Media Mentions

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program: Earlier this month, just in time for people’s summer vacations, American Airlines took a legal action that has the potential to expose travelers to more germs. The airline sued New York City over its paid sick leave laws. ... These lawsuits are one more example of American businesses’ frequent reflexive reaction against any pro-worker laws. Airlines themselves previously challenged, for example, a Miami living-wage ordinance and a San Francisco anti-discrimination ordinance requiring provision of employment benefits for domestic partners. The airlines’ problem isn’t the patchwork; if that were the case, they would be vigorously lobbying for a decent national paid sick leave policy. Their real problem is being told they have to do better by their workers.

Harvard has launched an animal law and policy clinic, becoming the latest law school to offer a hands-on course in the rapidly growing area. The clinic is part of the school’s animal law and policy program. Topics include litigation, legislation, policy, and administrative matters relating to issues affecting farmed animals, wildlife, animals in captivity, and threats posed by climate change. Kelly Levenda, student programs attorney with Animal Legal Defense Fund, said she is unaware of another top U.S. law school offering a hands-on legal clinic in addition to animal law courses. “We need to train attorneys and judges who work in this area,” said Levenda. “It’s great to have a top law school taking animal law seriously. Animal law is a social justice movement, and I think the more people who are exposed to it, the better.

...Indeed, while changes in both the nature of work and anti-union government policies abetted organized labor’s decline, Rolf is right to observe that the union business model may be an even bigger problem. ...In addition, as Harvard Law School’s Benjamin Sachs has proposed, unions should be allowed to “unbundle” their services so that they can advocate political causes without bargaining collectively. This could help give workers a stronger political voice without the necessity of getting involved in every workplace issue. Unions and employers should also be free to reach contracts that involve only some aspects of work — say, benefits and work rules but not wages and job tenure — and unions should be free to sell a range of services to anybody who wants to buy them, employers included.

An article by SJD candidate Evelyn Douek:  Two years ago, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, saw this controversy coming and begged not to be put in this position. Then and now, his company—which helps provide some of the basic plumbing of the internet—found itself at the center of the battle over which speech should and should not be easily available online. The more fundamental question is who gets to make these decisions, and it’s being answered by default, in the absence of any legal norms. Who are the deciders? This week, at least, companies like Prince’s are. Until recently, the infamous message board 8chan was one of Cloudflare’s clients. A breeding ground for violent extremists, 8chan has been the host of advance announcements of three mass shootings in less than six months, including the shooting in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday. Early yesterday morning, Cloudflare stopped serving 8chan—thereby disabling it, if only temporarily.

On a crisp and gray September morning, Jeannie Suk Gersen stepped into a lecture hall at Tufts University...Gersen is a feminist legal scholar and a writer of wry, slightly elliptical commentary on legal matters at The New Yorker. She is our foremost guide to the challenges that the #MeToo movement poses to the legal system. She has staked out a position at once conventional and embattled. She shares #MeToo’s goal of ending the impunity surrounding sexual assault. But she remains committed to the principles of due process, presumption of innocence, and the right to a fair hearing. This commitment places her in tension with some of the most impassioned actors in American public life, some of whom have come to regard due process as a fatal obstacle to deterring and punishing sexual misconduct...Gersen, [Janet] Halley, [Elizabeth] Bartholet, and [Nancy] Gertner designed an alternative set of Title IX procedures — applicable only to Harvard Law students — that the Office for Civil Rights eventually certified as meeting the requirements laid out in the Dear Colleague letter, while also satisfying the principles of fair process as Gersen and her colleagues understood them.

When AT&T acquired Time Warner last year for $85 billion, the companies said the deal would be great for consumers, who would benefit from lower prices and improved service. The Justice Department said the opposite, predicting the merger would give AT&T so much market power that price hikes and channel blackouts were all but inevitable. Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the current circumstances “seem to be precisely what the Department of Justice predicted would happen after the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, and precisely what AT&T successfully persuaded the trial court was implausible for it to ever do post-merger.” His verdict? “It looks like the court just got it wrong.”

Under a new California law signed into law on Tuesday, President Donald Trump will be ineligible to appear on the state’s presidential primary ballot unless he first discloses his tax returns. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1968 who is widely considered to be one of the most influential constitutional scholars in American history, immediately took to Twitter to preemptively rebuff arguments that the law unconstitutionally placed additional requirements on persons seeking the presidency. “California isn’t adding any requirements for the presidency — which it couldn’t do — but just ensuring that its voters are fully informed about all aspirants. This should survive the predictable constitutional challenge,” Tribe wrote. Also inclined to opine on the newsworthy legislation, Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, said the California law “plainly” violates the U.S. Constitution. “Hey Dems, just stop. This law is plainly unconstitutional,” Lessig wrote on Twitter.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The devil is a notoriously misleading advocate. Lawyers and pundits who revel in advancing arguments that they might like to act on but wouldn’t be caught dead making in a courtroom or legal brief seem to take perverse pleasure in making those demonstrably flawed arguments as “devil’s advocates.” Among the best recent examples is the way some lawyers and others who promote their views of sexual matters in public venues have been making the outlandish claim — as devil’s advocates, they say — that the age of consent to sex for youngsters, and young girls in particular, ought to be lowered if we’re to be consistent with the state laws and judicial rulings enabling younger women and girls to have safe and legal abortions without the consent of parents, guardians or other adults.

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Michele Goodwin, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, for a wide-reaching conversation about race and gender and the stories America tells itself so it can sleep at night. ... This week’s show also features excerpts from a live discussion Dahlia moderated at 92nd Street Ywith Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) and professor Laurence Tribe (Harvard Law School).

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  President Trump apparently learned a kind of code from one of his mentors, Roy Cohn: Always hit back. Never apologize. A rough and occasionally vicious lawyer, Cohn was chief counsel for Joe McCarthy. He practiced what he preached. Was Cohn right? There is a lot of evidence that he was. But existing evidence is preliminary, and it does not involve presidents, let alone Trump. If a president, particularly this president, does something offensive or horrifying, is he better off if he says that he is sorry? And if not, why not? With the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I recently investigated these questions. I asked about 400 demographically diverse Americans how they would react if Trump apologized for his recent tweet suggesting that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries from which they “originally came.”

The industrialization of synthetic biology is possible thanks to the same trend that has supercharged computing power...In the future, everyone might be an amateur synthetic biologist, programming the matter of life. If digital apps on our smartphones have transformed how we live and work, imagine what biological apps might do. It could be something as domestic as engineering a houseplant that rarely needed watering, or something as transformative as creating new forms of life...Even the advanced biotechnology of the future will require more expertise than pushing a button on a cellphone—but perhaps not that much more, and certainly far less than is required to use current weapons of mass destruction. “What we now have [with biotechnology] is the mirror opposite of nuclear weapons, which require great infrastructure, access to controlled materials and knowledge that you can’t simply go and look up online,” said Gabriella Blum, a professor at Harvard Law School and the coauthor of the book “The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat.” “So we ask ourselves: What’s people’s propensity to inflict harm, and in what ways?”

The Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos are urging a California federal court not to lift a stay in a proposed class action over collection of student loans from former students of Corinthian College, saying the court should wait for the Ninth Circuit to decide on the government's appeal of an injunction order in the case...Eileen M. Connor of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, representing the students, said they are not swayed by the department's arguments. "The filing confirms that the department has repeatedly violated the court's injunction by putting student accounts back into repayment," Connor told Law360 on Tuesday. "This causes significant confusion and distress for former Corinthian students, who were told years ago that they are entitled to have their loans fully canceled. We are interested in proceeding as quickly as possible to resolve their legal claims."

Despite President Trump’s efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations on fuel efficiency standards, California just made a deal with four automakers to continue reducing emissions. The Trump administration has targeted 80 plus environmental regulations involving air and water pollution, drilling, toxic chemicals, and protecting land and wildlife.  We start this hour with a look at the White House attempt to weaken environmental rules, how far they’ve gotten, and the legal challenges they’re facing with JODY FREEMAN, professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School. Then, can you imagine living without any plastic? No plastic bags, plastic containers, plastic toothbrushes or shampoo bottles? Some people are trying to go plastic-free but with varying success. Plastic is everywhere. We’ll talk about the challenges of trying not to use plastic, if it’s worth the effort, and get tips for your next trip to the supermarket. Our guest is DIANNA COHEN, co-founder and CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Today the Federal Reserve announced its first rate cut in more than 10 years. Despite knowing what to expect today, we don’t know much about how the members of the Federal Open Market Committee make decisions. So we called up Daniel Tarullo, who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board for eight years and now teaches at Harvard Law School. Tarullo was in the room when former Chair Janet Yellen announced the beginning of a cycle of rate increases in 2015. “I suspect not only the action but the allocation of votes has been known by the chairman for a week or more,” said Tarullo. Getting those votes, Tarullo said, is a big part of Chair Jerome Powell’s job. “The Fed chair really needs to act a bit more like the chair of an econ department than the boss of a company,” said Tarullo. “He or she has a bunch of independent-minded, smart people who need to be brought along to something resembling a consensus. And it actually takes a lot of work.”

A federal judge ruled last year that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ delays of an Obama-era regulation aimed at forgiving the student debt of defrauded students were illegal. Still, advocates say, the department continues to neglect the applications of those like Marler. More than 180,000 claims for student debt forgiveness remain “pending” and no borrower has had their request approved or denied in more than a year.“The Department of Education under Betsy DeVos is just ignoring the claims,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which is currently suing DeVos. “These people can’t plan for the future. “They’re losing faith in the government.” Nearly 900 former for-profit school students recently described the consequences of their education to the Project in written testimonies. Their stories make clear that a few years at a bad school can cast a shadow over the rest of someone’s life.

Mary Ann Glendon is the chair of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, announced by Secretary Pompeo on July 8, 2019, to great controversy. The commission was charged with examining the bases of human rights claims and the extent to which they are or are not rooted in the American rights tradition. The response of the human rights community was swift and fierce, with a lot of skepticism, a lot of anger, and a lot of criticism. Mary Ann Glendon, the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, sat down with Jack Goldsmith to discuss the commission, what it is and isn't looking at, and why examining the root bases of human rights claims is a worthwhile endeavor for a State Department commission.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  “I told you so.” That is what some progressives are saying about bipartisan policies that Democratic presidents carried over from their Republican predecessors and that the Trump administration is sometimes putting in a less-than-wonderful light. A case in point: cost-benefit analysis.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  At the Democratic debate this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren won loud applause, and helped define the Democratic presidential race, when she exclaimed, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” It was a powerful moment. But it fits with a strategy, now prominent on the left, of characterizing reform-minded pragmatism as a form of cowardice, a capitulation to the right, a demonstration of spinelessness, a Republican talking point or a failure of nerve or character, rather than what it usually is: a matter of principle.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  It’s not often that an act of statutory interpretation says something fundamental about who we want to be as a country. But in the Donald Trump era, the application of immigration law has become a touchstone of our collective identity. And so a decision by Attorney General William Barr that restricts the scope of who can get asylum under the Immigration and Nationality Act has consequences and meaning beyond the people whose lives it will immediately affect.

Books by Cass Sunstein, Mihir Desai, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Richard Fallon.

Harvard Law School today announced the launch of the new Animal Law & Policy Clinic...The clinic will be part of the Animal Law & Policy Program, led by Faculty Director Professor Kristen Stilt. Announcing the clinic, Stilt said: “The Animal Law & Policy Clinic at HLS will train and prepare our graduates to embark on careers in the animal protection field, produce impactful litigation and policy analysis to benefit the animal protection movement, and provide an internationally renowned platform for educating the broader public about the many pressing issues involving animal law and policy.” The clinic will be led by Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor Katherine Meyer and Clinical Instructor Nicole Negowetti. Recent HLS graduate Kate Barnekow ’19 will be returning to serve as the first Clinical Fellow, and Sarah Pickering will be joining the team as Communications Manager for both the clinic and the program...“Animal law is a vitally important and rapidly growing field,” said Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85. “Our new Animal Law & Policy Clinic will  give students real-world experience in this burgeoning field, build on Harvard Law School’s long tradition of innovative pedagogy, and prepare future graduates to address significant societal challenges. I am delighted to welcome Katherine Meyer to the Harvard Law School community and congratulate her, Kristen Stilt, and Nicole Negowetti on the launch of this terrific initiative.”