Media Mentions

Artificial intelligence is often hailed as a great catalyst of medical innovation, a way to find cures to diseases that have confounded doctors and make health care more efficient, personalized, and accessible. But what if it turns out to be poison? Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, posed that question during a conference in Boston Tuesday that examined the use of AI to accelerate the delivery of precision medicine to the masses. He used an alarming metaphor to explain his concerns: “I think of machine learning kind of as asbestos,” he said. “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.”

It turns out that the dates on our food labels do not have much to do with food safety. In many cases, expiration dates do not indicate when the food stops being safe to eat — rather, they tell you when the manufacturer thinks that product will stop looking and tasting its best. Some foods, such as deli meats, unpasteurized milk and cheese, and prepared foods such as potato salad that you do not reheat, probably should be tossed after their use-by dates for safety reasons. Tossing out a perfectly edible cup of yogurt every once in a while does not seem that bad. But it adds up. According to a survey by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and the National Consumers League, 84 percent of consumers at least occasionally throw out food because it is close to or past its package date, and over one third (37 percent) say they always or usually do so. That food waste in landfills generates carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And you are not just wasting calories and money...Emily Broad Leib, of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says that to have an effect, these changes need to be federally mandated. “We’re going to need the main government agencies that regulate food to be able to say: These are what these labels mean. When you see these on products, here’s what you should do, here’s how you should interpret them,” she said.

IIt is somewhere on the outer edges of conceivable that a sitting president will refuse to step down if he loses his re-election campaign. Nothing close to that has ever happened before. If that scenario plays out, America could still be saved from tyranny — but our democratic institutions would need to rise to the challenge. ..."There is no precedent for any such thing, any more than there is a precedent for the Trump presidency," Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "Exactly what would happen is hard to guess. At a minimum, we would be in a time of extraordinary danger and chaos. The very fact that one has to imagine a circumstance in which a president refuses to leave office after being lawfully defeated is more than enough to remind us of the existential danger posed by the current occupant of the Oval Office. ..."

An op-ed by Ronald Sullivan:  In May, Harvard College announced that it would not renew the appointment of me and my wife, Stephanie Robinson, as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses, because I am one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in advance of his coming sexual assault trial. The administration’s decision followed reports by some students that they felt “unsafe” in an institution led by a lawyer who would take on Mr. Weinstein as a client. I am willing to believe that some students felt unsafe. But feelings alone should not drive university policy. Administrators must help students distinguish between feelings that have a rational basis and those that do not. In my case, Harvard missed an opportunity to help students do that.

Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law and WBUR's Legal analyst joins us to discuss two Supreme Court decisions — Gundy v. United States and The American Legion v. American Humanist Association — and their implications.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In what is destined to become a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a World War I monument in the form of a large Latin cross in a public intersection in Bladensburg, Maryland. The controlling opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, flatly acknowledged that “the cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol.” But that wasn’t the end of the story, because the court also said the cross functioned as a monument, a symbol of the nation and a historical landmark. The opinion in American Legion v. American Humanist Association marks the first time the Supreme Court has squarely held that religious symbols dating back many decades should be evaluated under a different standard than newly erected ones.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is letting President Donald Trump know he can "get away with murder" by refusing to open an impeachment inquiry on him, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University opined Wednesday. Constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe admitted he is a lifelong Pelosi fan but agreed with George Conway, husband of Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, who criticized the House speaker for her continued stance against impeaching Trump. ... Tribe elaborated to Newsweek on Wednesday afternoon that George Conway is right and Pelosi is wrong "because both the Constitution and common sense tell us you don't refuse to convene a formal process to investigate a serious crime just because it looks like the criminal has the jurors in his hip pocket."

An article by Cass Sunstein:  If we are living through historic events, would we know? In 1965, Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia University, argued that it is impossible to tell, when you’re in the midst of things, whether an event is going to be deemed “historic” by future historians. If something happens – Russia successfully reclaims Crimea, for example, or Pete Buttigieg declares that he’s running for president – its ultimate significance will be determined by causal chains that cannot possibly be anticipated, and by an assortment of events that have yet to take place.

The Harvard Law professor whose planned legal defense of accused rapist Harvey Weinstein caused a campus furor that cost him a faculty dean position wants to use the episode to restore academic freedom, he said Thursday evening. In his first remarks since he lost the deanship last month, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. said he envisions creating an institution that could work within and beyond Harvard to reform academia and restore reasoned discourse on campuses. It was unclear exactly what shape that might take. But with his wife, fellow Harvard Law professor Stephanie Robinson, he launched an online video to begin to marshal support...“Our firm belief is that universities are doing a disservice to its students to allow them to substitute emotion for rigor,” said Sullivan. “And part of our goal is to recenter the intellectual project at the university. It’s not just Harvard. We see this as a much more systemic problem. To the degree that we can use what happened with us to impact and change the ways in which universities are educating its students, then we’re happy to do that.”

Back in 2009, median pay for FTSE 100 bosses was £2.19m compared with £21,580 for the average UK worker. That meant the 2009 ratio of boss-to-worker pay was 102:1. Then, between 2009 and 2017, bosses’ median pay grew by 7.3 per cent a year while the average UK worker’s pay grew annually by just 1.8 per cent. The effect of those differing growth rates was to take the boss-to-worker ratio to 155:1...It would be fatuous to suggest that the average boss had somehow become 50 per cent more capable than the average worker in that period. Yet, in effect, this is what the apologists for UK corporate governance would have us believe...It fools no one. For example, Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School who specialises in executive pay, is in no doubt that rising executive pay since the 1980s is all about power and rent extraction under the cloak of corporate-governance rules. These rules are chiefly framed by what Professor Bebchuk labels “the optimal contracting approach”, which attempts to overcome the core problem present in almost every organisation, namely that the people hired to run it don’t have the same interests as the people who hired them.

A New Zealand court on Tuesday blocked a murder suspect’s extradition to China, the latest repudiation of a Chinese legal system under Communist Party control...In a strongly worded ruling, the New Zealand court ordered the country’s government to consider human rights risks in China before deciding that the suspect, Kyung Yup Kim, should be sent there...But in its 99-page judgment, it directed the justice minister in New Zealand’s current center-left government to determine whether China valued adherence to the international human rights agreements it had signed. The minister, Andrew Little, must address evidence that torture of prisoners in China persists and is difficult to detect, the panel of judges wrote. Mr. Little must also seek evidence about “the extent to which the judiciary is subject to political control.”...Tony Ellis [Human Rights Program Visiting Fellow], Mr. Kim’s lawyer, said Mr. Little faced “a difficult if not impossible task” in answering “the profound and important questions posed by the Court of Appeal.”

The Mexican government has lodged a “cultural appropriation” complaint against Carolina Herrera for its use of indigenous patterns and textiles in its Resort 2020 collection. Garments from the New York-based brand’s latest collection that “feature a traditional flower embroidery known as ‘istmo de Tehuantepec,” as well as those with “a colorful ‘Saltillo Sarape’ stripe pattern” have led the Mexican culture ministry and the fashion media, alike, to call foul. But legal experts suggest there is more to consider here...“In some countries, courts have construed existing intellectual property laws to establish modest limitations on uses of traditional knowledge,” according to William Fisher, a professor of intellectual property at Harvard Law. For instance, “Australian courts have ruled that the importation and sale of carpets bearing images derived from motifs developed by Aboriginal groups violated Australian copyright law.” Other countries, he notes, such as Philippines and Guatemala, “have created sui generis regimes that [exclusively] govern traditional knowledge.”

If you’ve ever found yourself in your local grocery store wondering what the difference is between “sell by,” “best by,” “expires by,” or “use by” food labels, you’re not alone.  That confusion contributes to American consumers trashing $161 billion in food each year. Yet most people might be surprised to know that these labels often have very little to do with food safety...Apart from infant formula, which is required by law to have a “use by” date, there has never been federal oversight over date labels. According to Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, one way large companies set dates is by hiring taste testers to sample a given product over different periods, and then report when they think something tastes stale or slightly off. And, “in states that require date labels on a lot of different foods, some small food companies that we talked to said, ‘We don’t have any money to do taste testing. We just pick a date out of thin air,’” Leib says. These estimates are typically conservative, so the quality of food may still be fine long past the various best-by dates, Leib explains.

Things sure aren’t sparkling. La Croix’s parent company National Beverages facing a new lawsuit after new allegations that the company’s president considered falsely claiming its drink containers were free of the toxic chemical BPA. The chemical is said to affect neurological development in children. Shares of National Beverage fell to a multiyear low on Wednesday on the news of a lawsuit against the company...La Croix has been no stranger to controversy over the last year...Last year a Chicago law firm filed a class action lawsuit. The suit alleged that La Croix misled consumers by labeling La Croix as “all natural” in which the lawsuit says the product is “manufactured using non-natural flavorings and synthetic compounds...Although it can be misleading to consumers, “The term natural has escaped an enforceable definition by the Food and Drug Administration” according to Nicole Negowetti of The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein and Brian Shearer:  Would it be ethical for a lawyer to draft an employment contract in which a fast food worker is paid not with money, but only in burgers and fries? What if the lawyer’s client—the employer—asked for it? Most lawyers would balk at fulfilling such a blatantly illegal request. Unfortunately, for years, many lawyers have done something very similar: They’ve routinely included clearly illegal or unenforceable terms—like bogus noncompete agreements—in worker contracts. Fortunately, someone is now asking questions about this practice. On Wednesday, the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego School of Law submitted a letter to the California State Bar requesting an ethics ruling to stop lawyers from writing employment contracts with clearly unenforceable terms. The California Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct should swiftly respond that such conduct is unethical.

The National Rifle Association spent growing sums on overhead in 2018 even as it cut money for core activities such as gun training and political efforts, ending the year deeper in debt, new financial documents show...Professor Howard E. Abrams, a tax expert at Harvard Law School, said the NRA’s spending on overhead was “extraordinarily high.” “It is surprising that an organization as well-known as the NRA would have to spend that much on administrative and fundraising costs,” he said. “That is money that isn’t going to legislative programs, safety and training programs, and other core activities. It is sort of a cost of running the business. But it is a big cost.”

Including environmental, social and governance considerations in investment decisions is becoming of paramount importance for the fund management industry. Moreover, those principles may be coming into force in asset allocation even faster than previously thought. A new survey of ESG adoption rates, from UBS Group AG’s asset management unit and Responsible Investor Research, covers more than 600 asset owners in 46 countries, responsible for more than 19 trillion euros ($21 trillion) of assets...Legally, trustees “must consider only the interests of the beneficiary,” Max Schanzenbach of Northwestern University and Robert Sitkoff of Harvard Law School wrote. That would bar a fund manager motivated purely by ethical considerations from allowing ESG concerns to steer investment decisions. If, however, the trustee is convinced that pursuing such an investment philosophy will generate higher returns, the legal requirement would be satisfied. But the professors warn that the evidence for that is far from conclusive. Studies “have exaggerated the potential for ESG factors to generate excess risk-adjusted returns, and have failed to appreciate the instability and lack of robustness in academic findings,” they wrote.

Lawrence Lessig has a twinge of regret about not joining the massive field of candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, so he’s doing the next best thing — starting a podcast to interview and cajole them to support his agenda of political reforms. The prominent Harvard Law School professor and political activist briefly ran for president in 2016, an experience that he describes as both “the worst of times” and “the coolest thing I've ever done.”...So instead, he’s using his new podcast to go deep with candidates on campaign finance reform, voting rights, gerrymandering and more, and to push what he calls "POTUS 1” — a play on the name of a similar bill House Democrats’ passed this year called HR1.

Alex Whiting has joined the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) as Head of Investigations. Whiting, 54, is a prosecutor of French and US nationality with extensive experience of both domestic and international prosecutions, including stints at both the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as well as a distinguished academic career, the SPO announced on Thursday. According to the SPO Whiting came to the SPO from Harvard Law School, where he had been a professor of practice since 2013.

In an interview with NPR, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) opined that if the facts warrant it, President Trump should be indicted for crimes outlined in Robert S. Mueller III’s report: "There has to be accountability," Harris added. "I mean look, people might, you know, question why I became a prosecutor. Well, I'll tell you one of the reasons — I believe there should be accountability. Everyone should be held accountable, and the president is not above the law." ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe agrees that another look at the OLC memo is needed. “The 2000 OLC memo, which basically echoed the 1973 OLC memo and its reasoning, should certainly be revisited by whatever presidential administration succeeds the one now in power. To begin with, the OLC memo was analytically flawed from the start and rested on a theory fundamentally incompatible with the core constitutional premise that nobody, and certainly no president, is above the law.”

President Trump has threatened to take legal action if Democrats try to impeach him, musing that he’ll “sue.” He has peppered confidants and advisers with questions about how an impeachment inquiry might unfold. And he has coined his own cheeky term — “the I-word” — to refer to the legal and political morass that threatens to overshadow his presidency as he heads into his 2020 reelection campaign. ... Trump’s assertions that he would sue to prevent impeachment have prompted some criticism in the legal community, with Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who has called for Trump’s impeachment, describing the idea as “idiocy” in a tweet. “Not even a SCOTUS filled with Trump appointees would get in the way of the House or Senate,” Tribe wrote.