Media Mentions

A New York-based electricity provider is suing two Minnesota public agencies over a law it claims improperly favors home-state companies for new power line projects. The 2012 state law gives "incumbent" electricity transmission providers in Minnesota a "right of first refusal" for new power line projects. In other words, they get first dibs over companies that don't currently have transmission lines in Minnesota..."There are a few other states that have such laws," said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative. None has been tested in a federal court. The suit by LSP Transmission "could set an important precedent," Peskoe said.

Late last week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will add a case critical to the future of public-sector unions to its docket. With President Donald Trump's appointment of conservative-leaning Justice Neil Gorsuch, many expect the court to rule against the unions. Such a decision would energize the recent resurgence of state laws that effectively reduce the power of unions in both the public and private sector...“It is an enormously big deal,” says Harvard law professor Benjamin Sachs, who often writes about labor issues. “Unions have to provide services and representation equally to everyone in a bargaining unit. But if you can get those services for free, a lot of people won’t pay them. You have a classic free-rider situation.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Two very American stories about high-speed internet access are colliding right now, and the dissonance is striking. One is like a five-minute Shakespearean tragedy, neatly telling the story of what a high-priced local cable monopoly does (and doesn’t do). The other is a hopeful narrative of intelligent, effective government intervention. For the brief but evocative tragedy, you probably can guess who the high-priced local cable monopoly is: Comcast.

A letter to the editor by Charles Fried. Re “Top Court Puts Gerrymandering on Unclear Path” (front page, Oct. 4): At oral argument, the supremely intelligent chief justice said that proving and remedying gerrymandering might require the judiciary to parse “sociological gobbledygook.” Sorry, but that’s no excuse for not doing your job and saving our democracy. Every day, federal judges must pass on exquisitely intricate arguments in patent cases and on the admissibility of expert testimony in a wide variety of technical fields. Indeed, the social science here is not that difficult. An outside lecturer came to my grandson’s high school and explained it to the complete comprehension of a class of bright 15-year-olds.

It felt like a family reunion — with 600 relatives. That many friends, former students, colleagues, and well-wishers gathered Monday in a joyful celebration of the life and career of Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, advocate for Civil Rights, author of books on race and justice, and mentor to former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama...And when John Manning, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at HLS, announced that a group of Ogletree’s friends had established an endowed professorship in his honor, the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Chair in Race and Criminal Justice, the news brought down the house...The chair was made possible through the generosity of a group of Ogletree’s close friends, said David Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law. “When the history of Harvard Law School in the 20th century is written, Charles Ogletree’s name will be among the first ones mentioned,” said Wilkins...The panelists told stories to “bring home the Tree-ness of Tree,” as Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, explained...Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, said, “Throughout his career, Ogletree has embodied law in the service of society, just the same as other great beacons of the American legal profession, men and women like Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, and Charles Hamilton Houston.”...Another frequent participant was Obama classmate Kenneth Mack ’91, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law. Mack said he learned about Houston in a Saturday School class. It was a time, he added, when few people knew about the lawyer whom Ogletree deemed one of the 20th century’s greatest legal minds and Civil Rights lawyers.

European Union regulators’ tax crackdown on Amazon.com Inc. -- like the EU’s case against Apple Inc. -- should spur U.S. policy makers to address companies’ aggressive offshore tax-avoidance strategies before it’s too late, experts said...The rate and formula for that tax haven’t been set, but experts note that the framework calls for it to be applied “on a global basis,’’ minus credits for foreign taxes paid -- suggesting that companies could blend their results from high-tax countries like Germany with low-tax countries like Ireland to even out their global effective rates. That wouldn’t do much to prevent profit shifting to tax havens, according to Harvard Law professor Stephen Shay, a former top U.S. Treasury Department official during the tax overhaul of 1986. Instead, Shay said during an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday that a minimum tax should be calculated on a per-country basis, preferably at 80 percent of the corporate rate.

The special master overseeing the handling of a nearly $1 billion restitution fund in the criminal lawsuit over Takata’s potentially deadly air bag inflators made his first report to a Michigan federal court on Tuesday, saying that he’s hit several delays carrying out his duties so far. Harvard Law School professor and longtime mediator Eric D. Green, who was appointed special master in July by U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh, said in his first report that he’s hit a variety of delays in carrying out his responsibilities. Green said he was working on obtaining additional data needed to develop claims valuation formulas and methodologies from Takata, car makers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other parties.

In the wake of the breathtaking tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, with a dialog in earnest on gun control and the second amendment taking shape, I reached out to Harvard's preeminent constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe. What follows is my inquiry, and Professor Tribe's response in its entirety. It's important to bear in mind what Tribe said then. We're here again.

In the hours just after the massacre in Las Vegas, some fake news started showing up on Google and Facebook. A man was falsely accused of being the shooter. His name bubbled up on Facebook emergency sites and when you searched his name on Google, links of sites connecting him with the shooting topped the first page. It appears to be another case of automation working so fast that humans can't keep pace...Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard, says that with such massive scale even if there were humans helping out there would be mistakes. Benkler says that even if Facebook and Google blocked sites like 4chan, it wouldn't solve the problem. "Tomorrow in another situation like this someone will find some other workaround," Benkler says.

When the Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states that Russian actors had targeted their elections systems in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the impacted states rolled out a series of defiant statements...Still, most states lack the mechanisms to deal with large-scale changes to voter registration, said Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity specialist at Harvard’s Berkman Center who has written frequently about the security vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems. “Imagine an election in a state office, where 20 percent of the people can’t vote, and everyone says the voting roll was hacked. There’s no system to deal with that — there’s no plan, no rules,” he said.

The Trump administration is exploring ways to replace the use of Social Security numbers as the main method of assuring people’s identities in the wake of consumer credit agency Equifax Inc.’s massive data breach...Over the decades, the Social Security number became valuable for what could be gained by stealing it, said Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. It was the only number available to identify a person and became the standard used for everything from confirming someone at the doctor’s office to school. “They appeared at an age when we didn’t have other numbers,” Schneier said in an interview. “Think of this as part of our aging infrastructure” from roads and bridges to communications. “Sooner or later we as a society need to fix our aging infrastructure.”

Consider what is, for the moment, an entirely hypothetical question: What might Defense Secretary Jim Mattis do if he received an order from President Trump to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea in retaliation, say, for a hydrogen bomb test that had gone awry?Certainly, Mattis could try to talk the president out of the attack, if he thought the action was unwise...“The president’s view, and whatever orders stem from that view, carry the day,” wrote Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University professor and a widely respected authority on national security law, in a recent post on the Lawfare blog. (Harvard law student Sarah Grant [`19] co-wrote the post.)

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The secession of a region without constitutional authority is a big deal, as referendums in Catalonia and Kurdistan have shown in the last week. To get a sense of the possible consequences, think of the U.S. Civil War, which started precisely because Southern states insisted they could secede while Northern states pointed out that such a right was nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.

Victims of Takata Corp.’s rupture-prone air bags face additional lag time in receiving roughly $1 billion in payouts from the Japanese supplier after a court-appointed official encountered delays in steering the compensation...Eric Green, a Harvard University law professor appointed at the end of July to oversee the compensation funds, said he has “encountered a variety of delays and anticipates additional timing issues,” according to a status report filed in a Detroit federal court.

A new proposal from the Trump administration could force Californians to foot some of the bill for propping up struggling coal plants in Utah and Wyoming, critics say — but only if California Gov. Jerry Brown succeeds in his quest to unify the western power grid...While the text of Perry's proposal is difficult to decipher, its goal seems to be "guaranteed profitability" for certain power plants, said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School who has litigated cases before the commission. "It flies in the face of everything FERC has done for the last 20 years, which is really promoting the development of competitive markets for energy," Peskoe said.

Last November, from his downtown Colorado Springs home, local math educator Bob Nemanich, one of the 538 members of the Electoral College, helped launch a movement to try to change the way the United States chooses its president. Nearly a year later, he is still fighting. Nemanich is named as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed by national election law expert, Harvard Law School professor and attorney Lawrence Lessig, who briefly ran for president in 2016 before dropping out ahead of the Democratic primary...The legal action, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, aims to answer a major question once and for all, before the 2020 presidential election: Do members of the Electoral College have a constitutional ability to vote for whomever they want? “Regardless of what you believe the law is, it’s really important that it be clear before the next election,” Lessig says.

Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, who turned down the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal the year President Barack Obama gave the commencement address, will receive the 2018 Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal from the university's Center's for Ethics and Culture...She had been announced as the recipient of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 2009, but turned down the honor and did not attend the commencement ceremony because Obama was to be the primary speaker and receive an honorary degree.

When President Trump called for owners of National Football League teams to fire players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest racism, the response by players and others was an even more widespread dissent before games that touched a deep cultural nerve and shook a seminal American institution...“As a general rule, the Constitution’s free speech protections don’t apply in private-sector workplaces — including the NFL — so the First Amendment generally isn’t much help here,” said Benjamin Sachs, Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School and an authority on labor law.

...Faced with a lawsuit in Delaware, the state Medicaid program began loosening up treatment criteria this year, and in January will begin approving enrollees regardless of the severity of their disease. The state joins more than a dozen others that no longer (or never did) restrict hepatitis C treatment based on disease severity, said Kevin Costello, director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, which has been a key player in litigation in Delaware and other states.

Recently, I have worked with a number of professional services firms committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. Many offer diversity training and leadership development programs, and many support affinity groups for traditionally underrepresented groups. However, none has been able to crack what sometimes feels like a code set in stone: significantly increased diversity at the entry level, but very little change at the top...What if a de-biasing algorithm were used making sure the language in the feedback given was not inadvertently favoring one group over another? Field experiments by Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio of Harvard Law School suggest that such a process can level the playing field better than traditional, yearly performance appraisals.

...Joe Goffman, a long time air pollution attorney and a key architect of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, will be the next executive director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program. Goffman has worked for 30 years in various government roles. He was senior counsel in the Environmental Protection Agency's air and radiation office during the Obama administration, and since President Trump's inauguration, has worked in the Democratic staff on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "Using the vast intellectual and educational resources of the law school and the larger university, the ELP has already proven itself to be one of the country's most effective platforms to advance national environmental policy," Goffman said in a statement.