Media Mentions

If this country really has ambitions of having a 5G revolution like the one being talked about the Consumer Electronics Show this week, we need something else first. Fiber optic connections that reach everyone. "What it is is synthetic glass, in which the manufactured process is so carefully controlled that light can travel through that glass for many dozens of miles without using any of the signal that it's carrying," says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution - and Why America Might Miss it.” ... Susan Crawford says fiber technology is the biggest tech story the United States should be paying attention to in 2019.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, discusses his column: "No ‘Emergency’ Will Allow Trump to Build His Wall." Hosted by Pimm Foxx and Lisa Abramowicz.

The Labor Department is starting 2019 without confirmed officials in several key leadership posts, vacancies the business community fears could derail some policy initiatives. ... “I can certainly say there was nothing like this during our time,” Sharon Block, a former DOL policy office head under President Barack Obama, told Bloomberg Law. “These are not easy jobs. People learn how to do them and do them well. There’s huge value in having them stay. I can’t imagine doing the kind of work we did with the kind of vacancies they have.” The department still has career staff who are relied on heavily, she said. The WHD operated without a Senate-confirmed leader for the first five years of the Obama administration and under acting leadership for stretches of the George W. Bush era.

The resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has sent shockwaves through the Pentagon, with senior staff heading toward the exits. After announcing a plan to immediately withdraw from Syria, President Donald Trump and National Security Advisor John Bolton are downplaying plans to pull out immediately. A major hack is rocking the German political scene. Vietnam may play host to the next U.S.-North Korea summit meeting. And American and Chinese trade negotiators reconvene. ...The indictment strategy. American prosecutors have rolled out a number of indictments in recent months targeting Chinese cyberespionage, but two scholars aren’t convinced the legal campaign is providing any measure of deterrence. “On the basis of the public record in light of its publicly stated aims, the indictment strategy appears to be a magnificent failure,” Jack Goldsmith and Robert D. Williams write in Lawfare.

President Donald Trump would almost certainly face a legal challenge if he carries out his threat to get funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall by declaring a national emergency and circumventing Congress’s purse-strings power. Legal scholars said it was unclear exactly how such a step would play out, but they agreed that a court test would likely focus on whether an emergency actually exists on the southern border and on the limits of presidential power over taxpayer funds. ... Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said, “It’s a very aggressive use of presidential authority. The fact that it’s aggressive doesn’t mean it’s unlawful. But it does mean that it goes beyond the boundaries of what has been done before.”

For years, many labor experts seemed ready to write the obituary of strikes in America. In 2017, the number of major strikes—those involving more than 1,000 workers—dwindled to just seven in the private sector. Indeed, over the past decade, there were just 13 major strikes a year on average. That’s less than one-sixth the average annual number in the 1980s (83), and less than one-twentieth the yearly average in the 1970s (288).In 1971 alone, 2.5 million private-sector workers went on strike, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—that’s 100 times the number, 25,000, who went on strike in 2017. ... Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, says labor’s renewed militancy reflects a broader shift in the zeitgeist. “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 this country in a significant way.”

Marta Villanueva enrolled in a culinary program at the Art Institute of Phoenix as a way to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety after leaving the Army.  She used GI Bill benefits to pay for classes, which began in mid-2017. She dreamed of opening a business one day. But the school closed in December, leaving Villanueva out the time and money, and unsure how, or if, she’ll get her GI Bill benefits reinstated. ...But the contraction in private, mostly for-profit colleges isn't only a recent phenomenon, said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. There's a long-term, boom-and-bust cycle that runs counter to unemployment numbers, Merrill said.

During a conversation on MSNBC on Sunday, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig said that the real emergency facing the nation is the president himself. In response to a question about what powers President Donald Trumpwould have if he were to declare a state of emergency in order to get his border way, Lessig said the problem is that “the man is using words that have no connection to reality.” ... “He says we have a national crisis, a national security crisis. A national emergency. I agree we have a national emergency but the emergency is this president. The emergency is the fact we don’t have an executive who’s exercising his power in a responsible way.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump in a meeting with congressional Democrats on Friday said he was prepared for the partial government shutdown to continue for months — or even years — if he doesn’t get the money he wants for a wall along the Mexican border. It’s not hard to see how that prediction comes true. Both sides have framed the issue such that a victory for one side on funding a border wall entails defeat for the other. Neither side has much incentive to compromise. Suppose Trump is right. The longest shutdown on record is 21 days, from late December 1995 to early January 1996. (This is the 21st in the modern era.) What would a much longer shutdown mean for U.S. political life?

Two weeks into a partial government shutdown triggered by an impasse over the money President Donald Trump demanded for his promised border wall, Trump said he could declare a state of emergency and build his wall without congressional approval. ... "The Department of Defense has funds in its account that are not specifically designated for anything. Congress gives them money and says we don't know what’s going to happen over the next year — here’s 100 billion," Harvard Law School Professor Mark Tushnet told NBC News, guessing at an approximate funding amount. “My instinct is to say that if he declares a national emergency and uses this pot of unappropriated money for the wall, he’s on very solid legal ground,” he added.

EPA's polarizing new plan to scrap the legal underpinnings for Obama-era mercury standards traces a piece of its history to Brett Kavanaugh. ... Legal experts say Kavanaugh's 2014 dissent while on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit features prominently in the Supreme Court's final decision and may have persuaded the justices to take up the dispute in the first place. "Judge Kavanaugh's dissent ... struck me and many others as resembling a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari," said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Harvard Environmental Law Program and a former Obama EPA official. "If anything, then, his dissent may have had an impact in the Court's decision to take up the question in the first place."

When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you’re likely to think that they’re on the same side — the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas. In reality, their interests are at odds. ... Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor who writes regularly for The New Yorker, a Condé Nast magazine, read the small print, too, and thought: “No way. I’m not signing that.” Ms. Gersen, an expert in the laws regulating sexuality, often takes stands that may offend the magazine’s liberal readers, as when she defended Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rollback of Obama-era rules on campus sexual-assault accusations. When I called Ms. Gersen in November, she said, “No person who is engaged in creative expressive activity should be signing one of these.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: It feels quaint–maybe a bit absurd–to remark the fact that Donald Trump has no constitutionally moral justification for his demand that Congress fund the building of a wall on the Mexican border. Such an argument feels absurd when made against this president. Yet it should not be insignificant to Congress.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner have harshly criticized William Barr’s memo on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction of justice theory. They say (in the New York Times) that the memo “seriously damages [Barr’s] credibility and raises questions about his fitness for the Justice Department’s top position” and (later, on Lawfare) that the memo is “poorly reasoned.”

The day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, officially took office in Washington as the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives, video footage from her college days suddenly appeared on the internet. If the video showing her dancing and twirling barefoot on a rooftop was meant to be an embarrassing leak, it backfired badly. ... And Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, had been using Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s video among other “Lisztomania” and “Breakfast Club” mash-ups to illustrate the concept of fair use in his lectures, he said in an email on Friday.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: We go through life thinking the First Amendment is followed in the U.S. In practice, that isn’t always true. A case in point is that of Gunther Glaub, who is about to go to prison for a quirky protest in which he sent the bill for his new Chevrolet Camaro to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and scribbled on it, “Thank you for paying this debt.” Astonishingly, prosecutors went after Glaub on the theory that sending the government this invoice and a few other bills, including one for his wife’s student loan and another from his credit union, violated the federal law against submitting false claims to the government.

Two Harvard efforts are helping craft policy before the shift gains speed. ... There is broad understanding that many pivotal issues facing the world—such as climate change, immigration, and labor shortages—are intertwined, and changes in one can affect another. The shifts don’t develop in isolation. Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford understands that the rise of autonomous vehicles will be no different. To properly prepare the students who will not only have to adapt to these technologies but someday help shape them, their education cannot happen in isolation either. So when Crawford, the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law, designed her class “Autonomous Vehicles and Local Government Lab,” she made sure that its 80 students would be exposed to an interdisciplinary effort from a range of Schools, ensuring students would learn from each other.

In a major win for labor advocates, a federal court issued a long-awaited ruling last week finding that corporations could be held responsible for issues like wage discrimination or illegal job termination, even if the employees were subcontractors or working at a franchised company. ... The appellate court decision could have implications for the new rule as well. “I think it’s really hard to see how the board goes forward with its proposed rule now,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Hours before the 116th Congress began, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made clear she’s prepared to respect, even defend, the rule of law. In an interview broadcast Thursday morning on the “Today” show, Pelosi was asked whether she believed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III should honor decades-old Justice Department guidance, which suggests a president should not be indicted while in office. “I think that that is an open discussion in terms of the law,” said Pelosi, who became House speaker later in the day. She is now the highest-ranking government official to openly state what many experts have discussed for months. ... "There are some experts who continue to believe the Constitution might at least require postponing any criminal trial until the president is out of office,” Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe told The Washington Post. So some have suggested alternatives. Tribe, for instance, said that if indicted, a president’s criminal trial could be postponed until the end of his term.

An op-ed by Ryan Manucha '19: Let Canadians remember 2018 as the year that Gérard Comeau delivered to his fellow citizens a true gift: consumer freedom. When the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the resident of Tracadie, N.B., in his bid to fight the fines he incurred for bringing alcohol across the border from Quebec, he may have lost the battle. But he would go on to win the war – not just for himself, but for all beer-loving Canadians.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The Oscars were first presented in 1929. The Behavioral Economics Oscars, known throughout Hollywood as the Becons, did not appear until 2012. But as the iPhone is to the rotary phone, and as Lady Gaga is to Dean Martin, so are the Becons to the Oscars. After months of careful deliberation, the top-secret committee has finalized its choices. Here are the Becons for 2018.