Media Mentions

An interview with Jeannie Suk Gersen. When Candice Jackson, acting head of the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights recently said that “90 percent” of campus sexual assaults “fall into the category of ‘We were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation,” it caused an uproar. She quickly apologized, saying, “all sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously.” But, the exchange only brought more attention to the way the federal government is handling sexual assault cases on university campuses.

President Donald Trump’s unusual pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, issued before his federal case was even finished, has sparked a debate over whether the president could end Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe with a spate of pre-emptive pardons. But even mass pardons of all suspects in the Russia case would not close the door to potential prosecutions...Prosecuting agents of a foreign power, however, is different than making a potential case against agents of the United States. "It could happen," [James] Tierney says. "If the [district attorney] of Baltimore wants to go after the president, is that destabilizing? Yes it is." Tierney, who now teaches about the role of state attorneys general at Harvard Law School, adds, "The actual legal and practical obstacles to bringing this kind of case are very high."

The Department of Energy's grid reliability study has been described in many ways since it dropped last week, including schizophrenic, and an effort "to bail out aging coal and nuclear plants." But overall, the reaction has been more moderate and cautiously complimentary...Instead, the consensus seems to be that the study fairly accurately identifies how the nation's bulk power system reached this point: struggling with a changing generation mix and market structure that does not always align with policy goals. Environmental groups have been harsh judges of the document, but others say it is, all in all, fairly unremarkable in political terms. "It's a good compendium of information, but it's nothing new," said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School.

Title IX is a Nixon-era federal law barring sex discrimination in schools. Under the Obama administration, it became a mandate for colleges to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct with an imbalanced extrajudicial standard...Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is rightly considering rescinding the preponderance standard and replacing it with a stricter standard of proof...Fans of due process and the rule of law have discerned the problem. Harvard law professor Janet Halley, who investigated sexual misconduct claims as an administrator at Stanford, believes impartial truth-seeking is nearly impossible under the new rules. “We are overcorrecting,” she says. “The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due process procedures.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When black-clad anti-fascist protesters broke through police barricades Sunday afternoon and swarmed a peaceful rally in Berkeley, California, law enforcement stood aside and let them. City police Chief Andrew Greenwood explained the decision with a rhetorical question: “Does it make sense,” he asked, “to get into a major use of force over a grassy area?” With all due deference to police expertise, things are not that simple. Violent protesters who cross barriers and disrupt peaceful protest are deeply threatening to freedom of speech.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. However distasteful, the fact is that President Trump has the legal authority to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona for his criminal contempt conviction, in accordance with the US Supreme Court’s 1925 ruling in Ex Parte Grossman. Grossman was ordered to stop selling liquor during Prohibition. He ignored the order and was jailed until a presidential pardon led to his release. The district court that had issued the original contempt order persisted and rearrested Grossman, finding that contempt is an offense to the “dignity and authority” of the federal courts. To allow the executive to intervene in the contempt process, the court held, would undermine judicial independence.

President Donald Trump hinted during a speech in Arizona on Tuesday that he plans to pardon former Sheriff Joe Arpaio over his federal contempt-of-court conviction, but the president said he wouldn't take such an action immediately in order to avoid "controversy." Trump, speaking at a rally in Phoenix, suggested that relief was on the way for the 85-year-old ex-lawman known for his tough treatment of illegal immigrants...“It’s ‘in-your-face, court,’” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “This is the kind of charge that goes to the integrity of the process…. Part of the symbol here is of basically not paying respect to an order of a federal judge.” “It’s not unlawful, but it says something about his own contempt for the system,” she added.

Tensions ran high at the Texas Legislature during this most recent Special Session. Legislators cut summer plans short to spend the majority of their vacation time in Austin to fight over matters like bathrooms, property taxes, and school finance—with no resolve. The contentious nature of the Legislature resulted in very little items moving through the Texas House without objection. Well, that was until a resolution to make October “Texas Pecan Month” appeared in the Texas House...That story starts with two brothers from the Rio Grande Valley—Ricco and Sam Garcia [`19]. Earlier this year Sam Garcia, a Harvard Law Student, was sifting through statistical data from Google Trends and came across an interesting trend. Sam and his older brother, Ricco Garcia, were in the middle of researching for a book they are writing over potential state and federal policy suggestions to aid Texas agricultural growth when Sam discovered a peculiar annual phenomenon concerning the term “Pecan.”

With white supremacists emboldened and a national spotlight shining on bigotry and hate, 67 former state attorneys general are calling on Americans and their leaders to condemn hatred unequivocally. Follow the example, they suggest, that an Alabama attorney general set four decades ago...The statement — which was released Monday and is conspicuously addressed not to President Trump or any other official, but rather to the broad, unnamed public — begins, “There are times in the life of a nation, or a president, or a state attorney general, when one is called upon to respond directly to the voice of hate.” Mr. Baxley’s example, it continues, without directly quoting it, should serve as inspiration for “all who seek to equivocate in times of moral crisis.” Mr. Baxley “obviously spoke with real clarity — he just made it as clear as a human being can make it,” said James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who helped pull the joint statement together.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. At his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday night, Donald Trump remarked, of his decision to take on the Presidency, “Most people think I’m crazy to have done this. And I think they’re right.” A strange consensus does appear to be forming around Trump’s mental state...The class of professionals best equipped to answer these questions has largely abstained from speaking publicly about the President’s mental health. The principle known as the “Goldwater rule” prohibits psychiatrists from giving professional opinions about public figures without personally conducting an examination, as Jane Mayer wrote in this magazine in May.

An op-ed by Glenn Cohen. There’s a scientific development on the horizon that could upend the abortion debate: artificial wombs. The research remains preliminary, but in April a group of scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced amazing advances in artificial womb technologies. The authors explained how they had successfully sustained significantly premature lambs for four weeks in an artificial womb they had designed. This enabled the lambs to develop in a way very similar to lambs that had developed in their mothers’ wombs. Indeed, the oldest lamb — more than a year old at the time the paper was published — appeared to be completely normal.

...Mother Jones learned of these prison investments from an independent investigator who was invited by former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann to look into the legal case of the Postville meatpacking plant’s manager, Sholom Rubashkin...“The judge shouldn’t have any significant financial incentives for a longer sentence or a shorter sentence, or financial incentives to approve a very large raid or to disapprove a very large raid,” says former Deputy Attorney General Heymann, now a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump all but promised he would pardon disgraced Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt three weeks ago. “I won’t do it tonight,” he said. “But Sheriff Joe can feel good.” CNN is now reporting the White House has prepared the paperwork for Trump’s signature. As many have warned, pardoning Arpaio – famous for racially profiling Latinos in Maricopa County – would be an endorsement of racism. There’s another reason the possibility of a pardon should trouble us: it reflects Trump’s deep disdain for the judiciary and its role in our system of checks and balances.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he was just 14, convinced the professor to radically change his career path. The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide.

“[A]ffirmative action is like an injured bear,” writes Randall Kennedy. It’s “too strong to succumb to its wounds but too hurt to attain full vitality.” The renowned Harvard Law School professor wrote that four years ago, but it’s sure germane now in light of the Justice Department’s apparent renewed interest in anti-affirmative-action complaints against colleges. Harvard, in particular, is in the legal crosshairs. Jeff Sessions’s team says it wants a closer look at allegations filed on behalf of a group of Asian-Americans who say they face a higher bar for admission at Harvard than other racial and ethnic groups, including whites.

An interview with Bruce Schneier. In the internet era, consumers seem increasingly resigned to giving up fundamental aspects of their privacy for convenience in using their phones and computers, and have grudgingly accepted that being monitored by corporations and even governments is just a fact of modern life. In fact, internet users in the United States have fewer privacy protections than those in other countries. In April, Congress voted to allow internet service providers to collect and sell their customers’ browsing data.

President Trump spent 18 months as the ultimate law-and-order candidate, promising to rescue an American way of life he said was threatened by terrorists, illegal immigrants and inner-city criminals. But during seven months as president, many critics and legal scholars say, Mr. Trump has shown a flexible view on the issue, one that favors the police and his own allies over strict application of the rule of law...“I don’t think you have to be a champion of it; all you need to do is comply with it,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who was a solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan. “And he shows himself absolutely unwilling to respect it,” Mr. Fried said, citing the pardon as a particular thumb in the eye of a judge.

An op-ed by Ronald Sullivan. There is no greater injustice than an innocent person being convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. And even when a defendant may not be factually innocent, confidence in our criminal a justice system, and fundamental fairness, is undermined when a defendant doesn’t receive a fair trial. In 2012 and 2013, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office came under intense criticism for the number of wrongful convictions that had occurred under the then-District Attorney and his predecessors. Ken Thompson, now sadly deceased, was elected in 2013 on a promise to investigate and overturn wrongful convictions and restore fairness and integrity to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Soon after Thompson’s election, the current Acting District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, Thompson’s Special Counsel, reached out to me and asked that I design and implement what became Brooklyn’s Conviction Review Unit.

Thirteen legal scholars, in a letter to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, say U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's reassignment of 50 senior executives is illegal if the moves are part of an attrition strategy or to punish views inconsistent with the Trump administration's policies...The 13 legal scholars, whose areas of expertise involve constitutional, administrative and civil service law, include Yale Law School's Bruce Ackerman, Washington University School of Law's Kathleen Clark, UCLA School of Law's Jon Michaels, University of Chicago Law School's Jennifer Nou, Harvard Law's Ian Samuel and University of California Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Clement's complaint, the scholars said, "presents important questions about the extent of agency heads' authority to reassign members of the SES (senior executive service)."

When entering a lease for a new apartment or home, it is important for landlords and tenants to know their rights and responsibilities, housing law experts say...One of the most important things a tenant can do is thoroughly read and understand the terms of the lease, said housing attorney Julia Devanthery, who represents low-income clients through the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School. Any claims or promises should be made in writing. “Make sure you look at the apartment before you rent it,” Devanthery said.

Just a few months ago, Republican attorneys general were aggressively taking the Obama administration to court, notching significant victories that blocked executive actions on immigration and the environment. Now that Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, it's Democrats' turn to wage legal battles over some of the very same issues...Democratic officials say the party's AG ranks are more active than they were under the last Republican president, George W. Bush. And in solidly blue states where Democrats have control over all the levers of government, money is flowing to the AG office, says former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, who is now a Harvard Law School lecturer focusing on state AGs.