Media Mentions

An article by Noah Feldman: Chief Justice John Roberts split the baby — again. In a dramatic and complicated opinion in a much watched census case, he first held that the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was constitutionally and statutorily permissible and was supported by sufficient evidence. He was joined by the U.S. Supreme Court’s other conservatives. Then Roberts switched course. In a separate part of his opinion, in which he was joined by only the court’s four liberals, Roberts held that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross had not given his true reasons for wanting to ask about citizenship on the census, but had instead given a “pretext” — lawyer-speak for a lie. In this part of the decision, Roberts upheld U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman’s decision to send the census case back to the Commerce Department to give a new (and presumably honest) explanation for its actions.

An article by Noah Feldman: When the 2018 Supreme Court term began in October, all eyes were on the confirmation of the newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh. By the time the term wrapped up in June, the center of attention was Chief Justice John Roberts. And that’s where the focus is likely to stay as long as the court continues in this configuration. So far, the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy last summer has not had the effect of turning the court into a reliable forum for 5-4 decisions with the conservatives on top. Instead, Roberts seems to be embracing the role of the centrist — as he did most prominently in this term’s marquee case, blocking (at least temporarily) President Donald Trump’s administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Not every swing voter is the same, however. Roberts is extremely different from Kennedy.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Supreme Court term that ended this week had a large number of high-profile cases. But many of its decisions involved the relatively technical field of administrative law, which sets out legal restrictions on the power of federal agencies. It has profound effects on people’s lives, and it is often the subject of intense judicial debates. The court’s most far-reaching ruling settled a long-disputed question: If an agency issues an ambiguous regulation – involving clean air, food safety or civil rights – who gets to sort out the ambiguity? The agency or a court?

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of Facebook Inc., endorsed federal privacy legislation and greater regulation of political advertising, even as he cast governments as too slow to address many of the internet’s thorniest problems. In an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was racing to solve problems such as misinformation and how best to police online content. He expressed hope that governments would ultimately build a framework for tackling those matters....Speaking with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor and an occasional Facebook consultant, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed frustration both with calls to break up the company and with the U.S. government’s handling of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

On stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics that have put the company in the center of a political firestorm, from election security to content moderation and monopolistic power. In conversation with Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg said he wants to create more external standards so that private companies are not making morally complex decisions by themselves.

The US-China trade war rages on and dominates conversation ahead of the G20 summit this week. A US veto of appeals judges at the World Trade Organisation threatens to bring that cornerstone of the global economic order to a standstill by December, a month out from its 25th anniversary...Harvard Law School professor Mark Wu says the complexity of negotiations will delay any potential agreement. "The frustration that the US and possibly others have faced in relying upon the WTO to deal with its China-related trade challenges stems, in part, from the lack of a thorough updating of WTO rules over the past two decades," he says.

After 15 years trying to connect the world, Facebook Inc. is attempting to set up a better system for providing oversight of its sprawling platform. That effort is proving to be far from simple. The social-media giant on Thursday published a report on its efforts to create an independent content oversight board to examine some of its most controversial content moderation decisions...On Thursday, Facebook released Mr. Zuckerberg’s video discussion with two experts about governance: Noah Feldman, a professor of law at Harvard University who has been advising Facebook on the design of its oversight board, and Jenny Martinez, a human rights lawyer and dean of Stanford Law School.

It’s been roughly six months since Facebook started collecting global feedback on its proposal to create an oversight board for content moderation decisions. This morning, the platform released the findings of that process in an epic report—almost 250 pages of summary, surveys, public comment, workshop feedback and expert consultations...The report begins by outlining the (relatively short) history of the idea of an oversight board: the process began with Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman pitching the idea to Facebook in early 2018, followed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg first publicly floating the idea of a Facebook “Supreme Court” on a podcast in April 2018.

Every week it seems there is a new controversy about content on tech platforms...In November, Facebook announced the most ambitious and proactive idea of how to deal with these issues and rebuild trust in the way these consequential decisions are being made. It proposed an independent Oversight Board to hear disputes regarding the platform’s Community Standards and give transparent and binding decisions...Though multiple people have called for an appeals process and transparencyin Facebook’s content moderation process for years, the report cites a game-changing white paper by Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman written in March 2018. In remarks made public for the first time in the report, Feldman calls for the creation of a “Supreme Court to protect and define free expression and association on Facebook. Along with a lower appeals court, the court would interpret and apply an iconic, one-sentence values commitment that Facebook would adopt.”

As a junior in college, Delaney Dunne took an internship for class credit and $10 an hour at co-working company TekMountain in Wilmington, N.C. On graduation day this year, she received a letter from TekMountain’s parent asking about her employment status and reminding her she had signed a noncompete agreement with TekMountain in November 2017 that restricted her employment options...“The idea of noncompetes for interns is ludicrous,” said Terri Gerstein, a Harvard University academic who previously served in the New York attorney general’s office. “Internships are supposed to be for educational and professional development, and are about expanding—not limiting—job opportunities.” She said it is unlikely intern noncompete agreements would be upheld in court in most states.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed a crowd gathered for the second summit of his signature infrastructure policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)...With the BRI, Xi is signaling China’s readiness to reprise a more proactive geopolitical role, according to Harvard Law professor and international trade expert Mark Wu. “President Xi, much more than his predecessors, is assertive of this idea of the China dream — part of [which] is about national rejuvenation and China rightfully stepping back onto the global stage,” he said.

U.S. Route 285, cutting through the Texas-New Mexico border, is perilous...The remote highway is bustling, often dangerously so, because the U.S. fracking revolution is in high gear, and nearly-endless bounties of liquid gold lie beneath the West Texas ground. Overall, U.S. crude oil production and exports have both hit record highs. America is also now the world leader in natural gas production..."Natural gas really is a double-edged sword," said Joe Goffman, a former EPA senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation. The gas has unquestionably helped wean the U.S. off coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel — but left the country still emitting loads of heat-trapping carbon. "It presents a significant threat to climate and the environment," Goffman, now the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program," added. "It really poses a riddle for policymakers right now."

Alicia Davis feels like she was scammed. As a student at Florida Metropolitan University from 2006 to 2008, she said she was told the cost of her online criminal justice program would be covered by Pell grants and scholarships. She was told her credits could be transferred to other schools. Graduating from the school, a subsidiary of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, would lead to a job and a decent wage. None of it was true, said Davis, who accrued more than $22,000 in student loans from FMU. The 36-year-old is now one of seven plaintiffs suing the U.S. Department of Education and its chief, Betsy DeVos, for allegedly failing to offer relief to more than 158,000 student-loan borrowers who claim they were defrauded by for-profit colleges...Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending, which filed the case on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the Department of Education has illegally halted processing forgiveness applications under DeVos's tenure, neither rejecting nor approving any claims. According to the complaint, the department "intentionally adopted a policy of inaction and obfuscation." The Education Department last approved a borrower-defense application in June 2018. "The Department of Education has knowingly enabled for-profit colleges to defraud students," Eileen Connor, legal director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending, said in a statement. "It recklessly continued to act as a loan broker for disreputable schools despite clear records of abuse and misconduct," Connor added.

Mark Zuckerberg can't think of a single reason to break up Facebook, even as lawmakers call to dismantle or regulate major US tech platforms. In a conversation Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Zuckerberg said being big is actually a benefit in the fight to prevent the spread of misinformation and deal with election interference. "The question that I think we have to grapple with is that breaking up these companies wouldn't make any of those problems better," Zuckerberg said in a conversation with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. "The amount that we're investing in safety and security is greater than the whole revenue of our company was earlier this decade when we went public, so it just would not have been possible to do the things we're doing at a smaller scale."

The body representing America’s lawyers has staked out an eye-opening position in recent years—lobbying against efforts in Congress to close a loophole that enables terrorism, human trafficking, money laundering, and a host of other crimes. The legislation would force the owners of US companies to disclose their identities to the authorities. The move would make it much harder for criminals to hide their money in shell companies with anodyne names; something anti-corruption experts and law enforcement say is a crucial step in fighting financial crime and ending America’s status as the world’s biggest tax haven...The ABA declined to comment on the record for this piece, but has said it objects to the legislation because, they argue, it would burden small businesses and pose privacy concerns for entrepreneurs. In a recent letter of opposition, the ABA’s president said the organization supports “reasonable and necessary” measures to fight money laundering and terrorist financing, and offered to discuss other solutions with lawmakers. These arguments are met with deep cynicism among corruption scholars and pro-transparency advocates. While describing the ABA’s case in a blog post earlier this year, Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson wrote, “I’m trying to find a polite euphemism for ‘self-serving and intellectually bankrupt,’ but I’m having trouble.”

As public trust in Facebook’s ability to wield its power responsibly has fractured in the face of a series of privacy breaches and other scandals, the company has been facing fresh calls for regulation from numerous quarters of the federal government. But on one of the biggest issues leading to that breakdown of trust, its response to foreign election interference, Facebook has made significant progress, according to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who made a rare public appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday...In a discussion with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg invited regulators to set industrywide privacy standards and take a harder line with foreign interference in elections while pushing back against calls to break up Facebook.

The U.S. Department of Education is violating federal law by refusing to make decisions on applications to cancel federal loans from more than 158,000 students who attended for-profit colleges, a new proposed class action claims. The Massachusetts-based Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School announced the former students' suit on Tuesday, the latest in a string of cases against the department and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over Obama-era student loan protections. The complaint, filed in California federal court, says that even though students are able to cancel any federal loans they might have if their schools defraud them, the department hasn’t made a decision since June of last year on any applications to cancel those loans. “The Department of Education has knowingly enabled for-profit colleges to defraud students,” Eileen Connor, the legal director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, which is affiliated with the Legal Services Center, said in a statement. “It recklessly continued to act as a loan broker for disreputable schools despite clear records of abuse and misconduct, and now the department refuses to acknowledge the damage it has done by issuing these predatory loans to students, at taxpayers’ expense.”

My daughter and I were tossing a football back and forth while also flinging around arguments about free speech, sexual assault, youthful intolerance and paternal insensitivity. We were discussing a Harvard law professor, Ronald Sullivan. He had been pushed out of his secondary job as head of Harvard College’s Winthrop House after he helped give Harvey Weinstein, accused of sexual assault, the legal representation every defendant is entitled to. To me, as a progressive baby boomer, this was a violation of hard-won liberal values, a troubling example of a university monoculture nurturing liberal intolerance. Of course no professor should be penalized for accepting an unpopular client. To my daughter, of course a house dean should not defend a notorious alleged rapist. As she saw it, any professor is welcome to represent any felon, but not while caring for undergraduates: How can a house leader support students traumatized by sexual assault when he is also defending someone accused of rape?

A class action lawsuit filed in California Tuesday claims the U.S. Department of Education is "intentionally" not processing debt relief claims by students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges. "They don't have any timetable to resolve these claims and it's pretty clear that they don't have any intention to," said Eileen Connor, legal director for the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School, which brought the suit with the California-based legal service organization Housing and Economic Rights Advocates.

Last month, Harvard College told Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., and his wife that it would not renew their contracts as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of the school's 12 residential communities. They had held their positions for ten years. When appointed, they were the first African-Americans to be named faculty deans at Harvard...In a Newsweek exclusive, Sullivan gives his first interview since his ouster. In it, he defends his decision to take the case and accuses Rakesh Khurana, the Dean of Harvard College, of "cower[ing]" and "capitulating" to the "loudest voices in the room."

After working as a bartender for years, Alicia Davis decided in 2006 that she wanted to take steps towards starting a career in law enforcement by getting her bachelor’s degree. It’s a decision that’s haunted her ever since...Now Davis is fighting back. She’s part of a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday, accusing the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and the Department of Education of illegally stalling their decision on at least 158,000 borrower defense claims filed by people like Davis...“The law is really clear, but the Department of Education has ignored their claims,” said Eileen Connor, legal director at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which is representing the borrowers. “Students are coming forward today to say enough is enough.”