Media Mentions

An article by Noah Feldman: It’s good news that the Supreme Court has suspended oral arguments indefinitely. If nothing else, it helps keep Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg safe. Spry but still a cancer survivor, she celebrated her 87th birthday yesterday. I would say it’s practically a national security imperative to keep the nation’s unofficial favorite Jewish grandmother away from anyone who might give her the coronavirus. Apart from the health of the other justices (such as Justice Stephen Breyer, 79), the court personnel and the lawyers, the suspension of Supreme Court arguments also carries an important lesson for the rest of the justice system: It must respond creatively to the pandemic by maintaining core operations while limiting those aspects of its usual functioning that might endanger public health. At the Supreme Court, it’s relatively easy to eliminate situations that might lead to infection. That’s because the justices in general have relatively little public interaction with the parties who appear before them.

Two years ago, Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey issued 13 tweets emphasizing the need to make conversations on the platform less toxic. Mr. Dorsey said Twitter needed to work with outside researchers and hold itself publicly accountable for its progress. Now experts working with the company say those efforts have stalled, and some worry that Twitter’s commitment last week to boost growth—made in response to pressure from an activist investor—could further complicate those attempts...“For Twitter to increase its user rate quickly while also decreasing harmful content, Twitter would have to learn how to get users to post less harmful content,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center who has studied online speech and is a member of the company’s council. The problem, Ms. Benesch said, is “Twitter’s leadership has talked plenty about wanting to improve civility or ‘health’ as they call it, but they’ve failed to do—or even allow others to do—the actual work.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday that he would ask Congress to reinstate powers that were used during the 2008 financial crisis to support the economy as the coronavirus threatens to grind business activity in the United States to a halt. The comments suggest that the White House is bracing for a widespread downturn that could harm sectors well beyond the travel and cruise ship industries, and that the federal government could need to return to the type of crisis-era measures that were ultimately scaled back by lawmakers in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act...Hal Scott, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and the director of the nonprofit Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, said the Fed must restore its ability to be the world’s most powerful lender of last resort. It was unfortunate that such authorities needed to be reinstated amid a crisis, he said. “It would have been better to do it before the crisis,” Mr. Scott said. “When you get into a crisis and you do it, there’s a concern that you’re sending a panic signal — that we’ve got to do this, we need this power.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: After the stock market collapsed in late 1929, many people in the United States lost their jobs. By 1932, one in four Americans was suffering from lack of food. President Hoover, enamored of the efficiency of the private market and suspicious of all foreign countries, raised tariffs and waited, confident that the market would recover and all would be well again. Government intervention, he warned, would plunge the country “into socialism and collectivism.” The world seemed dark. With the COVID-19 crisis growing worse by the hour, the federal government’s colossal mishandling of it from the start — with faulty and too few tests and President Trump’s false claims that the virus was contained — may finally wake up our complacent country. We desperately need competence and courage in our government. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt trumpeted this message before cheering crowds, and went on to swiftly create a set of government structures based on the idea that government planning and support are necessary to keep us safe, provide opportunities to all, and ensure that no one is left out. It’s too bad that it takes a crisis to remind us what government is good for, but that’s where we are today.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Can a press release save lives? No doubt about it. At least if it comes from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it publicizes a serious violation of the occupational safety and health laws. The tale begins in 2009, when OSHA initiated a new policy: If one of its inspections found sufficiently serious workplace safety violations (warranting a fine of at least $40,000), it would issue a press release, identifying the violator. According to David Michaels, the OSHA administrator at the time, press releases would be a form of “regulation of shaming.” Michaels’s hope was that the releases would have “educational and deterrent purposes for other companies in the same industry and geographic area.”

An article by Cass Sunstein: The coronavirus epidemic has produced several different kinds of crises. It is of course a public health crisis, first and foremost. But it’s also an economic crisis, an international-relations crisis and a crisis of public morale. Fear is widespread and mounting. There was no pandemic, of course, but the economic crisis was incomparably worse. And the crisis of public morale, though also much worse, had similar features. The U.S. has not been here before, but it has been in the vicinity. In some ways, the closest analogy is to the Great Depression.

The U.S. Senate overturned a major student loan forgiveness rule. Here’s what you need to know. Student Loan Forgiveness: The U.S. Senate voted 53-42 to overturn a new student loan forgiveness rule introduced by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that critics argue limit student loan forgiveness for students when a college closes due to fraud. All Senate Democrats and 10 Republicans voted on a bipartisan basis. ... 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. ..."

Democracy and capitalism coexist in many variations around the world, each continuously reshaped by the conditions and the people forming them. Increasingly, people have deep concerns about both. In a recent global survey, Pew found that, among respondents in 27 countries, 51% are dissatisfied with how democracy is working. Further, Millennials and Gen Zs are increasingly disinterested in capitalism, with only half of them viewing it positively in the United States. ... Isabelle Ferreras, Tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation, professor at the University of Louvain, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School: Clearly not: Capitalism, as we can see across the globe, is compatible with all different kinds of political regimes: liberal democratic, communist, autocratic — and now illiberal democracies, too. Democracy is a system of government based on the recognition that people are equal “in dignity and rights” and should therefore have equal political rights. This ideal can be applied to entities of any size.

The top rated law schools in the country will all be moving to virtual instruction in order to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. All of the T14 law schools, which hold the top rankings in U.S News and World Report, had announced plans to move to virtual instruction in the coming weeks as of Thursday. Many other law schools across the country, including those in areas among the most affected by the virus, such as Washington State and New York, have also suspended in-person classes. Harvard Law School brought broad attention to the issue of coronavirus spread with an announcement March 10 that students will be asked to go remote.

A key debate on climate change is coming into focus for November's US presidential election. Voting this week in Michigan and several other states has cemented former vice-president Joe Biden’s lead over Bernie Sanders as the person to take on president Donald Trump in November. ... A first step for any future Democratic president would be to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate accord and restore climate rules and regulations that Trump has been busy repealing, says Jody Freeman, an environmental-law specialist at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former White House adviser under Obama.

Public health experts, law professors and green groups are supporting a group of children's effort to have the Ninth Circuit review a panel's decision to sink their lawsuit claiming the federal government is endangering their futures by not acting to curb climate change. Several health groups, including the American Lung Association and American Pediatric Society, and a slew of doctors, told the Ninth Circuit in an amicus brief on Thursday that the court should grant the children's en banc rehearing request because the case could help force the government to change its policies and make the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that are necessary to avoid future climate change damage. ... The public health experts are represented by Wendy B. Jacobs and Shaun A. Goho of the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Texas officials prevailed in the first round of a legal fight that carries implications for the national grid, but federal courts will have more chances to shape the outlook of competitive transmission in the U.S. The Texas saga involves a state law passed last year as S.B. 1938, which essentially gives incumbent utilities first dibs on building new high-voltage power lines that serve the state. ... "The future of competitive transmission is on the line," said Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Initiative. "The question will be ... if these laws are upheld by these two federal appeals courts, are other states going to follow suit?"

Harvard Law School will shift from in-person instruction to remote classes beginning on March 23, immediately following the school’s spring break, in order to limit the possible spread of coronavirus. President Larry Bacow announced the policy, which applies to the law school and the rest of the Cambridge, Mass., university’s students, on Tuesday.

The Ohio federal judge overseeing multidistrict litigation over the opioid epidemic tasked a Harvard Law School professor on Monday with helping the court navigate "novel" legal issues about how to compensate attorneys, some of whom say their payday could amount to more than $3.3 billion. U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster said in a notice that William B. Rubenstein, who previously worked on the multimillion-dollar NFL concussion settlement and subsequent fee fight, is best positioned to help navigate the debate over how much attorneys will be able to take home after the dust settles on a wave of opioid-crisis lawsuits.

Coronavirus lockdowns abroad are raising questions about the upper limits of government power as health officials in the U.S. and around the world scramble to slow the spread of infection. The U.S. public health toolbox contains a host of potential measures, ranging from gentle prodding over hand washing, to more severe actions like prohibitions on large gatherings and even sharp restrictions on the movement of infected individuals. ... “In times of emergency — including public health emergency — the temptation to violate individual rights is at its greatest, and the courts have often been called on to defend the rights of the vulnerable,” said Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen.

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.