Media Mentions

For decades, leakers of confidential information to the press were a genus that included many species: the government worker infuriated by wrongdoing, the ideologue pushing a particular line, the politico out to savage an opponent...But now this disparate cast has been joined by a very different sort of large-scale leaker, more stealthy and better funded: the intelligence services of nation states, which hack into troves of documents and then use a proxy to release them. What Russian intelligence did with shocking success to the Democrats in 2016 shows every promise of becoming a common tool of spycraft around the world...Yet that sobering experience does not suggest easy remedies. Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official now at Harvard who has written extensively on the press, says he thinks journalists will find it difficult to withhold authentic, compelling material simply because they know or suspect the source is a foreign intelligence service. “It shouldn’t matter whether the source is the Russians or a disgruntled Hillary Clinton campaign worker,” he argues.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Don’t be fooled by the superficially amicable split between the Boy Scouts of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The breakup, in fact, reflects a long festering period of incompatibility and will have consequences for both institutions and for the possibility of respectful disagreements in our federal republic. The immediate impetus for the divorce might seem to be the decision by the Boy Scouts to rename itself “Scouts BSA” in recognition of the fact that girls may now participate in its activities.

Remuneration incentive schemes are at the heart of problems in finance, and need to be overhauled to reflect long-term effort, Mihir Desai, professor of finance at Harvard Business School and professor of law at Harvard Law School told delegates at the CFA Institute annual conference in Hong Kong. Corporate governance is the most important problem in modern capitalism, Desai said, pointing to the fact that 150 years ago ownership and control were not separate, so the corporate governance issues that exist today were not present. “Why do investors trust managers with their money? All of finance is one big daisy chain of principal agent problems,” he said. At the heart of the issue, he said, is remuneration incentive programs

A letter to the editor by Samuel Garcia `19. Regarding the May 8 news article “Sessions vows to prosecute every migrant caught crossing border illegally”: In Hispanic culture, there is nothing more sacred than the family unit. As a result, a Hispanic family deciding to cross the border together is an enormous decision — especially since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is much more dangerous than people know. If you have successfully crossed the border, you have likely forfeited almost all of your money to a guide, braved deadly conditions and been faced with a situation at home so brutal or oppressive that you had to leave.

Electric-scooter maker Ather, artificial intelligence-driven health tech firm Sigtuple and biotech startup Pandorum are three examples of Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal’s investments in startups unrelated to the venture that started by selling books online and was sold last week to retail giant Walmart, valuing the Bengaluru-based firm just shy of $21 billion...“The ideal situation would have been domestic startups taking advantage of local market opportunities. But with the Indian government asleep at the wheel, foreign companies will now dominate,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The Walmart deal will intensify competition. The elephants will battle each and this will, in the short term, benefit Indian consumers. However, Indian startups will be trampled in the melee.”

...Educators are just beginning to recognize how emotional trauma can affect brain development, which in turn affects the ability to learn. Trauma, by this measure, is not just a catastrophic event, says Michele Verda, pediatric neuropsychologist at OSF HealthCare Children’s Hospital of Illinois. It can be a slow, steady build up of neglect, abuse, exposure to violence, the stress of family poverty...Susan Cole, a Harvard Law School professor and director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, advocates for trauma-sensitive schools. “A deep understanding of trauma and how to create a safe environment is central to learning,” she says.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens watched Thursday as his attorneys scrutinized potential jurors for his criminal trial next week. Greitens, who was joined by two state troopers, arrived Thursday morning at the St. Louis courthouse for the first day of jury selection...Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor who is assisting prosecutors in the case, argued that jurors who have opinions of Greitens but say they can set them aside should not be struck. He said the attorneys need to find jurors who can credibly “in good faith ... set aside previous knowledge.” He said they would need to “exclude the entire state” if the judge used the defense’s standard.

A century-plus of combined legal expertise is leaving the Labor Department, setting up four key vacancies in an office with unheralded influence on the administration’s workplace agenda. The DOL’s associate solicitors for employment and training (Jeffrey Nesvet), occupational safety and health (Ann Rosenthal), and administrative law and ethics (Robert Shapiro), along with the New England regional solicitor (Michael Felsen), are either about to retire or recently did so—all after lengthy careers in the senior civil service...The quartet of retiring lawyers oversaw one of the largest legal departments in the federal government, with some 600 DOL attorneys crafting rules and guidance in Washington or enforcing and litigating more than 180 laws across the country. “Those are four people who have been involved in every important decision in their areas for decades. It’s a tremendous loss,” Sharon Block, who was a senior counselor to Obama’s Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, told Bloomberg Law.

If you wanted to feel the full force of the intellectual whirlpool that is American politics in 2018, the place to go on February 25 was the Village Underground, a nightclub beneath East 3rd Street, where Alan Dershowitz, the longtime Harvard Law professor and civil liberties lion, was debating the future of American democracy on the side of President Donald Trump...The woman behind us in line took her free book, turned to her husband and asked, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”...“People everywhere ask what happened to him,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and lecturer at Harvard Law School who has known Dershowitz for years. “I get that from everyone who knows I know him.”...Dershowitz’s supporters see his position on Trump as consistent with the rest of his career. “If you look objectively at what he’s doing, he’s applying neutral civil liberties principles to Trump, as he would to anyone else,” said Harvey Silverglate, a civil rights lawyer in Boston and a longtime friend of Dershowitz’s. Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith told me, similarly, “Alan has obviously throughout his entire career been a principled defender of civil liberties, especially for those under criminal investigation. His commentary in the last year is entirely consistent with that lifelong commitment.”

As part of the Legal Executive Institute’s launch of the Next Gen Leadership: Advancing Lawyers of Color initiative, we spoke with Derek Davis, Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession and former shareholder at Greenberg Traurig. He continues to practice law as a licensed attorney in the State of New York and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts in addition to his role at Harvard. In the second part of this interview, Davis shared his vision for what a culture of inclusion looks like and discussed the meta-forces that are impacting the advancement of attorneys of color in the legal industry.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on the payments that Michael Cohen received from corporations and a Russian oligarch, and the line between lobbying and bribes.

A book review of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment" by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz...In “To End a Presidency,” Mr Tribe and Mr Matz have written a powerful, clear and even-handed guide to the legal and political aspects of impeachment, which, as they point out, is “neither a magic wand nor a doomsday device”. Previous commentators have focused on the definition of an impeachable act, then assumed that justified suspicion of such conduct means a trial in the Senate. Mr Tribe and Mr Matz explain that the definition is but the “tip of the iceberg”. Other steps towards impeachment include public hearings on alleged misconduct; investigations; establishing a committee to consider a president’s removal; debates and votes by the committee and then the House; setting the rules for the Senate trial and conducting it; and voting by the senators on each charge.

The Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), in partnership with Qatar Foundation (QF), has launched an initiative to promote and share knowledge about behavioural economics in Qatar. Devised by the SC’s Qatar Behavioural Insights Unit (QBIU) and QF, the ‘Community of Practice for Behavioural Economics in Qatar’ hosted a discussion with Professor Cass Sunstein, the founder and director of the Programme on Behavioural Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, at the SC’s Legacy Pavilion in Al Bidda Tower...Sunstein said he is impressed with Qatar’s commitment to behavioural economics and praised the work of the QBIU. “What I’ve noticed is that the World Cup is being seen by many as an opportunity to do something great in connection with football, and also things in relation to the type of challenges faced by many of the world’s nations, such as health issues and the promotion of entrepreneurship,” said Sunstein.

Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general who resigned this week after four women accused him of assault, was one of the most active state-level opponents of the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back environmental regulations. He was also the first attorney general to open an investigation into Exxon Mobil’s climate policies and statements. Most of Mr. Schneiderman’s environmental initiatives will almost certainly continue without him, in New York and other states. But a prominent figure in the legal fight against climate change has left the arena, and his eventual replacement could set different priorities...James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who teaches a course on the role of state attorneys general at Harvard Law School, said that unless the transition from one attorney general to another involves a change of political party, lawsuits tend to continue and similar ones tend to be filed...In the wake of scandal, the shock to staff members is keenly felt, but “after a day, the assistant A. G.s will get back to work,” Mr. Tierney said. In fact, he said, cases might proceed more smoothly without Mr. Schneiderman, whose tendency to garner publicity for himself could be a distraction.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. “Follow the money.” That Watergate meme is now poised to dominate the Donald Trump-Michael Cohen investigation for this news cycle — and beyond. The impetus is a document released by lawyer Michael Avenatti, confirmed by the New York Times, that revealed that a shell company Cohen created and used to pay off the porn star Stormy Daniels received $500,000 from a company linked to a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As more details emerge about President Donald Trump’s self-described fixer Michael Cohen, the whole mess in which Trump now finds himself may seem inevitable: Lie down with dogs and you wake up with fleas, as Poor Richard’s Almanac memorably put it. But that’s wrong. Trump could have avoided a full-on criminal investigation of the lawyer who paid off Stormy Daniels and did who knows what else that seems likely to create further serious legal problems for the president. We are where we are because of something very concrete Trump did himself a year ago this week: On May 9, 2017, the president fired James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Defendant is a cheater,” said Epic Games in its October 2017 lawsuit against a 14-year-old boy. “Nobody likes a cheater. And nobody likes playing with cheaters.” Epic isn’t the first games studio that’s has sued over cheating...Epic Games v. Rogers is a little different from the rest of the cases that were filed alongside it...None of the other cases have gone after mere cheaters themselves, according to Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School who’s an expert on the law around video games. Albert does note that Jagex v. Does (otherwise known as the Runescape case) went after John Does who were using bots. But in that case, the company appeared to be using a lawsuit to identify bot-using players through their PayPal accounts. Once it had that contact information, it dropped the lawsuit, banned players, sent out settlement letters.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. The particular manner in which President Obama crafted the Iran deal paved the way for President Trump to withdraw from it. Obama made the deal on his own presidential authority, in the face of significant domestic opposition, without seeking or receiving approval from the Senate or the Congress. He was able to do this, and to skirt constitutional requirements for senatorial or congressional consent, because he made the deal as a political commitment rather than a binding legal obligation.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In December of 2006, Donald Trump paraded Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan's SoftBank, through the lobby of Trump Tower. The proud president-elect called Son “one of the great men of industry.” Indeed, the two have a lot in common. They're both big talkers with deep respect for enormous numbers of zeros—Son is the world's 39th richest man—whose favorite currency is favors. Son promised over a year ago to bring jobs to the US, and, in response, Trump promised to make it easier for Son to do business in America. Last week, relentless, idiosyncratic, one-man-show dealmaker Son (sound familiar?) began the process of calling in Trump's promise of deregulation: Sprint, which is owned by SoftBank, will be acquired by T-Mobile, even though the federal government has twice in the past seven years said such a combination would be illegal. Is our government bound by the rule of law or the rule of President Trump?

So Warren Buffett is "delighted" that Apple Inc. has decided to buy back $100 billion worth of its own stock. And really, why wouldn't he be? As he pointed out Saturday during Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual meeting, Berkshire owns somewhere around 5 percent of Apple. "And," he noted happily, "with the passage of a little time, I figure we might own 6 or 7 percent simply because they repurchased shares." He added, "I love the idea of having our 5 percent or whatever it may be grow to 6 or 7 percent without us having to lay out a dime." But how should the rest of us feel about this use of Apple's cash?...When I asked Jesse Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of a recent article defending share buybacks in the Harvard Business Review, why companies weren't using the money to give employees raises, he scoffed. "The idea that a for-profit company shares the wealth with its workers is pretty far-fetched," he said.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will resign after four women told The New Yorker he choked and repeatedly slapped them during romantic relationships. Schneiderman had filed over 100 legal or administrative actions against President Trump and congressional Republicans. What will his departure mean for the future of those actions and the agenda of attorney general's office?