Media Mentions

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.

...At the same ceremony, Andrew Leon Hanna [`19] collected the £15,000 Bracken Bower Prize for the best proposal for a business book by an author aged under 35. His book, Twenty-Five Million Sparks, will explore how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas emerge from refugee camps and communities.

The students attended institutions with pragmatic names like the Minnesota School of Business and others whose branding evoked ivy-draped buildings and leafy quads, like Corinthian Colleges. Tens of thousands of them say they are alike in one respect: They were victims of fraud, left with useless degrees and crushing debts. Now the government program meant to forgive the federal loans of cheated students has all but stopped functioning...“This rule is only as good as the administration’s intent to implement it,” said Toby Merrill, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented dozens of borrowers in lawsuits against schools and the Education Department.

Sometime during the night of Oct. 16, 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eliminated more than 80 climate change web pages — many of the last vestiges to the agency's online recognition of climate change..."They're protecting themselves from scrutiny — an uninformed public is key to shielding them from scrutiny," Joe Goffman, a former EPA senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, said in an interview.

After Jeff Sessions' removal, Legal scholar Laurence Tribe warns of a constitutional crisis.

The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, once espoused the view that the courts “are supposed to be the inferior branch” and criticized the Supreme Court’s power to review legislative and executive acts and declare them unconstitutional, the lifeblood of its existence as a coequal branch of government...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said that Mr. Whitaker’s expressed views of the Constitution and the role of the courts “are extreme and the overall picture he presents would have virtually no scholarly support” and would be “destabilizing” to society if he used the power of the attorney general to advance them. Simultaneously criticizing the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review while criticizing cases where it declined to strike down laws regulating economic and health insurance matters was a sign of an “internally contradictory” and “ignorant” philosophy, Mr. Tribe said.

An article by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. The Acting Attorney General is in a position to seriously undermine the Russia investigation. He could potentially take several steps behind closed doors without the public being able to know in a timely manner. Other steps would be immediately visible. In the final analysis, the principal constraints on the Acting Attorney General if he is considering ways to undercut the investigation are the degree to which that individual is concerned about the personal repercussions of violating the most fundamental norms of his profession, the longer term damage to the institutions of justice, and any political blowback from Congress or the public.

Last week, the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School published a digital database of case law documents dating from 1658 to 2018. This initiative, the Caselaw Access Project, has worked for years to digitize all the documents, which consist of more than 40 million pages. We commend the Law School for making this massive trove of legal information available to the Harvard community and the public at large. Such a project is important for increasing legal transparency. As the project’s director, Adam Ziegler, noted, the entire project’s purpose was to address the “real need for ready access to court opinions.” Indeed, the finished project accomplishes that goal, providing access that stretches far in time and scope. Over three hundred and fifty years’ worth of case law documents from many areas of the U.S. judicial system — on the federal, state, and territorial levels — are now available.

The 2018 midterm elections brought significant gains for Democrats, who retook the House of Representatives and snatched several governorships from the grip of Republicans. But some were left questioning why Democrats suffered a series of setbacks that prevented the party from picking up even more seats and, perhaps most consequentially, left the US Senate in Republican hands...“The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Especially with a sitting president who won a majority in the electoral college [in 2016] while receiving roughly 3m fewer votes than his opponent, and a supreme court five of whose nine justices were nominated by Republican presidents who collectively received fewer popular votes than their Democratic opponents and were confirmed by Senates similarly skewed.”

Senior Republicans led a chorus of public warnings that the special counsel Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue his Russia investigation after Donald Trump finally fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions....Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Trump’s replacement of Sessions with Whitaker was arguably an impeachable offence in itself. “This rule of law crisis has been a slow-motion train wreck for a long time,” said Tribe.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Jeff Sessions’s term as U.S. attorney general has ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper. In two years, he managed to do significant damage to the independence and standing of the Department of Justice. Yet astonishingly, despite this dubious accomplishment, Sessions also completely failed to satisfy the wishes of his principal, President Donald Trump. You wouldn’t think it was possible to pull off the double feat of alienating both the people who work for you and the person you work for, but Sessions was up to the task.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Looking for the meaning of the midterms? President Donald Trump has defined it in a tweet, threatening a criminal investigation of Democrats if the House Democratic majority uses its powers to investigate him. This statement by the president comes close to a total repudiation of the norms of democratic governance.

The Northern District of California’s new procedural guidance for class action settlements is among the most detailed in the nation, prompting welcome relief to critics but raising fresh concerns for some practitioners...“It’s been my experience that the judges in the Northern District of California have been more attentive to these issues than others in the country,” said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Jack J. Lew ’78, Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff under former U.S. President Barack Obama, spoke Wednesday at Harvard Law School about how his Jewish background and beliefs have informed his political pursuits. Lew argued that public servants’ commitment to the nation’s interests should take precedence over their personal religious beliefs...After his lecture, Lew held a public conversation with Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92. The two discussed how Democrats and Republicans alike can draw on the same set of religious beliefs when defending their divergent political views.