Media Mentions

An article by Samantha Power:  Flying back to the United States from Asia on Air Force One in late November 2012, President Barack Obama was in high spirits. He had recently been reelected, and had just concluded a widely celebrated visit to Myanmar (also known as Burma)—the first ever  by a sitting U.S. president. The trip had almost fallen apart at the last minute, when it became clear that the military government was balking at reforms that were supposed to have been in place by the time Obama arrived. A few days before he departed Washington for Asia, the president dispatched me to Myanmar with instructions to lock down our desired terms before he landed, and over three bruising days of negotiations, I did so. The final agreement included a large release of political prisoners, a commitment to allow access for humanitarian workers to war-torn ethnic areas, and permission for critics of the Burmese dictatorship to return from exile or, if living in Myanmar, to travel outside the country. During the 20-hour journey back to Washington, Obama summoned me to his personal cabin on Air Force One and asked me what job I hoped for in his second term. My husband, Cass Sunstein, had just left the White House after three and a half years as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He was now commuting between our home in Washington and a small rental apartment near Harvard Law School, where he had resumed teaching. I did not want to leave government, but after serving as Obama’s multilateral-affairs and human-rights adviser on the National Security Council since January 2009, I was ready to try something new.

Thirty-six people were arrested at Saturday's Straight Pride Parade and protests. On Tuesday, Boston Municpal Court Judge Richard Sinnott denied the prosecution’s motions to dismiss charges of "disorderly conduct and resisting arrest" against seven of the arrested. There are more arraignments pending. Four officers were injured during the response to Saturday's events. We review what we know about what happened. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner.

I approach this Labor Day optimistic that a broad cross-section of American workers and leaders are ready to negotiate and build a new workplace compact that reduces income inequality, restores dignity and respect for all who work, narrows the divides that separate us and ushers in a new era of sustained prosperity. Workers and labor organizations are taking action to rebuild their bargaining power in new ways, business leaders are calling for a more balanced view of corporate responsibility than they have been espousing throughout the era of financial capitalism, educational institutions are offering new ideas and concrete programs to prepare for the future of work and Democratic candidates for president are determined to win back the support of the workers who abandoned them in 2016... The academic community is likewise poised to play a more activist and constructive role in supporting a new workplace compact...A broad-based coalition of labor law scholars convened by Harvard’s Program on Labor and Worklife will soon issue a report outlining a “clean slate” approach to updating the nation’s woefully outdated labor laws.

An article by Noah Feldman:  Critics of Boris Johnson’s decision to “prorogue” Parliament by sending its members home for several weeks say it is undemocratic: the Prime Minister is making it much harder for Parliament to influence Brexit, and thus making it more likely that the UK will leave the EU without a deal. Johnson’s supporters, however, maintain that there is nothing undemocratic about it, since it helps execute the will of the people as expressed in the 2016 referendum. Who’s right? Is the democratic will of the British people to be found in their Parliament, one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of representative democracy? Or is it to be found in the referendum’s Leave vote?

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Here is a puzzle about some of the Donald Trump administration’s most prominent deregulatory efforts: The very companies that are supposed to benefit from those efforts do not welcome them. In some cases, they strenuously oppose them. How can that be? There are several answers.

Let’s say it’s January 2021, and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants. The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives. What should Bernie do? For Samantha Power, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama’s second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her life to promoting humanitarian intervention—the idea that the United States, as the world’s “indispensable nation,” has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or halt atrocities.

The U.S. Department of Education has released its new Borrower Defense to Repayment rule, designed to give students debt relief in cases where they took out loans to pay for fraudulent schools. The new version, which goes into effect on July 1, 2020, makes it harder for federal student loan borrowers to have their debts forgiven, enforcing stricter criteria....But not everyone is feeling celebratory. Rep. Bobby Scott, chairman of the House education committee, criticized the new version, and Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending has already promised an upcoming lawsuit.

AirPods, the $159 wireless headphones from Apple Inc., are sold as an airy, liberating, wire-free experience. But like other modern gadgets, they have for some become an emotional burden and pain in the wallet...AirPods add to the jitters. The sleek white apostrophes that resemble electric toothbrush heads are slippery, small and easily pop out of ears. Popularity is finally skyrocketing, three years after their launch. So are the losses. Terri Gerstein will never go back to wearing a tether between her ear and phone. That’s why she fashioned a tool from a broom and duct tape to retrieve one of her AirPods that plunged through a Brooklyn sidewalk grate. The pod hunt was successful but left her shaken. “I felt like I don’t deserve them. I’m not careful enough. I don’t deserve something so nice,” said Ms. Gerstein, who directs a workplace-law program at Harvard Law School.

Podcast: Mischele Lewis learned that her fiancé was a con man and a convicted pedophile. By lying about who he was, did he violate her consent, and commit assault? Lewis’s story raises a larger question: What is consent, and how do we give it? ... Alondra Nelson, a professor of sociology and the president of the Social Science Research Council, explores this shifting of sexual norms with The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman. They spoke with the legal scholars Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob Gersen, and with the facilitator of cuddle parties, who compares her nonsexual events to “going to the gym for consent.”

Attorney General William P. Barr has booked a ballroom in President Trump’s hotel for his annual holiday party, an event that he could spend tens of thousands of dollars on and that drew criticism from ethics experts. ...Ethics experts said that Mr. Barr had not crossed the sort of ethical bright line that he would have if he were to be given a steep discount to rent space at the Trump hotel. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a vocal critic of the Trump administration, said he did consider the contract a “tasteless” decision that would harm Mr. Barr’s reputation, but not an impeachable offense.

Every single day, Donald Trump offers up a fragrant, colorful, teeming bouquet of reasons to believe he is unfit to hold the office of president. And every single day, the nation shrugs and waits for something to be done about it. (Really, congressional Democrats take a long summer break and largely shrug, and hope that the election will take care of this specific problem for them.) ... Larry Tribe of Harvard Law School puts it this way in an email to me: "The case for impeaching and removing Trump to protect our republic from the irreversible injury likely to be inflicted by his ongoing “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is now so compelling that only the delusional—or those utterly ignorant of our Constitution’s sole mechanism for defending the country from a lawless tyrant—could fail to agree. The only real question is whether attempting to remove Trump by impeachment is so certain to fail, and to backfire by increasing the odds of his remaining in office for a second term, that the effort would be self-defeating. But that excuse for not doing what’s obviously right as a constitutional matter is no longer tenable even if it might once have been: An impeached Trump who escapes conviction in the Senate after the evidence is laid out in public House hearings will be weaker in 2020 than a Trump who can brag that not even a Democratically controlled House could bring itself to impeach him. And GOP Senators who give him a pass will be easier to defeat than ones who’re spared any need to be counted."

The Russia report compiled by Robert S. Mueller III regarding Russian interference and obstruction details 10 categories of conduct that are more than sufficient grounds for impeaching President Trump. However, quite apart from the acts listed in the report, Trump has gone on a tear committing additional acts that betray his oath of office and should be included in any impeachment hearing. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe observes, “The president’s post-Mueller report stonewalling of Congress by directing all present and former White House employees to defy congressional subpoenas appears to be impeachable conduct under the Nixon Article III standard.” He adds, “Beyond that, the president’s deliberate ongoing defiance of the foreign emoluments clause by accepting financial benefits from foreign governments — and by inviting further such benefits — without congressional consent is impeachable, as is his dereliction of duty vis-a-vis Russia’s continuing attacks on our electoral sovereignty.”

We are now at the point where President Trump’s own officials are basically admitting that he has dangled pardons to underlings, as part of an apparent effort to get them to build his border wall in time for reelection. ...As law professor Laurence Tribe points out to me, this raises its own issues, constitutional and otherwise, because it in effect concedes that Trump’s concern in ordering these “takings” of land “isn’t even the public interest but his private political prospects.”

Heading into what looks to be a hard-fought presidential election, the Supreme Court will likely be asked to resolve a lingering but fundamental question about the creaky, little-understood electoral college system adopted in 1787. ...Harvard law professor Larry Lessig, who founded the Equal Citizens project and argued the Washington state case, said the aim is to “reform” the electoral college. “We know electoral college contests are going to be closer in the future than they have been in the past, and as they get closer and closer, even a small number of electors could change the result of an election,” he said in response to the Colorado ruling. “Whether you think that’s a good system or not, we believe it is critical to resolve it before it would decide an election.”

An article by Noah Feldman:  Critics of Boris Johnson’s decision to “prorogue” Parliament by sending its members home for several weeks say it is undemocratic: the Prime Minister is making it much harder for Parliament to influence Brexit, and thus making it more likely that the UK will leave the EU without a deal. Johnson’s supporters, however, maintain that there is nothing undemocratic about it, since it helps execute the will of the people as expressed in the 2016 referendum. Who’s right? Is the democratic will of the British people to be found in their Parliament, one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of representative democracy? Or is it to be found in the referendum’s Leave vote?

India has the potential to be one of the premier countries for legal practice and legal education, said Professor David B. Wilkins of Harvard Law School. The Indian bar, therefore, should not be afraid of competing with lawyers from around the world, both here in India and abroad, he said. Wilkins, Vice Dean, Harvard Law School, who was here to deliver the convocation address of O P Jindal Global University, said that while regulatory barriers might have been necessary at a certain point to allow India''s commercial legal profession to develop, it is a mistake to believe that such restrictions can exclude competition from foreign lawyers in the long run. "Foreign lawyers have already made significant inroads in the Indian legal market through ''fly-in-fly-out'' policies, and technology will only allow these existing inroads to grow. As a result, it is better for the Indian bar to meet the competition head on, especially given the significant increase in the capabilities of Indian law firms over the last several years," he said. Wilkins went on to say that the fears of many Indian lawyers about liberalising the legal market are likely to be exaggerated. "It is unlikely that many foreign law firms will want to set up offices in India," Wilkins noted, "and those that do will only practice commercial law".

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Friday finalized rules that make it more difficult for federal student loan borrowers to cancel their debt on the grounds that their college defrauded them, scaling back an Obama-era policy aimed at abuses by for-profit colleges. The rules, which the Trump administration weighed for more than a year, set a more stringent standard for when the Education Department will wipe out the debt of borrowers who claim they were misled or deceived by their respective colleges...Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending — whose successful lawsuit last year forced DeVos to implement the Obama-era rules — vowed on Friday to bring a new legal challenge “in the coming days” to stop the latest regulations from taking effect. “If Betsy DeVos won’t do her job and stand up for students, then we will fill that void,” the organization’s legal director, Eileen Connor, said in a statement. “That is why we will be filing a suit challenge these harmful new regulations that give a green light to for-profit colleges to continue scamming students.”

At recent panel discussions in New York, the cast and creators of two top Broadway plays, To Kill a Mockingbird and What the Constitution Means to Me, discussed the plays’ development and relevance, as well as the actors’ participation...The Constitution panel featured its playwright and star, Heidi Schreck, and Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who appeared with journalist Dahlia Lithwick...“People need to understand what the stakes are in a society run by big brother,” warned Tribe.

Labor Day 2019 comes in the midst of a crisis for the American labor movement...So a growing number of labor law experts and even presidential candidates (including Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg) have settled on a new approach to revive the US labor movement...This approach is called “sectoral bargaining,” and it could change the way work is done in the United States....“Sectoral bargaining is certainly getting more attention in legal academic and labor law policy debates,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and former practicing labor lawyer, says. “The way I would think about it is that there’s an existential panic about what will happen to the labor movement. That’s not new, it’s just getting worse. … If we need unions for economic and political equality as I think we do, we have to do something to stop that downward spiral.”

Elena Kagan was 'petrified' when a Law School professor called on her on her first day of class. She blew her first exams, which situated her in 'the bottom third of the class.' And then, in her second semester at Harvard Law School, things started to change.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Can a new regulation be something to celebrate? If it stands to save lives, absolutely. Here’s one that does: the Food and Drug Administration’s new proposalrequiring warnings, including graphic images, on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements. The regulation, now out for a 60-day comment period, also appears to fix the problems that hobbled previous attempts to mandate graphic cigarette warnings.