Media Mentions

The Trump administration is proudly axing U.S. EPA's high-profile climate rules, but climate adaptation work is quietly chugging along at the agency. The agency's adaptation work hasn't gotten much public attention since the Trump administration moved in...But EPA's climate adaptation efforts are continuing under Trump, even if they don't have the staffing and the prominence they had under the Obama administration. Some adaptation proponents are hopeful that the work can survive budget cuts, because it can appeal even to those who question humans' impact on climate change or costly policies to curb emissions. Leading the effort at EPA is Joel Scheraga, a career staffer for 31 years...His past work on adaptation likely helped prepare him to work effectively within an administration that questions humans' role in climate change, said Joseph Goffman, a former senior EPA official who worked with Scheraga during the Obama administration. Goffman is now executive director of Harvard University's Environmental Law Program. "[Scheraga] had an uncanny ability to engage with a full spectrum of public officials," said Goffman. "He is honestly one of my favorite people."

It was a snowy day, and as usual some Harvard Law School students were working in the library. But they weren’t studying, and they weren’t on campus. They were in the Cambridge Public Library, helping local residents do their taxes...From Feb. 9 to April 14, the student-run organization Harvard TaxHelp is leading the University’s branch of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at the Cambridge library. VITA is a program initiated by the Internal Revenue Service that offers assistance to those who make $54,000 or less annually, and those with limited English-speaking skills. The program is popular and has spread by word of mouth, so some clients may find themselves waiting awhile. “We wish we could do more,” said Edward Grais [`18], a volunteer tax preparer who is a student at the Law School...Harvard TaxHelp has more than two dozen student members. In one five-hour session, eight members can help as many as 30 clients. There are more than 40 VITA locations offering similar services within a 10-mile radius of Cambridge.

The most important revelation in a Washington Post report out Tuesday night is not that the special counsel Robert Mueller told President Donald Trump's lawyers he isn't a criminal target of the Russia investigation. Rather, it's that Mueller is preparing a report about Trump's actions in office and potential obstruction of justice. Mueller is tasked with investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 US election, and a significant thread in the inquiry is whether the president sought to obstruct justice when he fired James Comey as FBI director last year...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." He added: "Once the investigation is completed, I think it will be very difficult to keep Mueller's conclusions secret."

From a distance of 15 years and more than 3,000 miles, relatives of people killed by Bolivian security forces in 2003 have had their first taste of justice. A federal court civil jury in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Tuesday found former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his defense minister responsible for extrajudicial killings during a period of civil unrest, and awarded the plaintiffs $10 million in compensatory damages...Over the past decade, dozens of HLS students have worked on the case, under the supervision of clinical professors Susan Farbstein, J.D. ’04, and Tyler Giannini. Students have drafted briefs, traveled to Bolivia on fact-finding missions, and prepared for oral arguments, all in hopes of bringing the suit to trial. Farbstein and Giannini, who co-direct the International Human Rights Clinic, hailed the verdict, Giannini calling it “a clear signal that the U.S. is not a safe harbor for individuals who commit violent abuses and, just as importantly, it sends a message that no one is above the law.” “This is a major win for our clients, who have fought so long and so hard to get justice for their loved ones,” said Farbstein.

For decades, Latin American strongmen have had an escape route when their violent regimes are forced out of power: Stashing millions in ill-gotten gains in Florida beachfront property and hiding out in the tropical sunshine. But those days may finally be ending thanks to a landmark jury verdict in Fort Lauderdale yesterday. A federal jury found that two former Bolivian leaders were responsible for a bloody government crackdown in 2003 known as "Black October" and awarded $10 million to the families of indigenous peaceful protesters their soldiers killed..."It's a historic verdict because it holds the former president and defense minister to account, and it shows the most powerful people are not above the law in the United States," says Tyler Giannini, co-director of the Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, which helped bring the lawsuit in South Florida.

The news that the Trump administration is expected to roll back Obama-era EPA regulations on car emissions and fuel efficiency standards is tough to swallow for Harvard Law professor Jody Freeman. She negotiated those standards with the auto industry in 2009 and 2010 as a counselor for energy and climate change in the Obama White House. “It was kind of a historic achievement,” she said. “And it’s pretty dramatic to think that they might be rolled back now.” The standards require automakers to achieve an average of 36 miles per gallon across their car models by 2025. That's about 10 mpg over the standards in effect for 2018 models.

A U.S. jury on Tuesday found former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and his defense minister responsible for civilian deaths during 2003 street protests in Bolivia, awarding $10 million in compensatory damages to victims’ families. The civil lawsuit was brought a decade ago by eight families whose relatives died during a period of unrest in the poor South American nation. The case went to trial at a federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida...The family members are represented by a team of lawyers from the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, and several private law firms. The United States allows for the filing of civil suits in the country in certain international human rights cases. The plaintiffs included a couple whose eight-year-old daughter was shot by a stray bullet.

In a landmark decision Tuesday, a federal jury found the former president of Bolivia and his minister of defense responsible for extrajudicial killings carried out by the Bolivian military, which killed more than 50 of its own citizens and injured hundreds during a period of civil unrest in September and October 2003. The decision comes after a ten-year legal battle spearheaded by family members of eight people killed in what is known in Bolivia as the “Gas War.”...“This win is not only a momentous victory for the plaintiffs and the people of Bolivia, but affirms that no one is above the law,” said Tyler Giannini, Co-Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. “The plaintiffs’ victory sends an unmistakable signal to perpetrators around the world that they can be held to account for human rights abuses in the United States,” added Susan Farbstein, Co-Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

Nearly one year into his tenure, Neil Gorsuch seems to be having the time of his life. The Supreme Court’s newest justice is reveling in his role, diving into arguments with gusto and so far fulfilling the expectation that he would be a rock-ribbed conservative in the mold of his predecessor, the late Antonin Scalia. In doing so, he’s shaken up the dynamics of the highest court in the land. “Ideologically, he is what he seems to be, a conservative, textualist, originalist, but he’s approached the job differently,” said Ian Samuel, a Climenko fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, who co-hosts the “First Mondays” podcast about the Supreme Court.

Kyle Corkum imagines a “smart city” with futuristic amenities like driverless shuttle services, heated sidewalks and a super-resilient energy grid that keeps humming through the harshest of storms.As chief executive of LStar Ventures, a developer of planned communities, he has a chance to build the neighborhood of his dreams from the ground up on the site of a long-shuttered naval air station in this town just 12 miles south of Boston’s booming technology hub...The need for greater regulation of driverless vehicles has also come up for debate after the death last month of a woman who was struck by one of Uber’s self-driving cars in Tempe, Ariz. Very few local governments have thought through the long list of public- and private-sector values and concerns that should be deployed to constrain” the use of autonomous cars, as well as the technologies being used to monitor city streets, said Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor. “Once you’ve given a developer license to deploy total surveillance, with no public limitations, you’re done.”

The Post reports: The Trump administration will pressure U.S. immigration judges to process cases faster by establishing a quota system tied to their annual performance reviews, according to new Justice Department directives. Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s move raised immediate concerns...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe concurs. He tells Right Turn, “This is a shameful and cruelly inhumane effort to impose an assembly-line mentality on the already too-perfunctory deportation proceedings to which our nation has long subjected people, including children, who are identified for expulsion from our country.”

Fifty years ago the murder of a Baptist minister turned Civil Rights giant shook the nation. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn...We asked a group of Harvard scholars to reflect on King’s life, death, and legacy. Historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalled where they were when they heard about the assassination...Gordon-Reed, 9 years old in 1968, was with her mother at the home of one her friends “when her son came into the room and told us that King had been assassinated.”...Gordon-Reed said her mother and father “were not surprised” by King’s murder. “It was clear that he was making lots of people angry. The possibility of violence was always present given all that was at stake.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The death of Judge Stephen Reinhardt last week at age 87 marks the end of an era for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which also saw the abrupt retirement of Judge Alex Kozinski in December. For more than three decades, the largest appeals court in the nation had been the site of an epic legal struggle between the progressive liberal lion and the conservative-libertarian stalwart. The two judges, each brilliant in his own way and each at the extreme end of the ideological spectrum, fought with all the judicial tools available -- and even invented some new ones along the way. Their rivalry defined the 9th Circuit, at least from the perspective of the appellate lawyers who actually care about what appeals courts do. It won’t be the same again.

The Internal Revenue Service is providing some relief for companies facing looming tax bills after they stockpiled trillions of dollars offshore free of U.S. income tax. A timing quirk in the tax overhaul seemed to give companies such as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. -- all of which began their fiscal years before Jan. 1 -- the chance to reduce the foreign cash they’ll accumulate this year and lower their taxes. A press release issued by the IRS on Monday indicates that “if done in the ordinary course of business,” the move won’t be considered as tax avoidance, according to Stephen Shay, a tax and business law professor at Harvard Law School. “The light is green for this planning, not red,” said Shay, a former top Treasury official. “It is great for those whose years beginning before 2018 are still open for the planning.”

Deciding whether to submit a diversity statement in a law school application is not necessarily an easy call...Briana Williams [`18], a third-year student at Harvard Law School, says she spent more than a month crafting and polishing the written components of her law school application, including her diversity statement, to ensure that the application felt cohesive as a whole. "I took my entire trajectory on as a marathon," she says. Williams, who was homeless for a period during high school, wrote in her diversity statement about her challenges with poverty and how they motivated her to help others with disadvantages.

...On the surface, traveling for a medical procedure may not seem appealing, but people typically do it for outpatient procedures with quick recoveries and wrap a vacation around it, says MTA President Renee-Marie Stephano. Getting credible information on outcomes from overseas procedures can be difficult. A search of the PubMed medical database yields numerous case reports of complications from operations like weight-loss surgery and cosmetic procedures outside the patients’ home country, but many of these cases are from Europe and Australia. There’s no information available about complication rates. “As with everything in this industry, getting actual data is quite difficult,” says Harvard professor Glenn Cohen, author of the 2014 book Patients with Passports.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For the first time since the 1940s, Americans have been asking: Can it happen here? The question, which has been debated in the U.S. for months, is meant to draw attention to the potential fragility of democratic self-government -- and to emphasize that in some periods, democracies are especially likely to turn in authoritarian directions. It would be fair to pose that question in any case in light of China’s continued rise, Russia’s resurgent aggression, and the disturbing developments in Turkey, Poland, Hungary and the Philippines. To his most severe critics, some of the words and deeds of President Donald Trump make it seem as if democratic principles might not be entirely secure in the U.S. itself.

In a decision with far-reaching implications for President Trump, a federal court ruled this week that a lawsuit could go forward claiming he unconstitutionally received foreign emoluments — that is, monies from foreign governments explicitly prohibited by the Constitution — from his hotel in Washington..."Why did this case make it past the first hurdle and not the New York case? Will the New York case be appealed?" [Laurence Tribe]: We are appealing the decision in the Southern District of New York dismissing our suit there. One reason for the different results is that Judge Messitte considered but rejected as wrong some of the grounds Judge Daniels erroneously gave for dismissing the SDNY case. In particular, Judge Messitte correctly rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that because Trump’s patrons chose to stay at his hotel, there was nothing a court could do to redress the injuries caused by the emoluments violations; he also rejected Judge Daniels’s conclusion that only Congress, and not the courts, could enforce the foreign emoluments clause.

...Now President Donald Trump’s administration is reframing how the nation admits refugees, reducing who can come here and making it tougher to apply for protection. It is playing out not through congressional action or public announcement, but in policy tweaks and guidelines that together make up an overhaul...Sessions, in a speech last fall to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency over the courts, criticized “case law that has expanded the concept of asylum well beyond Congressional intent —created even more incentives for illegal aliens to come here and claim a fear of return.” Deborah Anker, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in asylum, said Sessions’ office declined to identify the decision he was reviewing, initially leaving lawyers without a way to respond to his request for arguments. “It was unprecedented,” she said. “The attorney general by executive action appears to want to be overturning the statute as it relates to asylum.”

...The drafters of the state constitution Louisiana adopted in 1898 said they aimed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana,” primarily by scrubbing from the rolls nearly all of the roughly 130,000 black people then registered to vote...But with cooperation from the East Baton Rouge Parish clerk of court, The Advocate was able to collect this information for two-thirds of the 200 convictions by 12-member juries that took place in the state’s most populous parish from 2011 to 2016. Those records include 46 trials, involving 552 jurors, that ended with a nonunanimous guilty verdict...Thomas Frampton, a former Orleans Parish public defender who now teaches at Harvard Law School, enlisted researchers there to analyze the newspaper’s data. Their analysis mirrors that of The Advocate. “The disparities that this data identify are not terribly surprising for those who have spent time in Louisiana courtrooms but are shocking in terms of how wide the (racial) gulf actually is,” Frampton said.

Official federal sentencing guidelines don’t distinguish between female and male offenders. They often downplay or outright disregard circumstances that are common among women, such as the role of an offender as the sole caretaker for children or an offender having been coerced into committing a crime. But judges commonly compensate ad hoc, which has led to women on the whole receiving much shorter sentences than men when facing the same punishments. Critics say the sentencing benchmarks should provide more flexibility from the start — a change that would benefit women like James but also men in similar circumstances, whose extenuating factors may be even more likely to be overlooked. “The notion that you simply deal with a complicated situation by saying, ‘Let’s ignore the complexity,’ is idiotic,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School.