Media Mentions

Readers discuss whether an article about the Minnesota senator’s reputation as a tough boss was fair or sexist, and whether it should sway voters. A letter from Charles Fried: A saying in the court of Louis XIV had it that “no man is a hero to his valet.” Your lengthy front-page article about Senator Amy Klobuchar suggests that no politician is a saint to her staff. In high-stress jobs every human being is prone to fits of temper and less than perfect fairness to those who work with her in close settings day in and day out.

An op-ed by David Jonathan Benger '20: A swastika was found on my childhood playground in Brighton Beach yesterday. It was drawn onto the very same jungle gym on which I used to play with my sister while my parents and grandparents watched over us to ensure our safety. A culprit is yet to be identified, but this is not an isolated incident. Attacks on Jewish bodies have been escalating in frequency and ferocity in New York and elsewhere over the last few years.

People facing criminal charges in Berkshire County district courts no longer will be required to post bail while awaiting trial — provided that they are not deemed flight risks. Following through on a promise she made on the campaign trail, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington has directed prosecutors to stop requesting that such defendants be held in lieu of bail. The policy officially was announced Friday. ... "I think it's certainly on the forefront of what the DA's offices are doing across the country," Colin Doyle, staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program, said of Harrington's policy. "Whether someone is in jail pretrial or released shouldn't depend on the money they have in their bank account." Through the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Doyle compiles research on bail statutes nationwide. On Monday, the group will release a nearly 100-page "bail guide" for state and local policymakers.

Joshua Matz and Larry Tribe, authors of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” recently wrote: Over time, a focus on impeachment can flatten and distort our politics. Many of [President] Trump’s worst policies can’t properly be squeezed into an impeachment framework. The same might be said about many of Trump’s scariest foreign-policy judgments and public statements. The Muslim ban, family separation, erratic negotiations with North Korea, and inaction on climate change—these are abhorrent policies, but they are not impeachable offenses. When the only worthwhile end game is Trump’s removal from office, justifiable outrage over these issues too quickly recedes into the background, even as we are treated to an endless diet of speculative headlines about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s secret files. And if impeachment were to unfold, with the Senate almost certainly unable to reach a two-thirds majority for removal, what would all of this have accomplished?

Despite American Jews’ generally low observance of Jewish religious traditions, paucity of Jewish knowledge, and relative non-belief in God, many feel remarkably committed. That is the central paradox of contemporary American Jewish life. And Harvard Law School professor Bob Mnookin confesses he is a prime exemplar of the paradox. ... Over the course of a career devoted to conflict resolution, Mnookin has written many well-regarded books and articles on disputes arising from divorce, commercial dealings, and international clashes, including the Israeli-Arab confrontation. Yet “The Jewish American Paradox,” Mnookin confesses, was the most difficult book for him to write. It required him to master a vast literature far afield from his expertise.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: If you are interested in the resolution calling for a “Green New Deal” that Democrats have introduced in the House, you might want to pay attention to one remarkable phrase in particular. It appears in the resolution no less than three times: “as much as is technologically feasible.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A federal district court in Houston has held that because women are now permitted to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military, all women must be obligated to register for the draft, just as men do. This might sound like a straightforward win for feminism, especially from the perspective of the old-fashioned legal-equality feminism championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both as an advocate and as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Yet the court’s decision raises the more complicated question of whether women should simply be offered access to traditionally male roles in the military, like combat positions, or whether they should be forced to assume those jobs.

Major technology companies, software developers, legal scholars and others have filed a flood of amicus briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Google's appeal in the company's yearslong copyright battle with Oracle over use of copyrighted code in Android smartphones. ... The eight law professors are represented by Christopher T. Bavitz of Harvard Law School.

When patients enroll in health insurance, they are often met with a stark reality: Even with insurance, they can’t afford their treatment. With the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions in limbo once again, it’s important to remember that those with such conditions need more than health insurance. They also need to be protected from discriminatory pricing so that they can afford the medications they need. ... A 2019 report by Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation found that some insurers continue to price all recommended H.I.V. regimens in a way that makes them prohibitively expensive.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One word holds the key to the major Trump-related court cases that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the next few months: deference. In the lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s border wall, and in the U.S. Supreme Court case over whether the census will include a question about citizenship, a central issue will be whether the courts should defer to the assertions that the Trump administration says provide a basis for the decisions they’ve taken.

For most of his life, Donald Trump has managed to stay a step ahead of the courts, the cops and the accountants. Two years into his presidency, however, he appears to be nearing a crossroads of accountability. Reports flew this week that special counsel Robert Mueller was preparing to close up shop. ... Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court, said a conclusion of the Mueller investigation would “open up space” for congressional inquiries to take the lead, “and that would start a whole new phase of this information becoming public and being investigated”.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world’s supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese used in everything from smartphones to electric cars. ... But you may not know that China is also on track to control most of the world's flow of high-capacity online services—the new industries, relying on the immediate communication among humans and machines, that will provide the jobs and opportunities of the future.

Animal law advocates from a variety of backgrounds are planning to gather at Harvard Law School this week for the school’s fifth annual Animal Law Week. ... The free lectures are scheduled for noon each day and are open to the public. The week is sponsored by the Harvard Law School Animal Law Society.

As Donald Trump faces mounting court trouble over his decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border, one attorney involved in suing the administration ridiculed the president’s legal team. “Honestly, I have never had an opponent who was quite as helpful,” Laurence Tribe said during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “And I find it odd to say, 'Thank you, Mr. Trump!'” Tribe, a constitutional law expert from Harvard Law School, has argued more than 30 cases in front of the Supreme Court. His latest case is against the White House: He is representing El Paso County, Texas, in a lawsuit to block Trump’s national emergency declaration. Tribe called the county "ground zero" in Trump's attack on the border.

During the last two weeks of January, Lillie A. Estes had shared with many that this was going to be her year. This would be the year a nascent Community Justice Network came together. ... The film series recently became the Community Justice Network. On Jan. 28, Estes asked the network to interview David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Estes envisioned a blog post illustrating the relationships emerging from the network's launch. More connectivity, more co-creation. Reached Jan. 30, Harris, a longtime Estes supporter and collaborator, offered ideas about navigating that energy. "Lillie herself is really a model and a hero to me," Harris said. "Keeping up with Lillie can be a challenge. But one thing that's unbelievably consistent about her, that I encounter rarely, is her absolute commitment to certain models for creating community leadership. I've seen her step back and say, 'I'm not going to make this decision, this is a collective decision.'

Malique Gordon has already moved three times since his 6-year-old son, Makari, was born. Gordon, 27, lives with his mother Maureen Nugent, who receives a Section 8 voucher. Section 8 — or the Housing Choice Voucher Program, as it’s now known — is a federal program that pays for a predetermined amount of rent.  ... “Suburban communities ... that are supposed to be the target for integration have certain characteristics, and we think those characteristics are good: They're clean, they're open, children have good schools,” says David Harris, managing director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “The question becomes, why it is that people have to move to the suburbs to have access to those things? Why isn't our policy designed to make sure all communities are endowed with those characteristics, where the amenities and the benefits are all the same?” Before his position at Harvard, Harris was the director of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. He argues “mobility” — moving people out of cities and to affluent suburbs — is the wrong solution. He calls it "policy by lottery.

It’s one of the most vexing challenges facing the labor movement: how to wield influence in an era increasingly dominated by technology giants that are often resistant to unions. Are workers best served when unions take an adversarial stance toward such companies? Or should labor groups seek cooperation with employers, even if the resulting deals do little to advance labor’s broader goals? ...But Sharon Block, a senior Labor Department official under President Barack Obama, argued that the deal was defensible. Ms. Block pointed out that the guild had taken something of a hybrid approach between cooperation and antagonism, lobbying for policies such as a minimum earnings standard for drivers and allowing passengers to tip, both of which have been enacted in New York. “There are situations in which taking the half loaf can be worthwhile,” Ms. Block said.

President Donald Trump on Thursday brought renewed national attention to what has emerged as one of the most hotly debated technological and geopolitical challenges — the race to build a next-generation 5G wireless internet network. ...  While major U.S. telecommunications companies have touted their investments in 5G technology, China's firms are by some measures a step ahead, causing concern that the U.S. could fall behind in building new technology off the next-generation networks. “The implication is that new industries of the future, the new ways of making a living, will be in China and not here. They’ll have this huge sandbox to play with and a lot of control over the market,” said Susan Crawford, author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It" and a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on technology policy.

When Phyllis Schlafly crusaded against the Equal Rights Amendmentin the 1970s as a threat to all-American motherhood, she handed out freshly baked bread and apple pie to state legislators. She warned of a dystopian post-E.R.A. future of women forced to enlist in the military, gay marriage, unisex toilets everywhere and homemakers driven into the workplace by husbands free to abandon them. ... Catharine A. MacKinnon, whose legal theories laid the basis for sexual harassment being defined as a form of sex discrimination, has championed the revival of the amendment as a weapon against what she sees as the continuing subordination of women through sexual violence and economic inequality. “You go after sexuality and economics, you’ve gone to the heart of misogyny,” she said.

An essay by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz: Calls to impeach President Donald Trump—and denunciations of those calls—have run rampant in American public discourse since Election Day 2016.  Although support for ending Trump’s tenure has never exceeded 50 percent, it’s no exaggeration to say that talk of impeachment is now a defining feature of our politics. But major implications of that fact remain underappreciated. Over the past two years, hardly any development in the federal government has escaped the inevitable think piece opining that Trump’s presidency has finally been doomed or saved. By November 2018, the word impeachment had already been uttered on cable news 12,000 times that year. New books and articles on the topic arrive weekly. Commentators including Elizabeth Holtzmanand The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum have championed the cause. Tom Steyer has poured millions of dollars into Need to Impeach, and many liberals have rallied to his banner. These calls for Trump’s removal echo widely in #resistance circles—and also on Fox and Breitbart, which gleefully feature this “proof” of a liberal conspiracy.

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of the county of El Paso, Texas argues that Trump's national emergency declaration to build a wall is unconstitutional with the most high-powered legal team that has joined this fight. Co-counsel Laurence Tribe says he's never had an opponent quite as helpful as Trump, whose public statements undermine his case for a national emergency. Lawrence also discusses with co-counsel Stuart Gerson.