Media Mentions

Sexual harassment “was not considered anything you could do something about — that the law could help you do something about — until a book was written by a then-young woman named Kitty MacKinnon,” the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at the Sundance Film Festival in January...The Supreme Court agreed with Catharine A. MacKinnon. In its first case involving sexual harassment in 1986, with Ms. MacKinnon as co-counsel, the court ruled unanimously that sexual harassment is sex discrimination. For over 40 years, Ms. MacKinnon, 71, has been a pioneer and lightning rod for sex equality. Along with her work on sexual harassment, she has argued, more controversially, that pornography and prostitution constitute sexual abuse of women in the context of social inequality. Ms. MacKinnon now teaches law at the University of Michigan and Harvard. (In 1990, I studied with her, in a class called “Sex Equality,” when she was a visiting professor at Yale Law School.) Her most recent book, “Butterfly Politics,” surveys her four decades of activism.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. The Trump administration on Thursday accused Russia of infiltrating by digital means “energy and other critical infrastructure sectors” in the United States. “We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” Eric Chien, a security-technology director at Symantec, said to Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger in the New York Times. “From what we can see, they were there,” Chien added. “They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation.”

President Trump has made rolling back regulations a top priority for his administration, and U.S. EPA has been leading that charge. But the agency faces formidable challenges in federal courts. Of 25 deregulatory actions taken by EPA in the Trump era, six have been challenged in court, according to an analysis by E&E News...EPA's deregulatory actions have taken a variety of forms, said Jody Freeman, founding director of Harvard Law School's energy and environmental law program, who served as a climate adviser for President Obama. In some cases, EPA has tried to suspend or delay compliance deadlines. In other cases, the agency has delayed rules themselves or missed deadlines in statutes, she said. "I think there's a concerted effort here to really throw everything possible at the Obama administration's environmental protection agenda," Freeman said. "That means trying every trick in the book."

Most U.S. Supreme Court cases are born the old-fashioned way: an aggrieved party goes to a lawyer to appeal a lower court decision, and the lawyer petitions the court. But the high-profile case of South Dakota v. Wayfair, involving state taxation of online retail sales, unfolded in a very different way. Lawyers sought out the clients—states, in this case—who were willing to lose below so they could potentially win before the Supreme Court...But is it improper or even unusual for states to pass contrarian laws aimed at forcing the Supreme Court to confront and rethink its own precedents? “It happens all the time,” said former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, now a Harvard Law School lecturer who advises state attorneys general. Tierney did not want to comment on the Wayfair case specifically, but said that in general, it is not uncommon for states to pass laws they know would be tested at the Supreme Court. State laws on abortion rights and immigration, for example, have been passed in defiance of court precedents, Tierney noted.

The Department of Education has begun notifying some former Corinthian Colleges students that it will forgive only one-half or less of their federal student loans, even though the students were defrauded by the now-defunct schools, the Associated Press has learned. The action is part of the Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ push to ease regulations governing for-profit schools. DeVos says she wants to protect taxpayers’ money, but critics say that the Trump administration has deep ties to for-profit colleges and is putting industry interests ahead of students...Alec Harris, Dieffenbacher’s attorney with the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University said: “There is no justification for making Sarah and others pay for having been cheated. The Department’s actions are incoherent and vindictive.”

On February 28th, two weeks after a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump said “it doesn’t make sense” for teenagers to be allowed to buy a semi-automatic weapon when federal law bans handgun sales to people under 21...On March 12th he tweeted, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that there is “not much political support (to put it mildly)” for raising the age to buy rifles. Mr Trump says he prefers to wait and see how the courts handle challenges to age limits in the states. He appears to be thinking of the conflict that is brewing in Florida, where the NRA filed a lawsuit on March 9th claiming that the Sunshine State’s new age restrictions violate the constitutional rights of 18-20-year-olds wishing to buy semi-automatic weapons...According to Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, the NRA “should and probably will lose”. No court has found people aged 18 to 20 to be a class worthy of special constitutional protection.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In the American internet access world, public assets are privatized all the time. Sometimes this happens when private companies are handed direct payments in the form of subsidies: public money, amounting to at least $5 billion a year, which is showered on companies to incentivize them to provide access in places where they feel it is too expensive to build. Sometimes this happens when companies are handed low-cost or no-cost access rights to infrastructure by state legislatures. And sometimes it happens in the form of broad public/private partnerships for "smart city" services. But the federal government doesn’t set high enough standards for the quality and price of the services the public subsidizes—and we're certainly no good at requiring competition.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. To people in the rest of the U.S., California can seem like a foreign country. From Donald Trump’s perspective, the feeling may not be purely cultural. California is pursuing a range of policies designed to thwart the president’s initiatives. Those include blocking offshore drilling that Trump wants to enable; preventing the softening of Obama-era miles-per-gallon standards; and contradicting Trump’s immigration policies with sanctuary laws (a topic I wrote about earlier this week).

The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) released a report this month chronicling the experiences of borrowers who had their EITC seized to pay back a student loan. Some told NCLC they were relying on the refund to improve their housing situation, others said they planned to use it to fix the car they need to get to their job and still others worried that losing the EITC could push them into homelessness...Perry’s story is similar to some of what Toby Merrill hears representing borrowers who have been misled by for-profit colleges as part of her work with the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a program at Harvard Law School that Merrill directs. Her clients often have their EITC seized over a student loan that Merrill argues the government doesn’t have a legal right to collect because they were made under fraudulent circumstances. “The Department of Education frequently seizes Earned Income Tax Credits from definitionally low-income borrowers whose loans aren’t even enforceable,” she said.

With speakers ranging from an environmental activist to a former Secretary of the U.S. Navy, the Advanced Leadership Initiative’s (ALI) Climate Change Deep Dive presented a multi-faceted look at the causes, consequences, and potential solutions for climate change. ALI Faculty Co-Chair Forest Reinhardt of Harvard Business School (HBS) led the 2018 Deep Dive, a two-day conference bringing together speakers from around Harvard University to share their collective knowledge with ALI Fellows...The first day of the 2018 Climate Change Deep Dive focused on scientific aspects of climate change and several options for mitigation. Speakers on the first day in­cluded Professor Peter Huybers of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Professor Robert Stavins of the Harvard Kennedy School, Joseph Goffman of the Harvard Law School, and Professors Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Joseph Lassiter, and Forest Reinhard of HBS.

By Fox News's own admission, a retracted report in May about the deceased Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was bad journalism. Nevertheless, the network is well-positioned to fend off a lawsuit brought by Rich's family that alleges “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” according to legal experts...The network has not offered a detailed explanation of how the faulty news report made it online and on the air. But John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he “would expect that most courts would be ... reluctant to impose liability on journalists — even highly irresponsible journalists — out of concern to protect freedom of the press.”

Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein has been named this year’s winner of the Holberg Prize, one of the largest international awards given to an outstanding researcher in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, is being given the prize for his wide-ranging, original, prolific, and influential research...“The main goal has been to deepen the foundations of democratic theory for the modern era, and to understand in practical terms how democracies might succeed in helping to make people’s lives better — and longer.”

President Donald Trump’s decree to tag steel and aluminum imports with hefty tariffs came with caveats aimed at providing assurances to U.S. allies, but opponents of the duties have been left with far more questions than answers in the wake of the policy’s tumultuous rollout. The core of Trump’s surprise announcement from last week remains intact — the U.S. will impose a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent levy on aluminum — but the fine print of the documents implementing those duties has sent the trade world into a frenzy as it tries to figure out how to navigate the orders...“How will that process work?” Harvard law professor Mark Wu said. “How that process works or plays out has implications for whether other countries choose to challenge this measure at the [World Trade Organization], what the timing of that would be and what the scope of such a challenge would be.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Did you hear? Taylor Swift is doing a new album, consisting of her favorite Katy Perry songs — and despite their lengthy feud, Perry herself will be performing on the album! OK, that’s not true. But a new study finds that by every measure, false rumors are more likely to spread than true ones. For those who believe in the marketplace of ideas and democratic self-government, that’s a big problem, raising an obvious question: What, if anything, are we going to do about it?

America will turn its drug-addicted eyes to Cleveland over the next year or two as the city becomes the capital of drug overdose law..."The prominence of discretion, the opportunity for creative problem solving, and the lack of narrow constraints on the judge or on the parties are precisely what causes some to be nervous and some to be optimistic," [Michael] Moffitt continued. "But regardless of one's initial reaction to the conversations that are beginning in Ohio, we should all be curious, because we are all likely to be affected by what emerges — or doesn't emerge."

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. What legal options are open to the United Kingdom in its response to the alleged Russian assassination attempt in Salisbury? A separate piece at Just Security will discuss whether the Salisbury assassination attempt triggers the United Kingdom’s right of self-defense to use force in response. That question has garnered the most attention of legal experts. There is another strong option to consider: referring the Russian agents, potentially including President Vladimir Putin himself, to the International Criminal Court.

Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor known for bringing behavioral science to bear on public policy (not to mention for writing a best-seller about “Star Wars”), has won Norway’s Holberg Prize, which is awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, law or theology...In a statement, Mr. Sunstein summed up his work as addressing “how to promote enduring constitutional ideals — freedom, dignity, equality, self-government, the rule of law — under contemporary circumstances, which include large bureaucracies that sometimes promote, and sometimes threaten, those ideals.”

An op-ed by Samantha Power. Two days after the 2016 presidential election, I held a town hall at the United States Mission to the United Nations. American diplomats were in shock; the president-elect had pledged to undo much of what we had helped achieve internationally...Many of them, along with some of our most capable diplomats, have since left government. Ridiculed as “Obama holdovers” and unable to defend policies that depart so markedly from American interests, our diplomatic corps has been hollowed out. If Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., wins confirmation as Rex Tillerson’s replacement as secretary of state, fixing this would become his responsibility.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump’s first visit as president to the hostile territory of California highlights his struggle with the state. Most recently that battle has been over the sanctuary laws that the state Legislature has passed and that Trump’s lawyers have challenged in court. Yet it’s worth recalling that California has a long history of acting like a republic unto itself on immigration — and that, not so long ago, the state was more hostile to immigrants than the federal government, not less.

Last week, Stormy Daniels filed a lawsuit alleging that a non-disclosure agreement she signed prior to the election about an alleged affair she had with President Donald Trump is invalid. Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, claimed that because Trump hadn't signed his name, the NDA didn't carry legal weight. At the same time, Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000, allegedly to stay quiet about the details of their alleged relationship – which the White House has denied...Thomas Frampton, a fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School who's previously written about the issue, tells Rolling Stone that it looks like there's reason to believe Trump's lawyer may have violated F.E.C. rules with the payout – but that hardly means it will lead to anything, given the political climate. "There's good reason to believe the reported payment may have violated federal election law," he says.

An article by David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, 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. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed.