Media Mentions

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s §230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability of Internet content platforms under state common law for bad acts, such as defamation, occasioned by their users. The platforms were free to structure their moderation and editing of comments as they pleased, without a traditional newspaper’s framework in which to undertake editing was to bear responsibility for what was published. If the New York Times included a letter to the editor that defamed someone, the Times would be vulnerable to a lawsuit (to be sure, so would the letter’s author, whose wallet size would likely make for a less tempting target). Not so for online content portals that welcome comments from anywhere—including the online version of the New York Times.

Harvard Law School is expanding its advising and mentoring programs four months after a school task force studying diversity and inclusion released a report calling for more advising opportunities on campus...John F. Manning ’82, the school’s recently appointed dean, said the Law School changed its policies to foster more organic and effective advising relationships between students and faculty. "The value added by mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population and the propensity to seek mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population,” Manning said...I. Glenn Cohen, a Law School professor who leads student reading groups, said he thinks the new advising program will help connect students with mentors and advisers more likely to share their specific interests and are more capable of answering their questions. “The reading group topics are connected to areas the students may be interested in, and by having the reading group instructors serve and be advisors for the students, we’d be more likely to get a match between what a particular student’s interest is and what the faculty member’s expertise is,” Cohen said...Marcia Sells, the Law School’s Dean of Students, said the school also instituted a program for students to take faculty out to dinner with all expenses paid by the school, similar to the College’s Classroom-to-Table program. In addition, administrators created a new peer advising program, she said. “We said to [the peer advisors], ‘You are a resource to them, plan a time to meet with them and talk—they didn’t have to take them out to lunch—but just to be there as a sounding board,’” Sells said...Sadie Hillier [`20], a first-year student at the Law School, wrote in an email that she thinks the new faculty advising program is very helpful. She wrote that she thinks she got “lucky” with her reading group and advisor, Law School professor Michael J. Klarman. “I've been provided with an abundance of mentorship opportunities in the last couple of months, and I have seized onto every single one,” Hillier said...Still, David Sackstein ’14 [`20], another first-year student who said he was in Cohen’s reading group, said that he fears some people may not get the resources they need despite the new programs. “There’s always, always, always going to be students who slip through the cracks,” Sackstein said.

An op-ed by Patrick J. Carome and Cary A. Glynn `18. Zeran v. AOL may not be a household name, but it is the Internet’s most important landmark ruling. This seminal court case, which was the first to consider the meaning and scope of §230 of the Communications Decency Act, has been a pillar of the legal framework that has permitted revolutionary services such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to exist and thrive. Under Zeran, websites are generally immune from liability for unlawful or harmful third-party content. Put simply, this precedent is largely responsible for the Internet as we know it.

...We may have helped create the AI monster here in the Hub, but it turns out we’re also the ones fighting to keep it on a leash, with a Justice League of passionate geeks working furiously to ensure the technology is used for the public good...Now [Bonnie] Docherty has turned her attention to another class of weapons that could endanger civilians—fully autonomous ones, powered by AI. She and a host of ethicists, advocates, and legal scholars worry about the possibility of a future in which wars involve robots that might have trouble discriminating between ordinary people and combatants—or be vulnerable to misuse by rogue regimes. “Fully autonomous weapons would face major obstacles in complying with existing international law,” Docherty explains, “and would cross a moral red line by making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield.”...[Chris] Bavitz, the managing director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, and his colleagues are assembling what they hope will be the definitive database of judicial risk-assessment products. “We are trying to create a one-stop-shopping resource,” Bavitz explains from his immaculate office overlooking Massachusetts Avenue. “Here are the products, here is what they purport to do, here are jurisdictions that use them, and here is the extent to which they make algorithms available for review.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The continuing revelations about Harvey Weinstein tell us something important about sexual harassment and sexual violence, and also about civil-rights movements and social change more broadly. In brief: Because of social norms, people often shut up. Even if they are humiliated, hurt or angry, they will not say a word. It is only when norms start to shift that people feel free to disclose what they have experienced, and to say what they think. Once they are unleashed, social upheaval can result. But it is hard or even impossible to predict whether that will happen – and what form it will take.

Students who attended for-profit colleges filed more than 98 percent of the requests for student loan forgiveness alleging fraud by their schools, according to an analysis of Education Department data published Thursday...“The for-profit college industry scams students across the country and taxpayers and that’s why the industry, including industry insiders who are now staffing the Department of Education, is now fighting so hard against rules that would clarify the borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, a legal services clinic that represents defrauded students. “If for-profit schools don’t want to be responsible for borrower defense claims and reimbursing taxpayers, then they could simply not cheat their students.”

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner, Vincent Schiraldi and Bruce Western. The Massachusetts Senate recently passed watershed legislation that, among other things, retroactively reduces mandatory sentences and incorporates 18-year-olds into the state’s juvenile court justice system. As researchers, educators, and former criminal justice practitioners, we think the legislation is on solid ground. Nine of the state’s 11 district attorneys have expressed concern that curbing mandatory sentences and raising the juvenile court age would be a “return to the old and discredited ways of the past.” It is just the opposite.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. Juli Briskman was fired after telling her employer that she’s the one who gave President Trump’s motorcade, as The Post’s Petula Dvorak put it, the “middle-finger salute seen around the world.” However sympathetic Briskman’s story is and heavy-handed the consequence seems, the conventional legal treatment of this situation would be straightforward: Briskman’s employer, the government contractor Akima LLC, has the right to fire her at will. Under this conventional approach, if Akima management doesn’t like it when employees publicly express political views, then as a private-sector employer, it isn’t bound to respect the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. But these aren’t conventional times, and the conventional legal approach doesn’t make sense today. Briskman’s firing is unconscionable, and it should be illegal.

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them. You might assume Facebook’s friend recommendations would work the same way: You tell the social network who you are, and it tells you who you might know in the online world. But Facebook’s machinery operates on a scale far beyond normal human interactions. And the results of its People You May Know algorithm are anything but obvious...Facebook doesn’t keep profiles for non-users, but it does use their contact information to connect people. “Mobile phone numbers are even better than social security numbers for identifying people,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier by email. “People give them out all the time, and they’re strongly linked to identity.”

...Vietnam has a complicated relationship with the social network. Once blocked, and still scrutinized, it has attracted the ire of authorities keen to preserve communist rule while becoming an avenue for budding entrepreneurs since access was restored. ...The government has to strike the right balance because pressure on social networks can backfire, said Rob Faris, research director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “The threat of shutting down sites, even if temporary, will inhibit investments in the digital economy and hamper innovation,” he said. “As more people conduct more of their lives on large platforms such as Facebook, the cost of blocking Facebook increases.”

At Uber, discrimination was baked into the system, a new suit alleges, pointing to systemic bias against women in the ride-sharing company’s performance evaluations. To assess and promote -- or fire -- workers, Uber Technologies Inc. used a practice known as stack ranking, a zero-sum evaluation that pits employees against one another. According to the lawsuit, filed in October by a former engineer at the company, Roxana Del Toro Lopez, stack rankings unfairly and disproportionately hurt women...Academic researchers have found that performance rating systems like stack rankings play to managers’ unconscious -- and conscious -- biases. Reviewing a decade of performance reviews at a “large professional services firm,” Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, a senior research fellow at Harvard Law School, found that women were 1.4 times more likely than men to receive critical feedback in highly subjective categories.

In almost every way, John F. Manning ’82 is the very image of a Harvard Law School dean. With two Harvard degrees, a Supreme Court clerkship, years of administrative experience at the school, and well-regarded scholarship to his name, Manning checks all of the expected boxes for the leader of one of the country’s preeminent legal institutions...“Being dean of Harvard Law School is a really hard job — there are a lot of demands on your time, a lot of constituencies that need to be satisfied — it’s like being president of a small college,” Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus said. “I think that people are very enthusiastic.”...“My job is to foster a large community in which there are lots of different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies,” Manning said. “What I do for my scholarship has nothing to do with what kind of things I’ll support as dean.”

A national campaign to impeach President Donald Trump has drawn some high-powered talent from legal academia. Two organizations, Free Speech for People and RootsAction.org, have joined forces behind Impeach Donald Trump Now, a grassroots petition drive that has collected thus far more than 1.2 million signatures, and a lobbying effort on behalf of a congressional resolution calling for an impeachment investigation. The campaign is aided by a 13-member legal advisory board, including: Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe and Lawrence Lessig...

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proceeds, one thing is increasingly clear: If there is a serious congressional effort to impeach President Donald Trump after the midterm elections, it will have to be based not on a general sense that he’s doing a bad job, but on something much more specific, like obstruction of justice, abuse of power or subversion of the Constitution itself. For that we have the Framers to thank or blame -- and one in particular, James Madison.

An op-ed by Sharon Block. As executives in Hollywood and other industries hold their breath to see who will be the next subject of an exposé on sexual harassment in the workplace, the nation’s board members should be on high-alert: They are also culpable for harassment in the companies that they are supposed to steward. Corporate boards are the institution that the law imbues with ultimate responsibility for company performance. That the Weinstein Company board and others failed so completely to understand what was going on within their firms should give impetus to new thinking about how corporations are governed.

Some crimes against children are so horrendous you can only see the perpetrators as inhuman creatures. It’s understandable. But that perception hurts the majority of kids in the system...Reunification is the case plan goal for more than half the more than 16,000 children in out-of-home care in Arizona. Helping their biological parents succeed is essential to safely moving those children out of foster care and back home. In fact, helping families before children are removed is best of all because it spares children the trauma of being taking away from everything familiar. But families are hurting in Arizona. Addressing poverty is “the best prevention program going,” says Elizabeth Bartholet, who teaches civil rights and family law at Harvard Law School and specializes in child welfare.

When the Trump administration withdrew proposed regulations last April that international adoption agencies worried would price them out of their jobs, the agencies breathed a collective sigh of relief. But just seven months later, it appears to be harder than ever to adopt a child from overseas...Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard University, said the administration has been implementing the regulations despite withdrawing them. “They have basically driven the Center on Accreditation out of business,” she said. Bartholet said the result would “destroy international adoption.” She said that while the Trump administration has been eager to rescind other Obama-era regulations, it has not paid adequate attention to the actions of the State Department on international adoption. “It’s really, really unfortunate,” she said.

...The ICIJ showed the findings from its investigation to J. Richard Harvey, a Villanova University law professor, and Stephen Shay, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. In 2013, both of them gave detailed testimony on Apple’s previous Irish structure to the U.S. Senate committee’s investigation. They both told the ICIJ it appeared likely the iPhone maker had transferred intangible assets to Ireland...Shay added: “By using Irish intangible property tax reliefs, Apple likely will pay little or no additional Irish tax for years to come on income at Apple Operations International.”

Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google pledged to Congress this week to do more to prevent the fakery that has polluted their sites. “We understand that the people you represent expect authentic experiences when they come to our platform,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee...Jonathan L. Zittrain, who studies the internet and society at Harvard, said the companies are reluctant to aggressively purge bogus users and deceptive content because of their business model, which is built on signing up more and more people. “These platforms are oriented to maximize user growth and retention,” Mr. Zittrain said. “That means not throwing up even tiny hurdles along the sign-up runway, and not closing accounts without significant cause. I suspect they figure there are enough accounts that are the subject of complaints to review without looking for more to assess.”

This week, Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller picked up the public pace of his team's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Indictments were unsealed, and a potentially important plea agreement revealed...Experts say there is nothing anyone could do to invalidate such pardons. A presidential pardon cannot be undone. But constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the new book Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide, notes that the framers of the Constitution, in the Virginia ratification debate, discussed whether abuse of the pardon power would be an impeachable offense — and James Madison explicitly said it would be. "If the president counsels crimes personally or participates in a crime personally," Sunstein says, "and then exercises the pardon power so as to shelter the people who engaged in those crimes, the Virginia debate is very clear. That is an impeachable offense."

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. Fiercely partisan reactions are overshadowing the accomplishments of the Republican tax proposal – as well as its misguided aspects. In reality, the plan is a mixed bag that has some good, bad and ugly parts.