Media Mentions

An article by Mark Weber. Lawyers beginning their legal careers in Big Law today earn more, specialize earlier and benefit from technology that affords them flexibility. I’ve spent 24 years working with students, alumni and employers. Here are seven notable changes impacting new lawyers today.

Deep in debt and undercut in the marketplace by renewable power, the big utility company FirstEnergy appealed to the Trump administration on Thursday to use emergency powers to let it charge more for standby power from its coal and nuclear plants. The request, in a letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, followed an announcement that the company plans to close three nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania unless they can get a break...In a detailed thread on Twitter dissecting FirstEnergy's bid, Ari Peskoe, an energy analyst at Harvard University, said the company's argument was "dizzying" in its critique of FERC, which regulates the grid, and PJM, which operates it regionally. The company called FERC's reliance on advice from the grid operators "misplaced" since between them they have allowed the markets to move in ways that put companies like FirstEnergy at a competitive disadvantage.

FirstEnergy Solutions says DOE must act to save coal and nuclear power in the mid-Atlantic, but the region's grid operator says there's no emergency — and in fact, it will probably get along just fine without FirstEnergy's power plants. In a highly unorthodox application to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the subsidiary to FirstEnergy Corp. blasted PJM Interconnection and FERC for failing to ensure that coal and nuclear plants make enough money to stay afloat..."The chutzpah involved here!" said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. He said the company's request was the same as Perry's earlier proposed rule, but this time "with a statutory mechanism." "They’re asking it for numerous other entities that have not made the request, and some were opposed to the original NOPR," Peskoe said.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. In recent weeks, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal and the adult-film actress and director Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, have forged ahead unbound. Both women sold their silence concerning their sexual encounters with Donald Trump, and now both are asking a court to declare those contracts void. All the while, they’ve been giving extensive media interviews on matters ostensibly covered by the agreements—most notably Clifford, in a much-hyped “60 Minutes” interview. A legal arrangement in which someone is paid not to talk (in Clifford’s case), or in which one sells one’s story in order to quash it (in the case of McDougal), is not unusual.

Unemployment among 16-24 year-olds in the US - at 9.2% - is twice the national average. Andrew Leon Hanna [`19], formerly with Generation, a youth employment initiative founded by McKinsey, tells us why.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans feeling like it’s time to start better protecting your personal data, you’re pretty much out of luck, according to cybersecurity experts...When asked what people can do to prevent their data from being harvested without their direct knowledge, security technologist Bruce Schneier’s answer was chillingly straightforward. “You can’t do anything. That’s the fundamental problem with this,” he said...“You live in the United States and the United States doesn’t regulate surveillance capitalism. Your data can be bought and sold without your knowledge and consent. That’s the way it works,” he said. “If you don’t like that, lobby your congressman. That is your only option.”

Talk has been circulating for some time now about President Trump’s legal team, with experts commenting that it appears to be inexperienced and hardly a match for the vaunted band of legal “killers” that special counsel Robert Mueller has assembled for the Russia probe...Good white-collar defense lawyers can see into the future — and that skill is only built by having done it before, said Harvard Law School Professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor whose career has also included leading prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “Complex federal criminal investigations are their own world,” he said. You need to know how these cases unfold. You need to know strategically how they may develop and how decisions you make today can affect other parts of the case.” Such cases can stretch out for years so the long-range view is key, Whiting said. “Every day you’re making decisions that will have impact one year, two years, and three years down the line.”

The revelation this week that President Donald Trump's lead defense lawyer may have offered pardons to two key witnesses in the Russia probe raises significant questions. What was the motive behind the alleged offer? What was the response, if any? And most importantly: was the lawyer acting of his own accord? Or was it with the knowledge, and possibly at the direction of, the president?...Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, said it was "unimaginable" that Dowd would have acted without the president's knowledge. "First, this isn't just any client and any case Dowd was handling," Whiting said. "You're talking about defending the President of the United States, and there's going to be much more care of what you do on behalf of your client."

The Trump administration is expected to launch an effort in coming days to weaken greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy standards for automobiles, handing a victory to car manufacturers and giving them ammunition to potentially roll back industry standards worldwide...As a result, the automakers’ victory might come with unexpected headaches for them, said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former counsel to the Obama administration. For instance, if the rest of the world moves toward stricter rules anyway, the American market could find itself an industry laggard, ceding leadership in clean vehicle technology to markets like China or the European Union. “I don’t really know if the auto industry wants what this administration might be doing,” she said. “It might be like the dog that caught the car.”

...Boldin, Davis, and Jenkins were part of a group of players who shared personal reasons for their activism and outreach in a conversation with Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, Friday at Harvard Law School. The discussion was part of “Changing the Conversation to Change Criminal Justice,” a conference sponsored by the School’s Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising, the Fair Punishment Project, and the Players Coalition, a nonprofit co-founded by Boldin and Jenkins in the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests. Last year the group helped broker a deal in which the NFL agreed to provide close to $90 million to support community-focused initiatives.

A few weeks after Hurricane Maria swept Puerto Rico last September, Harvard Law School (HLS) student Natalie Trigo Reyes ’19 visited the island where she grew up, and found an unrecognizable landscape...Trigo Reyes led a group of 29 HLS students who traveled to Puerto Rico over spring break to lend a hand to local residents who are still struggling to obtain disaster relief aid. Puerto Rico is a U.S. self-governing territory and its inhabitants are American citizens, although they can’t vote in presidential elections or elect representatives to Congress. The HLS trip was spearheaded by Andrew Crespo ’08, assistant professor of law, and coordinated by the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, led by Lee Mestre...Thinlay Chukkii, LL.M. ’18, was part of the humanitarian brigade. She and 10 classmates worked on several houses damaged by the hurricane...The experience left a mark on Chukki and reinforced her desire to pursue a career in public interest law. Something similar happened to Kevin Ratana Patumwat, J.D. ’19, who was sent to Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second-largest city, to help residents file FEMA appeals. Patumwat also said he was touched by people’s generosity and grace...“I remember the national reaction to Hurricane Katrina,” said Crespo. “The whole country wanted to help. It felt that part of being American was wanting to help our fellow Americans who were struggling. With Hurricane Maria, it felt different. It felt like a struggle to get the country to realize that there were 3 million Americans without electricity or drinking water.”

In a speech Monday in Manchester, New Hampshire, President Donald Trump enthusiastically backed capital punishment as a tool to fight the opioid epidemic. “If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time,” he said. “And that toughness includes the death penalty.” Now, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is trying to put Trump’s call into practice. In one-page memo dated Tuesday, Sessions instructed U.S. attorneys nationwide to be more aggressive when prosecuting any drug-related crimes...”It’s unclear how much of this is a symbolic gesture or how much it will yield an infusion of resources and actual prosecutions,” Carol Steiker, a Harvard University law professor, told me. Death-penalty cases are arduous for prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. The prosecutions pass through far more procedural hurdles than other criminal cases, and if the jury hands down a death sentence, both sides immediately enter a lengthy appeals process.

A letter by Samuel Garcia `19. Young migrants, like Miguel Perez Jr., who are sent back to Mexico face much more danger than one could ever imagine. I am from South Texas, an area that has felt the tightening immigration restrictions due to a high immigrant population, and far too many of us know of someone who has been recently deported to Mexico. Manya Brachear Pashman’s article “Afghan war vet deported to Mexico is 'homeless and penniless,' his Chicago family says” notes just how hard life will be for Perez in Mexico, since he has spent so much time in the U.S., but it does not fully capture just how dangerous it has become for people like Perez to be in Mexico.

Mark Zuckerberg will be headed to Washington. No one knows precisely when or to whom, but he himself has said he would be “happy” to testify. That he has never been before Congress is one of those minor miracles that only technology companies seem capable of generating through their bulky “policy” (i.e. lobbying) teams and still considerable popularity... And finally, Adam Holland of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society wants to know if there is any world in which Facebook agrees that it should be regulated as a public utility. “Mr. Zuckerberg, as Facebook continues to grow and succeed and be used by ever more citizens of the world, can you imagine Facebook being or becoming so ubiquitous, so essential to daily life, that you would consider it appropriate for FB, and the information that it controls, to be regulated as a public utility/resource/basic human right? If so, what is that size/ubiquity, and if not, why not?”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If John Dowd discussed the possibility of a presidential pardon with lawyers for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort while Dowd was serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, it’s a big deal -- definitely for Dowd, and conceivably for Trump. The president has the inherent power to pardon anyone he wants. But doing so with a corrupt reason -- such as saving the president’s skin -- would be obstruction of justice.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. While acting as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd reportedly discussed the possibility of presidential pardons for Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort in separate conversations with their lawyers. Reports by the New York Times and Washington Post on Wednesday suggest that Dowd’s intent might have been to influence Flynn and Manafort’s decisions on whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigations, but that legal experts are divided on whether Dowd’s offers could constitute obstruction of justice.

As regional gerrymandering challenges draw an increasingly national focus, impeachment threats inspired by one such case drew condemnation from experts in constitutional law and judicial ethics. “In Putin’s Russia, this is completely normal,” Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig said in a phone interview. Nearly 5,000 miles west of Russia, the impeachment resolutions at issue were introduced Thursday in Pennsylvania by state Representative Cris Dush, who serves the 66th District of Indiana and Jefferson Counties.

A group of Harvard Law students and alumni are urging Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 to make a number of changes to the school’s Low Income Protection Plan, which helps graduates who go into public service and other low-paying legal careers repay their loans...LIPP aims to assist eligible students in repaying loans by asking students to repay a portion of their student loans based on their income. The Law School then pays the remaining amount. Around 700 graduates are currently enrolled in the program, according to Kenneth Lafler, the school’s Assistant Dean for Student Financial Services...“We are committed to making Harvard Law School more financially accessible and committed to making both front-end and back-end aid here, making it possible for students to pursue the careers that they want to pursue,” Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15 [`20], president of the Coalition to Improve LIPP, said in an interview Wednesday. Sara R. Fitzpatrick [`20], a first-year Law student who serves as policy director for the coalition, said it’s important that graduates from underprivileged backgrounds are able to pursue careers that serve people in their communities...Several student organizations, including the Law School’s student government, the Women’s Law Association, and the Black Law Students Association, signed onto the letter. Paavani Garg [`18], a third-year Law student and president of the Harvard Women’s Law Association, wrote in an emailed statement that changes to LIPP would advance gender equality...The Student Government for Harvard Law School also signed the letter. Amanda M. Lee [`18], president of the Student Government, wrote in an emailed statement that the organization voted “unanimously” to sign the letter in support of the policy changes.

An op-ed by Amanda Chan `18, Amanda Lee `18, and Adam Savitt `18. 3 Every law student has met a lawyer who cannot help but offers the advice, “Don’t go to law school.” The misery in the legal profession is seemingly ubiquitous. The mental health crisis facing modern lawyers has been reported so extensively, it barely needs repetition. Yet the causes have been woefully overlooked. Why hasn’t Harvard taken responsibility for its contribution to this professional malaise? Last year, we pushed Harvard Law School to begin an annual mental health survey to measure the welfare of the student body. We began writing law school-specific survey questions based on our experience as students and worked with university health researchers and administrators to publicize the survey.

A lawyer for President Trump broached the idea of Mr. Trump’s pardoning two of his former top advisers, Michael T. Flynn and Paul Manafort, with their lawyers last year, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. The discussions came as the special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, John Dowd, who resigned last week, was offering pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation...But even if a pardon were ultimately aimed at hindering an investigation, it might still pass legal muster, said Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and a professor at Harvard Law School. “There are few powers in the Constitution as absolute as the pardon power — it is exclusively the president’s and cannot be burdened by the courts or the legislature,” he said.

An op-ed by Sharon Block. Baseball has long been identified as America’s national pastime — the quintessential American game. It has often reflected our culture and society, from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier during the civil rights movement to rising immigrant participation in the game as our population becomes more diverse. Sadly, as the new baseball season starts, the sport now reflects a very negative trend — the growing inequality and outsize influence of powerful, moneyed corporate interests in our political system. In a provision buried on page 1,967 of the new law to fund the government that passed last week with bipartisan support, Congress rolled back the most basic workplace protections for Minor League Baseball players.