Media Mentions

The Gazette sat down recently for an in-depth interview with four Harvard deans, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Claudine Gay, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Bridget Terry Long, dean of the Graduate School of Education, who were all named to their posts in 2018, and Michelle Williams, who became dean of the T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2016. The wide-ranging discussion focused on topics that included their personal inspirations, their thoughts on leadership, and their efforts to support one another.

In 1971, Guido Goldman, founding director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), walked into a meeting with West Germany’s then-finance minister, Alex Möller, hoping for a gift to help support the center. He left with a sweeping offer that he couldn’t have imagined. “I was kind of blown away,” said Goldman, recalling that meeting. He had envisioned a $2 million gift to the center, then known as the Western European Studies program, as a way for Germany to say thanks for the aid that the U.S. had given it in the years following the world wars. ... Through high-profile programs such as these, Harvard and its experts remained steady players in German and U.S. relations. They are often called when new initiatives arise across the Atlantic. Take, for example Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a professor of the practice at the Law School. Last year he was tapped to become a member of Merkel’s German Digital Council, which advises her government on topics like the role of data and digitizing systems and works on projects such as streamlining applications. “If Angela Merkel calls you and says, ‘Look, I need your advice,’ you’re likely to say yes,” Gasser said.

The anti-abortion movement is hitting an aggressive new stride in the United States. Whether it breaks into a sprint toward the Supreme Court is worrying reproductive rights activists amid a renewed push to reverse the long-standing precedent that legalized abortions. ... It would take four votes from justices to agree the case deserves review, explained Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist and lawyer with Harvard Law School. "It's the kind of case where they're unlikely to take the case unless they have five votes to get rid of Roe v. Wade," he said, as well as enough votes to overturn Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 ruling that partially reaffirmed the abortion law. Cohen said he can't foresee both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh facially overruling Roe. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who is also a conservative, has shown himself to be an "institutionalist" keen to protect the court's reputation, he added.

The Interior Department is defending how an oil and gas industry standard became part of revised federal offshore drilling rules. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement adopted an American Petroleum Institute standard for drilling margin in the final rule on offshore well control systems. Drilling margin is the pressure range that must be maintained inside a well to avoid a repeat of the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout that spewed 3.2 million barrels' worth of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. ... "I would not expect them to incorporate something as technical as this without providing an opportunity to comment on this specific standard," said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental & Energy Law Program.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Something unusual happened Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court: A Native American tribe won a case. The 5-4 decision preserved the rights of the Crow Tribe to hunt according to the promise of an 1868 treaty. It was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by the court’s three other liberals — and somewhat surprisingly, by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch. The other conservatives dissented. The case is important primarily for its moral meaning. In essence, the 1868 treaty, like many others, was written to mislead or even deceive the Indians who signed it. The court’s decision Monday didn’t repudiate the deceptive language. It’s hard for courts to do anything other than read legal documents the way they’re written.

President Trump’s lawyers now generate a nonstop stream of frivolous defenses in his all-out assault on Congress. On Monday, they made the ludicrous claim that former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who provided evidence to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that wound up in the redacted Mueller report, cannot come tell Congress and the American people what he told Mueller. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, "[The White House’s] efforts are totally groundless, as the Harriet Miers case made clear. There simply is no textual, structural, or historical basis for a sitting president to gag his former White House Counsel in response to a House subpoena seeking testimony about possible criminal and potentially impeachable conduct by that president. " He adds, “The place of Congress as a coequal branch would be obliterated if the efforts to silence McGahn could succeed. And all power to hold the president accountable would be destroyed unless those efforts were swiftly repudiated.”

President Trump’s escalating demands for investigations into his political opponents have intensified debate over whether his often-transparent calls for action by the Justice Department amount to abusing his power to bolster his re-election prospects. ... “It’s a terrible breach of norms for the president to publicly advocate prosecutions of his opponents,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who was an assistant attorney general during President George W. Bush’s first term. Mr. Goldsmith pointed out that this was not the first time Mr. Trump has intimated he might intervene in the functions of the criminal justice system. But Mr. Goldsmith said that, to date, “his White House and Justice Department subordinates have basically ignored him. Trump has violated norms, but his executive branch officials thus far have not.”

With states from Alabama to Missouri passing laws that would restrict or nearly ban a women’s right to abortion, is a women’s right to choose at risk of being overturned on the federal level? ... Laurence Tribe, professor of law at Harvard University, explains that a law such as that in Alabama is “clearly in conflict with Supreme Court precedent.” As such, it is likely that it would be struck down by the lower courts, because they are “bound by Supreme Court precedent even if they predict that precedent might be overturned by the Court.”

Instead of going outside for recess on a recent Friday, fifth-grader Thomas Stevenson walked down a hallway in Ridgeview Elementary School and entered a dimly lit room. Inside, lavender aromatherapy filled the air, spa-like music played and a projector broadcast clouds onto a screen. Passing by bean bag chairs on the floor and chess sets on tables, Thomas picked up some Legos and began building an elaborate structure. ... “It’s not like the teacher is going to become the mother that the child lost, or whatever happened,” said Susan Cole, director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, a joint program of Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children, a children’s rights organization. “But they're going to show them that you can have a good relationship with an adult, that an adult will help you to be successful and you’ll go on to form more caring relationships."

The phone call that ruined Mohammed Hoque’s life came in April 2014 as he began another long day driving a New York City taxi, a job he had held since emigrating from Bangladesh nine years earlier. The call came from a prominent businessman who was selling a medallion, the coveted city permit that allows a driver to own a yellow cab instead of working for someone else. If Mr. Hoque gave him $50,000 that day, he promised to arrange a loan for the purchase. ... “I don’t think I could concoct a more predatory scheme if I tried,” said Roger Bertling, the senior instructor at Harvard Law School’s clinic on predatory lending and consumer protection. “This was modern-day indentured servitude.”

The Justice Department brief filed on May 1 amounts to the Trump administration picking and choosing what parts of the Affordable Care Act should stay in place and also suggests it does not understand the law, experts told Healio Primary Care Today. ... “This latest brief is tortured legal reasoning,” Phil Waters, JD, clinical fellow at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School added.

Can a famed law professor serve on the defense team of the nation's highest profile #MeToo case — and also adequately serve the needs of university students under his care? That is one of the questions at the center of a controversy that's erupted at Harvard University. It involves law professor Ronald Sullivan. He's done some of the nation's most important criminal justice work on behalf of the wrongly incarcerated, and until recently he was also on Harvey Weinstein's defense team. Sullivan was also the faculty head of a Harvard dorm. ... "There is no inconsistency between being a faculty dean of a house at Harvard University and, at the same time, being a criminal defense attorney for Harvey Weinstein," Randall Kennedy, professor at Harvard Law School, told On Point's Meghna Chakrabarti.

Subpoenas are flying. Lawsuits are multiplying. Democratic leaders claim the country is in the grip of a “constitutional crisis.” And President Trump is crying foul. While it may sound like just the latest twist on Washington’s workaday partisan warfare, numerous legal experts and other scholars say the escalating conflict between House Democrats investigating the president and a defiant White House is entering uncharted territory. ... Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor and a political liberal, called Trump’s blanket refusals to comply with numerous subpoenas and other requests “completely unprecedented in the history of the United States.” ... “We’re at the beginning of a very lengthy and rather complicated and various process,” given the numerous prongs of the broader standoff, and the complexities embedded in each case, said Harvard law professor Charles Fried, who was solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan. The slowness of the legal process will likely work to Trump’s political favor, he said.

One year after the Supreme Court dealt government employee unions a severe financial blow, the country’s biggest public employee unions remain surprisingly flush. In its June 2018 ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the high court shut off a crucial source of revenue for unions that represent government workers: mandatory fees collected from union nonmembers to cover their share of collective bargaining costs. ... “In talking to folks, my perception is that there has been good news, that membership has not been falling off dramatically,” said Sharon Block, a former Obama Labor Department official who now runs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

The Post reports: A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016. ...How big a deal is this? “It appears to support the mounting evidence uncovered by Mueller that Trump’s lawyers, and presumably Trump himself (unless his lawyers were on an unauthorized mission of their own, which seems most unlikely), were committing the felony of witness tampering,” constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe tells me. “And the subject matter — what we were conceding to our Russian adversaries — went to the core of our national security. So it seems like a very big deal indeed.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: It’s increasingly clear that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting a woman’s right to choose abortion, is in jeopardy. But what is Roe all about? Privacy? Liberty? Women’s equality? Its survival may depend partly on the answer, so let’s go back to first principles. The Roe opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973, was entirely about privacy. As Blackmun put it, the right of privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” For two reasons, that’s awkward. First, the U.S. Constitution does not protect a general right of privacy at all. Second, any right of privacy, if it does exist, would not seem to encompass the right to choose abortion. Privacy usually refers to the right to control access to personal information.1 What does abortion have to do with that?

Here’s a quick thought experiment: What if the FDA operated more like the CIA That’s not a suggestion that the agency engage in eater surveillance or conduct covert drug-testing operations. Rather, it’s a question about the state of the agency’s political independence and how it can be protected in the face of partisan pressure. ...So why not make FDA an independent agency? Earlier this year, seven of America’s most recent FDA commissioners co-wrote a piece of commentary urging such a change in Health Affairs journal. Today, in a new article for Science magazine, a team of researchers considers the ways that doing so would benefit the FDA’s mission and protect consumers. ... “FDA regulates a huge percentage of our economy and makes a huge difference to people’s lives,” says I. Glenn Cohen, professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of the paper. In addition, ongoing changes to FDA leadership make the current moment an apt time to consider the agency’s independence. In March, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned from his role, after a brief tenure where he advanced a surprising number of Obama-era food policies. Currently, the agency is overseen by acting commissioner Ned Sharpless.

This past week, Senator Kamala Harris and Joseph R. Biden Jr., two of the Democrats running for president, said it should be considered, joining another, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for wider Big Tech breakups. And don’t forget that Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, wrote this month that he wanted its split up, too. We could argue (at length) about the validity of the idea. But how plausible is it? The weapon of choice behind most of these calls is antitrust law. Fine. There’s plenty of potentially anticompetitive behavior to go after. But in terms of end results, a breakup is possible, but by no means certain, from such legal action, according to antitrust experts I spoke with. Einer Elhauge, a Harvard law professor who was chairman of the antitrust advisory committee to the Obama campaign in 2008, told me that splitting WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook — the most popular proposal — was plausible but might depend on how deeply integrated they had become. “It’s hard to unscramble eggs,” he said. And Facebook’s push to intertwine the platforms more closely may make such unscrambling only harder.

An article by I. Glenn Cohen, Eli Y. Adashi and Rohit S. Rajan: For the better part of a century, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) preserved public health by rigorously applying the scientific method. The central tenet of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 which created the FDA calls for “experts qualified by scientific training and experience to investigate the safety of drugs.” In recent times, however, partisan political interposition has grown increasingly worrisome. As the sole arbiter standing between a new drug application and a potential public health calamity, the FDA can hardly afford to be buffeted by undue political interference. In a recent salvo in this decades-long tug-of-war over politics and independence, seven former FDA commissioners, hailing from both sides of the political aisle and spanning many administrations, recently recommended that the “FDA should be an independent federal agency reporting to the President” (1, 2). It is against this backdrop that we explore the utility, desirability, and feasibility of restructuring the FDA charter with political insulation and administrative streamlining in mind. Amid uncertainty over leadership and direction at the FDA since the commissioner stepped down in April, it is a particularly critical time to reflect on how to enhance the independence of the FDA in keeping with its enabling statute.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting: The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, has released for comment a draft of her Strategic Plan for the final years of her mandate, 2019-2021. Overall, the plan shows that the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) is frankly seeking to confront and meet the many challenges that the Court has encountered over the last few years. The most significant change in policy is with respect to the types of cases the OTP will consider bringing. Without abandoning the goal of charging the highest-level perpetrators in a situation, the new draft policy fully embraces an approach of bringing cases that are more modest – either narrower in scope or against lower-level accused, namely mid-level commanders or notorious perpetrators – when it can. While this change may be controversial, it is the best path forward to strengthening the work of the Court.

In early April, the European Commission published guidelines intended to keep any artificial intelligence technology used on the EU’s 500 million citizens trustworthy. The bloc’s commissioner for digital economy and society, Bulgaria’s Mariya Gabriel, called them “a solid foundation based on EU values.” ...Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler warned in the journalNature this month that “industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence.” Benkler cited Metzinger’s experience in that op-ed. He also joined other academics in criticizing a National Science Foundation program for research into “Fairness in Artificial Intelligence” that is co-funded by Amazon. The company will not participate in the peer review process that allocates the grants. But NSF documents say it can ask recipients to share updates on their work, and will retain a right to royalty-free license to any intellectual property developed.