Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump still seems to think that pressuring China to rein in North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is the best way to push back against the rogue state’s nuclear expansion, most recently in the form of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach Alaska. This approach hasn’t worked so far, and there’s a reason: Chinese President Xi Jinping has no strong reason to object to a North Korean nuclear insurance policy against the threat of being overthrown by the U.S.

Following Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ decision to “reset” new regulations put in place to protect students at for-profit colleges, two separate lawsuits now accuse the Secretary of breaking federal law by running roughshod over the regulatory process when she delayed the so-called Borrower Defense rule, which would have made it easier for defrauded students to get out from under their student loan burdens...Toby Merrill, director of Harvard Law’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, says that delaying the rule will affect hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers who have bona fide Borrower Defense claims but must navigate a byzantine and outdated system. “Not only does the Department want to pull back the process it has committed to, but it also is capitulating to companies that want to keep borrowers from enforcing their rights in court,” says Merrill.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Independence Day arrives this year during a period of intense political polarization, anger and distrust, potentially jeopardizing the ideals for which the American Revolution was fought. That’s a problem, but it also signals an opportunity. Nations benefit from the unifying effects of shared memories -- especially if those memories reflect a commitment to ideals. The revolution was inspired by two such ideals: self-government and human liberty.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Does Canada own the internet? The question may sound like a joke, but it’s the serious challenge presented by a Canadian Supreme Court decision issued last week. The court ordered Google to deindex search results that were letting one side of a lawsuit violate the intellectual property rights of the other -- not just in Canada, but worldwide.

In the four months since he took office as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history, according to experts in environmental law...“Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “Pruitt has come in with a real mission. He is much more organized, much more focused than the other cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies. It’s very striking how much they’ve done.”

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf. It was an article of Thomas Jefferson’s faith that no government should interfere in anyone’s private religious beliefs. A passionate student of history, Jefferson knew that religious struggles through the ages had caused “rivers of blood” to flow all over the world. The blood is still flowing. News of sectarian violence reaches us daily from across the globe, bringing us unimaginably horrific and mind-numbing images. One of Jefferson’s most fervent hopes was that Americans would be spared this carnage, and he did his best to set us on that path. It’s worth pausing, this Fourth of July, to ponder this facet of Jefferson’s deep wisdom, and how well we’ve lived up to it.

...Among the proponents of a sunset provision for dual-class share structures are Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the program on corporate governance who, with Kobi Kastiel, a research director of the program, published a detailed paper in April providing a framework for designing such structures. “The debate should focus on the permissibility of finite term dual-class structures—that is, structures that sunset after a fixed period of time (such as 10 or 15 years) unless their extension is approved by shareholders unaffiliated with the controller,” they wrote in the research paper.

The ongoing feud between the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and President Trump took a turn on Friday when Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough published an op-ed, “Donald Trump is not well,” in the Washington Post. In it, they wrote, “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked.” The story — ”Joe & Mika: TV Couple’s Sleazy Cheating Scandal” — was published on June 2. Quickly, some of Trump’s toughest opponents on Twitter questioned whether laws had been broken...Harvard Law School professor Andrew Manuel Crespo, who teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, told BuzzFeed News that many questions would need to be answered to know whether it is even possible that the actions violated any coercion, blackmail, or extortion laws. First, he said, more context is needed regarding what the conversation actually was.

Hal Scott, a Harvard Law School professor, discusses the state of the U.S. banking system with Bloomberg's Scarlet Fu and Julia Chatterley on "Bloomberg Markets."

...Nearly 80 years after the celebration of the nation’s origins had taken root as annual ritual, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out in detail the unfinished business that the Declaration espoused. In a speech given in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, Douglass rose to the occasion with searing hot rhetoric...The words of Douglass’ speech will be read this year on Monday, July 3rd in Boston Common, as well as other locations around the state, as remembrance of this great democratically inspired literature, but also as reminder of the original solemnity of the day. The public reading of the speech in Boston, which began annually in 2009, is the brain child of David Harris, a longtime civil rights activist, who is also the director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School. “Douglass was one of the nation’s greatest patriots and his words, as much as those of any founder, continue to guide us toward the democracy we want to be," Harris told me recently by email.

Last May's removal of four Confederate monuments in New Orleans touched off praise and criticism...This week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, one of the primary forces behind the removal of the public monuments of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Gen. Beauregard, along with the one opposing Reconstruction, called their displacements "very difficult and very painful." But he also said he believed it was the right thing to do, even though he might have lost some friends and allies in the process...Added another panelist, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard Law School: "We can distinguish between people who wanted to build the United States of America and people who wanted to destroy it. It's possible to recognize people's contributions at the same time as recognizing their flaws."

An appeals court Monday struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s 90-day suspension of new emission standards on oil and gas wells, a decision that could set back the Trump administration’s broad legal strategy for rolling back Obama-era rules...The agency has proposed extending the initial delay to two years; the court will hold a hearing on that suspension separately. “The court’s ruling is yet another reminder, now in the context of environmental protection, that the federal judiciary remains a significant obstacle to the president’s desire to order immediate change,” Richard Lazarus, an environmental-law professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. All 34 of the largest banks in the United States, representing over 75 percent of U.S. banking assets, recently passed the Federal Reserve Board's annual stress tests for the first time since the tests were created in 2011. However, celebration is very premature. The Fed's stress tests require banks to have sufficient capital to withstand levels of losses greater than the losses they suffered in the 2008 crisis. This latest test, based on economic assumptions released in February 2017, assumed that quarterly GDP growth would fall by 10.6 percent and the unemployment rate would hit 10 percent by mid-2017. In actuality, GDP is growing at 2 percent annually and the unemployment rate is under 5 percent.

The Considine Family Foundation has endowed a Harvard Law School professorship in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin G. Scalia, the school announced Friday. Scalia, who died last February, graduated magna cum laude from the Law School in 1960 and served as an editor of the Law Review. As an associate justice of the Supreme Court, he was known for his strict interpretations of the Constitution. His family pledged to donate a collection of his papers in March, and those papers will become a part of the Law School library’s collection.

The recent decision by a federal appeals court rejecting a challenge to Connecticut's solicitation for renewable energy has clarified the authority of states to favor certain types of generation resources over others. "The opinion is particularly significant because it is the first federal court decision to discuss the scope of the Supreme Court's 2016 Hughes decision," said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative. Peskoe was referring to an April 2016 Supreme Court decision in the case of Hughes v. Talen Energy Marketing LLC where the court unanimously struck down an effort by Maryland to promote new gas-fired generation. The court said the state strayed into federal regulators' exclusive jurisdiction over wholesale electricity markets.

It was 25 years ago this week that the Supreme Court found a South Carolina beach-erosion regulation amounted to a taking of private property. Property rights advocates hailed the 6-2 decision as a milestone in the fight against regulatory overreach, saying it showed that government couldn't use rules to take land without paying for it. But some legal scholars who have studied the effects of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council say its impact hasn't been so sweeping. "It was of significance symbolically, but it didn't really prove when the rubber hit the road to lead to many takings findings, and actually might have ironically led to fewer," said Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School.

I find the dates on food labels highly confusing. Why are there “sell by,” “display until,” “best before” and “use by” dates?...To understand this, Emily M. Broad Leib—Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Director of Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Deputy Director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation—believes consumers should first understand that none of these labels are regulated by federal law...Given there’s no federal regulation, consumers should be wary that these labels don’t necessarily offer a safe-to-eat date. “The reason companies are including dates at all comes from a valid business purpose in wanting consumers to eat food while the flavor is best,” said the legal expert.

Massachusetts recognizes the sacrifices of those who have been deployed in the military since 9/11 with a Welcome Home Bonus. It's a grant of up to $1,000 each time a service member serves honorably in Iraq or Afghanistan, and $500 to each service member who serves at least six months on active duty. But thousands of veterans have not received this bonus because of less-than-honorable discharges...Among them is Jeffrey Machado. He's one of two Massachusetts veterans now suing state Treasurer Deb Goldberg, saying that they were unjustly denied their bonuses after serving in Afghanistan...Dana Montalto, an attorney with Harvard Law School's Veterans Legal Clinic, is representing Machado and another Afghanistan veteran from Massachusetts suing for his bonus. "People can get a less-than-honorable discharge for a whole range of reasons, from really minor misconduct to things that are more serious," Montalto explained.

Two Army veterans, with the help of Harvard Law School, filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against the Massachusetts treasury, claiming it was unrightfully denying “welcome home” bonuses to them and other veterans with other-than-honorable discharges...“Both of these members deployed and were honorably discharged and re-enlisted. From a plain reading of the statute, they should be eligible,” said Dana Montalto, the senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic working on the case.

It’s hard to find defenders of impeachment—or at least, it’s hard to find good faith, consistent defenders of impeachment...Recent debates on this topic aren’t a symptom of a newly polarized age, and they aren’t a sign of national decline, the Harvard legal scholar (and former Obama adviser) Cass Sunstein said Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “The very word impeachment sounds kind of unfamiliar and British and dusty,” he quipped, but in fact, impeachment is a fundamental part of the American project, spanning back to the Declaration of Independence, which stands as articles of impeachment for King George.

When the justices took their chairs last October, Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency and Antonin Scalia’s seat seemed destined for a jurist who would anchor a liberal Supreme Court majority for the first time in almost five decades. Nine months later, as the justices wrapped up a largely uncontentious term, Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s pick for Mr Scalia’s seat, seems poised to cement the court’s conservative tilt for the foreseeable future... In the eyes of Ian Samuel of Harvard Law School, who clerked for Scalia, the new justice “seems to combine Justice Thomas’s views with Scalia’s writing skill and assertiveness."