Media Mentions

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. The three Republican commissioners now in power at the FCC voted this week to erase the agency's legal authority over high-speed Internet providers.They claim that competition will protect consumers, that the commission shouldn't interfere in the "dynamic internet ecosystem," and that they are "protecting internet freedom." Now that the vote is done, the agency has little to do but mess around with spectrum allocations. The mega-utility of the 21st century officially has no regulator.

President Trump on Sunday sought to douse speculation that he may fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III amid an intensifying campaign by Trump allies to attack the wide-ranging Russia investigation as improper and politically motivated. Returning to the White House from Camp David, Trump was asked Sunday whether he intended to fire Mueller. “No, I’m not,” he told journalists, insisting that there was “no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia...“If Rosenstein refused, Trump could fire him and keep firing everyone who replaced him until he found someone who would fire Mueller,” said Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and co-founder of the Lawfare blog.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving, Kenny Johnson left the Nelson Global Products plant in Clinton, Tenn., for the last time. Having devoted nearly 13 years to making tractor-trailer exhaust pipes, Johnson, 41, spent some of his final weeks at the plant watching Mexican workers train to take his job...This was the kind of economic dislocation that President Trump vowed to prevent with his “America First” policies...“This bill is potentially more dangerous than our current system,” said Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and former Treasury Department international tax expert in the Obama administration. “It creates a real incentive to shift real activity offshore.”

...In James Madison’s public career, spanning four exceptionally productive decades, this private passion of his—what he called “the sentiments of my heart”—is the most visible evidence of the force that fueled him. As Noah Feldman, Frankfurter professor of law, writes in his excellent, authoritative, and lucid reassessment of Madison, “Dolley frequently expressed opinions and emotions that Madison hid from view.” He was known as a dispassionate man of reason, systematic and mild-mannered, who preferred the company of ideas and lacked the need for attention many politicians have. Yet his profound sense of purpose made him a statesman of enormous impact. He imagined the United States as a unified nation rather than a confederation of republics with diverging interests in agriculture and trade, and helped shape that country.

The National Labor Relations Board has overturned a 2015 law that made it easier for contractors and workers at franchised businesses to form unions and collectively bargain with big corporations. The 2015 NLRB ruling said contract workers at a recycling center were jointly employed by a third party staffing firm and the business they worked for. Sharon Block was a member of President Obama's NLRB. She's now executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard Law School. “What the Obama board did was try to apply the proper legal standard, but in a way that fit the way that our economy and our business relationships work today,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Charlottesville, Virginia, has rejected permit applications from five organizations, far-right and otherwise, to hold protests in the city’s parks on the one-year anniversary of last summer’s protests there. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the city, which struggled to manage the rallies and was unable to prevent the terrorist car-ramming that killed one woman and injured 19 other people. There’s just one problem: Denying the permits is unconstitutional.

In this episode of Alphachat, Matt Klein talks with Harvard professor Mihir Desai about the deep connections between finance and the humanities. Special thanks to Elisheba Ittoop for help with editing this episode.

An op-ed by Vicki Jackson and Judith Resnik. As litigation against the revised travel ban moves forward, the Supreme Court’s decision Monday to stay the lower court orders in the Fourth and Ninth Circuit litigations—without exceptions previously insisted on for persons with established bona fide connections to the United States—seems to signal that a majority of the Court may now be prepared simply to defer to the presumed expertise and competence of the President over foreign affairs. This would be a tragic mistake.

Simon Heldin '19. It may be hard to believe, but there was actually a time when the Republican leadership thought that credible sexual misconduct allegations against their own were disqualifying.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. According to the most famous words of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” But what did the founders understand those words to mean?

One in three students have thought about self-harm or suicide in the last 12 months while 70 per cent rate their mental health as “poor”, according to a study by Headspace... Harvard Law professor Jeanine Suk wrote in The New Yorker: “About a dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students.”

Twenty-three people were executed and 39 sentenced to death in 2017 in the US, one of the few developed countries to still use the death penalty... In one week this April, Arkansas killed four people despite legal challenges to three of the cases, which the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School said had potent claims for mitigation. “One of the most disturbing features of the 2017 executions was the execution of prisoners who had never received meaningful review of important issues in their cases,” the report said. “At least five of those executed this year had received glaringly deficient legal representation or were denied substantial judicial review.”

Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform society, from babysitting children to self-driving cars. But, many scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, argue it may only be a matter of time before they gain consciousness and destroy mankind like something out of science fiction... But, a report by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic has called for humans to remain in control of weapons at a time of rapid advancement. Senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, Bonnie Docherty, said: "Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used."

Arpaio’s pardon unleashed a surge of criticism from lawyers, who argued the move undermined the independence of the judiciary. Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law professor and former head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in the President George W. Bush administration, called Trump’s decision an “irresponsible (but lawful) exercise of the presidential pardon power.”

The issue of sexual misconduct has emerged as a centerpiece of Democratic strategy for taking on President Trump and the Republican Party... Elizabeth Bartholet, the director of the child advocacy program and a professor at Harvard Law School, who is no fan of Donald Trump, wrote in an email: I think this is another moment we may look back on as a moment characterized by madness and sexual panic even though it is a moment that is important in recognizing serious abuses that deserve to be called out.

The audience could sense where the story was going almost as soon as Bryan Stevenson began telling it. Two black children in the barely desegregated South, hurtling with giddy, unguarded elation toward their first swim in a pool that until recently had been available only to whites... Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, deplored the mandatory sentencing rules that reduce defendants to “the quantity of drugs, their criminal record, and nothing else.” ... Friendly professor of law Carol Steiker looked back at the past few hundred years of American death penalty laws.

Daniel L. Shapiro. White House national security advisor H.R. McMaster recently noted that the potential for war with North Korea increases “every day.” While many commentators blame mounting tensions on Pyongyang’s increasingly sophisticated military hardware, the ultimate problem is a human one. It is people who make decisions about military and political strategy, and human psychology is the ultimate arbiter of such decisions. Only by addressing the psychology of conflict can we stop the current march to battle.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Roy Moore won’t sit in the U.S. Senate -- or be expelled from it. I would like nothing more than to write his political eulogy. But I can’t -- not yet. The truth is, it’s too soon to count Moore out of Alabama politics. This is the same man who was twice removed from the chief justiceship of the state for defying the authority of the federal courts. He came back strong both times.

Forget about today's modest incremental advances in artificial intelligence, such as the increasing abilities of cars to drive themselves. Waiting in the wings might be a groundbreaking development: a machine that is aware of itself and its surroundings, and that could take in and process massive amounts of data in real time...'Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used,' said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. 'Now there is a real threat that humans would relinquish their control and delegate life-and-death decisions to machines.'

Americans waste a lot of food — about 133 billion pounds a year, or roughly one-third of all the food produced in the U.S. In addition to wasting money and squandering a precious resource, all that waste creates an enormous environmental problem. Food waste often winds up in landfills, where it rots and releases large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the plan has promise. “In particular, one of the challenges with anaerobic digestion has been that many AD facilities are unwilling or unable to process food scraps at this time,” Leib told MACH in an email. “If this process is tailored specifically to utilize food scraps… that could help to increase capacity to process food scraps and really fill that gap, especially if it is cost-effective.”

A court-appointed expert brought in to address several questions surrounding attorneys’ fees payouts in the uncapped NFL concussion settlement recommended Monday that the Pennsylvania federal court overseeing the settlement should cap contingency fees for individual attorneys at 15 percent and scrap another request to set aside 5 percent of settlement awards to compensate future work in administering the settlement. Harvard Law School professor William B. Rubenstein submitted his final report to the the court, arguing that the “recommendations strike a proper balance between fairly compensating the lawyers for the services that they have provided — or will provide — while ensuring that the absent class members do not pay fees that are, in total, unreasonable.”