Media Mentions

Trump administration officials were putting the finishing touches on a strategy to roll back car pollution standards when they received a boost from an unexpected source: the Supreme Court. The announced retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on the court, and the plan to replace him with a reliable conservative in Brett Kavanaugh, energized the regulators. They plan to go with the boldest option, including a challenge to California’s ability to set its own limits...Jody Freeman, a Harvard environmental law professor and an architect of the Obama administration’s fuel efficiency pact with California, said it’s not clear how Kavanaugh would view key legal questions around the fuel economy rollback. “I don’t think we have enough of a record on Kavanaugh’s views of state powers and federalism to be confident about how this particular challenge would come out,” she said.

U.S. companies are collecting record amounts of cash in their coffers, and many can’t think of anything better to do with it than buy back their stock. Here’s a better idea: Hand out some of those shares to rank-and-file employees...In practice, though, a sizable portion of the repurchased shares are reissued in the form of equity-based compensation, said Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who studies compensation and buybacks. Mr. Fried said shareholders may see aligning executive pay with stock performance as logical because senior leaders can do disproportionately more to affect a company’s performance. But giving out shares at the entry level where wages are set could be considered a handout. “Companies aren’t in the business of making charitable contributions with other people’s money,” he said.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang. There is a problem with share buybacks—but it isn’t the one many critics and legislators are obsessed with...The real problem is that buybacks, unlike dividends, can be used to systematically transfer value from shareholders to executives. Researchers have shown that executives opportunistically use repurchases to shrink the share count and thereby trigger earnings-per-share-based bonuses. Executives also use buybacks to create temporary additional demand for shares, nudging up the short-term stock price as executives unload equity. Finally, managers who know the stock is cheap use open-market repurchases to secretly buy back shares, boosting the value of their long-term equity. Although continuing public shareholders also profit from this indirect insider trading, selling public shareholders lose by a greater amount, reducing investor returns in aggregate.

Fifty years ago, James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," released the iconic song, "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." It was released in August 1968, just four months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, said he remembers when he first heard the song. The funk- and soul-inspired hit was like nothing he had heard before — especially at a time in which Kennedy said overt "colorism," or the preference for lighter skin color, was prevalent in the black community.

An op-ed by Charles Fried. The fate of our democracy may very well hang on the vote of Justice Kennedy’s replacement. If a newly constituted Supreme Court were to overrule (or limit to a vanishing point) Roe v. Wade, it would only matter if state legislatures restricted abortion rights. Undocumented men and women brought to this country as children and who have lived here their whole lives are only in danger of deportation because of the inaction of the national legislature. The President can impose a twenty-five percent tariff on aluminum and steel from Canada on grounds of national security only because Congress gave him that unilateral power. And rules protecting the environment can be reversed only because Congress has not revisited and updated the enabling legislation in decades. In a well-functioning democracy, we would not need an unelected federal judiciary to save us from these and a long list of other destructive and often unpopular outcomes. But we do not have a well-functioning democracy.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith...But behind the indictment, and the congratulatory reaction to it, lie some uncomfortable unanswered questions about blowback toward U.S. officials, reciprocal interference by the United States in other nations' political affairs, the lack of preparation for renewed electoral interference in this country, and U.S. journalists’ publication of stolen U.S. government information. These questions have heightened significance and more difficult answers in light of President Trump’s astounding performance Monday in Helsinki.

...Now as federal appellate Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh seeks to replace the retiring Kennedy on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh’s 12-year record of skepticism toward such agency actions puts the landmark decision and other environmental protections at risk. Environmentalists fear that if Kavanaugh joins the court, he would vote to block anti-pollution regulations for decades, long after President Trump has departed...“That will be a major issue of litigation with a huge impact,” said Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus. “I can’t say how Judge Kavanaugh would react, but I can say Justice Kennedy would have been skeptical of taking away the state’s power in this area.” He predicted Kennedy’s retirement could have a major impact in two other areas of environmental law: clean water and endangered species.

...The National Bureau of Economic Research study found that in the decade before Donald Trump took office, there might have been a correlation between deportation fears and the drop-off in the number of Latino immigrants enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known as food stamps, and the Affordable Care Act insurance program, also known as Obamacare. Researchers looked at Latino enrollment in food stamps between 2006 and 2016, the most recent year for which data is available. They found that after the federal government began stepping up deportation efforts, Latino immigrant enrollment in SNAP and the ACA dropped...Declines in SNAP and ACA enrollment were largest in “mixed status” households where some people are in the country legally and some are not, the study found. For example, one family member may be a citizen, another an asylee or a permanent resident, and still another undocumented. “There’s a fear of exposing family members,” said Crystal Yang, assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, one of the report’s authors.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...The United States is not at war with Russia. People who are alarmed by President Trump’s statements in Helsinki are of course entitled to use the word “treasonous” in the colloquial sense — but not in the constitutional sense.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How’s this for a thought experiment the day after President Donald Trump provoked bipartisan disgust over his performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin: Try to think charitably and ascribe rational, non-corrupt motives to political actors.

An essay by Adrian Vermeule. One of the most curious features of life under political liberalism—for present purposes, the doctrine that the central task of politics is to promote individual autonomy and to secure its preconditions—is that all politics and political conversation happens at one step removed, one meta-level up. Instead of pursuing substantive excellence and justice, we have circuitous conversations about statistical properties like “diversity”; instead of deciding what ought to be permitted, what condemned, we debate “civility”; instead of discerning truth, we quarrel over “religious liberty”; instead of protecting the most vulnerable, we conceal our vices and crimes under the rubric of “choice,” in both market and non-market spheres (although to be fair there are almost no non-market spheres left any more). When we ask about Truth, liberalism answers “What is ‘Truth’? Your truth is not someone else’s truth, and it is no more legitimate to make your truth into public policy than it would be to force your taste in ice cream upon everyone else. All this is solely of private concern.”

...“United States v. Nixon was a watershed decision in establishing the core principle that not even the president is above the law,” emailed Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “[I]ts singular relevance in the present moment — when issues about the president’s amenability to judicial subpoenas and the like play a pivotal role — is obvious. … [Kavanaugh’s] analysis of the decision suggests an almost non-existent role for the federal judiciary in umpiring disputes between the president and the other branches of government.”

...But Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus, whose quote about Kavanaugh being “an outstanding member of our teaching faculty” was included in the White House release, said Friday that many of the law professor comments fall short of actual endorsements. Lazarus said he deliberately took no position on whether the Senate should confirm Kavanaugh. “A look at the actual words of many of those academics stop well short of a formal endorsement of the nomination,” he said. “They instead heap deserved praise on Judge Kavanaugh for his outstanding contributions to our law schools, as a teacher in particular. The question of whether, in the current political climate, senators should vote for or against Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation raises many additional considerations, which my quote does not go on to address.”

...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “This is probably the clearest and most indefensible of Trump’s First Amendment violations.” He observes, “The idea that it could be covered up vis-à-vis the courts by blanket claims that national security is at issue strikes me as highly implausible.” He continues, “If the president [were] to make individualized findings that one of the officials he seeks to deprive . . . of security clearance has in fact [abused] the privilege of using that security clearance by releasing classified information, that would be another thing. But to take an enemies list of this kind and threaten every member of it the way the president has done makes Nixon’s enemies list look trivial by comparison.”

...While many may think of Russia as an adversary and even an enemy, it has not been declared so. An “enemy,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said in an email to The Post, “arguably” requires a formal state of war. “Some commentators,” Tribe writes with co-author Joshua Matz in “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” “have argued that Russia also ranks among our ‘enemies’ ” because of its hacking to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. The argument is “interesting and important,” they write, but “continued legal uncertainty about whether it is treasonous to lend ‘aid and comfort’ to Russia militates against basing an impeachment on this theory.” There are plenty of other potential crimes in the Russia investigation, they write, but probably not treason.

An op-ed by Isabel Finley `19. Later this week, Harvard Law School students will begin bidding on interview slots to kick off a months-long recruitment process for summer associate jobs at the nation’s top law firms. Harvard’s “Early Interview Program” is the largest such program in the country, and thanks to the Office of Career Services, students will arrive for interviews equipped with everything from emergency lint-rollers to fashion advice to a daily continental breakfast. What students won’t have, however, is basic information about their prospective employers’ discrimination and sexual harassment policies — despite organized efforts to require such disclosures in the wake of #MeToo.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down mandatory union fees for government workers last month, the next phase of the conservative legal campaign against public-sector unions was underway. In March, with the decision looming, lawyers representing government workers in Washington State asked a federal court to order one of the state’s largest public-employee unions “to disgorge and refund” fees that nonmembers had already paid. Similar lawsuits were filed in California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Ohio...Beyond their legal claims, the cases share another striking detail: The lead counsel in each is a conservative lawyer named Jonathan F. Mitchell...Even so, Mr. Mitchell and his allies may get a favorable reception in the one court that really matters: the Supreme Court. “This court has shown itself to be so hostile to workers’ rights that they will find a way,” said Sharon Block of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, who is a former senior Labor Department official and National Labor Relations Board member.

...“There is no return on investment for students who attended schools like the Art Institute,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. “Taking out loans to pay the high prices that these schools charge benefits their investors while leaving students with mountains of debt and without the professional opportunities they were seeking.”

...HuffPost asked some constitutional scholars if it would be legal for lawmakers to make Trump’s interpreter share details from that meeting. Even they weren’t sure. “The legal territory is unsettled,” said Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “I don’t think there is any authoritative on-point precedent either way.”

...Mark Wu, law professor at Harvard. Right now we’re still in the opening throes of a trade war. Both sides are testing each other’s resolve. The question is whether either side will blink, or whether they’ll continue to engage in some form of tit-for-tat escalation. So far, the scale of trade affected by the $34 billion in tariffs is not that large; both economies believe that they can withstand the short-term negative impact. Neither President Trump nor President Xi Jinping can afford to appear weak to their domestic constituency. Each has painted the other side’s actions as unreasonable. But ultimately, both leaders realize that they need each other’s cooperation on a wide range of other non-economic issues. Against this backdrop, each side is gauging the likelihood of the other side yielding further.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. Translated from the French: It’s commonly thought that the stock market forces firms toward excessively short-term strategies. This expected short-termism is often thought to be a source of a good part of our current economic problems, leading policymakers to consider laws . . . to reduce stockholders’ influence...Although some local observations that are consistent, the evidence of an economy-wide impact is thin . . . .R&D expenses [thought to be a victim of stock-markets] have been rising, not falling, even while stockholder influence is thought to be rising. And, contrary to the idea that short-termism is draining cash [for investment] from large American enterprises, corporate treasuries are more flush with cash than ever. Why the gap between received wisdom and the weak supporting evidence?