Media Mentions

Legal and political battles have put the fate of the Affordable Care Act, and health care for millions of Americans, back into the spotlight and ensure that that it will play a pivotal role in the 2020 elections. ... Robert Greenwald, JD, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, concurred with Goodwin on the consequences of the ACA repeal. “If the lower court’s decision is affirmed, it would topple the entire ACA, including provisions entirely unrelated to the individual mandate such as the expansion of the Medicaid program. This would do untold damage to our health care system. It would leave over 20 million additional people uninsured,” he said in an interview.

On Aug. 29, 1991, William Barr had a decision to make. Cuban inmates had seized hostages inside an Alabama prison in a bid to avoid deportation, and now they were threatening to kill them. Only 19 days into his job as acting attorney general, Barr ordered the FBI to mount a rescue mission. ... Barr, now 68, is “not afraid to make decisions that fall into his areas of responsibility,” said George Terwilliger, who served as Barr’s deputy during his first stint as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush. ... “It is like fundamentally rigging the game before we know what the actual score is,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who worked with Barr on a telecommunications case in the 1990s. “His integrity, his history, his reputation is shattered by what he has done. I have no idea what could have motivated him.”

With the Monday Morning Massacre at the Department of Homeland Security, President Trump has created one more “acting” Cabinet secretary, left open a number of high-level posts and created further chaos at the agency charged with securing the border. One would think someone would point out to him how counterproductive is his purge. ... First, as a constitutional matter. Trump is effectively diminishing the role of the Senate in its advice and consent role. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe says he is worried about “a president who cares more about being able to bully his Cabinet members than about having Cabinet members with the Senate-backed clout to get anything done.” He adds, “It’s a symptom of Trump’s obsession with the appearance of power and his indifference to the policies that power can potentially implement.”

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: Just when it seemed everyone was open to new ideas about criminal justice, after last year’s reform bill, Thomas Turco, the state secretary of public safety and security, rehashed old tropes, and worse, old politics in blasting Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s prosecution plans. Turco’s broadside was released to the press without notice to the new DA; Rollins’s reply was swift, attacking Governor Charlie Baker for authorizing it. The reported rapprochement between the two officials, while admirable, shouldn’t obscure some of the larger issues the dust-up reveals. Turco criticized Rollins’s “decline to prosecute” list, ignoring crucial details in her 65-page plan. A Suffolk prosecutor was obliged to decline or divert certain offenses unless he or she got permission from a more experienced supervisor. (Turco ignored the “unless” clause.) The list consists of nonviolent crimes involving drugs, property, and offenses like driving with a suspended license, and it makes sense.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Philip Allen Lacovara: The uncertain prospect that the House Judiciary Committee will receive the raw, unredacted report generated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III got even less certain Friday. A decision by the federal court of appeals in Washington now confronts the House leadership and Attorney General William P. Barr with some difficult political choices. In a 2-to-1 decision in McKeever v. Barr, the court reaffirmed the principle of grand jury secrecy and concluded that a court has no “inherent power” to release grand jury information. This decision will give Barr a plausible basis to resist the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of the entire Mueller report, even if the committee goes to court to enforce it. But both the House and the attorney general have ways to cope with this obstacle, if they have the political will and the professional judgment to do so.

Lyft shareholders could come to regret giving up substantial power to CEO Logan Green and President Josh Zimmer, the company's cofounders. Lyft shares closed at $74.55 on Friday, nearly $4 below its first trade when the company went public on March 29. While the stock has seen a slight recovery from its all-time-low of $66 in its first week of trading, Wall Street isn't quite certain on how to treat the stock in the long-term. In a post published Wednesday, Harvard Law School's Lucian Bebchuk and Kobi Kastiel argue that Lyft's corporate governance structure "can be expected" to decrease Lyft's per-share value in the future, and increase the discount at which Lyft's low-voting shares trade. "Each of these effects would operate over time to reduce the market price at which the low-voting shares of public investors would trade," wrote Bebchuk and Kastiel. "These effects should thus be taken into account by any public investors that consider holding Lyft shares."

The Education Department failed to approve a single application for federal student loan relief in the second half of last year, according to new department data that signals that students who claim they were cheated by their colleges cannot count on help from Washington anytime soon. ... Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, said that she had borrowers who had claims pending from as far back as four years. The project, which represents thousands of students from ITT Tech and Corinthian, said that it had over 14,000 applications from ITT Tech pending at the department. Only 33 have been approved, and those were by the Obama administration. Zero have been approved under Ms. DeVos. Debt on the loans has continued to grow, Ms. Connor said. In lawsuits, the group has described how borrowers have experienced anxiety, fear and psychological and financial distress caused by delays.

The internet is an ethereal concept. The language we use to describe it contributes to that etherealness: we speak of servers being in "the cloud," as though they were weightless in heaven, and most if not all of our internet access happens wirelessly. ... Susan Crawford, the author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—And Why America Might Miss It,” has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure. “That would never happen," Crawford told me. "We saw that with electricity. We’ve seen it with internet access in America already.” This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future. I spoke with Crawford via phone about her new book and the myriad problems with internet infrastructure in the US. This interview has been edited for clarity.

In medical school, we learned about the ghastly effects of severe protein-calorie malnutrition. But we thought that conditions such as kwashiorkor and marasmus were mainly of historical significance, the scourges of long-ago wars and prison camps. We did not expect to witness them in our lifetimes. Yet today, severe malnutrition is engulfing Venezuela, with catastrophic consequences for the country’s people and its future generations. ...Second, an investigation by the ICC, which 122 countries have joined, would send a clear message about the enforceability of norms through international law. Although public-health claims have not yet been used as a basis for international criminal charges, some experts believe that they could be. According to Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former Prosecutions Coordinator at the ICC, “when certain regimes adopt extreme policies that strangle their own populations, we have to consider (and investigate) whether it meets the threshold of international criminality.”

By signing an executive order, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California recently ended the threat of execution as long as he is in office for the 737 inmates on the state’s death row, the largest in the Western Hemisphere. ... One study has shown that capital punishment has cost California $5 billion since the 1970s. Another study, by Ernest Goss, an economics professor at Creighton University, found that each death penalty prosecution in Nebraska cost $1.5 million more than when prosecutors sought life without parole. Those more complex realities do not negate the potential for contentious politics in 2020. “I think the Democratic primaries may be the first one in which candidates outflank one another on the left on criminal justice issues,” said Carol S. Steiker, an expert on the death penalty at Harvard Law School.

The Education Department failed to approve a single application for federal student loan relief in the second half of last year, according to new department data signaling that students cheated by their colleges cannot count on help from Washington anytime soon. ... Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, said that she has borrowers who have claims pending from as far back as four years. The Project, which represents thousands of students from ITT Tech and Corinthian, said that it has more than 14,000 applications from ITT Tech pending at the department. Only 33 have been approved, and those were by the Obama administration. Zero have been approved under DeVos. Debt on the loans has continued to grow, Connor said. In lawsuits, the group has described how borrowers have experienced anxiety, fear and psychological and financial distress caused by delays. The project has won several lawsuits against DeVos. But it said that the department continued to ignore crucial court rulings, including one that found the department could not take tax refunds of former Corinthian College students to pay their student loans while they have borrower defense applications pending. “The department’s delay is not neutral,” Connor said. “It’s harming students.”

Americans have the longest, most expensive and arguably most complex system of electing a head of state in the world. After all the debates, caucuses, primaries and conventions, the person who gets the most votes can still lose -- as happened most recently in 2016, when Republican Donald Trump won the White House. It’s a system that baffles non-Americans and some Americans as well, and it’s again spurring talk of change. Several Democratic presidential contenders including Senator Elizabeth Warren have called for letting voters pick their leader directly. ...Warren is among several Democratic senators who have proposed amending the Constitution to do away with the Electoral College. A nonprofit group founded by Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig has filed lawsuits in several states seeking to divide electoral votes according the share of the popular vote, instead of as winner-take-all.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy: News reports suggest that an effort by the Cambridge School Committee to display racial enlightenment has turned into a racially discriminatory act of political repression. In January, a teacher at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, Kevin Dua, sponsored a research project titled “RECLAIMING: Nigger v. Cracker: Educating Racial Context In/for Cambridge.” The project sought to explore the history and effects of racial slurs. Dua invited members of the committee to attend a discussion of the project in part because he wanted them to address an issue that surfaced when the students pursued their research: School computers blocked access to websites containing the n-word and other racial and ethnic slurs. One member of the committee who attended, Emily Dexter, listened to the presentation, participated, and volunteered to assist the students in negotiating the problem of the computer filters. So far so good. The situation presented a positive instance of public high school education: an exercise aimed at sparking curiosity about an important, albeit controversial, subject in the context of an academic setting in which students, instructors, and others could engage, hopefully, in a memorable, fascinating, edifying exchange of information and views. But then things went awry.

In a recent Q&A, Professor of Practice Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning 'A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,' reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda and the lessons learned—and not learned—since.

This small town in Denmark is getting a skyscraper, and it's not the only rural town with a tower. Maybe it's not such a good idea to get rid of transit drivers after all. Street grids are great, but sometimes you need an architechtural escape....This week on the podcast, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford talks about her new book Fiber about fiberoptic cables.

The new Broadway play "What The Constitution Means To Me" examines the limits of the nation’s founding document, probing legal history and U.S. Supreme Court rulings to make a sobering case that the Constitution falls short of ensuring comprehensive rights for all Americans.  Playwright and star Heidi Schreck, who has written for TV shows like “Billions” and “Nurse Jackie,” paid her way through college by winning a series of speaking competitions that give the play its title. She recalls in the play that as a teenager, she was passionately committed to the virtues of the Constitution, hailing it in her speeches as a “living, warm-blooded, steaming document.”...The play garnered praise from theater critics and constitutional law scholars during an off-Broadway run last year. Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe told the New Yorker magazine after seeing the earlier incarnation that the show “is something that needs a huge audience” because “what she said is extremely on-target.”  

An op-ed by Joseph Goffman and Hana Veselka Vizcarra:  Kudos to BP America for company chairman and president Susan Dio’s bold call on these pages for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, emitted by both new and existing oil and gas operations. Double kudos to BP for walking the talk by setting methane emissions reduction targets and taking active steps to reach them in its own operations. BP’s actions, in fact, deliver a double bonus: they cut methane emissions, and they demonstrate what kinds of pollution-cutting technologies and strategies are effective and affordable. This provides lessons for other companies, and if and when the EPA heeds BP’s call and regulates methane, the agency will look carefully at BP’s experiences and successes in reducing emissions.

Less than a year ago, a Tunisian engineer with the initials K.S. traveled to the coastal town of Monastir for the weekend. While there, he began chatting with someone on Grindr, an online dating and hookup app for gay men. They met later that day at a cafe, where K.S.’s date then suggested they move on to his house. After they arrived, K.S. said, two other men appeared, beat him and sexually assaulted him with a baton while shouting homophobic insults at him. Bleeding and terrified, K.S. went to a local hospital, but was refused medical treatment without a police order. At the police station, officers were more concerned about K.S.’s sexual history than the fact that he had been gang raped. ...Khouili, a Tunisian doctor and researcher, and [Daniel] Levine-Spound, a student at Harvard Law School, delve into the murky origins of the law, which they point out has “no clear analogue within pre-colonial Tunisian law.” “Previous Tunisian penal codes, such as the Qanun Al Jinayat Wal Ahkam Al Urfya issued in 1861 under the Husainid dynasty, include no reference to sodomy or homosexuality whatsoever,” they wrote.  

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: Over the past couple of weeks, I've been reading The Uninhabitable Earth. The author, David Wallace-Wells, had me from his first sentence ("It is worse, much worse, than you think"). Wallace-Wells has done us all the great favor of clearly laying out incontestable evidence for what global warming will mean to the way we live. The book's chapters focus on humanity's ability to work and survive in increasingly hot environments, climate-change-driven effects on agriculture, the striking pace of sea-level rise, increasingly "normal" natural disasters, choking pollution, and much more. It's not an easy read emotionally. But it forces the reader to look squarely in the face of the science. Wallace-Wells points out that even though thousands of scientists, perhaps hundreds of thousands, are daily trying to impress on lay readers the urgency of collective action, the religion (his word) of technology creates a belief that, to the extent there is some distant-and-disputed problem, everything will be mysteriously solved by some combination of machine learning and post-Earth survival. We'll live in spaceships and eat lab-printed meat, and Elon Musk will fix things.I see a parallel in another big news story: the hype and enthusiasm about 5G wireless as the “thing that will make the existing [communications] model obsolete.”

Strikes have been breaking out all over the country. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 485,000 workers were involved in strikes in 2018. This was the largest number since 1986. Tens of thousands of K-12 teachers have gone on strike in Republican-dominated states such as West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina and Arizona, but also in California, Colorado and Pennsylvania. The fever spread to hotel workers in several cities, university employees (grad students, regular staff and faculty), Lyft and Uber drivers and tech employees at Google and Amazon. ...The labor movement’s invigorated militancy reflects the spirit of the times, according to Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. She told veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, “When there’s a lot of collective action happening more generally — the Women’s March, immigration advocates, gun rights — people are thinking more about acting collectively, which is something that people hadn’t been thinking about for a long time in a significant way.”

Australia passed sweeping legislation Thursday that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove “abhorrent violent material” from their platforms.The law — strongly opposed by the tech industry — puts Australia at the forefront of a global movement to hold companies like Facebook and YouTube accountable for the content they host. ... Susan Benesch, founder of the Dangerous Speech Project at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that Australia’s attempt to keep “abhorrent violent material” off the internet could face similar problems, leading to more dramatic responses from the platforms. “It would likely encourage increased censorship and takedowns by companies,” she said. “The platforms would likely move their offices out of countries that pass such laws, to protect them from prosecution.”