Media Mentions

The Labor Department announced a proposal today that would limit the ability of workers to sue big companies for violations made by franchises or contractors, according to the New York Times. This would affect workers who fall under the category of joint employment, in which more than one company directly or indirectly controls their working conditions. ... “It has provided such an obvious road map for employers to evade liability,” Sharon Block, a former Obama Labor Department official, now the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, told the Times. “But that’s going to introduce tremendous uncertainty into the lives of American workers who are subject to these business models.” Block says that like almost every Trump administration change, this proposal is likely to be challenged by the courts as it goes into effect, after a 60 day commend period. Courts may still decide to disregard it when hearing lawsuits.

Applications for debt relief from students who say they’ve been scammed by their schools have been languishing at the Department of Education. That’s according to data from the agency requested and published late last week by the office of Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee, which oversees the Department. ...After a for-profit college association sued the government over the rule, the Department under current Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, delayed implementing the Obama-era regulation. Pulver’s organization, along with Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Lending, sued over the delays as did a group of states attorneys general. In the fall, a judge ruled the delays were illegal and that the 2016 law should take effect.

For years, consumer advocates have complained that food packaging misleads American consumers by conflating nutrient content with health. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed yet another message to help clear up this confusion: an agency-approved icon signifying that an item is indeed "healthy." ...In a bid to make the definition of "healthy" more science-based—and communicate that evidence to consumers—the agency issued a new guidance to food manufacturers in 2016. Both industry groups and public-health experts weighed in: Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, wrote in a 2017 comment in the Federal Register that the current approach "leaves room for food companies to argue that their use of 'healthy' should not be regulated." The Center for Science in the Public Interest has already criticized some of these arguments, including an organic egg company that petitioned the FDA for its products to be considered "healthy."

Dozens of women were filmed without their knowledge while receiving medical attention — including having surgery and giving birth — at a California hospital, according to a lawsuit filed last week in a state superior court. A lawyer for the women said 1,800 patients may have been filmed. The lawsuit alleges that motion-activated cameras were set up in three operating rooms at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, Calif., as part of an effort to catch a possible medicine thief. ...“They were reckless, to say the least,” Ms. Goddard said. It seemed that Sharp Grossmont could have found less intrusive ways to investigate the missing medicine, said I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an author of the casebook “Health Care Law and Ethics.” He noted that he did not have information about the hospital’s defense. “It appears they kept at least some of the videos for some time,” Professor Cohen said, “and one would think the right thing to do, even on the hospital’s own rationale, would be rapidly review them and destroy them right after if they didn’t show any evidence of the drug theft. “The fact that they failed to do even that is quite troubling.”

A new, first of its kind study tracks the political leanings of CEOs by examining 18 years of political contributions by more than 3,800 CEOs of S&P 1500 companies. The big picture: The chief executives of America's largest public companies are more than twice as likely to lean Republican in their campaign contributions than to favor Democrats. Among big energy companies, CEOs' Republican leanings are even stronger: more than 9 in 10 energy CEOs side with Republicans, and none with Democrats. The study, by professors from Harvard Law School and Tel-Aviv University, classifies a CEO as a Republican or a Democrat if they gave at least two-thirds of their campaign contributions to one party or the other. CEOs that distributed their contributions more evenly between the two major parties were classified as neutral. ...Harvard Law School's Alma Cohen and Roberto Tallarita and Tel-Aviv University's Moshe Hazan and David Weiss analyzed the political contributions to candidates, committees, and parties from 3,810 individuals who served as CEOs of companies in the S&P 1500 index between 2000 and 2017.

If Saudi Arabia or some other foreign government wants to get into your phone, it's going to happen. Your only option: Turn off the internet and just use the phone to make calls. "They will get you," says David O'Brien, a senior researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. "Of course, it depends on how high a value of a target you are." Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose phone should be un-hackable and as secure as Fort Knox, got compromised by Saudi Arabia, according to his security pro Gavin De Becker. "Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information," wrote De Becker in the Daily Beast.

The Labor Department released a proposal on Monday that would limit claims against big companies for employment-law violations by franchisees or contractors. The proposal, related to a concept called joint employment, seeks to define when, for example, employees of a locally owned McDonald’s restaurant could successfully take action against the McDonald’s Corporation over violations of minimum-wage and overtime laws. ...Critics accused the department of laying out a step-by-step guide to employers seeking to get off the hook for violations even when they have substantial control over workers hired by their franchisees and contractors.“It has provided such an obvious road map for employers to evade liability,” said Sharon Block, a former top official in the Obama Labor Department who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “But that’s going to introduce tremendous uncertainty into the lives of American workers who are subject to these business models.” Ms. Block said that the legality of the regulation was likely to be challenged once it was finalized, and that courts could refuse to be bound by it.

A nightmare. A wasteland. A place of confusion and half-truth. Ask Americans these days for their impressions of the news media and they are likely to produce such grim descriptions. These sentiments boil and fester as political and regulatory communities, whether motivated to tackle information monopolies or address data-privacy concerns, seem poised to get serious about new laws that could fundamentally alter the media ecosystem. But much of this energy is focused on the big tech companies, when the crisis, as the public perceives it, is deeper. ...The federal government could help address this market failure through the tax code. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein has pointed out, the government has long held the power to subsidize speech, a tradition begun when America’s 18th-century leaders gave postal subsidies to newspapers and magazines to ensure the diffusion of knowledge throughout the sprawling young republic.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if President Donald Trump or other like-minded public officials traded in their Twitter accounts for a new weapon in the ongoing war against the news media: suing journalists and news organizations for libel. For decades, media lawyers and journalists had little reason to worry about such a scenario, thanks to the 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan. To foster “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate, the court required that public officials filing libel lawsuits must prove that the defamatory statements at issue were made with “actual malice,” a standard that made it almost impossible for public figures to mount and win libel lawsuits. But on Feb. 19, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an unexpected opinion that unsettled that sense of security. ...Not everyone thought Thomas was wrong to raise the issue. “Some kind of chilling effect is not the worst idea, because it reduces the risk that falsehoods will destroy people’s reputations,” Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein wrote in a Bloomberg opinion column. “And in this context, the idea of democracy is a double-edged sword. If a speaker lies about a politician, and destroys her reputation in the process, democracy is not exactly well-served.”

An op-ed by Sam Garcia ’19 and Florida Representative Cindy Polo: “We won’t allow someone here illegally to commit criminal misconduct and simply be returned to our communities.”That is a quote from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ State of the State Address, and an example of what happens when you put being a politician over being a public servant. It is no secret this statement plays well politically with some Floridians — especially with the people who put DeSantis in office. However, it is clear that very little thought has been applied into how a law like this would practically work and effects it would have on Floridians. In order to turn the governor’s vision into a reality, the Florida Senate is proposing Senate Bill 168, which will effectively end sanctuary cities in Florida. The governor claims SB 168 will make Florida safer, but the results from other states that have enacted similar policies prove that he is not correct.

Across Mississippi and the country, people are finding unwelcome surprises in their mailboxes. Medical bills they expected to be largely covered by their health insurance arrive with a much bigger payment due. ...Mississippi’s balance billing law was groundbreaking in 2013, but needs to be updated, according to a report from the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. The report, issued in March, offers three recommendations: Clarify enforcement authority over balancing billing, Prohibit providers from reporting surprise medical bills to creditors, Establish transparent, reasonable payment standards for out-of-network providers that operate at in-network facilities along with a clear, fair process for resolving payment disputes between providers and insurers.

For a week, criticism rained down on Attorney General William P. Barr. Why did his letter advising Congress of the end of the probe contain his own opinion on obstruction of justice? Why did he not lay out basic information such as the size of the report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III? On Friday, Barr seemed to concede that his critics had a point. A new letter was sent to Congress, a sign either that the criticism had personally stung or that Barr worried, once released, the actual report would demonstrate his initial letter was nothing more than political spin to defend his boss. ...“Barr has acted from the very beginning as Donald Trump‘s Roy Cohn,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, referring to Trump’s former fixer and attack dog. “He has served the president and not the country.” Tribe continues, “His initial letter was inexcusable in seizing from Congress, for as long as he could get away with it, the role of deciding on his own, in the inexplicable absence of a determination by Robert Mueller, whether Trump was guilty of obstruction and would be indictable but for the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Rarely have the demands of constitutional democracy and the rule of law been in greater tension with the imperatives of progressive politics. Fidelity to the constitution and the primacy of law over naked power call for a determined effort by Congress to unearth the full truth about Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the election, and since assuming office. Congress a duty to look into the president’s offenses in seizing the White House and whether, having arrived at the pinnacle of power, he obstructed efforts to uncover the details of his corrupt ascent and to disclose the many facets of his interference with investigations into those details. At the same time, one would have to be politically blind not to see that the vast majority of voters care far less about those matters than about kitchen table issues like health care and economic opportunity for this generation and the next.

Augsburg University history Prof. Phillip Adamo led a classroom discussion about the N-word this school year, saying the racial slur rather than the euphemism. The class set off a flurry of student complaints, international press coverage of Adamo’s eventual suspension and intense soul-searching on Minnesota’s most racially diverse private campus about inclusion and academic freedom. ...This time, students took their complaints to the top. Adamo says he was told not to return to his classroom the following week and was relieved of his duties as honors program director. He was eventually suspended as the university sought to formally discipline him. His case drew national attention and press coverage in the U.K. and Denmark. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard law scholar Randall Kennedy, who is black, blasted Adamo’s suspension as “a dispiriting farce” and argued that Augsburg leaders had undermined the university’s reputation. Adamo got support from the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which charged that Augsburg “has run roughshod over academic freedom and its own policies.”

MMT (Modern Monetary Theory—a form of post-Keynesian economics) is everywhere these days. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders embrace it; Paul Krugman and George Will write about it; the Financial Times, Forbes, and The Economist have all run columns about it. Even the men’s parenting website Fatherly had an article on it. Do historians have anything to add?  ...MT, along with the euro crisis and awareness of  austerity’s social effects, has done much to open monetary and fiscal debates to wider audiences. Simply recognizing that money is political and historical (central, as Harvard Law Professor Christine Desan likes to say, to how a polity constitutes itself) is a difficult breakthrough for most people. On the other hand, seeing money in this way doesn’t—in a fractured polity characterized by demagoguery and high levels of inequality—make policy any easier to write or implement.

Pressure on Facebook is mounting following a live stream of the New Zealand mosque massacre, with the nation’s leader calling for an overhaul of the country’s social-media laws and her Australian counterpart proposing criminal penalties for companies that are slow to remove such content. ...Despite being relatively small markets, Australia and New Zealand may carry more clout in the debate over how Facebook moderates content. “English-speaking countries, at least for now, have a lot bigger impact,” said Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Democrats are starting to sound serious about expanding the Supreme Court in hopes of reversing its rightward march. They need to stop. Court packing would be bad politics and something worse: a threat to the rule of law. It’s OK to block nominees from the other party on ideological grounds. It’s wrong to destroy the structure of judicial independence that has been built up brick by brick since 1787. It’s OK to block nominees from the other party on ideological grounds. It’s wrong to destroy the structure of judicial independence that has been built up brick by brick since 1787.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The slaughter of 50 people at a New Zealand mosque this month by a white-supremacist gunman set off a new round of debate about whether white nationalist violence should be treated like Islamic terror. The discussion has covered various practical and theoretical topics but is missing a key element: the legal structure for dealing with the two is different.

An op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa (Labor and Worklife Program Distinguished Fellow): A question that students and parents put to me most frequently is whether it is worthwhile to pursue an MBA as a ticket to success in the business world. I tell them that a master of business administration from Harvard, Stanford or the University of California at Berkeley may be worth the high cost because of the brand, location and network value — but not those from most other business schools over the world. The time and money could be better spent in starting a company that solves real-world problems. Students will gain better practical experiences and have a greater purpose than the investment bankers and consultants that business schools strive to graduate.

ow do you start to wrap your head around some of the most fundamental issues surrounding new technology and how it impacts society? If you’re Jonathan Zittrain, you take this “brainstorming exercise,” as he calls it, and force it into the real world. Zittrain is, among other honorifics, a Harvard Law School professor and the faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He’s also the force behind Assembly, a collaboration between Berkman Klein and the MIT Media Lab, a program which is taking a unique approach to solving problems related to AI and ethics.

This week the Supreme Court will hear a case that could hamstring how the federal government regulates everything from water pollution and organic tomatoes to overtime pay and veteran’s benefits. The case, Kisor v. Wilkie, concerns, on its surface, a Vietnam vet trying to get medical treatment from Veterans Affairs for PTSD, and whether a particular incident in his service is relevant or not to his medical condition. ... Trouble is, that doesn’t happen much either. An exhaustive study by two law professors yielded no evidence that agencies more often wrote vague regulations after Auer than before. In the words of one of them, Adrian Vermeule, “Let us pause to absorb this: Much of the clamor against Auer has been premised on an empirical claim about agency behavior now shown to lack any discernible factual basis.”