Media Mentions

Mayoral candidate Adrian Perkins [`18] talks with 101.7 / 710 KEEL's Robert J Wright and Erin McCarty about what he sees are the major issues in the upcoming race for Shreveport's top political office. Perkins, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, tells KEEL listeners that he sees lowering crime, improving streets and bringing jobs to the area as his priorities. Perkins, who also attended Harvard Law School, says he has moved back to his hometown because, "I am a Shreveport boy. Everything that is on my resume is because I am from Shreveport." An in explaining the reason for his run: "I don't think Shreveport has another four or eight years to go down the road that its on. My platform is simple. I want to generate jobs and I want to decrease crime."

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen....The Cosby case is, in the end, an emblem of #MeToo, not just because it ended in a guilty verdict but because of the exceptional if controversial evidentiary procedure that enabled a chorus of witnesses—witnesses who would generally be excluded—to back up the main complaining witness and could well have made the difference between a juror having a reasonable doubt and not having it. It remains to be seen how broadly the legal workarounds for uncharged prior misconduct will be construed by trial courts in future sexual-assault cases, ones in which defendants are not alleged to have such a distinctive signature in the commission of their crimes—or so many victims.

Today, Democrat Adrian Perkins [`18] officially announced his candidacy. Perkins is 32-years old and was raised in Shreveport. He went to Harvard Law School and West Point. He believes his military experience makes him unique, compared to other candidates. Perkins wants to improve our airport, city streets, and work to provide high speed internet to everyone. He also wants lower crime saying, the way to do that is to get a new chief of police. "I want to pursue getting new leadership within the police department so we can make cultural changes. Right now, I speak to policemen all the time, I have multiple listening sessions with policemen and they want changes as well. I think new leadership can usher in those changes," said Perkins.

Two weeks after the verdict in a landmark human rights case in Fort Lauderdale, Thomas Becker was still excited. “This is a historic victory,” the attorney said. “This case shows that you can be a poor person and stand up for human rights, justice and social change. And you can win.”... The case was brought by a consortium of US human rights lawyers, including the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, where Becker was a student. He met one of the victims’ lawyers, Rogelio Mayta, at a La Paz dinner in 2005. “It was like combining water with thirst in a providential moment,” recalled Mayta whose team was already exploring whether bringing a civil case in the US might bring some measure of justice for the victims, given, in Mayta’s words, “the inefficiency in the Bolivian justice system.”

Last week 34 tech companies signed the Cybersecurity Tech Accord saying they won't help any government, including the U.S., carry out cyber-attacks. That came amid warnings from the U.S. and the U.K. about the Russian government's global attempts to hack routers and other network equipment. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke with Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard, about how tech companies will play a role in combating international cyber threats.

A book review by Samantha Power. When avid fans describe their love of baseball — and here I include myself, as well as Susan Jacoby, the author of “Why Baseball Matters” — we do so with a kind of reverence that, while wholly sincere, can often sound ridiculous. I associate my deep attachment with immigrating to the United States from Dublin in 1979 and landing in Pittsburgh on the eve of the Willie Stargell-led Pirates’ glorious playoff run. As I practiced an American accent in the mirror, I quickly understood the currency I would acquire if I could rattle off RBI, ERA and batting average statistics with the speed of the boys who lived on our block. Play ball!

During a campaign rally in Iowa in 2016, Donald Trump criticized former Hillary Clinton staffers who had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in the case involving her private email system. By pleading the Fifth, Trump suggested, they were admitting their guilt. “The mob takes the Fifth,” Trump told the crowd. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Trump’s assessment has taken on new meaning this week, as his longtime attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen pleaded the Fifth in the civil case brought against him by adult-film star Stormy Daniels. But contrary to the president’s views, it should not be assumed that Cohen’s move is proof of criminal culpability...“People who assert the Fifth may be innocent, but may fear that the government might still find a way to use their words against them,” explained Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Harvard University.

If every FBI subject were as loose-lipped and oblivious as President Trump, they’d need to build more federal prisons. His latest outburst came on “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning: “And our Justice Department — which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t — our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia!” Several aspects of this require scrutiny...Second, Trump’s language betrays his motive to interfere with, to obstruct, the Russia investigation. Ironically, “corrupt intent,” usually difficult to prove, is now being demonstrated to millions of viewers. “Trump’s ominous statement that ‘at some point [he] won’t’ stay ‘away from our Justice Department’ can help weaponize public and hopefully congressional support for measures to protect Mueller and Rosenstein and, in that sense, the remark is helpful to Mueller,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

President Trump’s interview Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” in which he blasted the Justice Department and admitted for the first time publicly that his personal attorney represented him in a hush-money payout to a porn star, was ill-advised even if it didn’t immediately place him in legal jeopardy, specialists said. “He’s unmoored, is the only way to describe it,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. Gertner, who’s emerged as a high-profile critic of Trump among legal scholars, said she was taken aback by comments the president made that “suggest he plans to obstruct justice or is motivated to obstruct justice.”

Mick Mulvaney, acting head of the consumer finance watchdog, told a room full of bankers that the only lobbyists he met with as a congressman were those who made political donations to his office, and he urged them to continue lobbying lawmakers to weaken the regulator he runs..."Mulvaney’s attitude is a thousand times worse for America than even Donald Trump," said Lawrence Lessig, founder of Equal Citizens, a campaign for democratic reform. "It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with D.C.—and that will remain wrong with D.C., even after this administration is gone."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One thing became clear during Wednesday’s oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court about President Donald Trump’s travel ban: Justice Elena Kagan has a strategy to persuade swing Justice Anthony Kennedy to vote against the ban. Her approach will be to depict the case as a watershed moment in the court’s jurisprudence about bias — thus making it extraordinarily difficult for Kennedy to find himself on the wrong side of history.

Ethics experts say Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should be investigated for potentially violating federal bribery laws after he admitted that, as a congressman, he only gave meetings to lobbyists who donated to his campaign...Many argue that regardless of whether Mulvaney engaged in any illegal conduct, his Tuesday admission is a fireable offense, and excusing it perpetuates a culture of impunity in Washington. "It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with DC — and that will remain wrong with DC, even after this administration is gone," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and former Democratic presidential candidate, told Business Insider in a statement.

...Korematsu v. United States upheld America’s wartime internment of thousands of Japanese Americans, and it’s still cited as legal precedent today. Harvard Law School’s Martha Minow recently wrote about the decision and its relevance in 2018. In the Spiel, president Trump’s approval ratings are highest in West Virginia. Senate candidate (and former convict) Don Blankenship is rolling with it.

An interview between President Donald Trump and the special counsel Robert Mueller may once again be in play. According to The Washington Post, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who is the newest member of Trump's legal team, broached the subject of a presidential interview with Mueller when he met with the special counsel on Tuesday...Mueller is mandated to provide reports of his findings to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed him as the special counsel in May 2017. But whether those findings are released to the public is Rosenstein's decision. Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, said he found it "striking" that "Mueller seems to be preparing the report with an expectation that it will eventually become public."

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a leading historian on law and society as well as an authority on constitutional and education law and policy, has been named dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard President Drew Faust announced today...“I am honored and excited to have the opportunity to lead the Radcliffe Institute, whose mission to bring scholars together across disciplinary and professional boundaries I enthusiastically embrace,” said Brown-Nagin...“Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a brilliant legal historian who is deeply committed to the project of interdisciplinary work. In her time at Harvard Law School, she has been a wonderful teacher of our students, superb leader of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, and invaluable institutional contributor,” said John F. Manning, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at HLS.

Big Law should be scared of Ian Samuel. Recently, the Harvard Law School lecturer and co-host of the “First Mondays” podcast created a huge uproar when he tweeted that Munger, Tolles & Olson required that summer associates agree to arbitration in their employment contracts. (He called the requirement “super gross.”) Almost immediately, law faculty and law students jumped on social media to condemn the super elite firm for attempting to silence summer associates.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. I’m grateful for James Freeman’s kind words about my recent essay in the Guardian warning about Deep State leaks, and relieved that he thinks I am “not nearly as far to the left as most Guardian editors.” We agree that there is a serious danger in the Deep State leaks of classified intelligence intercepts that contains U.S. person information and that were clearly designed to sabotage the Trump presidency. And we agree that in many ways those abuses were greater than the political leaks (and threats of leaks) during the Hoover era. But in contrast to Freeman, I don’t see how the evils of intelligence bureaucracy leaks detract from the evils in Trump’s many, many norm violations that I wrote about in a long critical essay on Trump in the Atlantic last Fall.

A report released by the Education Department on Tuesday reveals that black students and students with disabilities are still suspended and arrested at much higher rates than their classmates, further complicating Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ reconsideration of an Obama-era rule meant to curtail the disproportionate punishment of students of color...Suspensions can ultimately lead to a loss of instruction time that could overwhelmingly fall on students of color and those with disabilities. A report released last week by the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies and Harvard Law School’s Charles Houston Institute for Justice found that students of color with disabilities were more likely to be suspended and lost 77 more days of instruction, on average, than their white peers. In at least 28 states, the gap between disciplining black students with disabilities and white students worsened between 2013-14 and 2015-16.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new regulation Tuesday that would restrict the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use when it develops policies, a move critics say will permanently weaken the agency’s ability to protect public health...Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, said Mr. Pruitt would be “walking into a judicial minefield” if he told the E.P.A. to no longer consider certain studies during agency rule-making. That, Mr. Lazarus said, would be considered an arbitrary and capricious decision under the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs agency rule-making, and would “subject any agency regulation issued based on such a defective record to ready judicial invalidation.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Conservative law professor Kevin Walsh, in an intriguing new article, makes the case for repealing the “natural born” citizenship requirement for the presidency. Next month it will be 150 years since such a proposal for a constitutional amendment was first put before Congress. Today it really makes no sense to discriminate against naturalized citizens when it comes to the presidency, assuming it ever did in the first place. I can think of three further reasons that the timing is right. For one, between election cycles, it isn’t about possible candidates who were born abroad: Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Granholm or Ted Cruz (who probably isn’t barred anyway). It’s about the principle on its own.

Adopting a strategy successfully employed by the tobacco industry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a sweeping new regulation that would restrict the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use in developing its regulations. The EPA administrator, who has come under fire from both parties for his personal conduct and ethical scandals, announced the changes at an EPA event on Tuesday, where he was surrounded by conservative allies and pollution skeptics...Tuesday’s move advances that goal. Joseph Goffman, a former EPA attorney who is now director of the Harvard Environmental Law program, told me, he was especially struck by “how transparent Pruitt is about rigging the process: Rigging the membership of the science boards, rigging the range of studies that will be incorporated in agency decision making. And in both cases [he’s] excluding sources of information or expertise that would lead to outcomes that Pruitt doesn’t prefer.”