Media Mentions

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.”

The future of the U.S. power grid may ride in part on an obscure tussle over transmission in the Lone Star State. Front and center is a new law in Texas — enacted as S.B. 1938 — that gives incumbent utilities first dibs on building new transmission lines. Critics say the measure effectively cuts out new entrants, clashes with the state's history of competition and could raise the costs of transmission projects that factor into consumers' power bills. Proponents counter that the language preserves Texas' approach to electricity and should help ensure reliability and affordability..."As competitive transmission expands, it's certainly plausible that other utilities will go to their state legislatures and ask for this kind of protection," said Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Initiative

T-Mobile screwed over millions of customers when it collected their geolocation data and sold it to third parties without their consent. Now, two of these customers are trying to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company for the shady practice, but the telecom giant is using another shady practice to force them to settle their dispute behind closed doors...T-Mobile, as well as other massive corporations, can lean on this mechanism to legally prevent individuals from both grouping together under a common mission as well as shield disputes from the public—just as Amazon has done with its terms of service, for example. “A lot of wrongdoing and harmful practices get protected or suppressed as a result of that,” Deepak Gupta, an attorney teaching a forced arbitration seminar at Harvard Law School, told Gizmodo in May.

When Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman returned from the first voyage that orbited the moon, he addressed Congress to talk about the feat. Except he didn’t have the words to describe it in the way he wished he could, calling himself an “unlikely poet, or no poet at all.” So the astronaut instead recited the words of a poet to express the awe he felt looking down upon the planet we all call home: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”  Those words were by Archibald MacLeish LL.B. 1919, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, playwright and lawyer who a half century ago served as a literary interpreter of events beyond the imagination of most observers...On the...[day after the Apollo 11 landing], the [New York] Times presented the biggest headline in its history on its front page, which included two bylines. One was of a science reporter who wrote the news story. The other: Archibald MacLeish. As former Times editor A. M. Rosenthal later revealed: “What the poet wrote would count most, but we also wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day and perhaps you don’t either, so here is a fellow, a poet, who will try for all of us.”

Champions of human rights around the world are reacting with understandable suspicion to Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo’s announcement that he is creating a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” that will “ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.” Pompeo said the commission — which will be headed by Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican during the George W. Bush administration — wouldn’t opine on policy.

A letter to the editor by 19 Boston area faculty members, including Laurence Tribe, Dehlia Umunna, and David Harris.  WE ARE 19 FACULTY MEMBERS at universities across the Boston area, including Boston College, Boston University, Harvard University, and Northeastern University. We wish to respond to The Boston Globe’s recent article, “Stopping injustice or putting the public at risk? Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins’s tactics spur pushback,” which contained reporting that appears to us to be, at best, seriously misleading.

“Bear with me,” Jonathan Zittrain urged the audience as his talk — up to this point, a romp through the early history of the internet — lurched into Kantian philosophy: “I’m about to get all ‘East Coast’ on you.” Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, was in Palo Alto, Calif., delivering an energetic presentation on the ethical responsibilities of tech companies toward consumers in the era of artificial intelligence. About the shift of technology environments from unowned to owned and tightly controlled, he asked, “When is it that ‘can’ implies ‘ought’?” His provocative keynote was the culmination of a Harvard Tech Startup Night hosted by Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD) and the law firm WilmerHale at its Palo Alto offices.

The State Department established a new group to examine and define human rights, drawing skepticism from critics who worried the Trump administration was furthering its conservative political agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday the Commission on Unalienable Rights will conduct “an informed review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy” and provide him with “advice on human rights grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”...The new commission will be headed by human rights scholar Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Ms. Glendon said the commission will begin its work at a time when “basic human rights are being misunderstood by many, manipulated by many, and ignored by the world’s worst human rights violators.”

The Trump administration said Monday that it will review the role of human rights in American foreign policy, appointing a commission expected to elevate concerns about religious freedom and abortion. Human rights groups accused the administration of politicizing foreign policy in a way that could undermine protections for marginalized populations, including the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Democratic senators have raised concerns about the panel’s intent and composition, fearing it would consist of members who “hold views hostile to women’s rights” and blow away existing standards and definitions...The commission will be chaired by Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. A conservative scholar and author, Glendon turned down an honor from Notre Dame the year President Barack Obama gave a commencement address there, protesting the school’s decision to recognize him in spite of his support for abortion rights...Glendon, who joined Pompeo at the State Department for the announcement, said she was honored to do the job at a time when “basic human rights are being misunderstood by many, manipulated by many and ignored by the world’s worst human rights violators.”