Media Mentions

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.

...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.