Media Mentions

An op-ed by Hayley Evans `19. Based on trends in advancing robotics technology, many experts believe autonomous—and even lethal autonomous—robots are an inevitable and imminent development. Although the capabilities of future technologies remain uncertain because of the complexity of the task to be executed, and the environment in which that technology operates, it is fairly clear that exhibiting the human characteristics necessary to comply with the international humanitarian legal principles of necessity and proportionality—like a split-second judgment call or concern for humanity—represents a formidable challenge to fully autonomous weapons.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), one of DC’s most influential liberal think tanks with deep ties to the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign, has just proposed a big idea for raising Americans’ wages. A new paper by CAP’s David Madland calls for the creation of national wage boards, tasked with setting minimum wage and benefit standards for specific industries. Fast food companies, say, would send representatives to meet with union officials and other worker representatives, and hammer out a deal that ensures workers get a fair shake. Same goes for nurses, or retail workers, or home health aides, or accountants...“Sectoral bargaining is certainly getting more attention in legal academic and labor law policy debates,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and former practicing labor lawyer, says. “The way I would think about it is that there’s an existential panic about what will happen to the labor movement. That’s not new, it’s just getting worse. … If we need unions for economic and political equality as I think we do, we have to do something to stop that downward spiral.”

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The news about Facebook is not getting better. The company has sharply increased the number of users whose data was improperly shared with an outside company connected to President Trump’s campaign, to possibly 87 million. Amid an outcry, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. There is a dog-eared playbook for industry titans called before lawmakers: Apologize repeatedly, be humble, keep it boring. Mr. Zuckerberg can and should toss that playbook.

The four nor’easters in March brought down trees and closed schools and nearly derailed a much anticipated, historic contest between the Norfolk Prison Colony Debating Society and the Harvard College Debating Union. But, after a storm cancellation, the debate at last took place at the end of the month, at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison an hour outside Boston. The prison, which was designed in the nineteen-twenties by a Harvard alumnus and modelled on a college campus, started a debate team in 1933. Malcolm X, who entered the prison in 1948, was a member. (“Once my feet got wet,” he said, “I was gone on debating.”) Its first international debate was held in 1951, against Oxford University; Norfolk, charged with arguing against free health care, won. Laurence Tribe debated at Norfolk in 1961, when he was a Harvard junior and the national intercollegiate champion. “The guys we debated that day were serving either life sentences or the rough equivalent,” Tribe recalled recently. “They gave us a good fight.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Unnamed sources in a Washington Post story last week claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller told President Trump’s lawyers that “he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice.” The Post added that “Mueller’s investigators have indicated to the president’s legal team that they are considering writing reports on their findings in stages—with the first report focused on the obstruction issue.” The second and later report, according to the “president’s allies,” would concern “the special counsel’s findings on Russia’s interference.” Assuming the Post story accurately captures Mueller’s intentions, it raises two questions: First, is Mueller authorized to prepare an interim report on obstruction?; and second, under what circumstances can the report be sent to Congress or made public? The answers are not obvious.

The Minor League Baseball season kicked off on April 5 with more than 50 games across the country. Many players — in addition to facing the opposing teams — face the challenge of living on a low fixed salary that doesn’t include pay for spring training or offseason work. Their contract also doesn’t provide for extra pay when they work more than 40 hours per week, as they often do during the season — with a packed schedule of personal training, team practice, game play and travel...Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and an Obama administration appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, said that because many minor league players are paid such a low salary — in some cases working out to less than minimum wage for all the hours worked — their lawsuit should proceed. “We are talking about paying people $7.25 per hour, and time-and-a half when they work over forty hours. These are just bedrock principles of minimum standards,” Block said. And she said that not paying players during spring training flies in the face of other labor law precedent.

As ethical questions threaten the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, President Trump has defended him with a persuasive conservative argument: Mr. Pruitt is doing a great job at what he was hired to do, roll back regulations...The result, they say, is that the rollbacks, intended to fulfill one of the president’s central campaign pledges, may ultimately be undercut or reversed. “In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. And they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”

...Critics say the pervasive problems in Togo’s medical system — where equipment frequently malfunctions, electricity and water supplies are unreliable and new doctors earn less than taxi drivers — are the result of government corruption and ineptitude. But the current unrest in Togo extends far beyond the nation’s troubled health care system...I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on health law and bioethics, said medical ethicists generally agree that the potential benefits of a doctors’ strike can justifiably outweigh the potential risk to patients, if the dispute is about the quality of patient care (as opposed to, for example, pensions or vacation time). A recent peer-reviewed study of doctor’s strikes around the world found no evidence that they lead to an increase in patient mortality, he said. “When you agree to become a doctor, you do not agree to work under any possible condition with whatever quality of care that might mean for patients,” Professor Cohen said.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s spiraling ethics scandals and perilous job status were big news this week, but he also made headlines with his latest assault on President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy...But Pruitt did not kill or roll back Obama’s strict fuel-efficiency standards; he merely announced his intention to launch a process that could eventually weaken them. In fact, Pruitt has not yet killed or rolled back any significant regulations that were in place when President Donald Trump took office...“The vexing thing is that when you’re deal with public health and the climate, if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind, and Pruitt is adamantly refusing to move forward,” says Joe Goffman, a top official in the Obama EPA who now runs Harvard Law School’s environmental law program. “He isn’t changing the status quo as much as people think, but the status quo is a problem.”

An op-ed by fellow Terri Gerstein. Dozens of news anchors robotically intoned “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy,” after reciting what turned out to be a script by Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner and operator of 193 local TV stations. Dan Rather called it Orwellian, and many have asked in amazement: why would local journalists across the nation allow themselves to be used in such a demeaning way? The answer is clear to me, as a lawyer with decades handling cases involving low-wage workers: people need jobs. But the anchors may have an even more specific concern: an employment contract that doesn’t just bind but entraps them.

There are some law schools that produce more top lawyers then others. The Hollywood Reporter collected their list of the Top 10 Entertainment Law Schools of 2018. The lists looks at the Power Lawyers in the Entertainment industry and their alma maters. Here are the top nine law schools in this category...#2. Harvard Law School produces a lot of top talent. This year they had 15 alums make the list. The prestigious law school has a number of programs helping their students gain valuable experience in Entertainment Law. There is the Entertainment Law Clinic, Recording Artists Project, and Harassment Assault Law-Student Team, which was started three years ago to address the difficulty sexual abuse victims face fighting for their rights.

As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing...In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume. Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”...In addition to Baum and Lazer, the paper was co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Should coffee come with a cancer warning? As a matter of policy, the answer seems obvious: Of course not. As a matter of law, it’s much more complicated, at least in California. A tentative judicial ruling in Los Angeles County last week suggests that when people go to the local coffee place, their morning ritual is going to be accompanied by a jolt of fear. It could potentially turn into a fiasco, I think, and it tells us something important about how well-intentioned laws can go badly wrong.

Over a single weekend in March, an unprecedented disaster hit fertility clinics—twice. First came the news that the University Hospitals Fertility Center in Ohio, lost more than 4,000 eggs and embryos in a malfunctioning cryogenic tank. Then, in an unrelated incident, Pacific Fertility Center in California reported that liquid-nitrogen levels had fallen too low in a tank holding “several thousand” eggs and embryos, affecting an unconfirmed number. In-vitro fertilization can be a draining process—financially, physically, emotionally. And for some families, these embryos had been their last chance to have biological children. Dozens of lawsuits have since been filed; parents and would-be parents spoke of the children they will never have, of the siblings their children will never know. At times, they spoke not just of “embryos” but of “babies.”...The filing cites a 1985 Ohio Supreme Court case, Werling v. Sandy, that held a viable fetus is a person. But I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that case may not be the most relevant one here. A viable fetus is one that can survive outside of a womb. And in Egan v. Smith, an Ohio Court of Appeals court held in 1993 that wrongful death could not be brought for a nonviable fetus. This case is more likely to apply to embryos. “It’s a real stretch,” he says, “but lawyers are supposed to give every argument they can.”

..."Trauma informed" approaches toward investigating campus assault complaints are changing the way investigators interpret inconsistent reports or jumbled timelines. Where lapses in memory or chronological glitches once were seen as holes in an account, trauma-informed practices encourage investigators to start with an open mind. Proponents of the practices are quick to point out that that open mind should extend to the accused, as well...Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School who has challenged policies she thinks are unfair to accused students, agrees that trauma-informed approaches tip the balance further against accused students. "I’m concerned that some of the ‘trauma informed’ instructions tell adjudicators to treat what are typically considered signs of a witness not being credible as instead signs of the witness having been traumatized by sexual assault, and this risks feeding into a generally biased fact-finding system," Bartholet wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

If Friday afternoons are the best time to shove off embattled advisers, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt might want to start clearing out his desk today...Meanwhile, a new appointee is ensnared in his own troubling ethical issues. CNBC reports: John Bolton, who is days away from becoming President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, has been meeting with White House attorneys about possible conflicts of interest, CNBC has learned...Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe points to a series of campaigns in which Bolton’s PACs played a significant role. “Bolton’s superPAC appears to have spent a very substantial sum of money retaining the services of Cambridge Analytica to help Republicans get elected in some 2014 campaigns like that of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, paying that data firm over $1 million for various kinds of ‘research.'”

All over America, people have been demanding real bail reform including but not limited to ending the practice of cash bail. So what is cash bail? Cash bail is when a judge decides to assign a cash amount as the price for an accused defendant to be released from jail on their own recognizance or with conditions...As more and more jurisdictions across the country have passed bail reform legislation, the bail industry is starting to push back emphasizing a counter-narrative built entirely using the politics of fear...But, let’s not mince words here, the entire argument is BS, the VAST majority of defendants stuck in jail because of cash bail are accused of minor crimes as Crystal Yang, an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School explained in her recent New York University Law Review article: “On any given day, the United States detains almost half a million individuals before trial, with over 60% of the U.S. jail population comprised of individuals who have not yet been convicted."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A professor violates the terms of service to go onto a platform or a website. Once there, he unleashes bots that crawl all over and scrape the data viewable there. You might think this is a nightmare privacy scenario akin to the one in which the researcher Aleksandr Kogan scraped Facebook Inc. data that he later sold to Cambridge Analytica. And you might think the professor’s actions should be prosecuted. But a federal district court in Washington has just held that it’s a professor’s First Amendment right to break a site’s rules to collect data available there -- and that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act can’t criminalize the conduct.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Poland badly needs a way to get rid of its new “memory law” that makes it a crime for anyone anywhere in the world to ascribe Holocaust atrocities to the Polish state or nation. A solution may be emerging: Poland’s constitutional tribunal could strike down the law as a violation of freedom of expression under the country’s constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. That result would kill two birds with one stone. It would allow the right-wing PiS (“Law and Justice”) government to save face while escaping the global criticism it’s gotten as a result of the law.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The Nixon Administration saw it coming. In a stunning January 1974 report, the Nixon White House Cable Committee foretold that the new telecom platform known as cable would, eventually, be a monopoly service wherever it was offered...Nixon's plan fell victim to the lobbying efforts of the cable industry—powerful then, much more powerful now—on Capitol Hill. Today, the Cable Committee's predictions have come true: Both the cable and wireless industries, the transport networks on which everyone else rely, are fully mature, vertically integrated, and unruffled by competition. And they're planning to erect separate kingdoms.

The National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel is standing firm on a series of proposals to restructure the agency starting next year even as concern within the NLRB about the plans is said to have reached a boiling point...Stakeholders on the left continue to believe the general counsel’s reliance on the budget and expected appropriations as a central justification—as in his latest letter—is disingenuous. “The president’s budget came out after Congress had reached agreements on spending caps that are completely at odds with it,” Sharon Block, another Democrat former board member, told Bloomberg Law. Block, who is now at Harvard Law School, said the expectation that Congress will adhere to the White House budget next year “is not a serious idea.”