Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Student loans are imposing crushing burdens on millions of young Americans. According to one account, about one-quarter of the borrowers who began repaying their loans in 2005, 2007 or 2009 have since defaulted on them. That number greatly understates the economic hardship, not to mention the daily anxiety, produced by the pressures of repayment. What if there was an easy way to respond to the student debt crisis? A response that did not involve heavy-handed regulatory interventions?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It shouldn’t be a surprise that President Donald Trump reportedly told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn that he wanted to prosecute his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and fired FBI Director James Comey. Now that we know, however, the question is what to make of this revelation. My answer? The system is working.

Never mind the stacks of law books and the jockeying for grades at Harvard Law School: Second-year student Molly Coleman is working on bigger things. "At Harvard, it feels like when you get your admissions letter, you get this platform to make change," the 27-year-old from St. Paul said Saturday while home on break. Coleman was a writer on a Sept. 20 opinion piece for the law school's newspaper titled, "What is HLS (Harvard Law School) doing about Professor Brett Kavanaugh?"

After a Harvard Law student-led boycott of Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm announced last week it would no longer require associates to sign mandatory arbitration agreements — contracts that require employees to resolve workplace disputes with employers through an arbitration process, rather than through the courts...Alexandra V. Kohnert-Yount, a second-year Law student and member of the Pipeline Parity Project, said she was “pleasantly surprised” that the firm changed their policy so quickly after the boycott began. “Never doubt that a week’s worth of tweets can make a big law firm change their 10-year-old policy,” Kohnert-Yount said...Second-year Law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Molly M. E. Coleman said that the Kirkland & Ellis boycott is not the end of the group’s activism on arbitration agreements. Coleman, who helped organize the April letter, said the group is planning to organize protests against other firms with the controversial contract provisions. “I think that in the next few days there will be more about which ones we plan to target next and which ones we have the most concrete information on,” Coleman said.

...“The administration correctly perceives that the coal industry is suffering from real and significant economic disadvantage,” Joseph Goffman, former senior counsel in the EPA’s air office during the Obama administration, told Bloomberg Environment. “In a way, what ACE represents is the proposition that the coal industry needs as much help as it can get, and that even if that affects competition ostensibly with the oil and gas sector, the oil and gas sector is doing well enough that it can sustain that competition,” added Goffman, now executive director at Harvard University’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

An article by Jim Baker and Sarah Grant `19...One of the aspects of the recently released Watergate “road map” and related documents that attracted our attention is the set of materials pertaining to interactions, direct and indirect, between President Richard M. Nixon and two senior Department of Justice officials. The interactions cited in the road map occurred during March and April 1973. During that period, the president and his subordinates at the White House had contacts with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Henry E. Petersen, who was assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and is the official quoted above regarding the interaction with President Nixon. From June 1972 to May 1973, Petersen supervised the Watergate investigation conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). President Nixon was in touch with him frequently about the investigation, his future career and other matters along the way.

President Trump throws his support behind a rewrite of federal sentencing laws. What’s brought us to this point where politicians from both sides of the aisle are pushing for criminal justice reform? Guests...Nancy Gertner, retired Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

A group of 21 mayors and council members from around Utah have signed onto briefs with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in support of lawsuits filed against President Donald Trump’s shrinking of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. The amicus friend-of-the-court briefs — filed Monday and drafted by the Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic and the Salt Lake City Attorney’s Office — contend that the process was flawed, with little input from local voices, and that the boundary reduction will have detrimental economic and environmental effects in the state.

...For [Yee] Htun, teaching Myanmar human rights advocacy to Law School students is a full-circle experience. “Growing up in a refugee camp in Thailand, I was exposed to humanitarian work and service,” said Htun, now a clinical instructor and lecturer on law. “There is no doubt in my mind that my formative childhood shaped me and made me believe in the need to serve and use our freedom and privileges to make a contribution.”

An article by Yochai Benkler. The inadvertent disclosure of the likely existence of a sealed indictment against Julian Assange raises the question of what the constitutional implications of such an indictment might be. Only an indictment narrowly focused on knowing collaboration with a foreign intelligence agency, if in fact the evidence supports such a finding, would avoid the broad threat that such a prosecution would otherwise pose to First Amendment rights and press freedoms.

An article by Michelle Melton `19. For more than a decade, the national security agencies of the federal government have repeatedly recognized climate change as a national security threat. Since 2010, the Department of Defense has published at least 35 products explicitly addressing the threat of climate change. The intelligence community has produced at least a dozen more. These national security reports, and related comments by prominent military officials, reflect a consensus among national security stakeholders that climate change is a critical national security issue. The consensus continues in the Trump administration even though the president himself remains skeptical of climate change.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. On Thursday, election officials in Maine declared Democrat Jared Golden to be the first member of Congress elected by “ranked-choice voting” (“RCV”). Maine’s idea should now be adopted by New Hampshire for its presidential primary, and by battleground states for the general election as well.

Jack Goldsmith is a professor of law at Harvard University and served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel (2003-2004). In this Conversation, Goldsmith shares his perspective on America’s vulnerabilities to cyber attack—the complex and systemic threats to our digital and physical infrastructures, as well as to our politics via hacking and digital espionage. As Goldsmith explains, we have not done nearly enough to counter cyber threats through better defense or employment of countermeasures against adversaries. Finally, Kristol and Goldsmith consider what the government and private sector can do to improve our cybersecurity.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to restore the press credentials of Jim Acosta of CNN, handing the cable network an early win in its lawsuit against the president and members of his administration...“This ruling is not saying that what Acosta did was the right thing or the wrong thing,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and a Harvard Law School professor. “The judge ruled that the president can’t revoke his credentials without due process: a statement of what he did wrong, an opportunity to respond, a final decision. The ruling leaves those issues and his First Amendment challenge for another day.”

The disclosure that federal prosecutors have brought an unidentified criminal charge against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, follows years of government deliberations over the dilemma raised by competing desires to put him out of business and fears that doing so could create a precedent that would undermine press freedoms....Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who testified at Ms. Manning’s court-martial in 2013 that WikiLeaks played a watchdog journalism role, denounced any charging of Mr. Assange for his work with Ms. Manning and Mr. Snowden. Mr. Benkler described Ms. Manning and Mr. Snowden as “patriots” and “whistle-blowers” and who, even if one did not agree with their actions, “are clearly trying to do something to keep the government accountable.” But, he said, if there turns out to be evidence that Mr. Assange knowingly coordinated with a Russian intelligence agency trying to undermine democracy, “I don’t think you have the same kind of protections from prosecution.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon believes the entire human rights movement has fallen victim to a new form of skepticism that risks bringing it to collapse, with religious freedom being in the most precarious position. Currently a law professor at Harvard University, Glendon told Crux in an interview that “a new skepticism” is developing in society which, differently from the deep-rooted suspicion of the modern age towards most things, is specifically targeting the human rights movement. “Human rights activists are worried that the cause they gave their life to is falling apart. Human rights specialists are writing books about the end-times of human rights, so where does that come from?” she asked.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie.” Those words, attributed to George Washington at the age of 6, appeared in the fifth edition of Mason Locke Weems’s “The Life of Washington,” published in 1806. In case you’ve forgotten the details of the story: Young George cut down a cherry tree, and when confronted by his father, he confessed, “I did cut it with my hatchet.” Even as a kid, the nation’s first president knew that lying was wrong. He told the truth. It doesn’t matter that the story was a myth. What matters is that it resonated: Lying was taboo.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The word-processing error that unintentionally revealed the Justice Department’s sealed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is fascinating, not least because analogous mistakes can be found in texts going all the way back to the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. It also raises important legal policy questions: In a free, open society, what justifies the use of secret indictments? Are they a nefarious tool of the deep state, like secret trials? Or are they a valuable mechanism for allowing law enforcement to do its job?

The Department of Education released proposed regulations Friday meant to reshape how colleges handle allegations of sexual misconduct — Harvard among them. The long-anticipated proposal — which was announced alongside a statement by United States Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — provides a new framework for implementing Title IX, an anti-sex discrimination law that guides universities’ approach to handling sexual assault...Law School Professor Diane L. Rosenfeld, who teaches a course on Title IX, said the new guidance is “an attempt to make [schools] not responsible for off-campus” sexual assault and harassment...Law School professor Janet E. Halley said she plans to write a formal comment to the Department advocating for policies similar to the ones currently in place at Harvard Law School, which mandate a different hearing process than the one the government has put forth. She said she thinks the new proposal contains both necessary improvements and “disastrous” flaws. “A lot of my issues are my concern for the accused, but a lot of my issues are my concern for the complainant,” she said. “There’s good things and bad things for both sides here, so the public furor is pretty idiotic.”

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, director of the Project on State and Local Enforcement at the Labor and Worklife Program...Technology companies pride themselves on their cutting-edge, visionary nature. Now that they’ve taken the first step, here’s an opportunity for them to be early adopters, and national leaders, by making an even more impactful move: ending forced arbitration in relation to all employment-related disputes, not just sexual harassment. And given the extensive reach of these companies through their multitude of contractors, they should prohibit their contractors from forcing employees into arbitration, as well.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s on. Maryland filed a lawsuit Tuesday claiming that Matthew Whitaker can’t lawfully be acting U.S. attorney general because he has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice published its explanation for why Whitaker’s temporary appointment is lawful under the Vacancies Reform Act and the U.S. Constitution. Because the statutory and constitutional issues are technical and complex, you may well be asking yourself: What am I supposed to think? I’m here to give you an answer, albeit one that might frustrate you.