Media Mentions

If EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt survives the onslaught of accusations of mismanagement and excessive spending with his job still safe, he has his biggest benefactors to thank...So, why is Pruitt still so valuable to Trump donors like Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oilman who chaired Pruitt’s attorney general reelection campaign and called Trump last week? The answer doesn’t appear to be that Pruitt is a legal genius who has rapidly and effectively gutted regulations in a way that satisfies the courts. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, told the New York Times...Former EPA attorney Joseph Goffman, Harvard Environmental Law’s executive director, has been tracking the dozens of air, water, and climate regulations Pruitt has taken aim at so far. And Goffman has a counterargument: Pruitt has undermined environmental protection in ways that are not so easy or straightforward to untangle with a lawsuit. “He certainly sent the signal that in any given instance his policy preference is achieving lower levels of pollution reduction and achieving pollution reduction on a slower schedule,” Goffman says.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Americans think of July Fourth as Independence Day – the anniversary of their nation’s birth, signaled by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But if you really want to celebrate the country’s birthday, you might do that today. It’s Patriots’ Day. In a time of national tumult and division, let’s all raise a toast, and shed some tears. Recognized in just four states, Patriots’ Day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775. Every American should know the tale.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway. Last night, the United States, United Kingdom, and France launched a coordinated attack in Syria, reportedly aimed at sites related to Syria’s chemical weapons program. President Trump stated that he “ordered the United States armed forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons capabilities of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.” The president emphasized that “Assad launched a savage chemical weapons attack against his own innocent people,” noted that “[l]ast Saturday the Assad regime again deployed chemical weapons to slaughter innocent civilians near the town of Douma near the Syrian capital of Damascus, and stated that “[t]he purpose of our actions tonight is to establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread, and use of chemical weapons” (emphasis added). As we wrote before Trump’s announcement, there is no apparent domestic or international legal authority for the strikes.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word “community” to describe the internet platform. In his 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg famously argued “Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” Indeed, “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” In his testimony before Congress this week, he again used the term several times. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together,” he told the Senate. The notion of this community of more than 2 billion users worldwide, and over 200 million in the United States, seems core to Zuckerberg’s conception of the platform, and perhaps his own identity. But is Facebook a community?...[Jonathan Zittrain]: “Community” is used all the time by social media and other Internet companies to describe their users. It’s a poor choice of words, adopted no doubt because it makes the relationship between subscriber and company seem less transactional than it really is.

An op-ed by fellow Evelyn Douek. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week for over ten hours, but he had very little new to say. The overwhelming theme of the questions from lawmakers on the Senate judiciary and commerce committees and the House Energy and Commerce Committee was that, as Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley put it, “the status quo no longer works.” Consensus or even concrete proposals of what to do about it, however, were noticeably lacking. Zuckerberg did shed some light on Facebook’s current thinking about how it will combat hate speech on its platform. The plan epitomizes technological optimism: in five to ten years, Zuckerberg said, he expects artificial intelligence will able to proactively monitor posts for hateful content. In the meantime? Facebook is hiring more human content moderators.

Vivek Wadhwa is taking his globe-trotting research into technology’s impact on our present and future with a new appointment at Harvard Law School. Wadhwa has been named a Distinguished Fellow with the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School “to help with what I consider to be the most important research project of our times: to understand the impact of technology on jobs and develop policies to mitigate the dangers.” Reached by WRAL TechWire, Wadhwa says the project is “something that [economist] Richard Freeman and I have long been discussing. There is anecdotal evidence automation is affecting jobs but not enough hard research.”

The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case with huge potential impact on New Hampshire businesses, as well as anyone who shops online. The case essentially pits the 45 states that impose a sales tax against the handful that don’t, including the Granite State...“This is really billions of dollars of revenue that is not changing hands,” explains Ian Samuel, a Harvard Law School lecturer who is following this case. A recent GAO report found that states with sales tax were missing out on an estimated $8-13 billion in lost revenue, which impacts everything from school funding to infrastructure projects.

Losing millions of dollars a year at its power plants, Ohio-based FirstEnergy has asked the Trump administration for help. Though it may have the president’s ear, it’s unclear how much President Trump can do to help the company’s struggling coal and nuclear plants. FirstEnergy, which filed for bankruptcy last month, and plans to close three nuclear plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio, wants Energy Secretary Rick Perry to declare a “202-C” grid emergency, and make customers in Pennsylvania and surrounding states pay more for electricity from nuclear and coal...What is a 202? It’s a provision of federal law designed to keep the grid functioning during extreme events that could cause power outages, said Ari Peskoe, an electricity law professor at Harvard. “It was specifically written by Congress in 1935 to ensure that electricity supply did not have the sort of problems that arose during World War One,” Peskoe said.

An interview with Joseph Goffman...The Administration decided to roll back fuel efficiency standards for cars. What does that have to do with air pollution — why does this impact smog? [Goffman]: When cars burn less gasoline, they emit fewer pollutants, including the pollutants which contribute to the forming of smog in the air. Cars also emit the gases that cause global warming, and in a warming world smog forms more easily.

In the wake of the forcible arrest of a black Harvard undergraduate Friday, hundreds of University affiliates came together at multiple events held across campus to talk through the incident and to share their concern and support for one another. Cambridge Police Department officers arrested a Harvard undergraduate Friday night after a physical encounter with law enforcement on charges including indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, and assault. Shortly after the incident, the Harvard Black Law Students Association tweeted out a statement calling the arrest an instance of police brutality...BLSA hosted the meeting to update Harvard affiliates about what happened Friday and to provide students a place to heal and work through the arrest, according to BLSA member Emanuel Powell III [`19]. He specifically credited black women involved with BLSA for their participation in the event, noting the women facilitated conversation and ensured the gathering served as a “space of healing.”...BLSA member Amber A. James ’11 [`19], who spoke at the event, said she agrees with Powell and that she thinks the meeting served a key function in allowing Harvard affiliates to “[build] for the future.”...Several Faculty Deans sent emails to students in their Houses following the arrest Friday. Some announced they plan to hold House events to discuss the details of the incident and to offer students a space to respond and reflect. In an email to Winthrop House residents sent midday Saturday, Winthrop Faculty Deans Stephanie Robinson and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.—who serves as an advisor to BLSA—wrote they plan to provide students with a place to share their thoughts about the arrest. “Winthrop House will provide a space for students to process the incident itself, as well as the broader issues implicated by this particular incident,” Sullivan and Robinson wrote.

The first big interview with the fired FBI director James Comey is blazing toward a broadcast on Sunday night, but for the Donald Trump presidency, multiple meteors have already hit. In Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, obtained by the Guardian on Thursday from a bookseller in New York before publication, the former official casts Trump as both “unethical” and “untethered to truth” and compares his presidency to a “forest fire”...“There’s a clear pattern of the president seeming to think that the department of justice belongs to him,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in criminal prosecution issues. “And that’s deeply concerning. These threats to fire Sessions or fire Mueller or fire Rosenstein all fit into that."

America’s 500 biggest public companies in 2018 are expected to distribute up to $600 billion or more through stock buybacks...These companies and others find themselves sitting on an Everest of cash, thanks to profits pouring in faster than they can find productive ways to spend it. The profits have built up in recent years, aided by low borrowing costs, rapidly advancing technology that has reduced overhead and boosted margins, and international trade that has allowed offshore production of goods at bargain prices...“Public firms started with $3.3 trillion in cash in 2007 and accumulated 50 percent more cash over the next decade, ending with $4.9 trillion in the bank,” said Harvard law professor Jesse Fried, who is part of a team that has done extensive research on the subject and that supports buybacks. “Buybacks cannot be starving firms of cash for investment if cash stockpiles are huge and rising. If buyback alarmists were correct, investment by public firms should be declining.”

Throughout Donald Trump’s first year in office, Fox News has railed against what it calls the prejudice and unfairness of the “mainstream media’s” negativity in their abusive reporting on Trump...My personal choice among the many epithets hurled at Trump was provided by Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. Fried labeled Trump a “malignant buffoon.”

Grocery stores could be donating way more of the food they don’t sell. What’s stopping them? A patchwork of inconsistent and unclear food safety laws. A new report conducted by researchers at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic has found that very few states give businesses any instruction on how to donate food safely...Emily Broad Leib, director of the clinic and the study’s lead author, wanted to find out exactly where companies were getting hung up. “We kept hearing from businesses that they weren’t allowed to donate certain things, or being told that they had to follow really strict rules. Sometimes there’d be a business that said different parts of the country or even different cities in the same state have different rules.”

The special counsel Robert Mueller's team is now moving forward on the assumption that it will not secure an interview with President Donald Trump, NBC News reported...Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, said it wasn't surprising that Mueller will reportedly move forward without an interview with Trump. "I am sure that Mueller's team has enough evidence to draw conclusions on the obstruction prong without an interview with Trump," Whiting said. "An interview of the potential target of the investigation is always helpful, but most criminal investigations conclude without such an interview (because targets assert their Fifth Amendment privilege not to testify)."

Harvard Law School announced Wednesday that Arizona Senator Jeffry L. Flake will be its 2018 Class Day Speaker...Pete D. Davis ’12, a third-year Law student, voiced his disapproval of Flake in two Harvard Law Record opinion pieces published Wednesday and Thursday.

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and Harvard law professor, to get a sense of how war crimes charges against Assad could work.

...In Silicon Valley, heedlessness and recklessness have traditionally been seen as virtues–Facebook’s early internal rallying cry was “move fast and break things”–and necessary precursors for innovation. But a long-simmering reality check is coming to a head across the high-tech industry. While privacy concerns and even large-scale data breaches are nothing new, experts say the fracas at Facebook has brought the dilemma of increasingly powerful technology into better focus. “Being these networked citizens of the world, it’s kind of a struggle, at times, to say why we care about privacy,” says Urs Gasser, executive director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “But in this case, there is this element that the data about us is suddenly used to manipulate us in our decisionmaking and somehow mess with our democracy.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. According to numerous reports, President Donald Trump is giving serious thought to firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, special counsel Robert Mueller or both. His lawyers should be telling him something pointed and specific: If the dismissal is aimed at shutting down Mueller’s investigation, it would probably be an impeachable offense. In any administration, the president’s lawyers quickly learn that one of their most important jobs is to say “no” to their boss – and to tell him things he does not want to hear.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What if Donald Trump tries to fire Robert Mueller -- and fails? The scenario isn’t far-fetched. Under Department of Justice regulations, the special counsel, Mueller, can only be fired “by the personal action of the Attorney General” for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” President Trump, who doesn’t much care for legal technicalities, has ramped up his attacks on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and on Mueller himself. We know from the New York Times that he has at least twice tried to shut down the probe. Trump might yet try to fire Mueller directly; his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president “certainly believes he has the power” to do so.

The calls were placed quietly to top American diplomats who had resigned in droves over the past year. The message: Mike Pompeo, nominated to become the next secretary of state, wanted them back...Those who have long known Mr. Pompeo say he is perfectly suited for this moment. He graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy and became a tank commander in Germany. He left the military after just five years, as a captain, to attend Harvard Law School. Mary Ann Glendon, a law professor at Harvard who hired Mr. Pompeo as a research assistant, said that she “spent a lot of time talking to him about his future plans” — specifically, making his fortune and then going into politics. “And he did it,” she said.