Media Mentions

A federal judge has ruled that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' delay of a key student borrower protection rule was improper and unlawful. "This is such an important win for student borrowers and anyone who cares about a government that operates under the rule of law," says Toby Merrill, of Harvard Law School's Project On Predatory Student Lending.

American gun violence is “a human rights crisis” and the US government’s refusal to pass gun control laws represents a violation of its citizens’ right to life, according to a new report by Amnesty International...While framing America’s gun violence in human rights terms is a symbolic move, “I don’t think it’s symbolic in the empty sense,” said Gerald Neuman, the co-director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. “For some people who are already concerned about the number of deaths that are occurring, having it framed as a human rights issue may help them understand the issue differently – that there are rights on both sides to be considered.”

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. When Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was announced, on July 9th, his alma mater, Yale Law School, released a statement quoting several liberal faculty members’ praise of his intellect, accomplishments, and character. This move was excoriated in an open letter, signed by hundreds of the school’s students, alumni, and teachers, which asked, “Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?” The letter called Kavanaugh’s nomination “an emergency—for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country” and exhorted the school to have “moral courage” and withhold its support. “Perhaps Judge Kavanaugh will be less likely to hire your favorite students,” the letter said. “But people will die if he is confirmed.”...But the conflict over Kavanaugh is not just between liberals and conservatives but also between those emphasizing norms of professional excellence and nonpartisanship and those stressing policy outcomes.

If you want to get into Harvard Law School, you should probably spend some time working in the real world before you apply to hit the books in Cambridge. Law School Assistant Dean for Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer Kristi L. Jobson ’06 said in an interview that the school is placing a greater emphasis on applicants' work history than it did in the past. In recent years, the vast majority of successful Law School applicants have boasted at least one year of work experience. Eighty-two percent of this year's incoming first-year class worked for at least 12 months prior to starting school, Jobson said. “One thing that we continue to be interested in, for your reference, is work experience,” said Jobson, who graduated from the Law School in 2012. “When I was a 1L, my class was almost 60 percent straight from college. It's almost a flip of what it used to be."

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll talk with law professor Lawrence Lessig, who has spent much of his career trying to fix our broken political system. His new book, America, Compromised, is based on a series of lectures he has given about how US institutions no longer serve the purposes for which they were designed. They now serve the wealthy and corporations, which work to help the rich get richer. What's happening isn't illegal. It's systemic. He writes, "There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are." What can we do to change the system?

Hal Scott, director of the program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School, and Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, discuss what triggered the financial crisis in 2008 and if we are safe from another.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As fears mount over President Trump’s mental stability, more lawmakers and public-spirited citizens are turning in desperation to the 25th Amendment as a quick exit. But they should resist the temptation to pull that trigger. Because of the amendment’s complexity and many ambiguities, activating it to sideline Trump could unleash a dangerously destabilizing power struggle over the presidency rather than decisively ousting Trump. Early in Trump’s term, scholars (including me) explained that the amendment was designed for presidents who unexpectedly become mentally or physically incapacitated while in office, not those temperamentally unfit from the very outset. We believed that Trump fell only in the latter category. Yet now we must ask: Should that verdict be changed by the frightening episodes recounted in tell-all books, an anonymous op-ed, and a flood of disturbing press clippings?

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Last month, Reuters reported that T-Mobile was asking the small operators that resell T-Mobile's excess network capacity to write letters and opinion pieces in support of the company's proposed $36 billion merger with Sprint. T-Mobile's request wasn't unusual. Trumping up support for deals that aren't actually in the public interest is common practice in the swamp we know as U.S. telecom policy. When Comcast was working on its merger with NBCU at the beginning of this decade, supportive comments poured into the FCC from companies across the country who had an interest in keeping Comcast happy. By helpfully suggesting talking points to resellers—or MVNOs, for Mobile Virtual Network Operators—including Mint Mobile, Republic Wireless, and Ting, all of which lease access from the Big Four network operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) in order to sell phone and data services to customers, T-Mobile is following the usual "air of inevitability" merger playbook.

An op-ed by Daniel Levine-Spound `19. On July 30th, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul announced his support for Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Although he had initially voiced concerns regarding Kavanaugh’s “record on warrantless bulk collection of data and how that might apply to very important privacy cases,” Paul ultimately backed President Trump’s choice. Whatever one makes of Rand Paul’s waffling on privacy issues, his support for Kavanaugh speaks to an arguably deeper betrayal of his principles: opposition to the United States’ ever-expanding and seemingly interminable “War on Terror.” For few judges have shown themselves less willing to impose limits on American war-making, or more flexible in deferring to the Executive Branch on issues related to armed conflict, than Kavanaugh.

Half a century after Americans began fighting hunger with monthly food stamps, the nation’s physicians and policymakers are focusing more than ever on what’s on each person’s plate. In the 21st century, food is seen as medicine — and a tool to cut health care costs...“Food is medicine is an idea whose day has arrived,” said Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, one of the experts who testified in January at the launch of the congressional Food is Medicine Working Group, part of the House Hunger Caucus.

National security adviser John Bolton has put the International Criminal Court (ICC) in his crosshairs. In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society on Monday, Bolton pledged the United States would never cooperate with what he called an “illegitimate” court...“There’s almost no doubt that the judges will authorize an investigation of the Taliban, the Afghan government and the U.S. for torture,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former ICC prosecutor. “The threshold for getting permission to investigate is quite low.”

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. It is tempting to read or listen to John Bolton’s speech on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and think, we’ve seen this movie before and know its ending. And in many ways, that’s true. In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, Bolton “was honored” (his words) to lead a similar effort to undermine and even destroy the court. That honor did not last. The Bush administration soon retreated from this hostile stance, recognizing that many of the United States’ most important allies were members of the court (of the 29 members of NATO, only the U.S. and Turkey are not) and that the court could serve U.S. interests and policy goals. A major pivot occurred in 2005 when the U.S. assented to the U.N. Security Council referral of Sudan to the court to address the atrocities in Darfur. Obama officials then built on the Bush administration’s revised approach and adopted a policy of constructive engagement with the court, while still not taking any active steps to join.

Democrats are running like it’s 2006 again. That strategy may help them win races in November, but it isn’t risk-free. The revival of the minority party’s anti-lobbying, anti-big-donor messaging, known as the “culture of corruption” mantra from a dozen years ago, speaks to disheartened voters. It also allows Democrats to highlight the persistent ethical and legal troubles, including indictments and guilty verdicts, among those in the Trump orbit...Vilifying lobbyists amounts to “cheap talk,” says Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It.”...Lessig, an advocate of using taxpayer dollars to finance elections, says that risk exists. But the measure of overhaul proposals, he says, should not be whether it’s easy to pass but whether it would have any effect. “Democrats have been trying to do reform on the cheap,” he said. “What really disappoints me is when you see these supposed leaders, even progressives, take the easy way out.”

Harvard Law hopefuls, beware — the number of applicants to the Law School spiked by more than 30 percent this past year, and experts say it’s a trend that’s likely to continue. Harvard Law received 7,578 applications for the Class of 2021, compared to 5,755 for the Class of 2020, representing a 32 percent bump. That increase is significantly higher than the rise in law school applications nationwide, which clocked in at 8.3 percent...Harvard Law School Assistant Dean for Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer Kristi L. Jobson...said she thinks Harvard’s increase has little to do with the national increase. “We don't attribute the 32 percent increase that we saw to a parallel to the national increase because it was much higher,” Jobson said. “We think that our office has engaged in a systemic strategy in knocking down barriers to legal education.” She cited a few tactics in particular: Harvard recently eliminated seat deposits, included video interviews as part of the application process, accepted the GRE as a standardized test, and created a Junior Deferral Program. Still, Jobson believes that the spike is fundamentally due to excitement for the school itself.

Daniel Tarullo, Harvard Law School visiting professor and former Federal Reserve governor, discusses his experience during the financial crisis 10 years ago and the regulatory efforts since to keep it from happening again.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The decision of David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, to rescind Steve Bannon’s invitation to speak at the magazine’s festival next month has created a storm of protest. Those who abhor Remnick’s decision point to similar controversies on university campuses, where a pervasive question has been whether to host people whose statements or actions seem abhorrent to many people. Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center.

A landmark decision by the International Criminal Court begins an obstacle course for prosecutors seeking to put Myanmar military commanders on trial for the purge of ethnic Rohingya, while opening the door to other potential cases involving mass exodus, such as Syria...“It’s significant for the Rohingya case because it’s at least a narrow path for some accountability for the crimes committed,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor who previously oversaw investigations for the court.

Deanne Loonin, an advocate for low-income student loan borrowers and an attorney with the Harvard Law School Project on Predatory Student Lending, has a suggestion for the U.S. Congress in response to the federal student loan debt crisis. Policy experts discuss federal student loan defaults. “Discharge it” – all federal loans, not just those in default – in a comprehensive cancellation process “and start all over again” with a system that works better for students and the government, she said during an event Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where two research reports were unveiled that examined the national default crisis.

Reopening mercury pollution limits for power plants—over the objections of utilities that have already spent billions to comply—lays groundwork for the EPA to limit its own ability to require more stringent emissions standards in the future....“I think there is a war that current management at EPA is waging against benefits, and we have seen that war being staged at several battlefronts,” Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program who served as the EPA’s associate assistant administrator for climate and senior counsel in the agency’s air office during the Obama administration.

The National Coalition for Men, a men’s rights organization based in Southern California, has formed the beginnings of an all-volunteer law firm seeking to change legal systems that it claims are discriminatory against men on the state, federal, and even international level. While NCFM’s firm is not the first firm to cater to men’s issues, it may be the first to have grown directly from the men’s rights movement... Asked about the possibility of taking a gender discrimination like that to the United Nations’ judicial arm (aka the International Court of Justice), Harvard Law Professor Gerald Neuman said individuals cannot take cases to the ICJ—only states can. “If that is what they say, they sound very confused,” Neuman said.

In a surprise ruling, judges at the International Criminal Court said Thursday that they could exercise jurisdiction to investigate the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from their homes in Myanmar as a crime against humanity....“This ruling is enormously significant since, until now, this is the only route towards a measure of accountability,” said Alex Whiting, professor of international law at Harvard University. “There will be great challenges, but a challenge in itself is not a reason not to act.”