Media Mentions

Corporate America prides itself on rewarding success and punishing failure. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer does not fit comfortably into that narrative...But when Yahoo’s sale to Verizon becomes official in June, with the restructured company renamed Oath, Mayer will walk away with $186 million, according to a regulatory filing released this week. That includes shares of Yahoo stock Mayer owned, stock options, and a $23 million “golden parachute” of cash, restricted stock units, and medical benefits. Mayer did relinquish $14 million while taking responsibility for the Yahoo Mail data breach, but she’ll get 13 times that amount just to no longer remain part of the company...The new compensation standards naturally served to weaken resistance to hostile takeovers, as bundles of cash took the sting out of the loss of employment and prestige. Indeed, a 2012 study from Alma Cohen, Charles Wang, and Lucian Bebchuk confirms that companies offering golden parachutes are more likely to be acquired in a merger.

An op-ed by fellow Nikolas Bowie. Ask any member of the Trump administration what’s so bad about sanctuary cities, and he’ll likely respond with the same answer: They’re violating a federal law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a), which requires cities to jail people suspected of entering the country illegally. For example, right before Sean Spicer recently said that San Francisco and cities like it “have the blood of dead Americans on their hands,” he cited § 1373(a) by name and implied that sanctuary cities violate that statute when they “block their jails from turning over criminal aliens to Federal authorities for deportation.”...But § 1373(a) doesn’t say what Spicer or Sessions thinks it says. In fact, it says nothing about the administration’s chief complaint with sanctuary cities.

The Truth or Dare Podcast invites leading experts to share from their life’s best work in order to help listeners boost their social health. Today’s featured guest is Sheila Heen. Sheila teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she’s been part of the Harvard Negotiation Project for 2 decades. In addition to being the co-author of Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback, Sheila also serves as CEO of Triad Consulting.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behavior. Governments have taken notice -- and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The next fight over the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive orders will be about the designation of national monuments. Trump’s order to review all major monument declarations in the last 20 years sets the stage for reversal of some or all of President Barack Obama’s designations. Previous presidents have treated those decisions as irreversible. But Trump seems poised to break that tradition by claiming the implicit power to reverse anything a prior president has done.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The liberal West heaved a collective sigh of relief when the results of the first round of the French presidential election came in. After leading in the polls for weeks, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front ended up in second place, while Emmanuel Macron, a centrist political independent, finished first. Macron, the fresh face of Europe’s democratic center at just 39 years old, is expected to prevail handily in the second-round runoff on May 7. With Macron’s victory in France following Dutch voters’ rejection of the right-wing populist Geert Wilders earlier this year, most observers are treating the result as another rebuke to the populist revolt that fueled the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and US President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Many seem convinced that the populist tide has crested.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia '19...Senate Bill 4, the bill to eliminate sanctuary cities in Texas, was passed through the Texas House despite vehement opposition — and that means a lot of horrible changes are soon to come to the lives of undocumented immigrants in Texas. SB4, like many immigration-reform bills, was passed off as a way of “securing our border.” I believe it actually stands to make border towns and Texas as a whole inherently more dangerous. This is because local officers may now inquire into the immigration status of any victim or witness that they interview as long as it is “necessary to investigate the offense” — which could arguably be the case in basically every offense they investigate.

...The 14-day rule is an ethical line past which cultured human embryos are not to continue developing outside the body. It is protected by law in 12 countries, including the United Kingdom, and acts as a guideline in five, including the United States....Some critics view calls to re-evaluate the 14-day rule as a pernicious moving of the goalposts. How meaningful can they be, the line of reasoning goes, if scientists want to change rules as soon as they bump up against them? “There were disagreements about the rationale and validity of the 14-day rule before this point, but no one in the research community really pushed the issue because it was not particularly important,” says Glenn Cohen, a Harvard bioethicist. “There is nothing wrong with pragmatic necessity driving us to start a re-examination process.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Well before Donald Trump, we had plenty of presidents who operated by instinct. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all prided themselves on their ability to size up people and situations — and to do so accurately and quickly. Social scientists like to distinguish between two ways of thinking: fast and slow. In their terminology, System 1 is intuitive, rapid, and emotional. By contrast, System 2 is deliberative, reflective, and intent on calculation. System 1 operates effortlessly; System 2 works hard...On the basis of his first months, it seems clear that we have never had a System 1 president like Donald Trump — which accounts for his head-spinning combination of bold moves, big ideas, warm embraces, unseemly score-keeping, bizarre rages, and sudden reversals.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal district court in California ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s executive order on sanctuary cities would be unconstitutional if used to pull funding from municipalities that don’t do the president’s bidding in reporting undocumented people to the federal government. This result is heartening but not surprising: I predicted the result on constitutional grounds back in November, two months before the order was even issued. What’s noteworthy is how desperate the Trump Department of Justice was to avoid a defeat -- so desperate, in fact, that its lawyers told the judge that the executive order actually had no legal effect at all.

President Donald Trump and Republican foreign policy veterans in Congress are increasingly at odds over the U.S. response to a budding authoritarian movement in several NATO nations, confusing allies in the region and potentially undermining diplomatic efforts there. The contradictory signals coming from the White House, senior administration officials and U.S. lawmakers is creating confusion abroad about what U.S. policy is on issues like democracy and good governance, analysts and former and current State Department officials told CQ. “The lack of coherence of Trump policy in a lot of places in the world, what it’s doing is giving leaders in other countries plausible deniability,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University professor of international affairs.

It was bad enough when Hillary Clinton as secretary of state agreed to have meetings with people who had given to her foundation. Now, according to news reports, Ivanka Trump, while a federal employee, is soliciting donations for a new fund from foreigners. This comes on top of instances in which she sat with heads of state (from Japan and China) at a time that her business was doing deals in their countries...If true, this is egregious and potentially illegal, according to multiple ethics and legal experts. “If the donation would be a quid pro quo bribe, then asking for it is certainly solicitation of a bribe, which is every bit as criminal as the bribe itself,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells me via email.

A contribution by Simon Hedlin '19. “I am going to be honest with you and say that my most important advice on self-care is to have a geographic perspective. First, the Donald Trump phenomenon is not unique, but merely reflects a global uprising against globalization and technocracy. This movement has been growing for decades, and despite the negative impact of populism, the world is still a better place today than it used to be. I worked for the Swedish government when Sweden elected a party with neo-Nazi roots to Parliament in 2010, and I was in the UK right after the Brexit vote last year. We have seen populist insurgencies come and go through out history, and things have eventually, but always, turned out better. Trump is different only because America is the sole remaining superpower, which means that the stakes are much higher. However, based on other countries’ experiences with populism, I am convinced that America will muddle through.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What did the president know about the Mar-a-Lago advertisement that appeared for a time on official government websites? And when did he know it? These questions might sound trivial. They aren’t. The webpage about President Donald Trump’s private club, which had all the features of a marketer-drafted puff piece, is a prime example of corruption, namely the knowing use of government means to enhance the private wealth of the president. And corruption is the classic example of a high crime or misdemeanor under the impeachment clause of the Constitution.

Shareholders at scandal-scarred Wells Fargo & Co. voted Tuesday to keep all 15 of the bank’s directors, but in a stinging rebuke rarely seen in corporate elections did so in some cases by slim margins. After a three-hour annual meeting replete with shareholder outbursts and one unscheduled break to remove an angry investor, the San Francisco company announced voting tallies that showed the toll of the aggressive sales practices last fall that cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines...“The outcome is a wake-up call that directors at U.S. companies may no longer glide through a crisis without taking individual hits in reputation,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of Harvard Law School’s Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

Four Harvard Law School students are demanding that the Law School clarify how it considers applicants who have been accused or found guilty of sexual assault. Emma K. O’Hara , Shayna Medley , Dixie C. Tauber, and Kelly Jo Popkin ’11—all third-year law students in the school’s Gender Violence Policy Workshop—published the article in the Harvard Law Record Sunday, attaching a questionnaire they sent to Law School admission officers March 30...“I think we were all sort of motivated to want to do this particular topic now given that it’s admissions season,” Tauber said.

The shareholder vote against Wells Fargo directors on Tuesday was larger than anything seen at a big US bank during the financial crisis — but without Warren Buffett’s help the rebellion would have been even bigger. For four board members, only the support of the billionaire investor’s Berkshire Hathaway prevented them from being removed from office in the wake of the bank’s bogus accounts debacle...“There is a serious question as to whether any of the directors who received less than 60 per cent of the vote can stay on,” said Howell Jackson, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Early in his administration, President Donald Trump made Chicago a promise. "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on ... I will send in the Feds!" he blasted out in an evening tweet four days after his inauguration. The shootings in the city were a favorite talking point in tweets, speeches and even his joint address to Congress. "We're going to have to do something about Chicago," he said in January. "Because what's happening in Chicago should not be happening in this country."...Chiraag Bains, a former federal prosecutor at the Justice Department and now senior fellow at Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program, added that even if Justice Department does provide additional resources, "it'll take more than a punishment-oriented, law-and-order approach to improve public safety in Chicago."

Someone in the Trump administration recognized that even for the Trump clan, the latest act of self-promotion went too far. As NPR spelled out: An article on a State Department website about President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been removed after criticism that it was an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds...This time, the administration acted not just unethically but apparently illegally. “It manifestly violates 5 CFR 2635.702,” says legal scholar and litigator Laurence Tribe, referring to the statute that bars using public office for private gain. “Our emoluments case [challenging his receipt of foreign government monies derived from hotels] will put a stop to this sort of outrageous use of public office for private gain, which essentially puts the White House on the auction block and distorts U.S. government policy in the direction of foreign interests in ways that are opaque to public scrutiny.”

Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health expenses and lost portions of Social Security checks and tax refunds to their lender, the federal government...“This credit is being extended on terms that specifically, willfully ignore their ability to repay,” says Toby Merrill of Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “You can’t avoid that we’re targeting high-cost, high-dollar-amount loans to people who we know can’t afford to repay them.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to rewrite the First Amendment. In defending a civil suit against Trump by protesters who say they were roughed up in one of his campaign rallies, Trump’s legal team has advanced two claims that either misstate or substantially overstate constitutional doctrine.