Media Mentions

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Sometimes the young are wiser than their elders. Days after the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas slaughter stunned the world with the 800-city #MarchForOurLives and their brilliantly effective call for laws to stem the tide of gun violence, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens handed the gun lobby a rhetorical howitzer. For years, that lobby’s most effective way to shoot down proposed firearms regulations has been to insist, falsely, that any new prohibition would lead to the eventual ban of all firearms. It is easy for those who revile our lax gun laws to lose sight of how many Americans cherish the right of law-abiding citizens to keep guns at home for self-defense or hunting.

As President Donald Trump shakes up his legal team in preparation for a likely interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, the president and his attorneys have a number of different options for how they could approach the face-to-face session — but history shows that if they are too defensive, they might become embroiled in a lengthy court battle...But there is another method Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said Trump could use. "The Supreme Court held in the Nixon Tapes Case that executive privilege cannot overcome a grand jury subpoena," he told Business Insider. "So Trump would have to answer every question or be held in contempt — unless he takes the Fifth Amendment."

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19 and Ricco Miguel Garcia. My grandparents, like a lot of Hispanics who were around decades ago, remember the Texas Rangers as a group that was overtly discriminatory and at times mortally violent towards Hispanics. Although their mission was to keep Texans safe, the Texas Rangers often times were implicated in the brutal killings of innocent Hispanic Texans across the state in the early 1900s.

Going about your daily business—shopping online, buying a home, getting married, using a search engine, liking a Facebook page, registering to vote—leaves an enormous paper trail, and data brokers are scooping it up. Data brokers are entities that collect information about consumers, and then sell that data (or analytic scores, or classifications made based on that data) to other data brokers, companies, and/or individuals...Griffin Boyce, a system administrator at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, received several hundred dollars in a class action lawsuit settlement from LexisNexis, a corporation that provides business research and risk management services, after trying and failing to fix false information in its records...So, opting out is best done early and often. “Waiting until you’re targeted by creeps is a bad idea. There are lots of proactive steps people can take to protect themselves, and it only takes two hours a year to maintain,” said Boyce

As the White House and Congress descend deeper into turmoil, the US Supreme Court is showing signs of becoming as politically fractured as the rest of Washington. It may likewise be shifting more to the right...Unlike in past eras when individual justices were not so predictable based on party, the current five appointed by Republican presidents generally vote along conservative lines, and the four named by Democratic presidents vote on the liberal side. The incendiary atmosphere of the Obama and Trump eras and the increasingly polarized judicial confirmation process may be creating a more polarized Supreme Court. "There are no more stealth justices, no more surprises," said Harvard University law professor Richard Fallon. "That means the person (a president chooses) is going to have a strong disposition to line up on one side or another" accelerating conflict on the court.

If large law firms doing away with mandatory arbitration agreements for employees becomes a trend, plaintiffs may have the #MeToo movement and Twitter to thank. On March 24, Ian Samuel, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, posted a tweet about Munger Tolles & Olson making summer associates sign “a very unusual agreement,” which he described as “plainly calculated” to shield the law firm from harassment claims...Labor lawyers say mandatory arbitration agreements for law firm employees are in fact common. What’s unusual is that a day after Samuel’s series of tweets—rewtweeted around 600 times, “plus many more quote tweets,” Samuel told the ABA Journal—Munger Tolles in its own tweet announced that it would no longer require any employees, including summer associates, to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. “In this case, we were wrong, and we are fixing it,” read the March 25 tweet, which was reported by the American Lawyer.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s understandable that Justice John Paul Stevens would call for repeal of the Second Amendment, as he did Tuesday in an op-ed article in the New York Times, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of it to protect some gun sales. I have great respect for Justice Stevens, and what’s more I agree with him that the Heller case was wrongly decided by the court in 2008. But it would actually be a terrible idea to attempt a repeal of the Second Amendment just because the Supreme Court got it wrong. Experience shows that the Constitution is weakened if we respond to bad Supreme Court precedent by trying to amend it right away.

Dozens of iPhone owners are taking Apple Inc. to court over the company’s disclosure that it slowed down old phones to preserve battery life, in what could become one of the biggest legal challenges to the smartphone since its 2007 debut. Some five dozen iPhone customers have filed at least 59 separate lawsuits since December accusing Apple of slowing their phones to spur people to buy new iPhones, according to court records...Apple customers could find it difficult to win their case. Fraudulent-concealment claims, such as in the iPhone instance, are often hard to prove because courts typically want to preserve companies’ freedom to choose what to say, as long as it isn’t actively misleading, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School.

President Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of new tariffs last week is a slap at the World Trade Organization, a frequent target of his attacks. Allies are urging Mr. Trump to fix the 164-country body, not marginalize it. The WTO’s future is particularly uncertain because the Trump administration’s approach simultaneously circumvents and relies on it...“WTO law is woefully inadequate to deal with some, but not necessarily all, of the problematic trade practices arising out of China,” said Harvard law professor Mark Wu, a trade expert. As a result, he said, the U.S. and its allies will still seek recourse on some issues through the WTO. But gaps in international law and insufficient remedies available mean Washington feels more pressure to take further steps, either with allies or on its own.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now in congressional crosshairs — with his company’s stock plunging and throngs of users ditching his social media service — amid the growing privacy scandal from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. And the question of what to do with Zuckerberg’s unregulated internet behemoth could even bring about rare bipartisan action on Capitol Hill...Thousands of people who once shared family details, news links and political views on Facebook have pledged on Twitter to scrub it from their lives. Facebook stock plunged yesterday, closing down nearly 5 percent. “Reasonable people should be concerned that there appears to be very little protection,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “Vast amounts of data are being collected and they seem to be moving between companies with very little protection.”

Tens of thousands of people in Massachusetts participated in the March for Our Lives on Saturday, rallying on the Boston Common against gun violence and for stronger gun control laws. The protesters were energized and determined, but we've also been here before...Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor of history and law at Harvard University who studies social movements. She agrees that this march feels like it could lead to real change. She says timing is critical, citing examples like the Civil Rights Movement, and protests of the Vietnam War, which had power in part because of their timing. This movement, she notes, is happening in the run-up to the midterm elections. "The midterm elections give people the opportunity to express their disdain for what some believe is political indifference to the problem of violence by handguns and by assault weapons," Brown-Nagin says.

President Donald Trump is having a tough time finding new lawyers to represent him in the ongoing Russia investigation, and it may be because of his own doing. The turmoil started when Trump lost his top defense attorney last week..."Lawyers who might ordinarily [represent him] are unwilling because they see that Trump is unprepared to listen to the advice of his lawyers," said Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School. He added that Trump has "shown that he can turn on his staff and lawyers at any moment. It is hard to have confidence that you could represent Trump effectively under those circumstances."

Munger, Tolles & Olson will no longer require any of its employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. The Los Angeles-based litigation firm announced the new policy in a Tweet on Sunday after facing criticism by Harvard Law School lecturer Ian Samuel, who tweeted pictures of the firm’s arbitration agreement with incoming summer associates. “I think this is the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. Munger ought to be ashamed of themselves. And I will be making an extremely large fuss about this,” tweeted Samuel, who also co-hosts the podcast First Mondays, about the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when we're offline. It buys data about us from others. And it can infer even more: our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other personality traits -- even if we didn't take the personality test that Cambridge Analytica developed.

...Eric Greitens lost his requests to dismiss his indictment, hold his trial before a judge without a jury and disqualify a Harvard law professor from working on the team that’s prosecuting him...Greitens, a Republican and a Rhodes scholar, objected to the St. Louis city prosecutor hiring Professor Ronald Sullivan because of a Missouri law that makes it a crime for the same person to simultaneously serve as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. Sullivan previously represented the family of Michael Brown, the black teenager whose killing by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 set off nationwide protests. The professor currently represents a trader facing a criminal securities fraud trial in Connecticut in April. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, the lead prosecutor, argued that that the conflict-of-interest law would only apply if the professor was doing defense work in Missouri. State Judge Rex Burlison ruled against Greitens without explanation.

U.S. EPA’s “secret science” plan could reduce the health benefits that come along with controlling carbon emissions, scrambling previous calculations that gave weight to saving lives and avoiding heart attacks...Joseph Goffman, a former EPA official and current executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program, said Pruitt’s plan is “very much targeted” at specific studies that had been important in setting particulate matter standards. “Essentially, you have a constituency that don’t like certain results, and so they are sort of back-engineering to find a way to defeat the results,” Goffman said.

It was just after the news had broken: a black man had been shot by a police officer under questionable circumstances, the kind of event that has made headlines often enough in the past few years that Devin McCourty can’t remember exactly which one it was. What he does remember is his brother Jason’s reaction. “Man, I’m tired of just seeing everybody post on social media,” Jason said. That was two years ago. Now, Devin cites that conversation as one of the experiences that has led him to the forefront of a growing movement of NFL players flexing their muscles as activists. On Friday came a clear sign of progress. The day after a group including McCourty and former Patriot Troy Brown spent hours at the State House lobbying for a set of changes to the Massachusetts criminal justice system, House and Senate lawmakers filed a comprehensive reform bill that included several of the provisions they’d pushed for. The biggest: raising the age at which a child can be prosecuted criminally from 7 to 12. “I think it’s kind of reassuring what we’re doing,” McCourty said Friday, in between sessions of a social justice summit at Harvard Law School.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. Home is a place where you can be entirely yourself — unshaven, feet up, unworried, slow heartbeat. I live in Concord, Massachusetts, where the American Revolution started. My house, which was built in 1763, played a role — munitions were held here on that fateful day, April 19, 1775, when a British Army force marched on the town to capture the hidden cache of arms. The house feels as if it has a bright, free, determined, revolutionary spirit.

Harper Lee was a literary celebrity. Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriting superstar. And now the two — by proxy — are locked in a battle over who should shape the content in Mr. Sorkin’s stage adaptation of Ms. Lee’s famous novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Ms. Lee, before she died, agreed to allow Mr. Sorkin to write the adaptation. But there was one key condition: His play could not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel, nor alter its characters.” And therein lies the problem. Ms. Lee is now dead, so it’s impossible to know what she would make of Mr. Sorkin’s script. But her longtime lawyer has read a draft, and is unhappy. Earlier this month, Ms. Lee’s estate sued Mr. Sorkin’s producer over the project, alleging that Atticus Finch is too mean, Scout and Jem are too old, and Calpurnia is too opinionated, among other issues...Rebecca Tushnet: My own sense, having read the complaint, is that it includes a mix of valid concerns about anachronism and character arcs with highly contestable interpretations, ones we have no real way to know whether Lee would have shared.

An interview by Laura Dickinson and Alex Whiting. In November, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, sought authorization from a panel of ICC judges to open an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan in relation to the armed conflict there. This request is of particular significance to the United States. That’s because although the bulk of the activity that is the subject of the request concerns the Taliban, along with some alleged conduct by Afghanistan government officials, the request also encompasses alleged crimes committed by U.S. military personnel and CIA officials.

The controversy over protests during the national anthem at NFL games last season helped propel issues of racial inequality and social injustice to the forefront and gave athletes a stronger voice to bring about change, current and former players said Friday. The players, who spoke at a Harvard Law School summit on criminal justice reform, said they capitalized on the attention surrounding the protests to highlight issues they care about, like mass incarceration. Now, they're using their platform to talk to lawmakers, police chiefs and prosecutors across the country about injustices they see in the communities where they grew up.