Media Mentions

The Pentagon will reopen a records database that helps service members who are appealing a less-than-honorable discharge, a veterans group said Friday. The National Veterans Legal Services Program had sued the Defense Department over a lack of access to the database, arguing that the military had been breaking federal law since April. The database contains decisions by military review boards that grant or deny a veteran’s request to upgrade a discharge. Veterans and their lawyers study those decisions in hopes of building successful arguments of their own...Dana Montalto, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic, told The Associated Press earlier this month that post-9/11 vets have the highest rate of receiving less-than-honorable discharges. She added some veterans can wait years to get a decision from a military review board.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Have you ever shopped online for something (say, a hotel room) and selected an option with an excellent price only to learn, at the time of checkout, that the price is much higher than originally advertised? That happens a lot. A key reason is that advertised prices often exclude taxes and fees. Even if there is some disclosure of that fact (“taxes and fees not included”), consumers might not pay attention. Having initially seen a reasonable price and settled on their choice, a lot of them just put in their credit card number even if, at the final stage, they are shocked to see the unexpectedly high cost. In these circumstances, new research suggests that disclosure regulation can do a lot of good.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If ordinary rules of precedent were being followed, there would be no argument over whether witnesses should be allowed at the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Every single Senate impeachment trial, ever, has had witnesses. The precedent is unanimous. But the painful truth is that precedent carries much, much less weight in impeachment than it does in other constitutional contexts, whether in Congress or the courts or even within the executive branch itself. That’s unfortunate, because precedent helps make procedures — like how a trial works — fair and legitimate.

Kansas cannot bar people from conducting undercover investigations on factory farms, the a federal court in Kansas ruled Wednesday. For nearly 30 years — since 1990 — a Kansas state law made it illegal to take photographs or record video in a factory farm or slaughterhouse “with the intent to damage an enterprise conducted at the animal facility.” ... Animal advocates have responded with caution. “None of the major animal protection groups have done anything in Iowa in the last seven years,” Harvard’s Chris Green told me last year. The ag-gag laws worked. And when Iowa’s law was overturned, animal activists went back to work in the state. (Iowa has since tried another ban, but that one has been held up in court as well.)

US President Donald Trump's position on climate change has been in the spotlight again, after he criticised "prophets of doom" at the World Economic Forum in Davos. At the event, which had sustainability as its main theme, and activist Greta Thunberg as its star guest, Mr Trump dismissed "alarmists" who wanted to "control every aspect of our lives" - while also expressing the US's support for an initiative to plant one trillion trees....Meanwhile, Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard's Environmental Law Programme, argues that Mr Trump "believes nothing on climate change - he's a climate nihilist". Mr Trump's position is based on his need to appeal to "the part of the Republican establishment that rejects climate policy," Mr Goffman, who previously worked as Democratic staff director on the Senate environmental committee, adds.

The basic facts about inequality in the United States — that for most of the last 40 years, pay has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers and inequality has risen dramatically — are widely understood. What is less well-known is the role the decline of unionization has played in those trends. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement dropped from 27 percent to 11.6 percent between 1979 and 2019, meaning the union coverage rate is now less than half where it was 40 years ago. ... The good news is that restoring union coverage — and strengthening workers’ abilities to join together to improve their wages and working conditions in other ways — is therefore likely to put at least $200 billion per year into the pockets of working people. These changes could happen through organizing and policy reform. Policymakers have introduced legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, that would significantly reform current labor law. Building on the reforms in the PRO Act, the Clean Slate for Worker Power Project proposes further transformation of labor law, with innovative ideas to create balance in our economy.

For both better and worse, Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa was one of the most consequential union leaders of the 20th century. Unlike his very few peers (the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther and the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis could both claim comparable historic impact), he also has become the subject of three Hollywood pictures—1978’s F.I.S.T., with Sylvester Stallone ineptly playing a character modeled on Hoffa; 1992’s Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson in the title role; and now Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, with Al Pacino as the Teamster president. ... In his new book In Hoffa’s Shadow, Jack Goldsmith writes that the FBI now believes Hoffa’s killer was a Detroit-based young mobster who died just last year. But whatever Sheeran’s tenuous claims to veracity, his is a tale that Scorsese couldn’t easily resist.

On one level, the new report,  Clean Slate for Worker Power:  Building a Just Economy and Democracy—released Thursday and written by more than 70 professors, labor leaders and activists—is an ambitious menu of recommendations for how to remake America’s labor laws. ...Professor Sachs said, “The dire assessment by political scientists is that today in America the majority does not rule.” He added, “As economic wealth gets more and more concentrated, the wealthy build greater and greater political power that they, in turn, convert into government policy that enables them to build even more wealth, and on, and on.”The report is a wake-up call that something bold, even radical, needs to be done. Its authors see radical inequality and recommend radical solutions that seek to make the capitalist system fairer to workers, by giving them more power and say on the job, in politics and in policymaking. As Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and also one of the report’s main authors, put it, “The problem of inequality is on a different scale than in other countries, and the solutions have to be on a different scale.”

On Monday, President Trump’s chief lawyers in his impeachment trial, Jay Sekulow and Pat Cipollone, submitted a 110-page brief to the Senate laying out the case for his acquittal. The articles of impeachment, they say, are “an affront to the Constitution” brought about by a “rigged” “crusade” against a president who “did absolutely nothing wrong.” ... There are a select few scholars, however, who say the consensus should be reconsidered. One is Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School. In 2018, Mr. Bowie suggested in the Harvard Law Review that impeaching a president without any statutory justification conflicts with a fundamental principle of American law: that a crime cannot be retroactively defined. Impeachment without an underlying legal violation also risks setting a dangerous precedent that “would apply not just to someone as unpopular as President Trump but also to future presidents whose policies happen to misalign with a congressional majority,” he wrote. “The philosophical defense that the president should only be impeachable for a defined statutory crime is probably the strongest defense available to Trump’s supporters,” writes Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who testified in the House impeachment inquiry.

An op-ed by Jessica Fjeld is the assistant director of the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: When it comes to AI, Big Tech wants a hand in developing regulation. In a January 20 piece for the Financial Times calling for the regulation of the technology, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that his company’s artificial intelligence principles could be used as a template for future laws. Brad Smith of Microsoft said the same in a talk at the World Economic Forum earlier this week. Google and Microsoft are right that it’s time for government to step in and provide safeguards, and that regulation should build on the important thinking that’s already been done. However, looking only to the perspectives of large tech companies, who’ve already established themselves as dominant players, is asking the fox for guidance on henhouse security procedures. We need to take a broader view.

Anderson Cooper interviews Noah Feldman on the House managers case laying out abuse of power charge against President Donald Trump. ... "Everyone who is involved with this impeachment process has to understand, even if the outcome is the one most people predict, that's not what really matters on deepest level. It would be nice if Senators would come around, but that Trump is not just impeachable, but deserves to be removed from office. But even if they don't, it's important for the future of American democracy that others in the future, future generations, will be able to look back, watch this footage, watch the commentary, read the transcripts and see exactly what Donald Trump did and that he was impeached for it, to send the message that this kind of conduct just isn't okay, no matter what two-thirds of the Senate decides."

Stephen Colbert tore into the arguments used by President Donald Trump’s defenders, who claim abuse of power isn’t impeachable because it’s not a crime. “You don’t have to break the law to get fired,” the “Late Show” host said on Monday. “It may not be against the law for you to dunk your junk in my cappuccino, but I still want you fired. America does not run on junk-dunking.” Then, Colbert cited Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, who said the idea that only criminal acts are impeachable has “died a thousand deaths” in legal writings, yet “staggers on like a vengeful zombie.”

American Labor Law is broken, argues a report released today by Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. So, the report urges, the nation’s labor laws need to be fundamentally rewritten to make it easier for workers to organize, to have a voice in corporate decisions that affect them, and to participate in democracy—all essential to address larger concerns about economic and political equity in a divided, polarized society. At bottom, the project aims “to shift power from corporations to workers,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program, at the project’s launch Thursday morning. The ambitious, 100-plus page report lays out an agenda for a revitalized, robust labor law for the twenty-first century. ... “The richest 20 people in this country have more wealth than half the nation put together,” said Kestnbaum professor of labor and industry Benjamin Sachs, the co-leader with Block of Clean Slate. “It would take an Amazon worker about 4 million years working full-time to earn what Jeff Bezos now has. This vast disparity in material wealth means that millions of American families struggle just to barely get by.

An op-ed by Kate Andrias, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School: Cierra Brown works at a McDonald's in Durham, North Carolina. She earns little more than minimum wage, and even with a second job at a local hospital she can’t afford health insurance and pays for her diabetes medication out of pocket. She is frequently asked to stay late and close the store, hours after the bus stops running. If she complains, she knows she could lose her job — and nothing would change anyway. ... A consensus is building for such a system here in the US. Clean Slate for Worker Power, a coalition of more than 80 participants from labor, academia, and nonprofits, convened out of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, today released a set of sweeping recommendations to fundamentally rewrite US labor laws. The report calls for sectoral bargaining, as well as other proposals that would help shift the balance of power in this country back into the hands of working people like Cierra.

A pair of energy-producing states may face ideological challenges in their quest for a high court review of Washington state's blockade against the last major coal export project on the West Coast. Wyoming and Montana argued in a Supreme Court petition yesterday that Washington regulators violated constitutional protections on interstate commerce when they denied a Clean Water Act permit for the Millennium Bulk Terminals project in Longview, Wash. ... Justices for the Supreme Court will be more interested in evaluating Washington's denial of the terminal's Clean Water Act permit, rather than any alleged intent to further control global greenhouse gas emissions, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. He said the states' claims of discrimination are weak because they compare support for different products: apples versus coal.

The third day of President Trump's Senate impeachment trial. Law experts share their take on the president’s case – and what’s at stake for the Constitution and the country. Guests: Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School. Co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment and the Constitution."

Food insecurity and hunger cost the Commonwealth of Massachusetts nearly $1.9 billion in avoidable health care costs every year. Today, a team of attorneys from the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) and Community Servings, a nonprofit food and nutrition program, testified at a hearing on proposed legislation to establish a food and health pilot program in the state of Massachusetts. Harvard Law School Clinical Instructor and CHLPI staff attorney Katie Garfield ’11 and Jean Terranova, Community Servings’ director of food and health policy, testified before the Joint Committee on Public Health at the Massachusetts State House.

More than 70 scholars, union leaders, economists and activists called on Thursday for a far-reaching overhaul of American labor laws to vastly increase workers’ power on the job and in politics, recommending new laws to make unionizing easier and to elect worker representatives to corporate boards. ... The Clean Slate report, nearly two years in the making, aims to rethink American labor law from scratch. “We firmly believe that we’re past the point of tinkering around the edges, that to really fix the problems in our economy and political system we need a fundamental rethinking of labor law,” said Sharon Block, one of the report’s main authors and executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. ... “This is an attempt to lay out a comprehensive vision of what labor law reform ought to look like,” said Ben Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the report’s main authors. “We need this as a kind of North Star to know where we’re going when we have a chance to do reform of any kind.”

American workers have had the right to unionize since 1935, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his first term as president and the Great Depression was ravaging the economy. But the parameters haven’t changed much in 85 years. Not as the treatment of women and people of color became more equitable. Not as businesses employed more independent contractors who weren’t protected by labor laws. And not as the gulf between the haves and have-nots expanded. On Thursday, two Harvard Law School faculty members unveiled a sweeping proposal to rewrite US labor law, aimed not at updating what’s on the books but at starting over. ... “ ‘Clean Slate’ is our vision for what labor law would look like if it were actually designed to enable workers to build an equitable economy,” said Benjamin Sachs, Harvard Law School professor and coauthor of the report. “It’s not a project designed to garner bipartisan support. It’s not a project designed to get the maximum amount of business endorsement.” ... The project is not just about unions, said coauthor Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, who served in the US Labor Department under President Obama. It’s also intended to reform democracy, including proposals to promote workers’ civic engagement by mandating same-day voter registration and granting paid time off to vote and attend meetings.

Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program, and Benjamin Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School (HLS) are calling for an overhaul of American labor law. The Gazette sat down with Block and Sachs to talk about their report “Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Democracy and Economy,” which was released today.

Right now, too many rideshare drivers are teetering on the edge of the road. Nearly 80% of American workers report living paycheck to paycheck, but we live ride to ride. Despite recent legislative actions in New York and California to bring some stability to the rideshare industry, companies like Uber and Lyft still have too much power over our lives. ... A new blueprint released this week called “Clean Slate for Worker Power” [a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program]  fundamentally rewrites our nation’s labor law and provides a roadmap for a fairer future that would give rideshare drivers like me a seat at the table with the app-based titans.