Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Would you be better off without Facebook? Would society benefit, too? A team of economists, led by Hunt Allcott of New York University, has just produced the most impressive research to date on these questions. In general, the researchers’ findings are not good news for Facebook 1 and its users. Getting off the platform appears to increase people’s well-being — and significantly decrease political polarization.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a nonbinding amendment, drafted by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that contradicts President Donald Trump’s foreign policy on Syria and Afghanistan. It asserts that too fast a withdrawal from either country “would put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security.” Whether you agree or not, the amendment is well within the Senate’s power: It’s basically a message to the president, not a law that would require anyone to do anything. In contrast, Representatives Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, and Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, have introduced bills in the House that actually attempt to use Congress’s power of the purse to block the Trump administration from withdrawing troops from Syria and South Korea.

A group of Harvard law students pushing to end mandatory arbitration in Big Law have set their sights on a new target—Venable. The Pipeline Parity Project, as the student organization is called, on Monday called for classmates and law students across the country to boycott interviewing for summer associate positions at Venable in an effort to pressure the firm to stop using mandatory arbitration for any of its employees. ...“It’s unacceptable for any business to make its employees or customers sign away their legal rights,” said Beth Feldstein, a first-year law student at Harvard. “Venable publicly claimed to be doing the right thing, then turned around and deprived its workers of their day in court. We’re not going to let them off the hook.”

Ann Coulter, an infamously estranged backer of President Donald Trump, is continuing to hammer the president over his inability to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. ...Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe, however, immediately shot down Coulter’s claims that the president could order the wall built without congressional authorization. “Inherent presidential power as commander-in-chief doesn’t give Trump the power of the purse,” he wrote on Twitter. “We fought a revolution to end such power.”

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: ... From the start, the Trump Administration seized on Title IX as an area in which to reverse the Obama Administration’s positions. Under Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has rescinded more than twenty Obama-era policy guidelines on anti-discrimination laws, including ones that protected transgender students from discrimination and allowed them to use gender-segregated facilities of their choice. It has also cancelled policies that supported schools’ use of affirmative action, outlined disabled students’ rights, and attempted to curb racial disparities in elementary and secondary schools, based on research showing that minority students are punished for misconduct at higher rates than their behavior warrants. These revocations have rightly provoked concern that DeVos is turning her back on vulnerable students.

... In 43 states and the District of Columbia, driver’s licenses can be suspended because of unpaid court debt. In most locales, once a driver’s license is suspended, it can retain that designation indefinitely. Only four states currently require an “ability-to-repay” or a “willfulness” determination.  Otherwise, nonpayment of driver-related charges can lead to the loss of a driver’s license for years. ... “Excessive fees and fines pose a fundamental challenge to a fair and effective criminal justice system,” said Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard Law’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “At their worst, these practices can lead to a two-tiered system of criminal justice, exposing indigent defendants to especially harsh outcomes.”

Harvard affiliates and community leaders gathered Thursday evening for an event called “Beloved Streets: Race & Justice in America,” which marked the culmination of a winter-term course at Harvard Graduate School of Education of the same name. ... David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice and one of the course leaders, said the course attempted to create some spaces and places in a curriculum, fostering transparent conversations about important societal issues. ... “When I think about going into communities, what I think about is how can I operate from a place of listening,” said Emanuel Powell III, a Harvard Law School student and course participant.

Talks between the Trump administration and California over rules requiring automakers to steadily decrease car emissions are no closer to reaching a deal than when they began months ago, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle. ... “I’ve seen a lot of going through the motions,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard environmental law professor who is not involved in the current talks but worked on the first set of national vehicle emissions standards under President Obama. During those negotiations, Freeman said she required agency staff with technical expertise to be deeply involved.

Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford explains how America’s internet connectivity issues and corrosive infrastructure are holding the country back and how we can rally to fix it. She and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel also discuss the Huawei scandal, politicians’ roles in improving broadband internet, and her new book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It.

Harvard law professor Larry Lessig has been in New Hampshire often enough for political advocacy that he knows what will get lawmakers’ attention here, and he got right to the point Tuesday: He thinks our presidential primary is in danger. Lessig was testifying in favor of a bill to change the 2020 primary to ranked-choice voting, which would allow people to vote not just for a single candidate for each office, but mark the ballot to rank all the hopefuls from their top choice to their bottom choice.

Alumni discuss pathways to public service work in advance of Public Interested Conference. ... For [David] Harris, Ph.D. ’92, that path was long and meandering. It began with his grandfather, a Unitarian minister who preached the imperative to demonstrate faith by improving society. Harris struggled, however, with how to go about that. He ultimately chose to follow his mother’s example and study sociology, but it would take him nine years and stints at three schools to finish his undergraduate degree. ... After 10 years there, he met with Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree about the possibility of joining a new institute at Harvard that Ogletree had created to work on race and justice issues. “It was clear to both of us that it was just a perfect fit. And it has been,” said Harris, who has been the managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice since 2006.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If I were on the U.S. Supreme Court, I would probably vote to find Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax constitutional. But given the current composition of the court, that might well put me in the minority. Warren, who is exploring a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has suggested that the top 75,000 U.S. households pay an annual tax of 2 percent on each dollar of their net worth above $50 million. Billionaires would be taxed an additional 1 percent.

The expanded use of fiber-optic connections has opened up new possibilities to health care, education, retail and other fields. Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford joins host Krys Boyd to explain why we need to approach fiber with an increased urgency or risk falling behind other developed nations.

The Department of Education has been inundated with approximately 100,000 public comments on its proposed new rules for how campuses handle cases of sexual assault. ... Fighting these issues through agency regulations — once the domain of wonky lawyers — is something of a newer frontier in political activism. Harvard Law School Professor Jacob Gersen says most regulations still get just a smattering of comments — certainly not a hashtag campaign on social media. But it’s increasingly a part of political strategy.

Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Japanese law. He is also a keen observer of East Asian affairs. JAPAN Forward’s Jason Morgan recently sat down with Professor Ramseyer to sound him out on regional developments in the realm of law and policy in Northeast Asia.

PG&E Corp. on Tuesday became the largest public company to file for bankruptcy in the U.S. in the past decade as mounting liabilities from its role in triggering California wildfires pushed the utility over the brink. ... Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s electricity law initiative, said the changing nature of PG&E’s customer base mirrors broader challenges to the monopolistic business model many U.S. utilities have enjoyed for decades. “There’s a larger issue at hand regarding how utilities are coping with new technology,” Mr. Peskoe said. “Maybe this is an opportunity for the industry to think about this differently.”

Huawei chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is set for a long battle as she fights extradition from Canada to the United States, a process that could be complicated by intervention from US President Donald Trump, analysts say. ... International trade law specialist Mark Wu, from Harvard Law School, said that because the criminal charges against Huawei and Meng were overseen by the Department of Justice, Trump could intervene though his acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. “However, he should exercise extreme caution in doing so and not undermine the rule of law,” Wu said. “Any perception that her arrest is meant to offer political leverage in upcoming trade negotiations could jeopardise the success of the ongoing extradition hearings in Canadian court.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has already rescinded Obama-era guidelines for how schools handle sexual harassment and assault claims. Now, she is hoping to give what she calls fair protections to the accused. Advocates for survivors see this as a big step backward and they are making their voices heard. The deadline for public comment has been extended to Wednesday, Jan. 30. On the latest episode of On Campus Radio, we'll look into DeVos' proposed changes and how students and educators are responding to them. ... We'll then talk to Harvard law professors Janet Halley and Diane Rosenfeld about the debate over Title IX regulations.

Hepatitis C is one of the most common infectious diseases, with the potential to cause serious liver damage, so patients were thrilled when a set of revolutionary new medications became available five years ago. But at $90,000 per treatment course, the drugs were pricey, and many states, including Minnesota, balked at covering them under their taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs. ... Nationwide, state Medicaid programs are being urged — and sometimes sued — to drop treatment barriers. Led partly by the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard University, 21 states have dropped or reduced requirements that patients must suffer some liver damage before they are treated, a requirement that Minnesota never used. ... “What we are seeing here are measures that are deliberately put in place to stop people who need medically necessary care versus cost concerns,” said Phil Walters, an attorney with the Harvard center. He said the restrictions are “discriminatory and illegal.”

An op-ed by David Brooks: I went into journalism to cover politics, but now I find myself in national marriage therapy. Covering American life is like covering one of those traumatizing Eugene O’Neill plays about a family where everyone screams at each other all night and then when dawn breaks you get to leave the theater. But don’t despair, I’m here to help. I’ve been searching for practical tips on how we can be less beastly to one another, especially when we’re negotiating disagreements. I’ve found some excellent guides — like “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable” by Daniel Shapiro, “The Rough Patch”by Daphne de Marneffe and “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker — and I’ve compiled some, I hope, not entirely useless tips.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Many social problems seem impossibly daunting, simply because they are so large. Poverty, immigration, cancer deaths, gun violence, climate change – in light of the magnitude of those problems, most imaginable reforms seem pretty small. In their book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that the best response to big challenges is often to “shrink the change.” Instead of trying to solve a problem, dent it.