Media Mentions

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.

Gig economy workers – the fancy new way to describe short-term freelance serfs like Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders – are well in the sights of hackers...In a presentation at Usenix's Enigma 2018 conference in California on Tuesday, Kendra Albert, clinical fellow at Harvard Law School in the USA, described how the unusual nature of gig work leaves these contractors open to attack...Unfortunately the situation for gig workers is unlikely to improve, Albert told The Register. Customers and the app makers don't suffer especially from these kinds of attacks, all the risk is on the freelancers, who have very little choice in the way they work. “Gig workers rely on platforms and often don’t have the power to say no to employers,” [they] said.

An interview with Matthew Stephenson. First, did predatory developers use the law to confiscate thousands of acres from African-American?...Then, we continue analyzing political corruption, its causes, consequences and remedies.

Every awards show has its critics, but President Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed “Fake News Awards” has drawn attention from a group beyond the usual peanut gallery: ethics experts who say the event could run afoul of White House rules and, depending on what exactly the president says during the proceedings, the First Amendment...Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment professor at Harvard Law School, said that any sort of threat — including those similar to the ones Trump has previously made — would be a problem. “Part of what the First Amendment is about is we want to avoid a chilling effect,” she said. “If NBC curtails its coverage as somebody reasonably might do after the president says he wants to go after you, he doesn’t actually have to do it to create the harm that the First Amendment is designed to combat. The threats themselves are problematic.”

The eyes of Harvard’s undocumented students are turned to Washington as lawmakers wrangle over a deal to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Trump administration announced in September it would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—an Obama-era program that protected these “dreamers”—and set a March deadline for lawmakers to act before those protections expire. DACA protected approximately 790,000 youth, including many of the College’s 65 undocumented students...Jason Corral, the staff attorney at the Harvard Immigration Refugee and Clinical Program, said he is encouraging undocumented students to set up appointments with the clinic. “We've been telling students to set up consultations with us so that we can assess whether they might be eligible for any potential relief beyond DACA,” Corral said. “We have open office hours where people can just drop in or set up an appointment during the week. We've been doing that over the course of the last year.”

An op-ed by Elizabeth Bartholet. Like many others, I am outraged by the egregious incidents of sexual misconduct made public recently through carefully documented journalism. I applaud the removal of many alleged perpetrators who have clearly abused their positions of power, often through force and even violence. I celebrate those who have stepped forward to call out sexual misconduct and demand changes in the degrading culture that has characterized working conditions for women in too many settings for too long. However, I am concerned that in the recent rush to judgment, principles of basic fairness, differences between proven and merely alleged instances of misconduct, and important distinctions between different kinds of sexually charged conduct have too often been ignored.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The White House was quick to condemn a federal judge’s decision last week striking down the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. It called the ruling “outrageous,” and President Donald Trump tweeted that it shows “how broken and unfair our court system is.” But the judge’s decision to invalidate the program’s termination, and thus to protect young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, was not outrageous. Strictly as a matter of law, it was eminently reasonable – whatever Congress does or does not do in the coming days and weeks.

A loophole in the new U.S. tax law could allow multinational corporations like Apple Inc to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes on profits stashed overseas, according to experts...By manipulating their foreign cash positions, a determining factor under the new law, a U.S. multinational could potentially save money by shifting profits to the lower rate from the higher one, according to Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School...“This is clearly the result of rushed legislation,” said Shay, formerly a top Treasury Department tax official.

Jurors couldn’t agree the first time around whether to accept a woman’s story that “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby, sexually assaulted her over a decade ago. Now he faces a retrial in less than 90 days in a vastly different cultural climate, one in which powerful men from Hollywood to the U.S. Senate are being toppled by allegations of sexual misconduct...Diane Rosenfeld, a lecturer and director of a gender violence program at Harvard Law School, believes the floodgates of victim support opened after the Weinstein allegations and not after Cosby’s accusers came forward for two reasons: perceived credibility of the victims and the likability of the accused. “Bill Cosby had been such a treasured American hero, giving us this friendly, accessible view of a successful African-American family,” she said. “He was such a loveable public presence, his accusers didn’t have as much power collectively or public notoriety as victims in the Weinstein case.”

Legal experts have been saying for months that Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s plan to upend energy markets in order to prop up uncompetitive coal and nuclear power plants was destined to fail. Monday’s unanimous dismissal by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission -- an independent agency with four of its five members appointed by President Trump -- only confirmed that view...“If you look at the order on Monday, I think FERC starts out by reiterating its preference, its policies, for promoting competition, and quickly then rejects the proposal as unjust and unreasonable,” said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow with Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program. “They don’t waste a lot of time on the proposal. I think they just view it as completely inconsistent with everything the commission has done over the past 20 years.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The new federal tax on the investment income of universities with endowments of more than $500,000 per student is terrible policy, raising minimal revenue while imposing costs on financial aid. But it’s also something much worse: To the extent it targets institutions whose faculties skew liberal, the law violates the First Amendment. It’s squarely unconstitutional for the government to impose taxes on the basis of the views expressed by the entities being taxed. Although it might be a challenge to prove it in court, it is common sense that the law was designed to express conservative resentment against the academy.

Cliven Bundy wanted to walk out of the courtroom in his jail jumpsuit and ankle shackles. Deputy marshals blocked him from doing that. But if it hadn’t been for “flagrant misconduct” committed by federal prosecutors and investigators in the case, the Nevada cattleman may not have been walking out at all...The report suggests that parallel construction may be being employed to conceal information gathered through legally questionable methods. Whether it is obtained unlawfully or not is beside the point, according to Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School lecturer who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011, since the practice transfers the decision of what information gets disclosed to defendants from judges to law enforcement and prosecutors. “You can envision a situation where they think they’re doing something legal but they’re not sure, so they use parallel construction,” she adds.