Media Mentions

A central issue was the decision this week of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to review the consent decrees the U.S. Justice Department had arranged with police departments after patterns of unconstitutional racial discrimination and excessive force, including the shootings of black men. Chiraag Bains, senior fellow at Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program and former senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Obama, cited the review as evidence the Justice Department has been “predictably disastrous” on civil rights. “This administration insists that policing is a purely local matter into which the federal government should not intrude,” Bains said. “But we’re not talking about a federal takeover of these departments. We’re talking about the enforcement and protection of constitutional rights. There is no federalism problem.”

...By the hour, it seems, the legal and financial noose of convicting certainty is tightening around the necks of Trump’s campaign aides, and even some within his Cabinet, whose prime reason for appointment now appears to center around their ties to Russia. If some reports are to be believed, under the weight of mounting evidence, which could lead to his impeachment or imprisonment, Trump is ostensibly considering resignation. But don’t light up the fireworks — at least, not just yet...“As it stands today, the Constitution contains a serious design flaw,” Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe told me Sunday in an email communication.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s probably naive to think that there could be a nuanced conversation about Judge Neil Gorsuch’s citation of sources in his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.” But that’s precisely what we need. There’s no doubt that in at least one extended passage, Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, copied wording from an article in the Indiana Law Journal with only trivial changes and without citing the article. There’s even a footnote that’s replicated verbatim from the article, down to the exact same use of ellipses in citing a pediatrics textbook.

Eight weeks ago President Donald Trump said he would be releasing a “phenomenal” tax plan within two or three weeks. But there’s no sign of a plan yet, and mixed signals from the White House are imperiling Republican promises of speedy action. The administration hasn’t yet publicly answered the most basic questions about what a possible tax reform plan would look like. Will it pay for itself with offsets or add to the deficit? Trump hasn’t said...“I don’t think there’s clarity yet on who’s running the train,” said Stephen Shay, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, who was a senior tax official at Treasury during the last big tax overhaul under President Ronald Reagan. Referring to the current administration, Shay said “there’s nobody inside who has the knowledge base to put together tax reform.”

Styling themselves as characters from "Harry Potter," a group of Harvard students has launched the "Resistance School," a four-session program designed to teach techniques for challenging President Donald Trump's administration. Founded by former campaign staffers, organizers, and activists, the Resistance School aims to “sharpen the tools [necessary] to fight back at the federal, state, and local levels,” according to its website...Co-founder Joseph L. Breen [`17], a student at the Kennedy School and the Law School, said the idea for the training program came after the election as students and professors discussed how they could best stand up to Trump.

...China also hasn’t always abided by the norms of the international institutions it’s sought to join. In 2016, the International Monetary Fund included the Chinese yuan in its basket of currencies that make up the fund’s special drawing rights. Yet Chinese policymakers have generally reneged on their promises to allow the currency to trade more freely. In its latest report on Chinese compliance with World Trade Organization rules, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative raised concerns that China isn’t meeting its obligations on a wide range of issues, from tax policies to export restrictions to product standards. “There is increasing disgruntlement among some trade officials that China may be gaming the system,” says Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied China and the WTO.

United Nations Security Council talks on Syria hit a familiar snag on Wednesday, with clashes between the United States, Russia and other members blocking action on the latest case of poison gas killings in the country’s civil war...With the administration of US President Donald Trump edging closer towards accommodating Russian and Iranian efforts to keep Assad in power once the six-year-old war grinds to a halt, prospects for justice are bleak. “Though the crimes in Syria are on a staggering scale, there has been a blockage for any accountability,” Alex Whiting, a former ICC lawyer, told Middle East Eye.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s certainly symbolic that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called for a review of agreements made by the Obama Department of Justice with urban police departments to improve law enforcement and race relations. But in practice, reversing the 14 consent decrees in place would be extraordinarily difficult, and even the handful that are incomplete, such as the Baltimore decree, may well reach finality despite the review. President Donald Trump’s administration can affect community policing at the margin by signaling that it doesn’t care about police abuses. But it likely can’t roll back the steps taken under President Barack Obama.

Gish Jen has made a literary career in part from writing about the experiences of Chinese-Americans. During a lunchtime talk at Harvard Law School (HLS), she discussed her latest book, “The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap,” making the case for the sociological and cultural patterns that influence many aspects of identity...Jen got support for her theory during her March 29 talk from a small panel of speakers that included HLS Assistant Professor Mark Wu and Joseph William Singer, Bussey Professor of Law, who gave many pit-versus-flexi examples in business, mental health, and family.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Can local law enforcement agencies detain someone at the request of federal immigration authorities, or is that in violation of the Massachusetts state constitution? That was the question before the state's highest court on Monday in the case of Commonwealth v. Lunn — a Cambodian national who was detained by state court officers at the request of federal immigration officials, even though Lunn's state criminal case had been dismissed.

In February 2017, Microsoft announced Skype Lite, a brand-new edition of Skype just for India. A more spartan version of Microsoft’s marquee messaging service, Skype Lite is designed to run well on cheap Android phones and to handle calls over flaky 2G data networks — the trappings of an app made by a large, wealthy corporation for a large and largely poor emerging market. But that’s not all it does. Skype Lite also taps into a giant government-owned database filled with the demographic and biometric records — names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, photographs, iris and fingerprint scans — of more than a billion Indian citizens...Cryptographer and cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier echoed Hunt’s assessment. “When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data,” he said. “They will go around the encryption.”

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia has rejected efforts by the American Studies Association (ASA) to suppress a lawsuit filed against the Association by its own members challenging its boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. The judge ruled in favor of the ASA professors in four out of six claims, and authorized the case to go forward...“The circumstances of the ASA’s purported adoption of an anti-Israel BDS resolution are deeply shocking,” stated Harvard University Law Professor Jesse Fried who served as an expert adviser to the litigation team representing the plaintiffs.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with the decision by Donald Trump’s White House to stop the practice of giving the American Bar Association access to its judicial nominees in order to rate them. But in practice, the decision is scary and hypocritical -- because the administration waited until after the ABA gave Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch its highest rating before making it. That’s frightening because it implies that Trump’s future court nominees will be the kind of people who have no chance at the coveted “well-qualified” rating.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. He sounds so judicial. He talks about neutrality, raising plain vanilla issues about deference to the expertise of administrative agencies. It is boring, hardly likely to engender indignation. He says his decisions are required by the law — not affected by his own background. He is Judge Neil Gorsuch and he may soon be on the Supreme Court. Don’t be fooled. His approach is not neutral, not required by the law, and far out of the mainstream. Quite apart from social issues like abortion or gay rights, his approach could gut health and safety and antidiscrimination laws.

An interview with Cass Sunstein. Back in 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, had a vision for a personalized web. He said, in a Wall Street Journal interview, that one day, "technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." Of course, Schmidt was exactly right — think Netflix, Pandora, Google News. But, according to Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, that personalization, especially on social media, has also isolated us, polarized our political parties and divided our democracy.

An article by Andrew Hellman `19 and Glenn Cohen. Many children conceived using donor sperm or eggs want to know their biological parents. In the US, some clinics make the identity of the sperm donor available to a donor-conceived child at age 18. Most intending parents, though, choose sperm donation programs that do not reveal the identities of the sperm donors – so-called 'anonymous sperm donation' (though some have questioned whether true anonymity is possible in a world of social media and direct-to-consumer genetic testing).

An article by Emma O'Hara `17, Kelly J. Popkin `17, and Dixie Tauber `17. Like many members of the Harvard community, the Gender Violence Legal Policy Workshop at the Law School was deeply disturbed by the 2015 American Association of Universities report disclosing the widespread sexual abuse that takes place at Harvard. While initially grateful that the College appeared to have taken affirmative steps to address this issue through its proposed sanctions on single-gender social organizations, we were dismayed to learn that sexual assault prevention is no longer the driving force behind the sanctions.

...Hungarian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a fast-track amendment to Hungary’s higher education act that tightens the rules for foreign registered universities, most notably CEU — or “Soros University” as some ministers call it...Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of international affairs at Princeton University in the US, says the amendment illustrated the ruling Fidesz party’s longstanding suspicion of academic independence, citing reforms in 2011 that granted the government power to appoint rectors of most universities. “CEU was the last untouched university in Hungary, it was only a matter of time before the government came for them,” she says.

There are 205 accredited law schools in the US. If Neil Gorsuch is confirmed for the Supreme Court, two-thirds of the current justices will have studied at just one of them: Harvard...“It does mean something and it does matter,” says Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The Supreme Court didn’t use to be this way...Earlier courts were quite geographically diverse and educationally diverse.”...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law specialist at Harvard, says the court would benefit from greater diversity. The homogeneity of education and professional experience among the nine justices “skews the perspectives they bring” to the 70 or so cases decided each year. Along with complex legalities, those disputes turn on “questions of perspective and empathy, understanding of how the world works and what makes human, rather than just legalistic, sense”, he says...Richard Lazarus, a Harvard professor who has argued 13 Supreme Court cases, says the Trump presidency, already entangled in a series of legal challenges, could reverse the decline as idealistic young people conclude anew that “law matters”.

From the Philippines to Britain, 2016 was a year of political shake-ups, with voters in several countries across the globe ushering populist candidates or policies into office to combat inequality and "politics as usual," often highlighting corruption in the "insider" system they opposed. But in the push to reform their countries, such politicians can play a role in further corrupting government offices, a new report cautions, leading to continued social disparities and decreased transparency...“We’re seeing a wave of voter anger sweeping across a lot of democratic systems,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University, tells the Monitor.

In his first two weeks in office, President Donald Trump's "America First" pledge has proven more than an idle slogan. In word and deed, the White House has signaled an aggressive unilateral stance toward the world that's antagonized allies abroad and divided supporters at home. Trump's orders barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, temporarily halted in part by courts after sparking confusion and chaos at airports, were an exclamation point. In his short time in office, he's also defended the use of torture, tossed out the Trans-Pacific Partnership, demanded Mexico pay for a border wall, and threatened to withdraw from NAFTA, the sweeping hemispheric trade deal, if he can't renegotiate its terms..."Treating the system like its optional, or that it doesn't have any important function at the moment, is more dangerous than trying to destroy it deliberately," Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, said.