Media Mentions

An interview with Vivek Krishnamurthy. Can the federal government compel a U.S.-based email provider to turn over its records as part of a criminal investigation when those records are located outside of the country? The United States v. Microsoft case pending before the Supreme Court could have big implications for law enforcement, consumer privacy and the business operations of many companies that do business overseas.

...The movement’s roots and its present and future impact were the focus of a discussion with Harvard scholars on Monday night at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, organized by the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and moderated by Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism...For Harvard Law School’s Jeannie Suk Gersen, recent statements from U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg point to another divisive debate. Asked about the #MeToo movement in a recent interview, Ginsburg said due process must not be ignored. Gersen, the John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law, agreed. “One of the salient, and in my mind, very unfortunate aspects of the current moment is how a commitment to due process or fairness has become associated with one side, with men’s rights, with Betsy DeVos and her decision to rescind the Obama administration’s policies on Title IX,” which protects people from sex discrimination in education or other programs receiving federal aid, said Gersen.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. ...New York was supposed to be a model for how the modern city could launch high-speed internet for its residents. When the Bloomberg mayoral administration re-signed an agreement with Verizon in 2008, it required that the company wire all residential buildings with its fiber service, FiOS. The agreement was heralded by the press as a way of triggering competition— the presence of Verizon’s fiber product would end the local monopoly of Time Warner Cable, now Spectrum, which provides internet access over a different, lower-capacity wire called hybrid fiber-coaxial. Cable internet access dominates most cities, but it often loses market share to more reasonably priced fiber offerings.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Very quietly, the Trump administration recently issued a draft of its annual report on the costs and benefits of federal regulations. It’s a responsible and highly professional document — and a corrective to the noisiest claims, from both the White House and its critics, on the whole topic of regulation. The report is required by the Regulatory Right-to-Know Act, enacted in 2000. Since that time, Republican and Democratic administrations have cataloged the costs and benefits of federal regulations.

...The tragedy in Parkland was the 18th school shooting this year. Over the past 17 years, there have been more than 185 shootings at schools and universities, according to a report by the Chicago Tribune. But this time, the response has been different. In the 14 days since Nikolas Cruz, 19, allegedly set off a school fire alarm and gunned down victims as they left their classrooms, their fellow students and scores of others around the country have staged walkouts and other protests demanding that lawmakers and the Trump administration do something to curb the epidemic of violence...But Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, told Courthouse News that a legal challenge to an order banning bump stocks wouldn’t fly. “Nor do I think any new constitutional amendment dealing with guns makes the slightest bit of sense,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The revelation that the New Orleans Police Department quietly used a Silicon Valley company to predict crime raises dilemmas similar to those emerging from artificial intelligence in other spheres, like consumer behavior, medicine and employment. But what's uniquely shocking about the story of New Orleans's partnership with the national security company Palantir is that it has remained largely unreported before now.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig briefly ran for president in 2015, but his campaign was more of an effort to spread a message than win a job. He called it “a referendum” on campaign finance reform and electoral reform. More than two years later, Lessig is still working on those big issues. But instead of using a presidential run as a vehicle for them, he’s going directly to the courts.

It's a fact that liberals crazy, and has become a preoccupation for President Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' choice, crushed Trump at the ballot box, winning the popular vote by a margin of roughly 3 million, but Trump cruised to a win in the Electoral College, sweeping up 304 of 538 votes. It was the second time in recent history that the winning presidential candidate, a Republican, took office even though more people voted for the Democrat. It's also a system Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig believes is a Constitutional offense – and practically guarantees another popular-vote loser will again become commander-in-chief in the very near future. Every four years, the presidential election "focuses on 14 [swing] states, to the total exclusion of the rest of the country," says Lessig, who ran an under-the-radar campaign for president as an independent in 2016.

An op-ed by Hal Scott and Lisa Donner. Ten years after the start of the financial crisis, US policymakers are beginning to deal with the stiff regulatory reaction that it spawned, writes Hal Scott. The US Senate will take up the first bipartisan effort to rein in the impact of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill on smaller banks within weeks. But that should be just one step in reform. The bill would exempt banks with less than $100bn in assets from the Federal Reserve’s annual stress tests and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s annual living wills requirement that each bank explain how it could be safely wound down in a crisis.

An op-ed by Arun Vishwanath, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center. In the not-so-distant future, we will be presented with the version of the news we wish to read -- not the news that some reporter, columnist or editorial board decides we need to read. And it will be entirely written by artificial intelligence (AI). Think this is science fiction? Think again. Many of us probably don't realize that AI programs were authoring many parts of the summer Olympics coverage, and also providing readers with up-to-date reports, personalized based on the reader's location, on nearly 500 House, Senate, and gubernatorial races during the last election cycle.

“It Can't Happen Here,” a book written by Sinclair Lewis over 80 years ago, concludes with a president all but ending democracy in favor of an authoritarian regime of his own. To get elected, he promised the nation great economic reform and a return to traditional, patriotic values, vowing to save the country from welfare fraud, sex, crime and a liberal media — sound familiar? That book is now the jumping off point for a new book, “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America.” It's a collection of essays from some of the nation's leading thinkers, theorists and historians on exactly how democracies can crumble. Jim Braude was joined by Cass Sunstein, former administrator for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack Obama and editor and contributor of “Can It Happen Here?” and Martha Minow, former Dean of Harvard Law School, now professor and contributor to “Can It Happen Here?” to discuss their latest book.

Panelists shared personal stories, advice, and a range of historical experiences related to sexual violence at Harvard at an event Tuesday afternoon co-hosted by Our Harvard Can Do Better and the Radcliffe Union of Students...[Diane] Rosenfeld offered advice on activism for current students, encouraging them to demand an audience with the administration, especially with University President-elect Lawrence S. Bacow. “There is absolutely power in numbers. Gather your student groups and have meetings and meetings and meetings with the new President, even before he takes office. Let me him know that you need to be on his radar,” Rosenfeld said.

Two Harvard Law professors have joined nearly 140 professors from universities across the country in signing a public letter that critiques what the authors call “victim-centered practices” in higher education sexual harassment policies and procedures. Law professors Janet E. Halley and Elizabeth Bartholet ’62 signed the letter three weeks ago, along with academics hailing from institutions including Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School...“I signed it because I thought it was correct. I’ve seen the bad effects of politically slanted training,” Halley said.

An op-ed by David Harris. Several weeks ago the Boston Globe published an opinion piece by editorial and staff writer David Scharfenberg in which he called for an “honest” commitment to racial integration. He dismissed the “gauzy 1963 version” of integration, insisted that “harping too much” on its virtues “can feel paternalistic,” and lamented the “disastrous busing experiment of the 1970s” which proved that “forced integration…simply doesn’t work.” Even so, he declared integration the “single most important racial justice strategy we’ve got” and a “good start” toward “true racial reconciliation.” There are several basic problems with the article. First, it conflates race and class, creating a set of contrasts between black/urban/poor and white/suburban/affluent, using them interchangeably, without definition, assuming readers share the implied associations.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. China’s nearly 30-year experiment with time-limited government is officially coming to an end. The Chinese Communist Party has suggested amending China’s constitution to allow President Xi Jinping to serve more than two five-year terms. Considering that the party rules the country, and Xi rules the party, that means two things: The constitution will be amended. And Xi is going to be president for life, much like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping.

Leaving the gun debate to others, I propose that we focus on something more easily fixable about the Florida shooting: the epic failure of data integration that allowed this tragedy to happen...Data management might raise the hackles of civil libertarians. But Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me we should be able to satisfy those concerns: “None of the data points you’re talking about involve anything terribly private. The fact that he was doing target practice and shooting cats in the neighborhood and squirrels was hardly a private matter. The fact that he posted his desire to be a professional school shooter, he was exposing that to the world. He was essentially crying out, ‘Somebody stop me!’ And it is unfortunate, unfortunate puts it mildly, that the dots were not adequately connected. We shouldn’t underestimate the magnitude of the task the FBI has. They get hundreds and thousands of leads, some of which may be at least as alarming as this but don’t end up in school shootings. But, I do think we can do better than we’ve done.”

...With 19 people charged by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (including five cooperating witnesses), some believe a case against Trump is imminent...Advocates for presidential immunity rely heavily on one line by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers: A president, he said, “would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein insists that this quote “means you can’t indict and try a sitting president. He has to be removed first.”

For the second time in two years, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of union “fair share” fees, and the justices appeared just as ideologically divided as they were the first time...Two law professors’ ears may have been burning during part of the arguments as several justices focused on their amicus brief. Harvard Law School’s Charles Fried and Yale Law’s Robert Post offered a narrower path than overruling Abood. Their brief suggested adopting the statutory duties test proposed by Scalia and three other justices in Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Assn. in 1991. Under that test, contributions to a public-sector union “can be compelled only for the costs of performing the union’s statutory duties as exclusive bargaining agent.” If those statutory duties can be limited to wages, hours and working conditions, Justice Stephen Breyer suggested to Frederick, “those three terms have a hundred years of history written around them. It shouldn’t be hard to administer and should keep the things like lobbying and so forth out of it.”

A group of Harvard professors from across disciplines discussed the challenges, impacts, and implications of the #MeToo movement at a panel Monday at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Schlesinger Library...[Jeannie Suk] Gersen, a law professor, spoke about the role of due process in adjudicating sexual assault cases, pointing to the need for clarity in definition and accountability for sexual assault charges. “Due process is for innocent and guilty alike,” she said. “I am so heartened that the conversation has included actual real discussion about what we mean when we say sexual harassment, and what that behavior entails.”

The National Labor Relations Board is taking a redo on its controversial decision to limit joint employer liability for affiliated businesses, thanks to ethics questions surrounding Member William Emanuel’s (R) participation in the case. The board announced today that it has vacated its decision in Hy-Brand Industrial Contractors...“This was one of the most important issues that this board was going to deal with and everyone knew that his firm was involved,” former NLRB member Sharon Block told Bloomberg Law of Emanuel’s participation in the case. The board “broke precedent in dealing with an issue of this magnitude” by taking up the joint employment question in a case in which it could have been avoided, Block added.

Just two months into 2018, President Donald Trump is beset with scandals. His White House is more dysfunctional than ever. He's used vulgar language to describe poor countries and faulted Barack Obama instead of Vladimir Putin for Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And he's continued to lie about pretty much everything. ...News organizations often play the role of unwitting Trump ally. A study of online campaign coverage by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University concluded last summer that "the right-wing media ecosystem," especially Brietbart News and Fox News, were able to force mainstream outlets to report on their favored narratives. They pounced, for example, on controversies over the Clinton Foundation, fueled by a book by a Brietbart editor, producing coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere.