Media Mentions

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., unveiled a plan on Wednesday to give every voter up to $600 in what she calls "Democracy Dollars" that they can donate to federal candidates for office. ... An ethics reform bill in Congress backed by Democratic leaders in the House and Senate would match small donations with six times as much money in public funds. It includes a "my voice voucher" program similar to Gillibrand's but much smaller in scale: It would test the idea as a pilot program in select locations and the vouchers would be for only $25. "Gillibrand's plan is the most ambitious adoption of the idea that I think we've seen so far," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and former presidential candidate who has advocated for the voucher concept, told NBC News.

The economy is getting bigger, but not better. Not for most Americans, anyway. In the United States, additional income from productivity and growth has been going mostly to those at the topof the income and wealth ladder. Between 1979 and 2016, the US national income grew by nearly 60%, but after accounting for taxes and transfers, the bottom half of the income distribution experienced incomes rising by 22%, while those in the top 10% had income gains that were almost five times as much – 100%.... The good news is that there are plenty of good ideas about what that infrastructure needs to be. One of these is to allow workers to organize across an industry, rather than firm-by-firm. Employees in different firms could then come together to bargain with their employers, without disadvantaging any one firm vis-a-vis its competitors. This is just one of many proposals from a team of scholars, advocates and policymakers working on a new project at Harvard law School: Rebalancing Economic and Political Power: A Clean Slate for the Future of Labor Law. This way to think about collective bargaining – so-called “sectoral bargaining” – is new in the US but works in other countries such as Germany.

President Donald Trump's 2017 pardon of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio should be found invalid, a bipartisan collection of advocacy groups and legal experts told the Ninth Circuit, calling Arpaio "one of the nation's most notorious civil rights violators" and saying his exoneration would be "corrosive of the rule of law." ...In a statement Tuesday, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who took part in the groups' and experts' brief, said the pardon was "a license to violate the civil rights of refugees and immigrants." "The courts should strike down this blatant abuse of pardon power, which the framers designed as a way to temper justice with mercy — not as a way to destroy the very foundations of justice itself," Tribe said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: It’s easy to blame Attorney General William Barr for distorting special counsel Robert Mueller’s report when he summarized it before its release. Even Mueller apparently blamed Barr in a private letter that has now been leaked. But there’s something dissatisfying about blaming a scorpion for being a scorpion. Of course Barr took advantage of his opportunity to distort the report. He took his job to protect President Donald Trump. The question is, why did Barr get a chance in the first place? And the answer lies in the special counsel regulations, produced in 1999 by Janet Reno’s Department of Justice under Bill Clinton’s administration. The regulations give the attorney general the golden opportunity to shape public perception of a special counsel report by issuing a summary of the report’s findings. Indeed, so powerful is the attorney general under the regulations that the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — who, let us not forget, is appointed by the president and answerable to the president  doesn’t even have to release the special counsel’s report at all. If you want to blame someone, or something, for Barr’s sleight of hand, the proper target is clear: blame the regulations.

It’s probably a source of controversy in your own home. Those frustrating food expiration dates --- “best by” one date, or “use by” that one. One member of your family may want to throw something out. You may think the food is perfectly fine. Who’s right? “The majority of those labels are related to quality and not to safety,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “What they’re saying to consumers is, we’ve tested out this food, we’ve had people taste it, and this is when we think it will still taste the very best.” Much of the confusion about food labels concerns that very issue---their source. Many believe expiration dates constitute government warnings. But save for one food type, the government does not get involved.

After special counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to William Barr complaining about his summary of the Russia investigation was revealed on Tuesday, top legal scholars — including a longtime Harvard law professor — condemned the Attorney General for allegedly misrepresenting the special counsel’s findings, with some calling on him to resign or be impeached. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional legal expert who has taught at the leading academic institution for almost half a century, condemned Barr for misleading public opinion in a statement posted to Twitter, and called for the attorney general to be impeached for his actions. “Mueller says AG Barr misrepresented the ‘context, nature & substance’ of his probe. What else is there? Barr is a total disgrace and a phony,” Tribe wrote. “He must now testify under Rep. Jerry Nadler’s rules, then resign.” “Mueller must now testify as well. This is a new ballgame,” the professor continued. “AG Barr flat-out lied to the American people about the Mueller report’s incrimination of President Trump. He’s been outed as a total fraud. We can’t let Barr — or Trump — get away with such gross abuse of power.” “Barr must be impeached if he doesn’t resign first,” Tribe added.

Two years ago, as Nebraska was considering a “right to repair” bill designed to make it easier for consumers to fix their own gadgets, an Apple lobbyist made a frightening prediction. If the state passed the legislation, it would turn into a haven for hackers, Steve Kester told then-state senator Lydia Brasch. He argued the law would inadvertently give bad actors the opportunity to break into devices like smartphones. The bill was later shelved, in part because of industry pressure. ...Securepairs.org, founded by technology journalist Paul Roberts, has attracted the support of more than 20 security experts, including Harvard University security technologist Bruce Schneier, bug bounty expert Katie Moussouris, and ACLU technologist Jon Callas. They plan to arrange for expert witnesses to testify at legislative hearings across the country in an effort to convince lawmakers that the right to repair is inherently safe.

President Trump has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to keep two banks from responding to congressional subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown with Democrats eager to investigate his finances. ... The Supreme Court has traditionally given Congress broad power to investigate and has been reluctant to intervene when lawmakers issue a subpoena, says Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman. "The courts basically said, 'This is up to the Congress. They do what they want to do. We don't get involved,' " Feldman says. Trump and his attorneys may be hoping they can persuade the Supreme Court to step in and strike down — or at least restrict — the subpoenas, but that may take a while, Feldman says. Without a court order, the banks will have no choice but to comply with Congress' demands and turn over to investigators the records they want, Feldman says.

One of the Arab world’s most visible advocacy groups defending the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people is facing closure following legal threats by the government. ...“If the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival speaks to the increasing boldness and assertiveness of Tunisian LGBT activists, such an event was hardly imaginable a few years ago,” wrote Ramy Khouili and Daniel Levine-Spound [’19] in a recently published study, Article 230 – A History of the Criminalisation of Homosexuality in Tunisia. Khouili said few countries in the region have an LGBT movement as developed as Tunisia, but he said the lawsuit against Shams was indicative of “the myriad ways” in which people seek to silence the voices of Tunisian gay rights campaigners.

The Post reports on Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s resignation letter submitted Monday, effective May 11. No one in the saga of the Mueller report has gone through so many shifts in public perception or gone through such wild swings in his professional reputation. For a time he was the darling of Democrats, seeming to hold back the tide against interference with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe. Republicans such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) raked him over the coals regarding failure to produce documents (ah, those were the days when Republicans cared about the House’s investigative powers!) and even tried to impeach Rosenstein. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe describes Rosenstein’s tenure: “Self-serving. Self-protective. Filled with ethical compromise. Not exactly disgraceful. But not graceful either. Anything but heroic.”

President Donald Trump is suing both Capital One and Deutsche Bank to prevent them from complying with congressional subpoenas into his financial records. ..."It appears that Donald Trump made a practice of wildly exaggerating his wealth and the supposed business acumen that enabled him to amass it," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, told Salon last month. He added, "Although there are no legal and especially criminal consequences to that kind of exaggeration on reality television or in talking to journalists at places like Forbes in order to cheat one’s way onto various lists of the wealthiest people around, there are very serious criminal consequences indeed when such lies, in the form of fraudulent financial statements, are used either to extract loans from banks or to obtain insurance on favorable terms from various insurance companies."

Last Thursday, the NAACP suspended its Saint Louis County chapter president, a man by the name of John Gaskin. He was accused of two offenses. The second was a conflict-of-interest allegation that doesn’t concern us, but the first offense should. The NAACP actually suspended a chapter president in part for supporting greater due process for black men accused of sexual misconduct on campus. They suspended him for supporting civil liberties. ...Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gerson, one of the nation’s foremost experts on Title IX adjudications, has reported that the administrators and faculty members who work on campus sexual-assault cases say that “most of the complaints are against minorities.” Moreover, the modern attack on campus due process means that black men are facing an old problem. Yoffe quotes another Harvard professor, Janet Halley, who accurately notes that “American racial history is laced with vendetta-like scandals in which black men are accused of sexually assaulting white women,” followed eventually by the revelation “that the accused men were not wrongdoers at all.”

Stop & Shop’s stores were ghost towns during the recent strike. With workers standing outside in picket lines, customers stayed away , leading to one of the most effective strikes in recent memory. The grocery clerks and bakers and meat cutters holding signs were protesting proposed cuts to their benefits, but their plight also resonated with the public because they represented something bigger: working Americans across the country whose wages are barely budging while the cost of living skyrockets in such places as Boston and corporations rake in record profits. ...“What we’re seeing is an increasing resistance to the fundamental unfairness of a system that’s so skewed both economically and politically to the wealthy,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School labor professor, noting that when Uber goes public, former CEO Travis Kalanick’s stock is expected to be worth upward of $6 billion — an amount that would take a full-time Uber driver 150,000 years to make.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The brewing conflict between the House Judiciary Committee and Attorney General William Barr — over whether he will testify this week as scheduled, and under what ground rules — is a symptom of a much bigger emerging clash between Congress and the president. The most probable outcome is a stalemate: because the framers designed the Constitution that way. We have entered a new phase of the constitutional stress test that began with President Donald Trump’s election and shows no signs of winding down. In the first phases, Trump pushed the limits of executive power on immigration, and went after the criminal justice system in the hopes of delegitimizing it. This time, the initiative comes not from the president, but from a different branch of government.

Hours after Joe Biden made his presidential run official last Thursday, Anita Hill’s name was back in the news. Earlier this month, with an eye toward getting into the race, Biden called Hill to “express his regret” for her treatment during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the New York Times reported. ... Lastly, Biden’s critics say that his own questioning of Hill was unfair, blaming him for “setting an accusing, skeptical tone and losing control,” the Washington Post reports. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and Hill’s attorney at the time, told Politico he still blames Biden for mishandling the hearing: “I was shocked and dismayed that Joe Biden was asking questions that didn’t seem appropriate and was not in her corner as a Democrat,” Ogletree said. “The point is that he’s supposed to be neutral, but his questions to Anita Hill were as piercing as anyone’s.” Ogletree said he’s brought up the hearings with Biden in the years since, but hasn’t been satisfied with the response. “He’s said that this job was to control the hearing, that he was surprised by the result as well,” Ogletree said.

The Labor Department weighed in Monday on a question whose answer could be worth billions of dollars to gig-economy companies as they begin selling shares to the public: Are their workers employees or contractors? ... Sharon Block, a former top official in the Obama Labor Department who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said it was hard to tell from the facts the Labor Department chose to include in its letter whether the workers using the platform in question were truly independent contractors. But she said there seemed to be a stronger case to make for contractor status in that case than for Uber. Still, she speculated that the finding could be procedurally useful for the department if it later sought to deem Uber drivers to be independent contractors. “This as a strategy makes sense,” Ms. Block said. “They set the standard in a way that makes it really clear this company gets past it, and in a way that’s going to help them in the harder cases.”

The International Criminal Court’s recent rejection of its chief prosecutor’s request to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan has laid bare the limitations of its working. The statement of the Court that the current situation in Afghanistan “made the prospects for a successful investigation and prosecution extremely limited” has shocked civil society. ... The judges of the pre-trial chamber seem to have considered not only the interest of justice, but also the prospects of success as equally important in deciding the prosecutor’s request. Alex Whiting in his analytical article on the ICC decision in www.justsecurity.org, said the judges found strong evidence to indicate that for the moment at least, an investigation in Afghanistan simply could not succeed.

Problems with the U.S. health care system—including the rising costs of prescription drugs, the current opioid abuse crisis, and continued gaps in access to care—have moved front and center in national policy debates. But despite the urgency of these problems, politicians have not reached any consensus on how to solve them. The Trump Administration has sought to empower states to craft solutions to health care problems that affect their own populations, while Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Premila Jayapal (D-Wash.) have advocated for a national health insurance system they call “Medicare for All.” ... Against this backdrop, The Regulatory Review has invited numerous experts to analyze pressing concerns with the current U.S. health care system and offer their ideas for the future. "Defining and Establishing Goals for Medicare for All" by Carmel Shachar, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics: "It is increasingly difficult to find a Democratic presidential hopeful who has not paid at least some lip service to “Medicare for all.” Medicare for all, however, means many things to many people. As the fight to become the Democratic presidential candidate unfolds, it will be important to see how this term gets defined."

A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free exchange of ideas, but critics say the bill contradicts a federal law that allows social media platforms to regulate their own content. ...Opponents to the bill raised concerns about the conflict with a federal law that protects social media platforms. In the federal law, social media platforms are protected under a “good Samaritan” policy that allows them to moderate content on the platform however they want, or on a subjective basis. Kendra Albert, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the federal law would likely preempt SB 2373 because the bill is more restrictive. “The federal law contains what we would call a ‘subjective standard,’” said Albert, who specializes in technology law. “It's based on whether the provider thinks that this causes problems, whereas the Texas bill attempts to move it to an objective standard.”

A week before the public opening of "Hamilton: The Exhibition" -- the brainchild of "Hamilton" composer/lyricist/writer Lin-Manuel Miranda and his team -- exhibition creative director David Korins insisted everything was on schedule. A 360-degree, immersive, football field-sized homage to Alexander Hamilton, the exhibition opened Saturday on Chicago's Northerly Island. It represents a "deeper dive" into the life and times of the Founding Father and first treasury secretary depicted in Miranda's blockbuster musical. ...More than two years in the making, the exhibition is a collaboration between Miranda, Korins, director Thomas Kail, producer Jeffrey Seller and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire with assistance from Yale University historian Joanne Freeman and Harvard Law professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

At the heart of all politics and activism is the concept of change. People agitate, organize and vote because they believe that they can affect change in the world — or, in some cases, reverse changes that have already happened. But the process of change can be a bit mysterious. How does it happen? How can people make it happen? In his new book, "How Change Happens," Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein tackles these larger issues, looking at a history of social change and analyzing it for lessons that could be useful for those who seek to make changes to the status quo. He sat down with me recently on "Salon Talks" to discuss the way social movements get started and why what used to be considered common sense or can sometimes transform with surprising speed.