Media Mentions

Death, taxis and technology: titles in the running for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year give a new twist to the old maxim about certainty. The 17 books on the 2017 longlist include analyses of the implications of world-changing innovations, from the iPhone to drones; a lively account of the rise of Uber; and a sobering history of the role war, plague and catastrophe have played in shaping our economies...The unexpected symbiosis of the apparently separate worlds of the humanities and finance is the subject of another longlisted title, The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir Desai, which uses literature, history, movies and philosophy to shed light on dry financial theories.

Earlier this week, Chicago made national headlines when it announced it was suing Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Department of Justice’s threat to pull some federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities...Phil Torrey, an immigration lawyer and Harvard Law School lecturer, says its likely other cities will follow suit with Chicago and bring similar lawsuits if the Justice Department doesn’t change its tactics. “Chicago has advanced a strong claim that the DOJ’s new restrictions were not contemplated by Congress when it appropriated [Justice Assistance Grant] funds and the DOJ is acting outside of its authority when placing new conditions on those funds that target sanctuary jurisdictions,” Torrey told Boston.com.

Donald Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he intends to “get rid of” the Environmental Protection Agency and many of its Obama-era regulations. And in its first six months, his administration has overturned or halted nearly two dozen environmental policies and significantly backed off enforcement of environmental pollution laws. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times in his previous post as attorney general of Oklahoma, has been leading the charge. But rolling back Obama-era environmental protections is actually not that easy. There are laws that govern how the EPA can change its policies. And the courts are proving to be a considerable obstacle to the Trump agenda...As Harvard law professor Jody Freeman told me by email, “Courts don't tend to believe in ‘alternative facts.’ Even conservative judges stick closely to the record and can be expected to look skeptically at a misrepresentation of the science.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Metro, alleging the transit agency’s restrictions on “issues-oriented” advertisements violate the First Amendment...Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, said the ACLU’s case against Metro is “extremely strong.” “They [WMATA] do seem to be acting pretty inconsistently, and they seem to not have a clear policy,” she said. “For a government institution that decides to have advertising, for better or for worse, you can’t have your standards for what is allowable based on the identity of the person in the advertisement.”

While Donald Trump and his surrogates were loudly campaigning against Robert Mueller on Twitter and on TV, the special counsel and his team of F.B.I. investigators has been quietly building their case, the details of which burst into public view Wednesday when The Washington Post reported that the bureau searched the home of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in a dramatic pre-dawn raid at the end of last month...As Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting writes for Just Security, “A pre-dawn search by F.B.I. agents of Manafort’s house could achieve this objective in a way that a grand jury subpoena just couldn’t. And if Mueller was hoping to send a message, it is one that will likely be received by others in addition to Manafort. If it was not clear already, it should now be plain that Mueller will use all the investigative tools at his disposal to fulfill the task that he has been assigned.”

The ugly and tragic events in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in the death of one 32-year-old woman who was hit by a car, have sparked rallies across the country — and the firing of at least one white nationalist marcher...Employees are legally protected from being fired based on discrimination, for their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from interfering in the free exercise of speech and religion, does not protect employees who make statements or donations in favor of causes their employers disagree with from being fired, said Mark Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School...Attending a rally — no matter what side you’re on — can get you fired. Private-sector employees are generally employed at the will of the employer, Tushnet said, and their employers can fire them as they see fit. “That includes disagreement with what they say in public,” he said.

In Chinese schools, students learn that the United States became a great nation partly by stealing technology from Britain. In the halls of government, officials speak of the need to inspire innovation by protecting inventions. In boardrooms, executives strategize about using infringement laws to fell foreign rivals. China is often portrayed as a land of fake gadgets and pirated software, where intellectual property like patents, trademarks and copyrights are routinely ignored. The reality is more complex...“There is an unmistakable national policy to boost the position of Chinese companies in cutting-edge areas,” said William P. Alford, a Harvard law professor and an expert on Chinese intellectual property laws.

The push for Internet businesses to remove hateful speech spread to an influential corner of the tech industry on Monday as web registration service GoDaddy delisted a prominent neo-Nazi site in the wake of violent clashes over the weekend in Charlottesville...Liberal activists and even some conservatives praised GoDaddy’s decision in the wake of Saturday’s attack, saying the move represented a shift by tech corporations to take more responsibility. “It’s well past time for platforms that already exercise some discretion to stop pretending they are just dumb pipes that allow all types of garbage to flow through them,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “It seems to me a significant move in a direction that is long overdue.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The consensus right and left seems to be that President Donald Trump’s apocalyptic threat of “fire and fury” should North Korea continue its provocations has actually brought the possibility of nuclear annihilation closer. But hardheaded analysis suggests that, however unpresidential his rhetoric, Trump’s words have not appreciably increased the risk of war between the U.S. and North Korea. True, the New York Stock Exchange closed slightly down after his remarks, and the Nikkei was down 1.3 percent. But those relatively mild reactions probably reflect a reminder that such a war is, in fact, conceivable -- not a change in its probability.

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. With news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has begun using grand juries to conduct his investigation, there are now questions about where it might all lead. Of course, it might lead nowhere: at the end of the investigation Mueller might conclude that the evidence is insufficient to warrant criminal charges. Or it might lead to somewhere significant: Trump campaign and administration officials being charged with crimes related to Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election or with other crimes discovered during the investigation.

President Trump is transforming the study of constitutional law. The nation’s law professors have spent the summer revising their courses to take account of a president who generates fresh constitutional questions by the tweet. When classes start in the coming weeks, law students will be studying more than dusty doctrine. They will also be considering an array of pressing questions...“Teaching the Constitution has never felt more urgent, like unraveling a mix of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but with the highest possible stakes,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and vocal critic of Mr. Trump, who also represents plaintiffs challenging foreign payments to Mr. Trump’s companies.

Harvard’s presidential search committee, comprising the 12 members of the University’s Corporation other than the president along with three members of the Board of Overseers, today announced the membership of the faculty and staff advisory committees for the search. The composition of a third advisory committee, consisting of students from across the University, will be announced later in the summer. The members of the faculty advisory committee are as follows...William Alford, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, director of the East Asian Legal Studies program, and chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law School).

John Essey and family live in a modest, two-story home on a tree-lined street in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh. From the outside, it looks like any other house in the neighborhood. But this house has a brain...While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction, it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money..."Surveillance is now the business model of the Internet. Companies make money spying on you," says Bruce Schneier, an Internet security expert and the chief technology officer at IBM's cybersecurity arm.

Adrian Vermeule is Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, where he writes and teaches on administrative law and constitutional law and theory. He recently spoke with "First Things" assistant editor Connor Grubaugh about three books on constitutionalism from a Catholic perspective.

Billions of internet-connected things like smart light bulbs are expected to pop up in our homes and businesses in the coming years. And a group of senators wants to help make them more secure. The bipartisan group introduced a bill on Tuesday to address some concerns regarding the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). It would require any companies that provide the federal government with internet-enabled devices to meet basic security requirements...Also included in the bill is a provision that some security researchers should be able to look for vulnerabilities in smart devices without the threat of a lawsuit. Currently, researchers are hamstrung by certain laws. "It's an important step in vindicating the principal that one of the best ways to understand the vulnerabilities of something is to be able to tinker with it," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that President Donald Trump orchestrated his son Donald Jr.‘s initial statement regarding his meeting with a Russian attorney during the presidential campaign...Prof. Laurence Tribe is a known critic of President Trump, but he backed up his tweet by saying that POTUS knew that this topic would come up in a Justice Department investigation. Politicians are known to spin facts, and flat out lie to the media when it suits their purposes...“Not every politician — not by a long shot — is under a DOJ investigation that involves a son (and son-in-law) also under DOJ investigation when the politician concocts a lie for his son,” Tribe said.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Tuesday that President Donald Trump “weighed in” on a misleading statement issued by his son last month in response to reports that he met in 2016 with a Russian attorney, an acknowledgment that criminal law experts say opens the president and his attorneys up to serious questions about the president’s desire to quash the Russia investigation...Nonetheless, the president’s role could be fodder for special counsel Robert Mueller as he explores whether Trump obstructed justice to undermine the larger investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia, said Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal prosecutor. “Based on what we know now, it likely does not itself rise to the level of obstruction of justice, but it shows Trump's state of mind and could be relevant to proving Trump's intent when he more directly tried to interfere with the ongoing investigation," Whiting said, pointing to Trump's decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey.

The Trump administration wants to investigate discrimination against Asian-American college applicants. The Justice Department is reopening an investigation into a complaint that was filed against Harvard accusing the Ivy League school of racial discrimination in its admissions practices...Civil rights groups and legal experts are skeptical. “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.

A clash between America's most notorious labor union and the reality TV show Top Chef is coming to a head in federal court this week in a bizarre extortion trial that centers on allegations of nasty slurs and slashed tires. Federal prosecutors say four men from the Boston-based Teamsters Local 25 tried to extort staff on Bravo's wildly popular cooking series—including its star Padma Lakshmi...What remains to be seen is how jurors make sense of an ugly dispute between a local political force and a pop-culture institution—and the nuances of the labor laws in play. As Nancy Gertner, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law professor, put it, "The line between protected union activity and unprotected union activity is a fine line, and this case will be about that."

An interview with Tomiko Brown-Nagin. According to an internal document obtained by our partners at The New York Times, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will shift its priorities away from enforcing anti-discrimination laws on behalf of minorities, and focus instead on cases where white college applicants claim they've been discriminated against. The DOJ's project will focus on "intentional race-based discrimination," a phrase at the heart of affirmative action. The Supreme Court has ruled that race can be used as one factor among many in a “holistic” admissions process, but there are still many cases, related to universities that receive federal funding, where the lines are murkier.

Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted in June of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging a close friend, through text messages and phone calls, to commit suicide, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 months in a county jail. Ms. Carter was 17 in 2014 when the friend, Conrad Roy III, who was 18, poisoned himself with carbon monoxide in his truck...Some legal experts said the sentence seemed fair. “It recognizes this is an aberrant crime, a juvenile crime, a crime of social media, of the internet, and of the unique dramas of teenage boys and girls,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and a professor at Harvard Law School. “It deserves punishment, but you have to put it in context.”