Media Mentions

...But as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick learned this week, founder control is something of an illusion when a company needs constant infusions of investor cash in order to survive...But notably, Kalanick remains on Uber’s board of directors—an indicator that he and his shareholders are making an economic decision, and not a purely ethical one. “You can have the legal power to keep yourself king, but still voluntarily abdicate if that’s what it takes to obtain much-needed capital,” says Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in corporate governance. “Who wants to rule over a collapsing kingdom?”

President Trump, who came into office courting labor unions and vowing to stand up for American workers, is taking a major step to alter the direction of federal labor policy, positioning the National Labor Relations Board to overturn a series of high-profile Obama-era decisions...“The question is, on the major issues of the day, can we update the act to take account of changes in the labor market?” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School and a former union lawyer. “These guys are on one side; the Obama board was on the other. We’ll see a profound change in direction of labor law.”

The mistrial in the Bill Cosby case has left us deadlocked on another question: Is the legal system stacked against women in she said/he said sexual assault cases?...Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, has a provocative thesis: There is an inherent bias against women, but it doesn’t stem from sexism. “We chose to set up our system to be stacked in favor of the defendant in all cases,” she said. “So, in areas where most of the defendants are male, and most of the accusers are female, it’s a structural bias in favor of males. Even if we were to get rid of sexism, it would still be very hard to win these cases. I think this is what we have to live with on the criminal side, because we’ve made the calculation that this is the right balance of values.”

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. Ringling Bros. shuttered last month following a decade of falling ticket sales. Its Worcester shows in April were the final Massachusetts appearance for the iconic circus. But numerous circuses with elephants continue to tour Massachusetts - and virtually every single one of them contracts with elephant trainers or exhibitors who have a history of abuse and public endangerment. It’s a circus spectacle beloved by many but which in many cases also comes with an undercurrent of abusive treatment of these majestic animals. It’s an abuse that pending legislation in Massachusetts could help address by banning traveling elephant shows from the state.

An article by Susan Crawford. A couple of months ago, I interviewed a woman in public housing in the small town of Wilson, North Carolina. She told me that the best thing that ever happened to her family was getting internet access over the city's municipal fiber network. Included in her monthly rent bill is a $10 fee for 50 Mbps symmetric access (equal uploads and downloads). Why is this so wonderful? Because her sons are getting better grades, now that they don't have to go to the library to use the internet. Sadly, New York City is far behind Wilson, NC when it comes to ensuring ubiquitous, reasonably priced fiber optic internet access for every resident.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Governor Baker introduced a criminal justice bill in February to great fanfare. Designed to give prisoners incarcerated on mandatory minimum sentences access to good-time credit to hasten their release and to provide reentry programming, it received wide bipartisan support — as it should. The justification was clear. “Reducing recidivism,” Baker said, was the bill’s focus. The people of Massachusetts benefit “when more individuals exit the system as law abiding and productive members of the society.”

A few weeks ago I was interviewing the Rev. Laura Everett, at an intersection in Boston's Back Bay where a bicyclist was recently hit and killed, when in the background, we heard a pedestrian yelling at another pedestrian...Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote a book about the N-word, a word he called the "atomic bomb of racial slurs." "Not only [was] it used in that way 33 years ago," Kennedy said at his desk in Cambridge. "But is it used in that way today? Sure it is." Kennedy says the current political climate has created a sense that bigotry can be OK.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Where do we draw the line between words and physical harm? That's what we're left wondering after the verdict in the Michelle Carter trial, announced last Friday. Twenty-year-old Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her friend to commit suicide in a series of texts. In his decision, Judge Lawrence Moniz cited the fact that Carter texted Conrad Roy III to "get back in" after he had left the truck where he planned to kill himself with carbon monoxide.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. During Kevin Steele’s successful election campaign for District Attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 2015, he attacked the longtime incumbent, Bruce Castor, for having “refused to prosecute Bill Cosby” and promised “tough sentences for sexual predators.” After taking office, District Attorney Steele immediately moved on his promise to vindicate Bill Cosby’s victims, arresting and charging Cosby for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand, one of nearly sixty women to have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. But Cosby’s criminal trial, on three counts of indecent assault for the 2004 incident, ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury, after six days of deliberations produced neither conviction nor acquittal.

Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for sending 18-year-old Conrad Roy dozens of text messages that encouraged him to commit suicide. He died in 2014 of carbon monoxide poisoning, after he drove to a secluded parking lot and killed himself. Many legal experts were surprised by the judge's decision, and say from the very onset this was a very strange case, compounded by intense media scrutiny...John Palfrey, the headmaster of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a law professor and co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says many adolescents feel an emotional disconnect when using their devices and will say many hurtful things they'd never say in person. "I think the hard news for young people and their parents is things that young people do everyday on text or social media have extraordinary consequences - those can be life and death consequences, or that can be legal consequences," he says.

...If what you're hearing and reading and watching runs the gamut of what's referred to these days as the "mainstream media" -- center-right to partisan left -- then professor Yochai Benkler, at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, has concluded that all of you are consuming pretty much the same material. He recently completed a study of coverage of the Trump-Russia story throughout May 2017. "If you look and compare the words that are typical of places like the Wall Street Journal or Fortune or what we would normally think of as center-right; sites that are the three networks, the Times, the Post; all the way to Huffington Post and Daily Kos and things that are more partisan left -- they all used very similar words."

In a lawsuit filed against President Trump, the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland seek to pierce the web of Trump-related proprieties and force him to make a choice: the presidency or his business empire? The suit adds four critical elements to the legal fight over Trump’s refusal to liquidate domestic and foreign holdings that put him in violation of the Constitution...Constitutional expert Laurence H. Tribe explains, “The attorneys general of states and of the district are in a particularly good position to emphasize the domestic emoluments prohibition inasmuch as the Article II ban on extra compensation to the president from any state and from any part of the federal government is directly and dramatically concerned with sparing the states and federal agencies and departments from the distracting and resource-draining consequences of interstate and interagency competition for presidential attention and priority, so the kind of harm they can allege and prove directly illustrates the evils against which the Article II domestic emoluments clause was designed to shield them.”

Donald Trump confirmed on Friday he was the subject of an investigation over his firing of former FBI director James Comey, as the US president appeared to accuse the number two official at the justice department of orchestrating a “witch hunt."...Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert and former Harvard University professor, has argued that Mr Trump would be within his constitutional rights to order the end to an FBI probe, because of rights derived from his position as head of the executive branch of government. But Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and former colleague of Mr Dershowitz, said he “strongly disagreed.”...“On Alan’s view, a president would even have a constitutional right to bribe FBI agents with offers of hush money to destroy evidence of presidential perfidy,” said Mr Tribe.

For someone on the job barely a month, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was already facing plenty of incoming fire from her critics. Her big problem now: Her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, could soon be among them...“Brand is in a very tricky spot,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes wrote in a joint blog post on Friday. Both men know Brand and “admire her a lot.” But they said they were worried by her lack of experience as a prosecutor “or even a background in criminal law.” They said she might now be confronting the “tough task of insulating the investigation from the erratic and inappropriate behavior of President Trump.”

For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility...“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

Even though the Trump Administration gave Dreamers a bit of a reprieve last week through its continuance of DACA — the Obama-era program that lets certain young people brought to the United States illegally as children to remain in the country and work — Dreamers still shouldn’t get too comfortable...Philip L. Torrey, managing attorney at the Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, raised concerns about the still-tentative nature of DACA. “I think it’s certainly good news for DACA recipients that the administration will be issuing work authorization extensions,” Torrey said. However, Torrey noted that President Donald Trump could alter the DACA policy “at any moment” — which he said shows the need for Congress to act on immigration reform.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Amid the controversies dominating the news last week, hardly any attention was paid to the confirmation hearing for Neomi Rao, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. If confirmed, Rao, a law professor at George Mason University, will play a key role in overseeing federal regulation in areas such as environmental protection, food safety, health care, occupational safety and transportation policy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is President Donald Trump trying to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein without actually firing him? That’s the logical inference from the president’s tweet Friday morning asserting that he’s being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the person who told him to fire Comey, namely Rosenstein. The immediate effect of the tweet is to pressure Rosenstein to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rosenstein will now have to do so -- soon.

President Trump’s “travel ban” has drawn much scrutiny for its attempt to prohibit citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. But the executive order — which this week was struck down by a second federal court and seems headed to the Supreme Court this summer — has another important part: a reduction, by more than half, of refugee admissions, to 50,000 from 110,000. This provision is bad for the country for security and economic reasons. As discussed in a forthcoming report by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, it also potentially violates international commitments and American laws.

Harvard is an old institution. Founded in 1636, it's the oldest college or university in the country, and 10 years is a short time in that history. But Drew Faust, who announced Wednesday she's stepping down in 2018, has left her mark. Ten years ago, she became the first woman to lead Harvard...At the law school, Micah Nemiroff also had praise for Faust on Wednesday. He works at the career services office. "There's been a lot of great developments since she's taken over, including the way that the university recruits and accepts students from different backgrounds," Nemiroff said.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. Imagine police officers enter your home, without permission and without warning, while you’re sleeping. In a daze, you might think they were criminals breaking in. You might even seek to exercise your Second Amendment right to protect yourself and your family. But if the officers shoot you upon seeing that you’ve raised a weapon in self-defense, have they used excessive force? In other words, are police officers allowed to unreasonably provoke a response that will cause them to open fire?