical abuse — but they weren't the only people who put the child in danger. In the Netflix true crime docu-series The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, the social workers that neglected to protect Gabriel from harm are also put on trial. ... "The system is overwhelmingly oriented toward parent rights, toward family preservation," child advocate Elizabeth Bartholet explained in the documentary. "And there is very, very little emphasis on child rights...it's based on valuing adult rights."

As the Trump administration prepares to officially withdraw from the Paris Agreement later this year, one law professor is looking back at the Supreme Court case that opened the door for the United States to enter the global climate pact in the first place. In a book due to be released next week, Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus explores the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision that said the federal government can regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions as "air pollutants" under the Clean Air Act. ... Lazarus recently chatted with E&E News about the ripple effects of Massachusetts v. EPA, the lessons to be learned in the historic kids' climate case and his favorite foods in the Supreme Court cafeteria.

An EPA advisory panel's sharp rebukes of the Trump administration's Clean Water Act protections and vehicle emissions standards have provided a partial blueprint for how critics could challenge the rules in court. EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB), which includes many members selected by the Trump administration, last week finalized striking criticisms of the agency's proposed Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule and its recently narrowed definition of the "waters of the United States," or WOTUS. ... In contrast, a court could reprimand EPA for disregarding such guidance without a rational explanation for that decision, said Joseph Goffman, an Obama-era EPA official who is now at Harvard Law School. "The way the D.C. Circuit expressed itself really invited the inference that if the agency hadn't aligned itself in a thoughtful way with the science advisers, the court would have made a different decision," he said.

An article by John Bowers and Jonathan Zittrain: Corporate pronouncements are usually anodyne. And at first glance one might think the same of Facebook’s recent white paper, authored by Monika Bickert, who manages the company’s content policies, offering up some perspectives on the emerging debate around governmental regulation of platforms’ content moderation systems. After all, by the paper’s own terms it’s simply offering up some questions to consider rather than concrete suggestions for resolving debates around platforms’ treatment of such things as anti-vax narratives, coordinated harassment, and political disinformation. But a careful read shows it to be a helpful document, both as a reflection of the contentious present moment around online speech, and because it takes seriously some options for “content governance” that–if pursued fully–would represent a moonshot for platform accountability premised on the partial but substantial, and long-term, devolution of Facebook’s policymaking authority.

Veterans call it “bad paper.” In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories reported in 2013, The Gazette found that more soldiers than ever are receiving “bad paper”, which means they are receiving “other than honorable” discharges for some sort of misconduct ranging from drug use to insubordination. ... Just because a discharge is “other than honorable” doesn’t mean that a vet doesn't qualify for medical benefits, according to the VA’s own rules. But the new study by the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School says the VA has unlawfully turned away thousands of veterans with other-than-honorable discharges because officials at the VA systematically misunderstood the law and didn’t review the vets’ applications properly.

The delivery of legal services to low income consumers is being transformed by automation technology such as TurboTax-like forms for people facing eviction, and that transformation only shows signs of picking up steam as researchers continue to mine its potential for legal aid. Among those access to justice experts, there's hope that automation technology can one day identify clients who don't even know they have a legal issue...Matthew Stubenberg, associate director of legal technology at Harvard Law School’s access to justice lab, is exploring the ways that technology could help legal aid organizations identify people with legal needs who themselves don’t even know they need to reach out to a lawyer. Where some legal aid organizations are headed, he said, is toward implementing systems that could eventually allow them to collect and review public data that will alert them that a given person could have a legal need, which would allow them to reach out and offer their services. As legal aid organizations continue to implement data-gathering as part of their delivery of services, they will be able to move toward developing artificial intelligence tools, Stubenberg explained. Some potentially relevant public records could include water bills and homeowner records, for example. If a tenant stops paying their water bill and the owner of that building has a record of wrongful evictions, an eviction case could be flagged as a possibility, he said. “Once that’s done they will be able to identify people with these legal issues and move forward much faster with helping them, from when people had to identify their problems themselves,” he said.

It was a blunt warning about the dangers of youth vaping: Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced late last month that his state had joined 38 others to investigate whether Juul Labs, the nation’s largest electronic cigarette company, promoted and sold its nicotine-heavy products to teens. It was a moment Juul had worked to avoid...“It means they’re in a world of hurt,” James Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said of the multistate investigation. “The states are not buying what Juul is selling, and they’re saying, ‘We need to go deeper.’”

Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign policy. Do morals matter? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Nye to discuss his new book, 'Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.' They discussed the ethical and theoretical factors by which Nye judged each president before going through many of the cases he focuses on in the book.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has unlawfully turned away veterans with other-than-honorable discharges for decades because of flawed training and guidance that created a “cycle of misinformation,” a report released Thursday found. Rather than telling veterans with other-than-honorable discharges to fill out applications for health care, sending a written denial and informing them about their options to appeal, VA staff often rejects them on the spot, the report says. While other-than-honorable discharges, commonly known as “bad paper,” can preclude veterans from some VA services, that’s not always the case — particularly with mental health care. The gay veterans group OUTVETS, along with the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School, authored the report. They based findings on interviews with veterans, evidence from veterans advocates and legal aid attorneys, and documents obtained from the VA and Defense Department.

A study centered on veterans with “other-than-honorable” discharges reveals that they are routinely denied health care benefits – even if they’re potentially eligible. Many military veterans need help with medical issues after their service career ends. For that treatment, they can go to a medical center operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA.  But a study released Thursday by the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School alleged that some are being turned away from local VAs without treatment to which they have a right.

The 2020 Food Law Student Leadership Summit was held on the University of Arkansas campus last week. We speak with Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic, about how the summit began and what takes place during the event.

Before Elizabeth Warren entered politics, she spent nearly two decades as a professor at Harvard Law School, imparting her extensive knowledge of bankruptcy and commercial law to hundreds of young legal minds. And on Thursday, after she announced her withdrawal from the race to become the Democratic nominee for president, students at the Ivy League school expressed their gratitude for the Massachusetts senator’s bid by writing encouraging messages on Post-it notes and putting them around a portrait of her that hangs in a campus building. Some of the messages read: “Voting for you was the easiest vote I ever cast! Thank you for inspiring me!” and “You inspired me to come to HLS. Thank you," and “Don’t give up. We are with you!”

One of the bad things about bad behavior by politicians (particularly by Donald Trump, because he’s president, but by others as well) is that it not only can encourage bad behavior by politicians of all ideological stripes but also can be cited to justify it. All of this is sadly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s disturbing attacks against members of the Supreme Court. ... Schumer’s remarks received, thankfully, condemnation not just from Republicans but also from Democrats — among others, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, a staunch supporter of abortion rights and friend of the senator, and my friend Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during the Obama administration. Both urged Schumer to apologize and praised the chief justice’s response.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that he misspoke when he said that two justices appointed by President Trump to the Supreme Court would “pay the price” for a vote against abortion rights, but he defended his passion on the issue, saying his anger reflected that of “women across America.” ...Schumer’s remarks also drew rebukes from some liberals, including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. “These remarks by @SenSchumer were inexcusable,” he tweeted. “Chief Justice Roberts was right to call him on his comments. I hope the Senator, whom I’ve long admired and consider a friend, apologizes and takes back his implicit threat. It’s beneath him and his office.”

An op-ed by A. Benjamin Spencer, the Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law: On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, a case challenging a Louisiana law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The case is widely viewed as the first vehicle that could allow the current court to chip away at Roe v. Wade, if not overturn it. However, it may be more likely that the court will beat back the challenge to the Louisiana law on narrower grounds that have received much less attention: a lack of standing. While deciding this case on standing grounds would mean that the court leaves Roe v. Wade untouched, the adverse consequences for future legal challenges to abortion restrictions would be significant.  

The Department of Veterans Affairs has for decades unlawfully turned away thousands of veterans with other-than-honorable discharges, rendering some of the most vulnerable veterans invisible and desperate for help, according to a study released Thursday. Systemic misunderstanding of the law within VA about which veterans it should care for — and which should be denied services — has triggered improper mass denial of care since 1980, the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School said in the study, leaving an estimated 400,000 more at risk of never gaining access to health care they may have earned. The discharges, given for misconduct that can range from drug use to insubordination but not proved in court, are colloquially known as “bad paper” for the lifetime of negative consequences they can have.

In the past three months, regulators appointed by President Donald Trump have disrupted ambitious plans to combat climate change in electric grids serving 85 million people in the U.S., from Chicago to New York to Washington. ...“They’re taking these markets in a totally different direction than states want to go,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “It could backfire quickly.”