Media Mentions

...The WTO is the center of the global trading system. Made up of and governed by member nations, the WTO administers the network of international trade rules currently in place. It serves as a place to negotiate changes to existing agreements and, when issues come up, for member countries to mediate any disputes...There's also fear that other countries could choose to retaliate unilaterally against the United States, outside the aegis of the WTO. That could undermine faith in the entire global trading system. "It would weaken the institution's legitimacy if everyone seeks to end run the WTO rules," said Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School.

Federal lawsuits filed simultaneously in Texas and three other states are seeking to end the system that awards every electoral vote to the winning presidential candidate in each state. The lawsuits argue that the winner-take-all system violates voting rights by discarding ballots cast in support of losing candidates in the four states, particularly Democrats in the GOP strongholds of Texas and South Carolina, and Republicans in Democratic California and Massachusetts...It’s not just Lone Star Democrats — “everyone in Texas is being ignored, because Texas just doesn’t matter to the presidential election,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University law professor who was a leading organizer of the legal effort.

Big multinationals are paying significantly lower tax rates than before the 2008 financial crisis, according to Financial Times analysis showing that a decade of government efforts to cut deficits and reform taxes has left the corporate world largely unscathed. Companies’ effective tax rates — the proportion of profits that they expect to pay, as stated in their accounts — have fallen 9 per cent (two percentage points) since the financial crisis. This is in spite of a concerted political push to tackle aggressive avoidance...“There has been a lot of action and gestures that are very visible but the reality is different. Rate cuts and patent boxes [tax breaks for intellectual property] have been the dominant forces on corporate tax — and that reflects the continued dynamics of tax competition,” said Mihir Desai, professor of finance and law at Harvard university. “Call it a great irony or hypocrisy, but it’s one of the two.”

A shady meeting in Seychelles between a Trump associate and a Russian businessman is emerging as a focus in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — and raising questions about whether one participant lied to Congress about it. Erik Prince, a Trump booster who is the founder of private security firm Blackwater, met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian wealth fund manager with ties to President Vladimir Putin on January 11, 2017, in the Seychelles, an island chain off the coast of East Africa...Mueller, in the investigation so far, has charged others (former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos) with lying to federal investigators — not with lying to Congress. But the special counsel could use this as a chance to advance his case, and potentially win cooperation, says Alex Whiting, a professor of law at Harvard University. “I would not predict it,” Whiting added, “But it’s possible that that would happen.”

A former solicitor for the U.S. Interior Department sought to set the record straight on public lands Wednesday, disputing Western activists’ views that U.S. government ownership amounts to an unfair land grab and reminding listeners that much of the land was the federal government’s from the beginning...The event, in Harvard’s Northwest Laboratory, was sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and introduced by its director, Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering. It featured a discussion by environmental law expert Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, and Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School...Lazarus also discussed the lawsuits by environmental activists that Trump’s actions have prompted. Each side has good arguments, he said, but none that are clear winners.

“His voice is still in my head,” Justice Elena Kagan told the audience on Tuesday when asked how her former boss, Justice Thurgood Marshall, had affected her life. Kagan, along with three other former Marshall clerks, described a justice who demanded much from his clerks, but gave his time and knowledge generously in return. They also remarked on the peculiarity of working for, as one panelist put it, “not just a regular Supreme Court justice, but a living legend.” In addition to Kagan, the event, which was hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society, featured Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who also moderated the panel...During deliberations over a case, Marshall would tease and joke with his clerks. Kennedy once told Marshall that if he ruled the way he was intending, he would contradict one of his own earlier decisions. In response, Marshall asked Kennedy, “Do I have to be a damned fool all my life?”

At the height of the Great Depression, Congress created a program to help American businesses ease the pain of crippling tariffs. That program, which allows the designation of special geographic areas known as "foreign trade zones," is still in place today. Cities, states and companies — which began looking more to the zones several years ago when Donald Trump launched his campaign for the White House — are now sure to step up their use of FTZs as a way to lessen the impact of the president's newly ordered tariffs, experts told NBC News...Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in international trade law, agreed. "I would expect the use of them to increase as a result of the shift in government policy, trade and otherwise … whether that's by way of making better or greater use of existing FTZs or applying for new ones," Wu said.

This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news. Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write...The authors of the Science essay—who include Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official, and Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research—argue that avoiding the term distorts the issue. Fake news refers to a distinct phenomenon with a specific name, they say, and we should just use that name (fake news) to talk about that problem (fake news)...In an email, [Laurence] Tribe responded: “I do my best to avoid retweeting or relying in any way on dubiously sourced material and assume that, with experience, I’m coming closer to my own ideal. But no source is infallible, and anyone who pretends to reach that goal is guilty of self-deception or worse.”

President Donald Trump's legal team is considering proposing a deal to the special counsel Robert Mueller, which would allow him to interview their client in exchange for agreeing to wrap up the Trump-related thread of the Russia investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday..."He may agree to tell the Trump team what will be the areas of questioning, but that's about it," said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former federal prosecutor. "The premise of this approach by Trump's lawyers seems to be that they have bargaining leverage because Mueller wants Trump's testimony. But it's more likely the other way around, and Mueller knows it."

The contract Stormy Daniels signed just before the 2016 election with Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to keep her mouth shut about a tryst with the candidate is now available for lawyers and bystanders to study. Now, in the wake of Weinstein, #MeToo and Donald Trump, anecdotal evidence suggests that Daniels is not alone in abandoning the nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Women are more inclined to bust out of agreements that offered them cash in exchange for silence about sexual activity, abuse or harassment...Legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who conceived of sexual harassment as sex discrimination and actively litigates and advises cases, said NDAs can serve a positive purpose for survivors. “Without survivors agreeing to what defendants call ‘peace,’ i.e. defendants’ reputations not being subject to imminent critique in the mainstream media, companies and schools have no incentive to settle,” she said in an email.

In 2002, President George W. Bush slapped steep tariffs on steel imports, warning about the collapse of the U.S. steel industry, then lifted them 21 months later to avoid a trade war with the European Union and Japan. Sixteen years later, President Trump is imposing steel tariffs of his own — but this time, the most powerful potential trade war foe is China...China's domestic demand for steel is falling as its economy slows, and that excess steel is disrupting the world market, Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard, tells Axios. "China has to do something [in response to Trump's tariffs] just to signal its own resolve," Wu says. But they likely won't retaliate with the full brunt of their capability, with China content to let the West fight it out among themselves, he says.

In 2005, Jaime Mann was cited for several traffic violations in Craighead County — not having insurance, not wearing a seatbelt, and hazardous driving. She was charged about $500. She paid some of it, but then she started racking up fees and fines for the money and community service hours she owed...Mann was caught up in a system that has now come under scrutiny. Last year, two Craighead County judges opted to grant amnesty to many probationers, and that prompted the company to sue the county for lost income...According to Harvard Law School fellow Chiraag Baains, the private probation business model presents a conflict of interest. The companies communicate directly with judges about probationers’ progress and have influence. “For example, the company may decide, 'We’re not getting paid here. We want this person to spend some time in jail and maybe they’ll work harder to pay us,'" said Bains.

Trade associations opposed to President Donald Trump’s tariffs are exploring whether to try to block the tariffs order in court, using as a template the successful efforts to challenge the president’s travel ban...“One possible argument that an industry association might raise would be that the president has exceeded the bounds of what’s permissible under the congressional statute,” says Mark Wu, a trade expert at Harvard Law School. But given the careful way the president’s tariff proclamation was worded to refer to national security, he says, “it would be difficult for such an argument to prevail in court.”

Revelations this week that President Donald Trump spoke to key witnesses in the Russia investigation about matters they discussed with the special counsel Robert Mueller's team has legal experts baffled. They say it may open Trump up to potentially serious risks that could contribute to a criminal case against him...Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a longtime former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC and Boston, said it's possible Trump has been talking to witnesses in the investigation all along. "That wouldn't surprise me," he said, "because he is obviously consumed by the investigation and is completely undisciplined when it comes to following rules and basic norms."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Office of Special Counsel, the federal ethics watchdog, has found that President Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act last year by endorsing Republican candidate Roy Moore and opposing Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race. Conway did arguably break the rules. But the provision of the law that she broke seems at least borderline unconstitutional as applied to her. The circumstances of the case show why the First Amendment should be interpreted to protect a federal employee who is talking politics in a public forum.

...Nudges — tiny changes that have surprisingly large effects on how we act — offer policymakers a way to gently push us toward doing the right thing: Automatically sign up drivers as organ donors, or enroll employees in the company retirement plan, unless they opt out. Put the fruit at eye level and hide the cake and candy somewhere inconspicuous. These nudges work because real-world humans don't make decisions like coldly rational Mr. Spocks, but like flawed, idiosyncratic Captain Kirks. Nudges are essentially ways to harness our less-than-rational behaviors to help ourselves, or those around us...The idea first came to public view a decade ago through the best-selling book Nudge, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein...“The biggest change is the sheer explosion of initiatives, from private and public sectors alike,” says Sunstein, of Harvard University.

Here’s a disturbing fact to consider in 2018, the year women supposedly began to topple the patriarchy: Gun owners in the United States, a majority of whom are men, have better constitutional rights than women. Gun owners have the Second Amendment, in place since the 18th century. The U.S. is one of only three countries that offer constitutional protection to gun owners. Women, meanwhile, have been fighting for an equal rights amendment for decades. That’s because the Constitution does not actually grant women equal rights under the law, setting the country apart from 131 other nations that explicitly guarantee gender equality in their constitutions...“This amendment is the only legal initiative expansive enough to support what the Me Too revelations have shown is needed,” said Catharine MacKinnon, the legal scholar who first conceptualized the notion of sexual harassment in the courts and who sits on the advisory council of the current ERA Coalition.

Worker cooperatives are a viable alternative to corporate capitalism, yet they are rarely brought up in political discourse, two speakers at a Harvard Law Forum event argued Wednesday. Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at University of Colorado Boulder, and Jason Wiener, a worker cooperative lawyer, came to the Law School to argue the case for democratic cooperatives—speaking on how they work, why they’re important, and why so few people have heard of them...Harvard Law Forum President Peter D. Davis ’12 [`18] said the talk aimed to explore one way to approach a larger dilemma. “If you don’t like state communism, and you don’t like corporate capitalism, what do you like?”

...Tuesday’s testimony marked the first time that a former head of state of a foreign country faced trial in a U.S. civil court for human rights abuses, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the Mamani family...The couple belongs to one of eight families suing the former Bolivian government leaders under the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows suits for extrajudicial killings in foreign lands. The suit was filed in South Florida, where the two former politicians now live after fleeing Bolivia in 2003. The legal wrangling over the case has lasted for nearly a decade, and the trial is expected to last several weeks before U.S. Judge James Cohn. The relatives of the slain Bolivians are represented by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and several high-powered private law firms.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. President Donald Trump has shown little or no respect for the independence of the nation’s institutions. That lack of respect is what distinguishes him from his recent predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, and above all it is what demonstrates an authoritarian disposition. Reasonable people can differ about the Trump administration’s policies on taxes, regulation, abortion and government spending. For those who strongly support those policies, some of Trump’s less appealing personal characteristics, including a lack of grace, might seem relatively unimportant, a matter of detail.

Donald Trump owes his presidency to the Electoral College more than any other factor, even Russian interference. This constitutional quirk also gives a hint of irony to an unusual bill passed earlier this week by Maryland’s Democratic-controlled State Senate. The senators voted 28-17 on Monday, largely along party lines, to require presidential candidates to file copies of their tax returns with the state board of elections two months ahead of Election Day, so the filings can be made public...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor and frequent critic of the Trump administration, described Maryland’s bill as a “neutral, even-handed way” to allow voters to assess the “financial and ethical history” of would-be candidates. He also viewed its constitutional footing as more secure.“It’s not an interference with any federal prerogative, nor does it filter out in advance any set of presidential candidates who meet the Constitution’s age, residence, and other qualifications,” Tribe said.