Media Mentions

Donald Trump's trade representative said Tuesday that "a fair amount of distance" remains between the Canadian and U.S. sides in the NAFTA talks — but it was pretty obvious that it's China, not Canada, dominating Robert Lighthizer's thoughts lately...."Given the Trump administration's goal of closing transshipment loopholes, it shouldn't be altogether surprising that the U.S. is seeking for its free trade partners to apply a like-minded approach toward so-called non-market economies," said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies the strategy of state-owned industries in China. "Without it, there's the danger that foreign producers benefiting from unfair trade practices could use a revised NAFTA as a back door to circumvent U.S. tariffs."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As the battle over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation reaches its climax, the cascading emergence of seemingly credible charges of attempted rape, indecent exposure and other forms of sexual misconduct by the nominee has ignited a volatile mix of personal biography, judicial philosophy and national politics. The nation has certainly witnessed dramatic confirmation controversies before, but none has so explosively churned the political and the personal precisely at the nexus of a burgeoning social and cultural movement.

As our community follows developments related to two high-profile men facing accusations of improper conduct with women, KARE 11 sat down with a national expert on sexual assault. Dr. Diane Rosenfeld is the Director of the Gender Violence Program and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. On Wednesday, she offered several insights on the impending hearing involving Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the ongoing reactions to allegations against Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. “We shouldn’t rush to judgment, but we should have some kind of fair process that does not retraumatize someone who comes forward with allegations that are so painful and that reveal such painful and traumatizing incidents,” Rosenfeld said.

The Harvard Black Law Students Association released a statement Wednesday asking the Law School to place greater emphasis on criminal justice and calling on Harvard to steer clear of investing in prisons, among other demands. The group’s public statement — posted on Twitter Wednesday morning — endorses 10 demands issued as part of the National Prison Strike and states the Law School must “work to better prepare its students to support the plight of incarcerated people.”...Roughly 30 students gathered at the Law School three weeks ago to hold a demonstration in support of the strike. In an interview Wednesday, Lauren D. Williams, president of BLSA, said the group must continue to publicly back the cause. “I think it’s important that we as an organization stand by this cause because a lot of our work that we have done in school is really connected to this kind of work, and especially when we’re looking at a system that disproportionately impacts black and brown people,” Williams said...Emanuel Powell, one of the co-chairs of the Powerfully Utilizing Law School Educations for Political and Social Justice Committee — a subcommittee of the Harvard Black Law Students Association that organized the demonstration three weeks ago — said the group hopes to use the Harvard name to call attention to the cause. “I think it’s critical... for us to use our platform in support of individuals who are currently incarcerated — to use our platform to elevate their voices,” Powell said.

An op-ed by Ivy Yan `20. The last time I went back to China, I had just graduated from high school and was starting college at Harvard in the fall. We arrived in the city of Baotou at the beginning of June, just in time to catch the annual spectacle of the Gaokao, the national college entrance exam that determines where students can go to university, if at all...Despite the discomfort of growing up Chinese in suburban Indiana, I couldn’t help but feel thankful that my path to college in the United States involved fewer do-or-die moments.

...The former clerk declined to be named in HuffPost for privacy reasons, but Catharine MacKinnon, a prominent professor at the University of Michigan Law School who first conceptualized the notion of sexual harassment in the legal system, confirmed his story. “He spoke of hearing in the chambers things Judge Kozinski said that I vividly recall were sexually salacious,” she said, adding that the judge made this man extremely uncomfortable. The former clerk was MacKinnon’s research assistant years ago...“He thought it was discriminatory, harassing to everybody in the chambers. He was absolutely horrified and attempted to convey his lack of enjoyment of this to the judge,” MacKinnon said.

...‘’The battles over Supreme Court nominations from the early history of the republic focused on the nominees’ views of national debates about certain foreign entanglements, about a national bank, about legal tender, about slavery, or about economic regulation,’’ Laurence Tribe, the Harvard Law School expert on constitutional law, wrote in an email exchange the other day. “Those issues were of course packed with emotion at the time, but their intersection with individual nominees turned on the nominees’ philosophical and jurisprudential views largely apart from the ways they had conducted their personal lives, whether as adults or as teens.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Norman Eisen. Whatever happens to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, he should not resign. If President Trump is determined to oust him, Rosenstein should insist that he be fired rather than leave voluntarily.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. For much of the past decade, at Harvard Law School, I have welcomed a crop of new law students to campus each fall with an orientation speech warning them that the time for youthful indiscretions is over; it is now the first day of their professional lives. I admonish them not to engage in any conduct that they might later be tempted to lie about to get a job, and note that F.B.I. background checks are routine for lawyers seeking positions of trust. Though I’ve wondered about instilling this level of anxiety in students, many of them will later face scrutiny as public officials. Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh internalized such a stern professional message, in law school and later, as a religious and conservative lawyer. The current scandal surrounding the Supreme Court nominee involves events that allegedly took place while he was in high school, at Georgetown Prep, and in college, at Yale.

...Connie Cho [`20], a Law School student and Cabot House tutor who helped organize a campus walkout Monday to support Ford and Ramirez, said she and her peers are disappointed by what she called the Law School’s failure to address the allegations. “So many of us, as Law Students, saw this news and expected a response from our school,” Cho said. “There was no response.”

Several Harvard Law School professors said they were troubled by the sexual assault allegations recently levelled against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh and called for further investigation into his alleged misbehavior...Law School Professor Michael J. Klarman, a constitutional law scholar, wrote in an email Sunday that, while some have argued that Kavanaugh’s actions as a 17-year-old are not relevant to the judge's ability to serve on the Court, he does not buy that reasoning.“I certainly agree with the idea that we should be pretty forgiving toward youthful mistakes. But attempted rape is a really serious charge. And serving on the Supreme Court is a privilege, not a right,” Klarman wrote...Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 took his views on the Kavanaugh confirmation process to Twitter Monday. “Closing ranks around Kavanaugh even before Dr.Blasey Ford testifies is proof positive that these Trumpsters either (1) don’t regard an attempted rape and a nominee’s false denials as relevant and/or (2) are ready to disbelieve her without listening,” Tribe wrote. Tribe expanded on his thoughts in an email to The Crimson...Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’62 wrote via email that the Thursday hearings should be postponed pending an investigation.

Harvard Law School is refusing to say whether it will allow conservative judge and Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh to return to Cambridge to teach the course on the Court he is slated to offer Law students in Jan. 2019...Alexandra “Vail” Kohnert-Yount [`20], one of the authors of the Harvard Law Record article who helped organize Monday’s walkout and rally, said that several students have reached out to Manning regarding Kavanaugh — and at least some of them have asked whether the Law School will allow Kavanaugh to continue teaching. Kohnert-Yount said she has not individually contacted Manning.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the U.S., voters are often drawn to candidates who seem to be the opposite of the incumbent president — the anti-Obama, the anti-Bush, the anti-Clinton. Beto O’Rourke, now running for the Senate in Texas against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, is the anti-Trump.

A series of recent court rulings and settlements, including one last week in Indiana, have found that states cannot withhold potentially life-saving but expensive medications from Medicaid beneficiaries and prison inmates who have chronic hepatitis C...“If there were a cure for breast cancer or Alzheimer’s or diabetes, people would be storming the White House to make sure those medicines were available to everyone, you can be sure of that,” said Robert Greenwald, a professor at Harvard Law School and the faculty director of the school’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. “But we’ve responded completely differently with the cure for hepatitis C because of the stigma associated with that disease.” Greenwald and others insist that treating prisoners with hepatitis C is an indispensable step toward eradicating the disease in the whole population.

The US is imposing new tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods as it escalates its trade war with Beijing. We hear from Mark Wu, professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is defending a segment featuring the word “retarded” that airs on the streaming service saying that such language falls within the bounds of “creative expression.”...For his part, [Laurence] Tribe said he was unsatisfied by Hastings’ reply. “I do believe that media entities like Netflix have a higher moral (even if not legal) obligation to consider the psychic and cultural consequences of their choices than the one Reed Hastings accepts in his invocation of ‘creative expression,'” Tribe told Disability Scoop.

A second woman has come forward and accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in an incident she says occurred during Kavnaugh's freshman year at Yale. The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear testimony from Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, on Thursday, followed by testimony from Kavanaugh himself. It is unclear how these new allegations will affect the scheduled testimony or confirmation vote. Guests: Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

...“America is at a crossroads,” third-year Law School student and president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association Lauren D. Williams told the crowd. “It can turn a wilfully ignorant blind eye, as it has done countless times before, or it can stand by these survivors and ensure that there is a fair investigation and a fair judiciary hearing.”...Second-year Law School student Sejal Singh, who helped organize the walkout on behalf of anti-harassment student advocacy group the Pipeline Parity Project, said in an interview after the event that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would have a far-reaching impact on American teenagers. “We should think about not just the message that his presence on the Supreme Court would send to the American people, not just to women, but to boys, who see that there’s no consequences for this kind of behavior,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The revelation on Friday that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, considered wearing a wire to record President Donald Trump and discussed trying to get the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him is more than merely astonishing. It has consequences.

...Roughly 5 percent of U.S. coal capacity is scheduled to retire this year, while Energy Department figures show that domestic coal consumption in the power sector slumped to a three-decade low in 2017 (Climatewire, March 15). "They're basically trying to stop the bleeding," said Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative. "But they still can't stop their ultimate death."

Upperclassmen, alumni, and faculty travelled to and from the podium of Memorial Church Sunday afternoon for the College's first Latinx Convocation themed “Mis Raices, Mi Communidad.”...Dianisbeth M. Acquie ’16, a second-year Law School student and Lowell House resident tutor, said she was involved with the Latinx community during her time as undergraduate, including as vice president of Fuerza Latina. In her speech, she told first-year students that it was “remarkably brave” to leave their homes and chase that “beautiful dream” at Harvard. “There is a shirt I’ve seen before, and it reads, ‘I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams.’ And it’s true. I am. You are.”