Media Mentions

...Roberts will, it is hoped, work hard to preserve the independence and integrity of the court, especially in the current highly politicised atmosphere. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor whose students included Obama and Roberts, believes that the chief justice will take a “substantially different” posture on the court in the wake of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “I don’t think Roberts will be a centrist in the way Kennedy was, or a swing vote,” Tribe said. “But I think if and when there are cases about the ability to order a sitting president to testify or to indict a sitting president, or matters that go to the fate of Trump, if Kavanaugh joins Gorsuch and [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas, I don’t think we can assume Roberts will go with them.” Tribe, who was sharply critical of Kavanaugh’s partisanship during the confirmation process, added: “I think Roberts is an institutionalist, he believes in stability, he believes in the role of the court, he clearly sees it as part of his responsibility to protect it as a vital institution.”

Despite a slew of privacy breaches at big technology companies in 2018, Silicon Valley has yet to face any type of fines, or incentives to better protect users’ personal information, according to Vivek Wadhwa, a Harvard Law School distinguished fellow. “These people get away with murder,” he said on Wednesday during an interview with FOX Business’ Charles Payne. “And this shouldn’t continue like this.”

An estate plan requires planning. To put a fine point on it, a solid estate plan determines who gets what when you die, “preferably in a tax-efficient manner and with creditor protection,” says Robert H. Sitkoff, the John L. Gray professor of law at Harvard Law School. But death isn’t the sole reason for estate planning. A thorough plan will also include incapacity planning—deciding who will make decisions for you and who will take care of your children if you become debilitated. As we all know but would rather not think about, “mental and physical decay may precede death,” says Sitkoff. That’s why incapacity planning is a part of a good estate plan and is becoming more important because of our “ever-increasing human longevity.”

Student activists across the University say they willlead campaigns to increase campus voting rates and will work even harder to combat sexual assault in response to Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court last week...Law School student Vail Kohnert-Yount, a member of advocacy group the Pipeline Parity Project, said she found Manning’s email hypocritical given he previously spoke out in support of the judge after President Donald Trump nominated him over the summer...“It made me not only disappointed but deeply angry that he would think that we wouldn't see that hypocrisy.”...“We will continue pushing for changes that we want to see in the legal community and at Harvard Law School to start,” said Isabel Finley, the president of the Women’s Law Association. “Things that have to do with how women are able to perform here, how they're able to progress their careers in a way that is on par with men, whether or not they're getting that support.”...“The single most important thing that we can do and were already going to [do] regardless of the Kavanaugh decision was to make sure that students have an opportunity to volunteer in these elections this fall,” said Devontae A. Freeland ’19, the president of the Harvard College Democrats.

In 2015, seven years after the failure of Lehman Brothers brought the financial world to the brink of collapse, Dick Fuld, the former CEO, sold his Idaho mansion for around $30 million dollars, setting a record for private home auctions. It seems he was ready to leave his private trout-fishing stream and return to the world of high finance. Naturally, Dick Fuld lost significant sums of money when his bank collapsed. [Lucian] Bebchuk et al. (2010) calculate that, in 2000, Fuld owned about $200 million of Lehman Brother stock, which would eventually become worthless. Nevertheless, Fuld withdrew about $520 million from the bank between 2000 and 2008 in the form of cash bonuses and equity sales, none of which was accessible to Lehman’s creditors.

...Others said Kavanaugh’s comments were more than spur-of-the-moment outrage.“Rather than strive, as most others have done, to dissipate the partisan atmosphere, Judge Kavanaugh chose to throw the testimonial equivalent of gasoline on it,” Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, formerly head of the Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute, wrote in an email. “Perhaps out of uncontrolled fury at the nature of the accusations directed to him. Or perhaps based on a political calculation that it was the best or even only way to garner the support, including that of the tainted president who nominated him, necessary to maximize his prospects of confirmation. I do not know which it was.”

Yaseen Eldik graduated from Harvard Law School (HLS) in 2016. It was a period marked by “crippling, depressing anxiety,” unease rooted in the rhetoric of a xenophobic campaign season, and pressures associated with his chosen field and uncertain future. A spiritual person who had worked in the Obama White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Eldik spent much time that year, as in any year, in prayer...Fast-forward two years, and that space exists, thanks to an initiative spearheaded by Jeff McNaught, senior director of student affairs and administration, and to the counsel of Eldik himself. Opened at the start of 2017–18 academic year, HLS’ Interfaith Prayer and Meditation Space offers students a unique place for religious observance, meditation, and prayer...“Yaseen really helped to put my mind at ease when we were designing the space,” said McNaught. “...It’s been great to see this year how many students are using the room. Yaseen was right when he said that people would be happy to have a quiet, clean space with a few simple amenities for prayer.”...Also new during the last academic year is a meditation room in the renewed Winthrop House that reflects Faculty Deans Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Stephanie Robinson’s commitment to students finding agency for self-care.

A recent class-action lawsuit against the company claims LaCroix sparkling water has misled consumers by deeming itself “natural.”...“The biggest question still, the one that is dividing courts, is what counts as natural,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard law professor who specializes in false advertising. “It is genuinely hard to figure out what people expect the word to mean, and it’s genuinely hard to create a definition.”

There’s a quip attributed to LBJ that needs updating for 2020. “Whenever most senators look in a mirror, they see a president,” it goes. Elizabeth Warren’s mirror is a piece of legislation. The Massachusetts Democrat has introduced measures in recent months to transfer corporate governance to Washington and mandate social responsibility, by whatever definition it takes...“The [Accountable Capitalism] Act could also be expected to lead to additional distortions down the road,” writes Harvard Law professor Jessie Fried. Those distortions not only may be clumsy, but nefarious. “Once corporate law is federalized, Congress will be tempted to use its foot-hold in corporate governance to add more mandates and restrictions, ostensibly to address other ‘problems’ in corporate America, but actually to benefit key voting constituencies and campaign financiers.”

Can a Supreme Court Justice be impeached if the judge lied during confirmation hearings?..."If he lied under oath, certainly. But the question is always political, as Gerald Ford said, the question is just what Congress believes is impeachable," Lawrence Lessig, a Professor at Harvard Law School, said.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19. I had just turned 18 years old when my dad died from a heart attack. The deep sorrow of his passing overwhelmed me, and I fell back on the only thing that has consistently brought me hope and peace — my faith. I am a practicing Catholic, and I hope that one day I can raise my children to be Catholic. However, I am acutely aware of the many things that must be changed within the church. The intention of this article is not to defend the church's transgressions, but to advance the position that there is hope for church reform. However, progressive reform measures can only be pursued if there are progressive members of the church around to advocate for them.

Nine reflections on #MeToo, one year on...Catharine A. MacKinnon: After four decades, or two thousand years, depending on when you start counting, indications are that #MeToo is working. The imposed silence that has walled off reports of sexual abuse is crumbling. Sexually abused women, and some men, are rising up; perpetrating men, and some women, are tumbling down. What was previously ignored or attributed to lying, deranged or venial discontents and whiners is being regarded and treated as disgraceful and outrageous misconduct with which no self-respecting company or university can afford to be associated.

...Yet was Kavanaugh actually threatening to change the court into a partisan institution... or was he unintentionally telling the truth, which is that it already is a partisan institution? To find out, Salon spoke with Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School. "In a book that I wrote with a colleague named Joshua Matz several years ago called 'Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution,' I explored just how partisan the court was and concluded that really, with relatively few exceptions, it was much more even handed than people gave it credit for being," Tribe told Salon. "The court certainly lost a lot of its luster after Bush v. Gore, and it has from time to time vindicated the views of those who think of justices as just politicians in robes. But on the other hand, when Chief Justice [John] Roberts cast the decisive vote upholding the Affordable Care Act and a number of other equally notable occasions, the court has given people reason to trust it again."

It is easy to answer the question of how Brett M. Kavanaugh will be received by his fellow justices at the Supreme Court after a historically bitter and tumultuous confirmation battle: as one of nine equals, with whom they will work for the rest of their careers. The tougher question is how months of partisan warfare will affect the court’s image...The discretionary part of the docket will be an important thing to monitor, said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor who closely watches the court. “One bellwether might be the nature of the legal issues the justices accept for review in the near future,” he said. Speculation has been that the newly energized right side of the court might want to take cases that push the envelope, now that the more moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has been replaced by conservative Kavanaugh, Lazarus said. “Perhaps now those four, including Kavanaugh, might decide it is prudent for the court, for the good of the nation, to reduce the court’s profile,” he said.

After the angst of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation proceedings, even Justice Elena Kagan is talking publicly about the damage to the Supreme Court’s credibility. I asked constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe and ethics guru Norman Eisen about the status of the high court and what could be done to shore up its standing with the American people...Tribe: The risk to the Supreme Court, as I suggested in a recent New York Times op-ed that Justice John Paul Stevens referenced before Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation, is that the court will lose the trust of the American people — trust without which it can’t perform its vital functions as a balance wheel of democracy and a protector of vulnerable individual rights.

If Blum’s suit is successful, the effect will be felt far beyond Harvard. It will limit the freedom that academic institutions have often had in pursuing their unique educational missions. The lawsuit, and Blum’s efforts to change the cultural conversation surrounding diversity and discrimination, could end affirmative action in higher education as we know it....Suspicions about the fitness and the qualifications of nonwhites didn’t begin with affirmative action. But it has become the most prominent way that these suspicions are aired, since the stakes are so clear. Life rarely seems so zero-sum as it does when we imagine that we are vying for the lone seat in the classroom. “Affirmative action is part of a larger struggle,” Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, told me. “The much larger struggle is the struggle against the idea that the United States is a white man’s country. Do people of Asian ancestry benefit from that larger struggle against the notion that America is a white man’s country? Yes, absolutely.”

...Though more eyes may be on Kavanaugh, Roberts may be the most important justice after the retirement of Kennedy, the court's swing vote. Kavanaugh is likely to align with the court's more conservative justices, making Roberts the most likely to join the court's four liberals on occasion. “He won’t be as liberal in some dimension as Kennedy, but he’ll be more of an incrementalist,” said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a Roberts classmate there in the 1970s.

As Harvard prepares to face a high-stakes trial in a lawsuit alleging its undergraduate admissions process is discriminatory, a Texas-based group has filed a similar suit against the Harvard Law Review charging the publication illegally uses “race and sex preferences” to select its members. The lawsuit —filed Saturday in the U.S. District Court in Boston by an organization called Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences —also claims that the Law Review illicitly relies on race and sex preference when choosing articles. If true, these allegations would mean that the Law Review falls in violation of federal statutes Title VI and Title IX.

Breaking weeks of near-silence on newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 sent a five-paragraph email to school affiliates Monday calling the past few weeks an “extraordinarily painful and divisive chapter” of American history.

“When you think about the legal profession, what is remarkable is how little it has fundamentally changed over such a long period of time,” says David Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. Law has been resistant to some of the bigger changes sweeping the world economy. Globalisation, the rise and speed of new technology, including mobile technology — “all these things are transforming the economy, but they aren’t transforming us”, says Prof Wilkins. “Law is a lagging indicator.”

Lofting signs and bellowing chants, members of the Harvard International Socialists rallied in Harvard Yard Thursday afternoon to protest the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court — continuing a string of demonstrations against the judge at Harvard over the past week...Law School student Samantha E. Rodriguez [`20] said she believes the pressure that students have been placing on Kavanaugh contributed to his decision to depart HLS. “It was the vast number of emails that he was getting, the calls he was getting — from not only folks that go to the school, from people all over the country,” Rodriguez said. “They’re outraged.”“I think it exactly, for me, really shows the importance of really organizing and making our voices heard,” she added.