Media Mentions

...My concerns are shared by many academic observers. In a draft paper released in September, Prof. John C. Coates of Harvard Law School wrote that indexing is reshaping corporate governance, and warned that we are tipping toward a point where the voting power will be “controlled by a small number of individuals” who can exercise “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.” Professor Coates does not like what he sees, and offers tentative policy options—some necessary, often painful to contemplate. His conclusion—“The issue is not likely to go away”—is unarguable.

Another Big Law firm is backing away from mandatory arbitration agreements for employees amid renewed pushback on the provisions from a Harvard Law School student group. Sidley Austin said Wednesday that it will no longer require summer associates, associates or staff to sign mandatory arbitration agreements that prohibit them from suing over workplace issues such as harassment and discrimination...“We’re really pleased that firms like Sidley Austin recognize that dropping forced arbitration is the right thing to do for all of their employees,” said Pipeline Parity Project organizer Vail Kohnert-Yount in a statement announcing the change. “Hopefully, the lawyers at these firms will also rethink compelling these types of coercive contracts on behalf of their clients, because it’s obvious that forced arbitration impedes access to justice.”

Five years ago, Caroline Kennedy met with President Barack Obama, offering her services to his administration. Expecting to receive a legal or educational post, instead she was offered the ambassadorship to Japan, where she wound up serving until 2017. Kennedy was the first woman given the ambassadorship, and while in the position she orchestrated Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima, a key moment in U.S.-Japanese relations since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb there during World War II. The daughter of President John F. Kennedy focused on both those discussion points during her Tsai Lecture at Harvard on Tuesday, “Reflections on My Time as Ambassador.” In his introduction, her son, Harvard Law School student Jack Schlossberg, said, “She always tried to understand the Japanese perspective; she was relentless in her pursuit. She embodies an America that was humble and compassionate.”

Two major law firms have changed how they handle cases of sexual harassment and other disputes after students at Harvard Law urged attorneys to boycott the firms in a social media campaign...“We are not going to go work for firms that are going to deny us the right to go to court if we are sexually harassed,” said Sejal Singh, who is in her second year at Harvard Law.

...“These cooperation agreements are written in such a way that you’re much worse off if you do this,”Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor said, arguing that Manafort would have been better off had he had just pleaded guilty without agreeing to cooperate. “You’ve committed additional crimes that could enhance your penalty,” Whiting, who is now a Harvard Law professor, told TPM.

...Legal experts called Manafort’s arrangement “extremely unusual”—and potentially unethical depending on what was discussed between Manafort’s lawyer and Trump’s team. Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC and Boston who focused on organized crime and corruption cases, told me that if Manafort approved of his lawyers sharing information with Trump, then he never fully aligned his interests with the government—and was therefore never fully serious about cooperating. “I think it's likely that … it was all a game to buy time, to obstruct the investigation, and perhaps even to find out more about the investigation,” Whiting said.

The debate over corporations imposing arbitration on shareholders through corporate charters and bylaws is still mostly in the realm of theory and academic furor. The Securities and Exchange Commission, as you know, is contemplating the issue, though SEC Chair Jay Clayton has said he’s in no rush to decide whether the commission will end its longtime policy of squelching proposed mandatory arbitration provisions for companies going public...In the new paper, the securities law professors – including, among other luminaries, John Coffee of Columbia, Lucian Bebchuk and John Coates of Harvard, Ann Lipton of Tulane, James Cox of Duke and Donald Langevoort of Georgetown - contend that federal securities claims are outside the scope of corporate charters and bylaws governed by Delaware law. Corporations can’t impose mandatory arbitration of federal securities claims through charters and bylaws, according to the profs’ argument, because compacts between corporations and shareholders are limited to state law governance issues, not disputes under federal securities law.

As creditors of ITT Educational Services fight over the remaining assets of the defunct for-profit college operator, one group has secured a significant victory in the bankruptcy proceedings: former students...In the meantime, ITT’s estate has notified students who are eligible for the debt cancellation, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, a legal aid group that worked with the law firm Jenner & Block to represent the students. “This settlement does more for the cheated students of predatory for-profit colleges than [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos has done in her entire administration,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending. “At a time when students are being ignored by their government, ITT students stood up to this predatory college themselves and secured the relief they are owed.”

Disclosures over the past few days in the Russia investigation suggest that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has improved his case concerning obstruction of justice and collusion, both of which President Trump continues to deny...The arrangement between Manafort, his lawyers and Trump’s lawyers is unprecedented. “I have no doubt that serving as a mole or double agent inside the office charged with investigating the president, and feeding to the president and to witnesses like Corsi or Stone key information about the investigator’s plans — and about what others are telling the grand jury — after gaining the special counsel’s confidence by ‘flipping’ in order to get a better plea deal meets even the narrowest statutory definition of criminal obstruction of justice and could also constitute still more witness tampering on the part of practiced witness tamperer Paul Manafort,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s too soon to know whether a Chinese researcher who claims to have successfully edited the genomes of newly born twins is telling the truth. But if he is, and if the girls turn out to be healthy and normal, it heralds a significant change in the scientific and ethical status of human gene editing. The outrage might not last long. The consensus in the scientific community now is that human gene editing is medically dangerous and ethically wrong. Both of those beliefs are susceptible to changing, almost as fast as science is capable of progressing.

...Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor, has pushed for the Education Department to revise Obama-era guidelines on how colleges are to respond to sexual harassment and assault. In 2017, she and other Harvard law professors urged the department to rescind a letter that contained the guidelines. "Students would be forced to be interviewed or show up to hearings with no notice of what the charges against them were,” said Halley, who welcomes the proposed changes that give greater protections to the accused. "The fact that the Trump administration is proposing fairness is one of the great paradoxes of our time,” Halley said. “But fairness is fairness."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Democratic House of Representatives isn’t the only branch of the U.S. government headed for a clash with President Donald Trump. The Supreme Court is, too. The most recent evidence is the fight between Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts over whether it’s appropriate to categorize jurists as “Obama judges,” “Bush judges” and “Trump judges.” But the crisis has been building for two years, and the time has come for Roberts to act.

The Catholic Church in the United States has received staggering blows of late. The sinful and criminal behavior of a former leading prelate, the statewide investigations into clergy sex abuse across the country, the Vatican’s confused and vapid response – all have left many of the faithful in despair. Some American Catholics are even questioning their fidelity to Mother Church. It may seem curious, therefore, that comes now a new book recounting the conversion stories of sixteen leading intellectuals. Of course, there are no coincidences in the often-charming world of God. In Mind, Heart, & Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome, Robert George and R.J. Snell offer a refreshing and inspirational reminder from some of today’s greatest minds of the many splendored reasons to be Catholic...Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule matter-of-factly remarks that “the depths of the Church are not disturbed by the storms that pass to and fro on the surface.” Rather, he says , “the Church seems to me an institution whose foundations are as strong as iron. The turmoil will pass away; episodes, scandals and debates will come and go; but the line and witness of Peter’s successors will never fail.”

...In almost two years since taking office, Mr. Trump has denied the scientific reality of climate change and taken aggressive steps that will increase emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — despite unequivocal scientific evidence that those pollutants are warming the planet to dangerous levels...“These are life-extension projects for coal plants,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former counsel to the Obama administration. “It’s a very calculated effort to go in the opposite direction from what’s needed.”

On a March evening, Michael Thomas Jr. gave a special tour of Gannett House to his dad and two brothers, who were visiting to see the place where Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, first made national headlines. In 1990, Obama became the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review, which was founded in 1887 and is based at Gannett House. Thomas’ relatives delighted in seeing traces of Obama in the building, including a group photo of editors with the future president in the center. But they were also there to celebrate Thomas, who had recently become the third African-American man to be elected president of the esteemed legal journal. “My family didn’t understand the significance of it, at first,” Thomas said in an interview. “I don’t have lawyers in my family. When I told them that Obama had been president of the Law Review, they were very happy for me.”

He’s the lil’ engine who couldn’t. The manufacturing motor President Trump vowed to jump start in the nation’s heartland sputtered and stalled Monday when General Motors announced it would cut as many as 14,000 jobs and possibly more — many of them based in the Midwest...“[Trump] was running around saying the auto industry was building more plants and creating more jobs,” said Sharon Block, director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “This would suggest, again, that he wasn’t being truthful with the American people.”

The Trump administration’s recent policy change on compensation for tipped workers when they wash dishes or clean tables will likely cause legal trouble again, some attorneys and former Labor Department staff say...Courts tend to defer to agency regulations and policy with the understanding that the agency is the expert, Sharon Block, head of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg Law. But that could be thrown out given perceived “flip-flopping” by the agency. Block was also the head of the Obama DOL’s policy shop. “Although I don’t agree with the position in the opinion letter, I do think it’s important that agencies get deference, though that has limits,” Block said. “If there’s no basis for why the agency has changed the interpretation, even under a doctrine where the agency should get significant deference, they may not meet that standard here.”

A coalition of 10 Harvard Law School student affinity groups called on Dean John F. Manning ‘82 to establish a Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in a letter published Monday in the Harvard Law Record, the school’s student publication...Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells wrote in an emailed statement that the school has created a number of new mentoring and advising initiatives in the past year such as a new online platform to help students connect with each other, a pre-orientation course for incoming first-year students, and a preferred lender program for student loans. “The Law School has long had an unwavering commitment to creating a strong and inclusive community that is diverse along multiple dimensions,” Sells wrote...Demarquin D. Johnson, a second-year Law student and one of the letter’s authors, said the Law School needs to do a better job understanding these issues.“Currently, the Law School is unable to recognize the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity in every aspect of it,” Johnson said...Lauren D. Williams, a third-year Law student and president of the Black Law Students Association, said her organization’s main concern was the lack of a consistent faculty position dedicated to teaching critical race theory.

An op-ed by Philip Heymann and William Ruckelshaus. The Department of Justice has concluded that the president acted legally in appointing Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. But it has declined to comment on the illegality of President Trump putting Whitaker in charge of supervising the special counsel investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election. We were there more than four decades ago, dealing with the Watergate scandal.

An op-ed by Martha Minow. Why are leading educators, lawyers, and scholars filing briefs this week asking the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to listen to children in the Detroit public schools? A district court declined to proceed with the school children’s complaint that the Detroit public schools deprive students — 97 percent of whom are students of color — of any real chance for basic literacy while also exposing them to unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The school system has the lowest literacy rate of any major school district in the nation, a shortage of qualified teachers, and teaching materials that are both out-of-date and too few to serve the students. The schools do not even offer a core curriculum. Instead, the schools are infested with rodents and other pests. Extreme temperatures require early-bird dismissals and school closings.

The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World, by Robert Mnookin. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Mnookin, a Harvard law professor, delivers a methodical argument that for American Judaism to survive it will need to become much more inclusive. Our reviewer, Gal Beckerman, describes it as “a lucid legal brief of a book that proposes what would amount to a revolutionary (some would say heretical) revision. It no longer makes sense, Mnookin thinks, to use matrilineal descent, or any descent really, to determine who is a Jew. If you feel yourself to be a Jew, you get to be one.”