Media Mentions

In real life, in the natural course of conversation, it is not uncommon to talk about a person you may know. You meet someone and say, “I’m from Sarasota,” and they say, “Oh, I have a grandparent in Sarasota,” and they tell you where they live and their name, and you may or may not recognize them. You might assume Facebook’s friend recommendations would work the same way: You tell the social network who you are, and it tells you who you might know in the online world. But Facebook’s machinery operates on a scale far beyond normal human interactions. And the results of its People You May Know algorithm are anything but obvious...Facebook doesn’t keep profiles for non-users, but it does use their contact information to connect people. “Mobile phone numbers are even better than social security numbers for identifying people,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier by email. “People give them out all the time, and they’re strongly linked to identity.”

...Vietnam has a complicated relationship with the social network. Once blocked, and still scrutinized, it has attracted the ire of authorities keen to preserve communist rule while becoming an avenue for budding entrepreneurs since access was restored. ...The government has to strike the right balance because pressure on social networks can backfire, said Rob Faris, research director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “The threat of shutting down sites, even if temporary, will inhibit investments in the digital economy and hamper innovation,” he said. “As more people conduct more of their lives on large platforms such as Facebook, the cost of blocking Facebook increases.”

At Uber, discrimination was baked into the system, a new suit alleges, pointing to systemic bias against women in the ride-sharing company’s performance evaluations. To assess and promote -- or fire -- workers, Uber Technologies Inc. used a practice known as stack ranking, a zero-sum evaluation that pits employees against one another. According to the lawsuit, filed in October by a former engineer at the company, Roxana Del Toro Lopez, stack rankings unfairly and disproportionately hurt women...Academic researchers have found that performance rating systems like stack rankings play to managers’ unconscious -- and conscious -- biases. Reviewing a decade of performance reviews at a “large professional services firm,” Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, a senior research fellow at Harvard Law School, found that women were 1.4 times more likely than men to receive critical feedback in highly subjective categories.

In almost every way, John F. Manning ’82 is the very image of a Harvard Law School dean. With two Harvard degrees, a Supreme Court clerkship, years of administrative experience at the school, and well-regarded scholarship to his name, Manning checks all of the expected boxes for the leader of one of the country’s preeminent legal institutions...“Being dean of Harvard Law School is a really hard job — there are a lot of demands on your time, a lot of constituencies that need to be satisfied — it’s like being president of a small college,” Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus said. “I think that people are very enthusiastic.”...“My job is to foster a large community in which there are lots of different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies,” Manning said. “What I do for my scholarship has nothing to do with what kind of things I’ll support as dean.”

A national campaign to impeach President Donald Trump has drawn some high-powered talent from legal academia. Two organizations, Free Speech for People and RootsAction.org, have joined forces behind Impeach Donald Trump Now, a grassroots petition drive that has collected thus far more than 1.2 million signatures, and a lobbying effort on behalf of a congressional resolution calling for an impeachment investigation. The campaign is aided by a 13-member legal advisory board, including: Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe and Lawrence Lessig...

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proceeds, one thing is increasingly clear: If there is a serious congressional effort to impeach President Donald Trump after the midterm elections, it will have to be based not on a general sense that he’s doing a bad job, but on something much more specific, like obstruction of justice, abuse of power or subversion of the Constitution itself. For that we have the Framers to thank or blame -- and one in particular, James Madison.

An op-ed by Sharon Block. As executives in Hollywood and other industries hold their breath to see who will be the next subject of an exposé on sexual harassment in the workplace, the nation’s board members should be on high-alert: They are also culpable for harassment in the companies that they are supposed to steward. Corporate boards are the institution that the law imbues with ultimate responsibility for company performance. That the Weinstein Company board and others failed so completely to understand what was going on within their firms should give impetus to new thinking about how corporations are governed.

Some crimes against children are so horrendous you can only see the perpetrators as inhuman creatures. It’s understandable. But that perception hurts the majority of kids in the system...Reunification is the case plan goal for more than half the more than 16,000 children in out-of-home care in Arizona. Helping their biological parents succeed is essential to safely moving those children out of foster care and back home. In fact, helping families before children are removed is best of all because it spares children the trauma of being taking away from everything familiar. But families are hurting in Arizona. Addressing poverty is “the best prevention program going,” says Elizabeth Bartholet, who teaches civil rights and family law at Harvard Law School and specializes in child welfare.

When the Trump administration withdrew proposed regulations last April that international adoption agencies worried would price them out of their jobs, the agencies breathed a collective sigh of relief. But just seven months later, it appears to be harder than ever to adopt a child from overseas...Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard University, said the administration has been implementing the regulations despite withdrawing them. “They have basically driven the Center on Accreditation out of business,” she said. Bartholet said the result would “destroy international adoption.” She said that while the Trump administration has been eager to rescind other Obama-era regulations, it has not paid adequate attention to the actions of the State Department on international adoption. “It’s really, really unfortunate,” she said.

...The ICIJ showed the findings from its investigation to J. Richard Harvey, a Villanova University law professor, and Stephen Shay, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. In 2013, both of them gave detailed testimony on Apple’s previous Irish structure to the U.S. Senate committee’s investigation. They both told the ICIJ it appeared likely the iPhone maker had transferred intangible assets to Ireland...Shay added: “By using Irish intangible property tax reliefs, Apple likely will pay little or no additional Irish tax for years to come on income at Apple Operations International.”

Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google pledged to Congress this week to do more to prevent the fakery that has polluted their sites. “We understand that the people you represent expect authentic experiences when they come to our platform,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee...Jonathan L. Zittrain, who studies the internet and society at Harvard, said the companies are reluctant to aggressively purge bogus users and deceptive content because of their business model, which is built on signing up more and more people. “These platforms are oriented to maximize user growth and retention,” Mr. Zittrain said. “That means not throwing up even tiny hurdles along the sign-up runway, and not closing accounts without significant cause. I suspect they figure there are enough accounts that are the subject of complaints to review without looking for more to assess.”

This week, Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller picked up the public pace of his team's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Indictments were unsealed, and a potentially important plea agreement revealed...Experts say there is nothing anyone could do to invalidate such pardons. A presidential pardon cannot be undone. But constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the new book Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide, notes that the framers of the Constitution, in the Virginia ratification debate, discussed whether abuse of the pardon power would be an impeachable offense — and James Madison explicitly said it would be. "If the president counsels crimes personally or participates in a crime personally," Sunstein says, "and then exercises the pardon power so as to shelter the people who engaged in those crimes, the Virginia debate is very clear. That is an impeachable offense."

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. Fiercely partisan reactions are overshadowing the accomplishments of the Republican tax proposal – as well as its misguided aspects. In reality, the plan is a mixed bag that has some good, bad and ugly parts.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. With the indictments of two campaign associates of then candidate Donald Trump, and the guilty plea of one of his foreign policy advisers, some people are starting to talk again about the possibility of impeachment. Let’s put contemporary issues to one side and instead ask an enduring question: Did the framers get impeachment right? In other words, does the Constitution strike the right balance?

Forty years ago this month, Ms. magazine put sexual harassment on its cover for the first time. Understanding the sensitivity of the topic, the editors used puppets for the cover image — a male hand reaching into a woman’s blouse — rather than a photograph. It was banned from some supermarkets nonetheless. In 1977, the term sexual harassment had not been defined in the law and had barely entered the public lexicon. And yet, to read that Ms. article today, amid a profound shift in discourse, is to feel haunted by its familiarity...It was two years after that Ms. magazine cover, in 1979, that Catharine A. MacKinnon published a groundbreaking legal argument: that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was based on a legal theory she had developed while in law school...“Ashley Judd is the butterfly of this moment,” Professor MacKinnon said of the actor who began the recent groundswell of accusations against Mr. Weinstein. “She is the one who broke it open, who has made this possible for so many other women. And so you have an explosion of it because it’s for so long been suppressed.”

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced today that she will file a request with the judges of the Court to open an investigation in Afghanistan, including into allegations that U.S. military and CIA personnel committed acts of torture in connection with the conflict there. This is a big deal that could have significant implications for relations going forward between the U.S., the ICC, and States Parties of the ICC. How did we got to this point, where we are headed, and what exactly does it mean for the U.S. and the ICC?

The Trump administration has pulled out of a global deal to combat corruption in the fossil fuel industry, a move critics said could help oil companies keep hidden how much they pay in U.S. taxes. The Department of the Interior announced the decision on Thursday in a letter to withdraw immediately from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which compels oil, gas and mining companies to disclose payments to governments worldwide...“The decision to pull out was of greater symbolic significance than anything else,” Matthew Stephenson, a Harvard Law School professor who writes a blog about corruption, told HuffPost by phone on Friday. “It indicated the U.S. no longer had an interest in working with, let alone leading, the international community on this issue.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One legal question looms larger than others over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and its possible Russia connections: What laws, exactly, would be violated by collusion if it could be shown? Remember that the word “collusion” itself has no formal legal status in this investigation. No relevant federal criminal statute that I know of makes “collusion” -- as opposed to conspiracy -- a crime. The letter appointing Mueller directs him to investigate “links and/or coordination” between Russia and the campaign, with no mention of “collusion.”

With the release of an ambitious overhaul of the tax code, House Republicans are moving to fulfill a long-held desire of corporate America: a large and audacious tax cut. Yet economists are divided over whether the plan is likely to revitalize the economy or merely bestow a windfall on the wealthiest investors...Such dismissiveness failed to deter fans of the twin pillars of the House bill: lowering the top nominal tax rate on corporations to 20 percent from 35 percent, and changing the way global profits are taxed. “This will make the United States a better place to invest and a better place to be headquartered in,” said Mihir A. Desai, an economist at Harvard Business School who has at times complained about the White House’s economic claims.

Banks do pretty well under the tax bill unveiled Thursday: it puts them on track for big tax cuts yet lets the firms avoid some of the biggest potential downsides of the overhaul. At a 20% corporate tax rate, banks stand to be the among the biggest winners from tax reform, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence...The legislation proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee appears to let banks sidestep that issue, though. It does so by limiting the deductibility for companies that spend more money on interest than they take in, said Mark Roe, a professor at Harvard Law School. Banks by and large bring in far more in interest than they pay out.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. After more than 40 years of experimenting with capital punishment, it is time to recognize that we have found no way to narrow the death penalty so that it applies only to the “worst of the worst.” It also remains prone to terrible errors and unacceptable arbitrariness. Arizona’s death-penalty scheme is a prime example of how capital punishment in the United States unavoidably violates the Eighth Amendment’s requirement that the death penalty not be applied arbitrarily. The Supreme Court will soon consider accepting a case challenging Arizona’s statute and the death penalty nationwide, in Hidalgo v. Arizona.