Media Mentions

Human capital metrics, including occupational safety and health data, frequently are collected by a majority of global companies, yet many of these firms are not publicly reporting the information, according to a study released Oct. 23 by the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program in conjunction with the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS). Human capital metrics, including occupational safety and health data, frequently are collected by a majority of global companies, yet many of these firms are not publicly reporting the information, according to a study released Oct. 23 by the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program in conjunction with the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS). "Corporate Disclosure of Human Capital Metrics," authored by Aaron Bernstein and Larry Beeferman of the Harvard Law School Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project, notes that human capital metrics are of increasing interest to global investors who understand that a sustainable workforce is critical to a company’s success, including its bottom line.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman and Joseph Goffman. Lost in all the attention to the Trump administration’s effort to scuttle President Barack Obama’s clean power plan is its attempt to prop up the struggling coal industry by doing something very un-Republican — subsidizing it. Last month, Rick Perry, the secretary of energy, asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the independent agency that regulates electricity markets — to adopt a new rule to pay certain coal and nuclear plants more than they would otherwise earn in a competitive market. In essence, consumers would pay these plants a premium for electricity that competitors could produce, and are already producing, more cheaply.

For as much as American politicians and their constituents complain about taxes, the truth is that tax reform packages to address those complaints are rare — the last major reform of the tax code was passed in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan. But starting this week, tax talk is back in vogue in Washington D.C...On a recent and unexpectedly warm day for a New England fall, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge sat down to discuss tax policy in general and reform in particular with HBS Professor Matthew C. Weinzierl and Mihir A. Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at HBS and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who often testifies before Congress on corporate tax issues.

Supporters of the Department of Energy’s proposal to provide cost recovery for coal and nuclear plants are leaning on a broader interpretation of the Federal Power Act to justify the rule in their comments at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission...“There is a distinction between what FERC can do as a matter of law and what it should do,” Ari Peskoe, a senior electricity fellow at Harvard Law School, wrote to Utility Dive in an email. “As a matter of law, once FERC makes a technical judgment that a market rule will result in just and reasonable rates, as long as it has some evidence in the record to support its decision, it’s difficult to get a court to overturn that determination."

A number of the state’s Medicaid managed care organizations do not offer enough public information about their hepatitis C policies, according to a report released on Monday...The report, conducted by the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable and Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, analyzed policies in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico related to Medicaid recipients’ access to hepatitis C treatment. The report gave New York a grade of B-. The vast majority of New York’s 6.1 million Medicaid recipients as of July were enrolled in managed care plans rather than the traditional fee-for-service model.

Cass Sunstein’s new book, “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” published by Harvard University Press, is “a love letter to the United States of America,” in the words of its author. Cass is a leading scholar on the topic having published his first work on impeachment almost twenty years ago. The book offers a highly accessible, brilliantly thoughtful, and politically neutral analysis of what the Constitution means for our present moment and for generations that follow. Cass was generous enough to exchange his views with me on the toughest questions I could pose to him.

U.S. Sens. Steve Daines, Cory Gardner, Mark Warner and Ron Wyden recently introduced the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 to address what they see as glaring security issues associated with IoT devices. The tech industry "has an insecurity dilemma," pointed out David O'Brien, senior researcher at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. "Lots of devices and software are fundamentally insecure, and we've been unable to keep up with growing threats." The Mirai botnet -- crafted largely with hacked IoT devices -- and its distributed denial-of-service attacks on Dyn Inc. in Oct. 2016 temporarily disrupted much of the internet.

...The neighbors who are at war with the redeveloper of the former Middlesex County courthouse in East Cambridge have just received some help from a big name in constitutional law. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe helped write a brief that the courthouse’s neighbors submitted to the Supreme Judicial Court earlier this month, asking the state’s highest court to reconsider its decision not to overturn an Appeals Court ruling in favor of the developer, Leggat McCall Properties. Essentially, the battle revolves around whether government immunity to local zoning rules should continue after a property moves into private ownership.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is playing with fire. Over the weekend, he announced he would invoke a never-used provision of the Spanish constitution to remove the elected leaders of Catalonia from office because of their support for Catalan independence. The provision, with antecedents going back to the Holy Roman Empire, is designed to avoid fundamental conflict between federal states and a central government. Had the U.S. Constitution included a similar rule, it might have helped avert the Civil War. But historically, invoking the right to put down a rogue state also poses a grave danger to federalism and even democracy itself, as it did when Germany last took a similar step, in 1932.

On MidPoint we air a recent speech by pioneering feminist law professor, Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan, on social change through legal intervention; MacKinnon spoke Thursday at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida. There are several instances of rape and sexual assault in the news: from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, to President Donald Trump to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilley and comedian Bill Cosby.

Last week, Tom Steyer, the billionaire progressive donor, announced a $10 million campaign calling for President Trump’s impeachment, beginning with a television commercial running in all 50 states...Appearing on screen, Steyer asks, “If that isn’t a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become?” It’s a good question...But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump.

Chinese billionaire Wang Shi visited Harvard over the weekend, delivering a sold-out lecture in Mandarin Chinese about his experiences in business and academia...Qingnan Xie, a visiting fellow at the Law School, said in Chinese that she has long been familiar with Wang as “one of the Chinese business celebrities” and came to the event because of her interest in his entrepreneurial achievements. “I am doing research on innovations in Chinese academia. Vanke represents a wave of newly-rising businesses based on accumulation of capital, and the real estate business is super lucrative in China. I also want to see what his expectations are of the Chinese market,” she said.

The largest proxy battle in U.S. history ended last week in a near tie, leaving Procter & Gamble without the clear support of its shareholders and activist shareholder Nelson Peltz without a board seat...The canard that activist shareholders promote short-term gains at the expense of long-term value has been utterly demolished by academic research. Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk examined more than 2,000 activist events spanning 13 years and found that these interventions resulted in a 6% rise in stock prices on average and that targeted companies managed to hold on to these gains, above their benchmarks, over a five-year period.

...In the ninth episode of The Washington's Post "Constitutional" podcast, we explore the prison's origins and the pivotal court case, Gates v. Collier, in which Haber brought to light the constitutional violations that permeated Parchman Farm. This episode features the voices of Haber; Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Criminal Justice Institute; and David Oshinsky, author of “Worse Than Slavery” and a professor at New York University.

Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer spent three low-profile days on campus last week as part of his visiting fellowship at the Institute of Politics. Spicer attended several off-the-record meals with students, including a lunch on a political communications and a “Director’s dinner,” according to Jason Ge ’18 and Emily M. Hall ’18, co-chairs of the IOP Fellows and Study Groups Program. He also visited several classes, including a freshman seminar, and met with faculty and students from the College, Kennedy School, Business School, and Law School...Jeannette P. Leopold [`18], co-president of the Harvard Law School Republicans, attended a breakfast discussion with Spicer. “I thought it was really great that we had the opportunity to meet someone who’s been so influential,” she said.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. NFL players who have been protesting racism and police violence are under attack. Earlier this month, vice-president Mike Pence made a show of leaving a Colts-49ers game when twenty San Francisco players kneeled during the national anthem. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has threatened to bench any player who does not stand. Some fans have booed or burned jerseys. More important than the risk of being benched or booed, however, is the hijacking of the players’ message. Donald Trump has been the hijacker-in-chief. He has insisted that the protests disrespect the flag, the military, and “everything that we stand for.”

...The Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic has been Harvard’s first line of defense against Trump’s anti-immigration policies, offering legal assistance to Harvard affiliates with immigration concerns and filing high-profile amicus briefs in cases challenging Trump's travel bans. Still, according to Patricia N. Manos, a graduate student and supporter of the unionization effort, some Harvard affiliates are unaware of the University’s legal resources for TPS recipients...Manos added that the University’s legal clinics are also open to Harvard employees and students’ families: “It's worth noting, and a lot of employees don't know this, that the legal clinic is interpreting the Harvard community pretty broadly,” she said.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Like the repeated hook of a pop song that you can’t get out of your head, mergers between the already-powerful wireless giants keep coming. In the previous greatest hits category of wireless consolidation, the Obama administration managed to stop the music for a while: Its DOJ blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011, and a 2014 effort by Sprint to merge with T-Mobile was rebuffed by regulators. But the beat goes on, as rumors are swirling this month that Sprint and T-Mobile will soon announce plans to merge. This 2017 merger reprise—an attempt to revive the bad old days when harmful acquisitions were shooed past regulators—should also be soundly rejected.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was Richard Spencer’s party, and he can cry if he wants to. But the hecklers who shouted down the white supremacist Thursday at his University of Florida speech were invited guests, not government crashers. They held tickets distributed by Spencer’s own National Policy Institute. So they didn’t violate Spencer’s free speech rights by drowning him out with chants telling him to go home. Only the government is obligated to respect free speech rights -- and the university and law enforcement did everything by the book, to protect Spencer’s safety and preserve law and order outside the venue.

Two hours outside of D.C., near the Shenandoah Valley, 20 tiny houses sit on 80 acres of wooded land. Brooklyn-based Getaway brought them here after piloting its concept outside of Boston and New York. The idea? Put small cabins in remote locations near cities as a place to briefly disconnect. The co-founders, now backed with $15 million from Connecticut-based private equity firm L Catterton after a Series A that closed in February, opened reservations for D.C.-area residents earlier this month and, now, are preparing to welcome their first guest in about a week. The college friends and business partners, founder and CEO Jon Staff and co-founder Pete Davis [`18], started the company in 2015, when Staff was at Harvard Business School and Davis was at Harvard Law School.

With the deadline for public comment on the Department of Energy's controversial proposal to provide cost recovery for coal and nuclear power plants fast approaching, all sides have been weighing in. The DOE’s notice of public rulemaking (NOPR) is currently in the hands of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which recently agreed to an expedited review period...In a filing this week, Ari Peskoe, a Harvard Law School senior fellow writing for the Harvard Environmental Policy Initiative, laid out a Iegal argument he discussed days after the NOPR first came out during an interview on The Interchange with GTM Research chief Shayle Kann. In simple terms, DOE hasn’t shown, or even proposed, that current wholesale rates in FERC-regulated jurisdictions are “unjust and unreasonable” or “unduly discriminatory” -- and without such a finding, FERC has no justification to act to change what’s already in place.