Media Mentions

...To recap, we have three Americans–UCLA basketball players LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill and Cody Riley–arrested by Chinese authorities for alleged shoplifting. Trump took credit for their return to the states, saying he asked the country’s president Xi Jinping for help. Now we have that same president saying he should’ve done nothing. What does it mean if provable spite motivated a president’s decision to refrain from helping an American held in custody on foreign soil? Law&Crime reached out to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman for his take on the matter, and asked if such behavior, or something like it, could be impeachable. “Not impeachable,” Feldman wrote in an email. “He was under no duty to help and no duty to be nice about it after the fact.”

State-federal tension over electricity policy is likely to continue even after current debates over nuclear and coal subsidies end, speakers told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Annual Meeting last week. In fact, said former FERC Commissioner Tony Clark, “things are probably going to get more tense and more difficult before they get easier.”...Ari Peskoe, of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Policy Initiative, said legal challenges to Illinois’ and New York’s zero-emission credits for nuclear plants “expose a question that courts have not addressed in the 20 years of restructuring: May a state provide an incentive for energy production without intruding on FERC’s exclusive jurisdiction over energy sales? Perhaps the state authority over generating facilities means just that — the facilities themselves, and not the energy that they produce,” he said.

When a court on the Dutch North Sea coast issues its final verdict this week, it will signal the end of an experiment that has reverberated around the world, from the killing fields of Rwanda to the CIA’s secret cells in Europe...The glass is either half full or half empty, said Alex Whiting, professor of practice at Harvard Law School. “You can say we haven’t come far enough and the new institutions, particularly the ICC, have not replicated the success of the ICTY, but you can just as easily say it’s remarkable how far we’ve come in just 25 years,” he said.

Growing up in the mostly white city of Lethbridge in southern Alberta, Canada, Julian SpearChief-Morris [`18] often felt out of place...But after graduating from a local college and coming to Harvard Law School (HLS), with its diverse student body, SpearChief-Morris felt right at home. And when he was admitted to the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, one of the three honor societies at the School, he found a family. It’s a place that SpearChief-Morris has made his own...He is the first indigenous student to lead the bureau...As the bureau’s president, SpearChief-Morris worked to build bridges with other student organizations on campus. Esme Caramello ’94, J.D.’ 99, the bureau’s faculty director and clinical professor of law, praised him. “Julian is brilliant, organized, and mission-driven,” Caramello said in an email...His leadership is a source of pride for indigenous students at Harvard, said Leilani Doktor [`19], co-president of the Native American Law Students Association. SpearChief-Morris was co-president of the association last year, and during his term made unique contributions, said Doktor. “He spearheaded initiatives to collaborate with other student organizations, build community for native students, and infuse public service into our everyday lives,” she said.

Jack Schlossberg [`20], the only grandson of the late President John F. Kennedy, spoke out on climate change and joked about life on Harvard’s campus during an appearance at the university’s Institute of Politics Thursday...Schlossberg: Harvard Law School is great. I’m lucky to be here. It’s a really difficult, intense experience. But I know so much more than I did the day before I got to law school, so that’s a cool feeling.

Justice Neil Gorsuch returned to the faithful on Thursday night to address the Federalist Society, a conservative group that was instrumental to his nomination to the Supreme Court. Greeted by a standing ovation, Gorsuch delivered a rousing tribute to the conservative jurisprudence of the man whose seat he filled: the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch admitted, however, that the months since his nomination have been "surreal" at times..."Justice Gorsuch's manner at oral argument has rubbed some people the wrong way, but I'm not one of them," said Ian Samuel, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and host of First Mondays, a weekly podcast about the Supreme Court. "It is refreshing to have a justice join the court and decide they're not going to ease into it like a warm bath -- he's there to do a job and he decided to hit the ground running from day one," Samuel said.

The revelations overcame Edgar Maddison Welch like a hallucinatory fever. On December 1st, 2016, the father of two from Salisbury, North Carolina, a man whose pastimes included playing Pictionary with his family, tried to persuade two friends to join a rescue mission. Alex Jones, the Info-Wars host, was reporting that Hillary Clinton was sexually abusing children in satanic rituals a few hundred miles north, in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant...Welch did not find any captive children – Comet Ping Pong does not even have a basement – but he did prove, if there were any lingering doubts after the election, that fake news has real consequences. Welch's arrest was the culmination of an election cycle dominated by fake news – and by attacks on the legitimate press...That was exactly how the right-wing-media ecosystem worked during the 2016 campaign, explains Yochai Benkler, who directs the Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. After the election, he and his colleagues mapped about 2 million campaign-news stories. He found that far-right-media outlets were organized extremely tightly around Breitbart and, to a lesser degree, FoxNews.com. "The right paid attention to right-wing sites, and the more right-wing they were, the more attention they got," Benkler says.

Literature intersects with current affairs, philosophy, cricket, cinema, economics and theatre at the ongoing Tata Literature Live! LitFest in Mumbai. The four-day festival, which is discussing a range of burning issues, looks at the world through the lenses of Nobel laureates, writers, economists and intellectuals...Lounge caught up on email with Catharine A. MacKinnon, one of the US’ leading feminist scholars, a lawyer and an academic...[Mackinnon]:Many women, and men who oppose sexual harassment, are engaging the conversation on the best way forward at this juncture of change. The fact that sexual harassment affects all women does not mean that it affects all women in the same ways, or that all women are equally vulnerable to it. But it is true that women are subjected to pressures to deliver sexually in order to survive or advance economically, educationally, and in their work generally.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...To be sure, no one is above the law. Political opponents of a president cannot claim immunity from prosecution. But the bar must be set very high. That conclusion is vindicated not only by principle, but also by longstanding traditions. Whether Republican or Democratic, American presidents have been extraordinarily reluctant to call for prosecution of their political rivals. They have looked forward rather than backward. With his enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton, President Donald Trump is breaking that longstanding norm of American democracy.

...Tomiko Brown-Nagin, professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, and co-director of the Program in Law and History at Harvard Law School, grew up in the Deep South in the 1970s and was among the first African-Americans in her area to attend an integrated school. “Many will say desegregation is too costly for black students; there’s social isolation, low expectations, and a lot of other disadvantages,” Brown-Nagin said. “But at bottom the benefits outweigh the costs. Students who attend desegregated schools end up with higher career aspirations and in a higher place in our world.”

The first time a woman made a very public allegation of sexual harassment before Congress, against a very prominent man, she was greeted with skepticism and hostility by male members of Congress...More than a quarter century later, public people in politics, entertainment and journalism are battling sexual harassment or assault charges...But one things appears to be changing, something that was voiced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when he was asked about the Alabama man hoping to join McConnell's caucus next month. "I believe the women," McConnell said in his characteristic, low-key intonation...Catharine MacKinnon, who pioneered the legal concept of sexual harassment, notes the change in attitude – if not necessarily behavior. "Women reporting sexual harassment, for the moment at least, are being believed. The biggest difference as a result is that what was a privilege of power has become a disgrace," says MacKinnon, who teaches law at both Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan.

An open letter to the Massachusetts Legislature from Chelsea Barabas, Christopher Bavitz, Ryan Budish, Karthik Dinakar, Cynthia Dwork, Urs Gasser, Kira Hessekiel, Joichi Ito, Ronald L. Rivest, Madars Virza, and Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Members of the Massachusetts Legislature: We write to you in our individual capacities¹ regarding the proposed introduction of actuarial risk assessment (“RA”) tools in the Commonwealth’s criminal justice system. As you are no doubt aware, Senate Bill 2185² — passed by the Massachusetts Senate on October 27, 2017 — mandates implementation of RA tools in the pretrial stage of criminal proceedings...As researchers with a strong interest in algorithms and fairness, we recognize that RA tools may have a place in the criminal justice system. In some cases, and by some measures, use of RA tools may promote outcomes better than the status quo. That said, we are concerned that the Senate Bill’s implementation of RA tools is cursory and does not fully address the complex and nuanced issues implicated by actuarial risk assessments.

Peggy Fontenot has had a successful career as a Native American artist working in beading, silver jewelry and black-and-white photography. She's won numerous awards at art shows and has shown her work at top-tier museums. Today her career is in jeopardy because of a 2016 state law that says only members of federally-recognized tribes can market their work as "Native American" or "Indian made." Fontenot is a part of the Patawomeck tribe, which is recognized only in the state of Virginia. Now she's suing the state on the grounds that the law violates her First Amendment rights. "To call every state-recognized tribe fake and illegitimate is just broad sweeping and wrong," Fontenot told Reason...Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard law professor, says the Oklahoma law may have been poorly crafted, but was well-intentioned. She says fraud in the Native American art market is big problem.

An op-ed by Gabriella Blum. Wars used to be justified by their goals. Territorial expansion, restitution or claiming property, securing a throne, and mass religious conversion were all acceptable goals under the tenets of Just War Theory; and they all justified war to begin with, particularly if you ended up attaining them at the end. But since we no longer live in a legal world that sees war as the continuation of diplomacy, when we do end up going to war, it is becoming harder to define our goals. Indeed, our preoccupation with the legality or the justification for war often clouds our ability to see war – and judge it – in terms of goals sought and achieved.

...The Harvard Trademark Program licenses the University’s trademarks and investigates unauthorized use of the Harvard name. Within the College, the Office of Student Life places careful restrictions on how a student group can claim Harvard affiliation. Similar bodies exist for the University’s other schools. “The law here is actually a little murky because in general, you do have the right to say true things,” says Rebecca L. Tushnet ’95, a Law School professor who specializes in trademark law. “But Harvard can get around your right to say true things by making it part of the deal—that if you want to be recognized by the University, and if you want access to these other campus resources, you have to agree to their guidelines for using the Harvard name.”

State attorneys general have operated in an increasingly partisan manner in recent years -- both in terms of how they campaign and what cases they pursue. State AGs have a long history of working together in a bipartisan fashion -- pursuing consumer cases, for example, that affect people across state lines. That still happens. But now, incumbent AGs are targeting their peers in other states in a way they've never done before...Now that Donald Trump is president, it's Democratic AGs who are regularly suing the administration over issues such as immigration and the environment. The homepage for the Democratic Attorneys General Association boldly states: "Democratic Attorneys General are the first line of defense against the new administration." "All the Democrats are pretty well lined up on these Trump investigations," says Jim Tierney, who runs a program on AGs at Harvard Law School. "The presumption is that everyone will be in on the Democratic side."

On May 23, an email landed in the sales inbox of a San Francisco startup called HiQ Labs, politely asking the company to go out of business. HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments...In other words, as far as LinkedIn was concerned, HiQ was the tuna. When the larger company’s lawyers made that clear to Weidick, he hired the law firm Farella Braun & Martel. Deepak Gupta, a partner there, thought the case might interest his former professor, Laurence Tribe...When Gupta called, talking about a battle over control of social media data, Tribe says, “my constitutional nostrils flared.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Fasten your seatbelts. If all the relevant actors are guided primarily by their political self-interest, Roy Moore is headed for the U.S. Senate. And if that happens, we are in for a major national fight about expelling him from his seat, which could function as a partial preview of an impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The logic behind this analysis is that Moore will almost certainly be elected in Alabama’s special election next month. It’s effectively too late for Republicans to stage a write-in campaign against him even if they wanted to try.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In all the talk these days about the Constitution’s impeachment provision, there is widespread confusion about the meaning of the document’s mysterious words making the president, the vice president and other high-level officials impeachable for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If you want to know what impeachment is all about, it’s best to put contemporary issues to one side and start with a document that should unite each and every American: the Declaration of Independence.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. In the annals of U.S. tax overhauls, 1986 is the modern guidepost. That was when a Republican White House joined forces with a divided Congress to modernize and simplify the U.S. tax code, cutting taxes on most Americans and raising them for some powerful interest groups. It was the last piece of tax legislation to deserve the label “reform.” Republicans promised another set of reforms this year, but have pretty much abandoned comprehensive change in favor of tax cuts, mainly for companies and wealthy individuals. Lacking offsetting revenue increases as significant as those of 1986, the proposals are likely to increase U.S. budget deficits and the national debt.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that retired general Michael Flynn was under investigation for allegedly taking part in discussions about a plot to kidnap and extradite a controversial Turkish cleric in exchange for $15 million. Both Flynn’s lawyer and the Turkish regime quickly denied knowledge of or involvement in any such plot, which one source told the paper might involve use of a private jet and a Turkish prison island. But word of the investigation, reportedly part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, represented just the latest humiliation for the man whose stint as national security advisor was, at 26 days, a historically short one...“It is not clear that there is a direct link between the allegations of Flynn’s involvement in a plot to kidnap or extradite Gulen to Turkey and collusion with Russia,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard legal scholar and criminal prosecution tactics expert. “But Mueller’s appointment as special counsel permits him to pursue any matters that arise during the investigation.”