Media Mentions

Last Thursday, just hours before Rohingya militants attacked more than two dozen police and border outposts in western Myanmar, the former head of the United Nations presaged the coming violence in an urgent warning...The news conference was held to promote the release of a new report on how to improve the lives of Buddhists and Muslims living in Rakhine state, one of the country’s most impoverished and conflict-torn regions, from which tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya have fled violence in recent years...Yee Htun, a human rights advocate from Myanmar and instructor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., says the reforms outlined in the new report can’t come soon enough for Rakhine. “At the heart of this crisis are policies and practices that have a real dehumanizing effect,” she says.

NPR's Scott Simon talks to Bonnie Docherty, senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, about the group's call for a pre-emptive ban on fully autonomous weapons.

An op-ed by Sabrineh Ardalan. In the next few months, Congress will consider a bill that would cut the number of refugees allowed into the country by more than half. Supporters say this bill would help create job opportunities for U.S. workers and spur economic growth. Yet, arguments that refugees do more damage than good simply don’t hold water. A recent report from the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, where I work, outlines refugees’ significant contributions to the U.S., in both economic and human terms. These range from starting small businesses to generating tax revenues and creating new jobs.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...Tali Sharot of the University College London has shown that for such questions, and many others, good news is more likely to alter people’s views than bad news. What does that have to do with contemporary political issues? Along with Sharot and other collaborators, I have been exploring exactly that question.

The tax overhaul promised by President Trump and Republican congressional leaders is lugging a remarkably heavy load. The goal is not only to reduce the tax bills of corporations and small businesses, but also to stimulate investment, create jobs, increase global competitiveness and promote economic growth...Mr. Trump and the Republican leadership have pushed to slash the corporate tax rate and switch to what is known as a territorial system that would tax only profits earned in the United States and not those earned in other countries. Mihir Desai, an economist at Harvard Business School, likes that approach. “We currently have the worst of all worlds,” he wrote in an email. “We have a high marginal rate,” which encourages companies to avoid taxes and puts the United States at a global disadvantage.

When President Trump defended his pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Monday, he was quick to put his use of this unique presidential power into historical context...“The president has been trying since the beginning of his administration to delegitimize the judiciary,” says Chiraag Bains, senior fellow at the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., and a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

An interview with Jeannie Suk Gersen. When Candice Jackson, acting head of the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights recently said that “90 percent” of campus sexual assaults “fall into the category of ‘We were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation,” it caused an uproar. She quickly apologized, saying, “all sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously.” But, the exchange only brought more attention to the way the federal government is handling sexual assault cases on university campuses.

President Donald Trump’s unusual pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, issued before his federal case was even finished, has sparked a debate over whether the president could end Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe with a spate of pre-emptive pardons. But even mass pardons of all suspects in the Russia case would not close the door to potential prosecutions...Prosecuting agents of a foreign power, however, is different than making a potential case against agents of the United States. "It could happen," [James] Tierney says. "If the [district attorney] of Baltimore wants to go after the president, is that destabilizing? Yes it is." Tierney, who now teaches about the role of state attorneys general at Harvard Law School, adds, "The actual legal and practical obstacles to bringing this kind of case are very high."

The Department of Energy's grid reliability study has been described in many ways since it dropped last week, including schizophrenic, and an effort "to bail out aging coal and nuclear plants." But overall, the reaction has been more moderate and cautiously complimentary...Instead, the consensus seems to be that the study fairly accurately identifies how the nation's bulk power system reached this point: struggling with a changing generation mix and market structure that does not always align with policy goals. Environmental groups have been harsh judges of the document, but others say it is, all in all, fairly unremarkable in political terms. "It's a good compendium of information, but it's nothing new," said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School.

Title IX is a Nixon-era federal law barring sex discrimination in schools. Under the Obama administration, it became a mandate for colleges to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct with an imbalanced extrajudicial standard...Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is rightly considering rescinding the preponderance standard and replacing it with a stricter standard of proof...Fans of due process and the rule of law have discerned the problem. Harvard law professor Janet Halley, who investigated sexual misconduct claims as an administrator at Stanford, believes impartial truth-seeking is nearly impossible under the new rules. “We are overcorrecting,” she says. “The procedures that are being adopted are taking us back to pre-Magna Carta, pre-due process procedures.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When black-clad anti-fascist protesters broke through police barricades Sunday afternoon and swarmed a peaceful rally in Berkeley, California, law enforcement stood aside and let them. City police Chief Andrew Greenwood explained the decision with a rhetorical question: “Does it make sense,” he asked, “to get into a major use of force over a grassy area?” With all due deference to police expertise, things are not that simple. Violent protesters who cross barriers and disrupt peaceful protest are deeply threatening to freedom of speech.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. However distasteful, the fact is that President Trump has the legal authority to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona for his criminal contempt conviction, in accordance with the US Supreme Court’s 1925 ruling in Ex Parte Grossman. Grossman was ordered to stop selling liquor during Prohibition. He ignored the order and was jailed until a presidential pardon led to his release. The district court that had issued the original contempt order persisted and rearrested Grossman, finding that contempt is an offense to the “dignity and authority” of the federal courts. To allow the executive to intervene in the contempt process, the court held, would undermine judicial independence.

President Donald Trump hinted during a speech in Arizona on Tuesday that he plans to pardon former Sheriff Joe Arpaio over his federal contempt-of-court conviction, but the president said he wouldn't take such an action immediately in order to avoid "controversy." Trump, speaking at a rally in Phoenix, suggested that relief was on the way for the 85-year-old ex-lawman known for his tough treatment of illegal immigrants...“It’s ‘in-your-face, court,’” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. “This is the kind of charge that goes to the integrity of the process…. Part of the symbol here is of basically not paying respect to an order of a federal judge.” “It’s not unlawful, but it says something about his own contempt for the system,” she added.

Tensions ran high at the Texas Legislature during this most recent Special Session. Legislators cut summer plans short to spend the majority of their vacation time in Austin to fight over matters like bathrooms, property taxes, and school finance—with no resolve. The contentious nature of the Legislature resulted in very little items moving through the Texas House without objection. Well, that was until a resolution to make October “Texas Pecan Month” appeared in the Texas House...That story starts with two brothers from the Rio Grande Valley—Ricco and Sam Garcia [`19]. Earlier this year Sam Garcia, a Harvard Law Student, was sifting through statistical data from Google Trends and came across an interesting trend. Sam and his older brother, Ricco Garcia, were in the middle of researching for a book they are writing over potential state and federal policy suggestions to aid Texas agricultural growth when Sam discovered a peculiar annual phenomenon concerning the term “Pecan.”

With white supremacists emboldened and a national spotlight shining on bigotry and hate, 67 former state attorneys general are calling on Americans and their leaders to condemn hatred unequivocally. Follow the example, they suggest, that an Alabama attorney general set four decades ago...The statement — which was released Monday and is conspicuously addressed not to President Trump or any other official, but rather to the broad, unnamed public — begins, “There are times in the life of a nation, or a president, or a state attorney general, when one is called upon to respond directly to the voice of hate.” Mr. Baxley’s example, it continues, without directly quoting it, should serve as inspiration for “all who seek to equivocate in times of moral crisis.” Mr. Baxley “obviously spoke with real clarity — he just made it as clear as a human being can make it,” said James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who helped pull the joint statement together.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. At his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday night, Donald Trump remarked, of his decision to take on the Presidency, “Most people think I’m crazy to have done this. And I think they’re right.” A strange consensus does appear to be forming around Trump’s mental state...The class of professionals best equipped to answer these questions has largely abstained from speaking publicly about the President’s mental health. The principle known as the “Goldwater rule” prohibits psychiatrists from giving professional opinions about public figures without personally conducting an examination, as Jane Mayer wrote in this magazine in May.

An op-ed by Glenn Cohen. There’s a scientific development on the horizon that could upend the abortion debate: artificial wombs. The research remains preliminary, but in April a group of scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced amazing advances in artificial womb technologies. The authors explained how they had successfully sustained significantly premature lambs for four weeks in an artificial womb they had designed. This enabled the lambs to develop in a way very similar to lambs that had developed in their mothers’ wombs. Indeed, the oldest lamb — more than a year old at the time the paper was published — appeared to be completely normal.

...Mother Jones learned of these prison investments from an independent investigator who was invited by former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann to look into the legal case of the Postville meatpacking plant’s manager, Sholom Rubashkin...“The judge shouldn’t have any significant financial incentives for a longer sentence or a shorter sentence, or financial incentives to approve a very large raid or to disapprove a very large raid,” says former Deputy Attorney General Heymann, now a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump all but promised he would pardon disgraced Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt three weeks ago. “I won’t do it tonight,” he said. “But Sheriff Joe can feel good.” CNN is now reporting the White House has prepared the paperwork for Trump’s signature. As many have warned, pardoning Arpaio – famous for racially profiling Latinos in Maricopa County – would be an endorsement of racism. There’s another reason the possibility of a pardon should trouble us: it reflects Trump’s deep disdain for the judiciary and its role in our system of checks and balances.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he was just 14, convinced the professor to radically change his career path. The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide.

President Trump spent 18 months as the ultimate law-and-order candidate, promising to rescue an American way of life he said was threatened by terrorists, illegal immigrants and inner-city criminals. But during seven months as president, many critics and legal scholars say, Mr. Trump has shown a flexible view on the issue, one that favors the police and his own allies over strict application of the rule of law...“I don’t think you have to be a champion of it; all you need to do is comply with it,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who was a solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan. “And he shows himself absolutely unwilling to respect it,” Mr. Fried said, citing the pardon as a particular thumb in the eye of a judge.