Media Mentions

An article by Randall Kennedy: A series of dismaying events has transpired at Augsburg University, in Minneapolis. According to several undisputed news reports, it began in October, when a student read a sentence in class from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time ... Airing the N-word caused a commotion. The professor leading the class, Philip Adamo, asked the students if they felt it was appropriate to voice the word Baldwin had written.

Virginia’s Democratic governor declared this weekend that he’s “not going anywhere.” Refusing to resign, the 59-year-old promised to pursue racial equality during the final three years of his term. ... More than a dozen scholars sent suggestions for what the governor should be reading. ... To understand that awful chapter, Ayers recommends Northam looks at “Life in Black and White,” which focuses on Northern Virginia, by Brenda Stevenson. He also suggests “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” by Annette Gordon-Reed. ... Gordon-Reed, a Harvard historian who earned the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses,” suggests a book by Philip Morgan that might appeal to Northam: “Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: By a 5-4 vote Thursday night, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have made abortion all but impossible in the state — at least until the court can hear the merits of the case. The most important fact about this result is that Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote to stop the law from taking effect. That doesn’t tell you how he’ll ultimately vote on whether the law is constitutional. But it does tell you that Roberts cares about a fair process.

A second woman came forward Friday with claims that she had been sexually assaulted by Lt. Gov. Justin E. Fairfax of Virginia, intensifying the weeklong political crisis in the state and leading top fellow Democrats to call for Mr. Fairfax to resign. ... “Everything she said in her statement was exactly what she told me when we talked,” said Diane L. Rosenfeld, a founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, who said Dr. Tyson told her of the alleged assault in December 2017.

“What does Larry want to hear?” Anthony Scaramucci once asked himself. He was explaining to me his final exam strategy that led to an A- in Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe’s Constitutional Law class. “He wants to hear left-leaning judicial activism. So I wrote left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths.” Tribe shared his thoughts on this, below. ... "An exam filled with what Anthony Scaramucci told you was ‘left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths’ wouldn’t have received a grade as high as an A-, and exams that did a good job explicating an originalist position would’ve received very high grades."

An op-ed by Samuel David Garcia '19 and Joseph Gallardo '19: “Could you describe your time in the immigration detention center?” The young woman and her son nervously shuffled at the sound of this question. After taking a second to gather herself, she responded in Spanish, “Well, some guards were nice and others were very mean. I am just glad to have my family out of ‘El Congelador.’” “El Congelador” is Spanish for “the freezer.” Other immigrants had a different name for the Customs and Border Protection holding center they were in — “La Hielera” (the Ice Box). Many assume it is an ironic play on words, since ICE stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but those who have been in the center know “La Hielera” is no joke. In a lawsuit filed against CBP, a woman claims to have been so cold that her lips chapped and split, and her sister’s extremities began to turn blue.

... Much as “Hamilton” gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obama-era musical, “What the Constitution Means to Me” captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. ... The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama’s legal mentor at Harvard Law School, heard about the show from his eleven-year-old granddaughter and went with his family in December. “I thought, This is something that needs a huge audience,” he told me.

A Ninth Circuit judge suggested Friday that the Trump administration’s Education Department used a flawed formula to make defrauded students pay back at least some loan debt to the federal government. ... On Friday, a lawyer representing a nationwide class of more than 100,000 student borrowers argued the department’s new “Average Earnings” rule used an unfair formula to rescind the government’s previous offer of full debt relief. Attorney Joshua Rovenger, of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, said the department only used earnings data from 2014, when some students were still in school, and compared it to average earnings of graduates from other colleges, including those who now work minimum-wage jobs with their degrees and certificates.

An op-ed by Adam Holland, project manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: In April 2018, the scandal over how Cambridge Analytica gained access to personal data of 50 million Facebook users led to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. A September 2018 security breach involved the personal information of at least 30 million users. ... A promising way forward comes from Professors Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School, whose work was incorporated into draft federal legislation.

During the 18 months of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation, a cadre of legal experts have helped the public decipher the tight-lipped former FBI chief’s ongoing probe. We’ll be checking in with these “Muellerologists” periodically at Washingtonian. ... Alex Whiting, professor at Harvard Law School and former federal prosecutor with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office in Boston. "The Stone indictment indicates that the Mueller investigation has developed evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign sources of influence, including the Russians. The indictment alleges that after the first release of hacked DNC emails by Wikileaks—when it was already publicly known that the Russians had done the hacking—members of the Trump campaign asked Stone to obtain information about future releases from Julian Assange. These actions could amount to criminal violations of campaign finance laws, which prohibit the solicitation of a thing of value (the DNC emails qualify) from a foreign source."

Despite the years that have since passed, many of Elizabeth Warren’s former students at Harvard Law School share the same distinct memory: it was their very first day at the prestigious institution, and for many, their very first class. ...Years later, when clips of Warren grilling corporate CEOs and cabinet officials from the US Senate went viral, her former students would fire off emails and texts to one another joking about what it was like to be at the receiving end. “We could all empathize with the witness in the hot seat,” said Andrew Crespo, a former student of Warren’s who is an associate professor at Harvard. ... Her research in bankruptcy law – and the impact on the average person’s medical bills, mortgage payments and other installments – led Warren to become a leading expert on the subject and rise in the academia world. “These are the issues she still cares about,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped recruit Warren to its faculty. “I think she is extraordinary for this reason, that she got into politics because she cared about some issues. ... “When we brought her to Harvard, no one had a clue that she thought of herself as Native American,” said Laurence Tribe, the school’s professor of constitutional law.“I think she’s had an unfair rap,” he added. “I don’t think it’s the case that she ever exploited her family’s background or ancestry in a way that some people seem to think she did.”

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was slammed in The Washington Poston Thursday for abruptly threatening to not attend his scheduled testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin described Whitaker’s actions as a “stunt.” “The real issue here is Whitaker’s fear of appearing and being forced to answer questions under threat of congressional contempt, which could occur if he is under subpoena,” Rubin explained. She interviewed constitutional expert Laurence Tribe, who has taught at Harvard Law for 50 years and has argued three-dozen cases before the United States Supreme Court. “This is outrageous,” Tribe said. “Whitaker seems to think he is entitled to dictate the terms on which he is invited to testify. He is not.”

A hundred years later, the Bauhaus is everywhere. Much of today’s “mod” furniture — from teak and tubular tables to simple yet graceful sofas to chairs and lamps that blend form and function — has its origins in the Bauhaus, the 20th century German modern art/crafts and design school turned major cultural movement. ...Gropius also founded The Architects Collaborative, an architectural based firm in Cambridge that designed the Harvard Graduate Center in 1950, the first modern building on Harvard’s campus. The structure at  was renamed the Caspersen Center, a cluster of simple, flat-roofed, sleek dormitories of steel and concrete arranged around a small courtyard. Gropius wanted the building to mimic the “quadrangle structure so central to the Harvard tradition, but in a very modernist language,” said Muir. Gropius also wanted the building to incorporate contemporary art and pushed for a budget that would cover the cost of such art there.

America's first major offshore wind project is caught in a crosswind. The Federal Regulatory Energy Commission declined this week to rule on a waiver that would have eased the wind developer's entry into New England's electricity market. The decision, or lack thereof, prompted an unusual round of public sniping among FERC commissioners on Twitter and highlights the simmering tensions in New England, where state climate ambitions are straining against the structure of the region's wholesale electricity markets. ... But it's a fragile compromise. In many ways, the disagreement over Vineyard Wind's waiver is best understood as a fight over money, said Ari Peskoe, who leads Harvard Law School's Electricity Law Initiative. He pointed to a New England Power Generators Association filing with FERC this week, in which the power plant owners argued that Vineyard Wind's participation in the auction would prompt total market revenues to fall by $270 million. For the wind developer, on the other hand, the capacity auction represents an additional revenue stream outside its state contract.

President Trump lost a big one when he caved to Nancy Pelosi’s demand on the spending bill. Does that mean that “it’s all over for Trump,” as headlines have regularly blared? No. But it does mean that until he reasserts his authority, the locus of power is with the speaker and not with the president. Power unused is power lost. It’s a political truth that Democrats understand and Republicans pretend doesn’t exist. What is frustrating about this for supporters of border integrity is that the defeat was entirely self-inflicted. It didn’t have to happen at all. In fact, the president had the whip hand — if he had only recognized it and chosen to use it. Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, noted on Twitter that “Trump’s advantage in various negotiations, for a time, was that he seemed crazy and capable of doing something genuinely rash if he didn’t get his way. Lately he (or his advisers) have become excessively rational, and they’re getting slaughtered.”

The vast majority of companies that reported their fourth-quarter earnings between Jan. 1 and Feb. 1 did so without completing an audit, a practice that experts say could have troublesome consequences. Data provided by research firm Audit Analytics shows that of 174 companies with a market cap of at least $10 billion that reported earnings in that period, just six filed their 10-K and auditors report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the same day or earlier. ...“To the extent the new regulations increase the proportion of firms announcing earnings prior to the audit report date, we expect a commensurate decrease in the reliability of preliminary earnings information in the marketplace,” wrote the authors of that report, which was published by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation.

Evidence is a cornerstone of the law. The accused cannot be convicted without evidence, and sufficient evidence must support civil claims. But when it comes to improving the justice system and access to justice, are we using good evidence? “Often, we come up with an idea and we just run with it,” said April Faith-Slaker, associate director of research innovations at Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab (A2J Lab). “Sometimes that may work. But with an issue like access to justice, resources are extremely limited. We need to understand the best ways to use them.” ...“We are pushing for a transformation in the legal profession through rigorous research,” said Faith-Slaker, who is leading randomized control trials (RCTs) in multiple states. “There’s a real need for doing the research to figure out the best way to go about doing things,” she said. The A2J Lab, still relatively new, focuses on issues in the legal profession related to low-income and vulnerable populations, civil and criminal.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump was entirely right to reject “new calls to adopt socialism in our country.” He was right to add that “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion,” and to “renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” Yet to many Americans, the idea of socialism seems to have growing appeal.  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the nation’s most influential new voices, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Senator Bernie Sanders, a leading voice among progressives, has long described himself as a socialist. Since 2010, most Democrats have had a favorable attitude toward socialism. Recently, 57 percent of Democrats reported such a favorable attitude, well above the 47 percent who said they have a positive attitude toward capitalism. (By contrast, 71 percent of Republicans are upbeat about capitalism, and only 16 percent feel positively about socialism.)

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  The U.S. Senate passed a bill Tuesday that says state governments can refuse to do business with companies that boycott Israel. The bill passed, 77-23, with 22 Democrats and Republican Rand Paul maintaining that it threatens free-speech rights. So you might be wondering, as I was: Is the bill actually unconstitutional? The question is straightforward, but the answer isn’t — because of the strange way that the federal bill is written with regard to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.  The bill essentially declares that, if states want to pass measures targeting companies that boycott Israel, nothing in federal law prohibits the states from doing that. The strange thing is that no one really seems to think that the state laws violate any federal statute.

An op-ed by Mark Tushnet:  If Congress doesn’t come up with an appropriations bill funding his beloved wall, can President Trump declare a national emergency and build the wall anyway? The answer depends on law and politics. The Constitution is the starting point. It says that the government — even the president — can’t spend money unless Congress passes a law authorizing the spending. Without a bill funding the wall, where can the president find the money? Several places, it turns out. The National Emergencies Act says that a presidential declaration of an emergency triggers a bunch of other provisions. One provision allows a president to spend already appropriated money for “military construction projects.” There’s a pot of about $10 billion available under that provision. Another allows him to divert the emergency money already appropriated for disaster relief.

According to the official records, U.S. workers went on strike seven times during 2017. That’s a particular nadir in the long decline of organized labor: the second-fewest work stoppages recorded by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics since the agency started keeping track in the 1940s. ...Beyond the growing number of union alternatives, demonstrations by employees are part of a rise in political activity overall. The years since the 2016 election have witnessed the largest protests in U.S. history, inspiring a lot of people—particularly college-educated twentysomethings—to demonstrate for the first time. And while a Black Lives Matter protest or a Women’s March on Washington may seem unrelated to work, they can inspire people to speak out for other causes. “I think there’s a real desire for working people to not segment their lives so much,” says Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Companies know that, too. That’s why places such as Comcast, Facebook, and Google gave workers time off to join political protests in 2016. The problem, Block says, is that political issues are often workplace issues, too. “Immigration, racial justice, gender equality—people are seeing these things as interconnected, and that’s giving rise to movements that aren’t so easy to characterize but are very powerful.”