Media Mentions

Congress is back tomorrow with a full plate and an unclear path forward, muddled by squabbling between President Donald Trump and the GOP leadership at the Capitol. At the top of most lists is some sort of appropriations legislation to keep Uncle Sam’s lights on before the current funding measure runs dry at the end of this month...Not everyone is sure the Trump administration drops the appeal. Sharon Block, who ran the DOL’s policy shop in the Obama administration, told me the new decision still limits the department’s regulatory authority in a way the White House might not like. “If they’re being truthful that they want to promulgate a new rule, I guess they have to figure out a rationale for a salary threshold that aligns with his reasoning,” Block said, referring to Mazzant.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday responded harshly to reports that President Trump was inclined to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program...Laurence Tribe posits a broader protection beyond simply using the information DACA beneficiaries provided, citing a series of cases “involving government pulling the rug out from under those who rely to their detriment on its express or implied promises that would form part of the legal narrative.” He tells Right Turn, “Clearly, in serving its interests in smoking people without papers out of the shadows and into the open, the government — by promising them that, if they registered for DACA and complied with various other conditions, they’d not be targeted for deportation — created not just some technical estoppel but a basic duty as a matter of due process of law.”

...Public-school teachers who accept perks, meals or anything of value in exchange for using a company’s products in their classrooms could also run afoul of school district ethics policies or state laws regulating government employees. “Any time you are paying a public employee to promote a product in the public classroom without transparency, then that’s problematic,” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who is a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “Should attorneys general be concerned about this practice? The answer is yes.”

Four Harvard Law School academics have asked the U.S. Department of Education to revisit policies regarding campus sexual misconduct investigations...The Harvard memo (PDF) was signed by Janet E. Halley, Elizabeth D. Bartholet, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, all of whom are Harvard law professors, and Nancy Gertner, a lecturer at the school who is also a retired federal judge. They submitted the memo to the Department of Education Aug. 21. “Definitions of sexual wrongdoing on college campuses are now seriously overbroad. They go way beyond accepted legal definitions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. They often include sexual conduct that is merely unwelcome, even if it does not create a hostile environment, even if the person accused had no way of knowing it was unwanted, and even if the accuser’s sense that it was unwelcome arose after the encounter,” the memo reads.

President Donald Trump likes to tout his affinity for the American worker. He’s climbed into an American-made big rig in the White House driveway. He’s donned a hard hat while addressing West Virginia coal miners. And he’s boasted about hiring “thousands and thousands and thousands” of union workers...Trump’s budget proposed cutting the Labor Department’s funding by about 20 percent while boosting funding for the department’s union watchdog by 22 percent, despite the fact that union membership is at a record low. Most of the proposed cuts targeted workforce training programs that enjoy bipartisan support. Outside of targeting unions, Trump’s Labor Department is mostly focused on getting out of the way of employers. “Overwhelmingly, I would define their mission as a negative one,” says [Sharon] Block, who is now director of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife program.

An op-ed by Sharon Block. Labor law in our country is profoundly broken. The National Labor Relations Act is the federal statute that protects the right of employees to join a union, engage in collective bargaining or just stand together with coworkers to have a say in what happens at work. Congress passed the law in 1935 to “ encourage collective bargaining.” But the NLRA is failing to fulfill this purpose.

...Now Google is a brand worth an estimated $113 billion, and the word “google” is often used as a verb meaning “to search online.” Two entrepreneurs — who are not quite on the level of Page and Brin — are trying to exploit the popularity of the term, saying it has become so common that Google should no longer have a monopoly on its own name....“Consumers are in charge of the language,” Harvard law professor Rebecca Tushnet told TheWrap. “Whatever they think is a generic term for a product or service, is.”

...The truth is that many people want to be in a union, and, by most public opinion measurements, that desire has not waned, and has even strengthened in recent years, according to some scholars. Richard Freeman, co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, points out, "In 2002 the proportion of workers who said they would vote for a union rose above the proportion that said they would vote against a union for the first time in any national survey: a majority of nonunion workers now desire union representation in their workplace."

Earlier this week, President Trump took a question about the timing of his pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Trump said, "In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally. You know the hurricane was just starting. And I put it out that I had pardoned, as we say, Sheriff Joe.” Hurricane or not, it was a deeply controversial pardon. We dissect the legal questions surrounding it. Guest: Nancy Gertner,

...This book presents a balanced defense of what the writer, the Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, refers to as “positive discrimination.” Kennedy explores the history of race-related laws and asks why, despite preferential treatment in college admissions for people based on special categories like geography or legacy status, consideration on the basis of race has always been contentious. His focus is on higher education, where these discussions have historically taken place because of the scarcity of available seats and top universities’ role as “gateways to opportunity, socialization and certification” and “ training grounds for the power elite.”

Each January, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its annual data on union membership rates, labor braces itself to see how steeply the chart dips. This past year, the share of unionized workers declined 0.4 percent, to just 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers overall and a bare 6.4 percent of private-sector workers. As has been the case for many years now, the annual release represents the lowest year on record for unions....And yet, as Harvard Law Professor Ben Sachs has pointed out, the Supreme Court has not employed the typical typologies of preemption at all when dealing with labor law. Rather, it has created a “preemption doctrine [that] is among the broadest and most robust in federal law.”

Four Harvard Law School faculty members are pushing for the Department of Education to revise Obama-era Title IX standards governing how universities respond to sexual harassment and assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Department of Education last week, Law School professors Janet E. Halley, Elizabeth D. Bartholet ’62, and Jeannie Suk Gersen and lecturer Nancy Gertner called on the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to reevaluate the standards put forth in the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter.

President Trump’s controversial pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio last week raised red flags for critics who worried that Trump might pardon himself, if the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller leads to him, or that he might be signaling that he would pardon associates under legal pressure to give Mueller information about him...Federal pardons could open the door to criminal investigations in several states, NBC News also reported Wednesday. Trump’s pardon power would not apply to state crimes, said Harvard Law School Professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor whose career has also included leading prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “Pardon would not resolve all legal liability for the Trump people. They could face charges,” he said.

A few weeks ago, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival held one of its occasional outdoor concerts at a nearby Long Island winery...Afterward, when someone inquired about the presence of these heavily armed police, he was told that the Southampton police department required the extra protection...The militarization of local police forces, of course, is a trend that began after the Sept. 11 attacks, when many departments added “fighting terror” to their mission statements, and when the federal government began to make money available to local police to buy military-style equipment, including automatic weapons, night vision goggles and other paraphernalia. As the security expert Bruce Schneier points out, “when they get this stuff, they want to trot it out. So now it is being used.”

Harvard undergraduates bid their final farewell to summer Wednesday as they crowded classrooms and lecture halls on the College’s first day of classes. Though some classes consistently popular with students, like Economics 10a: “Principles of Economics” and Statistics 104: “Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Economics,” received expectedly high turnouts, others not as well known also drew large numbers...Richard H. Fallon, a Law School professor who teaches Government 1510, said the large turnout in his course may be due to increased interest in the U.S. Constitution. “If you want to speculate, we seem to be in a political climate in which we lurch from one looming constitutional crisis to the next,” Fallon said.

Last Thursday, just hours before Rohingya militants attacked more than two dozen police and border outposts in western Myanmar, the former head of the United Nations presaged the coming violence in an urgent warning...The news conference was held to promote the release of a new report on how to improve the lives of Buddhists and Muslims living in Rakhine state, one of the country’s most impoverished and conflict-torn regions, from which tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya have fled violence in recent years...Yee Htun, a human rights advocate from Myanmar and instructor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., says the reforms outlined in the new report can’t come soon enough for Rakhine. “At the heart of this crisis are policies and practices that have a real dehumanizing effect,” she says.

NPR's Scott Simon talks to Bonnie Docherty, senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, about the group's call for a pre-emptive ban on fully autonomous weapons.

An op-ed by Sabrineh Ardalan. In the next few months, Congress will consider a bill that would cut the number of refugees allowed into the country by more than half. Supporters say this bill would help create job opportunities for U.S. workers and spur economic growth. Yet, arguments that refugees do more damage than good simply don’t hold water. A recent report from the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, where I work, outlines refugees’ significant contributions to the U.S., in both economic and human terms. These range from starting small businesses to generating tax revenues and creating new jobs.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...Tali Sharot of the University College London has shown that for such questions, and many others, good news is more likely to alter people’s views than bad news. What does that have to do with contemporary political issues? Along with Sharot and other collaborators, I have been exploring exactly that question.

The tax overhaul promised by President Trump and Republican congressional leaders is lugging a remarkably heavy load. The goal is not only to reduce the tax bills of corporations and small businesses, but also to stimulate investment, create jobs, increase global competitiveness and promote economic growth...Mr. Trump and the Republican leadership have pushed to slash the corporate tax rate and switch to what is known as a territorial system that would tax only profits earned in the United States and not those earned in other countries. Mihir Desai, an economist at Harvard Business School, likes that approach. “We currently have the worst of all worlds,” he wrote in an email. “We have a high marginal rate,” which encourages companies to avoid taxes and puts the United States at a global disadvantage.

When President Trump defended his pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Monday, he was quick to put his use of this unique presidential power into historical context...“The president has been trying since the beginning of his administration to delegitimize the judiciary,” says Chiraag Bains, senior fellow at the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., and a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.