Media Mentions

Higher wages for low-skilled jobs often prevents return to prison. The mission statement for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is: “Reduce recidivism among those we touch.” But a big factor keeping a parolee from going back to prison is what the job opportunities are like where an inmate is released, according to a recent study. Ex-offenders released to counties with higher low-skilled wages stand a better chance of not going back to jail, wrote Crystal Yang, a Harvard Law School researcher. Yang studied 4 million offenders in 43 states released between 2000 and 2013. Among those were inmates released from Ohio prisons between 2009-2013. At the beginning of 2013, Ohio parolees numbered 14,653, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Michael Flynn, the short-tenured national security advisor for President Trump, is offering to testify to both the FBI and the congressional intelligence committees about possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in exchange for immunity...What does Flynn's public offer to testify mean? Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and national security law expert, makes a convincing case that Flynn is attempting to "bait" one of the congressional committees, not federal prosecutors, into getting him to testify: "I suspect that Flynn's lawyer is really targeting Congress. He is hoping that one of the Congressional committees will take the bait and grant him immunity in exchange for his testimony. If that happened, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute Flynn after he testified. Remember Oliver North?..." Whiting concludes the gambit wouldn't work and wonders if Flynn's lawyer knows his client doesn't have much to offer prosecutors and may be looking for a way to avoid charges himself.

A report released on Thursday by one of the nation’s top law schools concludes the state of Arkansas has ignored the mental states and legal representation of eight death row inmates scheduled to die next month. It’s the latest wrinkle in the state’s drive to kill eight inmates in 10 days. Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project claims five of the eight men suffer from either a serious mental illness or intellectual impairment. One death row inmates has an IQ of 70 after suffering a head injury. Another is a paranoid schizophrenic who says he sees his dead father around the prison as well as dogs. The report from Harvard Law notes the U.S. Supreme court has ruled it a violation of the Eight Amendment to execute people with intellectual disabilities.

For many people, a tax refund means a chance to fund a vacation or splurge on a big purchase. For some, though, it’s a way to wipe out crushing debt — not by paying it off, but by giving them enough money to pay for bankruptcy. A review of the past four years supports what attorneys know anecdotally: Filings of Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the most common form for individuals, have a seasonal spike...Many consumers rely on their refunds as a way to manage big expenses. “People use it to get caught up on rent or bills, and if they’re too far behind to get caught up, they hire a bankruptcy attorney to discharge their debts,” says Roger Bertling, an instructor in consumer protection at Harvard Law School.

At a gym near Kendall Square, hip-hop music provides the soundtrack as a trainer leads a client through a series of exercises. It looks like a typical gym, and in many ways it is. There are mats, weights, kettlebells and an exercise bike. But the trainers at InnerCity Weightlifting, or ICW, are not typical. Most have done significant time in jail, most have been shot, and some of them, like Dan Royal, who grew up in Dorchester, almost didn't make it...Mickey Belaineh[`16], a Harvard Law School grad who helps run ICW, says part of the philosophy is to never give up on anybody — even those who end up back in jail.

President Trump this week signed an executive order that begins rolling back the climate actions taken by his predecessor. Making good on promises to cut regulations and restrictions on energy production, Trump told coal miners on stage with him, "you're going back to work." There is much debate over whether that can happen..."The most immediate impact is a lot of litigation," said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Program Policy Initiative.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Contrary to numerous reports, President Donald Trump’s executive order on climate change does not come even close to eliminating President Barack Obama’s legacy with respect to greenhouse-gas reductions. Most of that legacy, involving dramatic emissions cuts in the transportation sector and from household appliances, remains intact.

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.