Media Mentions

It looks like Northern Pass is really dead this time: The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Friday upheld the project’s rejection last year by the state Site Evaluation Committee. “We have reviewed the record and conclude that the Subcommittee’s findings are supported by competent evidence and are not erroneous as a matter of law,” Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi wrote in the unanimous decision. The ruling leaves no obvious way forward for the 192-mile transmission line carrying almost a Seabrook Station’s worth of electricity down from Quebec hydropower plants, ending almost a decade of often-contentious debate. ... “Really hard to beat the state in court on a siting denial,” wrote Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, in response to the ruling.

An op-ed by Chelsea Barabas, Karthik Dinakar and Colin Doyle [staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program]: We can’t end mass incarceration without first changing what happens before trial. On any given day, the United States incarcerates nearly half a million people who have only been accused of a crime and await their day in court. In response, many cities and counties have started to use algorithms that try to predict people’s future criminal behavior, known as actuarial risk assessments. As researchers in the fields of sociology, data science and law, we believe pretrial risk assessment tools are fundamentally flawed. They give judges recommendations that make future violence seem more predictable and more certain than it actually is. In the process, risk assessments may perpetuate the misconceptions and fears that drive mass incarceration.

A group of libertarian and conservative lawyers that formed to counter alleged transgressions of legal norms by the Trump administration issued a statement Monday condemning tweets from the president that urged four minority female Democratic House members to “go back” to their home countries. Trump’s tweets, saying four freshmen members of the U.S. House should “fix” their home countries before criticizing the U.S., deeply angered Democrats but left Republicans largely silent. All four of the lawmakers are U.S. citizens, and three of them were born in the United States...In addition to George Conway, of counsel to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, other signatories included Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried, a former Reagan administration U.S. solicitor general...

President Donald Trump this week claimed he won an emoluments case brought against him after a federal appeals court dismissed the lawsuit. A Harvard law professor and constitutional expert says that's "bullshit." ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe fired back at Trump, noting that the president didn't win the lawsuit at all. "It's all bullshit, of course. He didn't 'win'," tweeted Tribe, explaining that the appellate panel had merely ruled that D.C. and Maryland lacked standing to bring the action. "[A]nd he's still using the Oval Office to rob us blind and fill his coffers with piles of rubles that put him in debt to our adversaries," Tribe continued.

The National Labor Relations Board’s ruling last week that made it easier for employers to oust unions marked at least the 10th time during the Trump administration that the NLRB settled case law without giving prior notice or an opportunity for public input, according to a review of decisions. The Republican-controlled NLRB’s ruling also overturned precedent for employers withdrawing recognition of unions in its July 3 decision in Johnson Controls without being asked to do so by the parties in the case. The board has similarly overturned prior decisions on its own initiative in most of those cases in which it didn’t request public briefing. Not providing notice or inviting additional input en route to overruling precedent without being asked feeds criticism that the Trump NLRB is advancing its pro-management agenda more aggressively than past boards pushed their policy priorities...The NLRB has invited briefing in at least four cases since Republicans took control of the board in 2017. The Obama board more frequently sought outside views. It called for public briefing a dozen times from 2014 to 2016, for example. "It’s a norm to allow the public to weigh in for a reason,” said Sharon Block, a former Democratic board member. “It’s a really important part of the process. The current board certainly hasn’t provided a good reason for breaking with that norm.”

President Trump has struck out in the courts on his effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling essentially called out Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for giving a false excuse for including the question.  ...Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe reiterates, “In my view, the president does not have either inherent or statutory authority to add the citizenship question by unilateral executive action. Article I of the Constitution — both textually and historically as well as structurally — manifestly assigns census matters to Congress.” He adds, “The 14th Amendment doesn’t alter that assignment but reinforces it. Article II does not give the president any role in this area beyond whatever role Congress delegates to him.” He concludes that Trump could not “could succeed along this path in getting the existing district court injunctions lifted.” Moreover, the existing ruling from the federal courts — preventing the inclusion of the census question — remain in effect.

As index investing giants exert a stronger grip on public companies, they have an opportunity to change the way such companies do business for the better. But according to new research, the indexing giants may not be doing such a good job. A new report from The Wall Street Journal cites researchers Lucian Bebchuk, professor of law, economics and finance at Harvard Law School, and Scott Hirst, law professor at Boston University School of Law. The duo recently published two papers on the power held and wielded by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street over US public companies. “Together, [they] control an average of one in five shares of S&P 500 companies, and that portion is likely to jump to more than 33% of shares over the next two decades,” the Journal said, citing a working paper issued in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The three fund managers also reportedly own 16.5% of shares in members of the Russell 3000 index, and could grow to hold 30.1% over the next two decades.

Emily Doe was nearly exiled from Maplewood, Missouri, because crisis hotline volunteers sent police to her home too many times within one year. Emily, who’s bipolar and suffers from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, called a crisis hotline because she was suicidal. Crisis volunteers sent emergency personnel to her house on three different occasions, and in one instance, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation and treatment. For doing what’s medically recommended — that is, calling for help — Emily received a citation and summons from the City of Maplewood to attend an ordinance enforcement hearing for “generating too many calls for police services.” Had the city determined her a “chronic nuisance,” officials would have not only evicted Emily but revoked her occupancy permit, effectively exiling her from the community for at least six months. “It’s just so callous it’s hard to believe,” said [Harvard Law School student] Sejal Singh, co-author of a new paper titled “When Disability Is a ‘Nuisance'” and published Monday in Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

An article by Harvard Law School students Jarwala Alisha and Sejal Singh.  Jane*, a resident of Bedford, Ohio, called 911 asking for help because she believed her boyfriend was suicidal. The police responded, wrote a report, and left. But the next day, Jane’s landlord got a fine and a form letter from the town’s chief of police ordering the landlord to stop the 911 calls coming from her home. Bedford had flagged Jane’s home a few months earlier because she had previously called the police when her boyfriend threatened to kill himself. When Jane called again, the city fined her landlord $250. Facing further fines and even a potential misdemeanor charge, the landlord began eviction proceedings against Jane—all because she called for help.

Soon-to-be Harvard Law School student Olivia Castor says she has "strong feelings" about the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT. First, it was expensive. She dropped about $300 on prep books and practice tests and paid about $2,000 for private tutoring. Castor took the LSAT last summer and says for about four months preparing for the exam practically took over her life..."Accepting the GRE is part of a larger strategy here in our office to be constantly innovating and thinking about ways to make a Harvard Law School education more accessible to any applicant," says Kristi Jobson, the assistant dean for admissions. The need for more diversity in the legal profession is something she takes personally. "As a practicing attorney myself and as a woman in the profession, I can tell you riding the elevator up a fancy New York City law firm, you feel it," she says. "And walking down the courtroom hallway, you feel the lack of diversity in the profession."

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Suppose that in the coming decades, Americans have a moral awakening with respect to the consumption of meat. Suppose they conclude that eating meat is a grievous moral wrong, above all because it promotes cruelty to animals, but also because it contributes to environmental problems, including climate change. That could happen. Many observers think that with the rise of plant-based meat alternatives such as the Impossible Burger, people will eventually be shocked and outraged that their parents and grandparents used to raise animals for food, allow them to suffer, and then eat them — without the slightest moral compunction. If so, political candidates would undoubtedly be called to account for their onetime eating habits.

An article by Noah Feldman:  It’s gratifying when the courts stand up to President Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power. But the federal appeals court that held Tuesday that Trump can’t block users from his personal Twitter account doesn’t fit into that paradigm. Although its decision will be hailed by some as a win for free expression, it’s actually based on a misconception about our social media accounts — one the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to fix. Here’s the basic problem: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit assumed in its opinion that Trump’s Twitter account was either “private” — in effect, Trump’s own property to do with as he wishes — or else “public,” in the sense that the account was a government-controlled space in which the First Amendment should apply...The reality, however, is that Trump’s Twitter account isn’t his private property or a government-controlled space. It’s something else: property controlled by Twitter Inc.

Life is complicated. And many D2C brands — and increasingly, more traditional companies trying to keep up with digital natives — succeed because they help eliminate the pain points or friction that behavioral economists simply call sludge. (Remember how tedious e-shopping was before one-click ordering? Or when you had to buy the whole CD?) But Cass Sunstein, now the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, says Americans are still buried under billions of hours of time-wasting annoyances.  Sunstein, a former White House paperwork reduction reformer, recommends companies conduct regular sludge audits to make sure they’re eliminating as many pain points — and as much friction — as possible.  Still, such a task isn’t easy. He tells D2C FYI why simplifying is so complicated

The Trump administration is on the verge of signing a “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, sources have confirmed to the Prospect. Asylum seekers attempting to enter the United States would be forced to file in Guatemala instead, on the grounds that it would be the first “safe” country they arrived in. Because most asylum seekers are coming from the south, this would allow the U.S. to send thousands of asylum seekers at the southern border back to Guatemala, and render them ineligible to apply for refugee status in the U.S...But experts like Deborah Anker, a Harvard law professor who focuses on asylum, believe that the flow of migrants would eventually continue. She tells the Prospect: “The reality is that people will keep trying to find a way to come because it’s a life or death situation for them and their families. But the Trump administration is trying to get around this by having this agreement.”

For all of its upsides, scientists such as the late Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could destroy mankind. At Harvard Medical School’s 2019 Precision Medicine conference, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain compared AI to asbestos: “It turns out that it’s all over the place, even though at no point did you explicitly install it, and it has possibly some latent bad effects that you might regret later, after it’s already too hard to get it all out.” He also noted that AI can be tricked, according to a story from Stat, citing a Google algorithm that correctly identified a tabby cat. When some pixels were changed, the algorithm thought the kitty was — no joke — guacamole.

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that President Donald Trump couldn’t block his critics on Twitter. More specifically, the court determined that Trump’s Twitter account is a “public forum” where citizens have a right to engage with his comments, the same way they’d be able to attend a town hall. This ruling could shape how all government officials use social media — from the US president to local garbage collectors...Kendra Albert, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, believes the Second Circuit’s decision is unnecessarily ambiguous. The Trump administration has argued that its account is government speech, or speech that the government is performing on its own behalf, which isn’t regulated by the First Amendment. Albert argues that the original ruling clearly separated the account’s “government speech” content from the interactive forum in the replies. “The lower court decision actually does a really good job of explaining why it matters that people are blocked, even if they can just log out of Twitter and see the president’s tweets otherwise,” Albert said, “and it’s because there’s sort of this discursive space going on underneath the tweet.”

The mission of a new panel created to advise the State Department on the definition of human rights and its role in American diplomacy may stand in conflict with what some of its members have said in the past...While Pompeo has insisted that the goal is to prevent authoritarian regimes from redefining human rights on their own terms, Mary Ann Glendon — the incoming chair, a Harvard Law professor and a former U.S. ambassador — recently advocated an approach of “flexible universalism,” in which she advises human rights activists to give more weight to local governments’ own traditions when appealing to them on the grounds of human rights.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig:  Gerrymandering is obviously democratically obnoxious. With modern technologies, it’s also increasingly democratically dangerous. It is inconsistent with the principles of equality and free association. Without doubt, it should be excised from our republic. Yet the fury generated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s opinion last month declining to end the practice shows precisely why Roberts may have been right.

For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous...For Pompeo, religious rights are plainly human rights; as to the rest, it’s unclear. As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  Since the April release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, debate has escalated among Democrats in the House of Representatives over the question of impeachment. A lot of the discussion has focused on political questions. Which party would benefit? Is it a serious problem that impeachment proceedings would be, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has suggested, “divisive”? Is impeachment a criminal or a “political” proceeding? It certainly isn’t a criminal proceeding, and it has an inescapable political component. But under the Constitution, impeachment is fundamentally a question of law, not politics. If, after assessing the facts, the House concludes that a president — Democratic or Republican — has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” then impeachment isn’t optional. In that event, the House has a duty to act, regardless of any potential political fallout.

Human rights group have lashed out at a new panel formed by the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which aims to reevaluate the role of the the State Department in dealing with human rights issues...The appointment of Pompeo’s former mentor, Mary Ann Glendon, to head the board has also alarmed human rights activists. A staunch conservative and Catholic activist, Glendon is the former ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican) under former President George W. Bush. A Harvard law professor who has written extensively against abortion rights, Glendon has supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. She’s also known for her opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS. In 2018, she received an award — the Evangelium Vitae Medal from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture — for her lifetime work as one of the “heroes of the pro-life movement.”