Media Mentions

When patients enroll in health insurance, they are often met with a stark reality: Even with insurance, they can’t afford their treatment. With the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions in limbo once again, it’s important to remember that those with such conditions need more than health insurance. They also need to be protected from discriminatory pricing so that they can afford the medications they need. ... A 2019 report by Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation found that some insurers continue to price all recommended H.I.V. regimens in a way that makes them prohibitively expensive.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One word holds the key to the major Trump-related court cases that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the next few months: deference. In the lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s border wall, and in the U.S. Supreme Court case over whether the census will include a question about citizenship, a central issue will be whether the courts should defer to the assertions that the Trump administration says provide a basis for the decisions they’ve taken.

For most of his life, Donald Trump has managed to stay a step ahead of the courts, the cops and the accountants. Two years into his presidency, however, he appears to be nearing a crossroads of accountability. Reports flew this week that special counsel Robert Mueller was preparing to close up shop. ... Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court, said a conclusion of the Mueller investigation would “open up space” for congressional inquiries to take the lead, “and that would start a whole new phase of this information becoming public and being investigated”.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world’s supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese used in everything from smartphones to electric cars. ... But you may not know that China is also on track to control most of the world's flow of high-capacity online services—the new industries, relying on the immediate communication among humans and machines, that will provide the jobs and opportunities of the future.

Animal law advocates from a variety of backgrounds are planning to gather at Harvard Law School this week for the school’s fifth annual Animal Law Week. ... The free lectures are scheduled for noon each day and are open to the public. The week is sponsored by the Harvard Law School Animal Law Society.

As Donald Trump faces mounting court trouble over his decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border, one attorney involved in suing the administration ridiculed the president’s legal team. “Honestly, I have never had an opponent who was quite as helpful,” Laurence Tribe said during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “And I find it odd to say, 'Thank you, Mr. Trump!'” Tribe, a constitutional law expert from Harvard Law School, has argued more than 30 cases in front of the Supreme Court. His latest case is against the White House: He is representing El Paso County, Texas, in a lawsuit to block Trump’s national emergency declaration. Tribe called the county "ground zero" in Trump's attack on the border.

During the last two weeks of January, Lillie A. Estes had shared with many that this was going to be her year. This would be the year a nascent Community Justice Network came together. ... The film series recently became the Community Justice Network. On Jan. 28, Estes asked the network to interview David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Estes envisioned a blog post illustrating the relationships emerging from the network's launch. More connectivity, more co-creation. Reached Jan. 30, Harris, a longtime Estes supporter and collaborator, offered ideas about navigating that energy. "Lillie herself is really a model and a hero to me," Harris said. "Keeping up with Lillie can be a challenge. But one thing that's unbelievably consistent about her, that I encounter rarely, is her absolute commitment to certain models for creating community leadership. I've seen her step back and say, 'I'm not going to make this decision, this is a collective decision.'

Malique Gordon has already moved three times since his 6-year-old son, Makari, was born. Gordon, 27, lives with his mother Maureen Nugent, who receives a Section 8 voucher. Section 8 — or the Housing Choice Voucher Program, as it’s now known — is a federal program that pays for a predetermined amount of rent.  ... “Suburban communities ... that are supposed to be the target for integration have certain characteristics, and we think those characteristics are good: They're clean, they're open, children have good schools,” says David Harris, managing director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “The question becomes, why it is that people have to move to the suburbs to have access to those things? Why isn't our policy designed to make sure all communities are endowed with those characteristics, where the amenities and the benefits are all the same?” Before his position at Harvard, Harris was the director of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. He argues “mobility” — moving people out of cities and to affluent suburbs — is the wrong solution. He calls it "policy by lottery.

It’s one of the most vexing challenges facing the labor movement: how to wield influence in an era increasingly dominated by technology giants that are often resistant to unions. Are workers best served when unions take an adversarial stance toward such companies? Or should labor groups seek cooperation with employers, even if the resulting deals do little to advance labor’s broader goals? ...But Sharon Block, a senior Labor Department official under President Barack Obama, argued that the deal was defensible. Ms. Block pointed out that the guild had taken something of a hybrid approach between cooperation and antagonism, lobbying for policies such as a minimum earnings standard for drivers and allowing passengers to tip, both of which have been enacted in New York. “There are situations in which taking the half loaf can be worthwhile,” Ms. Block said.

President Donald Trump on Thursday brought renewed national attention to what has emerged as one of the most hotly debated technological and geopolitical challenges — the race to build a next-generation 5G wireless internet network. ...  While major U.S. telecommunications companies have touted their investments in 5G technology, China's firms are by some measures a step ahead, causing concern that the U.S. could fall behind in building new technology off the next-generation networks. “The implication is that new industries of the future, the new ways of making a living, will be in China and not here. They’ll have this huge sandbox to play with and a lot of control over the market,” said Susan Crawford, author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It" and a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on technology policy.

When Phyllis Schlafly crusaded against the Equal Rights Amendmentin the 1970s as a threat to all-American motherhood, she handed out freshly baked bread and apple pie to state legislators. She warned of a dystopian post-E.R.A. future of women forced to enlist in the military, gay marriage, unisex toilets everywhere and homemakers driven into the workplace by husbands free to abandon them. ... Catharine A. MacKinnon, whose legal theories laid the basis for sexual harassment being defined as a form of sex discrimination, has championed the revival of the amendment as a weapon against what she sees as the continuing subordination of women through sexual violence and economic inequality. “You go after sexuality and economics, you’ve gone to the heart of misogyny,” she said.

An essay by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz: Calls to impeach President Donald Trump—and denunciations of those calls—have run rampant in American public discourse since Election Day 2016.  Although support for ending Trump’s tenure has never exceeded 50 percent, it’s no exaggeration to say that talk of impeachment is now a defining feature of our politics. But major implications of that fact remain underappreciated. Over the past two years, hardly any development in the federal government has escaped the inevitable think piece opining that Trump’s presidency has finally been doomed or saved. By November 2018, the word impeachment had already been uttered on cable news 12,000 times that year. New books and articles on the topic arrive weekly. Commentators including Elizabeth Holtzmanand The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum have championed the cause. Tom Steyer has poured millions of dollars into Need to Impeach, and many liberals have rallied to his banner. These calls for Trump’s removal echo widely in #resistance circles—and also on Fox and Breitbart, which gleefully feature this “proof” of a liberal conspiracy.

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of the county of El Paso, Texas argues that Trump's national emergency declaration to build a wall is unconstitutional with the most high-powered legal team that has joined this fight. Co-counsel Laurence Tribe says he's never had an opponent quite as helpful as Trump, whose public statements undermine his case for a national emergency. Lawrence also discusses with co-counsel Stuart Gerson.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: With his stunning plea for reconsideration of New York Times v. Sullivan – the landmark free-speech decision insulating the press, and speakers in general, from most libel actions – Justice Clarence Thomas has … performed a public service. Not necessarily because he’s right, but because there’s a serious issue here. To see why, imagine that a lawyer, a blogger, a talk-show host or a newspaper lies about you -- and in the process destroys your reputation. Your accuser might say that you are a pedophile, a drug peddler, an arsonist or a prostitute. In an hour, the lie goes around the world. If you count as a public figure, does the Constitution really mean that the law cannot provide you with any kind of redress? Thomas doesn’t think so.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is mulling the use of decentralized technology for his social media behemoth. Speaking with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said blockchain technology could be implemented as an alternative way for users to access, store and manage their private data. “Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice of whether to log in to different places and you’re not going through an intermediary,” he said in the Facebook Live interview.

While many attorneys go their entire careers without arguing a case before a top state appellate court, Liz Soltan managed the feat before even graduating from Harvard Law School, and without missing a single class. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Rule 3:03 allows senior law students to appear before the court on behalf of an indigent plaintiff. Soltan, a third-year law student working for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run legal service, handled the oral argument on behalf of a pair of Boston dry cleaner employees who said they were cheated out of $28,000 in wages and overtime pay and sought attorneys' fees stemming from the litigation. “It was a great experience. A lot of prep went into it,” Soltan told Law360. “I was so nervous that a lot of it is a blur. But I felt that it went well and I was optimistic. It was kind of fun to be up there, having a conversation with the justices.” Soltan is not the first law student to argue before the SJC, but it is rare to have a student present a case to the top court.

El Paso County in Texas has joined forces with the Border Network for Human Rights to file a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his decision to declare a national emergency in order to build his US-Mexico border wall. "The injunction requested by the county of El Paso and the Border Network for Human Rights is amply justified by the complaint filed today," Harvard law professor Laurence J. Tribe said in a statement. Tribe is one of America's foremost experts on constitutional law and is famous for representing former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore. He added, "President Trump’s effort to usurp Congress’s powers and abuse the U.S. Military manifestly subverts the Constitution and inflicts grievous harm on the 800,000 residents of a successful community that the President has shamelessly used as a poster child for his political posturing.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, former military commander of NATO, and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Trump Is Risking an ISIS Resurrection." Clive Crook, Bloomberg Opinion editor: "Trump Is Rooting for Ocasio-Cortez’s Democrats." Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Design a Green New Deal That Isn’t Over the Top." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Kavanaugh Shows How Conservative He Is on Abortion."

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. .... Mark Zuckerberg started his 2019 challenge of doing public debates. Zuckerberg took part in an interview with Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain. Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn't want "a camera in everyone's living room," but seemed to forget that Facebook sells a camera that goes in living rooms. Jonathan Zittrain pointed out that Facebook sells a camera-equipped device for the living room — Facebook Portal, its smart speaker with video calling.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman; President Donald Trump can’t just pull funding for high-speed rail from California as payback for the state’s challenging the constitutionality of his border wall. There are laws governing decisions by agencies like the Department of Transportation. Those laws require that agencies give principled policy reasons for their actions — not recite doubtful pretexts for decisions taken on political grounds. If the Transportation Department actually pulls the funding, as it has said it plans to do, California will challenge the decision in court. And the odds are pretty high that the state will win, regardless of what happens in the separate legal challenge to the border wall.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus. That most influential of art schools lasted only 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, when the Nazis shut it down. But the many events noted on the website Bauhaus at 100 give a sense of the global scale of that influence. Closer to home, no fewer than four shows are currently on display in Greater Boston, with another opening next month, “Arresting Fragments: Object Photography at the Bauhaus,” at the MIT Museum. ... Thanks to that Harvard connection, three of the four shows are in Cambridge. The largest and most ambitious, “The Bauhaus and Harvard,” runs at the Harvard Art Museums through July 28. “The Bauhaus at Home and Abroad,” at Harvard’s Houghton Library, is small and surprisingly enchanting (all hail the Bauhaus jazz band!). It runs through May 24. “Creating Community: Harvard Law School and the Bauhaus” is at Langdell Hall through July 31.