Media Mentions

John Hopkins University professor Martha S. Jones spoke about the history of birthright citizenship in the United States at an event held at the Harvard Law School Wednesday. The talk, hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, garnered a crowd of about 75 attendees. Jones, who teaches history, also discussed her book “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” which she published in May. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Tomiko Brown-Nagin introduced Jones and said the topic of the talk is “timely” given President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that he is considering an executive order that would end birthright citizenship in the United States.

...To gain a sense of how the election played out and what the results may mean going forward, the Gazette interviewed Harvard faculty members who study political history...and election law (Guy-Uriel Charles, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School). Below, they evaluate the results and what those may herald for the 2020 presidential race..."I was surprised and pleased that voters in Florida opted to restore voting rights to ex-felons who have completed their sentences. In fact, there was additional good news as voters in Michigan and Nevada decided to make voting easier in their states by adopting same-day registration and registering voters when they obtain or renew their drivers’ licenses."

An op-ed by Stephen B. Burbank, Richard D. Parker and Lucas A. Powe Jr. The rule of law requires friends who are willing to ignore the partisan din that afflicts our institutions. In that spirit, 20 years ago, we participated in a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court of the United States to reject a claim of privilege by President Bill Clinton, who was seeking to avoid civil litigation alleging sexual misconduct while he was governor of Arkansas. The Supreme Court did reject Clinton’s claim of immunity, vindicating the principle that no person is above the law. Now, President Donald Trump is appealing from an order denying his motion to dismiss a civil case brought against him. The plaintiff, Sumner Zervos, alleges that, while a private citizen, Trump defamed her when he called her a liar for accusing him of sexual misconduct. The president asserts that he has a constitutional privilege that protects him against civil litigation in state court, whether or not the claims relate to his official conduct.

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right? What process lets even the most outlandish conspiracy notions survive and flourish in the right’s echo-chamber ecosystem, in a way they don’t come close to doing elsewhere? Yochai Benkler is a Harvard law professor, the co-director of the university’s center for studying the internet and society, and co-author of a new book with the unmistakably alarming title “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” The book is a work of anatomy, dissecting how this deep disequilibrium is imperiling the nation’s civic and public life. Benkler has also rethought the part that social media play in all of this, beginning with our perceptions of what free speech has come to mean in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

Harvard Law School is home to the world’s largest academic law library, with more than 42,000 volumes. So why not just put it all online for anyone to access?... But let me back up and explain how the database came to be, as described to me by Adam Ziegler, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. Library head Jonathan Zittrain first came up with the idea in 2013, and the lab established a partnership with legal research platform Ravel Law to get it off the ground...“At almost every level, what we were doing was the first time anyone had done it,” Ziegler told me.

Judges have selected three book proposals to go forward to the final of the 2018 Bracken Bower Prize for young business writers. The finalists’ proposed books would tackle diverse challenges: how to create the pre-conditions for positive coincidences; the emergence of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas from refugee camps and communities; and how to integrate people with disabilities or learning and cognitive differences into the modern workplace. The finalists are: ...Andrew Leon Hanna [`19] for Twenty-Five Million Sparks...A panel of expert judges selected the three proposals from a shortlist of entries, drawn from the range of titles submitted for this year’s £15,000 prize, which is open to authors aged under 35. The winner will be announced on November 12 at a dinner in London

Samantha Bee has a new ice cream flavor, and she’s using it to teach her audience about constitutional originalism and campaign finance reform. On a special midterms election episode on Monday, the Full Frontal host dressed up in Colonial-era garb to talk to former FEC chair Ann Ravel and Harvard professor Larry Lessig about what the framers of the United States Constitution thought about money in politics. Both experts agreed that the founders who opposed Parliament’s dependence on the king would not approve of corporate lobbyists influencing members of Congress.

Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris and Hal Robert, three scholars affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, have a new book, “Network Propaganda:Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” presenting major new research about the political consequences of American media. I asked Benkler, who is the Berkman professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center, about what they found..."On the right, audiences concentrate attention on purely right wing outlets. On the left and center audiences spread their attention broadly and focus on mainstream organizations. This asymmetric pattern holds for the linking practices of media producers. Both supply and demand on the right are insular and self-focused. On the left and center they are spread broadly and anchored by professional press."

Harvard may be required to change its current Title IX policy to comply with new federal dictates if the U.S. Department of Education publishes a new set of guidelines under consideration, experts say...Harvard Law School Professor Diane L. Rosenfeld, who teaches a course on Title IX, speculated that the leaked draft guidelines “could likely change” from their current iteration, after the required notice-and-comment period. That portion of the regulatory process allows the public to provide feedback on changes to rules executive agencies propose. “Many of the things that are in the policy are legally very problematic,” Rosenfeld said. “They seek to import private law standards and criminal justice standards into a civil rights context for school adjudication under Title IX. And they’re just simply not the same legal and regulatory system, so the same rules don’t apply.”

Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet...Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It said: “To me, the most important function of the contract is to remind people that the web we have isn’t the only one possible. That’s both a warning – including about how aspects of the web have become – and an opportunity. The contract seeks to get those wielding the most power online to commit to some boundaries in how they treat their users.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When the smoke from the midterm election clears, one thing is certain: You will be seeing the name of Robert Mueller a lot more than you have for the past two months, no matter whether the Democrats manage to take the U.S. House or not.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. You may find it a little eerie to discover that you are being rated by the companies you buy things from, and that the quality of customer service you receive can be determined by your “customer lifetime value” score. Maybe it reminds you too much of China’s new social credit system, which is intended to allow the government to keep tabs on citizens’ anti-social behaviors — and punish them by cutting off privileges like intercity train travel if they’re noncompliant. Better get used to it. We are no longer rated by only the credit reporting agencies, which are subject to extensive federal regulation...My Harvard Law colleague Jonathan Zittrain and my onetime teacher Jack Balkin have been arguing for some time now that tech companies should be treated by the law as fiduciaries of our data, essentially holding users’ information in trust on their behalf.

According to Harvard Law School lecturer Jonathan Lovvorn, saving the planet and its inhabitants from climate catastrophe begins with the world’s most vulnerable population: animals...“What we are trying to do with the program is multifold,” said [Kristen] Stilt, an expert in Islamic law and society who is writing a book on animal welfare and the halal industry. “We want to encourage and facilitate excellent academic writing and research in animal law, we want to train young lawyers passionate about the topic, and we want to engage with the broader community about these issues. We believe that ideas matter, and that ideas can spark change.”...One of his current students, Kate Barnekow, arrived at the Law School planning to focus on gender and sexual violence, until a student group introduced her to the animal law program and “the opportunities available through the law to help animals.” “I see my interest in animal law as a continuation of my interest in a spectrum of marginalized voices whose interests are not always represented in the legal world, which includes women and survivors and people with nonbinary identities,” said Barnekow, who plans to work in animal law after she graduates in May. “I came to Harvard to raise up those voices.”

Whatever success Republicans have amassed in taking control of all three branches of U.S. government, and whatever fate awaits them as midterm elections near, some on the right are working to cement change by amending the Constitution. And to the mounting alarm of others on all parts of the spectrum, they want to bypass the usual process...But convention opponents have always feared that once one has been launched, it could tear up the Constitutions in all sorts of ways. What's to stop a convention from passing an abhorrent affront to the Founders, like an outright ban on Muslims, asks constitutional law professor Michael Klarman of Harvard University. He points to a 2009 Swiss referendum that resulted in outlawing the construction of minarets, the towers found beside mosques.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The global walkout by Google workers, a response to Alphabet Inc.’s reported protection of executives accused of sexual misconduct, may be a harbinger of something new in employer-employee relations: empowered workers’ moral-political protest directed as much against the general culture as against management. Although the walkout is connected in a broad sense to workplace conditions, this isn’t the trade union strike of old. Google’s workers are mainly professionals: engineers, not laborers. They have well-paid, high-prestige jobs at a company known for recruiting top employees. Not all of the thousands of workers who walked out were personal victims of workplace sexual harassment.

Legal funders routinely give significant “haircuts” on repayments from clients who take advances on expected recoveries from their cases, according to new research on an industry getting increasing regulatory scrutiny...Maya Steinitz of the University of Iowa College of Law, who has written extensively about litigation finance, called the discount data “very surprising.” She also said the “haircut” dynamic is not likely in play in the commercial realm and its highly negotiated, “a la cart” funding deals. “We simply don’t know if the findings from the funder who participated can be applied to the industry at large,” she said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. In ordinary times, a presidential proposal that stands no chance of surviving review, even by the judges and justices the president has appointed, wouldn’t matter much. But these aren’t ordinary times, and this president’s trial balloons are anything but harmless, even when we can confidently predict they won’t float. A perfect case in point is President Donald J. Trump’s threat to end birthright citizenship, a threat that sends chills down the spines of millions of lawful residents who understandably fear that they, or their children or grandchildren, may be cast into a stateless limbo, and become citizens of nowhere.

...Impeachment is so obviously the Democrats’ one overriding aim that the book industry has tried to anticipate its fulfillment. On my desk sits an impressive stack of books, all published in just the past few months, all on the subject of impeaching a U.S. president...As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz rightly contend in “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” (Basic, 281 pages, $28), the fact that Congress has the power to impeach doesn’t mean it has the duty to impeach.

A review by Kenneth Mack. One of the most visible faces to emerge from the protests in Ferguson, Mo., and the Black Lives Matter movement they sparked is DeRay Mckesson. Days after the protests began in August 2014, Mckesson, then a 29-year-old school administrator in Minneapolis, began driving to Ferguson to join in. He live-tweeted his journey to Missouri and posted it on Facebook, at one point asking for a couch to sleep on when he arrived. Once there, he and other participants took to Twitter as an organizing tool and an alternative to the mainstream media, which, they thought, misrepresented the protests as violent...His book “On the Other Side of Freedom” is, in part, Mckesson’s response to the charge that he has grabbed too much of the limelight and is unrepresentative of the dispersed networks of organizers, online activists and street protesters who compose this difficult-to-define movement. It is a combination of memoir, self-justification and inspirational guide to imagining a different world of racial politics and criminal justice.

This year, online advertising platforms including Facebook, Google, and Twitter are reviewing millions of ads to protect American elections from unlawful influence and to disclose legitimate campaign activity. These platforms are also making mistakes. This election, Facebook has been accused of wrongly blocking ads for community centers, news articles, veterans pages, and food advertising...Issue ads are harder to define. “The Federal Election Act doesn’t recognize issue ads as a category,” according to Vivek Krishnamurthy, Counsel at Foley Hoag LLP and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. “The distinction between ads that discuss public issues from ads that advocate for or against candidates is a line that comes from the First Amendment.” Because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech, companies are free to create more restrictive practices.

...But somewhere along the way, Title IX became about much more than just ensuring access to higher education and sports for women. Indeed, more than four decades later, the 37 words that comprise the statute are now used to regulate everything from campus sexual assault and harassment to bathroom rights of transgender students...."Most laws have openness to them and words that are not clearly defined, and it is understood that agencies under the president or under a particular administration will interpret those congressional laws, and that policymaking is what happens when those laws are interpreted," says Jeannie Suk Gersen, professor of law at Harvard Law School. "But you don't want those agencies to go crazy and do something that's totally outside of what Congress could have intended," she says. "But you also want there to be some leeway for the agencies to make policy within the limits of what Congress has provided."