Media Mentions

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. Sally Hemings takes center stage in Monticello on Saturday when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation opens an exhibit in a space where she is said to have lived for some time. Her story is told through the recollections of her son Madison Hemings, the third of four children she and Thomas Jefferson had who lived to adulthood. His memoir, published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, gives vital information about the Hemings family genealogy, his mother’s life and the course of his own history. As part of a major renovation of the plantation’s southern wing, visitors will for the first time see Sally Hemings depicted as a central figure in life on the mountain.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday kept the much-watched partisan gerrymandering case alive – in a most unusual way. The justices sent the claim by Wisconsin Democrats that Republicans violated the Constitution in the drawing of state assembly voting districts back to the lower court. They want to see whether the plaintiffs can prove that they were individually harmed by having their votes diluted within their own districts. If they can do that, their case will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Should a federal agency issue a regulation that will impose up to $3.5 billion in costs next year, and billions more in the coming decade – while delivering essentially no benefits? That sounds crazy. But a few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed to do exactly that. OK, not exactly – but pretty close. The proposal is the outgrowth of the longstanding national battle over whether to require labels for bioengineered (or genetically modified) foods.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. On June 8, the Appeals Chamber at the International Criminal Court (ICC), by a 3-2 vote, reversed the conviction of Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former military commander from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for failing to prevent or repress the commission of the crimes against humanity and war crimes of murder, rape, and pillage by his subordinate forces in the Central African Republic (CAR) during a four-month period in 2002-2003. In previous essays on Bemba’s conviction and 18-year sentence, I wrote that the Trial Chamber decisions established important precedents regarding the prosecution of sexual violence, as well as the ICC’s reliance on Article 28 of the Rome Statute, which criminalizes the failure of commanders to prevent or repress crimes that they know their subordinates are committing. Those advances have now been, of course, largely obliterated by the Appeals Chamber’s very controversial reversal.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The Business Roundtable, a prestigious organisation of the CEOs of the largest American companies, last week urged large public companies to stop telling investors what senior executives expect quarterly earnings will be. Their effort arises from the widespread belief that the scourge of market-driven short-termism is seriously damaging the American economy. Ending this quarterly earnings advice would help. Respected business leaders like Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett have promoted the idea under the headline that “Short-Termism is Harming the Economy”.

An op-ed by Gillian Metzger and Vicki C. Jackson... Think of the objections to the unchecked exercise of government power that motivated American history – the original tea party, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of 1789. For all the critiques one might make of it — tolerating and protecting slavery being one — this Constitution and the institutions of federal government that it created helped secure the rule of law in the United States. And a basic principle of the constitutional rule of law is that no person, not even the President, is above the law.

"It often happens," says Phil Torrey, managing attorney of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC), “that I’ll get a phone call from criminal-defense counsel somewhere random in the country, like the one last week I got from Tennessee. The lawyer says, ‘Hey, I’m about to go into the courtroom, here’s the plea deal that’s on the table—and my client’s not a U.S. citizen. What’s gonna happen?’” Torrey is addressing the four law students in his “crimmigration” clinic, who are learning how to advocate for criminal defendants who are not American citizens...In addition to its broader Immigration and Refugee Advocacy clinic, HIRC offers Torrey’s crimmigration clinic in the spring: an opportunity for students to gain direct experience working on and contributing to case law in this young field. When she co-founded HIRC in 1984, says clinical professor of law Deborah Anker, it “was at the bottom of the pile”; immigration issues were barely recognized as a subfield of law. But student interest has spiked since the 2016 election, and now, she says, the Immigration and Refugee Advocacy clinic has one of “the longest waiting lists among [HLS] clinics—about 100 students.”...As Nancy Kelly, a clinical instructor and lecturer on law, puts it, Donald Trump “ran on a platform of immigrants being criminals, and now he’s doing his best to make that a reality.”... The clinic hired a staff attorney, Jason Corral, in January 2017 to represent members of the University community; soon after, a number of additional Trump administration executive orders affected various Harvard students and staff members: the ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries (HIRC wrote an amicus brief challenging that order), the repeal of DACA (now under challenge in courts), and the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 400,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Nepal, and, most recently, Honduras...If the repeal proceeds without challenge, Corral says, HIRC may consider building asylum arguments for TPS holders.

The U.S. Supreme Court punted Monday on its biggest decision of its term so far. The justices had been expected to rule on the limits of partisan gerrymandering. Instead, the court sidestepped the major issues on technical grounds, sending the issue back to the lower courts for further examination...In an unusual step, the justices, by a 7-to-2 vote, sent the case back to the lower courts, in order to give the Democratic voters a chance to present evidence of injury on a district-by-district basis, instead of a statewide basis. The Maryland case, likewise, was remanded to the lower courts...But Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, was more optimistic for the challengers, seeing Monday's decision as "a short-term stumble on the way to a long-term victory." In the long run, he said, "we're going to see this as really the dam breaking and an extraordinary opportunity to clean up the unfairness of our political system."

An article by Sabi Ardalan. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently upended decades of U.S. legal precedent by asserting that women fleeing domestic violence will not generally qualify for asylum. To do so, he challenged the principle that women victims of domestic violence are members of a “particular social group.” This phrase – “particular social group” – is critical to the work of immigration lawyers like myself. It allows us to argue that women, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups face specific kinds of persecution based on who they are. If left unchallenged, Sessions’ ruling could endanger thousands of asylum-seekers, including many of my clients.

The Presidential pardon power is as old as the United States itself. But few Presidents — if any — have thrown this constitutionally enshrined power into the spotlight like Donald Trump. In recent weeks Trump and his lawyers have even suggested he has the power to pardon himself. All this talk got me curious. Just why was the president given the power to pardon in the first place? As Harvard Law School’s Michael Klarman explained to me, it goes back to the 55 men who met in Philadelphia to create the U.S. Constitution. "The main model they have is Great Britain," he explained. "There are lots of things in the Constitution that are directly derived from British practice."

Comcast is taking shots at Mickey Mouse. The Philadelphia cable and entertainment giant made a $65 billion cash offer for the assets that 21st Century Fox is already selling to the Walt Disney Co. for $52.4 billion in stock, setting up what may be a punishing takeover battle between the two legacy media giants...“We know from the personalities involved there will be blood on the floor somewhere,” Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of Captive Audience, about the Comcast/NBCUniversal merger. “It’s clearly going to be a battle of male wills. These are guys who are used to being in control and want their way and will do about anything to get it.” Of Murdoch, she added that “it’s hard to imagine an 87-year-old media mogul being in the backseat.”

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wants to teach Americans a lesson about impeachment, warning that it is “too important and too vital a power to be bandied about as ordinary politics.” Trump’s most ardent critics have been calling for impeachment since the day he was inaugurated, and while Democratic Party leaders have said it’s premature to talk about impeachment, a few House Democrats have already advocated for it...Tribe’s new book To End a Presidency, written with attorney Joshua Matz, offers a guide to the process of impeachment — a power they argue “should be invoked only under dire circumstances” — and wrestles with the consequences of taking such an action. Tribe spoke to TIME about his book, Trump’s pardon power and the trouble with impeachment.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A report released today by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found that former FBI Director James Comey acted outside the procedural norms of the FBI and the DOJ while conducting the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. The report also found no evidence of political bias in the FBI's handling of the case.

A federal court in Boston will receive motions for summary judgment on Friday in a lawsuit involving Harvard College’s admissions process that experts say could reshape the nation’s higher education landscape and undermine efforts to foster diverse student communities at colleges and universities across the country. A trial date has been tentatively set for October...Assessing the 2016 ruling, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, incoming dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, said, “Once again you had a decision upholding a state’s interest in pursuing educational diversity, and upholding the limited use of holistic admissions.” Yet given the narrow way in which the court has tailored previous rulings, Brown-Nagin added that colleges and universities “certainly should be aware that they need to not only endorse the educational benefits of diversity but show that the way in which they are implementing their mission is consistent with the law, that it’s fair, and that applicants are not being denied opportunities based on race.”

...But since the late 1970s, despite a “Reagan revolution” inspired in part by Friedman, the scope of the U.S. government has arguably increased, while business’s influence over it has surely grown. The academic study of this influence has over the years focused largely on campaign donations and lobbying expenditures, and it has not come to particularly strong conclusions. But some of the most dramatic examples of increased corporate sway aren’t directly linked to such spending. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, has since the 1970s used a novel interpretation of the First Amendment to assert ever-stronger protections for business, as John Coates of Harvard Law School described in an impassioned 2015 essay.

Immigration attorneys in Greater Boston are scrambling this week after a decision from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned a precedent determining who is eligible for asylum in the United States. Survivors of domestic violence and gang persecution, in many cases, were considered legitimate candidates for asylum — until now. Many immigration attorneys say the attorney general's decision is devastating...Deborah Anker has been working on asylum cases with domestic violence survivors for decades. She's the founder and director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. Anker said the decision from Sessions is a big blow, but she believes attorneys can still prove the need for asylum in some cases. But, she said, it's going to take a lot more work. "I think we will be very careful to submit extensive country condition evidence, condition evidence about the positions of different governments regarding women, and we'll be thinking through, carefully, other grounds for protection."

Nearly half of the 374 Big Law firms recently polled by U.S. law schools declined to say whether they require new associates to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. Dozens of U.S. law schools sent the survey to law firms in mid-May following outcry from students that the firms might require them to give up their rights to sue over employment practices in court. The schools released the results of the survey June 11. 188 firms—including Kirkland & Ellis, which is known to require associates to sign arbitration agreements—didn’t respond. A copy of an arbitration agreement given to a current summer associate was shared with Bloomberg Law. “We don’t know how many other firms do this, and it’s hard for people make an informed decision” whether to apply for or accept a position until “they know if they’re going to be forced to sign an arbitration agreement,” Sejal Singh [`20], a rising 2L at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg Law.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist. An author of 13 books including Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, his newsletter Crypto-Gram and his blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people...In an interview, Schneier speaks about some of the biggest online security threats that individuals, companies and governments will face in 2018; how these threats have ballooned because of the IoT (Internet of Things); learnings from the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook data compromise issue; Surveillance Capitalism; and his thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and cyberwar among other things.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. This week, there's a swirl of stories about Comcast, Fox, Disney, and Sky. (Nutshell: Fox and Comcast are fighting for control over Sky; Comcast and Disney are about to battle over Fox.) Although all of this has the impersonal buzz of brightly colored brands building bigger businesses, it's actually a deeply human saga. Comcast chair and CEO Brian Roberts and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, head of the 20th Century Fox empire, are looking to win long-running personal battles.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Might the World Cup, which starts this week, reduce ethnic divisions and political violence? Absolutely. To see why, we have to back up a bit. All over the world, many people closely identify with their religion, their race or their ethnicity – and much less with their country. That can be a serious problem. When people separate themselves from their fellow citizens, they tend to distrust each other. They become less able to address shared challenges. They regard each other as strangers – and, in extreme cases, as enemies.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a 5-4 decision along party lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld an Ohio law that lets the state kick people off the voter rolls if they don’t show up to vote for six years and don’t return a postcard saying they haven’t moved. It would be nice if legal principle had played any role in the decision on either side, but it didn’t, not really. The five conservatives, including Justice Anthony Kennedy, found in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that the state law was consistent with federal law; the four liberals said it wasn’t.