Media Mentions

Students enrolling at Harvard’s Business School, Law School, and Graduate School of Education (HBS, HLS, HGSE) for M.B.A., J.D. and LL.M., and Ed.M. degrees now can—and in some cases must—begin their programs of study before matriculating. Making use of the summer before the new academic year, each school has linked a new kind of instruction with online technology to introduce entering students to content critical to their coursework and, for HBS and HLS, their distinctive pedagogies...Shortly after he became dean of the law school in mid 2017, as part of his plans for online education, John F. Manning expressed interest in developing a common learning experience “meant to ensure that all incoming students, whatever their backgrounds and previous areas of study, start with the foundational knowledge that will enable them to thrive at HLS,”as a Harvard Law Today (HLT) report put it...Attwood and Williams professor of law I. Glenn Cohen, who had taught an online course on the HarvardX platform and also leads a first-year section, was tapped to lead the faculty group developing a pilot program—not least, he said, because he “thought it was a supercool project.” One reason for that, Cohen explained, derived from his own “origin story”: he was a first-generation college student, too (neither parent finished high school); there were no lawyers in his family; because he had studied bioethics (philosophy) and psychology, coming to HLS was a “big transition” (he is J.D. ’03); and as a native of Canada, “I knew nothing about the U.S. legal system.”

Last month, Roxanne Armbruster joined Harvard Law School as assistant dean and chief human resources officer. She brings a wealth of private and public sector experience to the position, having served as director of business operations at Ropes & Gray in Boston, as human resources business partner at TJX Companies and as a yeoman for eight years in the U.S. Coast Guard. In a conversation with Harvard Law Today, she talks about her wide-ranging career experiences, from tending buoys in Maine to building an HR business partner model in Boston.

Harvard Law School has announced the launch of its new animal law and policy clinic, as the number of institutions in the states offering Animal Law courses skyrockets. The new clinic, part of the school's Animal Law & Policy Program, covers a range of issues 'affecting farmed animals, wildlife, animals in captivity, and the overarching threat to all forms of life from climate change'...The clinic will be led by Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor Katherine Meyer and Clinical Instructor Nicole Negowetti, while recent HLS graduate Kate Barnekow JD '19 will be returning as the first Clinical Fellow, and Sarah Pickering will be joining the team as Communications Manager. "Animal law is a vitally important and rapidly growing field," said Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning. "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."

President Trump stepped into another controversy of his own making Monday by suggesting the U.S. could host world leaders at his golf resort outside Miami for next year's Group of Seven (G-7) summit. If Trump were to make his resort the meeting venue, his critics argue it would be another clear violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting payments from foreign countries, U.S. states or the federal government. ... Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor, tweeted that Trump’s pitch was “Emolumentally clear! Trump keeps proving that he is deliberately violating the Constitution’s main safeguard against financial corruption and compromise of presidential decisions by foreign powers.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed a $16.3 trillion climate plan Thursday, an expansive blueprint meant to enlarge American ambitions on combating planetary warming in a presidential campaign already marked by aggressive Democratic approaches...“I see these proposals as both markers and mobilizing tools,” said Jody Freeman, who was a climate adviser to Obama and now teaches at Harvard Law School. “They are a marker that says, ‘We care about climate change. We really, really do.’ And they are a mobilizing tool because we are in a primary and the idea is to try to attract the left side of the spectrum.”

Early Wednesday morning, federal agents arrested the former president of the Massachusetts State Police union and the group's Beacon Hill lobbyist at their respective houses in Worcester and Hull. The Massachusetts U.S. attorney is charging Dana Pullman and Anne Lynch with conspiracy and obstruction of justice — accusing the two of running a scheme that gathered thousands of dollars in illegal kickbacks. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notified local immigration attorneysthat asylum officers from Boston will be sent to the southwest border with Mexico to address the influx of asylum seekers there. It's a move Boston immigration attorneys say will impact their clients' chances of asylum. Guests [include]...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, WBUR legal analyst.

A recent op-ed from a progressive advocacy group that called on future Democratic presidents to shut Big Law partners out of consideration for the federal judiciary has prompted an uproar of opposition in some corners of the bar while others are nodding their heads. Law professors, plaintiffs-side trial lawyers, students, public defenders and Big Law lawyers have taken to social media in the past two days to express a full range of feelings on a proposal appearing in the Atlantic by the group Demand Justice to cut “corporate” lawyers from Democratic presidential hopefuls’ lists of potential nominees to the bench...Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, agreed that diverse backgrounds should be a factor for considering future judges, but also spoke out against a bright-line rule against Big Law. She chairs a committee that advises Massachusetts’ senators on good picks for the federal bench, and she noted that it has put forth employment lawyers, environmental lawyers and other nontraditional candidates because it has cast a wide net.

Earlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report highlighting the enormous environmental impact of agriculture. But the report also pointed to a clear way for us to feed more mouths without causing more planetary destruction: We can stop wasting food...Standardizing date labels could also make a difference. They became common in the 1970s as a marker of food quality, but many of us today wrongly assume that once the “sell by” date has passed, the food’s spoiled. In fact, these dates are often a manufacturer’s arbitrary estimate of when the food will taste most fresh — and different states have different standards. The result is we throw out loads of food that’s still fine to eat, according to Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food and Policy Clinic.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday rolled out an ambitious plan to strengthen organized labor in the United States, setting a goal of doubling union membership in his first term as president...The plan “is an important recognition of the fact that tinkering around the edges isn’t going to be enough to return power to American workers in our economy,” said Sharon Block, a former National Labor Relations Board member appointed by President Barack Obama, who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

It is no longer so unusual for people to show spontaneous online appreciation for the place they work — or, more often, the people they work with. But when Amazon “fulfilment centre ambassadors” took to social media this month to defend the company against criticism of working conditions, Twitter’s inauthenticity klaxon sounded immediately. Amazon has been coy about the details, stating the ambassadors — who first became visible a year ago — are real warehouse staff and part of a wider education programme that also includes tours of fulfilment centres. Twitter users dealt with this creepy public relations campaign in the way they know best, trolling Amazon’s dime-a-dozen diplomats and imitating the accounts so it became impossible to distinguish reality from parody. Terri Gerstein, a former labour lawyer now at Harvard Law School, pointed out on Slate that the initiative was part of a more general rise in “ventriloquist employers” that use “workers as a prop to serve company interests”.

Nathan Carman is either a criminal mastermind, or the victim of a series of unfortunate, fatal events. His aunts say he shot his multimillionaire grandfather to death in 2013, and killed his mother on a fishing trip in 2016 to get a portion of the family’s $44 million estate. But 25-year-old Carman has so far eschewed criminal charges, let alone gone to criminal court...After a six year legal battle that depicts the inner workings of an upper-class New England family, which feels like something out of the show Revenge, what finally lured Carmen to a witness stand in Rhode Island’s federal courthouse Thursday, was an $85,000 boat insurance claim...Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor and former federal judge, also says Carman’s testimony in the boat insurance trial “could be used in the homicide case” and handed over to a prosecutor. And Carman could have avoided all of this if he backed down from the $85,000 claim. But he didn’t.

Newspaper publisher Conrad Black, who disagrees with just about everything she does and believes, says, “she would get my vote as an ecumenical saint.” Alan Dershowitz, who disagrees with only most of what she does and believes, says he would “trade her for two American Supreme Court justices and a draft choice to be named later.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who probably agrees with her on just about everything, says she is “proud to count her among dearest sisters-in-law.”...Martha Minow, onetime dean of Harvard Law School, calls her work “pathbreaking.

Controversy over laws prohibiting members of the Electoral College from voting their conscience rather than the presidential candidate who won their state appears headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. A challenge is likely now that a federal appellate ruling this week split the courts over whether states can lawfully remove or sanction “faithless electors,” or those who stray. An unsual number did so in 2016 in the election of President Donald Trump. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who founded the progressive non-profit Equal Citizens, said Electoral College outcomes are going to get closer, raising the possibility of a small number of electors changing an outcome. “Whether you think that’s a good system or not, we believe it is critical to resolve it before it would decide an election,” Lessig said.

An article by Noah Feldman:  Democrats are talking seriously about ending the legislative filibuster once and for all, effectively changing the number of Senate votes required to pass a bill from 60 to 51. The result would be a transformation in the way the U.S. Senate has operated for well over a century and a half. This may seem like a terrible idea, robbing the Senate of its traditional role as a moderating influence on legislative enthusiasms. Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to think so, writing Thursday in the New York Times that Democrats would “regret it a lot sooner than they think.” But consider that it might be a good idea to make the Senate reflect the will of the public more than it has traditionally done. Entrenching minority veto power can certainly have moderating effects. It also blocks one of the most basic principles of democracy: the idea of majority rule.

An article by Noah Feldman:  A federal appeals court has held that members of the Electoral College have a constitutional right to vote for a different presidential candidate than the one they swore to support — and whom the voting public in their states actually chose. It’s a terrible holding. Inventing a right to be a faithless elector invites chaos, elevates formalism over democracy, and shows how indefensible originalism is when applied to evolving norms of democracy.

In a ruling that kicks at the foundation of how America chooses presidents, a federal appeals court on Tuesday said members of the Electoral College, who cast the actual votes for president, may choose whomever they please regardless of a state’s popular vote...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who founded the group that brought the case, Equal Citizens, said it was the first time a federal appeals court had ruled on whether electors could be bound in how they vote. Many states, including Colorado, have laws requiring electors to pledge that they will support the winner of the popular vote. The Constitution is mute on the subject. The appeals court noted that a handful of faithless electors have broken pledges to vote with their state’s majority since the presidential election of 1796. Equal Citizens wants the Supreme Court to review the issue before the 2020 election. Because of hyper-partisanship and demographic changes pushing the country into near evenly divided camps, Mr. Lessig said, soon there very likely will be a presidential election that yields a tie or near tie in the Electoral College. Then, many more electors other than Mr. Baca may seek to influence the results, producing chaos. “Whatever side you’re on, whether you think it’s a good or bad idea for electors to have freedom, the question ought to be resolved before there is a constitutional crisis,” Mr. Lessig said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed a $16.3 trillion climate plan Thursday, an expansive blueprint meant to enlarge American ambitions on combating planetary warming in a presidential campaign already marked by aggressive Democratic approaches...“I see these proposals as both markers and mobilizing tools,” said Jody Freeman, who was a climate adviser to Obama and now teaches at Harvard Law School. “They are a marker that says, ‘We care about climate change. We really, really do.’ And they are a mobilizing tool because we are in a primary and the idea is to try to attract the left side of the spectrum.”

An article by Randall Kennedy:  ‘How to Be an Antiracist” is a memoir by Ibram X. Kendi that details his grapplings with racism and his advice for eliminating it. Kendi is the director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University and the author of “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. Kendi’s latest book describes his peregrinations as a child and early adolescent in predominantly black, urban settings in New York; as an anxious student at the predominantly white Stonewall Jackson High School in Northern Virginia; as a journalism major at the virtually all-black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University; and as a PhD candidate in the African American studies department at Temple University. Kendi dissects what he sees as his own racism in each of these phases of his life.

Hours after China announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods on Friday, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. companies to “start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”...Trump could treat China more like Iran and order sanctions, which would involve declaring a national emergency under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA...Invoking IEEPA could also trigger legal challenges in U.S. courts, said Mark Wu, a professor of international trade at Harvard Law School...A far more dramatic measure, albeit highly unlikely, would be to invoke the Trading with the Enemy Act, which was passed by Congress during World War One. The law allows the U.S. president to regulate and punish trade with a country with whom the United States is at war. Trump is unlikely to invoke this law because it would sharply escalate tensions with China, said Wu. “It would be a much more dramatic step to declare China to be an enemy power with which the U.S. is at war, given the president has at times touted his friendship with and respect for President Xi (Jinping),” said Wu. “That would amount to an overt declaration, while IEEPA would allow the Trump administration to take similar actions without as large of a diplomatic cost.”

... How did special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony before Congress help or hurt the quest to impeach Donald Trump? Did Mueller reveal the entire truth about Donald Trump and his inner circle's collusion with Russia, obstruction of justice and other probable crimes? Are the Democrats approaching the impeachment of Donald Trump in a tactically and strategically sound manner? How would the framers of our Constitution respond to Donald Trump's behavior as president? Have the Constitution's structural flaws allowed Trump to undermine American democracy and the rule of law? In an effort to answer these questions and many others, I recently spoke with Laurence Tribe, a leading scholar of constitutional law and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Tribe is the author of several books, including his most recent (co-written with Joshua Matz), "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment."