Media Mentions

By Fox News's own admission, a retracted report in May about the deceased Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was bad journalism. Nevertheless, the network is well-positioned to fend off a lawsuit brought by Rich's family that alleges “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” according to legal experts...The network has not offered a detailed explanation of how the faulty news report made it online and on the air. But John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he “would expect that most courts would be ... reluctant to impose liability on journalists — even highly irresponsible journalists — out of concern to protect freedom of the press.”

Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein has been named this year’s winner of the Holberg Prize, one of the largest international awards given to an outstanding researcher in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, is being given the prize for his wide-ranging, original, prolific, and influential research...“The main goal has been to deepen the foundations of democratic theory for the modern era, and to understand in practical terms how democracies might succeed in helping to make people’s lives better — and longer.”

President Donald Trump’s decree to tag steel and aluminum imports with hefty tariffs came with caveats aimed at providing assurances to U.S. allies, but opponents of the duties have been left with far more questions than answers in the wake of the policy’s tumultuous rollout. The core of Trump’s surprise announcement from last week remains intact — the U.S. will impose a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent levy on aluminum — but the fine print of the documents implementing those duties has sent the trade world into a frenzy as it tries to figure out how to navigate the orders...“How will that process work?” Harvard law professor Mark Wu said. “How that process works or plays out has implications for whether other countries choose to challenge this measure at the [World Trade Organization], what the timing of that would be and what the scope of such a challenge would be.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Did you hear? Taylor Swift is doing a new album, consisting of her favorite Katy Perry songs — and despite their lengthy feud, Perry herself will be performing on the album! OK, that’s not true. But a new study finds that by every measure, false rumors are more likely to spread than true ones. For those who believe in the marketplace of ideas and democratic self-government, that’s a big problem, raising an obvious question: What, if anything, are we going to do about it?

America will turn its drug-addicted eyes to Cleveland over the next year or two as the city becomes the capital of drug overdose law..."The prominence of discretion, the opportunity for creative problem solving, and the lack of narrow constraints on the judge or on the parties are precisely what causes some to be nervous and some to be optimistic," [Michael] Moffitt continued. "But regardless of one's initial reaction to the conversations that are beginning in Ohio, we should all be curious, because we are all likely to be affected by what emerges — or doesn't emerge."

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. What legal options are open to the United Kingdom in its response to the alleged Russian assassination attempt in Salisbury? A separate piece at Just Security will discuss whether the Salisbury assassination attempt triggers the United Kingdom’s right of self-defense to use force in response. That question has garnered the most attention of legal experts. There is another strong option to consider: referring the Russian agents, potentially including President Vladimir Putin himself, to the International Criminal Court.

Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor known for bringing behavioral science to bear on public policy (not to mention for writing a best-seller about “Star Wars”), has won Norway’s Holberg Prize, which is awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts, humanities, the social sciences, law or theology...In a statement, Mr. Sunstein summed up his work as addressing “how to promote enduring constitutional ideals — freedom, dignity, equality, self-government, the rule of law — under contemporary circumstances, which include large bureaucracies that sometimes promote, and sometimes threaten, those ideals.”

An op-ed by Samantha Power. Two days after the 2016 presidential election, I held a town hall at the United States Mission to the United Nations. American diplomats were in shock; the president-elect had pledged to undo much of what we had helped achieve internationally...Many of them, along with some of our most capable diplomats, have since left government. Ridiculed as “Obama holdovers” and unable to defend policies that depart so markedly from American interests, our diplomatic corps has been hollowed out. If Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., wins confirmation as Rex Tillerson’s replacement as secretary of state, fixing this would become his responsibility.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump’s first visit as president to the hostile territory of California highlights his struggle with the state. Most recently that battle has been over the sanctuary laws that the state Legislature has passed and that Trump’s lawyers have challenged in court. Yet it’s worth recalling that California has a long history of acting like a republic unto itself on immigration — and that, not so long ago, the state was more hostile to immigrants than the federal government, not less.

Last week, Stormy Daniels filed a lawsuit alleging that a non-disclosure agreement she signed prior to the election about an alleged affair she had with President Donald Trump is invalid. Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, claimed that because Trump hadn't signed his name, the NDA didn't carry legal weight. At the same time, Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000, allegedly to stay quiet about the details of their alleged relationship – which the White House has denied...Thomas Frampton, a fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School who's previously written about the issue, tells Rolling Stone that it looks like there's reason to believe Trump's lawyer may have violated F.E.C. rules with the payout – but that hardly means it will lead to anything, given the political climate. "There's good reason to believe the reported payment may have violated federal election law," he says.

An article by David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Pennycook, David Rothschild, Michael Schudson, Steven A. Sloman, Cass R. Sunstein, Emily A. Thorson, Duncan J. Watts, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. The rise of fake news highlights the erosion of long-standing institutional bulwarks against misinformation in the internet age. Concern over the problem is global. However, much remains unknown regarding the vulnerabilities of individuals, institutions, and society to manipulations by malicious actors. A new system of safeguards is needed.

...The WTO is the center of the global trading system. Made up of and governed by member nations, the WTO administers the network of international trade rules currently in place. It serves as a place to negotiate changes to existing agreements and, when issues come up, for member countries to mediate any disputes...There's also fear that other countries could choose to retaliate unilaterally against the United States, outside the aegis of the WTO. That could undermine faith in the entire global trading system. "It would weaken the institution's legitimacy if everyone seeks to end run the WTO rules," said Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard Law School.

Federal lawsuits filed simultaneously in Texas and three other states are seeking to end the system that awards every electoral vote to the winning presidential candidate in each state. The lawsuits argue that the winner-take-all system violates voting rights by discarding ballots cast in support of losing candidates in the four states, particularly Democrats in the GOP strongholds of Texas and South Carolina, and Republicans in Democratic California and Massachusetts...It’s not just Lone Star Democrats — “everyone in Texas is being ignored, because Texas just doesn’t matter to the presidential election,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University law professor who was a leading organizer of the legal effort.

Big multinationals are paying significantly lower tax rates than before the 2008 financial crisis, according to Financial Times analysis showing that a decade of government efforts to cut deficits and reform taxes has left the corporate world largely unscathed. Companies’ effective tax rates — the proportion of profits that they expect to pay, as stated in their accounts — have fallen 9 per cent (two percentage points) since the financial crisis. This is in spite of a concerted political push to tackle aggressive avoidance...“There has been a lot of action and gestures that are very visible but the reality is different. Rate cuts and patent boxes [tax breaks for intellectual property] have been the dominant forces on corporate tax — and that reflects the continued dynamics of tax competition,” said Mihir Desai, professor of finance and law at Harvard university. “Call it a great irony or hypocrisy, but it’s one of the two.”

A shady meeting in Seychelles between a Trump associate and a Russian businessman is emerging as a focus in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — and raising questions about whether one participant lied to Congress about it. Erik Prince, a Trump booster who is the founder of private security firm Blackwater, met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian wealth fund manager with ties to President Vladimir Putin on January 11, 2017, in the Seychelles, an island chain off the coast of East Africa...Mueller, in the investigation so far, has charged others (former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos) with lying to federal investigators — not with lying to Congress. But the special counsel could use this as a chance to advance his case, and potentially win cooperation, says Alex Whiting, a professor of law at Harvard University. “I would not predict it,” Whiting added, “But it’s possible that that would happen.”

A former solicitor for the U.S. Interior Department sought to set the record straight on public lands Wednesday, disputing Western activists’ views that U.S. government ownership amounts to an unfair land grab and reminding listeners that much of the land was the federal government’s from the beginning...The event, in Harvard’s Northwest Laboratory, was sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and introduced by its director, Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering. It featured a discussion by environmental law expert Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, and Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School...Lazarus also discussed the lawsuits by environmental activists that Trump’s actions have prompted. Each side has good arguments, he said, but none that are clear winners.

“His voice is still in my head,” Justice Elena Kagan told the audience on Tuesday when asked how her former boss, Justice Thurgood Marshall, had affected her life. Kagan, along with three other former Marshall clerks, described a justice who demanded much from his clerks, but gave his time and knowledge generously in return. They also remarked on the peculiarity of working for, as one panelist put it, “not just a regular Supreme Court justice, but a living legend.” In addition to Kagan, the event, which was hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society, featured Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who also moderated the panel...During deliberations over a case, Marshall would tease and joke with his clerks. Kennedy once told Marshall that if he ruled the way he was intending, he would contradict one of his own earlier decisions. In response, Marshall asked Kennedy, “Do I have to be a damned fool all my life?”

At the height of the Great Depression, Congress created a program to help American businesses ease the pain of crippling tariffs. That program, which allows the designation of special geographic areas known as "foreign trade zones," is still in place today. Cities, states and companies — which began looking more to the zones several years ago when Donald Trump launched his campaign for the White House — are now sure to step up their use of FTZs as a way to lessen the impact of the president's newly ordered tariffs, experts told NBC News...Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in international trade law, agreed. "I would expect the use of them to increase as a result of the shift in government policy, trade and otherwise … whether that's by way of making better or greater use of existing FTZs or applying for new ones," Wu said.

This week, more than a dozen high-profile social scientists and legal scholars charged their profession to help fix democracy by studying the crisis of fake news. Their call to action, published in Science, was notable for listing all that researchers still do not know about the phenomenon. How common is fake news, how does it work, and what can online platforms do to defang it? “There are surprisingly few scientific answers to these basic questions,” the authors write...The authors of the Science essay—who include Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official, and Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research—argue that avoiding the term distorts the issue. Fake news refers to a distinct phenomenon with a specific name, they say, and we should just use that name (fake news) to talk about that problem (fake news)...In an email, [Laurence] Tribe responded: “I do my best to avoid retweeting or relying in any way on dubiously sourced material and assume that, with experience, I’m coming closer to my own ideal. But no source is infallible, and anyone who pretends to reach that goal is guilty of self-deception or worse.”

President Donald Trump's legal team is considering proposing a deal to the special counsel Robert Mueller, which would allow him to interview their client in exchange for agreeing to wrap up the Trump-related thread of the Russia investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday..."He may agree to tell the Trump team what will be the areas of questioning, but that's about it," said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former federal prosecutor. "The premise of this approach by Trump's lawyers seems to be that they have bargaining leverage because Mueller wants Trump's testimony. But it's more likely the other way around, and Mueller knows it."

The contract Stormy Daniels signed just before the 2016 election with Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to keep her mouth shut about a tryst with the candidate is now available for lawyers and bystanders to study. Now, in the wake of Weinstein, #MeToo and Donald Trump, anecdotal evidence suggests that Daniels is not alone in abandoning the nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Women are more inclined to bust out of agreements that offered them cash in exchange for silence about sexual activity, abuse or harassment...Legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, who conceived of sexual harassment as sex discrimination and actively litigates and advises cases, said NDAs can serve a positive purpose for survivors. “Without survivors agreeing to what defendants call ‘peace,’ i.e. defendants’ reputations not being subject to imminent critique in the mainstream media, companies and schools have no incentive to settle,” she said in an email.