Media Mentions

Across Mississippi and the country, people are finding unwelcome surprises in their mailboxes. Medical bills they expected to be largely covered by their health insurance arrive with a much bigger payment due. ...Mississippi’s balance billing law was groundbreaking in 2013, but needs to be updated, according to a report from the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. The report, issued in March, offers three recommendations: Clarify enforcement authority over balancing billing, Prohibit providers from reporting surprise medical bills to creditors, Establish transparent, reasonable payment standards for out-of-network providers that operate at in-network facilities along with a clear, fair process for resolving payment disputes between providers and insurers.

For a week, criticism rained down on Attorney General William P. Barr. Why did his letter advising Congress of the end of the probe contain his own opinion on obstruction of justice? Why did he not lay out basic information such as the size of the report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III? On Friday, Barr seemed to concede that his critics had a point. A new letter was sent to Congress, a sign either that the criticism had personally stung or that Barr worried, once released, the actual report would demonstrate his initial letter was nothing more than political spin to defend his boss. ...“Barr has acted from the very beginning as Donald Trump‘s Roy Cohn,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, referring to Trump’s former fixer and attack dog. “He has served the president and not the country.” Tribe continues, “His initial letter was inexcusable in seizing from Congress, for as long as he could get away with it, the role of deciding on his own, in the inexplicable absence of a determination by Robert Mueller, whether Trump was guilty of obstruction and would be indictable but for the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Rarely have the demands of constitutional democracy and the rule of law been in greater tension with the imperatives of progressive politics. Fidelity to the constitution and the primacy of law over naked power call for a determined effort by Congress to unearth the full truth about Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the election, and since assuming office. Congress a duty to look into the president’s offenses in seizing the White House and whether, having arrived at the pinnacle of power, he obstructed efforts to uncover the details of his corrupt ascent and to disclose the many facets of his interference with investigations into those details. At the same time, one would have to be politically blind not to see that the vast majority of voters care far less about those matters than about kitchen table issues like health care and economic opportunity for this generation and the next.

Augsburg University history Prof. Phillip Adamo led a classroom discussion about the N-word this school year, saying the racial slur rather than the euphemism. The class set off a flurry of student complaints, international press coverage of Adamo’s eventual suspension and intense soul-searching on Minnesota’s most racially diverse private campus about inclusion and academic freedom. ...This time, students took their complaints to the top. Adamo says he was told not to return to his classroom the following week and was relieved of his duties as honors program director. He was eventually suspended as the university sought to formally discipline him. His case drew national attention and press coverage in the U.K. and Denmark. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard law scholar Randall Kennedy, who is black, blasted Adamo’s suspension as “a dispiriting farce” and argued that Augsburg leaders had undermined the university’s reputation. Adamo got support from the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which charged that Augsburg “has run roughshod over academic freedom and its own policies.”

MMT (Modern Monetary Theory—a form of post-Keynesian economics) is everywhere these days. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders embrace it; Paul Krugman and George Will write about it; the Financial Times, Forbes, and The Economist have all run columns about it. Even the men’s parenting website Fatherly had an article on it. Do historians have anything to add?  ...MT, along with the euro crisis and awareness of  austerity’s social effects, has done much to open monetary and fiscal debates to wider audiences. Simply recognizing that money is political and historical (central, as Harvard Law Professor Christine Desan likes to say, to how a polity constitutes itself) is a difficult breakthrough for most people. On the other hand, seeing money in this way doesn’t—in a fractured polity characterized by demagoguery and high levels of inequality—make policy any easier to write or implement.

Pressure on Facebook is mounting following a live stream of the New Zealand mosque massacre, with the nation’s leader calling for an overhaul of the country’s social-media laws and her Australian counterpart proposing criminal penalties for companies that are slow to remove such content. ...Despite being relatively small markets, Australia and New Zealand may carry more clout in the debate over how Facebook moderates content. “English-speaking countries, at least for now, have a lot bigger impact,” said Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Democrats are starting to sound serious about expanding the Supreme Court in hopes of reversing its rightward march. They need to stop. Court packing would be bad politics and something worse: a threat to the rule of law. It’s OK to block nominees from the other party on ideological grounds. It’s wrong to destroy the structure of judicial independence that has been built up brick by brick since 1787. It’s OK to block nominees from the other party on ideological grounds. It’s wrong to destroy the structure of judicial independence that has been built up brick by brick since 1787.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The slaughter of 50 people at a New Zealand mosque this month by a white-supremacist gunman set off a new round of debate about whether white nationalist violence should be treated like Islamic terror. The discussion has covered various practical and theoretical topics but is missing a key element: the legal structure for dealing with the two is different.

An op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa (Labor and Worklife Program Distinguished Fellow): A question that students and parents put to me most frequently is whether it is worthwhile to pursue an MBA as a ticket to success in the business world. I tell them that a master of business administration from Harvard, Stanford or the University of California at Berkeley may be worth the high cost because of the brand, location and network value — but not those from most other business schools over the world. The time and money could be better spent in starting a company that solves real-world problems. Students will gain better practical experiences and have a greater purpose than the investment bankers and consultants that business schools strive to graduate.

ow do you start to wrap your head around some of the most fundamental issues surrounding new technology and how it impacts society? If you’re Jonathan Zittrain, you take this “brainstorming exercise,” as he calls it, and force it into the real world. Zittrain is, among other honorifics, a Harvard Law School professor and the faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He’s also the force behind Assembly, a collaboration between Berkman Klein and the MIT Media Lab, a program which is taking a unique approach to solving problems related to AI and ethics.

This week the Supreme Court will hear a case that could hamstring how the federal government regulates everything from water pollution and organic tomatoes to overtime pay and veteran’s benefits. The case, Kisor v. Wilkie, concerns, on its surface, a Vietnam vet trying to get medical treatment from Veterans Affairs for PTSD, and whether a particular incident in his service is relevant or not to his medical condition. ... Trouble is, that doesn’t happen much either. An exhaustive study by two law professors yielded no evidence that agencies more often wrote vague regulations after Auer than before. In the words of one of them, Adrian Vermeule, “Let us pause to absorb this: Much of the clamor against Auer has been premised on an empirical claim about agency behavior now shown to lack any discernible factual basis.”

Pressure on Facebook is mounting following a live stream of the New Zealand mosque massacre, with the nation’s leader calling for an overhaul of the country’s social-media laws and her Australian counterpart proposing criminal penalties for companies that are slow to remove such content. ... Despite being relatively small markets, Australia and New Zealand may carry more clout in the debate over how Facebook moderates content. “English-speaking countries, at least for now, have a lot bigger impact,” said Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet.

As the entire world now knows, last Friday special counsel Robert Mueller submitted the final version of his report to Attorney General William Barr. ... Why is impeaching Donald Trump viewed by many people -- including prominent Democrats -- as a near-term impossibility? Could impeachment succeed, and under what circumstances? Are congressional investigations and hearings a better way of holding Trump and his administration accountable for their misdeeds and general disregard for democracy? What would happen if Donald Trump were to be impeached and convicted, or if he loses the 2020 presidential election? Would he declare a national emergency in an effort to stay in office? In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Laurence Tribe, a leading scholar of constitutional law and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision not to render a legal decision on whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct the Justice Department’s Russia probe underscores the difficulty of proving obstruction of justice cases, said former federal prosecutors and legal experts. ... Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former federal prosecutor, said “obstruction of justice cases are famously hard to prove.”

No collusion? No obstruction. That’s what Attorney General William Barr appears to believe, at least in part. Legal experts say the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller did not find that President Trump and his associates and the Russian government colluded to interfere in the 2016 election appears to have been a major factor in Attorney General William Barr’s decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice. ... “I think he is saying that the fact that there are no underlying substantive criminal charges makes it more difficult to prove the elements of an obstruction charge, and that’s true. Obstruction cases are famously hard to prove, both as a legal matter and to a jury,” Harvard Law Professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor, said in an e-mail.

After nearly two years of investigation, interviews and indictments, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's job is officially done. While his report has not been released to the public, Attorney General William Barr has released a summary, stating that Mueller did not find evidence that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the foreign government’s election interference activities. ... To decipher the impact—for the president, and for the American people—Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and commentator Jennifer Braceras of the conservative think tank Independent Women’s Forum.

Health care providers in Mississippi continue to break the law by sending patients large, out-of-pocket medical bills that they don’t have to pay, concludes a Harvard Law School report released March 11. ... In its report, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School found that Mississippi’s anti-balance billing law, which was one of the first and strongest enacted in the country, needs revising.

Predicting that the public will not see the full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, Senator Lindsey Graham noted Monday that material covered by executive privilege will likely be kept under wraps. ... For Harvard Law professor Alex Whiting, getting the full report won’t change the outcome of its conclusions, which he says clear the president of criminal wrongdoing on both collusion and obstruction. “I think he’s exonerated of the criminal law charges and I think we have to move on. And I actually think that’s actually a good thing,” Whiting said in a phone interview. “I don’t think the Mueller investigation was ever going to topple Trump, legally or politically.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is over. Attorney General William Barr gave his summary of the report's findings Sunday—and said the special counsel did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it attempted to conspire or coordinate with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Republicans nationally and locally are celebrating the news. But Democrats, including those in Massachusetts' congressional delegation, say the four-page summary should not be the final chapter of this story. Guests: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner.

The headlines call his report a nothingburger. Our diverse panel of insiders says not so fast. ... Alex Whiting, professor at Harvard Law School, and former federal prosecutor with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office in Boston: I think the facts contained within the report could be significant politically, but not criminally. With respect to possible criminal charges, the report and Barr’s decision on obstruction effectively exonerate Trump.

An article by Catharine A. MacKinnon: From experience, women often assume that any opposition to power will produce retaliation followed by retrenchment: not only that any progress made will be clawed back, but that those pushing for it will be punished. While often realistic, fear of blowback can impede insistence on change and the collective mobilization it requires. Anxiety about backlash, however well founded, keeps one’s antennae endlessly attuned to giving power what pleases (and please pacifies) it. This contributes to keeping dominance in place.