Media Mentions

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.

...Trump is said to be near a “meltdown” in his fury at what he describes as “an attack on our country” — by which he means the ongoing criminal investigation of him. It’s a phrase that he has not used about Russia’s interference with our elections, and my guess is that at some point Trump will fire Robert Mueller, directly or indirectly, or curb his investigation...Trump’s supporters are saying that he could fire Rod Rosenstein, to whom Mueller reports, and appoint an acting replacement who could quietly rein in Mueller. Such a replacement could even go one step further and actually try to “bring an end” to the entire investigation, as Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd urged last month. But it’s not so simple. “Everything about this is legally uncertain,” Jack Goldsmith, who was an assistant attorney general in George W. Bush’s administration and is now a professor at Harvard Law School, told me.

The idea that Donald Trump might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and in so doing spark some kind of constitutional crisis has been gaining traction for months now. Political junkies, especially on the liberal side of the spectrum, have breathlessly discussed the scenario in neighborhood bars and on approximately 1,000 different podcasts...For some context on just how bad things are at this moment compared to October 1973—when an embattled Richard Nixon went on his own firing spree in hopes of scuttling the Watergate probe—I called up my favorite legal scholar, Noah Feldman. The historian and Harvard Law professor is usually pretty measured in assessing Trump's presidency, but he said some things that genuinely frightened me.

...The Justice Network is based in Memphis but has offices in Arkansas and Mississippi. It’s one of several private companies that oversees court fees and fines for people who are arrested. The Justice Network manages the system for the courts, and in turn charge people fees to manage their cases. In 2015, The Justice Network reported charging Arkansas’s Craighead county probationers more than $245,000 in fees. Last year, after 20 years in the county, The Justice Network left town. That was after the probationers were given amnesty days. They formed long lines to have their fees and fines forgiven...According to Chiraag Bains, a fellow at Harvard Law School, the private probation business model presents a conflict of interest because the companies can influence judges. “For example, the company may decide, we’re not getting paid here, we want this person to spend some time in jail and maybe they’ll work harder to pay us,” Bains said.

President Donald Trump all but confirmed that the United States will soon strike the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as he communicated in a threatening Wednesday morning tweet in which he taunted Russia and suggested American missiles were "coming" in Syria...Trump’s taunting tweets are ridiculous and dangerous, as well as totally inconsistent with his stated view that it’s dumb to alert the enemy to what you plan to do and when you plan to do it," Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School told Salon. "Trump has put the United States in a box. If he acts on his threats, he’ll have given Assad, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the [Iranian Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] advance warning and endangered our military.

Their timing could not be better. A day after reports surfaced that President Trump wanted to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in December (in addition to an earlier effort in June), five veteran Republicans have formed a new organization, Republicans for the Rule of Law, seeking to restrain the president from doing exactly that...Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe voices alarm at the prospect that Rosenstein might be on the chopping block. “Trump firing Rosenstein would be part of an ongoing impeachable pattern of presidential obstruction of justice,” he says. “Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing Rosenstein might violate the terms of his recusal but not if there was a genuine justification unrelated to Mueller’s investigation.”