Media Mentions

Cyber-attacks are on the rise, threatening power grids, driving up geopolitical tensions, and even crippling hospitals. Countries should agree a new “Digital Geneva Convention” to contain the risk and set up a new international organisation to police the new rules. These proposals from Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Brad Smith, also say that neutral companies dealing with the fallout should win protected status, like a technological Red Cross. Opinions differ on where the gaps are, if any, in international law, and whether Microsoft is a credible voice on the issues or just looking after its own vested interests...Dustin Lewis, senior researcher at the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, told IRIN: "the legal and political aspects are difficult, if not impossible, to completely dissociate".

While corporate profits might seem incongruous with doing social good, Howard Schultz, the executive chairman of Starbucks, would counter that the opposite is true. There is a great need, Mr. Schultz said, “to achieve the fragile balance between profit, social impact, and a moral obligation” to do everything possible “to enhance the lives of our employees and the communities we serve.”...The discourse about how companies should make money dates to the early 1600s in Amsterdam. The Dutch East India Company, the world’s first publicly listed company, profited “by war, rape, pillage and colonization,” said Stephen Davis, associate director and senior fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. “A group of Dutch burghers protested, arguing that the company should abide by ethical principles, so they launched what became the world’s first shareholder boycott of company stock on social grounds,” Dr. Davis said.

As the LPGA Tour prepares for the final tournament of its 2017 season, sports law expert and current Harvard Law School instructor Peter Carfagna has been elected as the incoming Chair of the Ladies Professional Golf Association's (LPGA's) Board of Directors, effective January 1, 2018..."I'm absolutely delighted to take on the role as Chair of the LPGA’s Board of Directors," said Carfagna. "Mike Whan and his executive team are true 'major league' players in the sports world - it will be my pleasure to work closely with them, and with our player and other independent directors, to accomplish the very ambitious Strategic Plan which will continue to showcase the LPGA as the premier women’s professional sports organization in the world."

With his term of office nearing a close, Mayor Kasim Reed has replaced the lawyer who headed up the Municipal Public Defender Office since 2010, tapping PD managing attorney Kenneth Days III to take over. The decision to oust interim PD Rosalie Joy comes after several lawyers and civil rights organizations expressed alarm at what they described as a campaign by some municipal court judges to fire Joy...Jon Rapping, Gideon’s Promise president and a law professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School and Harvard Law School, said he hoped incoming PD Days would not face the same sort of judicial pressure Joy has alleged. “Ms. Joy’s removal appears to be retaliation for her challenging unconstitutional practices,” said Rapping via email. “That some judges may have unethically interfered with the independence of the public defender is of grave concern for poor people in Atlanta trapped in [the] Municipal Court’s system.

...Led by Wendy Jacobs, the Emmett Clinical Professor of Environmental Law and director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, and developed in collaboration with the Harvard Office for Sustainability, the three-year research and teaching project was funded by the University as part of its living lab initiative to use the campus as a test bed for innovative sustainability solutions that can then be replicated across much broader levels. “No single professional discipline can tackle climate change in isolation; collaboration is critical,” said Jacobs...“The science behind a nitrogen fertilizer emissions-reduction strategy is already solid, but the challenge was developing an economical and practical implementation plan that could transform the concept into a feasible project,” said Harvard Law School student Chaz Kelsh [`18].

A month after his light-hearted appearance at Harvard Law School’s Bicentennial Summit, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts ’76 was all business when he returned to the Law School Tuesday night to preside over the final round of the Ames Moot Court Competition...Henry J. Druschel [`18], a third-year Law student and the captain of the winning team, said that the prospect of writing briefs and arguing before a Supreme Court Justice was “nerve-racking.” “It certainly drives you to put the most effort that you can into this, and make sure that the product that you put out is as close to professional quality as we can do as inexperienced law students,” he said. “We’re dealing with live issues of law and so it’s all very exciting.”...David Phillips [`18], a third-year student, won the award for best oralist for his arguments before the moot court. The teams argued a case about gender equity in the military draft process.

President Trump did not need to send a memo or telephone his attorney general to make his desires known. He broadcast them for all the world to see on Twitter. The instruction was clear: The Justice Department should investigate his defeated opponent from last year’s campaign. However they were delivered, Mr. Trump’s demands have ricocheted through the halls of the Justice Department, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions has now ordered career prosecutors to evaluate various accusations against Hillary Clinton and report back on whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate her...“I have no idea what will happen but this letter is entirely consistent with the A.G. later saying, ‘we followed normal process to look in to it and found nothing,’” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a former top Justice Department official under Mr. Bush. “The letter does not tip off or hint one way or another what the A.G.’s decision will be.”

Troves of recent comments from supporters and critics of a Trump administration plan to support coal and nuclear power generation are just the beginning of what promises to be a bitter battle over the future of electricity markets. As the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sifts through arguments over a Department of Energy proposal to prop up "fuel-secure" generators to boost the grid's resilience, one thing is clear: The embrace of any approach that appears to favor coal and nuclear over other fuel sources will spark a mad dash to the courtroom..."FERC can only order a change in rates if it first concludes that current rates are unjust and unreasonable," said Harvard Law School electricity expert Ari Peskoe, who noted that FERC's previous proposals for market rules through the years have included such a finding. "That's fundamental to the Federal Power Act. It's to protect utilities and the public from arbitrary rate changes."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. To anyone who’s been following Roy Moore for the past 15 years, there’s a single question that won’t go away: Why are we here? Given that Moore, as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court defied federal court orders and was removed from office -- not once but twice! -- it seems astonishing and outrageous that Republican voters chose him as a U.S. Senate candidate, leading to the current wave of sex-related allegations against him.

A research paper by Philip Heymann. A Special Prosecutor is appointed and empowered to find the facts about a crime by a high official. For obvious reasons, the appointment is an invitation to dramatic and public political battle. Even reliable accusations of crimes by a President—and the threat to the rule of law that ignoring them would pose—are fought with all the powers of his Administration.

To get the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention these days, try saying your speech rights are being violated. Whether the underlying topic is abortion, elections, labor unions or wedding cakes, the First Amendment is starting to dominate the Supreme Court’s agenda..."The current court interprets the First Amendment more expansively in many ways than it did in the past," said Rebecca Tushnet, an expert on the First Amendment who teaches at Harvard Law School. Although First Amendment claims have long had more "charisma" than other constitutional claims, "the gap may be getting even bigger," she said.

For the past several years, students who believe they’ve been scammed by their colleges have waited in limbo while policy makers and industry stakeholders determine their fate. This week provides a vivid reminder of their plight. Starting Monday, the Department of Education will convene a group of representatives from a variety of sectors to develop a rule for how and when these borrowers can have their federal student loans forgiven...But consumer advocates say the delays are simply a pretext for the Department to try to deny borrowers access to relief they’re entitled to under the law. Toby Merrill, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, described the new rule-making process as “regulatory theater.” “I don’t think that the Department is acting in good faith on behalf of borrowers,” she said. “This administration has only ever sided with the predatory for-profit college industry against borrowers — including against borrowers’ legal rights.”

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine. The approval, announced late on Monday, marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed...Seeking to address concerns about privacy and coercion, Otsuka officials contracted with several bioethicists. Among them, I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor, said safeguards adopted include allowing patients to instantly stop physicians and others from seeing some or all of their data.

“Slow down” is the last thing that supporters of the Republicans’ proposed tax overhaul want to hear...But the rush to “get it done” — particularly on the business side, where the most sweeping changes are planned — is alarming tax specialists who warn that new and unforeseen complexity, loopholes and glitches could come back to haunt tax collectors and taxpayers. “All of this is happening in an incredible rush, and frankly it’s absurd and incredibly poor governing to push a bill of this significance in the time frame they’re doing,” said Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School who worked in the Treasury Department during the Reagan and Obama administrations.

Hey, let’s talk about impeachment. You know, just in case it ever comes up. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein has written a concise, enlightening and argumentative history and guide to getting rid of presidents, but he insists he is not thinking of anyone in particular. Or, more accurately, he’s won’t tell us if he’s thinking of anyone in particular. “With the goal of neutrality in mind,” Sunstein writes in his opening chapter, “I am not going to speak of any current political figure. I am going to focus on the majesty, and the mystery, of impeachment under the U.S. Constitution.”

...Trump’s victory in November was an insult to all the women who had accused him of sexual assault or harassment and been called liars...Catharine MacKinnon has been fighting this fight for 40 years. She’s now 71, still an avid anti-porn feminist, still teaching law at the University of Michigan. Her advice: If women (and men) want real change, they should fight for more codified rights, in the form of an Equal Rights Amendment.She also says the #MeToo-ers should prepare for a bilious backlash. “Don’t assume that the women who have come forward—the real drivers of this awareness—won’t be assailed and reviled. Don’t assume that because there are so many of them, the awareness they are creating is irreversible. Don’t assume that a lot of sympathy won’t be generated for the consequences to these men for their voluntary behavior. White male supremacy didn’t get where it is today by allowing reality to win.”

An article by Christopher Bavitz. One track of the Berkman Klein Center’s work on artificial intelligence ethics and governance concerns the use of algorithms, machine learning, and related technologies in ways that impact social and criminal justice. Among other things, this research examines technologies employed by courts in their disposition of criminal cases. Increasingly, judicial determinations are informed by software that helps judges perform “risk assessments” of defendants or otherwise process and weigh factors relevant to decisions about sentencing, parole, and the like. The Center (along with collaborators at the MIT Media Lab) is undertaking a number of efforts to evaluate ways in which these kinds of technologies might mitigate or exacerbate bias.

A controversial free-market think tank, after years on the political fringe, has found an audience in the Trump administration. At an energy meeting of the Heartland Institute last week, some of the nation’s most vocal climate deniers gushed about the Trump administration’s rapid rollback of environmental and climate rules and set their sights on a far more ambitious plan: gutting the policy that allows the EPA to treat carbon as an air pollutant...To many legal experts, the endangerment finding is untouchable, or close to it. “I would be hard-pressed to guess at or articulate a theory whereby the Supreme Court would take the position that this wasn’t already decided as a final matter,” Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental Law Program and a former EPA official, told BuzzFeed News.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No Donald Trump trip would be complete without a shocking quote, and this week in Beijing, at the Great Hall of the People, the president obliged. After declaring the economic playing field between China and the U.S. “one-sided” and “unfair,” he continued with a big “but”: “I don't blame China,” Trump told the audience of business leaders from both countries. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for benefit of their citizens? I give China great credit.”

Two women who claim they were defrauded by a for-profit college have sued the Education Department and a private loan servicer in a case their attorneys say could provide a new legal remedy for tens of thousands of students frustrated with the department's inaction on claims seeking loan forgiveness..."People's rights not to pay for defective products is well established in law, so whatever the Department of Education is or is not doing, the legal rights of borrowers continue to exist and are enforceable against the government just as they are against private parties," said Toby Merill, a litigator at Harvard University's Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents defrauded students.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. The International Criminal Court announced Thursday that on Oct. 25 the Pre-Trial Chamber of the Court authorized the Prosecutor to commence an investigation in Burundi for alleged crimes against humanity committed by state agents and groups working on behalf of the state between April 26, 2015 and Oct. 26, 2017. The decision was initially issued under seal and was made public Thursday, after the Prosecutor took steps to protect potential witnesses and victims. The information provided to the Pre-Trial Chamber provided a reasonable basis to believe that the alleged perpetrators committed the crimes of murder, imprisonment, torture, rape, enforced disappearance and persecution. The number of alleged victims is high: 1,200 persons killed, thousands detained, thousands tortured, hundreds disappeared, and over 413,000 persons displaced.