Media Mentions

Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Japanese law. He is also a keen observer of East Asian affairs. JAPAN Forward’s Jason Morgan recently sat down with Professor Ramseyer to sound him out on regional developments in the realm of law and policy in Northeast Asia.

PG&E Corp. on Tuesday became the largest public company to file for bankruptcy in the U.S. in the past decade as mounting liabilities from its role in triggering California wildfires pushed the utility over the brink. ... Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s electricity law initiative, said the changing nature of PG&E’s customer base mirrors broader challenges to the monopolistic business model many U.S. utilities have enjoyed for decades. “There’s a larger issue at hand regarding how utilities are coping with new technology,” Mr. Peskoe said. “Maybe this is an opportunity for the industry to think about this differently.”

Huawei chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is set for a long battle as she fights extradition from Canada to the United States, a process that could be complicated by intervention from US President Donald Trump, analysts say. ... International trade law specialist Mark Wu, from Harvard Law School, said that because the criminal charges against Huawei and Meng were overseen by the Department of Justice, Trump could intervene though his acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker. “However, he should exercise extreme caution in doing so and not undermine the rule of law,” Wu said. “Any perception that her arrest is meant to offer political leverage in upcoming trade negotiations could jeopardise the success of the ongoing extradition hearings in Canadian court.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has already rescinded Obama-era guidelines for how schools handle sexual harassment and assault claims. Now, she is hoping to give what she calls fair protections to the accused. Advocates for survivors see this as a big step backward and they are making their voices heard. The deadline for public comment has been extended to Wednesday, Jan. 30. On the latest episode of On Campus Radio, we'll look into DeVos' proposed changes and how students and educators are responding to them. ... We'll then talk to Harvard law professors Janet Halley and Diane Rosenfeld about the debate over Title IX regulations.

Hepatitis C is one of the most common infectious diseases, with the potential to cause serious liver damage, so patients were thrilled when a set of revolutionary new medications became available five years ago. But at $90,000 per treatment course, the drugs were pricey, and many states, including Minnesota, balked at covering them under their taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs. ... Nationwide, state Medicaid programs are being urged — and sometimes sued — to drop treatment barriers. Led partly by the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard University, 21 states have dropped or reduced requirements that patients must suffer some liver damage before they are treated, a requirement that Minnesota never used. ... “What we are seeing here are measures that are deliberately put in place to stop people who need medically necessary care versus cost concerns,” said Phil Walters, an attorney with the Harvard center. He said the restrictions are “discriminatory and illegal.”

An op-ed by David Brooks: I went into journalism to cover politics, but now I find myself in national marriage therapy. Covering American life is like covering one of those traumatizing Eugene O’Neill plays about a family where everyone screams at each other all night and then when dawn breaks you get to leave the theater. But don’t despair, I’m here to help. I’ve been searching for practical tips on how we can be less beastly to one another, especially when we’re negotiating disagreements. I’ve found some excellent guides — like “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable” by Daniel Shapiro, “The Rough Patch”by Daphne de Marneffe and “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker — and I’ve compiled some, I hope, not entirely useless tips.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Many social problems seem impossibly daunting, simply because they are so large. Poverty, immigration, cancer deaths, gun violence, climate change – in light of the magnitude of those problems, most imaginable reforms seem pretty small. In their book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” Chip Heath and Dan Heath argue that the best response to big challenges is often to “shrink the change.” Instead of trying to solve a problem, dent it.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the most important political essay of the 20th century, “Politics as a Vocation,” by the German sociologist and legal theorist Max Weber. The essay includes a topical lesson for Americans as candidates announce their plans to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 election: Politics isn’t the realm of pure, absolute moral conscience, where everything can be described as right or wrong, black or white.

In 1996, the year Congress passed its landmark health privacy law, there was no Apple Watch, no Fitbit, no Facebook support groups or patients tweeting about their medical care. Health data was between you, your doctor, and the health care system. More than two decades later, that law — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — is still the key piece of legislation protecting our medical privacy, despite being woefully inadequate for dealing with the health-related data we constantly generate outside of the health care system. Now, there could be an opportunity for a revamp. ... Worse, HIPAA is a “four-letter word that medical people often use when they don’t want to do anything,” according to [I. Glenn] Cohen, a professor of law at Harvard University. Doctors have used it to avoid giving patients their own medical records, which, he says, “is like working with someone to write an autobiography and then being told you can’t take that biography out of the library.”

The federal government may be open again, but policy watchers say Friday's temporary deal to end the shutdown won't resolve uncertainty over whether the Trump administration can craft rules rolling back Obama-era energy and climate change regulations and successfully defend them in court before the 2020 presidential election. ... Joseph Goffman, who worked with the Obama-era EPA and is another 2013 shutdown veteran, said it's a coin flip whether the latest shutdown was long enough to push back finalization of major rules such as the CPP repeal and its replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, so that the inevitable legal challenges stretch past the 2020 elections.

Hamilton: The Exhibition takes visitors deeper into the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, while at the same time chronicling the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America. ... Hamilton: The Exhibition is a collaboration between Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, creative director and set designer David Korins, producer Jeffrey Seller, orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, and Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. Harvard Law Professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed is also providing historical consultation.

Susan Crawford, Harvard Law professor and former Special Asst. for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy during the Obama administration, discusses her new book, "FIBER: The Coming Tech Revolution—And Why America Might Miss It." Bill Barker, Portfolio Manager of the Motley Fool Small Mid-Cap Growth Fund, on why it’s a good time for both growth and value investors in mid-caps.

An op-ed by Vail Kohnert-Yount ’20, Jared Odessky ’20, and Sejal Singh ’20: In 2018, a record-breaking 609 major employers received perfect scores from the nation’s largest and most visible LGBTQ rights organization for their inclusion of LGBTQ workers. The Human Rights Campaign lauded corporations like Walmart, CVS, Chevron, Verizon, and Amazon for internal policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These changes might be worth applauding—if those companies didn’t also force workers to sign away their right to sue if they experience the very discrimination and harassment that nondiscrimination policies seek to stamp out.

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental and safety rules for the energy sector, government projections show billions of dollars in savings reaped by companies will come at a steep cost: more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, a jump in climate-warming emissions and more severe derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels. ... Joe Goffman, a former EPA official who helped create the clean power plan and now at Harvard Law School, said the omission of international impacts “doesn’t track with reality” given that climate change is a worldwide problem.

Harvard history professor Annette Gordon-Reed previews a lecture she’s giving in Houston on the impact of Confederate symbols on display in the public square. ... In the audio above, Gordon-Reed tells Houston Matters producer Maggie Martinabout the messages—both explicit and hidden—that Confederate icons convey to the public.

Obama studied law at Harvard, Bill Clinton at Yale (alongside Hillary). Nixon learned his way around the law at Duke, while FDR did the same at Columbia. A legal education has long served as a springboard to a political career. But past presidents are one thing—how common is it in 2019? ... Inevitably, some schools are more popular among legislators than others. Topping the table by some way are Harvard and Georgetown, schools whose elected alumni are spread across an array of states.

An article by Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith: President Trump is making noises again about withdrawing the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, which established NATO. Last week the House of Representatives voted 357-22 in support of the NATO Support Act. The bill does three things. First, it states the “sense of Congress” that the president “shall not withdraw the United States from NATO,” and that “the case Goldwater v. Carter is not controlling legal precedent.” Second, it states that “the policy of the United States” is to remain in NATO, to reject efforts to withdraw from NATO, and to work with and support NATO. Third, and most importantly, it prohibits funds “to be appropriated, obligated, or expended to take any action to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty.”

This week we witnessed a jaw-dropping affront to the rule of law and a violation of the president’s oath of office. The New York Times reported: “Michael D. Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump, indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony set for next month, his lawyer said on Wednesday, depriving House Democrats of one of their first big spectacles in their plans to aggressively investigate the Trump administration.” ...So why has this not caused a greater hullabaloo? Constitutional scholar and litigator Larry Tribe said, “It’s emblematic of a larger problem: Shouldn’t ‘high crimes’ (in the Impeachment sense) committed in plain view get at least as much attention as similar abuses committed in the dark and breathlessly unveiled in the form of ‘breaking news’?” He continued, “Many criminal law experts who should know better focus solely and obsessively on the precise language of U.S.C. §1512 (b) [the statute covering witness intimidation]. . . [and] the difficulties of proving the ‘intent’ element of that criminal prohibition beyond a reasonable doubt.” But of course special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in all likelihood will not indict a sitting president, so the real attention should be on whether such action is impeachable. The challenge, Tribe said, is how we “can protect ourselves from the seductively inoculating and anesthetizing effect of drip-by-drip disclosures — like those of Trump’s outrageous witness intimidation vis-a-vis his former fixer Michael Cohen — that generate more yawns than howls and seem unlikely to build up the bipartisan public outrage necessary for the impeachment power to be deployed successfully.”

For two years now we’ve heard, “No collusion!” and “Witch hunt!” Such disparagement of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s work was never viable (e.g. we knew about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 for well over a year); now it’s simply wrong. Perhaps the new phrase, albeit not original, should be: What did President Trump know, and when did he know it? ...If Trump was directing campaign aides to intercede with Stone, and by extension, WikiLeaks, that “would plainly constitute another piece — a big one — in the mosaic of evidence showing that Trump was committing campaign-related crimes in coordination with Russia to rig the presidential election in his favor by knowingly weaponizing stolen information against his opponent,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “That mosaic could certainly establish a high crime warranting Impeachment. But I still believe that an intense and public fact-finding process by the House, starting now, needs to precede any formal decision on impeachment, without which the essential public consensus favoring Trump’s removal won’t emerge.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The indictment of Roger Stone, who was arrested Friday by the FBI and charged with lying to Congress, provides the first detailed evidence that Stone was a go-between for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. In 2016, WikiLeaks had and released a large numbers of emails that had been stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Stone’s coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks is substantive, from what the court filings show. Stone, a Republican political operative and confidant of Trump, got advance notice of WikiLeaks document releases that he passed on to the Trump campaign. That included information about an “October surprise,” which turned out to be the leaking of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

Daniel Tarullo, a Harvard Law School visiting professor and former Federal Reserve governor, discusses the outlook for Fed monetary policy with Bloomberg's David Westin on "Bloomberg Markets: Balance of Power."