Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. When people get new information – about immigration, about President Donald Trump, about climate change – will they change their minds? It’s common to say that if they don’t, the reason is “confirmation bias," which means that people are far more likely to accept information that supports their current beliefs. But in some situations, what really matters is something different and even more insidious: “desirability bias.” When people display desirability bias, they find information more credible when it pleases them – even if it fails to confirm their pre-existing beliefs.

Every so often, a policy proposal comes along that's so ill-conceived, one can dispense with the usual nuance and just call it flat-out ridiculous. Energy Secretary Rick Perry's plan to subsidize coal-fired and nuclear power plants for stockpiling fuel was just such a proposal...Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School, sees some merit in finding ways to prevent plants that are providing power to the grid from incurring losses. Equally, though, he points out that keeping inflexible plants on the grid adds cost to the system, especially as coal-fired plants, for example, "seem like the kind of resources that are eventually going to go away."

James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired after distributing a memo questioning the company’s diversity policies, filed a class-action lawsuit Monday claiming that the technology giant discriminates against white men and conservatives. Damore’s suit came on the same day that conservative publisher Charles C. Johnson sued Twitter for banning him from the platform in 2015. The cases are the latest signs of a broad effort by some conservatives to challenge technology companies on the grounds that they favor liberal or moderate voices, reflecting the prevailing political sensibilities in Silicon Valley...Courts in that state have in the past highlighted the importance of free speech rights even when exercised on private property, making the state potentially more amenable to Johnson’s claims about censorship on a private online platform such as Twitter, said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “Of all the places to bring a long-shot case like this, California would be the place,” Zittrain said.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has told President Trump’s legal team that his office is likely to seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks...“The risk is that Trump would either incriminate himself, commit perjury, or lie — unless he truly has committed no offense and has nothing to fear from telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe tells me. “I regard that ‘unless’ as extremely implausible.” He adds, “That said, I would’ve have him plead the Fifth. That option isn’t realistically available to a sitting president, who simply can’t afford the steep political price that taking the Fifth would inevitably exact.”

...Harvard law professor and former Obama administration official Cass R. Sunstein has edited “Can It Happen Here: Authoritarianism in America,” essays by a diverse range of scholars on American democracy. The book was clearly inspired by Trump, but Sunstein said he doesn’t consider it a work of “resistance.” He calls it an “exploration of self-government” touching upon currents events and such historical moments as the internment of Japanese during World War II.

During three emotional days of divorce talks, Drake and Mandy Rooks managed to agree on how to divide up almost every aspect of their old lives down to the last piece of furniture. Only one thing remained: the frozen embryos...“Constitution questions are front and center in a way that they have not been in the other cases,” said Harvard law professor I. Glenn Cohen. And if the judges decide the Rookses’ dispute on such grounds, that would allow it to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court — where a ruling would apply nationwide. Cohen said the central issue focuses on how to balance one person’s constitutional right to procreate with another’s countervailing constitutional right to not procreate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Prohibition-lite: That’s President Donald Trump marijuana policy set out last week in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s guidance to U.S. attorneys, encouraging them to enforce federal pot laws even where states have legalized the drug. This is a reversal of President Barack Obama’s approach, which tried to impose some logic on law enforcement policy by discouraging federal charges. The effect of Sessions’s move is to make the law into a roulette game, with luck determining who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. And that in turn undermines the rule of law itself, which thrives on regularity, predictability, and treating like situations and people alike.

In Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, President Trump used the same promise to sell the tax bill: It would bring jobs streaming back to struggling cities and towns...The bill that Mr. Trump signed, however, could actually make it attractive for companies to put more assembly lines on foreign soil...“Having such a low rate on foreign income is outrageous,” said Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a Treasury Department official during the Reagan and Obama administrations. “It creates terrible incentives.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to sue the federal government over the recently enacted tax bill on grounds that it violates constitutional principles will face significant challenges, legal experts say...Thomas Brennan, a tax professor at Harvard Law School, said Cuomo’s plan to sue the federal government over the tax plan would be “difficult.” “My own thought is it would be a challenging thing to challenge this law on constitutionality, at least the SALT (state and local taxes) restriction,” Brennan said of the proposed Cuomo administration lawsuit. “I imagine the strategy would be to argue about an infringement on states’ rights of some sort.”

While drafting the Constitution, James Madison strove to ensure the protection of minority rights but also proposed that a slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. The contradiction, etched into the Constitution, would come to define Madison and a nation irreconcilably founded both on slavery and the ideals of liberty and justice. This paradox lies at the heart of “The Three Lives of James Madison,” by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who charts Madison’s life as the “father of the Constitution,” a political partisan, and ultimately a statesman in his roles as secretary of state and president.

The New York Times reported Thursday that President Donald Trump had his White House counsel try to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the Times and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, tell William Brangham what the revelations mean for the president and whether they amount to obstruction of justice.

While many players kicked back to relax on their day off Friday, safety McCourty had a different approach. As part of the NFL’s players coalition, he led a “listen and learn day” at Harvard Law School, joined by teammates Johnson Bademosi, Matthew Slater and Harmon as well as team president Jonathan Kraft. They met with criminal justice advocates to learn about, and explore solutions to, systemic issues that lead to racially and ethnically disparate outcomes with incarceration in Boston and Massachusetts, with special attention on the juvenile justice system. The group also visited the Haley House, a non-profit organization and café that hires and gives support to formerly incarcerated individuals.

A review by Zalman Rothschild `18. The notion of zera kodesh, “holy seed,” appears only twice in the Bible, both times in reference to the people of Israel as a whole. For Hasidim, however, it has a more restricted meaning. It denotes what Samuel Heilman, in his new book Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America, calls the “genealogical sanctity” of the offspring of rebbes, a characteristic that qualifies them (and almost them alone) to succeed to any vacant thrones of Hasidic courts.

An op-ed by Samuel David Garcia `19. In the past, economic opportunity in the Rio Grande Valley grew at an incredible pace as trade between the United States and Mexico flourished, but as domestic and global affairs have shifted, trade with Mexico has unfortunately become a source of economic volatility for the Rio Grande Valley.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has just gotten a lot worse, and the only real solution -- which,of course, is not a solution -- is to throw them all away and buy new ones that may be available in a few years. On Wednesday, researchers announced a series of major security vulnerabilities in the microprocessors at the heart of the world's computers for the past 15 to 20 years. They've been named Spectre and Meltdown, and they operate by manipulating different ways processors optimize performance by rearranging the order of instructions or performing different instructions in parallel. An attacker who controls one process on a system can use the vulnerabilities to steal secrets from elsewhere on the computer.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Above all else, the First Amendment is a barrier to “prior restraints” – injunctions and licensing requirements aimed at preventing speech from entering the public domain at all. Just as a new Steven Spielberg film, "The Post," is celebrating the vindication of that principle in the Pentagon Papers case, President Donald Trump’s lawyers have formally demanded that a publisher cease publication of a new book.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If President Donald Trump would actually sue Steve Bannon for violating a nondisclosure agreement made with his campaign, it would be great for the freedom of speech. That may sound strange, because Trump’s threatened lawsuit is precisely aimed to silence Bannon and other potential leakers who worked on the campaign. Bannon has been extensively quoted in excerpts published this week from the journalist Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” But Trump’s suit would almost certainly fail, and that’s why it would serve free speech.

When the Supreme Court hears a major election-law case next week, the Justice Department will argue that nothing prevents Ohio from canceling the voter registration of citizens who don’t confirm their eligibility after not voting for two years...It’s not unusual for the department to adjust some legal positions under a new administration. But legal analysts say the shifts since President Donald Trump took office have been particularly numerous and pronounced. “Every administration does, and certainly in my time we did do, the occasional U-turn—but with great reluctance,” said Harvard law professor Charles Fried, who, as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan represented the government before the Supreme Court and in select lower-court litigation.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. One puzzle that deepens with Mike Schmidt’s New York Times story on “Trump’s Struggle to Keep [a] Grip on [the] Russia Investigation” is why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has not recused himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation...Recall that Rosenstein is the acting attorney general for this matter because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself. As a result, Rosenstein appointed Mueller and, under the relevant Order and incorporated regulations, supervises him.

The Trump administration said Thursday it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters, giving energy companies access to leases off California for the first time in decades and opening more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard...Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School and a former Obama climate adviser, said the latest Trump proposal was more about sending a message. In the Arctic in particular, she said, low oil prices and the decision by Royal Dutch Shell to give up all but one of its federal oil leases indicate drilling is not on the near horizon. “But the decision is a signal, just like the one Congress sent with ANWR, that Republicans want to open the nation’s public lands and waters for business,” she said.

An op-ed by Marissa Brodney `18 and Meritxell Regué. On 15 December 2017, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Chamber II found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, former President and Commander-in-Chief of the UPC/FPLC, responsible for reparations in the amount of 10,000,000 euros — the largest ICC reparations order issued to-date. The Lubanga case was the first to reach the reparations stage — yet controversy surrounding procedural requirements delayed the Chamber’s determination of Lubanga’s monetary liability. Last month’s decision answered some of these procedural questions, and raised new ones.