Media Mentions

A few weeks ago, I read a short new book by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein titled, simply, “Impeachment.” The book doesn’t mention President Trump once. Sunstein started writing it, he told me, partly because he was alarmed by what he considered reckless talk of impeachment during Trump’s first weeks on the job, before he had started doing much. Sunstein’s goal was to lay out a legal and historical framework for thinking about impeachment, independent of any specific president.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. We’re nearing the end of 2017, which means that it’s time to announce the most coveted of the annual movie awards: the Behavioral Economics Oscars (Becons for short). Created just a few years ago, the Becons, as they are called, have taken the film industry by storm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news that Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to Russia-related offenses is striking, for several reasons. The lies he told the FBI were about asking the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, for political favors during the presidential transition, some of which the ambassador granted. The lies happened when Flynn was already national security adviser and Donald Trump was president. The fact that Flynn lied about contacts with Russia seems particularly suspicious. The content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations deepens the narrative that special counsel Robert Mueller has been building: Earlier guilty pleas revealed Russian efforts to connect with the Trump campaign; this one reveals official contacts between the Trump team and Russia after the election -- contact significant enough for Flynn to lie to the FBI about.

As some Harvard graduate students have loudly opposed a Republican tax proposal that could slash students’ earnings, others say they are concerned about the plan’s “devastating” elimination of deductions for interest on student loans...Law School student Suzanne Schlossberg [`18] said that the striking of the loan interest deduction would also discourage students from pursuing lower-paying jobs in the public sector after graduation...Kenneth Lafler, the Law School’s assistant dean for student financial services, wrote in an email that loan interest deductions are important for making tuition affordable for Law School students.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court are used to applying 18th-century principles to an America that would bewilder the constitution’s framers. Yet sometimes this is really hard. On November 29th the court considered how a 226-year-old rule, the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, bears on one arrow in the government’s investigative quiver: tracking people’s movements via their mobile-phone signals...Ian Samuel of Harvard Law School agreed. The colonial-era reference caught the government’s lawyer “entirely off-guard”, he says. Now the justices must reckon with how to find for Mr Carpenter—no mean feat in light of the competing interests of privacy and policing.

Imagine a stack of documents that need to be reviewed. And another. And another. Instead of paying a contract attorney to navigate the papers, companies and law firms now have a second option: they can delegate the job to a software (and, hopefully, let legal professionals do more meaningful tasks, instead of cutting their jobs). A company in the Harvard Innovation Labs’ batch, Evisort, is developing a series of algorithms that are meant to “organize, categorize, and draw insights” out of legal contracts, as their pitch says. Formed by four law students from Harvard, two data scientists from MIT and two computer scientists from Northeastern University, the company launched almost a year ago and currently has eight employees...Currently, Evisort provides six A.I.-powered modules that can extrapolate the contents and the meaning of 24 types of contracts. “Fundamentally, it’s a search tool: it’s basically Google for contracts,” Jerry Ting [`18], Evisort co-founder and CEO, said in an interview.

For a man who has alternatively been called the face, the leader, and the speartip of the progressive “resistance” to the Trump administration, Xavier Becerra seems comfortable working outside the spotlight. When Gov. Jerry Brown tapped Becerra to replace U.S. Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California’s attorney general, the 59-year-old congressman came with more than two decades of experience cutting deals and building coalitions as a high-ranking, but...little-known representative...Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, for one, says Becerra has demonstrated national leadership “even in cases where his name is not in the headlines.” The skills that he developed in the House, building consensus and holding a caucus together, seem to have served Becerra in building ties with attorneys general in other states, said Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who teaches a class on the role of attorneys general. “He knew from his congressional experience that everybody counts.”

As tough as it is for black lawyers to rise to the top in law firms, it’s even tougher for black female attorneys. Though black women have outnumbered black men in law schools for about two decades, they constitute only a fraction of the already tiny number of black partners at major firms: Less than two percent of Big Law partners are black, and 0.56 percent are female and black. Black women are the minority within the minority. Even the best-credentialed black female lawyers seem to fare poorly. According to a new Harvard Law School study of black alumni, male black alums were more likely to be partners than their female counterparts...“Black women have all the problems of black men plus what white women face,” says Harvard Law School professor David Wilkins, the author of the study about black alums.

...The Law School’s library will not change its hours during reading period, but it will limit which students may study there, according to Harvard Law School Library Executive Director Jocelyn Kennedy. “During fall and spring reading and exam periods, HUID access to the Harvard Law School Library is limited to Harvard Law School students, faculty and staff” according to the Harvard Law School Library website. Other HUID card holders "must check in at the Circulation Desk for access.”

A New Hampshire man who used his phone to record two on-duty police officers as they were searching his house was awarded $275,000 in a federal civil rights lawsuit. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who had filed the lawsuit, said Wednesday that the city of Manchester will pay Alfredo Valentin, who was arrested in 2015 on misdemeanor wiretapping charges after he used his phone to record the officers...Chiraag Bains, a former senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and who is now a visiting senior fellow at Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, said people “feel they have a right to know what the police, who are public servants after all, are doing.” “In many places, officers understand that being recorded when performing their public duties is a part of the job,” Bains said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Adrian Vermeule. Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

The rapid rise of wind and natural gas as sources of electricity is roiling U.S. power markets, forcing more companies to close older generating plants. Wholesale electricity prices are falling near historic lows in parts of the country with competitive power markets, as demand for electricity remains stagnant while newer, less-expensive generating facilities continue to come online....“Generators are just fighting for existing market share,” said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “The aging fleet of coal and nuke generators, combined with low prices, makes this intense.”

An interview with Susan Crawford. Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford on the risks of the FCC’s plan to do away with net neutrality rules and why she believes the agency should be focused instead on ensuring that all Americans have access to cheap, world class internet access. Then, Charlie Savage of the New York Times on how President Trump is reshaping the U.S. judiciary.

Barker was speaking at an advance screening of his documentary “The Final Year"—which chronicles foreign policy initiatives in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidential administration—at the Harvard Art Museums on Wednesday night. The screening was followed by a question-and-answer session with Barker and former United Nations ambassador Samantha J. Power. The documentary, set to be released on Jan. 19, 2018, follows Obama and several of his senior officials, including Power, who is currently a professor of global leadership and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of practice at the Harvard Law School...“We need to draw people into public service and government,” Power said. She also encouraged young people and Harvard students to consider entering the foreign service.

When it comes to workplace conflict, many of us sabotage ourselves. Instead of preparing for difficult conversations—which requires dealing with uncomfortable emotions and complex strategies—we avoid the issue until we’re forced to confront it, face-to-face. Emotions like anger and fear then get the best of us, inhibiting effective resolution. Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation deal with this conundrum daily. “It’s my observation that too many negotiators wing it,” says Douglas Stone, a negotiation lecturer at Harvard Law, a managing partner at Triad Consulting Group, and co-author of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I’ve got bad news for everyone who is working overtime to protest Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s campaign to eliminate net neutrality: You are being tricked. Pai is running a kind of shell game, overreaching (“go ahead and run all the paid prioritization services you want, Comcast!”) so that we will focus our energies on the hard-to-pin-down concept of net neutrality—the principle of internet access fairness that he has vowed to eliminate.

An interview with Glenn Cohen. The first so-called digital pill has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s a version of the antipsychotic drug Abilify and contains a tiny sensor that will send a signal to a patch the user is wearing. Advocates say the digital version will keep patients from forgetting to take their medicine. Others are concerned about potential Big Brother components related to ingesting something that could transmit information externally.

...Truthfeed appears to have connections to Trump’s political orbit, and its principal author has links to white supremacists and anti-Semites...Media researchers have found that Truthfeed takes pro-Trump disinformation to new heights. “Truthfeed is highly, highly partisan, highly pro-Trump, and willing to bend the truth considerably—if not make things up entirely—in order to promote the Trump agenda,” says Robert Faris, research director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, which studies the internet’s role in society.

Any major tax bill has unintended consequences and hidden loopholes. But the current Republican tax effort just bristles with such potential miscues. It's a slipshod product, legislated with minimal transparency and analysis and with a premium on partisan politics. The Senate is slated to vote this week on a tax bill that's similar to the one the House passed on Nov. 16. Both call for huge tax cuts, primarily for corporations and upper-income individuals, with little, sometimes nothing, for many middle-class taxpayers. Both parade as tax reform, but do little to reorganize the tax system as the last real tax reform did in a bipartisan measure passed in 1986...Stephen Shay, a Harvard University law school lecturer, tax lawyer and former Treasury official, has predicted that the rushed legislation "will be rife with undiscovered loopholes that increase the windfalls and scope of the deficit." The Finance Committee did hold an Oct. 3 hearing, he noted, but it lacked substance and was "irrelevant except to permit the committee majority to say a hearing was held."

As the nation faces the frequency of sexual harassment and assault at work, both experts who study the problem and the agency that enforces laws against it say that it’s women at the bottom of the labor market who suffer sexual harassment most often and are least likely to see anything like justice. Their experiences also suggest that the lines between predators and complicit cover artists don’t fall neatly along gender lines — often, the stories include women who overlooked sexual assaults or even facilitated harassment of female workers with less power to fight it...Vinson is a former Washington bank clerk who filed the suit which established the legal concept of the “hostile work environment” and prompted the Supreme Court to declare this a form of discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Vinson is also one of several black women who brought litigation central to almost every sexual harassment case which reaches a courtroom today, said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University and a legal historian.

After a 1993 fire, accidentally triggered by federal authorities, killed 75 members of an obscure Christian sect near Waco, Texas, one of the “lessons learned” was this: Call in religion experts in a crisis where faith is a factor. This month, nearly 25 years after the debacle now simply referred to as “Waco,” FBI officials and scholars from the American Academy of Religion gathered at Harvard Divinity School to reflect on how the crisis in Texas led to a new relationship between them – and on the challenges ahead...After 51 days, law enforcement moved to end the standoff by force but had “no qualified knowledge of how highly religious people would respond to the storming of (their) building,” said retired Harvard law professor Philip Heymann. As deputy attorney general at the time, he authored a report in the aftermath of Waco that emphasized the need for seeking out religious expertise in dealing with confrontations.