Media Mentions

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.

An interview with Yochai Benkler. Politicians, the public, and regulators are all starting to face up to the power of social media companies. Particularly ... Facebook. That company said last week it would give Congress thousands of political ads, linked to a possible Russian propaganda campaign. Facebook will also update its ad technology to try to keep political advertising in check. But it's looking more and more like Facebook's days of sell first, apologize later could be coming to an end.

A University-wide task force focused on diversity and inclusion recommended Monday that central administrators work with individual schools to devise plans to ensure historically marginalized groups experience “full membership in the Harvard community.”...“I’m certain there will be some discussion as to what do these recommendations mean, but I think at least it’s a helpful starting point, as opposed to sort of throwing it up in the air and saying ‘we’d like the school to be like this,’ in a very vague way,’” Law School Dean of Students Marcia Sells, a task force member, said.

Citing a key federal court ruling in a Brandeis University case, the Trump administration on Friday advised college officials across the country to evaluate sexual misconduct claims by the same standard of evidence they use for any other student infractions. The move by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could make it tougher to prove allegations of sexual assault at some universities...“I think that a lot of people are reacting with panic,” said Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and expert on sexual harassment.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In calling on NFL owners and fans to punish athletes who engage in political protests, President Donald Trump has become a Super Bowl champion of something he purports to oppose: political correctness. Apparently he’s fine with punishing dissenters, so long as he abhors what the dissenters are saying. In recent years, many Republicans and conservatives have complained that political correctness -- on university campuses, in workplaces and elsewhere -- can squelch minority opinions and enforce a left-wing orthodoxy. They’re right.

On their own, computers don’t know that it’s bad to treat racists or anti-Semites as just another niche marketing demographic. But Facebook and Google aren’t deploying enough human eyeballs to prevent the misuse of their ad systems. Instead, they’ve been making money off it...Facebook and Google, in contrast, have consciously decided to offer ads, via automated sales platforms, to algorithmically identified interest groups. Because of narrow targeting, people who might otherwise spot a misleading ad, and raise a ruckus about it, may never see it in the first place...“If they’re just passing along content from someone else, they can’t be held liable,” says Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet.

Two members of the legal team that settled a lawsuit earlier this year against the psychologists who designed and implemented a Central Intelligence Agency torture program spoke Friday afternoon at the Law School about their work on the landmark case. Paul L. Hoffman—a civil and human rights lawyer and lecturer at the Law School—and criminal defense lawyer Lawrence S. Lustberg played major roles on the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation team in Salim v. Mitchell, filed on behalf of three former CIA detainees...Elvina Pothelet, a visiting researcher at the Law School, said she was impressed with the obstacles the litigators surmounted in arguing the case to a settlement. “It gives hope that this kind of case can find their way to the courts,” she said. Lindsay A. Bailey [`19], a second-year Law student, agreed. “It’s inspiring to hear about the cases that are a win, because we take a lot of losses in the human rights litigation field,” she said.

Sheila Hobson never imagined the lawsuit she filed seven years ago about some unpaid overtime would one day become a Supreme Court case with far-reaching implications for American workers. But two days ago, on the eve of oral arguments, she came in for an even bigger shock — the U.S. government, her biggest champion, had suddenly switched sides...The answer is in an amicus brief filed by the U.S. Solicitor-General’s office in her case, National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil. The Trump Justice Department had reconsidered the position taken under President Obama, the brief said, and “reached the opposite conclusion.”...The new position of Trump’s Justice Department threw that principle out the window, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration official. “It could essentially close the courthouse door on workers,” she said.

European leaders are embracing a Libyan general who has ordered his soldiers to commit war crimes, according to new evidence that has been analysed by senior legal experts. The allegation of human rights abuses by Gen Khalifa Haftar, a former CIA asset who controls nearly half of Libya from his base in the east, comes as the general is due to arrive in Rome on Tuesday, where he will be received by Italian officials...The legal questions, and longstanding doubts among officials in the west about Haftar’s trustworthiness, have not dissuaded European leaders from seeking to forge an alliance with him. The analysis by Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel to the general counsel of the Pentagon, and Alex Whiting, a former international criminal prosecutor at the ICC, paints a troubling picture of Haftar’s record. The two experts point to a video that was posted on YouTube on 10 October 2015, recording a speech that Haftar gave to his LNA fighters on 18 September.

Taylor Swift has made it clear to the world she controls her brand, and one tool the singer leverages regularly to achieve this goal is trademark law. Swift's team has been regularly filing trademark applications for lyrics and other slogans under her holding company, TAS Rights Management LLC, striking down infringers in the process. But does it really work, and is this approach for everyone?...Enforcing a trademarks can be more difficult than obtaining one, though, especially in the digital age...As Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet put it, “It looks bad to sue your fans if they're doing it because they are your fans.”

Facebook and Google, two of world’s biggest and most influential companies, pride themselves on their ad businesses. These operations generate tens of billions of dollars per year, thanks in part to letting advertisers target even the most obscure microcommunities using unprecedented sets of data. As the revelations of last week evidenced, however, that ability is a double-edged sword, one that has come back to haunt these ad-supported giants...“These kinds of controversies will keep happening because the scale and expectations around how many employees are needed to oversee the content or ad programs is teeny compared to the number of ads being served,” says Kendra Albert, a lawyer and fellow at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.