Media Mentions

Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford explains how America’s internet connectivity issues and corrosive infrastructure are holding the country back and how we can rally to fix it. She and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel also discuss the Huawei scandal, politicians’ roles in improving broadband internet, and her new book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It.

Harvard law professor Larry Lessig has been in New Hampshire often enough for political advocacy that he knows what will get lawmakers’ attention here, and he got right to the point Tuesday: He thinks our presidential primary is in danger. Lessig was testifying in favor of a bill to change the 2020 primary to ranked-choice voting, which would allow people to vote not just for a single candidate for each office, but mark the ballot to rank all the hopefuls from their top choice to their bottom choice.

Alumni discuss pathways to public service work in advance of Public Interested Conference. ... For [David] Harris, Ph.D. ’92, that path was long and meandering. It began with his grandfather, a Unitarian minister who preached the imperative to demonstrate faith by improving society. Harris struggled, however, with how to go about that. He ultimately chose to follow his mother’s example and study sociology, but it would take him nine years and stints at three schools to finish his undergraduate degree. ... After 10 years there, he met with Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree about the possibility of joining a new institute at Harvard that Ogletree had created to work on race and justice issues. “It was clear to both of us that it was just a perfect fit. And it has been,” said Harris, who has been the managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice since 2006.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If I were on the U.S. Supreme Court, I would probably vote to find Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax constitutional. But given the current composition of the court, that might well put me in the minority. Warren, who is exploring a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has suggested that the top 75,000 U.S. households pay an annual tax of 2 percent on each dollar of their net worth above $50 million. Billionaires would be taxed an additional 1 percent.

The expanded use of fiber-optic connections has opened up new possibilities to health care, education, retail and other fields. Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford joins host Krys Boyd to explain why we need to approach fiber with an increased urgency or risk falling behind other developed nations.

The Department of Education has been inundated with approximately 100,000 public comments on its proposed new rules for how campuses handle cases of sexual assault. ... Fighting these issues through agency regulations — once the domain of wonky lawyers — is something of a newer frontier in political activism. Harvard Law School Professor Jacob Gersen says most regulations still get just a smattering of comments — certainly not a hashtag campaign on social media. But it’s increasingly a part of political strategy.

Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Japanese law. He is also a keen observer of East Asian affairs. JAPAN Forward’s Jason Morgan recently sat down with Professor Ramseyer to sound him out on regional developments in the realm of law and policy in Northeast Asia.

PG&E Corp. on Tuesday became the largest public company to file for bankruptcy in the U.S. in the past decade as mounting liabilities from its role in triggering California wildfires pushed the utility over the brink. ... Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s electricity law initiative, said the changing nature of PG&E’s customer base mirrors broader challenges to the monopolistic business model many U.S. utilities have enjoyed for decades. “There’s a larger issue at hand regarding how utilities are coping with new technology,” Mr. Peskoe said. “Maybe this is an opportunity for the industry to think about this differently.”

Huawei chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is set for a long battle as she fights extradition from Canada to the United States, a process that could be complicated by intervention from US President Donald Trump, analysts say. ... International trade law specialist Mark Wu, from Harvard Law School, said that because the criminal charges against Huawei and Meng were overseen by the Department of Justice, Trump could intervene though his acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. “However, he should exercise extreme caution in doing so and not undermine the rule of law,” Wu said. “Any perception that her arrest is meant to offer political leverage in upcoming trade negotiations could jeopardise the success of the ongoing extradition hearings in Canadian court.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has already rescinded Obama-era guidelines for how schools handle sexual harassment and assault claims. Now, she is hoping to give what she calls fair protections to the accused. Advocates for survivors see this as a big step backward and they are making their voices heard. The deadline for public comment has been extended to Wednesday, Jan. 30. On the latest episode of On Campus Radio, we'll look into DeVos' proposed changes and how students and educators are responding to them. ... We'll then talk to Harvard law professors Janet Halley and Diane Rosenfeld about the debate over Title IX regulations.

Hepatitis C is one of the most common infectious diseases, with the potential to cause serious liver damage, so patients were thrilled when a set of revolutionary new medications became available five years ago. But at $90,000 per treatment course, the drugs were pricey, and many states, including Minnesota, balked at covering them under their taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs. ... Nationwide, state Medicaid programs are being urged — and sometimes sued — to drop treatment barriers. Led partly by the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard University, 21 states have dropped or reduced requirements that patients must suffer some liver damage before they are treated, a requirement that Minnesota never used. ... “What we are seeing here are measures that are deliberately put in place to stop people who need medically necessary care versus cost concerns,” said Phil Walters, an attorney with the Harvard center. He said the restrictions are “discriminatory and illegal.”

An op-ed by David Brooks: I went into journalism to cover politics, but now I find myself in national marriage therapy. Covering American life is like covering one of those traumatizing Eugene O’Neill plays about a family where everyone screams at each other all night and then when dawn breaks you get to leave the theater. But don’t despair, I’m here to help. I’ve been searching for practical tips on how we can be less beastly to one another, especially when we’re negotiating disagreements. I’ve found some excellent guides — like “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable” by Daniel Shapiro, “The Rough Patch”by Daphne de Marneffe and “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker — and I’ve compiled some, I hope, not entirely useless tips.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Many social problems seem impossibly daunting, simply because they are so large. Poverty, immigration, cancer deaths, gun violence, climate change – in light of the magnitude of those problems, most imaginable reforms seem pretty small. In their book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that the best response to big challenges is often to “shrink the change.” Instead of trying to solve a problem, dent it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the most important political essay of the 20th century, “Politics as a Vocation,” by the German sociologist and legal theorist Max Weber. The essay includes a topical lesson for Americans as candidates announce their plans to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 election: Politics isn’t the realm of pure, absolute moral conscience, where everything can be described as right or wrong, black or white.

In 1996, the year Congress passed its landmark health privacy law, there was no Apple Watch, no Fitbit, no Facebook support groups or patients tweeting about their medical care. Health data was between you, your doctor, and the health care system. More than two decades later, that law — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — is still the key piece of legislation protecting our medical privacy, despite being woefully inadequate for dealing with the health-related data we constantly generate outside of the health care system. Now, there could be an opportunity for a revamp. ... Worse, HIPAA is a “four-letter word that medical people often use when they don’t want to do anything,” according to [I. Glenn] Cohen, a professor of law at Harvard University. Doctors have used it to avoid giving patients their own medical records, which, he says, “is like working with someone to write an autobiography and then being told you can’t take that biography out of the library.”

The federal government may be open again, but policy watchers say Friday's temporary deal to end the shutdown won't resolve uncertainty over whether the Trump administration can craft rules rolling back Obama-era energy and climate change regulations and successfully defend them in court before the 2020 presidential election. ... Joseph Goffman, who worked with the Obama-era EPA and is another 2013 shutdown veteran, said it's a coin flip whether the latest shutdown was long enough to push back finalization of major rules such as the CPP repeal and its replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, so that the inevitable legal challenges stretch past the 2020 elections.

Hamilton: The Exhibition takes visitors deeper into the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, while at the same time chronicling the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America. ... Hamilton: The Exhibition is a collaboration between Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, creative director and set designer David Korins, producer Jeffrey Seller, orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, and Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. Harvard Law Professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed is also providing historical consultation.

Susan Crawford, Harvard Law professor and former Special Asst. for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy during the Obama administration, discusses her new book, "FIBER: The Coming Tech Revolution—And Why America Might Miss It." Bill Barker, Portfolio Manager of the Motley Fool Small Mid-Cap Growth Fund, on why it’s a good time for both growth and value investors in mid-caps.

An op-ed by Vail Kohnert-Yount ’20, Jared Odessky ’20, and Sejal Singh ’20: In 2018, a record-breaking 609 major employers received perfect scores from the nation’s largest and most visible LGBTQ rights organization for their inclusion of LGBTQ workers. The Human Rights Campaign lauded corporations like Walmart, CVS, Chevron, Verizon, and Amazon for internal policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These changes might be worth applauding—if those companies didn’t also force workers to sign away their right to sue if they experience the very discrimination and harassment that nondiscrimination policies seek to stamp out.

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental and safety rules for the energy sector, government projections show billions of dollars in savings reaped by companies will come at a steep cost: more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, a jump in climate-warming emissions and more severe derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels. ... Joe Goffman, a former EPA official who helped create the clean power plan and now at Harvard Law School, said the omission of international impacts “doesn’t track with reality” given that climate change is a worldwide problem.

Harvard history professor Annette Gordon-Reed previews a lecture she’s giving in Houston on the impact of Confederate symbols on display in the public square. ... In the audio above, Gordon-Reed tells Houston Matters producer Maggie Martinabout the messages—both explicit and hidden—that Confederate icons convey to the public.