Media Mentions

President Donald Trump signed the 2018 farm bill Thursday afternoon, ending months of congressional negotiations over the $867 billion legislation. ... Ultimately, the 2018 bill maintains most programs as they were before, said Erika Dunyak, a clinical fellow at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Most lists of the year’s best books reflect the personal tastes of those who produce them. This list is different. It’s entirely objective. What unites these six books is that nothing is rote or by-the-numbers about them. Each of them crackles with a kind of demonic energy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The decision on Friday by a federal court judge in Texas to block the Affordable Care Act nationwide is a poetically perfect year-end twist in the Obamacare saga. Not since the first New Deal has a generational social change been so mired in judicial interference. Democrats on the streets may think they are pursuing the resistance against President Donald Trump. But the most effective resistance in the U.S. today is judicial resistance — in this case, by a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the signature initiative of Barack Obama’s administration.

Last month, we marked the centennial of the end of the Great War. Last week, we marked the 70th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In the intervening 30 years, between 1918 and 1948, human-rights violations of unimaginable scale took place, with the rise of totalitarianism and the genocidal brutality of the Second World War, in both the Pacific and European theatres, and above all in the Shoah. That the UN could pass the UDHR just a few years after WWII ended is one of the most remarkable achievements of statecraft in history. ... Later in life, I would come to know and work with Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard Law School professor who literally wrote the book on how the UDHR came to be, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The attorney general for Washington, DC said on Wednesday the US capital city had sued Facebook Inc for allegedly misleading users about how it safeguarded their personal data, in the latest fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. ... State attorneys general from both major US political parties have stepped up their enforcement of privacy laws in recent years, said James Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and Maine’s former attorney general.

Nancy Gertner discusses the sweeping criminal justice reform bill passed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. It's called the First Step Act, and it proposes some significant changes to the federal prison system. In a rare show of bipartisanship, the Senate passed the bill 87-12, with only 12 Republicans voting no.

President Trump has weaponized tariffs to upend the global rules of international trade — but can his policies withstand the peanut butter test? On Wednesday, a three-judge panel, deliberating in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, considered the most far-reaching legal challenge to the president’s aggressive use of national security to justify placing levies on steel and aluminum imports from Europe as well as from Canada, Mexico, China and other nations. ... “There are very few cases, but the precedents all suggest that Congress can delegate this authority to the president, and he has a wide discretion when it comes to issues of national security,” said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies international trade issues.

... What is clear, however, is that to the extent the president has a safe harbor for prosecution during his time in office, that protection is personal to him. His relatives and his business empire don’t get that benefit. ... “Unless the Office of Special Counsel or the Southern District of New York [prosecution team] intends to indict Trump personally (or has already indicted him under seal), no claim could be made that indicting any of the Trump organizations would somehow be an abusive circumvention of what ought to be an indictment of Mr. Trump as the real party in interest and the real ‘brains,’ if you’ll pardon the expression in this context, behind those entities,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: In its first act next January, the new House is scheduled to take up the most important civil rights bill in half a century. The bill signals a profoundly comprehensive understanding of the flaws that have evolved within our democracy. That it is scheduled first screams a recognition that these flaws must be fixed first, if we’re to have a Congress that is free to do the other critically important work that Congress must do. But that the bill is all but invisible to anyone outside the beltway signals the most important gap left in this most important fight to make representative democracy in America possible — if not again, then finally.

As the US Senate has invoked the War Powers Act – a 1973 law by which Congress sought an end to the war in Vietnam – as a way to disengage the US militarily from Yemen, it is relevant in this context to examine whether the executive has stepped into the sphere of the legislature. ... In this context, legal experts such as Jack Goldsmith, a former US assistant attorney general and current professor at Harvard Law School, wrote on the Lawfare blog that planned use of military force in Syria without the authorization of Congress would have set a precedent for presidential unilateralism, in part because “neither US persons nor property are at stake, and no plausible self-defense rationale exists.”

Over the past few decades, the science of animal cognition has changed people’s understanding of other species. In several, researchers have discovered emotions, intelligence and behaviour once thought to belong exclusively to humans. But the law has changed slowly, and in one respect barely at all. Most legal systems treat the subjects of law as either people or property. There is no third category. ... The upshot is that “the law is a patchwork,” says Kristen Stilt, who teaches animal law at Harvard Law School. Animals still lack rights, but the bright line separating them from people has been dulled by sentience laws and rulings in India, Argentina and Colombia.

Nearly nine in 10 grocery products now bear clearer labels for use-by dates, and consumers are finding them easier to understand, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA). ... A July 2017 GMA and Food Policy Action study revealed that 60% of Americans said they had discussions in their households about how to interpret the meaning of grocery date labels, and another 40% acknowledged having disagreements about whether to throw a product away. Similarly, a report by the Harvard Law School Food Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that over 90% of Americans may discard food too early because they misunderstand date labels.

A growing number of scientific reports and news headlines tell a grim tale — the quality and quantity of the U.S. water supply is increasingly threatened by droughts, contamination, algal blooms, severe weather and diminishing groundwater aquifers. Yet, rather than stepping up protections, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers just signed a proposed rule to revise the definition of the “waters of the United States” in ways that will substantially restrict the waterways protected as part of the Clean Water Act. ... Although the Trump administration and lobbyists stoked fears among farmers that government authorities would regulate ditches and ponds, the reality is that the Clean Water Act and associated regulations already contained “generous carve-outs for farmers”, according to Caitlin McCoy at Harvard Law School.

They say to dance like no one's watching. But what if millions are watching an avatar of you dance and someone else is making billions from it without your permission? That's the intriguing question at the heart of lawsuits from several dance creators who say that the massive video game "Fortnite" is profiting off their their moves. ... Harvard Law School professor William W. Fisher, who teaches a course on intellectual property law, said in an email that choreography lawsuits don't often make it into court. "Egregious instances of copyright are usually addressed through shaming, not law," he said.

Former University President Drew G. Faust has been named a University Professor, the highest honor a Harvard faculty member can receive, the University announced Monday. Faust joins 24 prominent Harvard faculty with the distinction—including University President Lawrence S. Summers, former Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Henry Louis Gates Jr.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and Matthew Schoenfeld: While Washington and Beijing battle over trade, a worrisome cross-border financial link has escaped scrutiny: Americans now collectively own most of the public equity of China’s biggest tech companies, including Alibaba, Baidu and Weibo. This relationship is strange (imagine if the Chinese owned most of Amazon, Facebook and Google). It’s also extremely risky, at least for American investors.

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act — colloquially known as Obamacare — needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... Another dimension of the controversial case is the fact that Judge O'Connor is widely perceived as a partisan judge, raising questions about his reasoning for deciding that Obamacare must be overturned. "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional. People who castigate judges as ‘activists’ whenever they reach liberal results had better step up to the plate and join those across the spectrum who are condemning this latest ruling as way outside the legal ballpark."

China's efforts to become a global powerhouse in the technology of the future are under attack. But don't expect it to beat a retreat....But any measures Xi might announce are expected to be a continuation of the gradual changes it has been introducing in recent years to open more of its economy to the world. "China is accelerating a series of economic reforms, many of which it would have enacted eventually anyway, and attempting to package it as a major concession to US demands," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School. Trump administration officials are still taking a wary approach to what China's offering.

A Harvard Law School professor, who also was a President Barack Obama appointee, says recent Michigan Republican moves to strip Democrats’ authority may be unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard who helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic and Marshall Islands. He told the Michigan Advance that a GOP plan to move campaign finance oversight from the secretary of state’s office to a proposed commission and another that would allow the Legislature to name itself as an intervening party in court cases might violate the state Constitution. “I think a compelling argument can be made that the attempt by the Michigan Legislature to restructure the State’s system of government in response to the Democratic victories in the elections for executive branch officials violates the letter and spirit of that bedrock provision of the Michigan Constitution,” Tribe wrote in an email.

Gareth Evans has warned signing up to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons will “tear up” the United States alliance ahead of a critical contested vote in an otherwise tranquil Labor conference. ... Australia has consistently refused to support or sign the ban treaty – supported by 122 countries – arguing that it relies on the protection of the United States nuclear umbrella. A paper by the International Human Rights Clinic at the Harvard Law School, published in December, concluded if Australia signed the treaty it would have to leave the nuclear umbrella but the US-Australia alliance is otherwise legally compatible with it.

A Quebec environmental group is taking the federal government to court. ENvironnement JEUnesse filed a class-action suit on behalf of Quebeckers aged 35 and under seeking a declaration that the government’s behaviour in the fight against climate change infringes on their human rights. The claim also seeks punitive damages.... Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus characterizes efforts to legislate solutions to systemic challenges such as climate risk as “super wicked problems.” He observed that “climate-change legislation is especially vulnerable to being unravelled over time … especially because of the extent to which it imposes costs on the short term for the realization of benefits many decades and sometimes centuries later.”