Media Mentions

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.”

An op-ed by Mark G. Yudof and Rachel F. Moran. This week The New York Times reported that the Trump administration’s Justice Department was seeking lawyers to pursue compliance investigations and federal lawsuits that may target affirmative-action programs in admissions at colleges and universities. That report was based on an internal document directed to the department’s civil-rights division that describes hiring for a new project that will address "intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions." While it’s uncertain whether the document reflects a broad new push against the use of race in college admissions, some observers were still puzzled by the announcement, given the Supreme Court’s track record in this area.

Thousands of former students in Massachusetts and across the country continue to be hounded about private loans they took out to attend for-profit schools that many say failed to provide the education they promised and have since shut down. The US Department of Education has agreed to wipe out some of the millions of dollars in federal loans that students loaded up on to attend institutions such as Corinthian Colleges Inc. and ITT Technical Institute, because regulators allege that they were predatory and left students in the lurch when they abruptly closed. But many of these same students continue to be stuck with their private loans...“For the private student loans, it’s harder to get immediate relief,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School. “There’s a lot of damage done to students.”

A group of Boston-based mathematicians calling themselves the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group are using their math superpowers to fight back against gerrymandering. They're holding a public event, the Geometry of Redistricting workshop, which begins on Monday. The workshop will feature lectures on legal and mathematical topics related to gerrymandering, as well as hands-on sessions on how to use open-source mapping software to redraw voting districts...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and outspoken critic of our current districting system, agrees that technology has made things worse. "What's really important about this process is that big data, technology, has radically improved the efficiency by which the politicians are now able to draw and select these districts," he says.

August may be beach time for many, but for law students it’s a serious month to get their careers on the right trajectory. Second-year students are gathering their nicest work clothes, real shoes – flip flops forbidden – and heading back to campus to undergo what may be the most important interviews of their work life. Law firm recruiters will be sizing them up and deciding whether to offer them an internship next summer, a position that — with hard work and luck — will lead to their first job in Big Law. “This is an event that can shape a student’s career and we do everything we can to make it a good experience for our students,” said Mark Weber, Assistant Dean for Career Services at Harvard Law School.

An interview with Alex Whiting. Reporting suggests that the Special Counsel is probing Trump's financial ties to Russia, a grand jury is issuing subpoenas, and 10 senior FBI officials could testify in Mueller's obstruction case.

Smart contracts technology is rapidly maturing. Self-executing coded agreements are being harnessed to launch new digital assets and will soon be used by American corporations to issue shares of stock on a blockchain overseen by the state of Delaware. But there is something impeding the technology, keeping its use largely confined, thus far, to the hothouse realm of cryptocurrencies...What is needed, experts say, are more and better "oracles," pieces of middleware by which smart contracts can receive, and act on, data from off-chain systems..."Oracles are the new miners in the blockchain world," Patrick Murck, special counsel at the New York law firm Cooley, recalls saying at a conference last year. "And I still believe that's true."

U.S. lawmakers unveiled a bill this week that, if passed, would set basic security standards for connected devices from wearables to environmental sensors purchased by federal agencies. The bill, called the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017, would require devices to have software that can be patched and passwords that can be altered before being sold to the U.S. government...While the legislation will provide companies with a set of guidelines, it does little to directly regulate security, said Jonathan Zittrain, a founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. But it could motivate companies eyeing sales to the government, which has a $95 billion technology war chest under President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for next year. “This bill deftly uses the power of the Federal procurement market, rather than direct regulation, to encourage Internet-aware device makers to employ some basic security measures in their products,” Zittrain said in a statement.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Are there any limits on the president’s pardon power? The question, which has generated vigorous debate this summer, has new relevance in view of special counsel Robert Mueller’s continuing investigation into "any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” No one can know where Mueller’s investigation is leading, but the possibility of criminal indictments cannot yet be ruled out.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A year ago, affirmative action in higher education seemed safe for a generation, after Justice Anthony Kennedy blessed it in a landmark Supreme Court opinion. Now President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is signaling that it plans to challenge the constitutionality of the practice in a way the federal government has never done before. And with Justice Neil Gorsuch in place and the possibility that Kennedy might retire in the next few years, the challenge could succeed. The legal reality is that higher ed affirmative action is now vulnerable.

Mixed messages are a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. So it is no surprise that in the wake of a Washington Post story on July 20th depicting Mr Trump as curious about the extent of his pardon power, contradictory spins emerged from different corners of the White House. Jay Sekulow, Mr Trump’s lawyer, flatly denied the report that, under investigation for suspicious ties to Russia, the president is looking into ways to shield his aides and himself...For Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Richard Painter and Norm Eisen, ethics czars for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the impeachment exception in the constitution “would make no sense if the president could pardon himself."

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib. This week, I am excited to join a group of advocates and chefs from Food Policy Action, the National Resource Defense Council, ReFed, and the James Beard Foundation in Washington, D.C. to put food waste on the plates of Congress. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and United States Department of Agriculture announced a national goal to halve food waste by 2030, but these agencies and Congress have not yet adopted policies to help us meet this ambitious goal. We are now approaching a critical opportunity to implement such policy change: the U.S. Farm Bill, expected to pass in 2018. This legislation shapes our food and agriculture system, covering everything from rural broadband to food assistance programs—yet the last Farm Bill, enacted in 2014, didn’t put a single dollar towards food waste reduction efforts.

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed all claims in a suit against New York State’s zero-emissions credit program, the second such victory for state nuclear subsidies after a complaint over the Illinois ZEC program was thrown out July 14. Judge Valerie Caproni of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted motions to dismiss the case from the state’s Public Service Commission, the defendant, and intervenor Exelon, owner of the three New York nuclear plants that will receive ZEC payments (16-CV-8164)...The Illinois and New York decisions are the latest in a string of federal court cases testing the boundaries between state and federal jurisdiction over electricity markets. “Under current law, states have broad authority to advance a cleaner electric grid,” said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School, who tracks constitutional challenges to state energy policies.

At a time when alternative facts rule the day and the landmark achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, and democracy itself, are on life support, it’s important for those of us in the know and in the struggle to share stories of local victories and “profiles in courage” to fuel our hope for a better tomorrow (particularly as thousands of recent law school graduates sit and prepare for their bar exams)...One such man is Harvard Law Professor and Harvard College Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

Today President Trump berates, insults, attacks, undermines and humiliates Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in my view as part of a plan to remove Sessions and fire special counsel Robert Mueller. These aggressive acts of obstruction of justice would violate the presidential oath of office, the president’s duty to preserve and protect the constitution, the president’s duty to faithfully execute the laws of the land, and the president’s duty to protect the nation from foreign enemies...Among the truest words describing the Trump presidency were written by Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, in an op-ed in The Washington Post discussing impeachment and obstruction of justice.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe defended a company’s right to scrape data from LinkedIn at a federal injunction hearing Thursday, saying barring it would be no different than barring speakers from a public square, in a case that the judge said has “serious implications” for privacy rights and access to information on the internet. “If you exclude someone from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you are excluding them from the modern version of the town square,” Tribe told U.S. District Judge Edward Chen. Tribe, an expert in constitutional law, was defending the right of his client, HiQ, to track changes LinkedIn members make to their profiles, even changes they choose not to publicize.

Apple Inc. likes to say it supports two million U.S. jobs. Plans by the company’s main manufacturing partner for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin will add at least 10,000 more, helping Apple fend off the threat of import tariffs on its most important product, the iPhone. President Donald Trump and Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou said in a White House press conference on Wednesday that the factory will initially employ about 3,000 people, before expanding to as many as 13,000...“Foxconn is doing its best to try to head off a trade war and they’re obviously being quite strategic in terms of making their investment in house speaker Ryan’s home district and thereby trying to gain goodwill,” said Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Trade and Foreign Direct Investment.

The number of spills and other mishaps at oil and gas sites fell sharply again last year, in line with decreased drilling...Many wells had repeated spills, and the study found that wells that have already had a spill are more likely than others to have another. In Colorado, for example, a spill is 4.6 times as likely at a well that has already had one. Patterson's co-author, Kate Konschnik, director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative, said that could help state agencies prioritize wells for inspection. "There is a tendency to have repeat spills," Konschnik said. "The state should be targeting sites that have already had a spill."

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Microsoft recently made a Very Serious Announcement about deploying unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. News outlets ate it up: "To Close Digital Divide, Microsoft to Harness Unused Television Channels," said the New York Times on July 10, in a headline that could have been written by the PR folks in Redmond. The Washington Post pegged both a really big number and a year on the plan: "Microsoft wants to bring 2 million rural Americans online by 2022," wrote Hamza Shaban and Brian Fung on July 11....Microsoft's plans aren't really about consumer internet access, don't actually focus on rural areas, and aren't targeted at the US—except for political purposes.

A federal judge in New York ruled last week that the Empire State’s plan to subsidize nuclear power plants “is constitutional” and “of legitimate state concern.” It’s a significant win for the nation’s largest nuclear fleet owner Exelon, which has been struggling to keep its money-losing power plants operational amid weak electricity demand and low energy prices. But the ramifications of last Tuesday’s decision go well beyond the legality of New York’s nuclear program...“Courts have upheld three programs in one month, all confirming states have authority to favor certain types of generation and use financial incentives to effectuate those preferences,” said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Program Policy Initiative.

In April, scientists achieved a major breakthrough that could one day drastically improve the fate of babies born extremely prematurely. Eight premature baby lambs spent their last month of development in an external womb that resembled a high-tech ziplock bag. At the time, the oldest lamb was nearly a year old, and still seemed to be developing normally. This technology, if it works in humans, could one day prove lifesaving for the 30,000 or so babies each year that are born earlier than 26 weeks into pregnancy. It could also complicate—and even jeopardize—the right to an abortion in an America in which that right is predicated on whether a fetus is “viable.” “The Supreme Court has pegged the constitutional treatment of abortion to the viability of a fetus,” I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School bioethicist, told Gizmodo.