Media Mentions

Asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. through Tijuana are out of luck for now, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reached capacity at its San Diego ports of entry, an agency spokesman told KPBS in an email on Wednesday...Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and founder of the Harvard Law School's Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, said the move is a violation of Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. "There's no question that this violates the statute, it violates our treaty obligations," she said. "You can't turn people away at the border. That's very fundamental ... It's not a gray area."

A sleeping media giant may be about to wake up: Fox News’ website — known for its high traffic, but not strong identity —is staffing up and sharpening its voice in hopes of equaling the impact of its increasingly pro-Trump television partner. A website that had been more closely identified with Shepard Smith’s brand of reporting has now moved closer to the mold of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, according to former staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity...Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor, was part of the group with MIT that studied how readers consumed news online during the 2016 election, and said that Fox News has an incentive to move to the right. Analyzing linking and sharing patterns of 1.25 million stories, his group found that Fox News and Breitbart formed the heart of “a relatively insular and self-referential” online news ecosystem...“Fox News became less prominent, fewer Twitter shares, fewer Facebook shares,” he said. But that changed during the general election. “It’s only when they line up, after Trump essentially wins out, that they return to their position of prominence,” he said. “In many senses, it was a capitulation of Fox News to the Breitbart line.”

In North Carolina, it costs inmates $10 a day to stay in jail before they’re even found guilty of a crime. Yet most people jailed pretrial are there because they can’t afford bail. It’s a predicament Mecklenburg County Public Defender Kevin Tully points out time and again to judges: that those who can’t buy their own freedom are charged for their own confinement...Starting last month, they committed to consulting a “bench card” during every case—a piece of paper they use to remind themselves to thoroughly assess a defendant’s ability to pay before setting a fine or fee, as well as which ones are waivable or can be reduced on a sliding scale. It’s a simple act, but one that could have significant consequences for low-income defendants and their families...The Mecklenburg judges think there could be safety in numbers. The judges brought in lawyers from Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Debt initiative who helped them develop the bench cards they now refer to...Mitali Nagrecha, director of the Harvard initiative, said that the cards were intended to “clarify” the law and “reset the tone.” She said other counties have expressed interest, and she hopes to release a statewide version in the coming months.

President Donald Trump’s recent tweets about current or former FBI officials could violate laws meant to protect witnesses, according to two former White House ethics lawyers. In recent days, Trump has criticized former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and outgoing FBI general counsel James Baker...But Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, pointed out to Ryan that to violate the witness intimidation law, Trump’s remarks must cross “the line from the ordinary kinds of attacks that investigation targets or defendants might make...over to statements designed to interfere with a witness’s testimony.”

..."How do you build a platform that allows the adversely impacted community members to step into their power?" At a time when many are feeling defeated as they try to fight against a racist and non-responsive government, many justice advocates around the country are asking this critical question. They recognize that nothing less than a total sea change in perspective will work: In order to create new policies and enhance community life, community justice organizers must turn to those most impacted..."Community justice grows out of the idea that entire communities are repressed, oppressed and held voiceless," said David Harris of Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ).

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions retracted an Obama-era guidance to state courts that was meant to end debtors’ prisons, where people who are too poor to pay fines are sent. This practice is blatantly unconstitutional, and the guidance had helped jump-start reform around the country. Its withdrawal is the latest sign that the federal government is retreating from protecting civil rights for the most vulnerable among us.

In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy...“I was interested in the mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. One of most remarkable stories of 2017 was the extent to which President Donald Trump was prevented from executing his many pledges—both on the campaign trail and in office—to violate the law. As predicted, courts, the press, the bureaucracy, civil society, and even Congress were aggressive and successful in stopping or deterring Trump from acting unlawfully. But will these checks continue to work in the new year?

Congressman Devin Nunes has been running around Washington acting like a guilty maniac for most of 2017. He used his role as the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try and sabotage the Trump/Russia investigation, and even got removed from legislation, which caused him to launch his own rogue investigation into clearing Trump. New evidence now suggests that Nunes was in on the Trump-Russia conspiracy from the beginning, and Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law Professor, thinks Nunes is going to be arrested for it...Trump put Devin Nunes on his transition team in hopes that he would help protect him against Nunes’ committee when they came digging for evidence.

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, activist investor Albert Frere's investment vehicle, became fashion group Burberry’s largest shareholder on Nov. 10. Activists’ bargaining power at companies with controlling shareholders is not always as limited as it appears, according to a 2016 paper by Kobi Kastiel, a fellow at Harvard Law School. Forces that facilitate activism include the right to nominate directors, the right to veto going-private transactions, and the use of litigation to put pressure on those in control, Kastiel concludes.

When allegations of serial sexual misconduct by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein broke in October, they triggered an intense national reckoning over sexual harassment and assault in the workplace and beyond...Today [Catharine Mackinnon] the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School tells the Gazette she is “inspired by the brilliance, heart, and grit of all the survivors who are speaking out and reflecting on their experiences of sexual violation, and being listened to.” And she said the downfall of so many powerful men is stunning, “especially given decades of stonewalling and recalcitrance and siding with abusers.”...“When you take a higher view of everything that’s going on, a meta-analysis, you can see that that is absolutely the way that defense works. Anytime somebody comes forward, there’s an attempt to discredit her,” said [Diane] Rosenfeld.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has suddenly found himself in the middle of Washington's biggest political firestorm, and there are growing signs that he may not be able to avoid being consumed by it. Rosenstein is the man responsible for overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government...Despite these recent controversies, Rosenstein has long been considered an apolitical straight shooter by those who’ve worked with him....Philip Heymann, Rosenstein’s former professor at Harvard Law School and later his colleague, told me. “He says what he thinks, but he’s always fair.”

The year 2017 may turn out to be when behavioral economics entered the mainstream after a leading practitioner in the field won a Nobel prize for his work. Behavioral economics is the study of how psychology affects the economic decision-making processes of individuals and institutions. Research in the field has led governments like those in the U.K. and U.S. to create teams of behavioral scientists to find ways to tweak citizens’ behavior to improve their welfare, for example, by helping more people enroll in retirement plans...Beyond the ethics, do people actually like when governments nudge them toward “better” behavior through defaults, labels and other means?...[Cass] Sunstein’s research suggests the answer is “yes,” most people “welcome nudges that help them live better lives.” “I have found that this enthusiasm usually extends across standard partisan lines,” he explained.

It’s almost quaint to think that just five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg cheerfully took credit for major pro-democracy movements during Facebook’s IPO launch...Today, the company has to reckon with its role in passively enabling human-rights abuses. While concerns about propaganda and misinformation on the platform reached a fever pitch in places like the United States in the past year, its presence in Myanmar has become the subject of global attention...As Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society put it, “[Facebook] abdicating feels weird because quite often (and this is sometimes reflected in the law) if you’re in a position to do something, to alleviate a great harm—and you’re profiting, you’re not a bystander, you’re implicated or involved—we tend to think you have a responsibility to do something.”

When President Trump adds his distinctive signature to the tax bill, he will also be making a huge bet that the Republican strategy of deep cuts for businesses and wealthy individuals will fuel extraordinary growth across the board...Some provisions of the bill were intended to be sharp and short. Next year, for example, businesses will be able to borrow money and deduct the cost of those loans at the current rate of 35 percent. But later on, when they reap the profits, they will pay a tax rate of only 21 percent. That could end up causing firms to simply shift the timing of investments they would have made regardless of a change in the tax code. “The really hard question a year from now is going to be is how much of the miniboom we see is just an acceleration of stuff that was going to happen anyway or additional investment that is really going to spur the economy,” said Mihir A. Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School.

The Education Department is abandoning the Obama administration’s practice of wiping out the loans for all students who were swindled by the now-defunct Corinthian college chain. Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by the for-profit school had more than $550 million in student loans canceled in full. But Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced Wednesday she is putting a new process in place that she says will be more efficient. The department will now look at average income in order to determine the value of a student’s education. Then it will decide whether to forgive the loan partially or in full. Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, called the decision “unlawful and arbitrary.”

“The quality of Indian law firms and Indian lawyers at the top of the market is as good as anywhere in the world. That is an important point to emphasise,” said David Wilkins, professor of law at Harvard Law School. Wilkins was making the point that India’s legal sector is ready for the entry of foreign law firms, in a phased manner. A move that has been contemplated by a succession of Indian governments over the years and continues to be an imminent possibility. Indian law firms will have to fight their foreign counterparts harder over talent than clients, Wilkins added. The Harvard Law School - Center on the Legal Profession, of which Wilkins is the faculty director, has recently completed a six-year-long study on the impact of globalisation on India’s legal profession. The book tracks the rise of India’s corporate legal sector and its impact on the economy and society.

An op-ed by Andrew Crespo. Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for … ultimately the American people” to decide. Those were the words of Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor, on that fateful Saturday night in October 1973, just moments after he was fired by the president whom he was investigating. A question for the American people to decide. To their credit, the American people responded, with what Attorney General Elliot Richardson, himself also removed from office that night, would later call a “public uproar” of “overwhelming power.”

Harvard will likely pay tens of millions annually in added federal taxes after congressional Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill Wednesday that included a tax on returns from large university endowments. University President Drew G. Faust called the new endowment tax “unprecedented” in an emailed statement Wednesday, adding it will constrain the University’s finances and limit its capacity to fund certain programs...Tax law specialist Howard E. Abrams, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, said he thinks provisions in the tax bill targeting colleges and universities stem from both a need to raise funds and, more broadly, from Republican disillusionment with higher education. “They need all the revenue they can get,” Abrams said. “I think there are more people in the Republican party than in the Democratic party who believe that higher education is failing the public—that it’s full of liberals teaching things that are irrelevant to getting a job. So the value of higher education seems less significant to many Republicans than to many Democrats.”

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Earlier this month, when a majority of Senate Democrats demanded Al Franken’s resignation after multiple allegations of unwanted kissing and groping, Bernie Sanders called for a “cultural revolution” to combat sexual harassment. The reckoning would affect “not only high-profile men,” Sanders said, but also harassers “in restaurants, in offices all over this country where you have bosses that are not famous.” Putting aside the unfortunate evocation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Sanders’s declaration posed a useful question: How will the current avalanche of sexual-harassment allegations toppling prominent men in media and government roll down to more mundane workplaces? As employers and employees across the country try to apply lessons from #MeToo into quotidian employment contexts, legal norms that govern workplace sexual harassment may also be poised to undergo epochal transformations.

Far and away the biggest complaint that Americans have with the tax system, poll after poll finds, is that big corporations don’t pay their fair share. So it’s more than a little startling that the tax bill Republicans are about to pass would not only slash the corporate tax rate across the board but also add a big incentive for companies to stash money overseas...Other analyses, like this one by Harvard Law School’s Thomas Brennan, are more optimistic, but even Brennan concludes that the largest corporations only used 12 percent of the money they brought back on research and development or new investment. The rest went to buying up other companies and reducing debt (both allowed under the law) and paying back shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends (not allowed).