Media Mentions

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.

An article by Noah Feldman:  It’s a great story: the Cherokee Nation is asserting its right to send a delegate to Congress under treaties dating back to 1785 and 1835. But it is also potentially a legal puzzle in the making. The 1785 treaty says the tribe is entitled to send a “deputy” to Congress whenever it wants. But that was before the Constitution, so “Congress” was a different body — and it isn’t clear what the role of a “deputy” would have been. A quasi-permanent presence of a Cherokee representative? Or simply someone who would show up on a one-time basis to speak on behalf of the tribe?

An article by Noah Feldman:  The news that an Oklahoma court is ordering Johnson & Johnson to pay $572 million for its part in feeding the opioid crisis probably comes as a surprise to no one familiar with the weird way the United States deals with crises. From IUDs to tobacco and beyond, Americans rely on self-interested plaintiffs’ lawyers to sue deep-pocketed manufacturers – and on state courts to impose big verdicts that are meant to redistribute wealth from companies and their shareholders to state taxpayers and (sometimes) victims. It’s worth pausing to notice the extremely bizarre structure of this uniquely American practice – and to wonder whether it achieves the social goal of creating incentives to avoid the next public health crisis.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner:  It doesn’t seem to matter who sits in the US attorney’s office when it comes to prosecuting union members or the politicians who advocate for them. Democratic appointee Carmen Ortiz prosecuted Joseph Burhoe and John Perry of Teamsters Local 82 for extorting nonunion employers to hire union workers at various fund-raising events. She also prosecuted four Teamsters in connection with the 2014 filming of the reality TV show “Top Chef.” While Ortiz began the prosecution of Walsh administration officials Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan for Hobbs Act violations in connection with their efforts to get union jobs at the Boston Calling music festival, the case against them was enthusiastically finished by Republican appointee Andrew Lelling.

The average business manages between 20,000 and 40,000 contracts at any given time. With that kind of volume, and the risk of compounding inefficiencies in time and cost, firms simply can’t afford to get contract management wrong...There is a key component of contracting, however, that is being overlooked—collaboration...Research from Harvard Law Distinguished Fellow Heidi Gardner has found that average revenue per customer rises among firms that have a high degree of collaboration. Better collaboration enables organizations to recognize and elevate employee contributions.

The president’s ability to index capital gains to inflation has been widely viewed as illegal, although supporters see hope in recent legal developments...Regardless of the legal questions, it’s unclear whether someone could show they were injured by the policy change in order to have standing to try to stop it in court. Hemel and Kamin identified at least one example that could meet standing requirements: if a taxpayer were to see their overall tax liability increase because indexing caused them to lose out on charitable giving deductions. This hypothetical seemed to fit into the traditional approach to standing in tax cases where a taxpayer is complaining about their own higher liability, according to Howard E. Abrams, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who agreed presidential indexing would be illegal.

A newly proposed Trump administration rule would allow for weaker monitoring of methane, a major greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. The proposed rule rolled out Thursday morning by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would eliminate current requirements on oil and gas companies to install technology to monitor methane emissions from pipelines, wells and facilities...“I would say it’s a lose-lose-lose. It’s a bad environmental outcome, it’s a bad outcome for what the industry itself is now saying it needs, and it’s pretty much outright sabotage of the EPA’s own legal authority and what the Clean Air Act was enacted to accomplish,” said Joseph Goffman, who helped develop the Obama-era regulations on methane at EPA and now serves as executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.

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. Mr. Barr booked the Presidential Ballroom at the Trump International Hotel for a 200-person holiday party that he holds every year. It could cost more than $30,000, according to a Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a nongovernment function. His decision to hold the event at the Trump hotel comes as the Justice Department works to defend Mr. Trump against charges that he is trying to profit from the presidency...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.