Media Mentions

A Christian group is threatening legal action if the Walsh administration doesn’t allow a religious flag to be raised on City Hall Plaza — the same spot they say where banners from “communist” nations as well as transgender and pride colors are set to fly...Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor, said the city’s interpretation that flying the flag on a city flagpole could be viewed as an endorsement would, in his opinion, hold water with a judge. “I think it’s much more likely for people to think if it’s on the city flagpole, then the city must be standing behind it,” he said. “If that’s right, then the city in my view is entitled to say no.”

Last week, Facebook disclosed to congressional investigators that it sold $100,000 worth of advertisements to a troll farm connected to the Kremlin surrounding the U.S. presidential election. These advertisements, which targeted voters with divisive political content, added even more evidence of Russia’s attempts to meddle with the election. But they also contributed to a larger conversation about free speech in an era where social-media posts replace political pamphlets and the public square has increasingly moved into cyberspace....Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, likewise falls in this camp. “If you deceive people consistently and on a large scale, you are probably damaging their willingness to engage as citizens in our democracy,” she says. She believes that the public should continue to pressure tech companies to create some mechanism for oversight as to what content is taken offline.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It is mid-September, and the Trump administration still has no website for its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That is astonishing. It is also a disservice to the American people.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Cake baking is an art. Or, so says a group of professional wedding cake bakers who have filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in what promises to be the blockbuster case of the upcoming term, Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The brief is obviously intended to support the claim of a baker to be exempt from anti-discrimination laws that say he must serve gay customers. It’s all together reasonable to think that a professional baker is an artist. The thing is, that shouldn’t matter. Artists are just like anyone else who has a business open to the public: They have to comply with anti-discrimination laws.

It’s no secret that the Trump administration is corporation-friendly to a fault. For all the talk of the underserved coal miners and workers whose jobs have been stolen by free trade agreements or China, the Oval Office has not been a friendly — or even safe — place for workers in the past eight months. We’ve already reported on the discontinuation of a number of worker safety programs and regulations but there’s much more to Trump’s undercutting of the fundamental rights of American workers going on. We talked with Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, about what’s on her radar as the Trump machine moves quickly forward. In Block’s 20-year career, she’s worked for the National Labor Relations Board and most recently served as the head of the policy office at the Department of Labor under President Obama. She and her team were, in fact, responsible for many of the policies being undercut or discarded by the new crew in town.

An op-doc produced by Rebecca Richman Cohen. Our harsh treatment of sex offenders is based on flawed social science.

Of the smorgasbord of features stuffed into Apple's new thousand-dollar iPhone X, one of the most intriguing is Face ID — a new feature that lets you unlock your iPhone with your gaze after the system has learned what you look like, using Apple’s first-ever neural engine. “In the iPhone X, your phone is locked — until you look at it, and it recognizes you," Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said onstage at today’s iPhone event. “Nothing has ever been simpler, more natural, and effortless.”...Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier, an internet security expert and chief technology officer at Resillient Systems, a subsidiary of IBM, said Apple’s “one in a million” failure claim may well hold up — but that it doesn’t matter if even one person in a million is still able to break into your phone. “That’s why [security] professionals don’t unlock phones that way,” Schneier wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email.

As thousands of students armed with smartphones start the new school year, they’ll have plenty of social media options to choose from to find friends and connect with their peers. But at a select group of college campuses, a new player has entered the scene -- a student-centered networking app called Islands...Rey Junco, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, agreed with Isenberg that anonymity can be a force for good. Junco’s research has focused on how social media affects young people’s psychological development. He said that while he understands the reservations about anonymity, he believes it is important for young people to be able to explore different identities in a safe way. “Let’s say someone is exploring an LGBT identity, or a nonmajority religious identity -- anonymity can allow you explore that without the danger that is inherent in doing that elsewhere,” said Junco.

In a judicial nominee hearing last week, Senator Diane Feinstein questioned whether the nominee's adherence to Catholic teaching should prevent her from a federal appointment. Less than twenty-four hours later, former White House strategist Steve Bannon lambasted the Catholic bishops for their support for DACA. Some have wondered if the two incidents indicate an uptick in anti-Catholic bias in the United States...These two cases - which happened in the span of one, shared 24-hour news cycle - have prompted some to wonder if anti-Catholic bias on both the political left and the right in America is on the rise. According to Adrian Vermeule, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, “hostility comes in different varieties.” “Feinstein’s hostility is a kind of myopia, blind to the fact that liberalism is itself a structure of dogma,” said Vermeule.

More than two dozen Law School students staged a sit in outside offices where students were interviewing for positions in the U.S. military Tuesday in protest of President Donald Trump’s announcement that transgender people may not serve in the military. The protest, organized by HLS Lambda and Queer/Trans People of Color, took place over the course of the day as the U.S. Army and Air Force conducted interviews for their JAG corps, which allows students to serve in the military while completing their legal education...Han Park [`18], the co-President of Lambda, the school’s BGLTQ student group, said that the groups leading the sit-in wanted to bring public attention to the issue. “We’ve had a dialogue with the school and said, ‘Listen, if you’re going to have an anti-discrimination policy in place, live up to it, or else don’t take the money, or do something else with the money,’” Park said. “That’s the conversation we’re going to be having, but we’re today, right outside the interview rooms, just to kind of show a physical presence saying that we don’t agree with this policy.”

An op-ed by Diane Rosenfeld. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week announced a retreat from the Education Department’s work to protect students from sexual assault. While demonstrating that she has given serious thought to the issue, DeVos’s position is based on two fundamental flaws. As a result, she is poised to abandon laudable work done in the previous administration to help schools reduce the incidence of campus rape.

Tens of thousands of former students who say they were swindled by for-profit colleges are being left in limbo as the Trump administration delays action on requests for loan forgiveness, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Education Department is sitting on more than 65,000 unapproved claims as it rewrites Obama-era rules that sought to better protect students...Alec Harris, a lawyer with Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School who is representing Dieffenbacher, said the inaction could put his client and her children on the street. "This is a Department of Education that has seemingly sided with industry and stacked the deck against former students of predatory for-profit schools every step of the way," Harris said.

Over the weekend, superstar games vlogger Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg blurted a vicious racist insult during a game of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The outburst sadly wasn’t too surprising, although PewDiePie promised to give up casual Nazi jokes last month, and it wasn’t the first time he had said that particular word. But this time, indie studio Campo Santo took the unusual step of filing a copyright takedown against PewDiePie’s playthrough of its 2016 game Firewatch...Kendra Albert, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center who works on video games and intellectual property, says that’s because there’s a largely symbiotic relationship between studios and video creators. “Most game companies understand that it's often in their economic interest to allow streamers to stream the game and send it out to a broader audience, and so there hasn't been a ton of litigation over it,” says Albert.

The archetypal image of the campus rapist is a rich, white fraternity athlete. The case of Brock Turner—the freshman swimmer at Stanford University convicted last year of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman after meeting her at a party, but sentenced to only six months in jail—reinforced this...How race plays into the issue of campus sexual assault is almost completely unacknowledged by the government...Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School and a self-described feminist, is one of the few people who have publicly addressed the role of race in campus sexual assault. Interracial assault allegations, she notes, are a category that bears particular scrutiny...Since there are no national statistics on how many young men of any given race are the subject of campus-sexual-assault complaints, we are left with anecdotes about men of color being accused and punished. There are many such anecdotes. In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’s spoken with who “routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases” say that “most of the complaints they see are against minorities.”

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It's an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers -- exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and other businesses vulnerable to fraud. Many sites posted guides to protecting yourself now that it's happened. But if you want to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, your only solution is government regulation (as unlikely as that may be at the moment).

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Senator Dianne Feinstein owes a public apology to judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett -- and an explanation to all Americans who condemn religious bias. During Barrett’s confirmation hearings last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein, the California Democrat, insinuated an anti-Catholic stereotype that goes back at least 150 years in the U.S. -- that Catholics are unable to separate church and state because they place their religious allegiances before their oath to the Constitution. If a Catholic senator had asked a Jewish nominee whether she would put Israel before the U.S., or if a white senator had asked a black nominee if she could be an objective judge given her background, liberals would be screaming bloody murder. Feinstein’s line of questioning, which was taken up by other committee Democrats, is no less an expression of prejudice.

Lawyers representing Donald Trump’s current and former aides are giving their clients one simple piece of advice: don’t lie to protect the president. As special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators prepare to question high-ranking aides — including Hope Hicks, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer — in the coming weeks, Trump’s long history of demanding his employees’ complete loyalty are being put to the test...Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law professor, said that Mueller may have more luck getting cooperation from recently ousted Trump officials – like Priebus and Spicer, though he noted the two men also may end up being overly cautious too. “These guys they have their careers and reputations to be concerned about,” he said.

An op-ed by Seth Berman. News of the Equifax breach has been buried by the wall to wall media coverage of Hurricane Irma and, perhaps, by the fact that we have all become inured to reports of yet another major hacking of financial data. This is a mistake. The Equifax breach appears to be far worse than previous breaches, with potential consequences of a totally different order of magnitude than the prior mass corporate hacks. Initial headlines focused on the number of impacted consumers, which is indeed breathtaking – approximately 143 million people according to Equifax.

After reaching a $101 million class action settlement to resolve lawsuits brought over a chemical spill that contaminated a West Virginia river, the plaintiffs lawyers asked a federal judge to grant them 30 percent of the fund as contingency fees. The judge praised their work but found that fee request to be just too high...The concern for those on the bench is how to award plaintiffs lawyers for their work without granting them excessive fees and leaving class members in the lurch. "Judges do take the role seriously," said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School whose highly regarded "Newberg on Class Actions" has cited the Eisenberg/Miller and Fitzpatrick studies in his 11-volume treatise, alongside data he has used from a former publication called Class Action Attorney Fee Digest. "And they understand they're a bulwark against excessive fees from the class members' money."

This past Wednesday, the Senate judiciary committee held its confirmation hearing for law professor Amy Barrett of Notre Dame, who had been nominated to serve on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. A devout Catholic, Barrett had not been shy about her personal views in her writings, including her opposition to both abortion and the death penalty. The former stance particularly concerned California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who asked Barrett whether her faith would interfere with her ability to apply the law...As Harvard law professor Noah Feldman put it to me, “It’s legitimate for Senators to seek assurance that a judge will rule according to the law. It’s outrageous—and unconstitutional—to suggest or even imply that a nominee’s religious faith would presumptively disqualify her from office.”