Media Mentions

Massachusetts Senator and former Law School professor Elizabeth Warren endorsed Harvard’s graduate student union Friday, weeks ahead of an election that will determine whether eligible University teaching and research assistants may unionize. “For generations, graduate students have done hard work that keeps universities running. It’s past time for them to be treated with respect and past time for them to have their own elected representation in the decisions that affect their lives,” Warren wrote in an emailed statement to The Crimson Friday...Law School student and union organizer Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15 [`20] said she thinks Warren’s message should encourage eligible students to vote in favor of unionization. “Her support is a sign that voting for the union is the right thing to do for people who believe in Senator Warren’s vision of an economy and a politics that works for everyone,” Sandalow-Ash said.

University President Drew G. Faust sent a letter Thursday to House and Senate leadership asking for “immediate attention” to protections for undocumented youth as legislators debated that issue in an unsuccessful effort to stave off a government shutdown. Lawmakers failed to reach a deal, and the shutdown is now entering its third day...In light of the Ninth Circuit ruling, Harvard informed students Wednesday that it will begin assisting with renewal applications. In an email to students, Jason Corral, the staff attorney for Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic, said DACA renewal applications have been posted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website. The University currently has around 65 undocumented students, administrators estimate...“I worry that immigration hardliners will ask for too much of a compromise that may negatively affect immigration law and policy in the long run,” Corral wrote.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Steve Bannon’s claim of executive privilege in his refusal to answer questions this week from the House Intelligence Committee is raising a novel and somewhat difficult problem: Should there be executive privilege for communications between the president and his close advisers during the transition period between the election and the inauguration? On the one hand, the president’s need for candid advice starts before he takes office. On the other hand, there’s something strange about applying a constitutionally based executive privilege to someone who is not, after all, the executive.

After taking the oath of office a year ago, President Donald Trump turned west to offer a preview of his presidency. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first,” he declared from the Capitol steps. To many Californians, however, Trump’s turbulent first year in office has felt as if it’s come with a different mantra: California last...The sustained resistance from California during Trump’s first year in office represents the most vigorous dispute between a state and the federal government since Southern politicians fought desegregation measures in the 1960s, said Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor who’s written several books about the civil rights movement. “There hasn’t been anything else like it in these last 50 years,” he said.

Bill Cosby goes back to court in April, but his retrial on sexual assault charges will unfold in a very different America than his first. Since then, the #MeToo movement has established that women who individually once feared their accusations would be discounted or dismissed can find corroboration and power when they come forward as a group...There has long been a debate on just how much judges are, or should be, swayed by public opinion...Others, such as the Harvard law professor Michael Klarman have argued that certain landmark rulings like Brown v. Board of Education would never have been possible if judges had not been reflecting shifting social mores. In some ways, Mr. Cosby paved the way for the #MeToo moment as he battled accusations for years that he had hidden a history of mistreating women behind his comforting pose as America’s Dad.

President Donald Trump possibly obstructed justice or intimidated a witness if he did indeed tell Steve Bannon not to answer certain questions during his interview with the House Intelligence Committee, according to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who worked at the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama...“Instructing Bannon to invoke a non-existent ‘executive privilege’ for pre-presidential communications—if that’s what Trump in fact did—would be legally improper at the very best, and could well constitute a form of witness tampering, and, in conjunction with Trump’s pattern of interference with the official probes into his campaign and the transition, an obstruction of justice,” Tribe told Newsweek by email.

Money to keep the U.S. government up and running could be about to run out — again. As of Thursday, Congress still hasn’t reached an agreement on passing the 12 appropriation bills that the provide annual budget, and its third extension on making that decision is about to expire on Friday...During the Carter administration, Congress couldn’t pass the budget on time, and President Carter asked Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti how that would affect the management of the federal bureaucracy. Civiletti returned with a legal opinion on the Anti-Deficiency Act of 1870...Over time, however, enforcement of the law grew lax...Then, in an April 1980 opinion, Civiletti wrote that there is no gray area on this issue. The opinion didn’t overrule any longstanding precedent, Howell Jackson, professor at Harvard Law School, tells TIME, but it still made a big difference.

An op-ed by Martha Minow. The Constitution created three coequal branches of government, but President Trump repeatedly demeans the judiciary. Before he was president, the Justice Department charged Donald Trump’s company with violations of the Fair Housing Act. Black “testers” were denied apartments when similar white testers were offered apartments in the same buildings managed in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Trump settled.

In 1997, The Scrapbook saw a funny New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.” Astonishingly, we noted, “the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate” had failed to penetrate the furrowed brows at the Times. We mocked them and were apparently ignored, because a year later they were back with more of the same, a story that captured the essence of modern liberal thought on crime...This reflection led us back to a terrific cover story in The Weekly Standard from February 23, 2009, by the late William Stuntz: “Law and Disorder: The case for a police surge.” Stuntz was a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of groundbreaking work on crime policy. In that essay he contended that just as a large surge of ground forces had quelled the insurgency in Iraq, so increases in police numbers tend over time to decrease violent crime.

Tech firms spend serious time and money trying to secure their employees and infrastructure from hackers. But gig economy companies like Lyft and Handy pay far less attention to cybersecurity for their contractors and, in some cases, encourage insecure behavior, researchers say—potentially exposing workers to greater risk of identity theft and phishing attacks. The ways that tech platforms communicate with their gig workers often encourage or reinforce shoddy security practices, according to research by Kendra Albert, a fellow at Harvard Law’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and Elizabeth Anne Watkins, a PhD researcher at Columbia University. “Gig work platforms don’t just externalize their security costs, they sometimes actively make their workers less secure,” Albert told attendees on Tuesday at Enigma, a cybersecurity conference in Santa Clara, California, where they presented the research.

An op-ed by Robert Greenwald and Judith Solomon. For more than 50 years, Medicaid has been our nation’s health care safety net. Medicaid allows our lowest-income, sickest, and often most vulnerable populations to get care and treatment, and supports the health of more than 68 million Americans today. As an entitlement program, Medicaid grows to meet demand: There is no such thing as a waiting list. This vital health program found itself under fire in 2017, and while there were no major reductions in funding or enrollment, it is far from safe in 2018. Whether by new legislation or actions the Trump administration may take, the threats to Medicaid are not going away anytime soon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can an international deal ever really be final? President Donald Trump seems to think the answer is no, given his penchant for withdrawing from agreements made under President Barack Obama -- the Paris climate change accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade and (maybe) the Iranian nuclear deal. But what about international agreements that actually declare themselves to be irreversible? That’s the case with the 2015 Japan-South Korea deal that was aimed at ending once and for all the conflict between the countries over the sexual enslavement of so-called Korean comfort women during World War II.

Nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a Harvard University professor says 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could still become commander in chief. Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, penned an essay for Medium in October outlining a series of hypothetical scenarios that could take place should the ongoing probe find that the Trump campaign actually conspired with Russia to influence the results of the election...On Wednesday, Lessig told Newsweek this scenario was still a possibility. “This is one way it could happen,” Lessig said. “But that’s very different from saying I think it will happen, or should happen, or [that] the evidence is there for it to happen.”

On Thursday, leaders of the American Law Institute are set to gather in Philadelphia to discuss controversial changes to its restatements of consumer and insurance law, the results of which would dramatically shift how the law in these areas is interpreted in courts nationwide in a way that could profoundly benefit the plaintiffs’ bar...A broad coalition of corporate general counsel also have objected to ALI’s proposed Restatement of the Law on Consumer Contracts, which not only would create an ill-defined and heretofore unknown category of “consumer contracts,” but inject the amorphous language of consumer protection statutes into the common law. The restatement was written by a panel that includes Harvard Law School professor Oren Bar-Gill, who co-wrote a 2008 paper with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and whose own book, “Seduction by Contract,” argues that “better legal policy can help consumers and enhance market efficiency.”

...Take one step back from the day-to-day work of organizing, and it is impossible to miss the specter of the Trump administration hanging over everything that CTUL does. There is the aforementioned threat of reclassification of worker centers by the Labor Department, which would burden them with legal restrictions and regulatory scrutiny, and would be a victory that Chamber of Commerce types have been craving for many years...Sharon Block, who served as a Labor Department official in the Obama administration and is now the director Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, says that during her time in government the White House made a point to reach out to worker centers across the country as allies, a marked difference in posture from what is happening now.

It was an off day not fit for man nor plow but as snow lay in foot-high piles around Harvard Square and cars crept along icy streets battered by arctic temperatures on the morning of Jan. 5, Devin McCourty was making his way to a day-long “Listen and Learn’’ session at Harvard Law School that had nothing to do with learning about who he might be facing a week later, when the Patriots were to begin their seemingly annual playoff run to the Super Bowl. oining him in Cambridge was a small but hearty band of teammates, Duron Harmon, Johnson Bademosi and Matthew Slater along with team president Jonathan Kraft, who for the rest of the day would have their eyes opened to the real reasons some of them had taken a knee earlier this season as the national anthem played in NFL stadiums around the country.

On January 6, 2017, JANA Partners, a New York–based activist hedge fund, and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) sent a letter to Apple’s board of directors that may change the future of activist investing. Citing a substantial body of expert research, the letter stated, “We believe there is a clear need for Apple to offer parents more choices and tools to help them ensure that young consumers are using your products in an optimal manner.”...But it’s also true that many activists are not as short-term as many assume them to be. Despite their reputation as slash-and-burn financial engineers, activists are actually no strangers to seeking returns from genuine, long-term value creation. Empirical research, such as the article “The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism,” by Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang, shows that in contrast to prevailing beliefs, the long-term effects of activist hedge funds are positive rather than negative.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is in the United States to deliver a lecture at the Harvard University, Boston, USA on “Africa Rising” course at Harvard Business School. Osinbajo, while at Harvard, would also engage in marathon meetings at the Ivy League School. Harvard described the lecture as ‘a historic moment’ as it would be the first time that an Africa-focused course would be offered at Harvard Business School...He also would have lunch with the Harvard Law School Students and Faculty at the Harvard Law School. Osinbajo would then hold meeting with Prof. David Wilkins and tour the Centre on the Legal Profession and Nitin Nohira, Dean, Harvard Business School at the university.

...Streaming has become the primary way we listen to music: in 2016, streaming surpassed both physical media and digital downloads as the largest source of recorded music sales. There are plenty of valid complaints about a music world dominated by streaming. Among the many arguments musicians level against Spotify, for example, one typically repeated is that the artist is the only link in the food chain getting the proverbial shaft. This argument is often predicated on notions of economics, intellectual property and ethics. Missing from a larger discussion is the radical idea that maybe it is the consumers who are being done the greatest disservice, and that this access-bonanza may be cheapening the listening experience by transforming fans into file clerks and experts into dilettantes...As long as we try to maintain the Sisyphean task of trying to experience everything, our brains, unable to adapt and forever lagging behind exponential technological progress, will continue to struggle. "Computing power is still doubling every 18 months," notes cryptographer and technology writer Bruce Schneier, "while our species' brain size has remained constant."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. We have our first confirmed federal Twitter judge, Judge Don Willett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. More than 500 legal scholars both young and old, as well as sophisticated practitioners, use Twitter to comment, analyze and argue. From a practical perspective, legal Twitter is thriving. But is legal Twitter a good thing? The question has been bouncing around on (surprise) Twitter -- but without (surprise) any very sustained engagement.

Since the fall, the staggering cascade of sexual-misconduct allegations waged against powerful men—from Hollywood moguls to prominent politicians—has mostly centered on the workplace. But as the nation fixated on the downfalls of Harvey Weinstein, John Conyers, and countless others, what has come to be known as the #MeToo movement has been reverberating on college campuses across the country, too...Support for the new guidelines “was a national moment of students rising up to say enough was enough, that we wouldn’t tolerate harassment and violence and institutional indifference anymore, and that we demanded safe and equitable campuses,” said Sejal Singh [`20], a Harvard Law student who works with the national advocacy group Know Your IX...The Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk recently argued in The New Yorker how Title VII, the workplace anti-discrimination law, could carry similar implications. “We can learn a lot from the campus experience, but we’re probably going to see repetition of some of the same errors in addressing such a serious and complex set of problems,” Suk wrote in an email.