Media Mentions

...Nearly three months ago, the the USDA removed its database of animal abuse records from its public website, with no explanation. National Geographic wanted to know why. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request in February for records relating to the decision to take the database offline. In bold disregard for transparency, the department’s response Friday consisted of 1,771 pages of completely blacked-out documents....Ongoing litigation is a common reason for redactions in FOIA responses, but Doug Haddix, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, says these full-page blackouts seem “excessive."...Delcianna Winders, of Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program, agrees. “While these bases may be legitimate for deleting portions of the records at issue, they absolutely cannot be used to withhold 1,771 entire pages,” Winders said in an email. She is part of the lawsuit against the USDA.

Scott Westfahl, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of its executive education program, will be busy the next few weeks. On April 30, doors opened for his school's one-week, $15,000 price-tagged program offering lawyers the chance to study law firm management at Harvard. In mid-May the doors will open again for a program targeting in-house lawyers. Westfahl answered ALM's questions about the students, goals and results of the programs, Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel, which are now in their tenth year.

Harvard Law School’s Junior Deferral Program will expand to accept applications from undergraduate juniors at colleges and universities nationwide in the fall of 2017, the Law School announced Wednesday...Jessica L. Soban ’02, the Law School’s chief admissions officer, said she felt the program had been sufficiently tested and was suited to expand. “We have been talking for the past several years about this being a pilot and collecting information from students who move through the program to understand what success it has really had for them,” Soban said. “This is the point where we feel like we have moved through an entire cycle with one cohort of participants in the program.”

School Resource Officers (SROs) have an immense job. They are not only tasked with maintaining the safety and security of the school and grounds, but often also play the role of mentor. Working within the academic environment provides challenges to law enforcement but also offers an immense opportunity to make a difference in the lives of children, who will one day be the adults making up our communities. An important key to embracing this role effectively is recognizing how trauma affects children and embracing programs that bring trauma-informed care into our schools...“We can overcome the silos of our different fields to provide schools with the support they need to help all children learn,” Susan Cole, Director Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative: Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School Lead author of Helping Traumatized Children Learn explains in the preface.

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford believes the United States must offer ubiquitous, affordable, high-speed Internet to all Americans to secure its economic future. She has spent her career—which includes teaching, writing, and advising President Obama on science, technology, and innovation policy—formulating practical, detailed proposals to make this possible. She talked to MIT Technology Review business editor Elizabeth Woyke about the reasons why the U.S. lags other developed countries in Internet price and speed and how locally managed fiber networks could close this digital divide.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What if the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark abortion rights ruling -- and nothing changed? Case in point: Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the decision from last June that established a new and improved constitutional rule for when a law unduly burdens a woman’s right to choose. Legally, the ruling struck down a Texas law that forced abortion clinics to close unless they qualified as ambulatory care centers. But now, almost a year later, only two of the clinics closed by the law have reopened. Roughly two dozen others closed during the three years the law was in effect, and many or most of those are unlikely to be revived.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is the Constitution archaic, as President Donald Trump implied recently in an interview with Fox News? The answer is a resounding yes -- if you’re an originalist, as Trump claims to be. The president unwittingly hit on the best possible justification for a living Constitution, which evolves to meet changing times. That evolution, of course, needs to take account of the fundamental elements necessary for life -- such as the separation of powers. And it would be a disastrous idea to amend the First Amendment, as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus hinted in another recent interview. But broadly speaking, the way to avoid archaism is to recognize that the Constitution is alive, and like every living thing, must adapt to changing circumstances.

While watching a sneak preview of Democracy Through the Looking Glass – a dismal report card on the media’s primary coverage last year – I realized that we all need to share in the blame. We, the media, sometimes missed the bigger issues, too often choosing to cover topics of little importance. You, the truth-seeking audience, drove TV ratings and posted stuff online, falsehoods that drove the narrative...Bloggers blog and websites report, each looking for clicks to generate cash, leaving the mainstream media to change its philosophy in the name of online traffic. “Racing to events that will get the most ad revenue,” Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, notes in the film.

...Trump’s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit...Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters, but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental health as a “liberal fantasy.” Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, “I believe that invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool—not immediately, but well before 2020.”

Maine Attorney General Janet Mills has joined Democratic colleagues from other states in filing legal challenges aimed at stopping the Trump administration from weakening environmental regulations. The suits reflect a growing trend of partisan alliances among states’ attorneys general...Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, says attorneys general have historically cooperated on various legal issues affecting the states without regard to partisan affiliation. “States are supposed to be different than the federal government, that’s why our country is set up that way. So there is always going to be friction between state governments and the federal government regardless of who is the president,” he says.

Alumni, faculty, administrators, and students flocked to the Divinity School this weekend, celebrating its two centuries of existence with lectures, a panel of Harvard deans, and a bicentennial party, concluding a years-worth of festivities...Several hundred people also attended the panel “Religion Matters: HDS at Harvard University” on Friday, which was moderated by Divinity School Dean David Hempton and featured Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and Graduate School of Education Dean James E. Ryan...Minow joked that “religion is present at the Harvard Law School before every exam” and detailed the connections between governmental and religious legal traditions. “For a law school to be situated in the United States, the temptation is to think that there is only one legal system. We’ve worked really hard to locate the United States and the 50 states inside of many legal traditions,” she said.

Capital Markets Regulation President Hal Scott discusses U.S. trust for Wall Street and government regulatory positions that need to be filled. He speaks with Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Surveillance."

Your law school is about to hit a major milestone, but how to celebrate?...Harvard Law School is also ramping up for its 200th anniversary, which it's celebrating throughout the coming academic year. The festivities kick off in September with a two-day arts celebration featuring performances, exhibitions and talks by law alumni and students in the arts. The following month is a two-day "intellectual summit" bringing back prominent alumni and thinkers to address a host of legal issues. For now, Harvard is staying mum on whether a certain high-profile alum who recently vacated the Oval Office, as well as his extremely popular alumna wife, will be in attendance. And in April, the school is hosting "HLS In The Community," which will highlight its public interest, pro bono and community contributions.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT technology specialist, celebrated the emergence of “the Daily Me” – a digital news service tailored to each reader’s specific interests. With the Daily Me, he suggested, you would no longer rely on newspapers and magazines to curate what you saw, and you could bypass the television networks. Instead, you could design a communications package just for you, with topics and perspectives chosen in advance...But let’s hold the celebration. The Daily Me is an enemy of democracy. Representative government depends on shared experiences, common knowledge and a host of unanticipated, unchosen encounters. All too often, information cocoons become echo chambers, which make mutual understanding impossible and which promote dogmatism, polarisation and the fragmentation of society.

...Google Fiber, which is now officially called Alphabet Access, has since expanded across the state line to Kansas City, Mo. It has also added another eight cities and plans to build networks in two more. But last year, the company put all other expansion plans on hold. It hired a new CEO and laid off hundreds of workers, leading some watchers to speculate that Google might be getting out of the fiber business altogether...“People got all excited about Google Fiber, which was very useful, because it opened people’s eyes to the country’s need for world-class, cheap data. But Google Fiber was never going to reach every city in America, because it’s not in their company’s interest to build basic infrastructure,” says Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor who specializes in Internet and communications law.

Corporate America prides itself on rewarding success and punishing failure. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer does not fit comfortably into that narrative...But when Yahoo’s sale to Verizon becomes official in June, with the restructured company renamed Oath, Mayer will walk away with $186 million, according to a regulatory filing released this week. That includes shares of Yahoo stock Mayer owned, stock options, and a $23 million “golden parachute” of cash, restricted stock units, and medical benefits. Mayer did relinquish $14 million while taking responsibility for the Yahoo Mail data breach, but she’ll get 13 times that amount just to no longer remain part of the company...The new compensation standards naturally served to weaken resistance to hostile takeovers, as bundles of cash took the sting out of the loss of employment and prestige. Indeed, a 2012 study from Alma Cohen, Charles Wang, and Lucian Bebchuk confirms that companies offering golden parachutes are more likely to be acquired in a merger.

An op-ed by fellow Nikolas Bowie. Ask any member of the Trump administration what’s so bad about sanctuary cities, and he’ll likely respond with the same answer: They’re violating a federal law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a), which requires cities to jail people suspected of entering the country illegally. For example, right before Sean Spicer recently said that San Francisco and cities like it “have the blood of dead Americans on their hands,” he cited § 1373(a) by name and implied that sanctuary cities violate that statute when they “block their jails from turning over criminal aliens to Federal authorities for deportation.”...But § 1373(a) doesn’t say what Spicer or Sessions thinks it says. In fact, it says nothing about the administration’s chief complaint with sanctuary cities.

The Truth or Dare Podcast invites leading experts to share from their life’s best work in order to help listeners boost their social health. Today’s featured guest is Sheila Heen. Sheila teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she’s been part of the Harvard Negotiation Project for 2 decades. In addition to being the co-author of Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback, Sheila also serves as CEO of Triad Consulting.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behavior. Governments have taken notice -- and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The next fight over the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive orders will be about the designation of national monuments. Trump’s order to review all major monument declarations in the last 20 years sets the stage for reversal of some or all of President Barack Obama’s designations. Previous presidents have treated those decisions as irreversible. But Trump seems poised to break that tradition by claiming the implicit power to reverse anything a prior president has done.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The liberal West heaved a collective sigh of relief when the results of the first round of the French presidential election came in. After leading in the polls for weeks, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front ended up in second place, while Emmanuel Macron, a centrist political independent, finished first. Macron, the fresh face of Europe’s democratic center at just 39 years old, is expected to prevail handily in the second-round runoff on May 7. With Macron’s victory in France following Dutch voters’ rejection of the right-wing populist Geert Wilders earlier this year, most observers are treating the result as another rebuke to the populist revolt that fueled the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and US President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Many seem convinced that the populist tide has crested.