Media Mentions

An op-ed by Richard Sun `20. Millennials are on the cusp of being the largest generation by population size. Our strength in numbers will give us meaningful influence on the 2018 midterm elections as a voting bloc. However, that influence only works if we do and we show up to vote. But the reality is, is that we don't have a great track record on that front. According to the Census Bureau, only 23 percent of millennials voted in the 2014 midterm elections compared to 39 percent of the population as a whole. That means other people in other age groups are about twice as likely to vote as we are. We are punching well below our weight. There are serious and meaningful consequences to low millennial voter turnout.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Not for the first time, the First Amendment has saved Donald Trump. A federal district court in California was correct Monday to dismiss Stormy Daniels’s libel suit against the president for using the phrase “total con job” to describe her allegation of being threatened by an unknown man in a parking lot. Not only that, the judge was probably right to make Daniels (or her supporters on CrowdJustice) pay Trump’s legal fees. The president’s style of discourse, with its constant insistence that everyone else is a liar, is path-breaking in its coarseness. But it’s now legitimately part of public rhetoric. Denying Daniels’s claim (with ridicule thrown in) doesn’t come close to the kind of libelous speech that is exempt from First Amendment protection.

A couple of liberal Harvard law professors are lending their name to a new campaign to build support for expanding the Supreme Court by four justices in 2021. The campaign, calling itself the 1.20.21 Project and being launched Wednesday, also wants to increase the size of the lower federal courts to counteract what it terms "Republican obstruction, theft and procedural abuse" of the federal judiciary...Harvard professors Mark Tushnet and Laurence Tribe are joining an effort being led by political scientist Aaron Belkin. He was a prominent advocate for repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibited LGBT people from serving openly in the military..."The time is overdue for a seriously considered plan of action by those of us who believe that McConnell Republicans, abetted by and abetting the Trump Movement, have prioritized the expansion of their own power over the safeguarding of American democracy and the protection of the most vulnerable among us," Tribe said.

A long-delayed federal rule intended to protect student loan borrowers who were defrauded by their schools went into effect on Tuesday, after a judge rejected an industry challenge and the Education Department ended efforts to stall it any longer...“We’re really gratified,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represented several student borrowers who challenged the department’s delay. “These regulations have a lot of critical protections in them for student borrowers and taxpayers.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In theory, taking a DNA test to reveal your ancestry is optional. But it’s on its way to becoming obligatory. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren announced Monday that she had submitted her DNA to ascertain that she does in fact have Native American ancestry — after President Donald Trump had taunted her by saying he would throw a testing kit at her. For those of us not in national politics, a study in the journal Science last week claimed that within a few years, it will be possible to identify some 90 percent of white Americans by using genetic databases that include their cousins. Even if you don’t take the test yourself, someone has taken it for you.

Months after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a hefty blow to teachers’ unions, a rash of new lawsuits has emerged that could further damage these labor groups...“Everybody knows where the end of this litigation road is, which is the Supreme Court,” said Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “Janus is sadly not the end of the road. This road just got a lot harder.”

More than 100,000 students defrauded by Corinthian Colleges can team up to sue Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for rolling back Obama-era rules that provided full debt forgiveness, a federal judge ruled Monday. U.S. District Judge Sallie Kim certified a nationwide class of approximately 110,000 students who claim the Education Department improperly used their private data to create a new Average Earnings rule that forces students to pay off at least some loan debt. “It’s a recognition by the court that in fact this whole group of people was affected in the same way,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Toby Merrill, with the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

When the Trudeau government agreed to a revised North American free trade deal, the Americans said Canada also agreed to something else: joining Donald Trump's trade war on China...."Although free trade agreements regularly require consultations on a variety of issues, they are typically on more narrow regulatory matters," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in Chinese trade issues. "Article 32.10 of the USMCA represents a novel and unprecedented approach," he said. And reiterating the six-month notice language in this part of the text is "particularly extraordinary."

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19. Julia* is a dreamer under DACA, which means that she is in the United States under DACA protection and is allowed to enroll in college despite her immigration status. She attended high school in McAllen, Texas and is now a student at the University of Texas at Austin. However, her older brother, who was once also in the United States under the protection of DACA, made much different choices than she did...After a few encounters with the police and ensuing arrests, Julia’s family tried to engage him in serious conversations about stopping his drug use, but those proved to be ineffective...their search for help revealed a legal system that is not flexible enough to allow immigrants who are impacted by the disease of addiction to seek help without fear of being removed from the United States.

An op-ed by Michael Klarman. Despite Democrats’ having won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, the Supreme Court has not had a liberal majority since 1969. Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell straight-out stole the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia early in 2016, a seat that should have been filled by President Barack Obama’s nominee (Merrick Garland), liberals are unlikely to control the Court for at least another couple of decades. As has been frequently noted, recently appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were nominated to the Court by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, and were then confirmed by a majority of senators who represented minorities of the American population.

...Even his critics say Mr. Frank has played a valuable role. “Although I often disagree with his objections, I think it is valuable to have a devil’s advocate challenging class action settlements and fee awards because there is otherwise often no meaningful pushback on what class counsel and the defendants put before the court,” said Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of “The Conservative Case for Class Actions,” which will be published next year. “Some people complain that his ultimate goal is to destroy, rather than improve, class actions,” said Professor Fitzpatrick, who is visiting this semester at Harvard Law School. “I am not sure if that is true — he says it isn’t — but it doesn’t really matter. A devil’s advocate’s job is to push back on everything, good and bad alike.”

N’West Iowa residents who are worried about the future of their respective post offices will have a chance to voice their viewpoints to a group of Ivy League scholars this weekend. A three-member team from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA, that is working to protect U.S. post offices will be in the region Saturday-Monday, Oct. 13-15, to visit with residents, especially during community meetings in Calumet and Hartley. Team members — such as 24-year-old Madelyn “Maddy” Petersen, a third-year law student who has ties to Hartley and Spirit Lake — are holding community meetings to conduct research for Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. “Our project and our clinic believe in the universal service of the post office,” Petersen said. “We know that some towns in northwest Iowa have seen closures and then also there have been a bunch of towns that have experienced reductions in services, reductions in hours or kind of a shift in how the mail is delivered.”

Harvard Law School students, faculty, and administrators convened behind closed doors at an off-the-record forum Thursday for two hours to reflect on the recent, and contentious, confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the partial release of a report that that a federal grand jury sent in 1974 to the House Judiciary Committee that was a key part of the Watergate scandal that drove President Nixon from office. ...The request for the release was made by Stephen Bates, a University of Nevada journalism professor and former Whitewater investigation prosecutor; Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes.

...“We lose what’s fascinating about a place by not having this bigger picture,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School whose work involves cities and technology, who looked at the images at our request. “They make you think big thoughts. Everybody becomes Robert Moses looking at these maps.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: Last month, I heard Jill Lepore give a talk about These Truths, her single-volume history of America from the 15th century through the 2016 presidential election. She got her biggest laugh when she made fun of WIRED for predicting in 2000 that the internet would both lead to the end of political division and be a place where government interference would be senseless.

...The states “spent significant resources trying to ensure that people who were eligible for loan cancellation because of Corinthian fraud would get it,” said Eileen Connor, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, one of the organizations representing the borrowers. “It’s just really outrageous that the Department really capriciously turned away from that.”

...I reached out to Mark Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard University, to talk about the case for abolishing the Supreme Court. I asked him if the Court is still fulfilling its constitutional role, if it’s unusual for a liberal democracy to place so much power in a single court, and if he thinks Democrats should consider packing the courts or imposing term limits on justices.

President Donald Trump used to attack Democrats as mere obstructionists determined to block his agenda. But with the opposition poised to seize control of the House, he’s painting them in far darker strokes -- as dangerous socialists hell-bent on turning the country into a poverty-stricken crime scene....The president’s dependence on hyperbole and inflammatory language receives less condemnation from Republican leaders today than it did when he campaigned for office, so there’s little incentive for him to tone it down, according to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and frequent Trump critic who teaches a class on the presidency. And the impact on the country may be long lasting. “I think that as dangerous as he has shown himself to be in many contexts, he’s said very little that’s quite as alarming as this,” Tribe said. “It’s rhetoric drawn directly from the playbook of fascists and dictators.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The consensus on civility emerging from Democratic Party leadership in the wake of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation seems to be, if you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Hillary Clinton told CNN that it was impossible to be civil to Republicans until the Democrats win back Congress. And on Wednesday a tape surfaced of Eric Holder, the former attorney general who’s considering a 2020 presidential run, saying that instead of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” the Democratic plan should be “When they go low, we kick them.” Is going low the right choice?

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen...The lawsuit, which will go to trial next week in federal district court in Boston, has been called “the Harvard affirmative-action case,” and it has been spoken of as if it could end affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere. Both the plaintiff, a national group called Students for Fair Admissions, and Harvard benefit from describing it that way, but, in fact, the stakes are somewhat different. Students for Fair Admissions was founded by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who has orchestrated several lawsuits challenging affirmative action, and the initial complaint included a demand that the court declare it illegal to use race as a factor in college admissions. But, in keeping with Supreme Court precedents, the judge in the case, Allison D. Burroughs, has granted judgment in favor of Harvard on that point. The question that remains for trial is whether Harvard has gone beyond what the Supreme Court has said are permissible ways to consider race in admissions—and, specifically, whether it has shown a special bias against Asian-American applicants.