Media Mentions

Louisiana’s on its way to abolishing split jury verdicts in criminal trials, but that won’t help convicts like Evangelisto Ramos unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in. The court’s been reluctant to take up the issue that’s again before it after Louisiana voted to abolish the practice Nov. 6, leaving Oregon alone in permitting it. But the new Louisiana law that applies to offenses committed beginning in January doesn’t apply retroactively...“The fact that unanimity still is not a requirement for the states is a very bizarre historical outlier that’s overdue for correction,” Thomas Frampton, Climenko Fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg Law. “We’ve reached a point now where almost every other piece of the Bill of Rights is understood to apply not just to the federal government but also to the states,” said Frampton, a former public defender who recently published a law review article on the jury issue.

...Thirty-one years later, the prevailing hiring bonus for Supreme Court clerks is $400,000—up from $300,000 in 2015. And that does not include salaries. If the trend continues, the clerk bonus will soon approach twice the annual salary of the justices they work for. Associate justices are paid $235,000, and the chief justice gets $267,000...“When the numbers get so high—in terms of the bonus itself and the numbers of hires going to one firm—it unavoidably raises concerns about what is being purchased and the meaning of public service,” Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus said in 2015. Lazarus, reached this week, said he stands by those remarks, adding that “a vast majority” of the Jones Day hires are likely to leave the firm in a few years. “Jones Day is paying a lot of money for a photograph,” he said.

Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 unveiled a new building slated to house several clinics, programs, and faculty offices at a reception early last week...D. James Greiner, a Law professor and Faculty Director of the Access of Justice Lab, said he is excited to move out of Wasserstein and into the much-needed new space. The new building is in part meant to accommodate the tremendous growth of clinical learning programs in recent years. "We’re currently in two different, small, basement offices, so the new office space is welcome,” Greiner wrote in an email. “We work with about 60 law, undergraduate, and graduate students at any one time, so the meeting spaces the new building offers are also quite welcome.”

...The Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian organization designed to counter “orthodox liberal ideology” within the American legal system, has built a sizable web of chapters in cities and law schools across the U.S. — including at Harvard Law School...In the Trump era, though, the Harvard Law chapter is maintaining its distance from the controversial president. Instead, the group is centering its focus on campus and on providing a space for students who find themselves at odds with Harvard’s liberal-leaning legal luminaries...Law School Professor Charles Fried said that, when the society first came into being, it primarily served as a community for students who fell to the right on the political spectrum. Fried said he has been involved with the Harvard chapter for decades...Annika M. Boone, third-year Law student and president of the Harvard Federalist Society, said the chapter mainly focuses on bringing in speakers for debates. “First and foremost, we’re a debating society,” Boone said. “Those were our earliest roots when we got founded, gosh, about 40 years ago.”

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor made an impassioned plea Tuesday afternoon for “serious thinking” among judges to find ways to come together more often, and to fight the effects of partisan polarization. “For decades, the court has always managed to maintain the public’s respect, in large part because the public has perceived it as less partisan than other institutions,” Sotomayor said in a conversation with Andrew Crespo, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School (HLS) before a room filled with law students...For Marvellous Iheukwumere, J.D. ’21, the talk was inspiring. “It was very stimulating, as a woman of color, to hear Justice Sotomayor,” said Iheukwumere. “It motivates me to keep focusing on my goals in the legal field.”

The number of criminal defendants who are challenging their waivers to their right to appeal is increasing throughout New York’s appeals courts, and appellate justices in Brooklyn are calling on trial judges to take greater care to ensure that defendants understand what they’re getting themselves into. ...Among them is Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who is on the faculty at Harvard Law School, who said the right to appeal should be as sacrosanct in the criminal justice system as the right to counsel and that it should be taken off the table for plea deals, especially at a time when the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved through plea deals. As for reducing backlog, Gertner said that justice should take priority over case management. “The more the criminal justice system becomes a mill, the more you see it taking in people who are one, innocent; two, poor; and three, black,” Gertner said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. CNN is going to win the First Amendment lawsuit it filed Tuesday against President Donald Trump’s White House for taking away reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. And the sad truth is that Trump won’t mind at all. As the president has shown repeatedly, he doesn’t especially care if, after he violates the Constitution, the courts reverse his action. Instead of understanding judicial repudiation as a defeat, Trump sees the whole episode as a victory.

The Justice Department vigorously defended the appointment of Matt Whitaker to serve as acting attorney general, saying Wednesday that the selection was entirely legal and that the White House was given that advice beforehand....Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe called the Maryland lawsuit entirely legitimate. "They're saying that since Jeff Sessions is no longer the attorney general, they can't be expected to engage in this battle against a kind of cloud that might just go pop the moment someone concludes, as they should, that Matt Whitaker is not constitutionally qualified to play that role," Tribe said. "If they're right about that, and I think they are, this is the way to have it declared."

University President Lawrence S. Bacow recently met with a U.S. Treasury Department official as the government prepares final regulations for taxing university endowments, Bacow said in an interview last month...The process of publishing final regulations around a law may take months or years, with plenty of feedback from those impacted, according to Harvard Law School Professor Thomas J. Brennan. “Taxpayers will often try to provide feedback on how they think the law might best be crafted, and how it may best work,” Brennan said. “There’s a whole long process with lots of input from lots of private parties.”

The state of Maryland is asking a federal judge to block Matthew Whitaker form serving as acting Attorney General, claiming that the appointment violates the constitution. A panel of experts—Pete Williams, Philip Rucker, Laurence Tribe and Mimi Rocah join Katy Tur to discuss the potential outcome.

An op-ed by Sabrineh Ardalan. Two days after yet another mass shooting, President Donald Trump on Friday issued a proclamation addressing mass migration...The administration plans to restrict asylum only to those who present themselves at ports of entry; people entering the country via the southern border in any other way would be limited to much more circumscribed forms of relief that would not include reuniting with their family members, obtaining a green card, or a path to citizenship. The administration also plans to enter into an agreement with Mexico to force asylum seekers traveling through that country to claim protection there instead of in the United States.

More than two dozen Harvard Law School students are asking their peers to boycott Kirkland & Ellis LLP over the international law firm’s use of mandatory arbitration agreements, and on Tuesday the group promised to expand the movement to other firms and law schools in the near future. The Pipeline Parity Project, founded last year by two Harvard law students, posted what it said is a copy of a Kirkland & Ellis forced arbitration agreement on its website Monday morning...“Releasing Kirkland’s contract was a way to educate our peers on what’s happening in the field and to expose what they are doing,” one of Pipeline Parity Project’s founders, second-year law student Vail Kohnert-Yount, told Law360. “I think the big goal is to get them to drop these coercive contracts ... but for students who showed up on the first day of their summer job and this contract was dropped on their desk, they should know in advance whether their company is going to tell them ‘Sign away your civil rights or you’re out of a job.’”

Hundreds of Law School students and affiliates gathered to see Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor preside over the final round of the school's annual Ames Moot Court Tuesday night...Third-year Law student Maxwell F. Gottschall ultimately won the award for "Best Oralist." The award for best overall team went to a team composed of Gottschall, Erika A. Herrera, Benjamin R. Lewis, Catherine H. McCaffrey, Eliza J. McDuffie, and Jacqueline K. Sahlberg. Prior to announcing the decision, Sotomayor said the teams were “a hair apart” and lauded the finalists in the competition. “Every time I come to one of these and I see the extraordinary performances of the students at these exercises, it fills me with hope about the future,” Sotomayor said. “It shows me that you are being trained to think and to respond in extraordinary, lawyerly, professional ways, and that you carry in your hands our future in a really good way.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Can the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives agree on anything? Here is a candidate: reduce paperwork mandates from the U.S. government. Before you laugh, please consider a number: 9.78 billion. That is the number of annual hours of paperwork burdens that the government imposes on its citizens.

...If a revitalized form of Judaism is the counterweight to Gans’s predictions, it will have to be much more expansive and inclusive than its current iteration. This is also the assessment of Robert Mnookin, a Harvard law professor, in The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World (PublicAffairs, $28), 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.

Students at Harvard Law School have launched a campaign urging their peers to boycott Kirkland & Ellis until the firm removes mandatory arbitration agreements from its employee contracts. On Monday morning, a student-led organization called the Pipeline Parity Project published a copy of a 2018 Kirkland arbitration agreement. In it, associates waived their right to sue the firm in court over a range of employment concerns, including sexual harassment and wage theft. “Kirkland & Ellis is now the biggest law firm by gross revenue in the world,” Harvard 2L Vail Kohnert-Yount, a member of the Pipeline Parity Project, said in a statement. “That makes it the biggest employer at Harvard Law School to use forced arbitration agreements, a form of coercive contract that requires employees, as a condition of employment, to waive their right to sue their employer for any reason.”

Trump is more afraid than ever about his future with the Russia probe after losing the midterms. His new acting A.G. is under fire his controversial comments about the probe. Lawrence discusses the constitutionality of his acting A.G.'s appointment with Laurence Tribe and Rep. Steve Cohen.

...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe counsels, “This rule-of-law crisis has been a slow-motion train wreck for a long time. Matt Whitaker is on record about the ways to clip Mueller’s wings and the alleged need to do so. And I suspect that too few ordinary people will care that this Wednesday afternoon massacre has quietly taken place.”

Millions of workers go to work every day for a company that isn’t actually their employer. The firm that sets their wages and schedules, and determines their benefits and how long their job lasts, isn’t the boss that actually cuts their paychecks. They are technically hired via a temp agency, a subcontractor, or another obscure “staffing agency” that supplies the worksite—like an Amazon warehouse or a school cafeteria—with auxiliary staff. The Trump administration is now quietly making it easier for companies to exploit these subcontracted and outsourced workers...According to Sharon Block, labor-law scholar at Harvard and former NLRB member under Obama, the new wording seems “intended to impose an even more onerous burden on parties trying to establish joint employer status. When you string together all the limiting adjectives that the Trump majority uses to describe the kind of control that must be established—essential, substantial, direct, immediate, not limited, not routine–it is hard to imagine how any party will establish joint employer status in other than the most obvious cases.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Perhaps the most alarming ― if not exactly surprising ― fallout from last Tuesday’s midterm elections was President Donald Trump’s immediate dismissal of his long-beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the subsequent appointment of Matthew Whitaker, a Trump toady and Sessions’ chief of staff, as his acting replacement. If the firing was, in part, an attempt to commandeer the nation’s post-election attention, it worked.

An op-ed by Eve Howe `21. Many reserve the honorific "hero" for those in the armed services. For them, a hero fearlessly charges into battle, ignoring all risk of death in service of their country. I served as an officer in the United States Navy for five years before coming to Harvard Law School, but I was never a hero. I was never deployed, never even touched a weapon, and never had to make a personal choice between life and liberty. Everything changed when I came out as transgender. Now, the battlefield is America, and I am on the front line, fighting for my life and rights. Transgender lives and rights are under attack. And whether or not I choose to fight this war, I will still face its consequences.