Media Mentions

This month, Washington lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a narrow bill that seeks to crack down on sex trafficking online. To most, it seemed like a no-brainer: Sex trafficking is obviously bad. The law, however, changed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a 20-year-old communications law that is the basis of the free internet as we know it. On April 11, President Donald Trump signed the bill — a combination of bills passed by the House and Senate, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) — into law...There are concerns that FOSTA-SESTA could lead to the further erosion of internet freedom and safe harbor protections. “The larger question is whether this is part of a case for more extensive regulation on different intermediaries, and I think we just don’t know the answer to that yet,” said Harvard law professor Rebecca Tushnet.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Facebook is massive. Six million advertisers use Facebook's vast data holdings to perfectly target ads reaching more than 1.4 billion daily (and 2.1 billion monthly) active users, amounting to almost 40 percent of the global internet population. That enormous user base forms a castle wall around Facebook’s core ad business, because few other companies can promise the same level of return for ad spends. It's trendy this month to call on the US government to rein in Facebook. But the government doesn't quite know how to treat the giant blue-branded company: Is it a media conglomerate or a platform?

An op-ed by James R. Clapper, Jr., Joshua A. Geltzer and Matthew G. Olsen. Speaking in Davos this January, President Donald Trump promised that, "when it comes to terrorism, we will do whatever is necessary to protect our nation." It's a commitment we share with the President. In fact, developing and implementing lawful and effective counterterrorism strategies and policies used to be our jobs in the intelligence community, at the White House and at the National Counterterrorism Center, respectively. That's precisely why we are opposed to Trump's travel ban, which heads to the Supreme Court this week for oral arguments. It's unnecessary, at odds with the Constitution, and ultimately counterproductive because it makes Americans less safe rather than more.

The Supreme Court will close out arguments for the term on Wednesday by weighing the constitutionality of President Trump’s third attempt to block nationals from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States...But Ian Samuel, a Climenko fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, isn’t convinced Kennedy is in the Trump camp on this one. “Nothing would be less extraordinary than Justice Kennedy changing his mind,” he said. Samuel argues Kennedy is likely to side with Hawaii’s argument that the travel ban is a clear case of unconstitutional religious discrimination. He also said it’s possible that argument could pull Chief Justice John Roberts into the majority for a 6-3 ruling in favor of the state.

...Even the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against Russia’s intelligence outfit (GRU), WikiLeaks, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone, the Trump campaign and others for conspiracy can force Trump and members of his inner circle to turn over documents and sit for depositions where they will have to testify under oath. “This lawsuit is well-grounded jurisdictionally and legally, dodges the difficulties that might’ve been triggered by naming Trump personally, and puts a high-powered piece on the 4-dimensional chessboard that can cause Trump’s circle endless trouble (through discovery and otherwise) after criminal proceedings have been completed and regardless of what happens on the impeachment front,” says constitutional scholar and Supreme Court advocate Laurence H. Tribe (a real lawyer). It can also “provide a potent platform for educating the public about the ugly details of how this presidency arose from a swamp far dirtier than the one Trump promised to drain.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. America doesn’t have coups or tanks in the street. But a deep state of sorts exists here and it includes national security bureaucrats who use secretly collected information to shape or curb the actions of elected officials. Some see these American bureaucrats as a vital check on the law-breaking or authoritarian or otherwise illegitimate tendencies of democratically elected officials. Others decry them as a self-serving authoritarian cabal that illegally and illegitimately undermines democratically elected officials and the policies they were elected to implement. The truth is that the deep state, which is a real phenomenon, has long been both a threat to democratic politics and a savior of it. The problem is that it is hard to maintain its savior role without also accepting its threatening role. The two go hand in hand, and are difficult to untangle.

More than 200 Harvard students and affiliates, many with red duct tape over their mouths, handed out flyers and encircled University Hall in protest Saturday to demand reforms to University processes they say led to the forcible arrest of a black College student April 13. The event was planned by Black Students Organizing for Change, a group formed by College students in the wake of the physical confrontation between a black student and the Cambridge Police Department last week...During the demonstration, Harvard Law student Akua F. Abu [`20] ’14 said in an interview she thinks it is important to showcase the mistakes and shortcomings of Harvard for prospective students. “The students who are coming to Harvard should really understand that Harvard can be a great and supportive place, but Harvard has made mistakes and Harvard needs to do better,” Abu said.

Some spirited sniping between two Harvard Law School giants might be funny in some context, were the fate of Western democracy not potentially tottering in the balance. In an Ali-Frazier battle of legal minds, former federal judge Nancy Gertner this week smote celebrated legal scholar Alan Dershowitz in the opinion section of The New York Times, accusing him of falsely smearing Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether or not the Trump campaign was in on it. Gertner and Dershowitz are longtime friends, but the highbrow exchange had an edge. Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, lumped Dershowitz, the loquacious Harvard law professor emeritus, in the same paragraph with partisan mouthpieces Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

On Friday night, the Cambridge Police Department arrested a black undergraduate on Massachusetts Avenue just outside the Law School. The incident has drawn national attention as Harvard affiliates and onlookers nationwide question whether the arrest and the proceedings leading up to the arrest were in accordance with University and Cambridge city protocol.Those who have witnessed or watched video of the arrest have seen what can only be described as a case of police brutality...we stand with the Black Law Students Association and others in strongly criticizing the arrest...n the aftermath of this troubling event, we call on Harvard to do everything it can to defend the student’s legal rights and rights as a student and are grateful for the work of the Law School professors, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Dehlia Umunna, who will represent him.

A group of Harvard Law School students recently wrote an open letter calling for the school to ensure that law firms who recruit on campus “protect the rights of their employees” to come forward and seek legal action if they “experience harassment, discrimination, or workplace abuse.” The letter stated that several law firms that recruit summer associates from the Law School have recently begun requiring new hires to sign mandatory arbitration agreements along with non-disclosure agreements...Molly M. E. Coleman, one of the letter’s organizers, said in an interview Thursday that the issues were first raised by a lecturer at the Law School who found out firms were asking students to sign these agreements...Sejal Singh, another organizer of the letter, pointed to the particular salience of law firms requiring summer associates to sign mandatory arbitration and non-disclosure agreements in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which sparked national conversations about workplace harassment...Coleman also said students have had productive conversations with Law School administrators, including Assistant Dean for Career Services Mark A. Weber, to try to move forward with their proposed changes. ..“I understand their concerns, and we take them very seriously. We are examining how to address the issue in our recruiting efforts,” he wrote.

...While fully autonomous weapons — the technical term for killer robots — aren't quite yet a reality, the rapid advance of robotics and artificial intelligence raises the specter of armies someday soon having tanks and aircraft capable of attacking without a human at the controls...But outlawing killer robots internationally may prove difficult. Bonnie Docherty, senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch and associate director of armed conflict and civilian protection at Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, says in an email that while most of the countries at the UN conference are concerned about autonomous weapons, there's not yet consensus support for a legally-binding international ban.

Internet activists are gathering in Cleveland this week for a conference about getting better internet access to more people. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance wants to reduce the inequity in broadband connections for people in rural areas or poor urban neighborhoods...Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford says America needs to treat high-speed internet as a utility like electricity or water, as other countries do. “It is embarrassing to have a Korean tell me that coming to America is like taking a rural vacation because life is so slow here. It is embarrassing for the mayor of Stockholm, the mayor said to me 'What can I do to help America?' ”

Months into the Korean War, President Harry Truman capped wages and imposed price controls on the steel industry, seizing authority under a newly passed law to take action in the name of national defense. Now, more than a half century later, Trump administration officials are considering using the same statute to keep struggling coal and nuclear power plants online, according to four people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity to discuss private deliberations..."This would extend the statute far beyond how it’s ever been used before," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. "This statute did not contemplate the sort of use that apparently now the administration is considering."

While in large part a spending bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says H.R. 2 would have a minimum impact on overall federal spending. It doesn't have the kind of budget-expanding numbers some departments see, but the farm bill still provides vital funding for rural waste management projects, which can be prohibitively expensive to start from scratch. More notable than routine spending and grant programs, however, is the establishment of a dedicated position within the federal government, which focuses exclusively on food waste and food loss prevention. The food waste liaison would be tasked with sharing information across government agencies and working to reduce food waste at the national level...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, said the liaison "represents a step in the right direction," but "we hoped to see more, and will continue to work with members of Congress to understand the importance of food waste reduction and these key ways that the farm bill can make a difference in this fight."

An interview with Emanuel Powell `19. Last Friday night, Cambridge Police forcefully arrested a Harvard student on Massachusetts Avenue. The officers involved in the arrest threw multiple punches while restraining the student. The Harvard Black Law Students Association released a statement calling the confrontation "a brutal instance of police violence."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. James Comey’s extraordinary attacks on Donald Trump as “morally unfit” to be president are more than a ploy to sell books. The unprecedented phenomenon of a fired FBI director taking on a sitting president is also a symptom of the most fundamental challenge facing the U.S. political system today. Put simply: There’s no single, nonpartisan trusted source of authority. In the recent past, nonpartisan law enforcement would have been trusted by broad swaths of the American people. Centrist news media would have been accepted by most members of both parties as authoritative.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Was Robert Mueller, the special counsel, complicit in one of the worst scandals in the F.B.I.’s history — the decades-long wrongful imprisonment of four men for a murder they didn’t commit? This question, which has been raised before, is being addressed again — this time by some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters on the right, especially Fox News’s Sean Hannity but also Rush Limbaugh and others. My friend Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Law School professor, has also weighed in. In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.”

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them. Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.

...Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment...“As Senate Majority Leader, McConnell has extraordinary power to control the nation’s legislative agenda — and that power carries great responsibility,” said constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

You’ve probably read about concerns over “designer babies,” whose DNA is shaped by gene editing. Greely is focused on a different technology that has gotten much less attention: In a startling bit of biological alchemy, scientists have shown that in mice, they can turn ordinary cells into sperm and eggs. It’s too soon to know if it could be done in people. But if it can, it could become a powerful infertility treatment, permitting genetic parenthood for people who can’t make their own sperm or eggs...Once the genetic profile is done, could it come back to haunt a child if, say, a life insurer or nursing home demanded to see it to assess disease risk? How would the large number of rejected embryos be handled ethically and politically? Perhaps future regulation could limit the number of embryos created, as well as what traits a couple could select for, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor.

new 10-year energy strategy from the Sununu administration prefers Uber to trains, supports nuclear at least as much as wind and solar, and says that electricity cost to ratepayers rather than support for renewables should be topmost in the minds of regulators and lawmakers. The 10-Year State Energy Strategy, released Tuesday by the Office of Energy and Planning, signals several shifts from a 2014 report issued under Gov. Maggie Hassan...The Energy Strategy is much less bullish on renewable energy sources due to fears they will raise the cost of electricity, arguing that subsidizes and mandates in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island might “socialize costs” throughout the six-state region, which shares a power grid. “The default assumption is that renewable energy is expensive, which may or may not be true, and expressing concern that New Hampshire is going to pay for it,” said Ari Peskoe, director Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “It’s sort of a southern New England versus northern New England issue.”