Media Mentions

Two gender neutral bathrooms at Harvard Law School that were previously inaccessible for most of the day will now have 24/7 access for students, after student groups raised the issue with administrators. The bathrooms, located on the second floor of Wasserstein Hall and near Harkness Cafe, were set behind two security doors that restricted student access when the cafe—which is open from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m. on weekdays—was closed...Lambda, the BGLTQ organization for Harvard law students, and the Queer and Trans People of Color organization brought the issue of restricted access to gender neutral bathrooms to administrators last fall. Gender neutral bathrooms are not limited to Wasserstein Hall. Both Han Park [`18], co-president of Lambda, and Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells said that there is access to other gender neutral bathrooms on campus and this was an isolated issue...In an email Monday, Sells wrote that temporary construction had been completed and the bathrooms were now accessible to students.

Few white-collar defendants have been more reviled than the man known as the Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli, even before he was convicted on multiple counts of securities fraud. The Atlantic called him “the perfect and very hateable combination of arrogance, youth, and avarice,” after he gained notoriety for acquiring the rights to generic drugs for rare diseases and then jacking up the prices...“I don’t have any connection to the case, but from reading the S.E.C.’s complaint, the allegations are of a nature that prosecutors would typically pursue to determine if criminal charges can be brought,” said Antonia M. Apps, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who teaches a course on white-collar crime at Harvard Law School. “It’s outright fraud.”

An op-ed by Mark Rienzi. Tuesday’s oral argument in NIFLA v. Becerra went quite poorly for those hoping the Court would endorse California’s effort to impose speech restrictions on pro-life pregnancy centers. The Justices took turns pointing out obvious unconstitutional applications of the law, questioning whether California had gerrymandered its law to target pro-lifers, and wondering about the quantum leaps in First Amendment doctrine that would be required to sustain the law. But the most important exchange — and the one that is indicative of a longer-term problem for the pro-abortion side in a range of speech and religion cases — related to whether the law was even needed in the first place.

An op-ed by fellow Terri Gerstein. Imagine a robber enters a bank, demands the contents of the safe, flees with bags of cash, and once caught, has to do one thing: return the stolen money and promise not to do it again. No penalty, no prosecution, no additional deterrent. More people would likely think, "Why not try? If I get caught, the worst that could happen is I would give the money back.” The federal labor department this month announced a nationwide pilot program which is pretty close to this scenario.

Since the revelation that President Trump (or someone acting on his behalf) compelled senior staff to sign non-disclosure agreements — in essence, preventing them from speaking about their White House service — much of the focus, and rightly so, has been on the improper presidential attempt to stomp on government employees’ First Amendment rights and attempt to prevent employees from speaking to congressional oversight committees (i.e., a violation of the separation of powers)...If candidates for administration jobs wrote out a $1,000 check to Trump to get hired, few would doubt that is anything but a bribe. Likewise, if Trump demanded $1,000 to hire someone, we’d all agree that amounted to soliciting a bribe. So, is the exchange of an NDA — something plainly of value to Trump — somehow different?...Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe doesn’t think that there’s a legal difference. “I’ve argued and believe that the NDAs Trump might have extracted from executive branch employees (if that story proves accurate) are a form of extortion in terms of what they extract from government employees and have the stench of bribery as well,” he tells me.

President Trump’s top attorney tasked with handling the special counsel’s Russia investigation stepped down Thursday amid a larger legal team overhaul. Lawyer John Dowd confirmed to the Daily News in a text that he was resigning, adding that he “loves the president” and wishes him well. Dowd’s departure comes as Trump’s attorneys have been negotiating with special counsel Robert Mueller over the scope and terms of an interview with the President...“Even tyrants and killers have rights and deserve legal defenders — but why would any lawyer with integrity want to represent someone who won’t take advice and, even worse, who basically wants the lawyer to help him continue his criminal career while remaining President?” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said.

An enigma baffling American economists for years has been solved, with a little help from outside. In a study published in January, professors Efraim Benmelech, Nittai Bergman and Hyunseob Kim explain why over the 68 years from 1948 to 2016 the productivity of the average American employee increased 242% while wages rose only 115%...One of the most important researchers in this respect is Lucian Arye Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Fifteen years ago he published a book with Harvard Law colleague Jesse Fried, “Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation,” explaining why the correlation between executive pay on Wall Street and performance is so weak. It’s mainly because directors are captives of management, and the market for managers isn’t really a market, it’s more like a rigged game.

Julie Yip-Williams, whose candid blog about having Stage IV colon cancer also described a life of struggles that began with being born blind in Vietnam and her ethnic Chinese family’s escape in a rickety fishing boat, died on Monday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 42...Ms. Yip-Williams received a bachelor’s degree in English and Asian Studies from Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Maddie McMahon `19...While the matter is certainly not crystal clear, we think that the regulations in historical context almost certainly preclude some of the more aggressive models of disclosure, especially by the special counsel himself. The special counsel regulations do not apply to Mueller’s investigation directly. Rather, Rosenstein appointed Mueller pursuant to his general authorities under 28 U.S.C. §§509, 510, and 515, and then pursuant to these authorities made “Sections 600.4 through 600.l0 of Title 28 … applicable to the Special Counsel.”

...The cascading momentum of newly filed lawsuits surrounding Trump’s past payoffs to women to hide adulterous behavior will drive coverage of another legal sphere: the silencing of women via what may be judged to be unenforceable contracts...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar, said Gerety is raising legitimate issues that courts will have to consider. “Gerety raises good questions about a number of factors that would go into any judicial decision about whether to enforce a non-disclosure agreement of the kind Donald Trump seems to have pressured some of his sexual partners, and maybe even members of his administration, into signing,” he said.

...Trump’s efforts could soon reach your neighborhood restaurant, barbershop, and nail salon. One of the administration’s major deregulation efforts is currently underway at the Department of Labor — and if implemented, it could potentially hurt millions of American workers who get tips as part of their jobs. The agency is considering a new rule that would give employers unprecedented control over what to do with a worker’s gratuities...“It’s really, really troubling,” said Sharon Block, a law professor at Harvard who worked at the Department of Labor under the Obama administration and who helped develop the Obama-era rule clarifying that tips were the property of the workers who earned them. “This is no small thing for people who really can’t afford to be subsidizing their employers.”

Porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal are suing to get out of nondisclosure agreements that bar them from talking about alleged affairs with President Trump, but neither woman is waiting for a court's permission to speak out...Former U.S. solicitor general Charles Fried, who teaches contract law at Harvard Law School, told me the “liquidated damages” referred to in the nondisclosure agreement (i.e. the money Daniels supposedly owes for speaking publicly) “could be treated as a penalty, and penalty clauses are unenforceable.” Fried said the court’s decision would hinge on whether $1 million per violation of the contract is a “reasonable estimate” of the damage to Trump’s reputation or is “excessive” — and therefore an unfair and unenforceable penalty.

Innocent victim or background contributor? Facebook now faces questions from authorities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean after news reports in The Guardian and The New York Times this week revealed that a psychologist illicitly gave data from 50 million Facebook users to a political consulting firm that tailored political ads to many users during the 2016 U.S. presidential election...Vivek Krishnamurthy studies international issues in internet governance as a clinical attorney at Harvard Law School’s Cyber Law Clinic. He spoke with the Gazette about the legal implications of the breach for Facebook, the laxity in U.S. privacy protections, and how Facebook’s difficulties may mark the end of the tech industry’s long deregulation honeymoon in this country.

Further revealing how far the Trump administration is willing to go to "actively make workers' lives worse," Bloomberg Law reported on Wednesday that White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney personally approved the Labor Department's decision to delete an internal analysis showing that its proposed "tip-sharing rule" would allow companies to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from their employees per year...Mulvaney ultimately sided with Acosta, and the Labor Department scrubbed its internal analysis from the final proposal. "The story about how Secretary Acosta pushed out the tip stealing rule while hiding the cost from the public keeps getting uglier," Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, wrote in response to Bloomberg Law's reporting. "Having to go so far up the chain to get the okay to flout the rules shows that Acosta knew that they were trying to get away with something."

An interview with Cass Sunstein. On The Gist, before Donald Trump’s headline-hogging presidency, things like bridge collapses made news for more than a few days. In the interview, Cass Sunstein’s new book asks if the U.S. is fundamentally immune to authoritarianism, or whether president Trump has proved the opposite. His new book—Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America—puts the question to more than a dozen leading writers.

Breitbart, the alt-right news site whose executive chairman Steve Bannon was pushed out in January after feuding with President Donald Trump, has lost about half its readership according to comScore, raising questions about its future...Rob Faris, the research director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that Breitbart’s rise was in some ways facilitated by Fox News being slow to embrace Trump. “A big part of Breitbart’s success was that there was a niche to be filled that Fox News was not able to fill at that point,” said Faris, who co-authored a study on the conservative media ecosystem during the election. But now, with Fox‘s primetime hosts having fully embraced the president, he says, “The role, the importance of Breitbart is diminished.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was easy to miss it, what with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson being fired and President Donald Trump fueling rumors of more personnel shake-ups. But last week Jared Kushner, presidential adviser and son-in-law, presided over a highly unusual White House conference on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Who participated was noteworthy: Israel was there, alongside Arab states with which it does not have diplomatic relations, such as Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Stormy Daniels's attorney has been all over TV and radio in recent weeks, saying the porn star should be free to discuss her alleged affair with President Trump because Trump neglected to sign their 2016 nondisclosure agreement...This contention is central to a lawsuit in which Daniels has asked a court to invalidate the contract — and it is probably a losing argument, according to legal experts. “The idea that it's null and void, I don't think that goes anywhere,” said Charles Fried, a former U.S. solicitor general who teaches contract law at Harvard Law School.

As rumors swirled over the weekend that the White House would soon undermine and eventually remove special counsel Robert Mueller, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted on CNN that doing so would be the beginning of the end for the Trump presidency. “We’re a rule-of-law nation,” he declared...Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith has speculated that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Mueller directly by invoking his constitutional Article II powers to “bypass or invalidate” Justice Department procedure. But other experts disagree, and even Mr. Goldsmith says the president would be “committing political suicide” if he were to go down this path.

An op-ed by Finale Doshi-Velez and clinical fellow Mason Kortz. A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a woman on Sunday in Tempe, Arizona. Few details have emerged, but it’s reportedly the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle. In January, a Pittsburgh car crash sent two people to the hospital; the accident involved a self-driving Fusion from Ford-backed Argo AI. The Fusion was hit by a truck that ran a red light, and at the last second, the human back-up driver reportedly took the car out of autonomous mode and took control of the Fusion’s wheel. Could these crashes have been avoided?

When Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein found out on March 14 that he was this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize, he said he was both surprised and gratified. “It felt like squash had been made an Olympic sport, and I had been informed that I made the team,” Sunstein said. “Meaning, very surprising and slightly surreal—and a great honor.” The Holberg Prize is a Norwegian award given annually to a researcher who has made great contributions to the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein is a researcher in behavioral science and political theory, and his work explores the intersection of the two fields...Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who taught Sunstein, wrote in an email that Sunstein “is a national treasure.” “His breadth and depth of insight across disciplines is unparalleled, as is his productivity. That he credits me as his mentor is humbling but enormously gratifying,” he wrote.