Media Mentions

What happens when you become president of the world’s most prestigious university? Suddenly everyone has advice for you. Lawrence S. Bacow, the former president of Tufts University, was named Harvard University’s next leader last week, and already the lobbying has begun. Here’s a taste of what students, alumni, professors, and others say they want him to focus on, when he takes over from president Drew Faust after her retirement in June...Jeannie Suk Gersen: “I hope President Bacow will focus on strengthening traditions of free speech, academic freedom, and respect for intellectual diversity that make possible the uncomfortable exploration of ideas that push us to discovery.”

...Where does the outrage come from, and why does it seem to emerge so suddenly? Media reporting is often a trigger, but for every hard-hitting investigation that unleashes a sustained storm, a dozen squalls blow over swiftly. One clue comes from a large research study of jury-style deliberations, conducted by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade, along with Cass Sunstein, who has recently been exploring the dynamics of outrage. (Mr Sunstein was a senior official in the Obama administration, co-author with Richard Thaler of Nudge and is a legal scholar at Harvard Law School.) This study looked at debates over punitive damage awards against corporations. When individual jurors felt a corporate crime was outrageous, the group displayed a “severity shift”.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The state of North Carolina is paying $300,000 to a magistrate who quit rather than marry gay couples as ordered by the courts. Something is seriously wrong here. The magistrate was entitled to resign as a matter of conscience. But the religious accommodation that federal law requires of ordinary employers shouldn’t apply to state officials who say that their religion means they can’t obey their oath to the U.S. Constitution.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The use of the Second Amendment to block consideration of sensible gun control measures is a national disgrace. And conservatives themselves have explained why this is true. For decades, conservatives have objected to the use of constitutional provisions as a political weapon, insisting that controversies should be resolved in democratic arenas instead. They have made this argument to oppose judicial recognition of the right to choose abortion; protection of same-sex marriage; creation of a rigid “wall” between church and state; and creation of new rights in the criminal justice system. Going even further, they have argued against the left’s efforts to use the Constitution to block reasonable political debates — about religion, about privacy, about equality — that the justices have never settled.

Two years after the FBI unsuccessfully sought Apple's help to hack into a phone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, law enforcement and companies are no closer to resolving the dispute over digital-message privacy...The EastWest Institute, a New York-based security think tank, has produced a report offering nine points that encourage governments to allow the use of strong encryption while creating a legal framework for authorized law enforcement to access the plain text of encrypted data in limited cases...What is decided will have influence far beyond our borders because the U.S. has long served as a role model to Europe in encryption policy, said David O’Brien, a senior researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s official: Syria has become a war of all against all. The latest proof is the report that U.S. planes killed somewhere between four and 200 Russian “mercenaries” last week. A few days before that news broke, Israel shot down an Iranian drone that came from Syria and then attacked Iranian targets, losing an F-16 in the process. And just a few days before that, Turkey mounted an extensive war against U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds -- probably the same people who called in the airstrikes against the Russians.

Campaign attorneys and legal scholars are divided on whether Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to an adult film star weeks before the presidential election is a violation of campaign-finance law. Mr. Cohen, a longtime personal attorney for President Donald Trump, said Tuesday night that the payment to Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, was a “private transaction” using his personal funds. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone,” Mr. Cohen said in the statement...Thomas Frampton, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said one of the critical issues in Mr. Edwards’ case was whether the payments were for the purpose of “influencing an election,” as opposed to merely concealing an affair. Prosecutors had difficulty proving the former in part because some of the payments happened as Mr. Edwards was dropping out of the race, Mr. Frampton said.

Heidi Gardner knows how to get law firms to pay attention when she tells them collaboration – not exorbitant rewards to rainmakers and an eat-what-you-kill environment – is the key to long-term success and profitability: by using hard data..."We've got millions of data records from lots of different firms, sometimes spanning up to 10 years," she told The Australian Financial Review during a recent visit to Sydney. "We can measure collaboration and we can measure the outcomes, sometimes years down the road, and show strategically there are very strong benefits of collaboration."

Jennifer Ann Drobac, a [visiting scholar] at Harvard University Law School, discusses a new lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein that was brought by New York attorney general Eric Schniederman over the sale of his company, Weinstein Co. She speaks with Bloomberg’s June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s "Politics, Policy, Power and Law."

Donald Trump has turned the political world upside down, again and again, like a kid flipping a coin. Every day we wake up to either a new scandal or several lingering ones. It is astounding. It is maddening. It is numbing...As the Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence H. Tribe wrote on Twitter: “F.B.I. director Wray just testified in the Senate that — despite Russia’s ongoing intrusions into our electoral systems — Potus has never charged the F.B.I. with protecting U.S. elections from Russia! Let that sink in. That’d be like F.D.R. doing nothing in response to Pearl Harbor.” Let me be clear: Any president who refuses to protect Americans from a foreign threat is himself a domestic threat.

Politico reports: Jared Kushner, a White House aide and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, appears to have drawn more money out of three separate lines of credit in the months after he joined the White House last year, a newly released document shows...In sum, Kushner has huge and growing debt, many suspicious Russian contacts and a close relationship (perhaps second only to Ivanka’s) with Trump. “The more money Kushner owes, especially to lenders or guarantors who do not have America’s best interests at heart, the more he and his father-in-law the President are subject to compromising pressures at best and outright blackmail at worst,” constitutional lawyer Larry Tribe tells me.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. By January 6, the Powerball lottery jackpot hit a new high at $560 million - one of the largest in U.S. history. The winner was a woman from Southern New Hampshire, who is arguing in court for her right to remain anonymous. A team of lawyers went to court this week to fight for her anonymity.

An article by Einer Elhauge. When the leading shareholders of horizontal competitors overlap, horizontal shareholding exists. In my initial Harvard Law Review article on horizontal shareholding, I showed that economic theory and two intra-industry studies indicated that high levels of horizontal shareholding in concentrated product markets can have anticompetitive effects, even when each individual horizontal shareholder has a minority stake...In a new article, I show that new proofs and new empirical evidence strongly confirm my economic claims.

An op-ed by Ryan Manucha `19. Recently, the British Columbia government refused to allow increased shipments of bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to B.C. ports. In response, the Alberta government has blocked all imports of B.C. wine, and has threatened to expand the scope of its retaliatory measures. This ongoing trade war between Alberta and B.C. doesn’t look all that different from the trade disputes that regularly take place between countries. But whereas international trade disputes have the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement Body as a customary venue for resolution, domestic Canadian trade wars lack a similarly treaded arena for adjudication.

...The Trump administration is seeking to change wage regulations so that restaurants and other businesses with tipped workers can decide how the gratuities are divvied up...Sharon Block, a former Labor Department official under Obama, said it’s hard to read the proposal any other way. In adopting a judge’s dissent in a tip-sharing lawsuit, Trump’s team seems to argue that the Labor Department can’t tell an employer what to do ― or not do ― with a worker’s tips if the employer pays the federal minimum wage of $7.25. As the judge put it, so long as the workers receive the legal minimum, employers can run tip pools “however they see fit.” “I’m not sure how, based on their adoption of [the dissent], they could draw a legal distinction between what our regulation did and a rule that says the employer can’t keep the tips,” explained Block.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman effectively blocked a sale of the failing Weinstein Co. on Sunday by suing it for violating state sex discrimination laws. Is he a white knight protecting the interests of Harvey Weinstein’s victims? Or a publicity-seeking politician poised to destroy investors’ value by forcing the company into bankruptcy? The answer depends on a simple principle: Any sale should benefit Weinstein’s victims, not harm them.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 2012, the Barack Obama administration imposed regulatory standards that require significant increases in the fuel economy of automobiles. 1 Intent on reducing regulatory costs, the Donald Trump administration is rethinking those standards. But it’s encountering a major roadblock: California. Because California is so large, and because more cars are sold there, by far, than in any other state, its regulators are in a strong position to drive the national market with respect to fuel economy — and to influence national regulators as well.

...Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science. This semester, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are jointly offering a new course on the ethics and regulation of artificial intelligence...But until recently, ethics did not seem relevant to many students. “Compared to transportation or doctors, your daily interaction with physical harm or death or pain is a lot less if you are writing software for apps,” said [Visiting Professor] Joi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab...The Harvard-M.I.T. course, which has 30 students, focuses on the ethical, policy and legal implications of artificial intelligence.

Soon after the announcement that Lawrence S. Bacow would be Harvard’s next president, congratulations started pouring in from deans of schools across the University. From community messages to personal statements, Harvard’s deans eagerly expressed their enthusiasm about their new boss. John F. Manning ’82, the dean of the Law School, took pride in the fact that Bacow was an alumnus of his school, and complimented his “superb judgment” in a statement Sunday. He wrote that he was often directed to Bacow for advice when he first took on the Law School deanship last year. “When I became dean, one of the most frequent pieces of advice I got from fellow deans was, ‘You need to meet Larry Bacow; he has terrific insights about how to lead a school.’ They were right,” Manning wrote in an emailed statement.

President Donald Trump’s recent repeal of Temporary Protected Status has led some student activists and TPS recipients to argue that the University should hire more staff for the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. The Immigration and Refugee Clinic, staffed by attorneys and students at Harvard Law School, provides legal support for immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. The clinic recently hired a full-time staff attorney, Jason M. Corral, to protect University affiliates impacted by the Trump administration’s revised policies...Sabrineh Ardalan, assistant director of the Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, wrote in an email that multiple part-time attorneys are present at TPS renewal clinics, and that her spring clinical students are required to volunteer for the clinics at least once. A focus on the University’s response to the TPS repeals comes amid a broader discussion over the University resources for immigrant affiliates.

Justice Elena Kagan committed a breach of protocol midway through the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dec. 5 argument in a case involving a cake for a gay wedding. Seeing that a lawyer’s time was expiring but wanting to ask another question, Kagan said she was confident Chief Justice John Roberts would give the attorney a bit more time. Kagan then looked sheepishly toward Roberts. "Is that OK?" she asked. Roberts gave her a look of mock exasperation, and the courtroom burst into laughter. The fleeting moment showed the rapport between the two and offered a glimpse into the dynamics of a court that often splits 5-4 along ideological lines...What the four share is a willingness to muffle some disagreements for what they see as a greater good. Each wants to avoid the perception that the court is "just another political institution," like Congress or the White House, said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor who focuses on the Supreme Court.