Media Mentions

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.

...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.