Media Mentions

A letter by Delcianna Winders. Just because Syria Shrine Circus handlers didn't abuse the animals while a Pittsburgh councilwoman was riding on their backs doesn't mean they're well-treated ( “Pittsburgh councilwoman takes circus test ride”). To the contrary, abundant evidence leaves no question that these animals suffer routine abuse. Carson & Barnes Circus, the company that supplies the elephant act for the circus, has an extensive rap sheet of Animal Welfare Act violations. It has repeatedly paid penalties for these violations, including after its head trainer was caught on video hitting elephants with a bullhook, which resembles a fireplace poker, and shocking them with an electric prod.

Labor unions in America are in crisis. In the mid-1950s, a third of Americans belonged to a labor union. Today, only 10.7 percent do, including a minuscule 6.4 percent of private sector workers. The decline of union membership explains as much as a third of the increase in inequality in the US, caused voter turnout among low-income workers to crater, and weakened labor’s ability to check corporate influence in DC and state capitals...But the recent victorious fight for a $15 minimum wage in New York offers a path to sectoral bargaining at the state level...“Sectoral bargaining is certainly getting more attention in legal academic and labor law policy debates,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard law school and former practicing labor lawyer, says.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. If there’s one thing that brings Americans together, it’s our hatred of the giant companies that sell us high-speed data services. Consumers routinely give Comcast, Charter (now Spectrum), Verizon, CenturyLink and AT&T basement-level scores for customer satisfaction. This collective resentment is fueled by the sense that we don’t have a choice when we sign up for their services. By and large, we don’t: These five companies account for over 80 percent of wired subscriptions and have almost total power in their territories. According to the Federal Communications Commission, nearly 75 percent of Americans have at most one choice for high-speed data.

The evidence is staggering. Three tons of captured Syrian government documents, providing a chilling and extensive catalog of the state’s war crimes, are held by a single organization in Europe. A Syrian police photographer fled with pictures of more than 6,000 dead at the hands of the state, many of them tortured. The smartphone alone has broken war’s barriers: Records of crimes are now so graphic, so immediate, so overwhelming...Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor, said accountability is a matter of politics and so far Syria has not been high in the world’s priorities. But he has been surprised, tenuously, since the latest chemical attack.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought sweeping change to the Department of Justice. In just two months as the nation’s top cop, Sessions has moved quickly to overhaul the policies and priorities set by the Obama administration...Alex Whiting, faculty co-director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School, said it appears Sessions is resurrecting the tough on crime policies last seen during the George W. Bush administration. “Obama moved away from that approach, and I think in the criminal justice world there seemed to be a consensus between the right and left that those policies, those rigid policies of the war on drugs and trying to get the highest sentence all the time, had failed,” he said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe, Richard W. Painter, and Norman L. Eisen. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump broke with decades of tradition and declined to release to the public his federal tax returns, as every president since Richard Nixon had done. Trump's decision highlighted the fact, previously unknown to many, that prior candidates had released their tax return not due to a legal obligation, but because they believed -- correctly -- that the information was important to voters.

Corrected version. Professors and students at the Law School gathered on Tuesday to argue whether aggressive acts by international states should be included under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court...Harvard Law professor Alex Whiting and Middlesex University London professors William Schabas and Donald Ferencz spoke on the panel. Law School Dean Martha Minow and Law School professor Gerald L. Neuman '73 also spoke at the event...The event continued with references to essays written by symposium contributors, including members of the Harvard International Law Journal that organized the symposium. Marissa R. Brodney [`18], an executive editor of Harvard International Law Journal, wrote an essay on the designation for victims of aggression. “The symposium explores what has always been a relevant question and has become an increasingly relevant question in our current geopolitical moment” Brodney said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news media have been quick to note U.S. President Donald Trump’s embrace of bombing in Syria and the need for NATO as reversals of the foreign policy he advocated on the stump. But he’s made another flip in the past week that’s just as consequential, and possibly more important for his future foreign policy. By asking China to “solve the North Korean problem” in exchange for an improved trade deal, Trump has embraced linkage. Broadly, linkage is the idea that economic policy and geopolitical strategy can be used in tandem, with trade-offs between the two realms. This idea wasn’t on Trump’s radar before the election, especially not with respect to China.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Most of the coverage of the United Airlines bumping debacle assumes something like, “United Airlines had a right to remove that flier. But should it have?” But a close reading of the fine print of the contract included in every ticket purchased from United Continental Holdings Inc. strongly suggests that United in fact breached its contract with passenger David Dao. The contract allows the airline to deny boarding involuntarily in case of overbooking. But that’s not what happened; the airplane wasn’t oversold.

A letter by Delcianna Winders. Anyone considering going to the Jordan World Circus should know that this notorious outfit has been cited for a host of animal welfare violations. Jordan World Circus and the animal exhibitors it features have repeatedly endangered the public, including when an elephant attacked her trainer while giving rides, allowing an elephant to escape and a bear to get loose, and failing to protect the public during photo-ops with bears.

Ten Harvard Law School student affinity groups have endorsed Professor David B. Wilkins ’77 to be the next Dean of the Law School in a letter published in The Harvard Law Record Wednesday...Natalie D. Vernon [`17], who co-wrote the letter and is the president of the Women’s Law Association, said drafters of the letter started by determining the qualities of an individual who would be best suited to the deanship. “We started with a big picture conversation about the qualities we think a dean should possess,” Vernon said. “We took a look around and we had some conversations about who would best meet these qualities, and Professor Wilkins is above and beyond the best candidate for the job.” Kristin A. Turner [`17], who also co-wrote the letter and is the president of the Black Law Students’ Association, said the students who drafted the letter decided to endorse a specific candidate to offer a concrete option.

Samantha Power, who served as the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 until 2017, has been named to a joint faculty appointment at Harvard Law School (HLS) and Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), the deans of the two Schools announced Thursday. The appointment begins immediately...“I am very excited to return to Harvard, as I believe it is essential that we do all we can to ensure that graduates have the skills they need to succeed in messy geopolitical and multilateral environments,” said Power. “Given the daunting challenges we confront — whether from terrorism, rising nationalism, climate change, or mass atrocities — it is essential that we in academia draw lessons from experience, devise practical approaches, and prepare the next generation to improve their communities, their countries, and the world.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Something good might come of the horrible incident involving United Airlines, in which a passenger was forcibly evicted to make room for airline personnel. The Department of Transportation, working with the major airlines, should substantially increase the compensation given to passengers involuntarily bumped because of overbooking. By itself, overbooking is not objectionable. Sometimes passengers miss flights because of late connections. Sometimes they just don’t show up. Most airlines occasionally overbook.

A predominant theme in Silicon Valley over the past year involves powerful founders behaving badly. Uber Technologies Inc. and Zenefits, a maker of human resources software, are two companies whose public reputations have been partly undone by such conduct. Now the same destructive dynamic appears to be playing out at Tanium Inc...The situation at Tanium underscores the risk of venture capitalists placing near-absolute power in the hands of a company’s creators. Orion Hindawi and his father David control more than 60 percent of votes on Tanium’s board. Similar structures have worked for Facebook Inc. and Snap Inc., but investors take on increased risk by ceding authority, said Jesse Fried, a professor of business law at Harvard University: “If you have a CEO who generally is doing a good job but is acting bad on the margins, you’re not going to get in their face.”

Telecommunications policy has been in flux since President Trump designated Ajit Pai the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in January. How will issues such as expanding high-speed Internet availability and preserving net neutrality fare under the Trump administration? Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford has advised President Obama and two New York City mayors (Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio) on science, technology, and innovation policy. She also co-led the FCC transition team between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and writes books and articles about telecom policy. She spoke to MIT Technology Review about the value of local community fiber networks, what she thinks the new FCC should do, and her predictions for the future of net neutrality.

When President Trump chose the Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, his mission was clear: Carry out Mr. Trump’s campaign vows to radically reduce the size and scope of the agency and take apart President Barack Obama’s ambitious climate change policies...Legal experts say they can see why opponents of climate change policy want to go after the endangerment finding — as long as it remains in place, any efforts to undo climate regulations can always be reversed. “As a matter of theory, they’re absolutely right,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “If you want to get rid of the climate stuff, you get rid of the root, not just the branches. They want him to uproot the whole thing.”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 228 new members. Members of the 2017 class include winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the Wolf Prize; MacArthur Fellows; Fields Medalists; Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Arts recipients; and Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award winners. Among them are 13 Harvard faculty and two benefactors. Those elected from Harvard include Alan M. Garber, provost of Harvard University and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; John A. Quelch, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration; Jonathan L. Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law...Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing — and opportunities available to — the nation and the world.

Professors and students at the Law School gathered on Tuesday to argue whether aggressive acts by international states should be included under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court...Harvard Law professors Gerald Neuman and Alex Whiting and Middlesex University London professor William Schabas spoke on the panel...The event continued with references to essays written by members of the Harvard International Law Journal that organized the symposium. Marissa R. Brodney [`18], the executive editor of Harvard International Law Journal, wrote an essay on the designation for victims of aggression. “The symposium explores what has always been a relevant question and has become an increasingly relevant question in our current geopolitical moment” Brodney said.

Jacob Weisberg and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman discuss the three most pressing categories from which the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump may be drawn—corruption, abuse of power, and the violation of democratic norms.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the debate over whether U.S. President Donald Trump needed congressional authorization to bomb Syria after last week’s chemical weapons attack, one important reality is being obscured: The expansion of the imperial presidency is nonpartisan. Trump’s minimalist rationale for the cruise-missile strike marks a stronger version of the claim to executive power than any other president has invoked. But that claim is building on substantial extensions of unilateral power made by Bill Clinton in bombing Kosovo and Barack Obama in bombing Libya.

An op-ed by visiting fellow Jordan Brennan and Kaylie Tiessen. In 2015, hot on the campaign trail and seeking a way to differentiate themselves from their political opponents, the Trudeau Liberals made a political calculation: rather than raise taxes to finance their spending commitments, they would resort to deficit financing. The initial promise was to run two consecutive $10 billion dollar deficits before returning to budgetary balance in 2019, though once in office that commitment was promptly jettisoned. In Budget 2017 we learned that last year’s deficit was $23 billion, this year’s deficit will rise to $29 billion and, by 2019, the shortfall will still be $23 billion.