Media Mentions

More than 100 bankruptcy scholars, including Nobel prize winners and former Federal Reserve governors, are urging Congress not to undo the orderly liquidation authority, the provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill meant to protect the U.S. economy from a bank collapse as bad as Lehman Brothers', or worse. The group is calling the proposed action currently before the U.S. House of Representatives "a grave mistake." The letter was written by Jeffrey Gordon of Colombia Law School and Mark Roe of Harvard Law School and signed by Nobel prize winners Oliver Hart and Peter Diamond, former Federal Reserve governors and the so-called father of modern banking theory, Douglas Diamond.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the U.S. and Europe, many people worry that if prominent politicians signal that they dislike and fear immigrants, foreigners and people of minority religions, they will unleash people’s basest impulses and fuel violence. In their view, social norms of civility, tolerance and respect are fragile. If national leaders such as President Donald Trump flout those norms, they might unravel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the president fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? That question, considered Wednesday by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, would be of fundamental constitutional importance under any circumstances. But these aren’t just any circumstances. The case, PHH Corp. v. CFPB, involves the watchdog agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis. As established by the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has an unusual independent leadership structure, with the president severely restricted in his ability to fire the director. One of the questions raised by mortgage lender PHH in its case challenging an insurance kickback fine is whether the CFPB setup violates the constitutional separation of powers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a remarkable 10-to-3 decision, a federal appeals court on Thursday affirmed the freeze on the second iteration of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration from six majority Muslim countries. The court said that national security “is not the true reason” for the order, despite Trump’s insistence to the contrary. It’s extraordinary for a federal court to tell the president directly that he’s lying; I certainly can’t think of any other examples in my lifetime.

If you want to know what a responsible approach to House oversight in response to substantial evidence of possible executive wrongdoing might look like, watch House Judiciary Committee Democrats...Constitutional litigator and Harvard law professor Laurence M. Tribe tells me: “This latest Trump gambit for wiggling out of a constitutional mandate certainly shows that liquidation is the only practical way for Trump to comply with the Emoluments Clauses. All he and his lawyers are doing is picking a course of action — donating selected profits to charities he favors — that is constitutionally defective to begin with and then complaining that it’s also infeasible to implement.”

An interview with Alex Whiting. Over the past few months, many revelations have surfaced surrounding the Trump administration. While the nature of those revelations varies, one name in particular, has repeatedly emerged in reporting: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Flynn was an adviser to Trump’s campaign and served as national security adviser before he was forced to resign in February...So if Flynn resigned in February, why does his name keep popping up in headlines? How do Flynn’s actions fit into the larger story surrounding possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia?

Why did Wall Street go astray? For most of the last several centuries, bankers and financiers were the pillars of society, the bastions of morality, the people in society that everyone respected. Of course, there was the odd rotten apple in the barrel, but by and large, bankers were trusted and looked up to. Yet over the last few decades, Wall Street has become almost a synonym of evil. What went wrong? What can be done to restore the financial sector to the level of respect that it once enjoyed? This week, I talked about these issues with Harvard Business School finance professor Mihir Desai, on the publication of his intriguing new book, The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2017).

...Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, says, “This is about Facebook’s determination to have billions of people treat its platform as The Internet… Facebook wants simultaneously to be viewed as basic infrastructure while ensuring its highly profitable ways of doing deals are unconstrained.” In the case of Facebook, or any other major platform, tech founders and leaders, who make billions off the affective digital labor of billions worldwide, have a distinct responsibility to imagine all the ways their platforms can be perverted in a world that includes murder, rape, child abuse, and terrorism, and those who will use platforms like Facebook to enact them.

An op-ed by Tyler Giannini, Mackennan Graziano `17, and Kelsey Jost-Creegan `17. When Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos met with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., discussion of the Colombian implementation of the peace deal took a backseat to other issues, including the importance of continued economic cooperation...In Colombia, however, conflict and business prospects have been historically entwined, and for peace and economic cooperation to progress, the legacy of U.S. businesses in fueling the country’s decades-long conflict must be addressed. Chiquita Brands International is a case in point.

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. In the wake of the curtain closing last week on Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, New York State and New York City are slated to consider critically important measures to protect wild animals used in circus acts and public health and safety. Earlier this week, the state Senate passed the Elephant Protection Act, banning the use of elephants in entertainment; the Assembly is set to consider the bill soon. Likewise, the New York City Council is considering a bill flat-out banning the use of wild animals for entertainment. These measures are crucial because despite Ringling’s closure, numerous exhibitors — virtually all of them with documented records of abuse and public endangerment — continue to haul animals into the city and the state

**Correction: This story was misattributed to Alex Whiting in yesterday's News@Law. An interview with Glenn Cohen. DNA kits are very popular these days with people wanting to know what countries their ancestors came from. But before seeking out the secrets of your family tree, make sure you read the fine print.

What has come to be called “fake news” is a hard problem to solve, if indeed it is solvable at all. This is because it is created by the interaction of human psychology with several forces: the affordances of digital technology, the business models of giant internet companies and the populist revolt against globalisation. But that hasn’t stopped people trying to solve the problem...Wikipedia, like any social organisation, has many flaws and problems, but it’s still better than any of us ever expected. Some years ago, a Harvard scholar, Jonathan Zittrain, published a remarkably prescient book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, in which he accurately predicted much of what would happen to the internet in the years following the invention of the smartphone. At the time, many readers were puzzled by the fact that Professor Zittrain devoted a chapter of the book to an extensive discussion of Wikipedia’s governance processes. In fact, it was a mark of his prescience.

An op-ed by Martha Minow...In this season of commencement addresses, we have heard of the challenge to push harder, to give of yourself, and to make a difference, but the compliment of highest expectations means the most when it is offered by someone who is committed to help us achieve them. The 100th anniversary of the birth of President John F. Kennedy is a perfect occasion to revisit his inspiring challenges to Americans and, indeed, to the world, and to remember how he matched his high expectations with sacrifice, service, and contagious belief.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. The language of finance can be insidious. Words like leverage and concepts like diversification can morph from narrow financial terms into much more general ways of understanding the world. For students that go into finance or business, the idea of “optionality” is particularly pliable—and taken too far, it can be downright dangerous.

In a fierce, sometimes personal speech, Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general fired by President Trump for refusing to defend his travel ban, told the graduating class at Harvard Law School on Wednesday that her decision was a surprising but crucial moment when “law and conscience intersected.” Ms. Yates has become a hero to many Democrats for standing up to the president on one of his first and most contentious policy initiatives. Mr. Trump’s supporters regard her as just one of many holdovers from the Obama administration who have publicly and privately tried to sabotage his agenda.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. The news that Donald Trump asked the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, and the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign to influence the presidential election may, or may not, contribute to the overall emerging picture of obstruction of justice by the president. This revelation underscores several important points about the investigation.

United States and elsewhere shouldn’t be able to read them, either, ordering Facebook to erase the postings from its networks around the world. Austria is, in effect, declaring that its hate-speech laws can be enforced globally, against any online entity. So if an Internet service publishes something nasty enough to offend an Austrian, the judge’s reasoning is that Austrian law should apply — regardless of where the content was published. And if Austria can bring Facebook to heel anywhere in the world, so can any other country. It’s easy to see why Facebook is digging in for a hard fight. The news didn’t shock Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, who foresaw this problem in a 2003 research paper. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner,” he said to me.

An interview with Mihir Desai. People have a bad impression of finance, and that's mostly worrying because its often justified, says Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai. The sector is in dire need of rehabilitation, and there are several ways it can be done. The first is to realize that turning money into more money is a shortsighted investment. To play the long game, the system needs to focus on and reward value creation, which drives innovation and the economy.

Economic forces and incentives shape not only our lives, but also our fiction – and economists rarely miss a chance to point this out. “Economics spotting” isn’t just a parlor game, however. It can help us remember why we care about economics in the first place. In an era when finance can look like alchemy or worse, its appearance in fiction can remind us that its most fundamental ideas are elegant and essential. There’s a bonus, too: approaching finance this way has the potential to enrich finance itself. “The Wisdom of Finance,” a new book by my Harvard Business School colleague and mentor Mihir A. Desai, traces financial ideas as they turn up in literature (as well as in music, film and theater). Desai’s panorama underscores how finance serves basic human needs – and crops up in unusual places.

"it was supposed to be an uneventful time,” former acting U.S. attorney general Sally Q. Yates told Harvard Law School (HLS) degree candidates during her Class Day speech—even, as her former chief of staff joked, a time for “long, boozy lunches.”...Yates the HLS Class of 2017—the bicentennial class, and the first to have a 50/50 ratio of men and women—that the same compass that helped her decide to stay when the going got tough is “inside all of us—that compass that guides us in times of challenges is being built every day, with every experience.” She added, “You, too, will be faced with weighty decisions where law and conscience intertwine. The time for introspection is all along the way—to develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for. Because you never know when you will be called upon to answer [those questions].”

An interview with Glenn Cohen. DNA kits are very popular these days with people wanting to know what countries their ancestors came from. But before seeking out the secrets of your family tree, make sure you read the fine print.