Media Mentions

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.”

Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard University, co-authored an op-ed calling on New York state Tuesday to move forward with a bill that would prevent President Donald Trump from using his pardon power to escape criminal responsibility. It noted that with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation having reached its conclusion, attention has now turned to the Southern District of New York — which is known to be pursuing cases surrounding Trump’s interests.“[It’s] easy to forget that the president, his company, his adult children and many of his close associates face potential criminal liability for business practices that trace back years,” Tribe wrote in an op-ed in the New York Daily News, co-authored by Ron Fein, the director of Free Speech for the People. “These are unlikely to be crimes of espionage or treason, but rather tax evasion, bank fraud and the like.”  

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, recently raised a lot of suspicion when he argued for government regulation of his own company and other social media platforms. Some people have been skeptical of his motives, complaining that he is trying to fend off more aggressive regulation or to squelch competition. But instead of attacking the messenger, we should discuss the message on its merits. Zuckerberg’s argument is an important step in the right direction — one that should produce sustained discussion and eventually legislation. Heads of companies don’t usually contend that the government should be regulating them. But Zuckerberg rightly noted that if we were starting anew, we would not want private companies to decide, entirely on their own, how to answer the fundamental questions that social media providers are now facing. Consider the integrity of elections — a problem made most vivid by Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In a 5-4 decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the execution of a Missouri man who says the lethal injection may cause him excruciating pain because of a medical condition. The legal commentators have been out in force since, explaining the politics of the justices’ disagreement and the ever-changing technical aspects of death penalty jurisprudence. That analysis is useful, but it’s also beside the point. What’s really at stake is whether and how the Supreme Court should engage with what the late Justice Harry Blackmun memorably called “the machinery of death.” On that question the verdict of history will be clear: All nine justices have gotten it terribly wrong. And so has the Supreme Court itself. The reason is not legal, but moral. It’s morally repugnant for the justices to stage clinical-sounding debates on whether specific methods of execution are constitutional, balancing firing squads against injections, gas chambers and electrocution — all against the historical backdrop of hanging.

The Second Circuit unanimously overturned a U.S. Tax Court decision that had denied a retired Connecticut woman her tax refund, saying Tuesday that the ruling had resulted in differential treatment of taxpayers that Congress had intended to avoid. People who file a tax return before receiving a deficiency notice are usually allowed to go back three years before the notice was mailed to them to seek a refund or credit of overpaid income taxes. Those who do not file a return before receiving a deficiency notice were restricted to a two-year look-back period until 1997, when Congress enacted language permitting a refund or credit if the Internal Revenue Service issues the notice “during the third year after the due date (with extensions) for filing” a tax return. ... The case had attracted the attention of law professors T. Keith Fogg and W. Edward Afield, of Harvard Law School and Georgia State University, respectively, who filed a brief advising the Second Circuit that the “(with extensions)” language should add to the time period for awarding a refund, not lessen it.

Congressional efforts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act could derail Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' attempts to finalize rules regarding Title IX and campus sexual assault. If Tuesday's Senate hearing is a barometer for how members of Congress might legislate on the issue as part of the larger higher education overhaul, the language is likely to be more measured than DeVos' proposed rules, which largely aim to bolster the rights of those accused. ...Most of the witnesses agreed that requiring a cross examination isn't necessary. "What is required is the opportunity to ask questions and I do not think it's essential to do it in a direct fashion," Jeannie Suk Gersen, professor of law at Harvard Law School, said, regarding due process. "I think that as long as there is an opportunity to put questions to the other side through a neutral party, that's enough."