Media Mentions

A growing number of scientific reports and news headlines tell a grim tale — the quality and quantity of the U.S. water supply is increasingly threatened by droughts, contamination, algal blooms, severe weather and diminishing groundwater aquifers. Yet, rather than stepping up protections, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers just signed a proposed rule to revise the definition of the “waters of the United States” in ways that will substantially restrict the waterways protected as part of the Clean Water Act. ... Although the Trump administration and lobbyists stoked fears among farmers that government authorities would regulate ditches and ponds, the reality is that the Clean Water Act and associated regulations already contained “generous carve-outs for farmers”, according to Caitlin McCoy at Harvard Law School.

They say to dance like no one's watching. But what if millions are watching an avatar of you dance and someone else is making billions from it without your permission? That's the intriguing question at the heart of lawsuits from several dance creators who say that the massive video game "Fortnite" is profiting off their their moves. ... Harvard Law School professor William W. Fisher, who teaches a course on intellectual property law, said in an email that choreography lawsuits don't often make it into court. "Egregious instances of copyright are usually addressed through shaming, not law," he said.

Former University President Drew G. Faust has been named a University Professor, the highest honor a Harvard faculty member can receive, the University announced Monday. Faust joins 24 prominent Harvard faculty with the distinction—including University President Lawrence S. Summers, former Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Henry Louis Gates Jr.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and Matthew Schoenfeld: While Washington and Beijing battle over trade, a worrisome cross-border financial link has escaped scrutiny: Americans now collectively own most of the public equity of China’s biggest tech companies, including Alibaba, Baidu and Weibo. This relationship is strange (imagine if the Chinese owned most of Amazon, Facebook and Google). It’s also extremely risky, at least for American investors.

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act — colloquially known as Obamacare — needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... Another dimension of the controversial case is the fact that Judge O'Connor is widely perceived as a partisan judge, raising questions about his reasoning for deciding that Obamacare must be overturned. "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional. People who castigate judges as ‘activists’ whenever they reach liberal results had better step up to the plate and join those across the spectrum who are condemning this latest ruling as way outside the legal ballpark."

China's efforts to become a global powerhouse in the technology of the future are under attack. But don't expect it to beat a retreat....But any measures Xi might announce are expected to be a continuation of the gradual changes it has been introducing in recent years to open more of its economy to the world. "China is accelerating a series of economic reforms, many of which it would have enacted eventually anyway, and attempting to package it as a major concession to US demands," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School. Trump administration officials are still taking a wary approach to what China's offering.

A Harvard Law School professor, who also was a President Barack Obama appointee, says recent Michigan Republican moves to strip Democrats’ authority may be unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard who helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic and Marshall Islands. He told the Michigan Advance that a GOP plan to move campaign finance oversight from the secretary of state’s office to a proposed commission and another that would allow the Legislature to name itself as an intervening party in court cases might violate the state Constitution. “I think a compelling argument can be made that the attempt by the Michigan Legislature to restructure the State’s system of government in response to the Democratic victories in the elections for executive branch officials violates the letter and spirit of that bedrock provision of the Michigan Constitution,” Tribe wrote in an email.

Gareth Evans has warned signing up to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons will “tear up” the United States alliance ahead of a critical contested vote in an otherwise tranquil Labor conference. ... Australia has consistently refused to support or sign the ban treaty – supported by 122 countries – arguing that it relies on the protection of the United States nuclear umbrella. A paper by the International Human Rights Clinic at the Harvard Law School, published in December, concluded if Australia signed the treaty it would have to leave the nuclear umbrella but the US-Australia alliance is otherwise legally compatible with it.

A Quebec environmental group is taking the federal government to court. ENvironnement JEUnesse filed a class-action suit on behalf of Quebeckers aged 35 and under seeking a declaration that the government’s behaviour in the fight against climate change infringes on their human rights. The claim also seeks punitive damages.... Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus characterizes efforts to legislate solutions to systemic challenges such as climate risk as “super wicked problems.” He observed that “climate-change legislation is especially vulnerable to being unravelled over time … especially because of the extent to which it imposes costs on the short term for the realization of benefits many decades and sometimes centuries later.”

Less than two weeks after joining President Trump’s legal team last April, Rudy Giuliani let slip to Sean Hannity that his client reimbursed Michael Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election. This contradicted Trump’s claim that he had no knowledge of the payment, which has since been thoroughly disproven. At the time, the president tried to explain that Giuliani had yet to “get his facts straight” while preaching the need to “learn before you speak.” ... Despite the typo-ridden arguments Giuliani and Trump have laid out on Twitter, this is not the case. As Harvard Law professor Alex Whiting pointed out the same day as Giuliani’s walk-back tweet, if Trump were to be convicted of the crimes the SDNY seems to have proof he committed, he would be looking at a minimum of close to three years in prison.

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act—colloquially known as Obamacare—needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional."

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: When President Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign on November 7 and appointed the unqualified Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, just about everyone assumed that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was in trouble. ... These are but the latest in an 18-month-long string of extraordinary achievements by the Department of Justice in investigating the chief executive and his associates despite Trump’s objections, threats, and firings of important DoJ officials. There has been feverish concern that Trump’s actions would destroy the department’s independence. Quite the opposite has happened. Trump’s efforts have failed entirely. And DoJ independence is stronger than ever.

Gareth Evans has warned signing up to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons will “tear up” the United States alliance ahead of a critical contested vote in an otherwise tranquil Labor conference. ... A paper by the International Human Rights Clinic at the Harvard Law School, published in December, concluded if Australia signed the treaty it would have to leave the nuclear umbrella but the US-Australia alliance is otherwise legally compatible with it.

Students at Iowa's Grinnell College pulled back Friday from a campaign to expand their two-year-old union over concerns that a Republican-dominated board in Washington could use it to strip all or most student workers of the right to bargain collectively. ... "This Board has shown that they have a view of the Act that is not very hospitable towards worker organizing," said Sharon Block, a former board member who now directs the Labor and Work Life program at Harvard Law School. "You just can't discount the possibility that they would reverse that docket again."

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has unveiled a proposal to modify the rules on college campus for adjudicating sexual assault cases, citing inequities that erode the rights of the accused. Many feminists are outraged, wary of obstacles sexual assault victims frequently face in gaining justice. ... Harvard University law professor Janet Halley wrote in a 2015 Harvard Law Review—citing “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the Emmett Till case—“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.”

Mayor-elect Adrian Perkins ['18] will takeover as Mayor of Shreveport on December 29th. Ahead of being sworn in, Perkins has announced the members of his 15 person transition team. His team includes business leaders, educators, service men and Harvard faculty members. ... The members of the Mayor-Elect's transition team are: ... Professor Gerald Frug, the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, discussed his column: "Trump’s Tweeting His Post-Presidency Defense Now."

In the past year, much as been said about a "Trump bump" for law schools, referencing an idea that more people are interested in law school since Donald Trump was elected president. Some support for the theory may be found in ABA data released Friday. ... Among the law schools with some of the largest first-year classes are Harvard Law School, which listed 566 first-year students on its 509 Report. Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University Law Center and George Washington University Law School, listed 581 and 564 first-year students in their 509 reports, respectively.

Now that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and confidant is headed to prison for crimes related to paying off two of the president’s paramours, a vexing question takes on new salience. What happens if prosecutors think that Mr Trump may have broken campaign-finance laws by directing Michael Cohen and American Media Inc (publisher of the "National Enquirer") to send hush-money cheques in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election?  ...Saying otherwise is to put presidents “above the law”. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, agrees. It is “crazy”, Mr Tribe writes, that “even the most criminally corrupt president” may be immune from indictments while in office. The OLC position is not just bad policy, he argues, it’s unconstitutional.

The architect of Obamacare warned the Affordable Care Act could die if the U.S. Supreme Court backs a ruling by a Texas judge calling the law unconstitutional — a decision that would force Massachusetts to strip coverage or pay astronomical bills. ...  Robert Greenwald, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said nothing will change immediately as a result of the decision by the Texas judge that found the law to be unconstitutional and invalid . “This is certainly not the final word on the Affordable Care Act,” Greenwald said. “Obviously it’s going to be appealed, it’s going to be a long slog on this and other challenges to the ACA.”

The Republican-led Congress approved a massive corporate tax cut last year on the premise that executives would put the money saved to good use. Companies would build new factories. They would hire more workers. Buy new equipment. Get more efficient. Fund more research. Expand. ... Harvard law professor Jesse Fried has done extensive research on buybacks and supports them. Fried said the money spent on buybacks circulates back to workers because people reinvest the cash they get from selling shares to the company. “Shareholders take much of this cash, invest it in capital-hungry private firms, which use it to invest and hire workers,” Fried said. “And while public firms may grab the spotlight, smaller private firms employ twice as many workers and tend to be much more innovative, and can often put this cash to better use.”