Media Mentions

For years, New York City public housing residents had requested more streetlights. In 2016, they arrived — in the form of portable, diesel-powered flood lights that blast 600,000 lumens into the night sky. For comparison, a bright indoor lamp might put out 1,600 lumens. The mobile light towers weren’t permanent. They were part of a six-month, $5 million experiment initiated by the office of Mayor Bill De Blasio in partnership with the housing authority, the police department and researchers at the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. ...It’s typical of the city’s heavy-handed approach that their response to lighting complaints from public housing residents was to install floodlights which many associate with the police department, said Katy Naples-Mitchell, a fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. “I would imagine the people who are calling 311 asking for improved lighting may be frustrated with the remedy of floodlights operating from sundown to sunrise in their neighborhood,” Naples-Mitchell said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The Supreme Court this week held that a state may not be sued in the courts of another state. Ordinarily, the public would take little note of a decision so technical and procedural. Aside from specialized groups of lawyers and academics, it would’ve drawn a yawn. Instead, the opinion, Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, sparked a media firestorm suggesting the decision could have major implications for several lightning-rod issues, particularly abortion, and set a new standard for the depths of partisanship to which the Supreme Court has sunk. These fears are well-founded, but somewhat premature — the worst reverberations of this decision may well be mitigated if the dissenting justices act wisely.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The Georgia anti-abortion law signed last week and the near-total abortion ban Alabama will consider again Tuesday are just the most recent examples of what you could call “Kavanaugh laws.” Like anti-abortion statutes recently enacted by Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota and Ohio, these are blatantly unconstitutional laws openly intended to violate the U.S. Supreme Court’s abortion-rights jurisprudence that goes back to Roe v. Wade. ... So what happens next? In the immediate term, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the bills will be blocked by the federal district courts, as the first handful of Kavanaugh laws have already been. The vast majority of federal district judges, whether appointed by Democrats or Republicans, recognize that it isn’t their job to change Supreme Court precedent.

A debate from the Intelligence Squared series, moderated by John Donvan. What if the next car you buy or taxi you hail drives itself? Driverless cars, also known as autonomous or self-driving vehicles, are currently in test-drive mode around the globe. Proponents claim this innovation will drastically improve our lives, with fewer auto accidents, less traffic congestion and carbon emissions, as well as greater accessibility for the elderly and those with physical limitations. Opponents, however, argue that autonomous vehicles will increase traffic, render current infrastructure obsolete and jeopardize millions of auto-related jobs. AGAINST THE MOTION: ... Dr. Ashley Nunes, senior research associate, Harvard Law School [Labor and Worklife Program] and MIT: "If there is one group of Americans that stands to benefit from driverless car technology, it's poor people, which raises a very interesting question: can poor people afford it? We've crunched the numbers, and what we have found is that they cannot."

The Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent on Monday in a split 5-4 ruling that legal experts said did not bode well for the future of other well established cases like Roe v. Wade. ... Though Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe argued that while Breyer was right to challenge the majority’s reasoning in this decision, he wouldn’t “lightly assume that the chief justice, for instance, would be as willing to overrule the abortion precedents as he was willing to upend the interstate sovereign immunity precedent set by Nevada v. Hall.” ... “Especially noteworthy about the decision today was the majority’s explicit concession that its new ruling was based on nothing in the Constitution’s text but on general inferences from the constitutional design, structure and history,” Tribe said.

A recent Harvard Gazette interview with the current and future presidents of the Harvard Board of Overseers, the alumni board that acts as a ‘Socratic steward of the University’

In his new book, "Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution," Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig looks at how the Supreme Court has managed to protect its institutional integrity throughout its history. We also look at the importance of maintaining the non-partisan nature of the Supreme Court moving forward.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In a 5-4 decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed iPhone users to sue Apple Inc. for being a monopolist when it comes to apps. The fascinating fact about the holding isn’t its legal logic, which was sensible enough, although by no means obvious. Rather, it’s worth noticing that the opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh—and joined by the court’s four liberals. Four other conservative justices dissented, joining an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

A letter by Elizabeth Bartholet: As a former member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, I write to condemn the university’s recent action removing Winthrop House faculty deans Ronald Sullivan Jr. and Stephanie Robinson from their positions. University administrators have acted on an unprincipled basis, simply responding to student pressure and the public pressure of the moment. They have failed in their educational responsibilities to students and in their larger leadership responsibilities.

Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet discusses the controversy at Harvard University over Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan, a renowned defense attorney, joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team. She speaks to Bloomberg’s June Grasso.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Someone on Twitter recently asked: “What is your most [fire emoji] take that absolutely infuriates people and you know deep down in your heart is 100% true”? I was inclined to respond: “The statutory interpretation analysis in the Mueller report is one-sided and weak.” I instead decided to try to explain why I believe this, knowing full well that it will infuriate the vast majority of legal elites who are convinced that the only things preventing President Trump from going to trial today are the Office of Legal Counsel’s ruling that a sitting president cannot be indicted and Attorney General William Barr’s “lack of inner strength.”

China held back from immediate retaliation for higher U.S. tariffs, unlike in past rounds, taking time to weigh its options amid uncertainty over how the Chinese economy would weather a full-bore trade conflict. A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs. “China doesn’t want to fan the flames,” Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard University, says. “It wants to be seen as the reasonable party and open to compromise.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to bar federal district courts from issuing nationwide injunctions — the court orders that make the entire government stop enforcing a law or policy that one district judge finds is likely to be unconstitutional. Such injunctions are always bad for the administration that’s in office, so you can understand why this Republican administration might think the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would be sympathetic to its request. But in the long run, nationwide injunctions are a powerful judicial tool to check the president and Congress, regardless of party. So you can expect the justices to think hard before taking that power away from lower courts — and effectively transferring it to themselves.

Seven years after graduating from the University Of Michigan Law School, Jim Greiner had clerked for a Fifth Circuit judge, worked for the U.S. Department of Justice and transitioned to private practice at Jenner & Block — in other words, he’d gathered plenty of legal experience. Jim Greiner, director of Harvard University's Access to Justice Lab, brings a statistician's eye to the practice of law. But what he hadn’t done is taken a math class since high school. So after repeatedly encountering “heavy numbers” in his case load, the man who would eventually launch Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab took a leap — from the practice of law to the study of statistics. “I started to become frustrated with how I was unable to follow the experts,” he said. “And I was also finding out at the same time that I cared a whole lot more about facts than I did about political theory and rhetoric.” The focus on facts propelled Greiner toward a 2007 Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Statistics, earned the same year he joined the Law School faculty. Since then, he’s worked to bring a concept called “randomized controlled trials” to the world of legal services.

At first glance you could be in Singapore. The roads are smooth and well maintained, the city carefully landscaped with plenty of trees and space for pedestrians. Bandar Seri Bagawan - the capital city of Brunei - is safe, orderly and very quiet. It is the conspicuous domes of the mosques, some dazzlingly gilded, the large signs in Arabic script and the prominent pictures showing the bearded figure of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah that tell you this is Brunei. ... Dominik Mueller [Visiting Fellow with the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World] is an expert on Islam in South East Asia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and one of the very few academics to have studied Brunei closely. "The sultan has increasingly turned to religion over the past three decades, especially since his first pilgrimage to Mecca in 1987. He has repeatedly stressed the obligation from Allah to introduce the Sharia penal code, and the blessings this would bring, in this world and the afterlife," he told the BBC.

An article by Evelyn Douek, S.J.D. Candidate: On Thursday, in an eloquent and reflective New York Times op-ed, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes added his voice to the growing chorus calling for the social network to be broken up. Most arguments for antitrust action against Facebook generally focus on its data collection, privacy practices, and effects on innovation, but Hughes emphasizes the unilateral power that Mark Zuckerberg has over 2 billion people’s speech. He calls it “the most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power.” ... We may, as a society, decide that the lack of competition and invasions of privacy might make breaking up big tech worth it. But it’s unlikely that such an approach would solve the speech-related issues. In some cases, it may actually make them worse.

An op-ed by Mihir A. Desai: Uber’s initial public offering — the biggest in a year of blockbusters — is yet another chance for Uber and its detractors to sell their competing ideas of what this company represents. As it heads toward a valuation of about $90 billion — nearly the combined value of General Motors and FedEx — Uber is packaging its new image as a socially oriented company led by a contrite chief executive facing an enormous potential market that it has only begun to explore. Skeptics see a company with significant legal exposure, a corrupt culture, declining profitability and slowing growth that has forced it to make an awkward pivot to less attractive businesses such as Uber Eats and Uber Freight.

... Are we currently in the midst of a genuine constitutional crisis? Would we even know one if it bonked us on the heads? The last time people started throwing the C-words around, it was January of 2017, when the newly inaugurated Trump had just signed an executive order closing America’s borders to travelers and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries. ... Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe agrees that this probably isn’t the time to parse legal language: “Crisis schmisis—what’s in a word? We’re under an ongoing cyberattack from a hostile foreign power that helped install an imbecilic self-seeking con man as our leader, who committed numerous felonies to avoid being held accountable for his illegitimate election, who is encouraging ongoing attacks by that same foreign power and others, who violates his oath of office daily, and who seems secure from removal by virtue of a spineless Senate abetted by a cowardly House. Our constitutional norms are in meltdown as we watch in helpless stupor waiting for the monster to steal or cancel the next election. If this doesn’t qualify as a crisis, the word should be retired forthwith.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: I’ve been in a cave for several weeks crashing to complete my new book and am only now emerging to read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the commentary on it. I’ll hopefully have more to say on the report, especially on its legal analysis of criminal obstruction of justice as applied to the president. But for now I want to comment on the reaction to Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the report in his March 24 letter and his May 1 testimony. It seems over the top to me.

The assertion of privilege is not an actual “conclusive” assertion of executive privilege; it is only a “protective” assertion. ... What does that even mean? And why would the administration take such an action? A bit of background helps explain what is really happening here.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President Donald Trump’s “protective assertion of executive privilege,” in response to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, is creating a great deal of confusion. To dispel it, we have to see the trees, not the forest. To do that, it is crucial to understand that the subpoena called not only for the unredacted version of the Mueller report, but also for “[a]ll documents referenced in the Report” and “[a]ll documents obtained and investigative materials created by the Special Counsel’s office.”