Media Mentions

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is defending a segment featuring the word “retarded” that airs on the streaming service saying that such language falls within the bounds of “creative expression.”...For his part, [Laurence] Tribe said he was unsatisfied by Hastings’ reply. “I do believe that media entities like Netflix have a higher moral (even if not legal) obligation to consider the psychic and cultural consequences of their choices than the one Reed Hastings accepts in his invocation of ‘creative expression,'” Tribe told Disability Scoop.

A second woman has come forward and accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in an incident she says occurred during Kavnaugh's freshman year at Yale. The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear testimony from Kavanaugh's first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, on Thursday, followed by testimony from Kavanaugh himself. It is unclear how these new allegations will affect the scheduled testimony or confirmation vote. Guests: Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

...“America is at a crossroads,” third-year Law School student and president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association Lauren D. Williams told the crowd. “It can turn a wilfully ignorant blind eye, as it has done countless times before, or it can stand by these survivors and ensure that there is a fair investigation and a fair judiciary hearing.”...Second-year Law School student Sejal Singh, who helped organize the walkout on behalf of anti-harassment student advocacy group the Pipeline Parity Project, said in an interview after the event that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would have a far-reaching impact on American teenagers. “We should think about not just the message that his presence on the Supreme Court would send to the American people, not just to women, but to boys, who see that there’s no consequences for this kind of behavior,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The revelation on Friday that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, considered wearing a wire to record President Donald Trump and discussed trying to get the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him is more than merely astonishing. It has consequences.

...Roughly 5 percent of U.S. coal capacity is scheduled to retire this year, while Energy Department figures show that domestic coal consumption in the power sector slumped to a three-decade low in 2017 (Climatewire, March 15). "They're basically trying to stop the bleeding," said Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative. "But they still can't stop their ultimate death."

Upperclassmen, alumni, and faculty travelled to and from the podium of Memorial Church Sunday afternoon for the College's first Latinx Convocation themed “Mis Raices, Mi Communidad.”...Dianisbeth M. Acquie ’16, a second-year Law School student and Lowell House resident tutor, said she was involved with the Latinx community during her time as undergraduate, including as vice president of Fuerza Latina. In her speech, she told first-year students that it was “remarkably brave” to leave their homes and chase that “beautiful dream” at Harvard. “There is a shirt I’ve seen before, and it reads, ‘I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams.’ And it’s true. I am. You are.”

Richard Lazarus has advised hundreds of clerkship hopefuls during his seven years on the faculty at Harvard Law School, and the 15 years he spent at Georgetown University Law Center before that. Never once has he broached the subject of appearance with a student in regards to landing the job. That’s not entirely true. There was the time many years ago when he asked a female student, after the fact, whether she had removed her facial piercings for an interview with a federal appellate judge. “I recall she looked at me quizzically and exclaimed something like, ‘Of course! I wanted to get the clerkship!’” Lazarus said. “Which she in fact did secure and she has since enjoyed a wonderfully successful career, first at the U.S. Department of Justice and later as a tenured law professor.” Lazarus and others said that urging law students to look a certain way to appeal to a hiring judge—as prominent Yale Law School professor Amy Chua is said to have done with female students seeking clerkships with U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—isn’t standard practice.

Far from the Supreme Court debates raging in Washington, four Harvard Law School students are taking a stand. "There should be a real, full, and fair investigation before Judge Kavanaugh teaches here," Sejal Singh [`20], a Harvard Law Student, said Saturday. According to Harvard's website, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is scheduled to teach a course this winter entitled, " The Supreme Court since 2005." "I think Harvard Law School does a responsibility to investigate given that Judge Kavanaugh is on their payroll," Vail Kohnert-Yount [`20]said Saturday.

Much debate over the effectiveness of the 2017 tax overhaul has centered on corporate buybacks, and as November elections approach, that debate is sure to heat up....But a big chunk of repurchases among the S&P 500 is offset by new equity—$3.3 trillion worth between 2007 and 2016, versus $4.2 trillion in buybacks over the same period, according to a Sept. 4 paper from Harvard Law School professor Jesse M. Fried and Harvard Business School professor Charles C. Y. Wang. The S&P 500 may spend $1 trillion on repurchases in 2018, Fried told Bloomberg Tax, “but they’re probably going to have $500 billion to $600 billion in equity issuances.” The focus on the S&P 500, he said, ignores the many young, growing businesses that employ a much larger slice of the workforce and tend to issue far more shares than they’re paying out.

...This week, the Kavanaugh matter is a stark symbol of a social and cultural issue that roiled the country and created the #MeToo movement long before the nominee’s name was known outside legal circles...‘’Turning the Supreme Court into an instrument of polarized politics,’’ Martha Minow, the former dean of the Harvard Law School and now the occupant of a prestigious endowed chair there, said in an interview, ‘’is bad for the country, bad for the rule of law and bad for everyone.’’...‘’The political and the personal have become entwined precisely at the nexus of the #MeToo movement with issues like sex equality in the workplace and in matters of reproduction and abortion,’’ said Laurence Tribe, a onetime Supreme Court clerk who is a prominent Harvard Law expert in constitutional law. The result, he said, was ‘’the first occasion in our history in which the long-term legal stakes of a particular nominee’s confirmation and the issues of character and attitude presented by an explosive personal accusation profoundly overlap.’’

Undergoing an FBI background check is standard operating procedure for a number of federal positions, including nominees for the Supreme Court. It’s a review that’s meant to probe a nominee’s qualifications as well as possible security risks the person could pose to the United States. ... Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe highlighted the possibility of blackmail in Kavanaugh’s case as all the more reason why the FBI should conduct a full review of the sexual assault allegations against him.

Four Harvard Law School students are calling for the school to investigate the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh - or cancel the course that he is scheduled to teach as a lecturer at the Ivy League school this winter. The students made their case in the Harvard Law Record, an independent newspaper affiliated with the law school.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Without the context that the findings of an F.B.I. investigation could provide, the Senate hearing planned for Monday pitting Brett Kavanaugh against Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexual assault, runs the risk of being seen as little more than Kabuki theater, or, more pointedly, a gesture of appeasement to the #MeToo movement. In other words, we gave her a hearing, now we’re ready to vote.

Facebook is doing all of this election work out of a feeling of obligation to its user base. But what if it had a legal obligation to act in the best interests of its users? That’s the argument Jonathan Zittrain makes today in the Harvard Business Review, and it makes for thoughtful companion reading to the day’s war-room analyses. Zittrain’s piece explores the question of whether social networks should become what Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin calls “information fiduciaries.”

An article by Jonathan Zittrain. I used to be largely indifferent to claims about the use of private data for targeted advertising, even as I worried about privacy more generally. How much of an intrusion was it, really, for a merchant to hit me with a banner ad for dog food instead of cat food, since it had reason to believe I owned a dog? And any users who were sensitive about their personal information could just click on a menu and simply opt out of that kind of tracking. But times have changed.

A drama is playing out in Boston federal court before a respected judge that could prove to be a legal “Watergate,” one that could reshape class action practice. Combining elements that are both sordid and comic, this litigation has already shown that the leading experts on legal ethics disagree significantly over what must be disclosed to the court approving a class action settlement...the Labaton firm hired Harvard Law Professor William Rubenstein, a class action expert, who opined that fee allocation agreements do not need to be included in this notice to the class...Relying on the language of Rule 23(h), which cross references Rule 54(d)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which in turn states in subclause (d)(2)(B)(iv) that a motion for fees must “disclose, if the court so orders, the terms of any agreement about fees for the services for which the claim is made,” Professor Rubenstein argued that disclosure of fee allocation agreements need not be disclosed—absent a court order. He testified: “I’m saying Rule 23 says that the burden’s on the Court.”

It's not every presidential administration in which news that the former campaign chairman has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, gets knocked off the front page in a matter of hours. But the Trump team is ever the exception. And today, all anyone can talk about is his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, and the woman who has publicly accused him of sexual assault. Jim Braude was joined by Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law, and Martha Coakley, former state Attorney General, now a partner at Foley Hoag, and Jim Rappaport, former chair of the Mass. GOP.

With Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh set to face a high-stakes Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Monday, Harvard Law School students are organizing to stand in solidarity with Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who has accused the judge of sexually assaulting her three decades ago...Sejal Singh, a second-year Law student and member of the Pipeline Parity Project, said in an interview Wednesday that the group decided to stand with Ford — and against Kavanaugh’s confirmation — on Monday because of the nominee's record and the impact he could have on multiple areas of the law, should he be confirmed to the Supreme Court. “We are concerned about the impact Kavanaugh, based on his record and based on these credible allegations from Dr. Ford, would have on the law, around civil rights, sexual harassment, women’s place in public life, and a whole host of other things,” Singh said. Third-year Law student and member of the Pipeline Parity Project Yaacov “Jake” Meiseles urged American citizens not to underestimate the impact of Kavanaugh's successful nomination to the Court.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. During hearings earlier this month on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, asked him, “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assaults of a sexual nature?” Kavanaugh answered no. Days later, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, told the Washington Post that Kavanaugh had drunkenly attempted to rape her more than thirty-five years ago, at a party in a Maryland home, when she was fifteen and he was seventeen. She recalls that he pinned her to a bed, groped and attacked her, tried to remove her clothes, and put his hand over her mouth as she tried to scream. Ford has passed a lie-detector test, and her therapist has records of her describing the event in 2012. The Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed this week’s planned confirmation vote for Kavanaugh and scheduled a hearing for next Monday to consider the allegations.

...“I would be very troubled if someone were about to go to jail for something like this that happened 40 years ago,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who has written extensively in defense of women’s rights in sexual harassment and sexual assault. Still, she said, “With respect to the Supreme Court you’re dealing with an elite position which is a privilege to be confirmed for. And arguably the standards are much higher.” Judge Gertner noted that she had raised two teenagers — “teenage boys are nuts,” she said — and she has seen how allegations, even when found to be false, can unfairly tarnish young men. Last year, she and three other Harvard Law School professors urged the Department of Education to reassess Obama-era guidance to colleges on dealing with allegations of sexual assault, arguing they had encouraged colleges to adopt definitions of misconduct that are “seriously overbroad.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The scheduled testimony by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, responding to Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault in the early 1980s, raises a central question: With respect to that accusation, who has the burden of proof? In the coming weeks, the answer to that question might turn out to be decisive to Kavanaugh’s prospects for confirmation. Invoking the standard used in criminal law, some people have said that Judge Kavanaugh should be presumed innocent. Others say that senators should avoid any presumption and ask instead: Who is more credible? Who is the most likely to be telling the truth? It’s not so simple.