Media Mentions

An op-ed by Samantha Power. When I met Ibraheem in 2014, he had already endured more as a 12-year-old than most of us could ever imagine: the terror of Assad’s barrel bombs, the loss of his mother and four siblings, and the trauma of being carried in his father’s arms on a desperate, eight-month search for medical help, which brought him to the refugee center in Jordan where we sat together one afternoon. Four years later, after the filmmakers of this short documentary shared it with me, I am struck not just by the confident young man he has become — walking the halls of his new high school, calling out answers in class — but also by the clarity and determination in his heart: “We went out against our will, and we shall return with our hope.”

...From the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law to Harvard Law School to the Georgetown University Law Center, students have penned letters calling on law school administrators to bar firms with these agreements from using campus facilities to recruit new summer associates...“At law schools, we don’t talk about what people’s individual contracts look like,” said Molly Coleman [`20], a first-year Harvard Law School student who played a role in organizing the campaign. “There’s the culture of secrecy [and] you’re told you’re not allowed to share your contract with anybody.” However, that so-called wall of silence was torn down following a tweet by former Jones Day associate and current HLS lecturer Ian Samuel that Munger Tolles required its summer associates to sign mandatory arbitration and nondisclosure agreements in their employment contracts.

A tax whistleblower's appeal missed a 30-day filing deadline, but that should not stop the U.S. Tax Court from hearing the appeal, said an amicus brief filed in the D.C. Circuit by Harvard Law School's Federal Tax Center.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. Many Americans now believe that President Trump should be removed from office. Increasingly, calls for impeachment have merged with allegations that Trump is a criminal. Only a thorough investigation can reveal whether Trump has actually broken the law. But regardless, it is wrong and dangerous to suggest that proof of criminal offenses is essential when deciding whether to impeach. It’s easy to understand the recent focus on criminality. It would be a very big deal if the president committed a crime. Further, the Constitution is frustratingly vague in defining grounds for removal: “Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Given that ambiguity, tying impeachment to the criminal code feels comfortingly objective. It also neatly distinguishes impeachability from cruelty, incompetence and stupidity — none of which justifies removing a president.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important states’-rights decision announced Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed New Jersey to permit sports gambling, both by private casinos and through state-run lotteries. The case, Murphy v. NCAA, has important constitutional consequences – and could have a major economic impact as well. The law at issue is the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which Congress enacted in 1992. It prohibited states from either operating sports gambling or authorizing private actors like casinos to run sports gambling. Importantly, the law didn’t make sports gambling a federal crime. Instead, to save money on federal law enforcement, it relied on states’ existing prohibitions plus the ban on authorization.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the last half-century, the most innovative work in antitrust law came from the University of Chicago. According to the Chicago School, led by the legendary economist Aaron Director and promoted by law professor Robert Bork, the goal of antitrust law should be to increase consumer welfare, not to combat bigness as such. Chicago School proponents often argued in favor of government restraint. In their view, uses of the antitrust law to prevent mergers, or to break up large companies, often do more harm than good. Their arguments have had a major influence on both regulators and courts, frequently promoting a “hands off” attitude in the face of growing concentrations of economic power.

Part two of an interview with Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. Is there a danger in normalizing impeachment talk? This is a major theme of our book. The normalization of impeachment talk has created a massive boy-who-cries-wolf dilemma, diluting impeachment’s potency as a weapon of last resort in cases of genuine national peril. To many Americans, impeachment threats are little more than a standard rhetorical weapon in our partisan civil war. Recognizing this development, presidents and political entrepreneurs have aimed to benefit from impeachment talk by using it to rally their base, raise money, distract attention, and condemn opponents.

An interview with Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. Why did you think a book on impeachment of this type was necessary now? Everyone with a pulse and an Internet connection knows that impeachment haunts Trumpland. Starting a year before the election and continuing through the present, discussion of [President] Trump’s disgraced ouster has been unavoidable. Amid all this impeachment talk, we found it distressing that many voters deeply misunderstand what’s involved in ending a presidency. Lots of people, for example, believe impeachment is justified based only on dislike of a president’s policies or personality.

Yale Law School and other top legal education programs on Monday asked law firms recruiting on their campuses to disclose their workplace harassment policies for summer associates. Those positions can be a key step toward a professional career for law students. But recent reports showed that some big firms have required summer associates to sign mandatory arbitration or nondisclosure agreements. Organizers have pushed for the disclosure of those policies, arguing they allow law firms to limit reports of workplace misconduct, including sexual harassment, to secretive forums that favor employers...“Contractually surrendering rights contributes to workplace cultures in which discrimination and harassment are facts of life for too many women who work for law firms," said Molly Coleman [`20], a Harvard law student who helped organize the campaign for the disclosures.

An op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa. Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart demonstrates both Indian e-commerce’s coming of age and a repetition of history. US giants will spend billions in India because they see huge opportunities, and this will produce a short-term boon for Indian consumers. When the dust settles, though, prices will rise and consumer choices will become more limited than they had been. Foreign companies will mine data and manipulate consumer preferences. They will have once again colonised India’s retail industry.

For Blessing Jee, one of the best things about her Harvard education was putting it on hold. Jee knew when she arrived that she would take time off from her studies. What she didn’t expect was that it would make her “fall back in love with Harvard” — and set her, newly energized, on her future path. When she graduates in May, Jee will take another break before returning to pursue public interest law at Harvard Law School...For the past several months, Jee has been working with former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who is writing a book about forgiveness in the law. Jee said Minow, whose work includes research into amnesty and pardons, debt relief, and child soldiers, helped her see that “forgiveness has a real place in the law and it shouldn’t be discarded just because the law should just be principled and objective.”...Minow, the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, called working with Jee “joyous because of her wide-ranging interests, precise reasoning, and boundless energy and generosity. … It is unusual to find someone so powerfully able to combine deep focus and wide vision. She will bring tremendous talents to the Harvard Law School.”

The National Labor Relations Board’s surprise decision to tackle joint employer liability via regulation is raising questions about whether the board’s Republican majority already knows how it will resolve one of the biggest labor policy debates in recent years. But that’s not likely to stop the board from using the rulemaking process to limit legal responsibility for businesses in franchise, staffing, and other contractual arrangements...Supporters of the Obama board’s approach to joint employment say the indirect control standard gives workers a seat at the table, with everyone involved in setting the terms and conditions of their jobs. They’re concerned that the board Republicans will simply turn the scrapped Hy-Brand opinion into a regulation. “We know where they want to get to now because of the decision in Hy-Brand,” former NLRB Member Sharon Block (D) told Bloomberg Law. “They appear to be using the rulemaking process to do an end run around conflict-of-interest problems.”

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein. I was Eric Schneiderman’s Labor Bureau chief for almost six years. Our team did great work: We filed civil lawsuits against scofflaw employers and criminally prosecuted others who grossly abused their workers. We proposed laws to expand people’s rights; we issued reports to shed light on violations; we were tireless in our commitment to ensuring justice for vulnerable New Yorkers. I left the office more than a year ago. Now that Schneiderman has resigned over allegations he abused former romantic partners, though, all anyone asks is, “Did you know?”

For decades, leakers of confidential information to the press were a genus that included many species: the government worker infuriated by wrongdoing, the ideologue pushing a particular line, the politico out to savage an opponent...But now this disparate cast has been joined by a very different sort of large-scale leaker, more stealthy and better funded: the intelligence services of nation states, which hack into troves of documents and then use a proxy to release them. What Russian intelligence did with shocking success to the Democrats in 2016 shows every promise of becoming a common tool of spycraft around the world...Yet that sobering experience does not suggest easy remedies. Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official now at Harvard who has written extensively on the press, says he thinks journalists will find it difficult to withhold authentic, compelling material simply because they know or suspect the source is a foreign intelligence service. “It shouldn’t matter whether the source is the Russians or a disgruntled Hillary Clinton campaign worker,” he argues.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Don’t be fooled by the superficially amicable split between the Boy Scouts of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The breakup, in fact, reflects a long festering period of incompatibility and will have consequences for both institutions and for the possibility of respectful disagreements in our federal republic. The immediate impetus for the divorce might seem to be the decision by the Boy Scouts to rename itself “Scouts BSA” in recognition of the fact that girls may now participate in its activities.

Remuneration incentive schemes are at the heart of problems in finance, and need to be overhauled to reflect long-term effort, Mihir Desai, professor of finance at Harvard Business School and professor of law at Harvard Law School told delegates at the CFA Institute annual conference in Hong Kong. Corporate governance is the most important problem in modern capitalism, Desai said, pointing to the fact that 150 years ago ownership and control were not separate, so the corporate governance issues that exist today were not present. “Why do investors trust managers with their money? All of finance is one big daisy chain of principal agent problems,” he said. At the heart of the issue, he said, is remuneration incentive programs

A letter to the editor by Samuel Garcia `19. Regarding the May 8 news article “Sessions vows to prosecute every migrant caught crossing border illegally”: In Hispanic culture, there is nothing more sacred than the family unit. As a result, a Hispanic family deciding to cross the border together is an enormous decision — especially since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is much more dangerous than people know. If you have successfully crossed the border, you have likely forfeited almost all of your money to a guide, braved deadly conditions and been faced with a situation at home so brutal or oppressive that you had to leave.

Electric-scooter maker Ather, artificial intelligence-driven health tech firm Sigtuple and biotech startup Pandorum are three examples of Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal’s investments in startups unrelated to the venture that started by selling books online and was sold last week to retail giant Walmart, valuing the Bengaluru-based firm just shy of $21 billion...“The ideal situation would have been domestic startups taking advantage of local market opportunities. But with the Indian government asleep at the wheel, foreign companies will now dominate,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The Walmart deal will intensify competition. The elephants will battle each and this will, in the short term, benefit Indian consumers. However, Indian startups will be trampled in the melee.”

...Educators are just beginning to recognize how emotional trauma can affect brain development, which in turn affects the ability to learn. Trauma, by this measure, is not just a catastrophic event, says Michele Verda, pediatric neuropsychologist at OSF HealthCare Children’s Hospital of Illinois. It can be a slow, steady build up of neglect, abuse, exposure to violence, the stress of family poverty...Susan Cole, a Harvard Law School professor and director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, advocates for trauma-sensitive schools. “A deep understanding of trauma and how to create a safe environment is central to learning,” she says.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens watched Thursday as his attorneys scrutinized potential jurors for his criminal trial next week. Greitens, who was joined by two state troopers, arrived Thursday morning at the St. Louis courthouse for the first day of jury selection...Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor who is assisting prosecutors in the case, argued that jurors who have opinions of Greitens but say they can set them aside should not be struck. He said the attorneys need to find jurors who can credibly “in good faith ... set aside previous knowledge.” He said they would need to “exclude the entire state” if the judge used the defense’s standard.

A century-plus of combined legal expertise is leaving the Labor Department, setting up four key vacancies in an office with unheralded influence on the administration’s workplace agenda. The DOL’s associate solicitors for employment and training (Jeffrey Nesvet), occupational safety and health (Ann Rosenthal), and administrative law and ethics (Robert Shapiro), along with the New England regional solicitor (Michael Felsen), are either about to retire or recently did so—all after lengthy careers in the senior civil service...The quartet of retiring lawyers oversaw one of the largest legal departments in the federal government, with some 600 DOL attorneys crafting rules and guidance in Washington or enforcing and litigating more than 180 laws across the country. “Those are four people who have been involved in every important decision in their areas for decades. It’s a tremendous loss,” Sharon Block, who was a senior counselor to Obama’s Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, told Bloomberg Law.