Media Mentions

President Donald Trump wants Americans to get lower prices for medicines — and the rest of the world may pay for it. His "America First" message on drugs at home, coupled with pro-pharmaceutical industry policies abroad, could lead to higher costs for patients around the world — without making drugs more affordable for those in the U.S. Trump on Friday plans to deliver his long-promised speech on how to lower drug costs, addressing an industry he has in the past accused of "getting away with murder." Global health officials worry he will also target practices that keep medicines affordable in other countries...“It’s certainly possible that pharmaceutical companies will pocket the profits from higher overseas pharmaceutical prices to the benefit of shareholders,” without lowering U.S prices, said Mark Wu, a trade expert at Harvard Law School. “On the other hand, it could provide the administration with some leverage to push pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices domestically in return for these overseas gains and benefits from the new tax plan.”

President Trump has won confirmation of 15 circuit court judges, but he still has a long way to go in reshaping the courts because most of those picks have replaced retiring Republicans rather than adding to the party’s overall numbers. So far, Mr. Trump has not dramatically altered the makeup of any of the 12 circuit courts of appeals. But with a dozen circuit court nominees pending, that could soon change. In several circuits, the number of Democrat-appointed judges is slightly higher than the number of Republican-appointed judges...Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard University, is disappointed that judicial nominees are chosen these days on more ideological and political grounds. “In the end, we might as well elect our judges and have done with it,” he said.

A new interdisciplinary project at Harvard will explore how behavioral science and behavioral economics can help improve health outcomes for patients and decisions made by doctors. It also has the potential to increase cost-effectiveness. The project, Behavioral Insights Health Project at Harvard, is a University-wide partnership between faculty members at Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School and other Harvard schools...The Project’s board of advisers, which is expected to grow, includes a wide range of faculty from the Harvard community, including Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School. [Cass] Sunstein said he expects the project to attract students and faculty from schools across the University, and, in particular, to draw on the research and expertise of the Behavioral Insights Group based at the Harvard Kennedy School.  “We intend to share best practices, explore which interventions work and which do not, and find ways to reduce illness, suffering and premature mortality,” said Sunstein.

Bloomberg Boston Bureau Chief Tom Moroney and Radio News Anchors Peter Barnes, Pat Carroll and Anne Mostue are joined by top names from local business and finance to medicine and politics, along with Bloomberg reporters covering the latest stories in Boston, the Bay State and beyond...Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain explained what he believes Mark Zuckerberg could do to fix the mess at Facebook.

For the last 17 months, Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, had held himself up as the anti-Trump: a one-man legal wrecking ball, taking on the president and his agenda in both the courts and the court of public opinion. His sudden and spectacular downfall — Mr. Schneiderman announced his resignation hours after four women emerged to describe in detail how he had physically assaulted them — has raised questions of whether a powerful office at the heart of the Democratic legal resistance could be sidelined and besmirched by scandal...Even though Mr. Schneiderman has often served as the public face of the sprawling legal battles against Mr. Trump, Mr. Rankin said that his organization had already devised a strategy to share responsibility for the various lawsuits against the president’s policies...“Nothing is going to change,” predicted James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “No change — zero.”

As America heads toward the 2018 midterms, there's an 800-pound gorilla in the voting booth. Despite improvements since Russia's attack on the 2016 presidential race, the U.S. elections infrastructure is vulnerable — and will remain so in November. Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier laid out the problem to an overflowing room full of election directors and secretaries of state — people charged with running and securing elections — at a conference at Harvard University this Spring. "Computers are basically insecure," said Schneier. "Voting systems are not magical in any way. They are computers."..."This is the problem we always have in computer security — basically nobody has ever built a secure computer. That's the reality," Schneier said. "I want to build a robust system that is secure despite the fact that computers have vulnerabilities, rather than pretend that they don't because no one has found them yet. And people will find them — whether it's nation states or teenagers on a weekend."

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. Earlier this month, the Pentagon stopped selling phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei on military bases because they might be used to spy on their users. It’s a legitimate fear, and perhaps a prudent action. But it’s just one instance of the much larger issue of securing our supply chains. All of our computerized systems are deeply international, and we have no choice but to trust the companies and governments that touch those systems. And while we can ban a few specific products, services or companies, no country can isolate itself from potential foreign interference.

The Trump administration is preparing to battle California’s tough car pollution regulations using an approach that federal courts have already rejected. Twice. Federal regulators are drafting a proposal that takes aim at California’s cherished authority to set its own smog-busting rules. A leaked draft of the plan that is being finalized for submission to the White House shows that it wouldn’t outright revoke the state’s ability to set pollution standards, but it asserts that a 1975 law prohibits states from setting their own limits on greenhouse gas emissions...The so-called preemption argument in the draft EPA-NHTSA proposal “looks like an effort to do an end-run around the waiver,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard environmental law professor.

An interview with Glenn Cohen. More than 12 million people have had their DNA analyzed by direct-to-consumer genealogy tests like 23andMe and ancestry.com. That number more than doubled last year, giving the industry a huge boost. Late last month, authorities charged a man in Sacramento County, California as the so-called Golden State Killer after tracking him down with a private DNA test company, one called GEDmatch.  Joseph James DeAngelo is accused of a string of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 80s. The suspect never gave his own DNA to GEDmatch, but his relatives did, and that allowed police to find him. Some law enforcement officials say such tests are a promising tool to catch criminals, while privacy advocates are worried that innocent people might be swept up if a search is too broad. 

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. There is talk these days about a complex and somewhat arcane legal concept: obstruction of justice. The term refers, broadly speaking, to willful efforts to interfere with the operations of the legal process, including criminal investigations. Let’s bracket the hardest definitional puzzles for now, and ask a question that could become pressing before long: What happens if special counsel Robert Mueller concludes that President Donald Trump has, in fact, obstructed justice? In answering, we should take a vow of neutrality. We should not allow our views about any particular president — negative or positive — to color our understanding of the meaning of the Constitution.

The housing advocates began to descend on the State House early Wednesday afternoon for one last push for the Jim Brooks Stabilization Act — a city-backed measure they say could help prevent tenant displacement amid Boston’s housing crunch. But then, as advocates prepared to hoist their banner, word began to spread: A legislative committee had just killed the proposal...The home rule process, which is meant to ensure state oversight of municipal matters involving taxes, fees, and elections, is strict in Massachusetts, relative to other states, legal experts say. A Harvard University law researcher described in a 2004 report how a home rule petition can halt a minor municipal plan, such as to regulate dog fees. “We need a new way of thinking about home rule, one that would empower cities and towns to work together to solve regional problems, not just go to the state with hat in hand — or dig in their heels against changes they have little power to control,” wrote David J. Barron, the Harvard Law School researcher, who is now a federal appeals court judge in Boston.

...Today's trading system may be bent, but it is not broken. Import tariffs are low. Quotas are relatively uncommon. In 2016, some $15.4trn of merchandise flowed between countries belonging to the World Trade Organization...Then there is China. After its entry into the WTO in 2001, its government cut tariffs and undertook domestic policy reform. But its economic model of state-infused capitalism, referred to by Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu as “China, Inc”, also evolved in ways that sat awkwardly alongside the world’s trade rules. The “Made in China 2025” industrial policy, its apparent tolerance of industrial espionage and intellectual-property theft from foreign companies, and its cheap loans from state-owned banks to Chinese manufacturers all rub up against the spirit, if not the letter, of the global trading system.

...Laurence Tribe, constitutional scholar and co-author of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” explains, “Rudy Giuliani’s casual comment that, being president, Mr. Trump has no obligation to comply with a judicially approved subpoena lacked any legal basis and must have been a PR comment addressed to uninformed members of the public rather than a legal remark addressed to the judges who would ultimately rule on a claim of sweeping presidential immunity to legal process. No American president has ever defied such a subpoena.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that we are finished with the spectacle of the U.S. House chaplain being forced out, then withdrawing his resignation and returning to his post, it’s a good time to ask a question that may have been bothering you all along: Why, exactly, does Congress, bound by the establishment clause of the Constitution, have a paid chaplain to deliver prayers and minister to its members?

After Daniel Tarullo announced last year that he was resigning from the board of the Federal Reserve, big bank stocks such as Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. rallied. That was no surprise. The 65-year old longtime public servant was the primary architect of postcrisis financial regulations that imposed stricter requirements on big financial firms...The Boston native is now back home, teaching law at Harvard University. In an email, Mr. Tarullo wrote he has now made it through the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. The 2016 presidential election was the first campaign in American history marked by credible threats of impeachment against whoever won. This was partly because both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had long been shadowed by charges of corruption, criminality and conspiracy. But it also reflected a more unnerving development: the emergence of a permanent presidential impeachment campaign. Since the failed effort to oust President Bill Clinton two decades ago, calls to remove the president have become standard fare in American politics. In a stark break from the past, a whole generation has come to view impeachment talk as an ordinary feature of our partisan civil war, in which nothing is sacred and the Constitution has been weaponized. This degradation of presidential impeachment is dangerous.

...In response to Kennedy’s narrow conception of corruption, Harvard Law professor and onetime presidential contender Lawrence Lessig has advocated for a broader idea of corruption. In his book Republic, Lost, Lessig spells out his notion of “dependence corruption,” whereby Congress is unduly responsive to big donors because they are dependent on them for campaign money. He takes pains to argue on “originalist” grounds, hoping to appeal to the conservative majority of the Court, who attempt to cleave closely to the meaning of words as they are found in documents at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. Alas, his arguments have largely fallen on deaf judicial ears.

Xerox Corp (XRX.N) on Friday appealed a New York court ruling to block its deal with Fujifilm Holdings (4901.T), just hours after the company announced that its ousted CEO and directors would remain in place. Xerox said its entire board and management team would stay, as the agreement to oust them reached with dissenting shareholders Darwin Deason and Carl Icahn expired late Thursday. “With the caveat that I have not been privy to these negotiations, I find the rejection of the settlement by the Xerox board to be extraordinary and highly unusual,” said Guhan Subramanian, a professor at Harvard’s law and business schools who served as an expert witness for Xerox in the litigation.

As we lurch through the second year of Trump administration, it’s hard to know whether to just give up the whole rule-of-law thing or rejoice at the very faint stirrings of conscience appearing on Capitol Hill...Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School, who during the George W. Bush Administration forced the withdrawal of the infamous “torture memos,” wrote in an email that the debate over AUMF renewal is “political theater.” He wrote, “I do not think passage of the Corker-Kaine bill matters to anything real. The nation supports, or at least acquiesces in, the stealth Forever War, for better or worse.”

...Bill Lee, 68, a partner at WilmerHale in Boston, skirted his law firm’s mandatory retirement age of 65 when its management committee granted him a waiver. Lee also teaches at Harvard Law School and serves as senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s governing boards, where he recently led the school’s search for a new president. Last month, he was in California consulting with Apple Inc., which he represents in its long-running patent litigation with Samsung. “When I walk into the office in the morning, people say, ‘How are things?’ ” Lee said. “I say, ‘Great. I’m past mandatory retirement age, and they haven’t locked the doors.’ ”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s something extremely fishy about President Donald Trump’s tweets on Thursday morning about the source of the money his lawyer Michael Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Trump, echoing what his lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday night on Fox News, seems to be claiming that a $35,000 retainer he paid to Cohen on a monthly basis should be considered reimbursement. But a retainer isn’t reimbursement. A retainer is a fee for services. And a fee paid to a lawyer isn’t normally reimbursement unless there is some agreement saying it is.