Media Mentions

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist … courtesy of artificial intelligence...Experts say the use of these risk assessments may be the biggest shift in courtroom decision-making since American judges began accepting social science and other expert evidence more than a century ago. Christopher Griffin, a research director at Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, calls the new digital tools “the next step in that revolution.”

Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, will form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States, the three companies have announced. Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, will form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States, the three companies have announced...In a statement emailed to Healio.com, Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and professor at Harvard Law School, said the venture pointed to a systemic issue with American health care. “We have failed as a nation to produce a health care delivery system that affords comprehensive health coverage to everybody, Greenwald wrote.

Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a joint partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to create an independent health care company for their employees, putting an end to months of speculation that the technology giant was eyeing a foray into the medical industry...“Amazon already has huge amounts of our data — we give it to them in exchange for two-day shipping,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in health law policy. “But what happens when you add in actual health care data? Many people are already concerned about who has access to that information, and this exacerbates those concerns.”

Twelve of the top 100 most-cited law professors of all time teach at Harvard Law School, according to the Social Science Research Network—and professors Lucian A. Bebchuk and Steven Shavell took the first two spots. An electronic service that aims to make research papers and scholarly articles easily accessible, the SSRN contains over 650,000 documents by more than 360,000 authors...“The rankings reflect the significant impact that the Harvard Law School faculty has on policy research and the legal academy,” Bebchuk wrote in an email. Law Professor Cass R. Sunstein ’75, who ranks in fourth place with 1,484 citations, said he thinks there is a significant benefit to publishing work on SSRN. “I think it’s a good thing if you have a paper that’s published and that could benefit from the comments and criticisms of others,” Sunstein said...The list also includes Law professors Louis Kaplow, Reinier H. Kraakman ’71, Mark J. Roe, Jesse M. Fried ’86, Alma Cohen, Allen Ferrell, John Coates IV, Oren Bar-Gill, and J. Mark Ramseyer.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. On January 3, the world learned about a series of major security vulnerabilities in modern microprocessors. Called Spectre and Meltdown, these vulnerabilities were discovered by several different researchers last summer, disclosed to the microprocessors’ manufacturers, and patched—at least to the extent possible. This news isn’t really any different from the usual endless stream of security vulnerabilities and patches, but it’s also a harbinger of the sorts of security problems we’re going to be seeing in the coming years.

After reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at the direction of the president, unsuccessfully applied pressure on FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, McCabe has announced that he intends to depart earlier than planned...So what does this all mean? “If it turns out that McCabe was pressed to accelerate his planned early retirement by a month or so by Sessions or on behalf of Trump, this would strengthen the argument for a pattern of obstruction of justice,” constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “But without proof of such pressure, this development isn’t likely to have major significance.”

Last fall, Justice Elena Kagan touted the advantages of an experienced U.S. Supreme Court Bar—the “repeat players” who know what the court likes. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seems to think criminal defense lawyers still aren’t getting the message...Lamenting the lack of diversity on the high court itself, Sotomayor said in 2013 she was bothered by the fact judges rarely come to the bench from the defense bar or with civil rights experiences. “We’re missing a huge amount of diversity on the bench,” she said. A 2016 study by Harvard Law School’s Andrew Crespo analyzed what he called the high court’s institutional shift over the last four decades toward the prosecution. One part of that shift, Crespo found, was the “rise of a sharp advocacy gap between criminal defendants and the rest of the increasingly expert Supreme Court bar, including expert advocates for the prosecution.”

In the days immediately following the 2017 Women’s March, members of the Harvard University Cyberlaw Clinic and their colleagues at metaLAB learned that a number of artists who’d created some of the iconic images from the march were facing challenges, mostly brought on by the fact that work they’d created for themselves and their close circles had gone viral and was appearing all across the internet. “When you’re getting that kind of attention, you want to have your ducks in a row, and we realized that there wasn’t really a good resource for folks to get their questions answered,” said organizer Jessica Fjeld, in an email interview with Hyperallergic.

The Declaration of Independence doesn’t mince words when it states that “all men are created equal.” And yet the country’s other foundational document – The Constitution – protected the most unequal of institutions in slavery. Harvard Law Professor Annette Gordon-Reed joins us to talk about how America has struggled since its founding to reconcile these conflicting ideas. Her essay “America’s Original Sin” appears in Foreign Affairs magazine.

...Are workers employees or independent contractors? Some of the first major labor cases before the Supreme Court focused on that issue—such as whether newspaper delivery people were considered contractors or employees. Sharon Block, a former NLRB member and now executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, had this to say: “I think there is a tendency to get distracted by the bright, shiny object of technology. To assume that because technology is involved doesn’t mean that standards don’t apply. The standards of the relationship isn’t changed.”

An op-ed by David Weinberger. Artificial intelligence systems are going to crash some of our cars, and sometimes they're going to recommend longer sentences for black Americans than for whites. We know this because they've already gone wrong in these ways. But this doesn’t mean that we should insist—as many, including the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation, do—that artificial intelligence should be able to explain how it came up with its conclusions in every non-trivial case.

The mandate of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and enforce environmental regulations. Yet since he was confirmed last February, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has worked deliberately to stall or roll back this core work of his agency, efforts he’s now celebrating with posters...“He is much more organized, much more focused than the other Cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University, told the New York Times. “Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The web is abuzz with the revelation that President Donald Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller in June but was blocked by White House counsel Donald McGahn. What information can be gleaned from the leak and its circumstances? Let’s pull on the deerstalker and try to draw some inferences -- both positive and negative.

Even as President Trump's falsehoods go, this one was pretty blatant: Two months after he unsuccessfully tried to fire Robert S. Mueller III, Trump denied that he had even considered doing such a thing...Another constitutional law expert, Mark Tushnet of Harvard University, said it would be a “stretch” to say that such lies inherently violate a president's duty to faithfully executive the laws. But he said it could play into an obstruction case. Another constitutional law expert, Mark Tushnet of Harvard University, said it would be a “stretch” to say that such lies inherently violate a president's duty to faithfully executive the laws. But he said it could play into an obstruction case.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. Although President Trump confidently declared that he is willing to speak to special counsel Robert Mueller under oath, and is even “looking forward to it,” his principal lawyer advising him on the investigation, Ty Cobb, has darkly warned of a “perjury trap.” That “concern” has now been echoed by Trump supporters Roger Stone and Rush Limbaugh, who have both cautioned Trump about speaking with Mueller. So, is Mueller really laying a trap for Trump? No.

President Trump reportedly ordered the dismissal of special counsel Robert Mueller last June, but backed down after White House counsel Don McGahn said he would quit rather than carry out the order, according to The New York Times and others. In Davos, the president dismissed the report as "fake news." John Yang reports and Judy Woodruff talks to Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by fellow Yasser Latif Hamdani. The Kasur incident is too horrific to write about. Nor does one wish to get into the controversies about the victim’s father and his conduct or that of the Government of Punjab. It has been a painful ordeal for everyone in Pakistan and indeed all around the world. What is sad though is this damnable attempt to politicize this issue.

Dozens of Harvard affiliates remain uncertain about their futures after government officials announced earlier this month that changes to the Temporary Protected Status program will end protections for nearly 200,000 Salvadorans...“We are deeply concerned about the administration’s recent withdrawal of TPS for those from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan and the impact it could have on members of the community,” University spokesperson Melodie L. Jackson wrote in an emailed statement...Jackson wrote that the University is working closely with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Harvard Human Resources, and student affairs offices to provide support services as needed for University affiliates who may be affected by the policy changes...At the clinic, attorneys and students at Harvard Law School provide immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers with free legal consultations about TPS and other immigration concerns like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. HIRC also offers social services during walk-in hours at Cabot Science Library on Wednesdays from 3 p.m. to 4:30 pm.

...First, Trump’s failed attempt to fire Mueller was apparently known to many individuals, indicating both a lack of discipline on Trump’s part (what else did he say to these people?) and possible waiver of the any privilege...Second, “Attempted obstruction is obstruction even when the perpetrator backs down after failing to get his consigliere to do the deed for him,” constitutional lawyer Larry Tribe emails me. “In addition, it’s part of a persistent pattern of obstruction. And it’s also strong evidence of consciousness of guilt.”

When Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, moved into his corner office on the West Wing’s second floor last January, he chose not to decorate its walls or fill its glass-paneled shelving with personal items...Now, Mr. McGahn has been thrust squarely into the public eye by the disclosure that in June he threatened to resign in order to stop President Trump from firing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and into whether Mr. Trump committed obstruction of justice...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote last year on the Lawfare blog that Mr. McGahn was either incompetent or ineffective — giving bad advice, or advice that his client ignored. Mr. Goldsmith said on Friday that there were too many unanswered questions about what happened in June to judge what it means for Mr. McGahn. He might “have acted to protect the president, or himself, or both, from legal trouble,” Mr. Goldsmith said.

An op-ed by Hugh Simons and Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio. It’s perplexing. Women comprise 45 percent of Big Law associates but only 22 percent of partners. Why are they leaving in such numbers? Are they underperforming and thus being outplaced? Are they ineffective at the profession’s upper echelons? A comparison of how female and male partners move laterally answers these questions with a resounding “No!” The data show women partners are less likely to depart involuntarily, are more successful when they move to higher profitability firms and are more effective as senior partners.