Media Mentions

As Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, defends his company's data practices this week before Congress, one of the nation's largest cable companies is asking federal lawmakers for a bill that would rein in social media platforms, search engines and other tech giants that have access to their users' personal data. The proposal by Charter Communications on Monday calls for requiring "greater privacy and data security protections" of companies such as Google and Facebook, whose Cambridge Analytica fiasco has inflamed a debate about Silicon Valley's handling of consumers' personal information...The disarray and tumult afflicting the tech industry is an opportunity for Internet providers to gain a bigger foothold with policymakers, according to Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor. "Charter is using the current kerfuffle over Facebook to divert any regulatory energy that might have been heading its way towards Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google," Crawford said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. The raid on the office of Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, the president’s latest tweet-complaints and related rant, and the White House press secretary's claim that the President believes he has the authority to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, have many people spun up about that possibility that Trump will soon fire Mueller, or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Trump critics warned yesterday that firing Rosenstein or Mueller would spark a “constitutional crisis.”...Are we really in or near a constitutional crisis, or even a real confrontation? Will Trump really fire Sessions or Rosenstein or Mueller this time? It sure seems from the news coverage in the last 24 hours that something momentous is about to happen. But might the Republican warnings dissuade the President from acting?

A federal judge in Colorado on Tuesday dismissed a case its plaintiffs hope will eventually bring more clarity to how members of the Electoral College should vote in presidential elections. And a dismissal is actually just what the plaintiffs wanted. They expect an appeal could bring their case before the nation’s highest court...The case will certainly be appealed, said Lawrence Lessig, a well-known national elections attorney based in Massachusetts who represents Colorado’s electoral college members...“Imagine if the state said every elector had to vote for a Democrat,” Lessig told The Colorado Independent. “Being an elector is to have the power to make a choice.” Williams says he was following state law, and also followed instructions from a state judge throughout the process when he told electors to vote for Clinton.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said Tuesday that the fiduciary rule remains a priority for the organization he leads, though he didn’t share an exact time frame for its release...Hal Scott, director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation and the Nomura Professor at Harvard Law School, noted that overall the market structure was sound, “but just needs to be adjusted.” He highlighted problems with market data, in which his committee recommended that the SEC require all self-regulatory organizations to publicly disclose revenues from proprietary data feeds and operating securities operating processors or SIPs, as well as performance data. Speed is a key metric for data consolidators, Scott said, and a “significantly slower SIP would not survive competitive pressure. This change also would level the playing field between those who rely on SIPs and those who use proprietary data feeds.”

As President Trump continued to fume on Tuesday about the Justice Department’s raids on the office and hotel room of his longtime personal lawyer, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made a provocative claim: The president, she said, believes he has the legal authority to fire Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation...Still, Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, said the previous Supreme Court statements did not arise in a context exactly like a situation in which Mr. Trump said he had the constitutional power to fire Mr. Mueller directly and then tried to do it. Mr. Goldsmith said it was unclear what would happen then. “I agree that the proper and most legally sound route would be to order Rosenstein to dismiss Mueller and then fire him if he doesn’t comply,” Mr. Goldsmith said.

Hong Kong’s position as a global financial heavyweight has long been secure. The city-state’s commitment to free market principles has seen it evolve from a mercantile shipping hub into a thriving, service-orientated economy. The adoption of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle in 1997 has allowed Hong Kong to retain its economic freedom while also acting as a gateway to the rapidly growing Chinese market...Aurelio Gurrea-Martínez, a fellow in Corporate Governance and Capital Markets at Harvard Law School, believes dual-class shares, while not necessarily harmful, are open to abuse. “Through the use of dual-class share structures, some shareholders (usually the company’s founder and its top executives) are able to pursue their vision and enjoy the full benefits of control without paying for this privilege,” Gurrea-Martínez explained. “They become what many authors call ‘controlling minority shareholders’. This means that not only will they run the company as they see fit (sometimes for their own interest or portfolio, and not for the interests of the shareholders as a whole), they will also enjoy the private benefits of control.”

...Billed as the first-ever Israel summit at Harvard, the event was held under tight security at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. It attracted more than 400 mostly undergraduate and graduate students from Harvard, as well as other Ivy League institutions and colleges in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Thousands more watched the summit on live stream...The summit boasted an eclectic cast of speakers, including Amar’e Stoudemire, the six-time NBA All-Star forward who played last year for the Hapoel Jerusalem team after retiring from the NBA; Israeli-born fashion mogul Elie Tahari; Harvard’s president emeritus and former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Lawrence Summers; and Ron Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations...Stoudemire’s talk was “the cherry on top of a great day,” said Daniel Egel-Weiss [`20], a student at Harvard Law School. Hearing Stoudemire speak about his Jewish cultural awakening was fascinating, he said, but the whole day was interesting. “It’s great to have an ambassador [for Israel] in social circles,” Egel-Weiss said.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry downplayed the likelihood that his department would declare a grid emergency and direct financial support to coal and nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions Corp. (FES), the competitive-generation arm of FirstEnergy Corp. On March 29, FES told Perry that its money-losing coal and nuclear power plants face closure — amounting to a grid emergency — and that the Department of Energy should use its authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to keep them online...If DOE were to issue a 202(c) order, "people would be immediately filing challenges at the D.C. Circuit," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. Such a legal move, which is almost assured from other power generators, natural gas interests and large electricity consumers, among others, would prevent any meaningful "emergency" action to help the FES plants.

An op-ed by fellow Mark Erlich... For the past 40 years, employers have pursued a strategy of shedding obligations to their employees as part of a broader outlook that views labor as one more risky liability to move off a balance sheet. For some, this has meant the purposeful misclassification of employees as independent contractors, a tactic adopted by Beldi’s disreputable construction contractors as well as more high-profile and celebrated firms such as FedEx and Uber. A 2015 General Accounting Office report suggests that “alternative work arrangements”—an expansive phrase that includes part-time employees, independent contractors, free-lancers, temp agency workers, on-call, and contract workers—now constitute more than 40 percent of total reported employment. And the trend is only increasing.

When President Trump upon taking office refused to completely sever his ties to his international business interests, he set in motion events that would inevitably lead to violation(s) of the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution and gross conflicts of interest...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explains: Trump’s refusal to sever his all-entangling business ties throughout the world when he became president was and continues to be both a clear violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and a profound threat to our nation’s security, which depends on having a president whose only allegiance is to the United States and its people, including of course our Constitution and laws. The way lawyers from the Trump Organization and its often opaque network of nested corporations blatantly intervened in U.S.-Panama relations last month was a classic example of what we get when we elect a president with no respect for the separation of his own and his family’s economic interests from the conduct of America’s foreign policy.

As President Donald Trump has gone on the offensive against China in an attempt to push it to abandon trade practices many companies and governments say are unfair, Beijing has sought to portray the US moves as an attack on the international trading system as a whole...Experts says it's a bizarre state of affairs, given China's own track record on trade..."China is seeking to cast itself as the defender of a rules-based system, but its own past behavior raises doubts about just how committed China is to following the spirit, if not letter, of the law," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School.

In an extraordinary series of events, the FBI executed a no-knock raid on President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel...Let us not understate how extraordinary a development this is. The standard of proof required to raid any attorney’s office is exceptionally high. To authorize a raid on the president’s lawyer’s office, a federal judge or magistrate must have seen highly credible evidence of serious crimes and/or evidence Cohen was hiding or destroying evidence, according to legal experts. “The FBI raid was the result of an ongoing criminal investigation *not* by Mueller but by the interim US Attorney personally interviewed and selected by Trump himself, pursuant to a warrant issued under strict standards by a federal judge, subject to approval by the head of the Criminal Division,” said constitutional scholar Larry Tribe.

An op-ed by Alison Omens and Sharon Block. The United States has fallen behind on equal pay. According to JUST Capital’s 2017 Rankings, 78 of the 875 largest publicly-traded U.S. companies have conducted pay equity analyses, while only 54 have established a policy, as well as targets, for diversity and equal opportunity – that’s 9% and 6% of these corporations, respectively. When it comes to pay equity, corporations in the U.S. are not beholden to the same rules as those in other nations, and are lagging when it comes to equal pay for women.

Students who attended for-profit colleges filed more than 98 percent of the requests for student loan forgiveness alleging fraud by their schools, according to an analysis of Education Department data. The study by The Century Foundation represents the most thorough analysis to date of the nearly 100,000 loan forgiveness claims known as borrower defense received by the agency over the past two decades and paints an alarming picture of the state of for-profit higher education in America...“The for-profit college industry scams students across the country and taxpayers and that’s why the industry, including industry insiders who are now staffing the Department of Education, is now fighting so hard against rules that would clarify the borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, a legal services clinic that represents defrauded students. “If for-profit schools don’t want to be responsible for borrower defense claims and reimbursing taxpayers, then they could simply not cheat their students.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Here’s a prediction that is sure to annoy everyone: Now that he’s national security adviser, John Bolton will become more moderate. Some extremists moderate when they take public office because of bureaucratic pushback from the middle. That’s not what I expect for Bolton. He’s made a career of fighting the bureaucracy from the right. I predict Bolton will moderate for the opposite reason: In this stage of President Donald Trump’s administration, there’s almost no one left to push back at Bolton from the center. Without such opposition, Bolton is going to realize that he’s the grown-up in the room, and the closest thing to a realist anywhere in Trump’s foreign policy circles.

...When news of the proposed settlement in the McDonald’s joint employment case broke last week, some folks might have assumed we accidentally dropped a zero from the $170,000 that Mickey D’s is offering a group of workers to resolve their unfair labor practice complaints. Surely, the chance to resolve one of the biggest cases in the labor and employment space without risking a ruling that McDonald’s is a joint employer with its franchisees of franchise restaurant workers could fetch a bigger price tag? “It sounds like they’re getting off awfully cheap,” former NLRB member Sharon Block (D) told me of the settlement. In fact, McDonald’s may wind up resolving the case without paying anything to the 19 or so workers who said they were retaliated against for participating in Fight for $15 demonstrations.

An op-ed by Hayley Evans `19. Based on trends in advancing robotics technology, many experts believe autonomous—and even lethal autonomous—robots are an inevitable and imminent development. Although the capabilities of future technologies remain uncertain because of the complexity of the task to be executed, and the environment in which that technology operates, it is fairly clear that exhibiting the human characteristics necessary to comply with the international humanitarian legal principles of necessity and proportionality—like a split-second judgment call or concern for humanity—represents a formidable challenge to fully autonomous weapons.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), one of DC’s most influential liberal think tanks with deep ties to the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign, has just proposed a big idea for raising Americans’ wages. A new paper by CAP’s David Madland calls for the creation of national wage boards, tasked with setting minimum wage and benefit standards for specific industries. Fast food companies, say, would send representatives to meet with union officials and other worker representatives, and hammer out a deal that ensures workers get a fair shake. Same goes for nurses, or retail workers, or home health aides, or accountants...“Sectoral bargaining is certainly getting more attention in legal academic and labor law policy debates,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and former practicing labor lawyer, says. “The way I would think about it is that there’s an existential panic about what will happen to the labor movement. That’s not new, it’s just getting worse. … If we need unions for economic and political equality as I think we do, we have to do something to stop that downward spiral.”

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. The news about Facebook is not getting better. The company has sharply increased the number of users whose data was improperly shared with an outside company connected to President Trump’s campaign, to possibly 87 million. Amid an outcry, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, is expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. There is a dog-eared playbook for industry titans called before lawmakers: Apologize repeatedly, be humble, keep it boring. Mr. Zuckerberg can and should toss that playbook.

The four nor’easters in March brought down trees and closed schools and nearly derailed a much anticipated, historic contest between the Norfolk Prison Colony Debating Society and the Harvard College Debating Union. But, after a storm cancellation, the debate at last took place at the end of the month, at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison an hour outside Boston. The prison, which was designed in the nineteen-twenties by a Harvard alumnus and modelled on a college campus, started a debate team in 1933. Malcolm X, who entered the prison in 1948, was a member. (“Once my feet got wet,” he said, “I was gone on debating.”) Its first international debate was held in 1951, against Oxford University; Norfolk, charged with arguing against free health care, won. Laurence Tribe debated at Norfolk in 1961, when he was a Harvard junior and the national intercollegiate champion. “The guys we debated that day were serving either life sentences or the rough equivalent,” Tribe recalled recently. “They gave us a good fight.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Unnamed sources in a Washington Post story last week claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller told President Trump’s lawyers that “he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice.” The Post added that “Mueller’s investigators have indicated to the president’s legal team that they are considering writing reports on their findings in stages—with the first report focused on the obstruction issue.” The second and later report, according to the “president’s allies,” would concern “the special counsel’s findings on Russia’s interference.” Assuming the Post story accurately captures Mueller’s intentions, it raises two questions: First, is Mueller authorized to prepare an interim report on obstruction?; and second, under what circumstances can the report be sent to Congress or made public? The answers are not obvious.