Media Mentions

The future of AT&T could be shaped by two big decisions in Washington this week, with the Justice Department suing the telecom giant on Monday to block its $85 billion purchase of Time Warner and the Federal Communications Commission announcing a plan Tuesday to roll back net neutrality rules, handing a big win to Internet providers...Still, consumer advocates say relying on after-the-fact enforcement is no substitute for clear, preemptive rules that seek to prevent consumers from being harmed in the first place. "Taking FCC [rulemaking] power off the table leaves us with only antitrust authority to rely on to protect consumers," said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard University. "Which won't be enough, in the long run."

In recent months, prominent legal scholars on both sides of the political spectrum have proposed court-packing plans, or at least urged reconsideration of the longstanding political norm against court-packing. If such ideas take hold, it will be a very dangerous development... But in his most recent post on this subject, [Mark] Tushnet notes – with admirable candor – that “[t]he rationale is not (on the surface) to ‘seize control of the judiciary'” (emphasis added). That, of course, suggests that “seizing control” is a major part of the rationale beneath the surface.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19 and Carlos Peña Ortiz. In an election and presidency filled with incendiary comments, Americans may have all but forgotten about comments like this made during Donald Trump’s campaign. Unfortunately, many Mexicans have not, and one man in particular — presidential frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador — might do something about it. As a populist wave swept through Europe, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief as Emmanuel Macron declared victory in the French presidential election, seemingly ending the populist onslaught worldwide. However, in less than a year, America may once again be holding its breath as the Mexican presidential election takes place.

The Trump administration is sure to be hell for working people, but so far the actual Labor Secretary has been relatively quiet on the specifics...As explained at length here by former Labor Department official Sharon Block, the only real purpose for reclassifying worker centers is to make their lives harder by requiring them to do a ton of paperwork and follow a ton of new rules. There is no threat being addressed here, except the threat that day laborers might be paid a semi-living wage.

An op-ed by Matt Olsen. A core national security law allowing the government to collect intelligence information—Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—is set to expire at the end of the year. With the deadline looming, the debate in Congress over reauthorizing Section 702 now centers on a crucial issue: the FBI’s ability to search for clues in its databases. The focus on this issue is important. There is a national security imperative for the FBI to review quickly and efficiently data that the government has lawfully collected when the Bureau opens an investigation or identifies a new suspect, especially someone who may have links to terrorism or espionage.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Despite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome. Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame. He and his minions effectively tanked their own plans to merge their company—the largest major pay-TV provider in the country and the second-largest wireless carrier—with Time Warner’s must-have cable channels and sports rights.

President Trump has dismissed global warming as a hoax, snubbed the Paris emissions pact and scrapped U.S. EPA climate rules. But executive actions can be fleeting — as the Trump administration has shown by moving swiftly to unravel many of President Obama's climate change policies. Yet there's a major piece of Trump's climate legacy that could be more enduring: his court picks...Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert and professor at Harvard Law School, said courts have played an "outsized role" in climate policy in recent years because regulators are working with an old law to deal with a problem its authors weren't specifically addressing. "The reason why the courts play a big role right now is that, whether the executive branch is run by [President George W.] Bush or the executive branch is run by Obama, each time they're kind of stuck with old language," Lazarus said, noting that the 1970 Clean Air Act hasn't seen a major overhaul since 1990.

An op-ed by Maryanne Tomazic and Abbe Muller. Rhode Island blocks life-saving treatment for people living with Hepatitis C. The state Department of Human Services applies unnecessary restrictions on Medicaid patients suffering from this disease. These restrictions not only contradict medical and legal advice, but they impair Rhode Island’s ability to address a public health crisis.

New York is one of 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized medical marijuana––a trend that 94 percent of Americans support, according to an August Quinnipiac poll. But on December 8, all of that could begin to change. Congress has until that day to decide whether to include the Rohrabacher-Farr Act (also known as Rohrabacher-Blumenauer) in a bill that will fund the government through the next fiscal year...In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed back against the bill when he sent a strongly worded letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, asking them to oppose protections for legal weed and allow him to prosecute medical marijuana..."He’s old fashioned and very conservative," said Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department official for the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton administrations. "Literally seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, marijuana was thought to be a very dangerous drug. Why would he focus on this issue? Because he’s seven years out of date."

More than 2,000 conservatives in tuxedos and gowns recently filled Union Station’s main hall for a steak dinner and the chance to cheer the man who saved the Supreme Court from liberal control. Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t disappoint them, just as he hasn’t in his first seven months on the Supreme Court. “Tonight I can report that a person can be both a publicly committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court,” Gorsuch said to sustained applause from members of the Federalist Society, using terms by which conservatives often seek to distinguish themselves from more liberal judges... [Ian] Samuel, a professor at Harvard Law School and former Scalia law clerk, said Gorsuch has an obvious interest in questions about accountability in the American system of government and control over the court system. “It’s better that he puts it out there and says this is who I am. I don’t think he cares whether some people think it’s shocking,” Samuel said.

A battle over who should run the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the coming months was set for court as Obama-era holdovers sought to maintain their control over a powerful watchdog which President Donald Trump is seeking to curb...While the legal battle rages, the CFPB’s enforcement work will be put in limbo. “Anything that the agency does or fails to do could be subject to challenge until this cloud is removed,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.

From the Israeli perspective, there is both some bad news and some good news with regards to the legal bombshell that the International Criminal Court prosecutor dropped on the US on Monday. The ICC prosecutor filed a formal submission to move the US’s conduct in the Afghanistan War and its interrogation of its prisoners to a full criminal war crimes investigation...Top ICC expert Alex Whiting told The Jerusalem Post that the ICC decision regarding US targeting probably came about because “there just isn’t enough evidence of intent or that there was a policy to target civilians. They fall too much on the side of error rather than [of war crimes].”

Over just two days this week, the Trump administration has both sued AT&T Inc. to block its planned takeover of Time Warner Inc. and proposed allowing internet-service providers—like AT&T—to form closer alliances with content companies, like Time Warner. ...Because the FTC doesn’t have the authority to create and enforce broad rules, it isn’t in a position to police fast and slow lanes that may harm competition, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University and a former chairman of the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee.

...An investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — published Nov. 1 — revealed that TripAdvisor had deleted reports of rapes, blackouts and other injuries and deaths among travelers vacationing in Mexico...Vivek Krishnamurthy, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said most user review type sites have issues with how they are moderated. From inadequate staffing, to training and culture, problems persist...“Once you start playing with the content, it becomes trickier,” said Krishnamurthy of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “The more you go down the road of becoming an e-commerce site with reviews, the protections start to look shakier.

James Madison, who wrote the first drafts of the U.S. Constitution, sponsored the Bill of Rights, and served as the fifth Secretary of State and the fourth President, was America’s least fun Founding Father...That’s the kind of book one expects upon a first glance at “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President,” by Noah Feldman. But Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, at Harvard Law School, has written something else: a palliative for the age of Trump that never names the current President, as told through the political evolution of an important weirdo whose constant recalibrations enabled him, with increasing success, to fight epic battles with his own, founding-era “haters and losers.” Feldman is at once subtle and candid about the aptness of his narrative.

The panelists at a recent Harvard Law School discussion about the power of special prosecutors agreed on this: There’s no flawless system that uses the executive branch to investigate the executive branch...Panelists at the Harvard event, part of the law school’s bicentennial program, offered varying perspectives of what works, what doesn’t and what might be done about it. These were lawyers and Harvard law alums—now working at private firms, or at law schools—who brought unique insight to the challenges facing Robert Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation of any collaboration between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia’s interference last year in the election.

The Department of Justice has opened a probe into the role of race in Harvard University's admissions policies and is threatening to sue unless Harvard turns over documents by a Dec. 1 deadline, according to correspondence obtained by NPR....In August when the probe was confirmed, legal experts told Carapezza that they were skeptical about the allegations of race-based discrimination: " 'It seems entirely consistent with President Trump's campaign rhetoric,' says Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a constitutional law professor at Harvard. Brown-Nagin points out that the Trump administration's decision to target affirmative action policies comes as racial tensions are rising on many campuses.

In a matter of hours this week, the Trump administration twice weighed in on one of the central issues shaping business and society today — just how much market power big companies should be allowed to amass. Yet in back-to-back developments, two federal agencies arrived at starkly different conclusions, and one company, AT&T, found itself on opposite sides of the debate...“The F.C.C. is saying that they’re going to give up any legal authority over regulating high-speed internet,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re handing the power to choose winners and losers online to about five companies.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When you get rid of your dictator, is it important to follow the rules? That delicate question is dominating the transition-in-progress in Zimbabwe, where longtime president Robert Mugabe has refused to step down despite the demands of the public, the army and his own political party. The counterintuitive answer is that it actually is worthwhile to show obedience to the rule of law, even when the person being overthrown hasn’t and doesn’t.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor took an important step on Monday in pursuing a war-crimes case related to Afghanistan, requesting permission to investigate torture, rape and other atrocities — including those possibly committed by Americans....Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the court who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said he believed that Ms. Bensouda probably would focus first on suspected Taliban abuses because they constitute the majority of crimes. But unwillingness by others to cooperate with her inquiry, Mr. Whiting said, would “make it very difficult for her to progress from the stage she is at now — sufficient evidence to justify opening an investigation — to actually being able to charge anyone with crimes.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Imagine that at Thanksgiving dinner, you find yourself seated next to a cousin you like a lot but rarely see -- or better still, a devastatingly attractive friend of the family, someone you think you'd like to know better. Here’s a quiz: What’s the best way to make a good impression?