Media Mentions

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler:  Industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence. On 10 May, letters of intent are due to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new funding programme for projects on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon. In April, after the European Commission released the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, an academic member of the expert group that produced them described their creation as industry-dominated “ethics washing”. In March, Google formed an AI ethics board, which was dissolved a week later amid controversy. In January, Facebook invested US$7.5 million in a centre on ethics and AI at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Companies’ input in shaping the future of AI is essential, but they cannot retain the power they have gained to frame research on how their systems impact society or on how we evaluate the effect morally. Governments and publicly accountable entities must support independent research, and insist that industry shares enough data for it to be kept accountable.

On several occasions, President Donald Trump has used the word “coup” to describe efforts by law enforcement to investigate influence by Russia on the 2016 election. “This was a coup,” Trump said during an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News in April. “This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government.” ...Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told PolitiFact that the Russia investigation “is not a coup, because the FBI had very good reasons for commencing an investigation of Trump. It beggars belief that anyone in the FBI had the intention of subverting a duly elected president.”

A former congressman. Law professors. Advocates for campaign finance reform. But no Republicans. The so-called Citizens Commission, created by Question 2 on the November ballot, now has all 15 of its members. The ballot question, which passed with 71% of the vote, established a commission to research and advocate for a constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United. That decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing a candidate as long as they do not coordinate directly with the candidate. ...The commission includes three professors — Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub, of Northampton; Harvard Law School professor Nikolas Bowie, of Cambridge; and Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos, of Wellesley.

There are growing calls for US Attorney General William Barr to resign or be impeached over his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report. It's been revealed that Robert Mueller was dissatisfied with William Barr's four page summary of the report in which he concluded that President Donald Trump did not collude with Russia to win the 2016 election and did not commit obstruction of justice. In the bombshell revelation, Robert Mueller said the Attorney General's summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of his work. ...It comes as William Barr today testified on Capitol Hill about the Mueller investigation. Guest: Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University Producer:Linda Lopresti

The Post reports: Democrats in Congress can move ahead with their lawsuit against President Trump alleging that his private business violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted on the case, told me the ruling is “very gratifying but not surprising. It’s the president’s corrupt financial entanglements with foreign governments that I’ve always believed would bring him down in the end. The Constitution told us to follow the money — and that’s exactly what we’re doing."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., unveiled a plan on Wednesday to give every voter up to $600 in what she calls "Democracy Dollars" that they can donate to federal candidates for office. ... An ethics reform bill in Congress backed by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate would match small donations with six times as much money in public funds. It includes a "my voice voucher" program similar to Gillibrand's but much smaller in scale: It would test the idea as a pilot program in select locations and the vouchers would be for only $25. "Gillibrand's plan is the most ambitious adoption of the idea that I think we've seen so far," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and former presidential candidate who has advocated for the voucher concept, told NBC News.

The economy is getting bigger, but not better. Not for most Americans, anyway. In the United States, additional income from productivity and growth has been going mostly to those at the topof the income and wealth ladder. Between 1979 and 2016, the US national income grew by nearly 60%, but after accounting for taxes and transfers, the bottom half of the income distribution experienced incomes rising by 22%, while those in the top 10% had income gains that were almost five times as much – 100%.... The good news is that there are plenty of good ideas about what that infrastructure needs to be. One of these is to allow workers to organize across an industry, rather than firm-by-firm. Employees in different firms could then come together to bargain with their employers, without disadvantaging any one firm vis-a-vis its competitors. This is just one of many proposals from a team of scholars, advocates and policymakers working on a new project at Harvard law School: Rebalancing Economic and Political Power: A Clean Slate for the Future of Labor Law. This way to think about collective bargaining – so-called “sectoral bargaining” – is new in the US but works in other countries such as Germany.

President Donald Trump's 2017 pardon of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio should be found invalid, a bipartisan collection of advocacy groups and legal experts told the Ninth Circuit, calling Arpaio "one of the nation's most notorious civil rights violators" and saying his exoneration would be "corrosive of the rule of law." ...In a statement Tuesday, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who took part in the groups' and experts' brief, said the pardon was "a license to violate the civil rights of refugees and immigrants." "The courts should strike down this blatant abuse of pardon power, which the framers designed as a way to temper justice with mercy — not as a way to destroy the very foundations of justice itself," Tribe said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: It’s easy to blame Attorney General William Barr for distorting special counsel Robert Mueller’s report when he summarized it before its release. Even Mueller apparently blamed Barr in a private letter that has now been leaked. But there’s something dissatisfying about blaming a scorpion for being a scorpion. Of course Barr took advantage of his opportunity to distort the report. He took his job to protect President Donald Trump. The question is, why did Barr get a chance in the first place? And the answer lies in the special counsel regulations, produced in 1999 by Janet Reno’s Department of Justice under Bill Clinton’s administration. The regulations give the attorney general the golden opportunity to shape public perception of a special counsel report by issuing a summary of the report’s findings. Indeed, so powerful is the attorney general under the regulations that the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — who, let us not forget, is appointed by the president and answerable to the president  doesn’t even have to release the special counsel’s report at all. If you want to blame someone, or something, for Barr’s sleight of hand, the proper target is clear: blame the regulations.

It’s probably a source of controversy in your own home. Those frustrating food expiration dates --- “best by” one date, or “use by” that one. One member of your family may want to throw something out. You may think the food is perfectly fine. Who’s right? “The majority of those labels are related to quality and not to safety,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “What they’re saying to consumers is, we’ve tested out this food, we’ve had people taste it, and this is when we think it will still taste the very best.” Much of the confusion about food labels concerns that very issue---their source. Many believe expiration dates constitute government warnings. But save for one food type, the government does not get involved.

After special counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to William Barr complaining about his summary of the Russia investigation was revealed on Tuesday, top legal scholars — including a longtime Harvard law professor — condemned the Attorney General for allegedly misrepresenting the special counsel’s findings, with some calling on him to resign or be impeached. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional legal expert who has taught at the leading academic institution for almost half a century, condemned Barr for misleading public opinion in a statement posted to Twitter, and called for the attorney general to be impeached for his actions. “Mueller says AG Barr misrepresented the ‘context, nature & substance’ of his probe. What else is there? Barr is a total disgrace and a phony,” Tribe wrote. “He must now testify under Rep. Jerry Nadler’s rules, then resign.” “Mueller must now testify as well. This is a new ballgame,” the professor continued. “AG Barr flat-out lied to the American people about the Mueller report’s incrimination of President Trump. He’s been outed as a total fraud. We can’t let Barr — or Trump — get away with such gross abuse of power.” “Barr must be impeached if he doesn’t resign first,” Tribe added.

Two years ago, as Nebraska was considering a “right to repair” bill designed to make it easier for consumers to fix their own gadgets, an Apple lobbyist made a frightening prediction. If the state passed the legislation, it would turn into a haven for hackers, Steve Kester told then-state senator Lydia Brasch. He argued the law would inadvertently give bad actors the opportunity to break into devices like smartphones. The bill was later shelved, in part because of industry pressure. ...Securepairs.org, founded by technology journalist Paul Roberts, has attracted the support of more than 20 security experts, including Harvard University security technologist Bruce Schneier, bug bounty expert Katie Moussouris, and ACLU technologist Jon Callas. They plan to arrange for expert witnesses to testify at legislative hearings across the country in an effort to convince lawmakers that the right to repair is inherently safe.

President Trump has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to keep two banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown with Democrats eager to investigate his finances. ... The Supreme Court has traditionally given Congress broad power to investigate and has been reluctant to intervene when lawmakers issue a subpoena, says Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman. "The courts basically said, 'This is up to the Congress. They do what they want to do. We don't get involved,' " Feldman says. Trump and his attorneys may be hoping they can persuade the Supreme Court to step in and strike down — or at least restrict — the subpoenas, but that may take a while, Feldman says. Without a court order, the banks will have no choice but to comply with Congress' demands and turn over to investigators the records they want, Feldman says.

One of the Arab world’s most visible advocacy groups defending the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people is facing closure following legal threats by the government. ...“If the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival speaks to the increasing boldness and assertiveness of Tunisian LGBT activists, such an event was hardly imaginable a few years ago,” wrote Ramy Khouili and Daniel Levine-Spound [’19] in a recently published study, Article 230 – A History of the Criminalisation of Homosexuality in Tunisia. Khouili said few countries in the region have an LGBT movement as developed as Tunisia, but he said the lawsuit against Shams was indicative of “the myriad ways” in which people seek to silence the voices of Tunisian gay rights campaigners.

The Post reports on Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s resignation letter submitted Monday, effective May 11. No one in the saga of the Mueller report has gone through so many shifts in public perception or gone through such wild swings in his professional reputation. For a time he was the darling of Democrats, seeming to hold back the tide against interference with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Republicans such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) raked him over the coals regarding failure to produce documents (ah, those were the days when Republicans cared about the House’s investigative powers!) and even tried to impeach Rosenstein. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe describes Rosenstein’s tenure: “Self-serving. Self-protective. Filled with ethical compromise. Not exactly disgraceful. But not graceful either. Anything but heroic.”

President Donald Trump is suing both Capital One and Deutsche Bank to prevent them from complying with congressional subpoenas into his financial records. ..."It appears that Donald Trump made a practice of wildly exaggerating his wealth and the supposed business acumen that enabled him to amass it," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, told Salon last month. He added, "Although there are no legal and especially criminal consequences to that kind of exaggeration on reality television or in talking to journalists at places like Forbes in order to cheat one’s way onto various lists of the wealthiest people around, there are very serious criminal consequences indeed when such lies, in the form of fraudulent financial statements, are used either to extract loans from banks or to obtain insurance on favorable terms from various insurance companies."

Last Thursday, the NAACP suspended its Saint Louis County chapter president, a man by the name of John Gaskin. He was accused of two offenses. The second was a conflict-of-interest allegation that doesn’t concern us, but the first offense should. The NAACP actually suspended a chapter president in part for supporting greater due process for black men accused of sexual misconduct on campus. They suspended him for supporting civil liberties. ...Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gerson, one of the nation’s foremost experts on Title IX adjudications, has reported that the administrators and faculty members who work on campus sexual-assault cases say that “most of the complaints are against minorities.” Moreover, the modern attack on campus due process means that black men are facing an old problem. Yoffe quotes another Harvard professor, Janet Halley, who accurately notes that “American racial history is laced with vendetta-like scandals in which black men are accused of sexually assaulting white women,” followed eventually by the revelation “that the accused men were not wrongdoers at all.”

Stop & Shop’s stores were ghost towns during the recent strike. With workers standing outside in picket lines, customers stayed away , leading to one of the most effective strikes in recent memory. The grocery clerks and bakers and meat cutters holding signs were protesting proposed cuts to their benefits, but their plight also resonated with the public because they represented something bigger: working Americans across the country whose wages are barely budging while the cost of living skyrockets in such places as Boston and corporations rake in record profits. ...“What we’re seeing is an increasing resistance to the fundamental unfairness of a system that’s so skewed both economically and politically to the wealthy,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School labor professor, noting that when Uber goes public, former CEO Travis Kalanick’s stock is expected to be worth upward of $6 billion — an amount that would take a full-time Uber driver 150,000 years to make.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The brewing conflict between the House Judiciary Committee and Attorney General William Barr — over whether he will testify this week as scheduled, and under what ground rules — is a symptom of a much bigger emerging clash between Congress and the president. The most probable outcome is a stalemate: because the framers designed the Constitution that way. We have entered a new phase of the constitutional stress test that began with President Donald Trump’s election and shows no signs of winding down. In the first phases, Trump pushed the limits of executive power on immigration, and went after the criminal justice system in the hopes of delegitimizing it. This time, the initiative comes not from the president, but from a different branch of government.

Hours after Joe Biden made his presidential run official last Thursday, Anita Hill’s name was back in the news. Earlier this month, with an eye toward getting into the race, Biden called Hill to “express his regret” for her treatment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the New York Times reported. ... Lastly, Biden’s critics say that his own questioning of Hill was unfair, blaming him for “setting an accusing, skeptical tone and losing control,” the Washington Post reports. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and Hill’s attorney at the time, told Politico he still blames Biden for mishandling the hearing: “I was shocked and dismayed that Joe Biden was asking questions that didn’t seem appropriate and was not in her corner as a Democrat,” Ogletree said. “The point is that he’s supposed to be neutral, but his questions to Anita Hill were as piercing as anyone’s.” Ogletree said he’s brought up the hearings with Biden in the years since, but hasn’t been satisfied with the response. “He’s said that this job was to control the hearing, that he was surprised by the result as well,” Ogletree said.

The Labor Department weighed in Monday on a question whose answer could be worth billions of dollars to gig-economy companies as they begin selling shares to the public: Are their workers employees or contractors? ... Sharon Block, a former top official in the Obama Labor Department who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said it was hard to tell from the facts the Labor Department chose to include in its letter whether the workers using the platform in question were truly independent contractors. But she said there seemed to be a stronger case to make for contractor status in that case than for Uber. Still, she speculated that the finding could be procedurally useful for the department if it later sought to deem Uber drivers to be independent contractors. “This as a strategy makes sense,” Ms. Block said. “They set the standard in a way that makes it really clear this company gets past it, and in a way that’s going to help them in the harder cases.”