Media Mentions

If large law firms doing away with mandatory arbitration agreements for employees becomes a trend, plaintiffs may have the #MeToo movement and Twitter to thank. On March 24, Ian Samuel, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, posted a tweet about Munger Tolles & Olson making summer associates sign “a very unusual agreement,” which he described as “plainly calculated” to shield the law firm from harassment claims...Labor lawyers say mandatory arbitration agreements for law firm employees are in fact common. What’s unusual is that a day after Samuel’s series of tweets—rewtweeted around 600 times, “plus many more quote tweets,” Samuel told the ABA Journal—Munger Tolles in its own tweet announced that it would no longer require any employees, including summer associates, to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. “In this case, we were wrong, and we are fixing it,” read the March 25 tweet, which was reported by the American Lawyer.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s understandable that Justice John Paul Stevens would call for repeal of the Second Amendment, as he did Tuesday in an op-ed article in the New York Times, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of it to protect some gun sales. I have great respect for Justice Stevens, and what’s more I agree with him that the Heller case was wrongly decided by the court in 2008. But it would actually be a terrible idea to attempt a repeal of the Second Amendment just because the Supreme Court got it wrong. Experience shows that the Constitution is weakened if we respond to bad Supreme Court precedent by trying to amend it right away.

Dozens of iPhone owners are taking Apple Inc. to court over the company’s disclosure that it slowed down old phones to preserve battery life, in what could become one of the biggest legal challenges to the smartphone since its 2007 debut. Some five dozen iPhone customers have filed at least 59 separate lawsuits since December accusing Apple of slowing their phones to spur people to buy new iPhones, according to court records...Apple customers could find it difficult to win their case. Fraudulent-concealment claims, such as in the iPhone instance, are often hard to prove because courts typically want to preserve companies’ freedom to choose what to say, as long as it isn’t actively misleading, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School.

President Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of new tariffs last week is a slap at the World Trade Organization, a frequent target of his attacks. Allies are urging Mr. Trump to fix the 164-country body, not marginalize it. The WTO’s future is particularly uncertain because the Trump administration’s approach simultaneously circumvents and relies on it...“WTO law is woefully inadequate to deal with some, but not necessarily all, of the problematic trade practices arising out of China,” said Harvard law professor Mark Wu, a trade expert. As a result, he said, the U.S. and its allies will still seek recourse on some issues through the WTO. But gaps in international law and insufficient remedies available mean Washington feels more pressure to take further steps, either with allies or on its own.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now in congressional crosshairs — with his company’s stock plunging and throngs of users ditching his social media service — amid the growing privacy scandal from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. And the question of what to do with Zuckerberg’s unregulated internet behemoth could even bring about rare bipartisan action on Capitol Hill...Thousands of people who once shared family details, news links and political views on Facebook have pledged on Twitter to scrub it from their lives. Facebook stock plunged yesterday, closing down nearly 5 percent. “Reasonable people should be concerned that there appears to be very little protection,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “Vast amounts of data are being collected and they seem to be moving between companies with very little protection.”

Tens of thousands of people in Massachusetts participated in the March for Our Lives on Saturday, rallying on the Boston Common against gun violence and for stronger gun control laws. The protesters were energized and determined, but we've also been here before...Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor of history and law at Harvard University who studies social movements. She agrees that this march feels like it could lead to real change. She says timing is critical, citing examples like the Civil Rights Movement, and protests of the Vietnam War, which had power in part because of their timing. This movement, she notes, is happening in the run-up to the midterm elections. "The midterm elections give people the opportunity to express their disdain for what some believe is political indifference to the problem of violence by handguns and by assault weapons," Brown-Nagin says.

President Donald Trump is having a tough time finding new lawyers to represent him in the ongoing Russia investigation, and it may be because of his own doing. The turmoil started when Trump lost his top defense attorney last week..."Lawyers who might ordinarily [represent him] are unwilling because they see that Trump is unprepared to listen to the advice of his lawyers," said Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School. He added that Trump has "shown that he can turn on his staff and lawyers at any moment. It is hard to have confidence that you could represent Trump effectively under those circumstances."

Munger, Tolles & Olson will no longer require any of its employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. The Los Angeles-based litigation firm announced the new policy in a Tweet on Sunday after facing criticism by Harvard Law School lecturer Ian Samuel, who tweeted pictures of the firm’s arbitration agreement with incoming summer associates. “I think this is the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. Munger ought to be ashamed of themselves. And I will be making an extremely large fuss about this,” tweeted Samuel, who also co-hosts the podcast First Mondays, about the Supreme Court.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when we're offline. It buys data about us from others. And it can infer even more: our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other personality traits -- even if we didn't take the personality test that Cambridge Analytica developed.

...Eric Greitens lost his requests to dismiss his indictment, hold his trial before a judge without a jury and disqualify a Harvard law professor from working on the team that’s prosecuting him...Greitens, a Republican and a Rhodes scholar, objected to the St. Louis city prosecutor hiring Professor Ronald Sullivan because of a Missouri law that makes it a crime for the same person to simultaneously serve as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. Sullivan previously represented the family of Michael Brown, the black teenager whose killing by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 set off nationwide protests. The professor currently represents a trader facing a criminal securities fraud trial in Connecticut in April. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, the lead prosecutor, argued that that the conflict-of-interest law would only apply if the professor was doing defense work in Missouri. State Judge Rex Burlison ruled against Greitens without explanation.

U.S. EPA’s “secret science” plan could reduce the health benefits that come along with controlling carbon emissions, scrambling previous calculations that gave weight to saving lives and avoiding heart attacks...Joseph Goffman, a former EPA official and current executive director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program, said Pruitt’s plan is “very much targeted” at specific studies that had been important in setting particulate matter standards. “Essentially, you have a constituency that don’t like certain results, and so they are sort of back-engineering to find a way to defeat the results,” Goffman said.

It was just after the news had broken: a black man had been shot by a police officer under questionable circumstances, the kind of event that has made headlines often enough in the past few years that Devin McCourty can’t remember exactly which one it was. What he does remember is his brother Jason’s reaction. “Man, I’m tired of just seeing everybody post on social media,” Jason said. That was two years ago. Now, Devin cites that conversation as one of the experiences that has led him to the forefront of a growing movement of NFL players flexing their muscles as activists. On Friday came a clear sign of progress. The day after a group including McCourty and former Patriot Troy Brown spent hours at the State House lobbying for a set of changes to the Massachusetts criminal justice system, House and Senate lawmakers filed a comprehensive reform bill that included several of the provisions they’d pushed for. The biggest: raising the age at which a child can be prosecuted criminally from 7 to 12. “I think it’s kind of reassuring what we’re doing,” McCourty said Friday, in between sessions of a social justice summit at Harvard Law School.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. Home is a place where you can be entirely yourself — unshaven, feet up, unworried, slow heartbeat. I live in Concord, Massachusetts, where the American Revolution started. My house, which was built in 1763, played a role — munitions were held here on that fateful day, April 19, 1775, when a British Army force marched on the town to capture the hidden cache of arms. The house feels as if it has a bright, free, determined, revolutionary spirit.

Harper Lee was a literary celebrity. Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriting superstar. And now the two — by proxy — are locked in a battle over who should shape the content in Mr. Sorkin’s stage adaptation of Ms. Lee’s famous novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Ms. Lee, before she died, agreed to allow Mr. Sorkin to write the adaptation. But there was one key condition: His play could not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel, nor alter its characters.” And therein lies the problem. Ms. Lee is now dead, so it’s impossible to know what she would make of Mr. Sorkin’s script. But her longtime lawyer has read a draft, and is unhappy. Earlier this month, Ms. Lee’s estate sued Mr. Sorkin’s producer over the project, alleging that Atticus Finch is too mean, Scout and Jem are too old, and Calpurnia is too opinionated, among other issues...Rebecca Tushnet: My own sense, having read the complaint, is that it includes a mix of valid concerns about anachronism and character arcs with highly contestable interpretations, ones we have no real way to know whether Lee would have shared.

An interview by Laura Dickinson and Alex Whiting. In November, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, sought authorization from a panel of ICC judges to open an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan in relation to the armed conflict there. This request is of particular significance to the United States. That’s because although the bulk of the activity that is the subject of the request concerns the Taliban, along with some alleged conduct by Afghanistan government officials, the request also encompasses alleged crimes committed by U.S. military personnel and CIA officials.

The controversy over protests during the national anthem at NFL games last season helped propel issues of racial inequality and social injustice to the forefront and gave athletes a stronger voice to bring about change, current and former players said Friday. The players, who spoke at a Harvard Law School summit on criminal justice reform, said they capitalized on the attention surrounding the protests to highlight issues they care about, like mass incarceration. Now, they're using their platform to talk to lawmakers, police chiefs and prosecutors across the country about injustices they see in the communities where they grew up.

An op-ed by Martha Aguirre Rubio and Raj Salhotra `18. Student involvement drives educational success. That’s a fact we’ve both learned, one as a member of the HISD Student Congress (StuCon) and the other as a teacher. Through StuCon, students have helped administrators understand how the lack of internet access can significantly decrease the quality of the education a low-income student receives. After sustained advocacy from students, HISD formed partnerships with Sprint and Comcast to increase accessibility.

An op-ed by Jesse Fried and Steven Davidoff Solomon. In December 2013, the American Studies Association adopted a boycott of Israel. The organization, which says it “promote[s] the development and dissemination of interdisciplinary research on U.S. culture and history in a global context,” banned ties to Israeli educational institutions. The Israel boycott resolution was first approved by ASA’s leadership, known as the National Council. Then, due to low voter turnout, it was ratified by a mere 20 percent of the organization’s members. Four distinguished ASA members have since sued the group and certain ASA leaders, claiming that the small turnout invalidated the vote’s result under the ASA’s bylaws and the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act.

Oklahoma lawmakers may soon sanction private adoption agencies turning away same-sex couples and other prospective parents who don’t meet their religious criteria, a possibility cheered by the Roman Catholic Church and many evangelical Christians and lambasted as discriminatory by gay rights groups. It’s a conflict playing out across the nation, and both sides say that if the other wins, the number of children placed in loving homes will fall...“I don’t know of any empirical evidence on the topic,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. “In general, any barriers to adoption are likely to decrease numbers of homes for kids in need,” Bartholet added in an email. “But, of course, it’s possible that religious agencies would shut down rather than put their religious principles aside.”

According to Justice Maraga, strong judiciaries acting as the custodian of constitutionalism were critical to Africa’s quest for sustainable development. In a keynote address he delivered at the 9th Annual African Development Conference at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the head of Kenya’s Judiciary said bad laws were impeding development in Africa...During his stay in Harvard, Justice Maraga presented Harvard Law School’s Vice Dean, Prof William Alford, a copy of the 2016-2017 State the Judiciary and the Administration of Justice Report, which enumerates some of the achievements in the justice sector in Kenya as well as challenges faced. The backlog of cases is a key challenge identified in the report which at the time of its release in December last year stood at 533,350 cases.

...Children suffering trauma — such as domestic violence or a drug or alcohol addicted parent — are marred by emotional turmoil. They struggle to learn, get along with others and frequently find themselves in trouble, a path that often leads to jail or even prison. Schools are seeing increasing numbers of children dealing with trauma, which equates to more detentions, suspensions and even expulsions. In effort to change this and give these students an education and a fair shot at life, many schools are scrapping their traditional disciplinary models in favor of those that create a calmer, predictable environment to help these children navigate their hurt so they can learn...Susan Cole, director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative established by the Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School, said her institute has received requests from schools across the world seeking to use trauma sensitive models. “We begin to see, sadly, that this is not uncommon and that it’s a real community problem,” she said.