Media Mentions

During the last two weeks of January, Lillie A. Estes had shared with many that this was going to be her year. This would be the year a nascent Community Justice Network came together. ... The film series recently became the Community Justice Network. On Jan. 28, Estes asked the network to interview David J. Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Estes envisioned a blog post illustrating the relationships emerging from the network's launch. More connectivity, more co-creation. Reached Jan. 30, Harris, a longtime Estes supporter and collaborator, offered ideas about navigating that energy. "Lillie herself is really a model and a hero to me," Harris said. "Keeping up with Lillie can be a challenge. But one thing that's unbelievably consistent about her, that I encounter rarely, is her absolute commitment to certain models for creating community leadership. I've seen her step back and say, 'I'm not going to make this decision, this is a collective decision.'

Malique Gordon has already moved three times since his 6-year-old son, Makari, was born. Gordon, 27, lives with his mother Maureen Nugent, who receives a Section 8 voucher. Section 8 — or the Housing Choice Voucher Program, as it’s now known — is a federal program that pays for a predetermined amount of rent.  ... “Suburban communities ... that are supposed to be the target for integration have certain characteristics, and we think those characteristics are good: They're clean, they're open, children have good schools,” says David Harris, managing director of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “The question becomes, why it is that people have to move to the suburbs to have access to those things? Why isn't our policy designed to make sure all communities are endowed with those characteristics, where the amenities and the benefits are all the same?” Before his position at Harvard, Harris was the director of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston. He argues “mobility” — moving people out of cities and to affluent suburbs — is the wrong solution. He calls it "policy by lottery.

It’s one of the most vexing challenges facing the labor movement: how to wield influence in an era increasingly dominated by technology giants that are often resistant to unions. Are workers best served when unions take an adversarial stance toward such companies? Or should labor groups seek cooperation with employers, even if the resulting deals do little to advance labor’s broader goals? ...But Sharon Block, a senior Labor Department official under President Barack Obama, argued that the deal was defensible. Ms. Block pointed out that the guild had taken something of a hybrid approach between cooperation and antagonism, lobbying for policies such as a minimum earnings standard for drivers and allowing passengers to tip, both of which have been enacted in New York. “There are situations in which taking the half loaf can be worthwhile,” Ms. Block said.

President Donald Trump on Thursday brought renewed national attention to what has emerged as one of the most hotly debated technological and geopolitical challenges — the race to build a next-generation 5G wireless internet network. ...  While major U.S. telecommunications companies have touted their investments in 5G technology, China's firms are by some measures a step ahead, causing concern that the U.S. could fall behind in building new technology off the next-generation networks. “The implication is that new industries of the future, the new ways of making a living, will be in China and not here. They’ll have this huge sandbox to play with and a lot of control over the market,” said Susan Crawford, author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It" and a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on technology policy.

When Phyllis Schlafly crusaded against the Equal Rights Amendmentin the 1970s as a threat to all-American motherhood, she handed out freshly baked bread and apple pie to state legislators. She warned of a dystopian post-E.R.A. future of women forced to enlist in the military, gay marriage, unisex toilets everywhere and homemakers driven into the workplace by husbands free to abandon them. ... Catharine A. MacKinnon, whose legal theories laid the basis for sexual harassment being defined as a form of sex discrimination, has championed the revival of the amendment as a weapon against what she sees as the continuing subordination of women through sexual violence and economic inequality. “You go after sexuality and economics, you’ve gone to the heart of misogyny,” she said.

An essay by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz: Calls to impeach President Donald Trump—and denunciations of those calls—have run rampant in American public discourse since Election Day 2016.  Although support for ending Trump’s tenure has never exceeded 50 percent, it’s no exaggeration to say that talk of impeachment is now a defining feature of our politics. But major implications of that fact remain underappreciated. Over the past two years, hardly any development in the federal government has escaped the inevitable think piece opining that Trump’s presidency has finally been doomed or saved. By November 2018, the word impeachment had already been uttered on cable news 12,000 times that year. New books and articles on the topic arrive weekly. Commentators including Elizabeth Holtzmanand The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum have championed the cause. Tom Steyer has poured millions of dollars into Need to Impeach, and many liberals have rallied to his banner. These calls for Trump’s removal echo widely in #resistance circles—and also on Fox and Breitbart, which gleefully feature this “proof” of a liberal conspiracy.

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of the county of El Paso, Texas argues that Trump's national emergency declaration to build a wall is unconstitutional with the most high-powered legal team that has joined this fight. Co-counsel Laurence Tribe says he's never had an opponent quite as helpful as Trump, whose public statements undermine his case for a national emergency. Lawrence also discusses with co-counsel Stuart Gerson.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: With his stunning plea for reconsideration of New York Times v. Sullivan – the landmark free-speech decision insulating the press, and speakers in general, from most libel actions – Justice Clarence Thomas has … performed a public service. Not necessarily because he’s right, but because there’s a serious issue here. To see why, imagine that a lawyer, a blogger, a talk-show host or a newspaper lies about you -- and in the process destroys your reputation. Your accuser might say that you are a pedophile, a drug peddler, an arsonist or a prostitute. In an hour, the lie goes around the world. If you count as a public figure, does the Constitution really mean that the law cannot provide you with any kind of redress? Thomas doesn’t think so.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is mulling the use of decentralized technology for his social media behemoth. Speaking with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said blockchain technology could be implemented as an alternative way for users to access, store and manage their private data. “Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice of whether to log in to different places and you’re not going through an intermediary,” he said in the Facebook Live interview.

While many attorneys go their entire careers without arguing a case before a top state appellate court, Liz Soltan managed the feat before even graduating from Harvard Law School, and without missing a single class. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Rule 3:03 allows senior law students to appear before the court on behalf of an indigent plaintiff. Soltan, a third-year law student working for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run legal service, handled the oral argument on behalf of a pair of Boston dry cleaner employees who said they were cheated out of $28,000 in wages and overtime pay and sought attorneys' fees stemming from the litigation. “It was a great experience. A lot of prep went into it,” Soltan told Law360. “I was so nervous that a lot of it is a blur. But I felt that it went well and I was optimistic. It was kind of fun to be up there, having a conversation with the justices.” Soltan is not the first law student to argue before the SJC, but it is rare to have a student present a case to the top court.

El Paso County in Texas has joined forces with the Border Network for Human Rights to file a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his decision to declare a national emergency in order to build his US-Mexico border wall. "The injunction requested by the county of El Paso and the Border Network for Human Rights is amply justified by the complaint filed today," Harvard law professor Laurence J. Tribe said in a statement. Tribe is one of America's foremost experts on constitutional law and is famous for representing former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore. He added, "President Trump’s effort to usurp Congress’s powers and abuse the U.S. Military manifestly subverts the Constitution and inflicts grievous harm on the 800,000 residents of a successful community that the President has shamelessly used as a poster child for his political posturing.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, former military commander of NATO, and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Trump Is Risking an ISIS Resurrection." Clive Crook, Bloomberg Opinion editor: "Trump Is Rooting for Ocasio-Cortez’s Democrats." Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Design a Green New Deal That Isn’t Over the Top." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Kavanaugh Shows How Conservative He Is on Abortion."

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. .... Mark Zuckerberg started his 2019 challenge of doing public debates. Zuckerberg took part in an interview with Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain. Mark Zuckerberg said he doesn't want "a camera in everyone's living room," but seemed to forget that Facebook sells a camera that goes in living rooms. Jonathan Zittrain pointed out that Facebook sells a camera-equipped device for the living room — Facebook Portal, its smart speaker with video calling.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman; President Donald Trump can’t just pull funding for high-speed rail from California as payback for the state’s challenging the constitutionality of his border wall. There are laws governing decisions by agencies like the Department of Transportation. Those laws require that agencies give principled policy reasons for their actions — not recite doubtful pretexts for decisions taken on political grounds. If the Transportation Department actually pulls the funding, as it has said it plans to do, California will challenge the decision in court. And the odds are pretty high that the state will win, regardless of what happens in the separate legal challenge to the border wall.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus. That most influential of art schools lasted only 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, when the Nazis shut it down. But the many events noted on the website Bauhaus at 100 give a sense of the global scale of that influence. Closer to home, no fewer than four shows are currently on display in Greater Boston, with another opening next month, “Arresting Fragments: Object Photography at the Bauhaus,” at the MIT Museum. ... Thanks to that Harvard connection, three of the four shows are in Cambridge. The largest and most ambitious, “The Bauhaus and Harvard,” runs at the Harvard Art Museums through July 28. “The Bauhaus at Home and Abroad,” at Harvard’s Houghton Library, is small and surprisingly enchanting (all hail the Bauhaus jazz band!). It runs through May 24. “Creating Community: Harvard Law School and the Bauhaus” is at Langdell Hall through July 31.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig:  The New Hampshire Legislature, now controlled by the Democratic Party, had an extraordinary opportunity to allow voters in New Hampshire to speak more clearly in the upcoming 2020 presidential primary. Last week, the House Election Law Committee decided to keep the voters quiet. The issue is how voters will be allowed to express their preferences through their primary vote. The tradition is that voters vote for one candidate and one candidate only. The candidate who wins the most votes is then declared the winner. But obviously, in a field of a dozen candidates, “the winner” is an ambiguous idea. If one candidate gets 22 percent of the vote, and the rest get less, in what meaningful sense does that candidate represent the will of New Hampshire voters? More importantly, given the gaggle of candidates we know will run, how do voters decide whom to support? Does a vote for one candidate not likely to win waste that vote? Should the voter pick the less compelling candidate, because she believes others are likely to pick that candidate, too? This conundrum is what the system called “ranked choice voting” is intended to solve.

President Trump has a peculiar view of government in general, and of the Justice Department, specifically. He views himself as having unlimited authority over the executive branch — without regard to either constitutional or statutory obligations. It’s the “unitary executive” on steroids. Combine this with his mob-based worldview, in which he imagines that his wiseguys (e.g., Roger Stone, Michael Cohen) “fix” things just like others did for other presidents. Trump demands to know, “Where is my Roy Cohn?” The result is a reflexive, constant demand from Trump to make his troubles go away — not by cooperating, but by eliminating the key person atop the investigation. ... “As part of Trump’s ongoing corrupt pattern of efforts to deflect the federal investigation from his own criminal conduct in winning the presidency, his attempt to put a conflicted and thus legally ineligible person in charge of the [Southern District of New York-Cohen] prosecution solely to protect himself could well constitute the crime of obstruction under 18 U.S.C. Section 1505,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang: Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently announced they would introduce legislation to prohibit a public firm from repurchasing its own stock, unless the firm first invests in employees and communities, including paying workers at least $15 per hour and offering “decent” pension and health benefits. Welcome to the newest form of virtue-signaling on Capitol Hill, in which Democratic senators demonstrate their concern for employees by proposing bills that severely restrict — or even outlaw — buybacks. The proposals are based on misleading measures of corporate capital flows, as well as on a profound misunderstanding of how the US economy works. If enacted, such bills could threaten not only the capital markets but also the workers and communities the senators claim to care about.

It’s now being widely reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is set to wrap up his investigation and deliver a report to Attorney General William Barr as soon as next week. Which has raised a big question: How much will Barr disclose about Mueller’s findings to Congress? ...  “The special counsel regulations in no way restrict the fullest possible public disclosure by the attorney general of Mueller’s findings and the evidence backing them up,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told me. Tribe also noted that if Mueller has chosen not to indict Trump because of Justice Department policy protecting a sitting president, that would argue in favor of transmitting as much information as possible to Congress “for consideration in the context of possible impeachment.”

Many legal analysts who watched Donald Trump declare a national emergency over immigration on Friday thought the president had weak legal grounds for doing so. In particular, many thought Trump hurt his own case by admitting, right there in the White House Rose Garden: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.” ... “The legality of Trump’s decision will probably turn on highly technical provisions involving the use of funds for military construction projects,” wrote Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, a former White House official under Barack Obama. ... Jack Goldsmith, Sunstein’s colleague at Harvard and a veteran of the justice department under George W Bush, said presidents have broad leeway in declaring emergencies. “‘Emergency’ isn’t typically defined in relevant law, presidents have always had discretion to decide if there’s an emergency, and they’ve often declared emergencies under circumstances short of necessity, to address a real problem but not an emergency as understood in common parlance,” Goldsmith tweeted.

An employee suing an employer for unpaid wages can recover attorneys' fees when winning a "favorable settlement," even when a court does not sign off on the deal, according to a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling Tuesday with potentially wide-ranging implications. ...The employees’ case was presented to the high court by Liz Soltan, a Harvard Law School student arguing as a student practitioner with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She told Law360 Tuesday the court's decision might help combat wage theft, which studies have suggested may be problem costing workers in the Commonwealth $700 million annually.  “Wage theft is such an epidemic in Massachusetts, especially among low income and immigrant workers, this is the kind of ruling we needed for access to justice,” Soltan said. “I am hoping it'll mean more lawyers are going to feel secure in taking these cases.”