Media Mentions

...“I think there will be a report at the end, because I think there’s a whole lot more that needs to be laid out and put together, and the whole picture presented,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court. “People have talked about he’s trying to get the story out through these speaking indictments and speaking informations. I don’t think that – my guess is that Mueller is just sort of doing his job and and doesn’t have some sort of grand strategy that way.”

One of the nation's largest for-profit college chains announced Wednesday that it was abruptly closing in dozens of locations nationwide, after its accrediting agency suspended approval. Birmingham, Alabama-based Education Corp. of America said it was closing schools operating as Virginia College, Brightwood College, Brightwood Career Institute, Ecotech Institute and Golf Academy of America in more than 70 locations in 21 states. The company said in October that it had more than 20,000 students, although more recent documents indicate the number may be closer to 15,000...Toby Merrill, who directs the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said students can ask the U.S. Department of Education to cancel loans if a school closes. However, that opportunity doesn't apply if a student transfers credits or if a school hires a successor to offer students classes to complete their programs.

At a time when social media affects everything from our private lives to our public discourse, the rules governing online behavior are increasingly under scrutiny. At Facebook, the process behind those rules — how they are determined, and how they continue to change — is the province of Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management. On Monday, Bickert, who holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, joined Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law, for a wide-ranging conversation about the social media giant’s policies and its evolution. The event, which included tough questions from audience members on the company’s recent headline-making controversies, was hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

A letter by Simon Hedlin `19. I appreciate the administration’s commitment to combating human trafficking, which Ivanka Trump discussed in her Nov. 30 column. But Ms. Trump did not properly address the most important factor causing modern slavery, which is the demand side of the equation. With respect to sex trafficking, the high demand for paid sex has made this exploitation of people’s most fundamental rights an incredibly profitable enterprise in the United States. One report found that pimps in Atlanta make as much as $32,000 per week. Law enforcement agencies should obviously continue to punish traffickers, but they are not going to be successful unless we also reduce people’s willingness to pay for sex. My own research as a public-policy researcher suggests that countries that target the demand for paid sex experience lower levels of trafficking. One successful method for reducing demand is to not arrest prostituted people and trafficking victims but instead exclusively arrest traffickers and sex buyers.

An essay by Robert Mnookin. This month poses a “December dilemma” for many American Jews, especially those in interfaith relationships. Should you celebrate Chanukah? Christmas? Or both? Many intermarried American Jews with children celebrate Chanukah, now the most popular Jewish holiday. The December dilemma focuses on whether you may also have a sparkling tree in your living room and condone additional gifts on the 25th. Today about a third of self-identified Jews report having a Christmas tree at home, according to a 2013 Pew survey.

Last Wednesday, three swastikas were found spray-painted outside the office of a Jewish psychology professor at Columbia’s Teachers College in New York City. In an interview with the Washington Post, the professor remarked that she may have been the target of anti-Semitic vandalism because “I’m a Jew at this college — one of the only ones who acts like a Jew.” Non-Jews may be confused by the meaning of the professor’s response, but Jews will know she is referring to what Robert H. Mnookin calls “The Jewish American Paradox” in his new book of that title.

If his Twitter activity is any indication, President Donald Trump is getting nervous about what's coming next out of the Mueller investigation — especially as it relates to the testimony of his former fixer, Michael Cohen, who's been cooperating with the special counsel. Legal observers have pointed to his disparaging tweet towards Cohen as potential evidence of obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, three sentencing memos are due from Mueller this week: for Cohen, former security advisor Michael Flynn, and ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. To discuss the latest in the Russia probe, Jim Braude was joined by...Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

The pair of lawsuits challenging Harvard’s sanctions rely on unusual and in some cases far-fetched legal arguments — but it is too early to know whether the complaints will be successful, experts say...Harvard Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92 said lawyers will have to get “creative” going forward if they hope to argue Massachusetts state law protects students’ right to join social groups. The attorneys are specifically alleging the penalties violate undergraduates’ freedom of association as guaranteed under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act. Feldman said the freedom of association argument may prove viable. But he also noted Harvard may have its own claim to freedom of association under Massachusetts law: the University could argue that it has the freedom to associate — and not associate — with whomever it chooses, he said. Under this interpretation of the law, Harvard would have broad discretion to sanction social groups.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s proposed regulations overhauling how colleges handle sexual assault, which may become law in January, are far from perfect. But there is a big reason to support them: I’m a feminist and a Democrat, and as a lawyer I have seen the troubling racial dynamics at play under the current Title IX system and the lack of due process for the accused...We see what the Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley described in a 2015 law review article: “The general social disadvantage that black men continue to carry in our culture can make it easier for everyone in the adjudicative process to put the blame on them.”...“I’ve assisted multiple men of color, a Dreamer, a homeless man and two trans students,” Professor Halley told me. “How can the left care about these people when the frame is mass incarceration, immigration or trans-positivity and actively reject fairness protections for them under Title IX?”

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Jose Medina-Perez, an immigrant, evaded ICE detention after his arraignment in the Newton District Court on drug charges and a Pennsylvania fugitive warrant, according to the Globe. While an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was waiting to take him into custody, he slipped out the back door of the courthouse. The details of how that happened are unclear. What is clear is that everyone — the defense lawyer, the prosecutor, and the judge — was concerned about whether Medina-Perez had been identified correctly in the fugitive warrant. The mug shot attached to the warrant didn’t match the defendant in the courtroom.

A coalition of women’s law associations from law schools across the country announced Monday that they will no longer accept funding from law firms that require employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, and praised the work of Havard Law's Pipeline Parity Project on the issue. The Pipeline Parity Project, a Harvard Law School student group focused on ending harassment and discrimination in the legal profession, executed a successful boycott of the world’s highest grossing law firm, Kirkland & Ellis...DLA Piper — one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the world — does not appear to be as willing as Kirkland & Ellis to drop their agreements. Quoted in a Law.com article, the firm said that they find arbitration to be “fair and efficient.”...Second-year Law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Molly M.E. Coleman said the group was disappointed with DLA Piper’s statement, but members will continue to pressure the firm, especially given the support from women’s law associations across the country...Though the group has started a second boycott, they have not completed the Kirkland & Ellis campaign, according to second-year law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Alexandra “Vail” Kohnert-Yount.

Rattled by rapid oil price swings in recent months, Southeast Asian economies are on tenterhooks ahead of an OPEC meeting this week that is expected to result in a supply cut to boost prices..."What the [Trump-Xi] meeting yielded is simply a temporary cease-fire agreement," said Mark Wu, professor of law at Harvard University and an adviser to the World Trade Organization. "For it to hold will require that much more progress be made in the negotiations over the next 90 days." So far, he said, "the two sides have not been able to resolve the systemic challenges plaguing the relationship, such as [intellectual property] theft and technology transfer. Unless those thorny issues are resolved, there eventually will be renewed calls to step up the pressure once more."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When I heard that Israeli police had recommended the indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges for the third time, I knew my job: sit down and write a column about how Israel faces a definitional moment in its struggle to maintain democracy and the rule of law. I’m still going to write that column...But before I go into the details of the scandal and what the Israeli attorney general’s office ought to do with the police recommendation, I have to pause for an admission. As an American, I hold no moral high ground from which to criticize Israel’s engagement with executive corruption.

Women’s associations from eight elite law schools including New York University School of Law and Cornell Law School are joining the fight against forced mandatory arbitration among legal employers...At least one of the women’s associations has already taken action on the mandatory arbitration front. The Harvard Women’s Law Association last month dropped Kirkland & Ellis as the primary sponsor of its spring conference due to the firm’s use of those agreements. Kirkland & Ellis had donated $25,000 annually for that designation. “While the WLA remains extraordinarily grateful for Kirkland’s support of this event, I believe it would be a disservice to our mission to continue providing this exclusive spotlight to the only sponsoring firm that has both declined to answer the law schools’ survey on firm use of mandatory arbitration and nondisclosure agreements, and is known to still require these provisions in employee contracts,” association president Isabel Finley wrote in a Nov. 14 letter to the firm.

The Assembly of State Parties to the International Criminal Court opens its annual session on December 5 in The Hague. Here are the main topics and issues that will be discussed. They give a hint of the Office of the Prosecutor’s priorities and dilemmas, and the hot debates that they will trigger in the coming year...Then there’s Ivory Coast, where, after the focus on pro-Gbagbo forces, now come the pro-Ouattara forces (CIV II). Here the court says there’s been “good progress” but, since Ouattara and supporters are in power, [Alex] Whiting agrees this is “extremely challenging”. He believes “the OTP deserves a lot of credit for continuing to press this” and suggests this investigation shows how committed the OTP is to “balance” and not remaining trapped into one-sided investigations. “One can only hope that the Ouattara government understands that the credibility of investigations on the other side, the credibility of its own government, the credibility of its efforts to have accountability, will depend on how much it cooperates,” says Whiting. “But not every government sees that... So, those will be difficult investigations.”

...Mothers and fathers who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated — but who have not been accused of child abuse, neglect, endangerment, or even drug or alcohol use — are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assault their kids, according to a Marshall Project analysis of approximately 3 million child-welfare cases nationally...To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority in these difficult cases. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family. “You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller marked a return to an “active” public phase in the Russia investigation this week, with a rapid-fire series of court filings and document releases that followed a quiet period around the midterm elections and the Thanksgiving holiday...“A lot of people are trying to give false information to the American public and to the investigation, and the Mueller team is not being derailed,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court. “They are uncovering false statement after false statement, because they are able to prove what actually happened. “That strikes me as the unifying theme, that the Mueller team knows a lot.”

An effort to seek a new election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race is an “extraordinary attempt to overturn the results of a fair and free election,” an attorney for U.S. Rep.-elect Jared Golden said in a legal filing late Wednesday. Peter Brann, the lawyer for the Lewiston Democrat, said the request by U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin to overturn the ranked-choice voting results is unlikely to prevail and ought to be rejected. “Golden won the election fair and square,” Brann said in legal papers filed with the U.S. District Court in Bangor. “Poliquin’s sour grapes preliminary injunction is too little, too late, and is outweighed by the injury to the thousands of Maine voters who selected Golden over Poliquin and who would be disenfranchised by Poliquin’s attempt to use the courts to overturn the results of the election,” said Brann, a Lewiston attorney.

There's something truly out of place amid a slew of uneventful news releases on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) website: Six bizarre sentences, accusing the Obama Administration of distorting climate science..."For the EPA’s political leadership to do this is, one might say, deplorable," Joe Goffman, a former EPA senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, said in an interview. "They’ve done something really flagrant as part of the campaign to foster misinformation to the public about climate science," Goffman, now the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program, added. "I would argue they committed a genuinely cardinal sin with respect to the values of scientific integrity and the trustworthiness they owe the public."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. While legal experts scramble to decipher what might be going on in the shady minds of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi — and the even more shadowy Roger Stone, a Trump confidant — too little attention has been paid to the more basic question of what President Trump and his team have been doing as part of an increasingly obvious conspiracy to obstruct the investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the run-up to Saturday’s crucial meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina, the U.S. is signaling that cyberespionage will be a crucial part of its grievances against China. The basic complaint is that while both China and the U.S. try to hack each other’s national security apparatus, China also attacks private U.S. companies for the benefit of its own enterprises. The American allegation of asymmetry is accurate — but it’s also starting to seem outdated and more than a little hypocritical.