Media Mentions

An interview with Randall Kennedy. This week on Freak Out And Carry On, Ron Suskind and Heather Cox Richardson respond to the violence in Charlottesville and President Trump's response. They also dive into the history of confederate statues with Randall Kennedy, law professor at Harvard University and author of "The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency", and Tony Horwitz, author of "Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War".

Though statues of former Chief Justice Roger Taney have been removed from prominent perches around the country in the aftermath of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., the infamous jurist remains safely interred in one high profile venue — the U.S. Supreme Court...Ian Samuel, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who cohosts a podcast about the Supreme Court, argues that the Court’s Taney imagery does not serve an exultant purpose, unlike other statuary. Samuel clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “Unlike valedictory statues in public spaces — where an editorial decision is made to praise a particular person among many — the Court’s practice is to have a bust and portrait of every Chief Justice,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In context, it constitutes neither praise nor blame but simply acknowledgement of the person’s status as one of the Chief Justices of the United States.”

After the eruption of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, extreme right-wing groups are planning to proceed with marches in Boston, California, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia in the coming weeks. Some local officials, fearful that even unrelated events organized by groups with similar messages could escalate into confrontations, are looking for ways to control or to mitigate the potential for mayhem. In Boston, where a so-called "free speech" rally is scheduled for this weekend, Mayor Martin Walsh declared, "I don't want them here, we don't need them here, there's no reason to be here," according to the Boston Herald...The fact that the event will go on underscores how, under the free speech protections of the First Amendment, cities face an exceptionally high bar to block groups from gathering, even – or especially – groups that espouse hate. "The city has to start out with the assumption that they have to grant a permit," says Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies constitutional law.

They said they had come to stand up for free speech, but in the end, their invited speakers addressed only a small group of sympathizers, on a bandstand surrounded by barricades, far from the throngs of counterprotesters, who could not hear them at all. By 12:45 p.m., only 45 minutes into their official program, organizers of the Boston Free Speech rally ended the event and were escorted by police out of the park, to chants of “Go home, Nazis” from the crowd. A Facebook post for the event listed 14 speakers and was scheduled to last for two hours...Those who study and advocate for the First Amendment were split on the city’s actions. “Free speech doesn’t guarantee that anybody listens to you,’’ said Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment specialist at Harvard Law School. She said the ideas of the rally came across because of the heightened attention to it.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed. President Trump has asked if the U.S. should take down statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers. Scott Simon speaks with historian Annette Gordon-Reed about their differences from Confederate leaders.

If you were concerned that American political discourse is very seriously broken, there's bad news: You're right, and the technological forces that shaped it can't be the ones substantively provide a fix. A new report on disinformation, partisanship, and online media released on Wednesday by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society takes a grim view of the state of political discourse..."[T]he issue is even though people are forming false beliefs, they probably want to form those false beliefs because these stories are essential to constructing their political identities," Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and one of the authors of the report, told me in a phone interview.

An op-ed by Josh Craddock `18. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. The childish playground ditty is at least partly true: Mere words cannot break an arm or bust a nose. Words can be hurtful emotionally and psychologically, but they cannot be acts of violence because they lack physicality. Some academics and journalists need this reminder.

In the wake of the Charlottesville protests during which James Alex Fields Jr. killed one and injured numerous others with his car, a rally to be headlined by white supremacist Richard Spencer, which was scheduled to take place on September 11 at Texas A&M University, has been cancelled...The Dallas Morning News writes: "State Rep. John Raney, R-College Station, told reporters in Austin that the event was canceled after concerns about hate messages on Facebook and several reports of people saying they'd bring their weapons." In an effort to better understand the situation as it pertains to the First Amendment, The Daily Wire spoke with Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard. Tribe said that “more facts” would be necessary to properly assess any First Amendment violation, however, the “basic principles are clear.”

Activist investors who aggressively force change at companies are good for shareholders, according to fund experts, after claims from Hermes' chief executive Saker Nusseibeh that they can ruin longer term shareholder value in pursuit of short term gain...Adrian Lowcock, investment director at Architas, also welcomed investor activism. He pointed to data from the US showing that activist investors can improve longterm value. "Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk and two colleagues did analyse 2,000 incidents of activist investing. "In the five years that followed there was marked improvement of share price performance, compared to the three years beforehand, even taking into account any rally after news broke of the activists involvement," he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Obscured by the tumult surrounding President Donald Trump’s horrendous response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the White House managed to take a significant positive step this week: issuing an executive order designed to lower regulatory barriers to infrastructure projects, and to speed up and simplify the process for obtaining necessary permits and clearances.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Morally, the only proper reaction to last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia, is outrage. Legally, the analysis has to be more nuanced. To help prevent further violence while preserving freedom of speech, we need to distinguish three categories, all of which seem to have been in play in Charlottesville: terrorism, peaceful protest and provocative action aimed at producing street violence.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. I came to Charlottesville, Virginia for the first time in 1995. After four months of feverish work, I had completed a manuscript about what I thought was the biased and, therefore, unreliable way in which historians had handled the question of whether Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at his plantation, Monticello...I mention these things to say that the national tragedy that unfolded in Charlottesville last week struck at every aspect of my being—a black person, a friend, an American, and a scholar who has devoted many years to studying Jefferson, slavery at Monticello, and, by extension, Charlottesville.

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. Legal experts debate whether special counsel Robert Mueller has the authority to indict or prosecute a sitting President. Missing from any public discussion is a middle-ground option that is not necessarily precluded by any Justice Department legal opinion, and that was strongly endorsed by the Watergate special prosecutor’s legal team. What’s the option? Presentment. Grand juries have historically had the power not only to indict but also to issue presentments, which were more like reports of wrongdoing without a criminal charge.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford...I have a suggestion for you, Jeff Bezos. How would you like to become the Andrew Carnegie of our time? Yes, I am talking about libraries. Those places where books sit on shelves, not delivered by FedEx. And so much more. Carnegie made them the center of his philanthropy, and almost became synonymous with them. More importantly, he changed countless lives with his investments in libraries. I have heard that you’re looking for big ideas, and this is one.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. On Wednesday news broke that at the end of last month, FBI agents searched one of Paul Manafort’s homes for documents as part of the Russia collusion investigation, directed by special counsel Robert Mueller. What is the significance of this news, and why didn’t Mueller just obtain the documents by grand jury subpoena? Mueller’s use of a search warrant tells us that he was able to establish on the basis of evidence, and to the satisfaction of a United States Magistrate-Judge, that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of a specific crime or crimes existed in the location to be searched.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. President Trump is notoriously obsessed with leaks in his administration — so much so that Attorney General Jeff Sessions made leak investigation a Department of Justice priority. But one man’s leak is another man’s whistleblower. And, with a few exceptions, like the leaking of classified information, whistleblowing is often encouraged, even legally protected.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. The application process for schools, fellowships, and jobs always came with a ritual: a person who had a role in choosing me—an admissions officer, an interviewer—would mention in his congratulations that I was “different” from the other Asians...In a federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts in 2014, a group representing Asian-Americans is claiming that Harvard University’s undergraduate-admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against Asians. (Disclosure: Harvard is my employer, and I attended and teach at the university’s law school.) The suit poses questions about what a truly diverse college class might look like, spotlighting a group that is often perceived as lacking internal diversity.

Death, taxis and technology: titles in the running for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year give a new twist to the old maxim about certainty. The 17 books on the 2017 longlist include analyses of the implications of world-changing innovations, from the iPhone to drones; a lively account of the rise of Uber; and a sobering history of the role war, plague and catastrophe have played in shaping our economies...The unexpected symbiosis of the apparently separate worlds of the humanities and finance is the subject of another longlisted title, The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir Desai, which uses literature, history, movies and philosophy to shed light on dry financial theories.

Earlier this week, Chicago made national headlines when it announced it was suing Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Department of Justice’s threat to pull some federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities...Phil Torrey, an immigration lawyer and Harvard Law School lecturer, says its likely other cities will follow suit with Chicago and bring similar lawsuits if the Justice Department doesn’t change its tactics. “Chicago has advanced a strong claim that the DOJ’s new restrictions were not contemplated by Congress when it appropriated [Justice Assistance Grant] funds and the DOJ is acting outside of its authority when placing new conditions on those funds that target sanctuary jurisdictions,” Torrey told Boston.com.

Donald Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he intends to “get rid of” the Environmental Protection Agency and many of its Obama-era regulations. And in its first six months, his administration has overturned or halted nearly two dozen environmental policies and significantly backed off enforcement of environmental pollution laws. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times in his previous post as attorney general of Oklahoma, has been leading the charge. But rolling back Obama-era environmental protections is actually not that easy. There are laws that govern how the EPA can change its policies. And the courts are proving to be a considerable obstacle to the Trump agenda...As Harvard law professor Jody Freeman told me by email, “Courts don't tend to believe in ‘alternative facts.’ Even conservative judges stick closely to the record and can be expected to look skeptically at a misrepresentation of the science.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Metro, alleging the transit agency’s restrictions on “issues-oriented” advertisements violate the First Amendment...Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, said the ACLU’s case against Metro is “extremely strong.” “They [WMATA] do seem to be acting pretty inconsistently, and they seem to not have a clear policy,” she said. “For a government institution that decides to have advertising, for better or for worse, you can’t have your standards for what is allowable based on the identity of the person in the advertisement.”