Media Mentions

The Minor League Baseball season kicked off on April 5 with more than 50 games across the country. Many players — in addition to facing the opposing teams — face the challenge of living on a low fixed salary that doesn’t include pay for spring training or offseason work. Their contract also doesn’t provide for extra pay when they work more than 40 hours per week, as they often do during the season — with a packed schedule of personal training, team practice, game play and travel...Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and an Obama administration appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, said that because many minor league players are paid such a low salary — in some cases working out to less than minimum wage for all the hours worked — their lawsuit should proceed. “We are talking about paying people $7.25 per hour, and time-and-a half when they work over forty hours. These are just bedrock principles of minimum standards,” Block said. And she said that not paying players during spring training flies in the face of other labor law precedent.

As ethical questions threaten the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, President Trump has defended him with a persuasive conservative argument: Mr. Pruitt is doing a great job at what he was hired to do, roll back regulations...The result, they say, is that the rollbacks, intended to fulfill one of the president’s central campaign pledges, may ultimately be undercut or reversed. “In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. And they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”

...Critics say the pervasive problems in Togo’s medical system — where equipment frequently malfunctions, electricity and water supplies are unreliable and new doctors earn less than taxi drivers — are the result of government corruption and ineptitude. But the current unrest in Togo extends far beyond the nation’s troubled health care system...I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on health law and bioethics, said medical ethicists generally agree that the potential benefits of a doctors’ strike can justifiably outweigh the potential risk to patients, if the dispute is about the quality of patient care (as opposed to, for example, pensions or vacation time). A recent peer-reviewed study of doctor’s strikes around the world found no evidence that they lead to an increase in patient mortality, he said. “When you agree to become a doctor, you do not agree to work under any possible condition with whatever quality of care that might mean for patients,” Professor Cohen said.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s spiraling ethics scandals and perilous job status were big news this week, but he also made headlines with his latest assault on President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy...But Pruitt did not kill or roll back Obama’s strict fuel-efficiency standards; he merely announced his intention to launch a process that could eventually weaken them. In fact, Pruitt has not yet killed or rolled back any significant regulations that were in place when President Donald Trump took office...“The vexing thing is that when you’re deal with public health and the climate, if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind, and Pruitt is adamantly refusing to move forward,” says Joe Goffman, a top official in the Obama EPA who now runs Harvard Law School’s environmental law program. “He isn’t changing the status quo as much as people think, but the status quo is a problem.”

An op-ed by fellow Terri Gerstein. Dozens of news anchors robotically intoned “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy,” after reciting what turned out to be a script by Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner and operator of 193 local TV stations. Dan Rather called it Orwellian, and many have asked in amazement: why would local journalists across the nation allow themselves to be used in such a demeaning way? The answer is clear to me, as a lawyer with decades handling cases involving low-wage workers: people need jobs. But the anchors may have an even more specific concern: an employment contract that doesn’t just bind but entraps them.

There are some law schools that produce more top lawyers then others. The Hollywood Reporter collected their list of the Top 10 Entertainment Law Schools of 2018. The lists looks at the Power Lawyers in the Entertainment industry and their alma maters. Here are the top nine law schools in this category...#2. Harvard Law School produces a lot of top talent. This year they had 15 alums make the list. The prestigious law school has a number of programs helping their students gain valuable experience in Entertainment Law. There is the Entertainment Law Clinic, Recording Artists Project, and Harassment Assault Law-Student Team, which was started three years ago to address the difficulty sexual abuse victims face fighting for their rights.

As Americans increasingly turn to social media as their primary source for news and information, the dangers posed by the phenomenon of “fake news” are growing...In a recent study described in the journal Science, lead authors Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and an associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and more than a dozen co-authors argue that a multidisciplinary effort is needed to understand better how the internet spreads content and how readers process the news and information they consume. Such broad-based efforts are necessary, the authors said, “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”...In addition to Baum and Lazer, the paper was co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Should coffee come with a cancer warning? As a matter of policy, the answer seems obvious: Of course not. As a matter of law, it’s much more complicated, at least in California. A tentative judicial ruling in Los Angeles County last week suggests that when people go to the local coffee place, their morning ritual is going to be accompanied by a jolt of fear. It could potentially turn into a fiasco, I think, and it tells us something important about how well-intentioned laws can go badly wrong.

Over a single weekend in March, an unprecedented disaster hit fertility clinics—twice. First came the news that the University Hospitals Fertility Center in Ohio, lost more than 4,000 eggs and embryos in a malfunctioning cryogenic tank. Then, in an unrelated incident, Pacific Fertility Center in California reported that liquid-nitrogen levels had fallen too low in a tank holding “several thousand” eggs and embryos, affecting an unconfirmed number. In-vitro fertilization can be a draining process—financially, physically, emotionally. And for some families, these embryos had been their last chance to have biological children. Dozens of lawsuits have since been filed; parents and would-be parents spoke of the children they will never have, of the siblings their children will never know. At times, they spoke not just of “embryos” but of “babies.”...The filing cites a 1985 Ohio Supreme Court case, Werling v. Sandy, that held a viable fetus is a person. But I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that case may not be the most relevant one here. A viable fetus is one that can survive outside of a womb. And in Egan v. Smith, an Ohio Court of Appeals court held in 1993 that wrongful death could not be brought for a nonviable fetus. This case is more likely to apply to embryos. “It’s a real stretch,” he says, “but lawyers are supposed to give every argument they can.”

..."Trauma informed" approaches toward investigating campus assault complaints are changing the way investigators interpret inconsistent reports or jumbled timelines. Where lapses in memory or chronological glitches once were seen as holes in an account, trauma-informed practices encourage investigators to start with an open mind. Proponents of the practices are quick to point out that that open mind should extend to the accused, as well...Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School who has challenged policies she thinks are unfair to accused students, agrees that trauma-informed approaches tip the balance further against accused students. "I’m concerned that some of the ‘trauma informed’ instructions tell adjudicators to treat what are typically considered signs of a witness not being credible as instead signs of the witness having been traumatized by sexual assault, and this risks feeding into a generally biased fact-finding system," Bartholet wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

If Friday afternoons are the best time to shove off embattled advisers, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt might want to start clearing out his desk today...Meanwhile, a new appointee is ensnared in his own troubling ethical issues. CNBC reports: John Bolton, who is days away from becoming President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, has been meeting with White House attorneys about possible conflicts of interest, CNBC has learned...Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe points to a series of campaigns in which Bolton’s PACs played a significant role. “Bolton’s superPAC appears to have spent a very substantial sum of money retaining the services of Cambridge Analytica to help Republicans get elected in some 2014 campaigns like that of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, paying that data firm over $1 million for various kinds of ‘research.'”

All over America, people have been demanding real bail reform including but not limited to ending the practice of cash bail. So what is cash bail? Cash bail is when a judge decides to assign a cash amount as the price for an accused defendant to be released from jail on their own recognizance or with conditions...As more and more jurisdictions across the country have passed bail reform legislation, the bail industry is starting to push back emphasizing a counter-narrative built entirely using the politics of fear...But, let’s not mince words here, the entire argument is BS, the VAST majority of defendants stuck in jail because of cash bail are accused of minor crimes as Crystal Yang, an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School explained in her recent New York University Law Review article: “On any given day, the United States detains almost half a million individuals before trial, with over 60% of the U.S. jail population comprised of individuals who have not yet been convicted."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A professor violates the terms of service to go onto a platform or a website. Once there, he unleashes bots that crawl all over and scrape the data viewable there. You might think this is a nightmare privacy scenario akin to the one in which the researcher Aleksandr Kogan scraped Facebook Inc. data that he later sold to Cambridge Analytica. And you might think the professor’s actions should be prosecuted. But a federal district court in Washington has just held that it’s a professor’s First Amendment right to break a site’s rules to collect data available there -- and that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act can’t criminalize the conduct.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Poland badly needs a way to get rid of its new “memory law” that makes it a crime for anyone anywhere in the world to ascribe Holocaust atrocities to the Polish state or nation. A solution may be emerging: Poland’s constitutional tribunal could strike down the law as a violation of freedom of expression under the country’s constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. That result would kill two birds with one stone. It would allow the right-wing PiS (“Law and Justice”) government to save face while escaping the global criticism it’s gotten as a result of the law.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The Nixon Administration saw it coming. In a stunning January 1974 report, the Nixon White House Cable Committee foretold that the new telecom platform known as cable would, eventually, be a monopoly service wherever it was offered...Nixon's plan fell victim to the lobbying efforts of the cable industry—powerful then, much more powerful now—on Capitol Hill. Today, the Cable Committee's predictions have come true: Both the cable and wireless industries, the transport networks on which everyone else rely, are fully mature, vertically integrated, and unruffled by competition. And they're planning to erect separate kingdoms.

The National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel is standing firm on a series of proposals to restructure the agency starting next year even as concern within the NLRB about the plans is said to have reached a boiling point...Stakeholders on the left continue to believe the general counsel’s reliance on the budget and expected appropriations as a central justification—as in his latest letter—is disingenuous. “The president’s budget came out after Congress had reached agreements on spending caps that are completely at odds with it,” Sharon Block, another Democrat former board member, told Bloomberg Law. Block, who is now at Harvard Law School, said the expectation that Congress will adhere to the White House budget next year “is not a serious idea.”

The Trump administration is proudly axing U.S. EPA's high-profile climate rules, but climate adaptation work is quietly chugging along at the agency. The agency's adaptation work hasn't gotten much public attention since the Trump administration moved in...But EPA's climate adaptation efforts are continuing under Trump, even if they don't have the staffing and the prominence they had under the Obama administration. Some adaptation proponents are hopeful that the work can survive budget cuts, because it can appeal even to those who question humans' impact on climate change or costly policies to curb emissions. Leading the effort at EPA is Joel Scheraga, a career staffer for 31 years...His past work on adaptation likely helped prepare him to work effectively within an administration that questions humans' role in climate change, said Joseph Goffman, a former senior EPA official who worked with Scheraga during the Obama administration. Goffman is now executive director of Harvard University's Environmental Law Program. "[Scheraga] had an uncanny ability to engage with a full spectrum of public officials," said Goffman. "He is honestly one of my favorite people."

It was a snowy day, and as usual some Harvard Law School students were working in the library. But they weren’t studying, and they weren’t on campus. They were in the Cambridge Public Library, helping local residents do their taxes...From Feb. 9 to April 14, the student-run organization Harvard TaxHelp is leading the University’s branch of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at the Cambridge library. VITA is a program initiated by the Internal Revenue Service that offers assistance to those who make $54,000 or less annually, and those with limited English-speaking skills. The program is popular and has spread by word of mouth, so some clients may find themselves waiting awhile. “We wish we could do more,” said Edward Grais [`18], a volunteer tax preparer who is a student at the Law School...Harvard TaxHelp has more than two dozen student members. In one five-hour session, eight members can help as many as 30 clients. There are more than 40 VITA locations offering similar services within a 10-mile radius of Cambridge.

The most important revelation in a Washington Post report out Tuesday night is not that the special counsel Robert Mueller told President Donald Trump's lawyers he isn't a criminal target of the Russia investigation. Rather, it's that Mueller is preparing a report about Trump's actions in office and potential obstruction of justice. Mueller is tasked with investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 US election, and a significant thread in the inquiry is whether the president sought to obstruct justice when he fired James Comey as FBI director last year...Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, said he found it "striking" that "Mueller seems to be preparing the report with an expectation that it will eventually become public." He added: "Once the investigation is completed, I think it will be very difficult to keep Mueller's conclusions secret."

From a distance of 15 years and more than 3,000 miles, relatives of people killed by Bolivian security forces in 2003 have had their first taste of justice. A federal court civil jury in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Tuesday found former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his defense minister responsible for extrajudicial killings during a period of civil unrest, and awarded the plaintiffs $10 million in compensatory damages...Over the past decade, dozens of HLS students have worked on the case, under the supervision of clinical professors Susan Farbstein, J.D. ’04, and Tyler Giannini. Students have drafted briefs, traveled to Bolivia on fact-finding missions, and prepared for oral arguments, all in hopes of bringing the suit to trial. Farbstein and Giannini, who co-direct the International Human Rights Clinic, hailed the verdict, Giannini calling it “a clear signal that the U.S. is not a safe harbor for individuals who commit violent abuses and, just as importantly, it sends a message that no one is above the law.” “This is a major win for our clients, who have fought so long and so hard to get justice for their loved ones,” said Farbstein.

For decades, Latin American strongmen have had an escape route when their violent regimes are forced out of power: Stashing millions in ill-gotten gains in Florida beachfront property and hiding out in the tropical sunshine. But those days may finally be ending thanks to a landmark jury verdict in Fort Lauderdale yesterday. A federal jury found that two former Bolivian leaders were responsible for a bloody government crackdown in 2003 known as "Black October" and awarded $10 million to the families of indigenous peaceful protesters their soldiers killed..."It's a historic verdict because it holds the former president and defense minister to account, and it shows the most powerful people are not above the law in the United States," says Tyler Giannini, co-director of the Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, which helped bring the lawsuit in South Florida.