Media Mentions

The grid operator for the mid-Atlantic region released a long-anticipated study about whether coal and nuclear plant retirements present a threat to its electric supply. The study found there's no immediate threat over the next five years. But it found that under some scenarios -- a perfect storm of plant retirements, pipeline failures, and extreme weather -- there could be problems in the future...Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard University, said the study provided little support for those in favor of the plan to bail out FirstEnergy's coal and nuclear plants. "Had they found an immediate need, then that would have supported FirstEnergy's case," Peskoe said.

Students called on Harvard to divest from the prison industry during the first public event held by the newly formed Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign Thursday evening...This October, Drake — along with Anneke F. Dunbar-Gronke, a third-year student at Harvard Law School, and Paul T. Clarke, a graduate student in African and African American Studies — penned a Crimson op-ed criticizing Harvard’s investments in companies associated with the prison industry...In an interview during the event, Dunbar-Gronke said she believed the University’s investments in prisons are intrinsically political. “We would like for a depoliticized endowment, and that would mean divesting from a system that is inherently politicized by the fact that it disproportionately affects black, brown, and poor people, and undocumented people, and we as students are in a unique position to hold the University accountable.” Dunbar-Gronke also said she thinks Harvard's investments run contrary to the University’s efforts to address its ties to slavery.

Judges’ citations tell a lot about their dispositions. We can glean relationships between cases, judges’ perspectives on these cases and judges’ relationships with other judges based on case citations. For this reason, empirical scholars have spent much time and energy analyzing judges’ citation patterns. A slew of Supreme Court researchers have written fascinating pieces about the justices’ case citation...Professors at the University of Virginia were cited in the most observations with 13. Most of these cites were driven by UVA professors Caleb Nelson and Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, who was cited in four observations (twice by Thomas and twice by Alito). The justices cited an assortment of Harvard Law professors, who accumulated 12 opinion-cites, with only one professor, Adrian Vermeule, cited in more than one observation. Following Harvard Law, University of Chicago Law’s faculty tallied 11 opinion cites, while faculty from Georgetown Law, Stanford Law and Yale Law each accumulated nine opinion-cites.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If President Donald Trump carries through on his promise to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, he will probably lose in court. But don’t be surprised if the ultimate ruling is narrow: To do what he wants, the president needs unambiguous authorization from Congress — and he hasn’t got it. The governing principle is called the “canon of constitutional avoidance” — for short, the Avoidance Canon. It’s a technical idea, but it has immense importance. It links individual rights with the safeguards of checks and balances. It puts the genius of the U.S. constitutional system on fine display.

House Democrats can't wait to call President Trump's EPA chief to the witness stand. The agency — long a source of controversy no matter which administration runs it — could soon be up against Democratic committee heads eager to hold hearings and subpoena documents. Trump's plans for EPA, including reshaping the workforce, overhauling the use of science and rolling back Obama-era regulations, will all get heavy scrutiny if the House flips to Democratic control next year...Joe Goffman, then a top air adviser at EPA when Republicans gained power after the 2010 elections, remembered the scrutiny from the Oversight panel under then-Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). "You had a committee using its investigatory powers to interject itself in a rulemaking. They were not looking at management or practices. They were treating a rulemaking as a form of malfeasance or misfeasance," said Goffman, now executive director of the Harvard Law School's Environmental & Energy Law Program. "They were treating the rulemaking process as if the agency was engaging in some sort of misconduct."

President Trump’s pledge to sign an executive order in an effort to abolish the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship has focused attention on the 14th Amendment, which states that anyone born in the country is an American citizen....“The idea that the president has the power to end birthright citizenship, plainly protected by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, by executive order is preposterous,” said Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Constitutional scholars who agree about little else have agreed about this for over a century.”

U.S. archivists on Wednesday revealed one of the last great secrets of the Watergate investigation — the backbone of a long-sealed report used by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski to send Congress evidence in the legal case against President Richard M. Nixon...Sirica’s modern-day successor, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on Oct. 11 ordered the disclosure of Jaworski’s report by the National Archives and Records Administration — with limited redactions — in response to petitions by California author and former Nixon deputy Watergate defense counsel Geoffrey Shepard and by Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes; Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush; and Stephen Bates, a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who co-wrote the Starr report with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh years before his rise to the Supreme Court, as well as other members of Starr’s team.

U.S. Supreme Court justices questioned an $8.5 million Google settlement in a case that could make it harder for companies to resolve class-action lawsuits without providing direct compensation to those affected...Critics say such settlements are an increasingly common litigation tactic, used by Facebook Inc. as well as Google. But a brief filed by Harvard law professor William Rubenstein said that in the past two decades federal judges have approved only 18 cy pres settlements in which all the money went to lawyers and outside groups.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes. In neat script near the top of the document, someone has written, “Filed under seal, March 1, 1974.” Above that, red typed letters read, “Unsealed October 11, 2018 by Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Order No. 11-mc-44 (BAH). The Jaworski “Road Map,” the last great still-secret Watergate document, became public Wednesday when the National Archives released it under Judge Howell’s ruling from earlier this month. It sees the light of day for the first time in four and a half decades at a remarkable moment, one in which a different special prosecutor is considering the conduct of a different president and reportedly contemplating—as Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski once did—writing a report on the subject. The document’s release owes a great deal to the legal team at Protect Democracy, which represented Stephen Bates and the two of us in seeking its unsealing.

A panel co-hosted by ProPublica, The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, and Harvard Law’s Criminal Justice Policy Program looked at the use of unreliable forensic science practices and models for reform...Held on Oct. 25 at Harvard Law School, the discussion convened prominent leaders from across the judicial system — including Nancy Gertner, a retired federal district judge and Harvard Law School senior lecturer

The Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School published a full collection of United States court cases dating from 1658 to 2018 on Monday as part of a years-long project to make case law more accessible. The initiative, dubbed the Caselaw Access Project, digitized more than 40 million pages of U.S. state, federal, and territorial case law documents from the Law School library. Though basic information for all cases in the database is now publicly accessible, users are limited to five hundred full case texts per day. Harvard affiliates currently have unlimited access to all case texts. Adam Ziegler, who directed the project, said his team worked on the Caselaw Access Project for more than six years. “It started with the simple observation that there was a real need for ready access to court opinions,” Ziegler said...Several Law School faculty members expressed their optimism about the project and its potential. Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen called the project “a game changer,” and Law School Professor Christopher T. Bavitz said the initiative will bring about “enormous benefits” for teaching, research, and legal analysis.

An op-ed by David J. Benger `20. On Sep. 6, 1972, Munich Olympic Games correspondent James K. “Jim” McKay looked at the television camera and solemnly pronounced, “Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight.” All 11 Israeli Olympic athletes who were kidnapped by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization, had been confirmed killed. I have thought of that moment frequently during the last few days. The parallels to the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh are striking. Eleven people died in both attacks. Equally poignantly, both attacks yielded victims who had themselves lived through the era of the Holocaust. Perhaps most importantly, both were culminations of hateful rhetoric gone unchecked.

...“Even Trump and his lawyers surely realize that this off-the-wall threat has no legal legs to stand on and wouldn’t get the votes even of the most stalwart judicial conservatives,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Whatever he’s being told by his lawyers, President Donald Trump can’t use an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented parents. The Constitution puts Congress, not the president, in charge of citizenship.

President Donald Trump's proposal to eliminate birthright citizenship was met with skepticism in Massachusetts Tuesday by legal experts who say it will not pass constitutional muster. ..."The president is coming out of outer space to think that the president has the authority to change the rules on who is a citizen," said Harvard Law Professor Gerald Neuman, an expert on human rights and immigration law. Neuman said there have been occasional movements over the years to change the definition of citizenship, but there "is no credible argument" that it is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. "Tampering with the guarantee of citizenship under the Constitution is an extremely dangerous and serious business," Neuman said.

The Vincentian-born president of the Harvard Law Review, Michael Thomas, Jr., wants climate change to be seriously addressed. In delivering the keynote address Sunday at the gala Independence Anniversary Luncheon, marking St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ 39th Anniversary of Independence, at Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn, Thomas said now that he’s on the verge of leaving law school, he’s been spending a lot of time thinking about what comes next...Thomas said, as the international community learns more about climate change, “we must come together to face this problem globally. “This is the greatest challenge my generation faces,” he said. “A massive hurricane, the likes of which we see with increasing frequency, will someday affect St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It is not a question of ‘if,’ but rather ‘when.’

President Trump’s stunning new promise to end birthright citizenship by executive order is roiling the midterm debate at the eleventh hour, fanning the flames of an already explosive immigration fight — and dividing Republican message-makers — just days before voters head to the polls...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said in an email that the president can no more eliminate birthright citizenship “than he could wipe out the First Amendment (or the Second, for that matter).” “Even Trump and his lawyers surely realize that this off-the-wall threat has the weakest possible legal legs to stand on and wouldn’t be likely to get the votes even of the most stalwart judicial conservatives,” Tribe said. “And they must realize as well that this threat, while legally all but empty, nonetheless strikes fear in the hearts of a vast number of legal immigrants and current citizens — both naturalized and by birth.”

One of the reasons you're able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant is because you're not too worried that it's clean in the kitchen. That's because you know that restaurants have to meet a minimum standard of cleanliness, or risk being shut down. The restaurant is obligated to act in the best interests of its diners. This is one example used by Jonathan Zittrain to argue that it may be time to create a similar kind of obligation for social media platforms and other tech giants who hold our personal data. Along with Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin, Zittrain has long floated the idea that today's online tech platforms become 'information fiduciaries'.

Come election time, it's popular for Illinois Republicans and Democrats, when political circumstances suit them, to clamor for the state's top lawyer to investigate corruption—almost always, to no avail...Yet candidates often cannot resist taking up the cudgel of anti-corruption, sometimes identifying their targets by name. "If I say, 'Elect me and I'll go after Donald Trump or Speaker (Mike) Madigan or Jared Kushner,' anyone who says that is absolutely wrong," said James Tierney, former attorney general of Maine and now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. "That is the opposite of what our criminal justice system is supposed to be about."

Launching today is the capstone to a massive project executed over the last three years to digitize all U.S. case law, some 6.4 million cases dating all the way back to 1658, a span of 360 years. The Caselaw Access Project site launching today makes all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public in a consistent digitized format. The site is the product of a partnership started in 2015 between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and legal research service Ravel Law to digitize Harvard’s entire collection of U.S. case law, which Harvard says it the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere outside the Library of Congress...On Friday, I visited the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School and met with Adam Ziegler, director, and Jack Cushman, senior developer, who have me a preview of the site.

In a significant milestone for public access to the law, the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School on Monday published more than 40 million pages of U.S. court decisions online. The publication, which represents nearly 6.5 million state and federal court cases, is the culmination of a five-year project that saw Harvard slice the spines off a vast collection of legal reporter books in order to digitize them...According to Adam Ziegler, Director of the Library Innovation Lab, the library is also working with state governments to help them ensure all future decisions are published online in a machine-readable fashion with a neutral citation system. Ziegler also noted the Caselaw Access Project will be a treasure trove for legal scholars, especially those who employ big data techniques to parse the corpus. “It’s an opportunity to reconstruct the law as a data source, and write computer programs to peruse millions of cases,” he said.