Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s good news that women will soon be able to drive in Saudi Arabia. But as a milestone, it isn’t primarily a marker of sex equality, which remains a distant objective in the kingdom. Rather, it’s an important indication that the monarchy now thinks it doesn’t have to defer to the country’s religious establishment. That’s a remarkable development that may allow some modernization -- but also heralds a move away from the separation of powers and toward consolidation of absolute authority in a totalitarian king.

An op-ed by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. The Trump Administration is waging a quiet war on workers. The effort involves anti-union appointments to federal agencies, repeal of Obama-era regulations that were designed to raise the wages of low and middle income workers, and support for anti-worker legislation in Congress. But the most recent salvo may actually prove to be the most devastating. In a case called Murphy Oil, slated for the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term, the Trump administration is inviting the court to eviscerate the rights of employees who don’t have a union.

The votes have been counted and President Trump has moved into the White House, but the campaign to upend the Electoral College is far from over...The idea is not to eliminate the Electoral College, which would require a constitutional amendment, but to require states to implement a system in which electors cast ballots based on the percentage of the popular vote. “It’s crazy that our nation’s least-democratic election is the one for president,” said Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School professor and founder of Equal Citizens.

It’s not often – if ever – you’ll come across a book written by a Harvard finance professor who seems just as comfortable talking about the romantic choices of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet or the business acumen of Stringer Bell in The Wire, as about economic theory. But, in his new book The Wisdom of Finance, Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard Business and Harvard Law School, has drawn on the arts to make his case...He had two motivations in writing the book. “One, there is a great deal of misconceptions about finance and then finance gets demonised, and a lot of this happens because people don’t understand finance. And my second motivation is that people in finance . . . we have to rehabilitate finance, and look at what we do with a moral lens.”

It doesn’t look like any NFL players will be disciplined for kneeling or locking arms in protest during the playing of the National Anthem. But First Amendment experts say most employees can be fired from many jobs for exercising their freedom of speech...But government employees are in a different position, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet told TheWrap. He said that under the First Amendment, government workers who speak about public policy can’t be fired unless their speech interferes with their jobs — by provoking fights, for example. “Typically, though, governments aren’t able to make that showing,” he said.

With his stellar credentials, Andrew Manuel Crespo, 34, could have had a gilded entree to the elite worlds of finance, academia or government. He graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude. At Harvard Law School, he was the first-ever Latino president of the Harvard Law Review and he clerked for two Supreme Court justices. But when it came time to get a job, Crespo became a public defender in Washington, D.C. His first client was eight years old. The way his young clients and their families trusted him, Crespo remembered, was something that he never took for granted. “I was working in juvenile criminal court, and my clients were 12, 13, 16 years old,” Crespo said. “There is something very powerful about meeting people for the first time when they are literally behind bars. You are introducing yourself when they are at one of the most broken, vulnerable moments in their lives.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Hype about using enormous sets of sensor-collected data to “drive results” in US cities is getting pretty thick. Local government officials across the country are overrun by vendors offering to install soup-to-nuts systems that will monitor parking, pedestrians, pollution, and pests, among a zillion other things. It’s as if the big tech companies are baffled by why local government needs to exist at all. “We’ve got engineers! We’ll do it for you!” is the implicit pitch. McKinsey says the global Internet of Things market may be worth as much as $6.2 trillion over the next few years. But all that data won’t help if it doesn’t address the most vital issues in our cities. And one of the most vital of all is inequality of opportunity.

An article by Gabrielle G. Hirz, Kathleen Saunders Gregor, and Stefan G. Gerlitz `18. You own a business selling medical marijuana, an enterprise which, while legal in 29 states and the District of Columbia, is prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act as a business trafficking in a Schedule I controlled substance. Although, under 2013 guidance, the Obama administration discouraged federal prosecutions of marijuana dispensaries that operated legally according to state laws permitting its medical or recreational use, perhaps you are more concerned under the current administration. When it comes time to file your Federal income tax returns, and those of your business, what are you legally obligated to disclose?

The US investment regulator’s powers to recoup losses from financial advisers who break the law were dealt a blow by a landmark Supreme Court decision this summer. But the Securities and Exchange Commission has stressed to the FT that the court’s decision will have a limited impact on its ability to go after wrongdoers...Several legal experts have claimed the case puts the regulator at a considerable disadvantage when seeking redress. “The decision clearly imposes a limit on SEC enforcement powers and may force the staff to rely more on civil money penalties,” says Howell Jackson, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Seated cross-legged on the floor and armed with poster paper and colorful markers, roughly 20 students gathered at Harvard Law School Tuesday evening to scrawl messages protesting the arrival of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is slated to speak on campus Thursday. “The cost of education shouldn’t include sexual violence,” read one poster...In a written statement Tuesday evening, Harassment/Assault Law-Student Team co-presidents Sarah B. Gutman [`18] and Marielle Sanchez [`18] wrote that “being silent is being complicit.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has kicked off an effort to reform how the federal government advises colleges and universities about handling sexual misconduct. Critics are worried the process will roll back protections for victims of sexual assault, but feminist Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley says reform is necessary.

On September 25, North Korea accused US President Donald Trump of declaring war on the communist state. Pyongyang's accusation, coupled with a threat to shoot down American warplanes flying near North Korean airspace, came six days after Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. In his remarks, Trump warned America could "totally destroy" North Korea in order to stop that country's expanding nuclear weapons program...The Korean War never actually ended, legally speaking. In July 1953, the combatant countries—the United States and its allies on one side, North Korea and China on the other—agreed to an armistice halting active fighting, but without actually settling the conflict. "Since there is only an armistice, the US and North Korea—or, more accurately, UN forces and North Korea—are still in a state of armed conflict or war," James Kraska, a [visiting] Harvard law professor and expert in the legal aspects of armed conflict, told Motherboard.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. Can Massachusetts take a stand against foreign influence in our elections? On Wednesday, a legislative committee will consider a bill to plug a loophole that the federal government has left wide open for foreign influence. There are many ways for foreign interests to influence elections here. We saw several of them in 2016, like the Russian government’s sophisticated computer hacking attacks on state election systems, or its intelligence operatives’ high-stakes meeting with Trump campaign officials on the promise of sharing potentially compromising information.

An op-ed by Justin Levin `18. In the aftermath of President Trump’s attack on Colin Kaepernick and other professional athletes, and the historic protests that erupted around the NFL on Sunday and Monday in response, many are lamenting how the wall that once separated politics from professional sports has collapsed. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports’ Jason Whitlock claimed, “the league will no longer be allowed to present football as an escape from America’s divisions.” In reality, however, the NFL, and professional sports more generally, have never been apolitical as Whitlock describes.

...But could everyday workers be fired for expressing their opinions at the office?...The short answer: If you’re not a government employee: No...But it doesn’t necessarily protect private-sector employees who make statements or donations in favor of causes their employers disagree with, Mark Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, previously told MarketWatch. Private-sector employees are generally employed at the will of the employer, Tushnet said, and their employers can fire them as they see fit. “That includes disagreement with what they say in public,” Tushnet said.

An op-ed by Thomas Abt. This week the F.B.I. released its annual tally of crime in the United States, and the picture it paints is troubling. In 2016, there were 17,250 homicides, an increase of more than 8.5 percent from the previous year. This comes on the heels of a 12 percent rise in 2015, bringing the total increase over two years to nearly 22 percent — the largest two-year increase in homicide in 25 years. Violent crime — which includes rapes, robberies and assaults, in addition to homicides — is also up, but less so, rising 4 percent, after a 4 percent increase in 2015. What to make of this two-year spike in death and violence is unclear, but you can be certain of this: Partisans on all sides will seek to spin this situation to their advantage. And that’s a problem that stunts productive conversation about solutions.

Does a river — or a plant, or a forest — have rights? This is the essential question in what attorneys are calling a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit, in which a Denver lawyer and a far-left environmental group are asking a judge to recognize the Colorado River as a person...Jody Freeman, director of Harvard’s environmental law program, said Mr. Flores would face an uphill battle. “Courts have wrestled with the idea of granting animals standing,” she wrote in an email. “It would be an even further stretch to confer standing directly on rivers, mountains and forests.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the addition of North Korea and Venezuela save President Donald Trump’s third travel ban from the constitutional flaws of his first two? By rights, the answer should be no -- and the new ban would be unlikely to survive careful judicial scrutiny of its shaky logic. But in the real world, the U.S. Supreme Court may take the opportunity to de-escalate the ongoing conflict between the Trump administration and the judiciary. If that is so, a majority of the justices could simply defer to Trump’s assertion that the countries on the list were chosen because they don’t provide information to facilitate screening of visitors.

T.J. is joined by two prominent election reform attorneys: Lawrence Lessig with Equal Citizens and Chad Peace with the Independent Voter Project. They discuss their latest reform lawsuits and projects, breaking down each case into its ‘elevator pitch’.

Betsy DeVos is coming to Boston and she’s in high demand, not just from friendly quarters...The multiple invitations may be less an indication of DeVos’s popularity and more a sign of how polarizing a figure she and education department have become in recent months. “All we’re asking is for a few minutes for her to hear the perspective of people who have been harmed by these schools,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard. “Based on the actions she has taken, she doesn’t seem like she’s getting that perspective.”

Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law, has been at the heart of scholarly arguments over corporate governance for a long time, perhaps since 1990, the year he edited a textbook on Corporate Law and Economic Analysis. That was also the year Bebchuk, along with Marcel Kahan, authored a seminal article on “legal policy toward proxy contests.”...His more recent work includes a paper with Alon Brav, of Duke University, and Wei Jiang, of Columbia Business School, on the long-term effects of hedge fund activism. The argument of this paper is in line with Bebchuk’s long held convictions on the subject. He and his colleagues take issue with the common contention that hedge fund activism in particular represents a short time horizon, that hedge funds push for immediate pay-outs at the expense of long term strategic thinking.