Media Mentions

The Harvard College student whose arrest by Cambridge and Transit police officers has sparked debate over police use of force is now represented by two Harvard Law School professors who said their client won’t be speaking publicly any time soon. Selorm Ohene, 21, a mathematics major at Harvard, was arrested by police last Friday during an encounter...In a statement Tuesday, Harvard Law School professors Ronald F. Sullivan Jr. and Dehlia Umunna said they now represent him. Sullivan is the director and Umunna is the deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard. “He is currently recovering from injuries sustained during his encounter with the Cambridge Police Department,’’ the attorneys wrote in a joint statement. “This has been and continues to be a trying ordeal for Selorm and for his family.”

More than 500 people attended the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association’s 45th Anniversary Gala at the Boston Park Plaza. Desiree Ralls-Morrison, executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at Boston Scientific, was the keynote speaker. Awards were presented to Melvin Miller, Intisar Rabb, Keith N. Hylton, Maria O’Brien Hylton, Ralls-Morrison, Jonathan L. Allen, Jalessa L. Almonacy, Courtney M. Person and Stephanie N. Johnson.

The Cambridge police have launched an internal investigation into an incident on Friday night in which officers tackled and punched a black Harvard student they were trying to arrest as he stood naked in the median of a busy street. The police, who released a video of the scene on Sunday amid complaints about the officers’ conduct, said that the student, Selorm Ohene, 21, was apparently high on drugs and acting in an aggressive and unruly manner when they approached him and tried to calm him down. He came at them, the police said, with clenched fists...Mr. Ohene is studying mathematics, according to a statement from his lawyers, Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. and Dehlia Umunna, both of whom are professors at Harvard. They said he is still recovering from his injuries, but offered few other details about the arrest on Friday. The lawyers said it had been a trying ordeal for their client and his family, and they asked the public and the media to respect his privacy.

Social media companies have embraced artificial intelligence tools to scrub their platforms of hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other content deemed noxious. But will those tools censor other content? Can a program judge the value of speech? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Congress last week that his company is rapidly developing AI tools to “identify certain classes of bad activity proactively and flag it for our team.” It is one of several moves by Facebook as it struggles with an erosion of consumer trust over its harvesting of user data, its past vulnerability to targeted political misinformation and the opaqueness of the formulas upon which its news feeds are built...“The problem is that surveillance is Facebook's business model: surveillance in order to facilitate psychological manipulation,” Bruce Schneier, a well-known security expert and privacy specialist, said. “Whether it's done by people or (artificial intelligence) is in the noise.”

An interview with fellow Leah Plunkett and Anton Kaska. For years, Facebook has collected personal information in order to direct advertising to consumers. But a recent scandal with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which was able to collect this data, has raised huge concerns and a Congressional inquiry.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Make no mistake: The presidency of Donald Trump has hit a major inflection point with the investigation of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Until now, Trump personally was in jeopardy only if special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in Washington finds evidence that he knew about collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 election...Now, however, the Southern District can investigate potential Trump crimes in any area connected to Cohen, a fixer who is known to have arranged payoffs to an adult film star who says she had an affair with Trump. These prosecutors can go back as far as they want before the election, not to mention during and after it.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. I think the question of whether the U.N. Charter is law is misleading or meaningless or both, for reasons that I hope this post will make apparent. But now that I have your attention, I want to sketch a few thoughts about the varied reactions to the airstrikes in Syria by the United States, Great Britain, and France. As Oona Hathaway and I have argued, the U.N. Charter clearly prohibits the strikes, and none of the three recognized exceptions—consent, self-defense, Security Council authorization—are present here. But is that the end of the matter?

An op-ed by Mark Roe. A decade after the global financial crisis, policymakers worldwide are still assessing how best to prevent bank failures from tanking the economy again. Two recent publications – one from the US Department of the Treasury, and another by Federal Reserve economists – provide an indication of where we are. The US Treasury report examined whether to replace the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act’s regulator-led process for resolving failed mega-banks – the Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) – with a solely court-based mechanism. The Treasury’s study was undertaken under instructions from President Donald Trump, who was responding to pressure from several Republican congressional leaders – such as Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee – who advocate replacing regulators with courts.

An essay by Mihir Desai. The Trump Administration's successful efforts at tax legislation stand out as the primary achievement of its first year. But the hurried, largely furtive drafting, and rush to passage at the end of 2017, have helped obscure the new tax regime’s real impact. Much of the reporting and debate has focused on the politicking that went into passing the bill, and the purported effect on the federal budget deficit. That has diverted attention from the true significance of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Instead of simply changing rates and addressing loopholes, the TCJA represents a structural change to the income tax and, consequently, will lead to major changes in behavior.

Organized labor managed an increasingly rare feat on Monday — a political victory — when its allies turned back a Senate measure aimed at rolling back labor rights on tribal lands. The legislation, called the Tribal Labor Sovereignty Act, would have exempted enterprises owned and operated by Native American tribes from federal labor standards, even for employees who were not tribal citizens...More than half a million people are employed by casinos and affiliated resorts on tribal trust land, and a vast majority are not citizens of tribes. Thousands employed in other tribal enterprises could have been affected as well. “It’s a very, very troubling step at a moment when we should be doing everything we can to try to protect people’s collective rights and when there are so many people who feel so disempowered in this economy,” said Sharon Block, a former member of the National Labor Relations Board who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

I have long thought Scooter Libby’s conviction was unjust and that President George W. Bush should have pardoned him rather than commute his sentence. However, coming on the heels of the raid on President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and on the same day that Trump phoned Cohen(!), Trump’s pardon of Libby means we are now at risk of a constitutional standoff concerning the pardon power...“Pardoning Cohen would greatly strengthen the case for obstruction because its obvious purpose would be to remove the pressure for Cohen to cooperate with federal prosecutors seeking to learn about the Trump-related skeletons in Cohen’s closet and to give Manafort and other Mueller targets reason to believe in the pardon prospects Trump has dangled in front of them,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

If EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt survives the onslaught of accusations of mismanagement and excessive spending with his job still safe, he has his biggest benefactors to thank...So, why is Pruitt still so valuable to Trump donors like Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma oilman who chaired Pruitt’s attorney general reelection campaign and called Trump last week? The answer doesn’t appear to be that Pruitt is a legal genius who has rapidly and effectively gutted regulations in a way that satisfies the courts. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, told the New York Times...Former EPA attorney Joseph Goffman, Harvard Environmental Law’s executive director, has been tracking the dozens of air, water, and climate regulations Pruitt has taken aim at so far. And Goffman has a counterargument: Pruitt has undermined environmental protection in ways that are not so easy or straightforward to untangle with a lawsuit. “He certainly sent the signal that in any given instance his policy preference is achieving lower levels of pollution reduction and achieving pollution reduction on a slower schedule,” Goffman says.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Americans think of July Fourth as Independence Day – the anniversary of their nation’s birth, signaled by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But if you really want to celebrate the country’s birthday, you might do that today. It’s Patriots’ Day. In a time of national tumult and division, let’s all raise a toast, and shed some tears. Recognized in just four states, Patriots’ Day commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775. Every American should know the tale.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway. Last night, the United States, United Kingdom, and France launched a coordinated attack in Syria, reportedly aimed at sites related to Syria’s chemical weapons program. President Trump stated that he “ordered the United States armed forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons capabilities of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.” The president emphasized that “Assad launched a savage chemical weapons attack against his own innocent people,” noted that “[l]ast Saturday the Assad regime again deployed chemical weapons to slaughter innocent civilians near the town of Douma near the Syrian capital of Damascus, and stated that “[t]he purpose of our actions tonight is to establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread, and use of chemical weapons” (emphasis added). As we wrote before Trump’s announcement, there is no apparent domestic or international legal authority for the strikes.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word “community” to describe the internet platform. In his 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg famously argued “Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.” Indeed, “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” In his testimony before Congress this week, he again used the term several times. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together,” he told the Senate. The notion of this community of more than 2 billion users worldwide, and over 200 million in the United States, seems core to Zuckerberg’s conception of the platform, and perhaps his own identity. But is Facebook a community?...[Jonathan Zittrain]: “Community” is used all the time by social media and other Internet companies to describe their users. It’s a poor choice of words, adopted no doubt because it makes the relationship between subscriber and company seem less transactional than it really is.

An op-ed by fellow Evelyn Douek. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week for over ten hours, but he had very little new to say. The overwhelming theme of the questions from lawmakers on the Senate judiciary and commerce committees and the House Energy and Commerce Committee was that, as Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley put it, “the status quo no longer works.” Consensus or even concrete proposals of what to do about it, however, were noticeably lacking. Zuckerberg did shed some light on Facebook’s current thinking about how it will combat hate speech on its platform. The plan epitomizes technological optimism: in five to ten years, Zuckerberg said, he expects artificial intelligence will able to proactively monitor posts for hateful content. In the meantime? Facebook is hiring more human content moderators.

Vivek Wadhwa is taking his globe-trotting research into technology’s impact on our present and future with a new appointment at Harvard Law School. Wadhwa has been named a Distinguished Fellow with the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School “to help with what I consider to be the most important research project of our times: to understand the impact of technology on jobs and develop policies to mitigate the dangers.” Reached by WRAL TechWire, Wadhwa says the project is “something that [economist] Richard Freeman and I have long been discussing. There is anecdotal evidence automation is affecting jobs but not enough hard research.”

The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in a case with huge potential impact on New Hampshire businesses, as well as anyone who shops online. The case essentially pits the 45 states that impose a sales tax against the handful that don’t, including the Granite State...“This is really billions of dollars of revenue that is not changing hands,” explains Ian Samuel, a Harvard Law School lecturer who is following this case. A recent GAO report found that states with sales tax were missing out on an estimated $8-13 billion in lost revenue, which impacts everything from school funding to infrastructure projects.

Losing millions of dollars a year at its power plants, Ohio-based FirstEnergy has asked the Trump administration for help. Though it may have the president’s ear, it’s unclear how much President Trump can do to help the company’s struggling coal and nuclear plants. FirstEnergy, which filed for bankruptcy last month, and plans to close three nuclear plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio, wants Energy Secretary Rick Perry to declare a “202-C” grid emergency, and make customers in Pennsylvania and surrounding states pay more for electricity from nuclear and coal...What is a 202? It’s a provision of federal law designed to keep the grid functioning during extreme events that could cause power outages, said Ari Peskoe, an electricity law professor at Harvard. “It was specifically written by Congress in 1935 to ensure that electricity supply did not have the sort of problems that arose during World War One,” Peskoe said.

An interview with Joseph Goffman...The Administration decided to roll back fuel efficiency standards for cars. What does that have to do with air pollution — why does this impact smog? [Goffman]: When cars burn less gasoline, they emit fewer pollutants, including the pollutants which contribute to the forming of smog in the air. Cars also emit the gases that cause global warming, and in a warming world smog forms more easily.

In the wake of the forcible arrest of a black Harvard undergraduate Friday, hundreds of University affiliates came together at multiple events held across campus to talk through the incident and to share their concern and support for one another. Cambridge Police Department officers arrested a Harvard undergraduate Friday night after a physical encounter with law enforcement on charges including indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, and assault. Shortly after the incident, the Harvard Black Law Students Association tweeted out a statement calling the arrest an instance of police brutality...BLSA hosted the meeting to update Harvard affiliates about what happened Friday and to provide students a place to heal and work through the arrest, according to BLSA member Emanuel Powell III [`19]. He specifically credited black women involved with BLSA for their participation in the event, noting the women facilitated conversation and ensured the gathering served as a “space of healing.”...BLSA member Amber A. James ’11 [`19], who spoke at the event, said she agrees with Powell and that she thinks the meeting served a key function in allowing Harvard affiliates to “[build] for the future.”...Several Faculty Deans sent emails to students in their Houses following the arrest Friday. Some announced they plan to hold House events to discuss the details of the incident and to offer students a space to respond and reflect. In an email to Winthrop House residents sent midday Saturday, Winthrop Faculty Deans Stephanie Robinson and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.—who serves as an advisor to BLSA—wrote they plan to provide students with a place to share their thoughts about the arrest. “Winthrop House will provide a space for students to process the incident itself, as well as the broader issues implicated by this particular incident,” Sullivan and Robinson wrote.