Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The keystone of President Donald Trump’s executive order on the environment, signed Tuesday, is a directive to the Environmental Protection Agency to review and rescind the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to shift the country’s electricity generation from coal-fired plants to sources that emit less carbon. When the EPA acts, that will trigger a legal fight about whether the Trump plan complies with the Clean Air Act. And that fight will almost certainly involve the doctrine of Chevron deference, Neil Gorsuch’s special target of judicial dislike.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that President Donald Trump has failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, he’s turning to tax cuts to get a much-needed political win. There’s just one problem: What the Republicans want violates international law. If the reform bears any resemblance to the leading proposal, favoring corporate exports over imports, it’s going to get the U.S. sued in the World Trade Organization -- where it will lose.

One of the first young undocumented immigrants to be detained under President Donald Trump’s new deportation priorities is expected to be released on Wednesday, his attorneys announced. An immigration judge in Seattle agreed on Tuesday to allow Daniel Ramirez Medina, 24, to post a $15,000 bond in exchange for his release — all while a challenge to his deportation and a separate case in federal court proceed through separate tracks. He has no criminal record...Laurence Tribe, a prominent Harvard law professor who is contributing to Ramirez’s legal efforts, said on Twitter that the immigrant’s fight “isn’t over.”

Donald Trump launched an all-out assault on Barack Obama’s climate change legacy on Tuesday with a sweeping executive order that undermines America’s commitment to the Paris agreement. Watched by coalminers at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, the president signed an order to trigger a review of the clean power plan, Obama’s flagship policy to curb carbon emissions, and rescind a moratorium on the sale of coalmining leases on federal lands...“Whatever process was used create it, that process will have to be used to undo it,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law expert at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. It’s good to be one of the handful of companies controlling data transmission in America. It’s even better — from their perspective — to avoid oversight. And it’s best of all to be a carrier that gets government to actually stop existing oversight. The stagnant telecommunications industry in America has long pursued the second of those goals — avoiding oversight, or even long-range thinking that would favor the interests of all other businesses and all other Americans over those of AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Comcast — by proclaiming that there is something really magnificent coming any day now from the industry that will make anything regulators are worrying about irrelevant.

You’ve probably heard the warnings. Yet there you are: Scrolling frantically through an app's Terms of Service's pages for a glaring reason to not share your email or birth date — or, perhaps more likely, skipping right past it all and clicking “Agree.” The app makers know better than to bold anything or make anything clear — especially about how your actions will morph into marketing metadata, sprinkling a trail of "cookies" behind you...Security technologist and cryptographer Bruce Schneier compares walking around with a smartphone to carrying a tracking device 24/7.

What would possess two Obama Administration veterans to propose that the Trump Administration—which on Tuesday revoked much of Obama's climate legacy—implement a cap and trade program to reduce auto emissions? A new cap-and-trade proposal was unveiled Monday by Cass Sunstein, now of Harvard Law School, who headed Obama's effort to streamline regulations, and Michael Greenstone, now of the University of Chicago, who served as chief architect of Obama's "social cost of carbon" policy, which enabled the government to consider the climate impacts of nearly everything it does—until Trump abandoned the policy yesterday.

An op-ed by Yee Mon Htun and Tyler Giannini. At first glance, the UN Human Rights Council resolution passed on Myanmar looks like a rebuke of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) government. The resolution calls for an international investigation into “alleged recent human rights violations by the military and security forces,” singling out Rakhine State in particular for scrutiny. Given her muted public response to the violence, her government’s denials, and the lack of any serious domestic investigation to date, it would be easy to lay a lot of the blame at Aung San Suu Kyi’s door.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Constitutional checks and balances are doing their job, making sure Donald Trump doesn’t rule on his own. First, it was the courts blocking the president’s executive order on immigration -- twice. Now, remarkably enough, it’s Congress, which has refused to repeal the Affordable Care Act and change Obamacare into Trumpcare. Last week’s developments on Capitol Hill may seem more surprising, because a Congress of the same party is typically a weaker check on a president than an opposition-dominated one. But the constitutional design of separation of powers is supposed to work regardless of parties -- and in historical terms, it often has.

President Trump is set to make a trip to the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday to sign an executive order that will "initiate a review" of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan and unravel a handful of other energy orders and memorandums instituted by his predecessor...Exactly how the Clean Power Plan will affect the Paris Climate Agreement is "unknowable," Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University told ABC News. "As a formal matter, we cannot really withdraw from Paris for about two years," said Lazarus.

Muslims complain they're frivolous bills meant to spread fears and sow suspicion of their religion in a nation divided. But supporters of state proposals, including one in Montana, to prevent Islamic code from being used in American courts argue they aren't overtly anti-Muslim and are needed to safeguard constitutional rights for average Americans...But Will Smiley, an editor at the Harvard Law School's SHARIAsource, an online collection of academic writings on Islamic law, is skeptical the bills proposed by lawmakers would have made a difference in the initial ruling. "These new laws don't provide any new safeguards," Smiley said. "Courts can still make mistakes, like most observers agree that New Jersey court did."

Economists and regulatory experts are proposing a cap-and-trade system for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions to replace existing fuel economy standards...Michael Greenstone and Sam Ori from the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and Cass Sunstein, former President Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and now a legal scholar at Harvard University, saw an opening...Sunstein, one of the country's leading legal scholars, argued that EPA could implement the system after 2025 without passing legislation because it is required to regulate tailpipe emissions. "The Trump administration has a policy challenge," he said. "They seem inclined to think that it's too aggressive now, but how to form a new proposal is very much in their hands...If the legal and administrative challenges can be met, they can meet their own goals, which is having something less burdensome, and energy savings goals."

President Donald Trump on Tuesday will order the Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle his predecessor's landmark climate effort, backing away from an aggressive plan to cut emissions at power plants that had been the foundation of America's leadership on confronting global warming..."There is a real question of whether they can legally dismantle the Clean Power Plan and replace it with nothing," said Jody Freeman, who was Obama's adviser on climate change and now directs the environmental law program at Harvard. Before the plan was put in place, she said, utilities found themselves exposed to potentially costly nuisance lawsuits from states demanding they take action to limit exposure to the public health threat of carbon. Those suits could re-emerge, she said, if the revised EPA plan lifts greenhouse gas restrictions on power companies.

There has been no shortage of events at Harvard on the public’s loss of trust in journalism and the prominence of fake news stories and outlets. In many ways, Thursday’s panel at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, moderated by Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow, was a practical outcome of those discussions. The panel, titled “Fake News, Concrete Responses: At the Nexus of Law, Technology, and Social Narratives,” presented four Berkman Klein staff members who talked about existing and potential tools with which to combat the wave of misinformation that escalated during the 2016 election cycle and shows no sign of slowing down today. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” quoted Bemis professor of international law Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the center.

That “fake news” is both pervasive and dangerous is no longer in doubt. How best to respond, however, is still an open subject. Because of that, the topic made for a lively panel at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society...What is fake news? The range of possibilities, said Berkman Klein Fellow An Xiao Mina, is broad enough to render the term almost meaningless, and can encompass everything from “when an Onion article is cited as news to dealing with state-sponsored propaganda botnets.” Professor Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law and co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center, offered a definition based on intent, defining fake news as that which is “willfully false,” which he said means a story “that the person saying or repeating knows to be untrue or is indifferent to whether it is true or false.”

...Federalism is part of our government’s design — a vertical sharing of power between the national and state governments. Our Constitution outlines a separation of powers between the federal government’s three branches. The 10th Amendment holds onto the remaining balance of power for the states, which is often referred to as states’ rights. With the national government now in a Republican grip and President Trump rolling out executive orders, a conversation has begun about what a progressive federalism makeover might look like. Federalism — a vertical, ambiguous division of power — doesn’t have a particular political valence, says Kenneth Mack, a legal historian at Harvard Law School.

f you travel by air from certain countries – which happen to be Muslim-majority – to the US or UK, you will no longer be allowed to take your laptop or tablet in your hand baggage. You will probably have lots of questions, such as: why has the US banned them from flights operated by airlines based in those countries, but not on US carriers?...“It makes so little sense,” says Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

An op-ed by Richad Hirani `19. The world is watching, Canada. Given global circumstances, Canada has been uniquely placed to capture the world's attention and admiration. While Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States grapple with a political climate that has become more hostile to Islam, Canada has had the opportunity to affirm itself as a beacon of inclusivity and diversity. Canada has been positioned to send a symbolic message not only to its global allies, but more importantly, to the thousands of Muslim-Canadian families at home.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Charles Schumer, the leader of the Senate minority, has said that he will ask Democrats to filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch. In response to that request, the Senate Democrats have four options. Each of them has considerable appeal, but each also runs into significant objections.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s suggestion that Democrats will filibuster Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court might make sense as payback for the Republicans’ block on Judge Merrick Garland -- if the Democrats thought they could lockout any Trump nominee until 2020. If not, however, this seems like a bad moment to bring out the filibuster and subject it to the risk that the Republicans will use the so-called nuclear option to eliminate it for this and future Supreme Court fights.

An op-ed by John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky. On Monday, the Connecticut Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Munn v. Hotchkiss, a tragic personal injury case. The court will be sorely tempted to make bad law in Munn. It must resist that temptation. Cara Munn, 15, was bitten by a tick while hiking on a mountain in China during a summer trip organized by The Hotchkiss School, her private school. The tick transmitted encephalitis, which has left her permanently unable to speak. Cara and her parents sued Hotchkiss in a federal court, arguing that the school was negligent for failing to warn them that the trip might bring her into contact with disease-bearing insects and for failing to take steps to ensure that she used insect repellant, wore proper clothes while walking in forested areas and checked herself for ticks.