Media Mentions

...Mothers and fathers who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated — but who have not been accused of child abuse, neglect, endangerment, or even drug or alcohol use — are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assault their kids, according to a Marshall Project analysis of approximately 3 million child-welfare cases nationally...To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority in these difficult cases. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family. “You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller marked a return to an “active” public phase in the Russia investigation this week, with a rapid-fire series of court filings and document releases that followed a quiet period around the midterm elections and the Thanksgiving holiday...“A lot of people are trying to give false information to the American public and to the investigation, and the Mueller team is not being derailed,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court. “They are uncovering false statement after false statement, because they are able to prove what actually happened. “That strikes me as the unifying theme, that the Mueller team knows a lot.”

An effort to seek a new election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race is an “extraordinary attempt to overturn the results of a fair and free election,” an attorney for U.S. Rep.-elect Jared Golden said in a legal filing late Wednesday. Peter Brann, the lawyer for the Lewiston Democrat, said the request by U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin to overturn the ranked-choice voting results is unlikely to prevail and ought to be rejected. “Golden won the election fair and square,” Brann said in legal papers filed with the U.S. District Court in Bangor. “Poliquin’s sour grapes preliminary injunction is too little, too late, and is outweighed by the injury to the thousands of Maine voters who selected Golden over Poliquin and who would be disenfranchised by Poliquin’s attempt to use the courts to overturn the results of the election,” said Brann, a Lewiston attorney.

There's something truly out of place amid a slew of uneventful news releases on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) website: Six bizarre sentences, accusing the Obama Administration of distorting climate science..."For the EPA’s political leadership to do this is, one might say, deplorable," Joe Goffman, a former EPA senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, said in an interview. "They’ve done something really flagrant as part of the campaign to foster misinformation to the public about climate science," Goffman, now the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program, added. "I would argue they committed a genuinely cardinal sin with respect to the values of scientific integrity and the trustworthiness they owe the public."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. While legal experts scramble to decipher what might be going on in the shady minds of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi — and the even more shadowy Roger Stone, a Trump confidant — too little attention has been paid to the more basic question of what President Trump and his team have been doing as part of an increasingly obvious conspiracy to obstruct the investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the run-up to Saturday’s crucial meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina, the U.S. is signaling that cyberespionage will be a crucial part of its grievances against China. The basic complaint is that while both China and the U.S. try to hack each other’s national security apparatus, China also attacks private U.S. companies for the benefit of its own enterprises. The American allegation of asymmetry is accurate — but it’s also starting to seem outdated and more than a little hypocritical.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The key revelation of Michael Cohen’s new guilty plea is this: Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller is one step closer to showing links between Donald Trump’s business interests in Russia and his conduct as a candidate for president...But the main takeaway is that Cohen and others in the Trump organization were actively doing a Russia deal that linked Trump’s emerging presidential candidacy with his business interest in a Moscow Trump Tower. And Trump knew about it, to a degree yet to be revealed.

Jerome B. Karabel ’72, a sociologist at University of California, Berkeley, discussed the history of Harvard’s admissions policies and suggested potential reforms at a Law School lecture Thursday....“In the Asian-American community in the Law School we’re having a conversation about what affirmative action means to us and how we balance understanding that there is a historical need for affirmative action with discrimination that is actively against Asians,” Elizabeth Gyori, a third-year Law student, said. “[We want] to have that conversation in a meaningful way and build solidarity across groups.” The Progressive Jewish Alliance at Harvard Law School organized the event, which was co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Harvard Hillel, the Jewish Law Students Association, the Harvard South Asian Law Students Association, and La Alianza, an organization of Latinx and Latin American law students. “The issue of affirmative action in college admissions is a matter of interest to our community on a variety of levels,” Ian D. Eppler, co-founder and events chair of the Progressive Jewish Alliance at HLS, said. “We wanted to bring a historical perspective to the dialogue.”

A Harvard Law School student group focused on ending harassment and discrimination in the legal profession praised the D.C. Circuit Court for its recent adoption of workplace conduct policies in a statement Thursday. The student group, the Pipeline Parity Project, has been advocating for policy changes that address workplace misconduct in the court system since its founding in April...Organization member and second-year Law student Sejal Singh praised the new policies as a “powerful step forward” in a written statement...Second-year Law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Emma R. Janger said in an interview Thursday that the group set out at its founding to organize in response to Kozinski’s alleged sexual harassment of clerks.

Two experts discuss a new trend in international criminal justice: the setting-up of evidence-gathering bodies by the United Nations when other, immediate, accountability options are lacking. Are they a replacement for a larger failure, or a sign of a resilient international system that adapts to hostile geopolitics?...“In a way they could be seen as a reflection of a larger failure because they are second-best options for these situations,” says Harvard law professor Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “They are stop-gaps because there hasn’t been a referral or a tribunal set up, or any other kind of accountability. So these are a replacement for that failure. On the other hand, I think you could look at it as a sign of growth and development of the international justice project.

Harvard professors decried the Trump administration's asylum policies to a packed room at the Law School Thursday, condemning in particular the administration's treatment of caravans of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States — the latest flashpoint in the country's immigration debate. In the hour-long panel, “The Migrant Caravan and the Law and Politics of the Border,” Anthropology Professor Ieva Jusionyte and Law School Clinical Professor Sabrineh Ardalan spoke about the legal, social, and political issues surrounding migrant caravans. Three Law School student organizations — Harvard Immigration Project, Mexican Law Students Association, and La Alianza — hosted the event...Harvard Law student and La Alianza member Perla F. “Fabi” Alvelais, who attended the event, reiterated the speakers' statements. She said the national discourse surrounding immigrants from Central America is “upsetting” and “completely wrong.”

It’s said that there are no winners in a trade war. But as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Buenos Aires this weekend, the consensus is that China will sit down in a weaker economic position...Washington has less to worry about than China’s policymakers, who are facing the tough choice between greater fiscal stimulus and economic reform priorities such as deleveraging, said Mark Wu, an expert on international trade and international economic law with Harvard University. “Because of the strong recent economic expansion, US economic policymakers have fewer short term systemic issues about which to worry,” he said. “And President Trump’s voters have been willing to tolerate the negative cost of a trade war given their support for his other domestic policies.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. After a tragedy, it is common for people to send “thoughts and prayers.” Skeptics argue that it’s much better to do something more tangible – to send money, to volunteer, or to press for reforms that will reduce future tragedies. In the context of gun control, the idea of thoughts and prayers has become a parody of ineffectual and even pathetic responses to horrific events. Some people decry thoughts and prayers as doing nothing – except to make bystanders feel better about themselves.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s just one conceivable reason for Paul Manafort’s lawyers to be meeting with President Donald Trump’s during Manafort’s plea negotiations: Manafort was looking for a pardon, and Trump’s lawyers were dangling the possibility, whether expressly or implicitly. Of all the troubling aspects of Trump’s behavior during this investigation, the hint of pardon abuse is the worst.

...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.