Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s too soon to know whether a Chinese researcher who claims to have successfully edited the genomes of newly born twins is telling the truth. But if he is, and if the girls turn out to be healthy and normal, it heralds a significant change in the scientific and ethical status of human gene editing. The outrage might not last long. The consensus in the scientific community now is that human gene editing is medically dangerous and ethically wrong. Both of those beliefs are susceptible to changing, almost as fast as science is capable of progressing.

...Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor, has pushed for the Education Department to revise Obama-era guidelines on how colleges are to respond to sexual harassment and assault. In 2017, she and other Harvard law professors urged the department to rescind a letter that contained the guidelines. "Students would be forced to be interviewed or show up to hearings with no notice of what the charges against them were,” said Halley, who welcomes the proposed changes that give greater protections to the accused. "The fact that the Trump administration is proposing fairness is one of the great paradoxes of our time,” Halley said. “But fairness is fairness."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Democratic House of Representatives isn’t the only branch of the U.S. government headed for a clash with President Donald Trump. The Supreme Court is, too. The most recent evidence is the fight between Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts over whether it’s appropriate to categorize jurists as “Obama judges,” “Bush judges” and “Trump judges.” But the crisis has been building for two years, and the time has come for Roberts to act.

The Catholic Church in the United States has received staggering blows of late. The sinful and criminal behavior of a former leading prelate, the statewide investigations into clergy sex abuse across the country, the Vatican’s confused and vapid response – all have left many of the faithful in despair. Some American Catholics are even questioning their fidelity to Mother Church. It may seem curious, therefore, that comes now a new book recounting the conversion stories of sixteen leading intellectuals. Of course, there are no coincidences in the often-charming world of God. In Mind, Heart, & Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome, Robert George and R.J. Snell offer a refreshing and inspirational reminder from some of today’s greatest minds of the many splendored reasons to be Catholic...Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule matter-of-factly remarks that “the depths of the Church are not disturbed by the storms that pass to and fro on the surface.” Rather, he says , “the Church seems to me an institution whose foundations are as strong as iron. The turmoil will pass away; episodes, scandals and debates will come and go; but the line and witness of Peter’s successors will never fail.”

...In almost two years since taking office, Mr. Trump has denied the scientific reality of climate change and taken aggressive steps that will increase emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — despite unequivocal scientific evidence that those pollutants are warming the planet to dangerous levels...“These are life-extension projects for coal plants,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former counsel to the Obama administration. “It’s a very calculated effort to go in the opposite direction from what’s needed.”

On a March evening, Michael Thomas Jr. gave a special tour of Gannett House to his dad and two brothers, who were visiting to see the place where Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, first made national headlines. In 1990, Obama became the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review, which was founded in 1887 and is based at Gannett House. Thomas’ relatives delighted in seeing traces of Obama in the building, including a group photo of editors with the future president in the center. But they were also there to celebrate Thomas, who had recently become the third African-American man to be elected president of the esteemed legal journal. “My family didn’t understand the significance of it, at first,” Thomas said in an interview. “I don’t have lawyers in my family. When I told them that Obama had been president of the Law Review, they were very happy for me.”

He’s the lil’ engine who couldn’t. The manufacturing motor President Trump vowed to jump start in the nation’s heartland sputtered and stalled Monday when General Motors announced it would cut as many as 14,000 jobs and possibly more — many of them based in the Midwest...“[Trump] was running around saying the auto industry was building more plants and creating more jobs,” said Sharon Block, director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “This would suggest, again, that he wasn’t being truthful with the American people.”

The Trump administration’s recent policy change on compensation for tipped workers when they wash dishes or clean tables will likely cause legal trouble again, some attorneys and former Labor Department staff say...Courts tend to defer to agency regulations and policy with the understanding that the agency is the expert, Sharon Block, head of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg Law. But that could be thrown out given perceived “flip-flopping” by the agency. Block was also the head of the Obama DOL’s policy shop. “Although I don’t agree with the position in the opinion letter, I do think it’s important that agencies get deference, though that has limits,” Block said. “If there’s no basis for why the agency has changed the interpretation, even under a doctrine where the agency should get significant deference, they may not meet that standard here.”

A coalition of 10 Harvard Law School student affinity groups called on Dean John F. Manning ‘82 to establish a Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in a letter published Monday in the Harvard Law Record, the school’s student publication...Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in an emailed statement that the school has created a number of new mentoring and advising initiatives in the past year such as a new online platform to help students connect with each other, a pre-orientation course for incoming first-year students, and a preferred lender program for student loans. “The Law School has long had an unwavering commitment to creating a strong and inclusive community that is diverse along multiple dimensions,” Sells wrote...Demarquin D. Johnson, a second-year Law student and one of the letter’s authors, said the Law School needs to do a better job understanding these issues.“Currently, the Law School is unable to recognize the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity in every aspect of it,” Johnson said...Lauren D. Williams, a third-year Law student and president of the Black Law Students Association, said her organization’s main concern was the lack of a consistent faculty position dedicated to teaching critical race theory.

An op-ed by Philip Heymann and William Ruckelshaus. The Department of Justice has concluded that the president acted legally in appointing Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. But it has declined to comment on the illegality of President Trump putting Whitaker in charge of supervising the special counsel investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election. We were there more than four decades ago, dealing with the Watergate scandal.

An op-ed by Martha Minow. Why are leading educators, lawyers, and scholars filing briefs this week asking the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to listen to children in the Detroit public schools? A district court declined to proceed with the school children’s complaint that the Detroit public schools deprive students — 97 percent of whom are students of color — of any real chance for basic literacy while also exposing them to unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The school system has the lowest literacy rate of any major school district in the nation, a shortage of qualified teachers, and teaching materials that are both out-of-date and too few to serve the students. The schools do not even offer a core curriculum. Instead, the schools are infested with rodents and other pests. Extreme temperatures require early-bird dismissals and school closings.

The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World, by Robert Mnookin. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Mnookin, a Harvard law professor, delivers a methodical argument that for American Judaism to survive it will need to become much more inclusive. Our reviewer, Gal Beckerman, describes it as “a lucid legal brief of a book that proposes what would amount to a revolutionary (some would say heretical) revision. It no longer makes sense, Mnookin thinks, to use matrilineal descent, or any descent really, to determine who is a Jew. If you feel yourself to be a Jew, you get to be one.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I recently took a trip to Berlin that sharpened my view of America. It turned out that the blandly named conference I'd been invited to—something about digital markets—was actually a giant collective hand-wringing about the state of German politics. The far-right, populist Alternative for Germany party recently gained substantial strength, accounting for nearly 15 percent of voters nationwide (up from about 3 percent in 2015), and reshaping the political landscape as it spews malicious anti-immigrant rhetoric. The center-right and center-left parties are losing power and spinning with anxiety, trying to figure out how to win back hearts and minds.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Student loans are imposing crushing burdens on millions of young Americans. According to one account, about one-quarter of the borrowers who began repaying their loans in 2005, 2007 or 2009 have since defaulted on them. That number greatly understates the economic hardship, not to mention the daily anxiety, produced by the pressures of repayment. What if there was an easy way to respond to the student debt crisis? A response that did not involve heavy-handed regulatory interventions?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It shouldn’t be a surprise that President Donald Trump reportedly told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn that he wanted to prosecute his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and fired FBI Director James Comey. Now that we know, however, the question is what to make of this revelation. My answer? The system is working.

Never mind the stacks of law books and the jockeying for grades at Harvard Law School: Second-year student Molly Coleman is working on bigger things. "At Harvard, it feels like when you get your admissions letter, you get this platform to make change," the 27-year-old from St. Paul said Saturday while home on break. Coleman was a writer on a Sept. 20 opinion piece for the law school's newspaper titled, "What is HLS (Harvard Law School) doing about Professor Brett Kavanaugh?"

After a Harvard Law student-led boycott of Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm announced last week it would no longer require associates to sign mandatory arbitration agreements — contracts that require employees to resolve workplace disputes with employers through an arbitration process, rather than through the courts...Alexandra V. Kohnert-Yount, a second-year Law student and member of the Pipeline Parity Project, said she was “pleasantly surprised” that the firm changed their policy so quickly after the boycott began. “Never doubt that a week’s worth of tweets can make a big law firm change their 10-year-old policy,” Kohnert-Yount said...Second-year Law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Molly M. E. Coleman said that the Kirkland & Ellis boycott is not the end of the group’s activism on arbitration agreements. Coleman, who helped organize the April letter, said the group is planning to organize protests against other firms with the controversial contract provisions. “I think that in the next few days there will be more about which ones we plan to target next and which ones we have the most concrete information on,” Coleman said.

...“The administration correctly perceives that the coal industry is suffering from real and significant economic disadvantage,” Joseph Goffman, former senior counsel in the EPA’s air office during the Obama administration, told Bloomberg Environment. “In a way, what ACE represents is the proposition that the coal industry needs as much help as it can get, and that even if that affects competition ostensibly with the oil and gas sector, the oil and gas sector is doing well enough that it can sustain that competition,” added Goffman, now executive director at Harvard University’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

An article by Jim Baker and Sarah Grant `19...One of the aspects of the recently released Watergate “road map” and related documents that attracted our attention is the set of materials pertaining to interactions, direct and indirect, between President Richard M. Nixon and two senior Department of Justice officials. The interactions cited in the road map occurred during March and April 1973. During that period, the president and his subordinates at the White House had contacts with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Henry E. Petersen, who was assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and is the official quoted above regarding the interaction with President Nixon. From June 1972 to May 1973, Petersen supervised the Watergate investigation conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). President Nixon was in touch with him frequently about the investigation, his future career and other matters along the way.

President Trump throws his support behind a rewrite of federal sentencing laws. What’s brought us to this point where politicians from both sides of the aisle are pushing for criminal justice reform? Guests...Nancy Gertner, retired Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

A group of 21 mayors and council members from around Utah have signed onto briefs with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in support of lawsuits filed against President Donald Trump’s shrinking of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. The amicus friend-of-the-court briefs — filed Monday and drafted by the Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic and the Salt Lake City Attorney’s Office — contend that the process was flawed, with little input from local voices, and that the boundary reduction will have detrimental economic and environmental effects in the state.