Media Mentions

A national group is focusing on Alaska in a bid to get the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit a 2010 decision that upended how campaigns are run in this country. The court decision paved the way for corporations and unions to make unlimited independent expenditures, and in Alaska, was viewed by state officials as likely rendering several provisions of law prohibiting or limiting certain contributions unconstitutional...Lawrence Lessig, founder of Equal Citizens, said his group believes the commission has sided with “what is a kind of conventional view among lawyers” that his group believes is incorrect. “What we’re trying to seek is clarification that the limits can be enforced,” he said. Equal Citizens zeroed in on Alaska, in part, because the state has a procedure in place that allows citizens “to force the state to explain why it’s not enforcing its own law,” he said.

Even in his hometown of Springfield, Mark Janus is a relatively unknown figure. Janus is a state employee who works in a nondescript office investigating child support claims. He’s also a divorced father of two adult children and he volunteers to help Boy Scouts. Until recently there was little in the 65-year-old man’s life that would indicate he would make history. But on Feb. 26 the United States Supreme Court will hear his case. At stake is whether government workers should, as a condition of employment, be compelled to pay money to a union. “I would say this case has the potential to be a landmark case,” Harvard University Law Professor Benjamin Sachs told Illinois Times. “Essentially, if the court rules in Mr. Janus’ favor, it would put every government worker in the United States under a right-to-work regime.”

Despite a global brand as a reckless Twitter addict and loudmouth, Donald Trump has a history of behaving himself in formal legal settings. Before he was president, the real estate heir was deposed dozens of times, mostly in various lawsuits related to his businesses, which have been accused of discriminating against black people, screwing over renters, and stiffing contractors. When pressed to tell the truth under penalty of perjury in formal depositions, Trump has tended to provide something resembling it...For some insight into how presidents have been compelled to testify in the past, what a Supreme Court ruling on a Trump subpoena might look like, and how the thorny question of his testimony is as much a political question as a legal one, I called up Noah Feldman, a legal historian at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the past, a president under investigation couldn’t afford to plead the Fifth Amendment. While it’s often a good strategy in a court of law -- especially since it can’t be used to infer guilt -- the court of public opinion is a different matter. What president would want to appear to be hiding guilt behind a legal technicality? All bets are off in the Donald Trump era. The president’s lawyers have reportedly advised him not to cooperate with any request from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to question him. So far, Mueller has not forced the issue with a subpoena, but that could change in the coming days or weeks.

Paying union dues and baking a wedding cake may not seem like classic examples of free speech—except perhaps at the Supreme Court. This year, the high court is poised to announce its most significant expansion of the 1st Amendment since the Citizens United decision in 2010, which struck down laws that limited campaign spending by corporations, unions and the very wealthy...Harvard law professor Charles Fried, the U.S. solicitor general under President Reagan, filed a brief in the union case questioning how the court could say the 1st Amendment protects public employees from paying a union fee, but not for speaking out about problems in an agency.

The Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School has partnered with the Thailand Institute of Justice to launch workshops focused on strengthening the rule of law and sustainable development around the world. The most recent collaboration, held in Bangkok last month, comprised three sessions designed for faculty and scholars titled “TIJ Workshop for Emerging Leaders on the Rule of Law and Policy,” “IGLP Workshop for Scholars,” and “Student Workshop for Next-Gen Global Leaders.”...Law School professor David W. Kennedy, who serves as the director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, said both institutes—at Harvard and in Thailand—bring something to the table in developing legal education around the world. “They [TIJ] offer their own programs and workshops for emerging leaders from the region and we [IGLP] provide them with some of the curriculum and offer them some of our faculty to help them implement their workshops,” Kennedy said.

Steve Wynn resigned yesterday as the C.E.O. of Wynn Resorts after allegations of sexual misconduct. Those accusations have created an important test for corporate America. In recent months, many powerful men have had to step down from senior positions as they have faced accusations of sexual harassment, but none were the head of a public company like Mr. Wynn. How would the board, shareholders, regulators, customers and unions react?...In an email exchange with me, Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor and an expert in corporate governance, asked why the board did not suspend Mr. Wynn from his position pending the investigation, or demand that he not interact with Wynn Resorts employees, a step that would have limited his ability to influence the board investigation. In fact, the board, in its statement, sounded somewhat saddened by Mr. Wynn’s departure, saying it had “reluctantly” accepted his resignation.

As Congress moves to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, University President Drew G. Faust raised concerns about the bill’s impact on federal financial aid at a Faculty meeting Tuesday evening...Faust told Faculty members that the Act would reduce student aid and support for work study...Kenneth H. Lafler, an assistant dean for student financial services at the Law School, said he thinks the changes to the Higher Education Act would have a relatively limited effect on Law School students, but would impact graduate students outside of Harvard. The Law School has its own loan repayment program, the Low Income Protection Plan, that is independent of federal loan forgiveness. Lafler said 681 graduates were enrolled in LIPP in last year. “Most law schools around the country changed the way they provide loan assistance to integrate with the public service loan forgiveness program. So, the cancellation of that program would be a significant change for those schools, because they’re really dependent on that program,” Lafler said.

Students, professors, and legal experts discussed the direction the nation should take following the national spotlight on the #MeToo movement at a Tuesday evening panel...Panelists included Law School Professor Diane Rosenfeld, Massachusetts Legislative Aide Preyel Patel, University of Massachusetts-Boston Professor J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, and Know Your IX Policy and Advocacy Coordinator Sejal Singh [`20]...A central theme in the panelists’ responses was the call for intersectionality within the movement, and advocacy for marginalized groups. “I can’t speak for a trans woman, but I can hold a space for her,” Rosenfeld said. Panelists also called for individuals to not shy away from difficult conversations with their peers.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. The Nunes memo was thoroughly debunked less than 12 hours after its publication. The sources of this debunking transcended politics, and ranged from The Intercept and Marcy Wheeler to Paul Rosenzweig and David French. I want to focus here on two other writings related to the memo: The cover letter to the release of the Nunes memo written by White House Counsel Donald McGahn, and President Trump’s Friday morning tweet.

The world may have turned its attention to rampant sexual harassment and assault in 2017, but activists on college campuses have waged this battle for decades. Their work has not only foretold today’s Me Too movement but has also laid the foundation for cultural changes necessary to curb workplace harassment. Harvard-trained lawyer Diane Rosenfeld is at the heart of this movement. Her work focuses on a single question: How do we create a culture of sexual respect on, and beyond, college campuses?...In an interview with Quartz, Rosenfeld spoke about strong female alliances, how teaching breathed new life into her career, and the wonders of “smooth aggressiveness.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Democrats are right to press for the release of their own House Intelligence Committee memo to counteract the Republican memo about the Russia investigation that was released to great fanfare last week. But the truth is, it doesn’t much matter what the Democrats’ memo says. President Donald Trump has already won this round, even though the Republican memo wasn’t earth-shaking. Trump and the House Republicans have only one goal, which is to refocus the whole conversation around special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation on the issue of partisanship, not the Trump campaign’s conduct.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Late last year, the Department of Labor proposed an important and controversial federal regulation without a serious analysis of its costs and benefits, and of its likely effects on low-income American workers. That’s a big mistake, a disservice to the public and a bad precedent. It might cause legal trouble as well. The absence of such an analysis, including numbers, is inconsistent with decades of practice supported by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

From immigration to the economy to North Korea, President Donald Trump hit on a variety of huge policy areas during his State of the Union address last week — but there was one line in particular that, while largely overlooked, could have potentially massive consequences for the reach of executive power and the rule of law at the federal level. The president seemed to instruct Congress to authorize sweeping new powers for the executive branch...But Harvard Law professor Charles Fried said that even if Trump's proposal was actually put up for consideration, it would be extremely difficult to implement. "If we're talking about civil servants there needs to be statutory authorization," Fried explained.

Police accountability has been a huge issue in Chicago, but has been virtually ignored in the suburbs. The next Illinois Attorney General could change that. “You can’t be an attorney general … without paying serious attention to the quality of criminal justice in your state. It’s probably your prime responsibility,” said former Maine attorney general James Tierney, a Harvard Law School lecturer. In Chicago, outgoing Attorney General Lisa Madigan has sued the city in an attempt to force federal oversight of police reform efforts. But how to reform police departments outside the city’s borders remains a question. In an effort to hold those officers more accountable, the candidates vying to be the next attorney general have pledged to file federal lawsuits, investigate corruption, and push legislation.

On June 6, 206, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joined his wife, Elaine Chao, now the U.S. secretary of transportation, at a ceremony on the Harvard Business School campus to dedicate a new building emblazoned with the Chao family name. Funded by a $40 million gift from the Chao family and its foundation, the building would serve as a new hub for Harvard’s Executive Education program. But the family’s generosity appears to have come at the expense of taxpayers — the money, it turns out, would already have been in the public treasury had it not been sheltered from the government in complex offshore tax havens...The Marshall Islands’ corporate registry list both companies as still active. Stephen Shay, a tax expert and professor at Harvard Law School, said he does not believe that there would be anything illegal about a foundation’s public tax forms listing an offshore contributor at the address of its U.S. domestic parent company, although such a move “would not seem usual.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. A decade ago, Chicago handed over control of its parking meters to a cadre of private investors. Officials pitched the deal as an innovative win-win. In exchange for a 75-year lease, the cash-strapped city got a lump sum. In fact, that large upfront payment was far less than the meters’ potential revenue—it was more than $1 billion too low...Beginning last fall, Toronto has been getting a flood of publicity about a deal with Sidewalk Labs, part of Google spinoff Alphabet. Reports describe the deal as giving Sidewalk the authority to build in an undeveloped 12-acre portion of the city called Quayside.

A book review by Randall Kennedy. "A More Beautiful and Terrible History" is a critique of what its author derides as the ascendant fable of the civil rights movement. Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis contends that influential shapers of public memory have attempted with considerable success to whitewash and truncate recollections of the black protests that challenged the racial status quo between the 1950s and the 1970s. The culprits include academics, journalists and politicians. What they have done, she charges, is depict a movement devoid of unsettling militance, with narrow aims that were accomplished on account of an attentive citizenry that only needed to glimpse injustice in order to respond nobly. The fable, she argues, is complacently triumphalist, offering a distorted mirror that misleadingly celebrates observers.

An op-ed by Catharine MacKinnon. The #MeToo movement is accomplishing what sexual harassment law to date has not. This mass mobilization against sexual abuse, through an unprecedented wave of speaking out in conventional and social media, is eroding the two biggest barriers to ending sexual harassment in law and in life: the disbelief and trivializing dehumanization of its victims. Sexual harassment law — the first law to conceive sexual violation in inequality terms — created the preconditions for this moment. Yet denial by abusers and devaluing of accusers could still be reasonably counted on by perpetrators to shield their actions.

...The #MeToo movement fits naturally into the narrative we’ve constructed about the dramatic lives of our favorite stars. We are captivated by these women: their monochromatic dresses, majestic pins, sad eyes; their sober interviews and rousing speeches. It is a movement that feels cinematic in the scope of the depravity it unearths and the progress it promises. It is grittily dynamic, vehemently forward-moving. But Harvard is not Hollywood. Proclaiming “Me, too” means something different on a campus than it does on a screen...Sejal Singh [`20], a Harvard Law student and Policy Coordinator at Know Your IX, a national campaign against sexual harassment and violence in schools, says she thinks “we have yet to even scratch the surface” on the problem of sexual misconduct in academia. “It’s sort of odd to me that we were supposedly having this national moment where we start to reckon with not just these individual harassers, but I think much more importantly, the way that these intuitions have enabled them,” Singh says...Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at the Law School who has campaigned against Obama-era Title IX changes, says she thinks this protracted focus on the issue means that higher education is in a position to “appreciate the complexity of the problem.” “All of those issues that we dealt with and are continuing to deal with on campuses are now on a broader scale at workplaces and other kinds of institutions,” Suk Gersen says...But others worry that academia’s focus on Title IX shifts the focus to semantics, stymying the potential for more nuanced discussions about broader cultures of harassment. “We’re still fighting about the legal definition,” says Paavani Garg [`18], a Harvard Law student and president of the Women’s Law Association. “We’ve been talking about Title IX for so long... It seems to be something that isn’t always the most effective way of dealing with victims of sexual assault and their needs.”

What do they call it? Ah yes. Black excellence. As such, 27-year-old Michael Thomas [`19] of New York City’s Brooklyn borough has been named the editor of the Harvard Law Review, Vol. 132, the second black person in as many years...Thomas, a second-year student at Harvard Law, says he took the “Michelle Obama route” by majoring in sociology undergrad at Princeton and then entering Harvard Law, where he is involved with the Black Law Students Association and the Harvard Law Documentary Studio...“[The] conversations that go on within and outside our pages have an effect on the law,” Thomas told The Root via email. “It’s important that those conversations reflect the full range of experience of the people who interact with the law and, that is to say, all of us.”