Media Mentions

As part of what the Alabama House's Republican leaders dubbed "pro-life day," lawmakers passed legislation Thursday that would write anti-abortion language into the state constitution, allow doctors to refuse to perform services and ban assisted suicide. Representatives in the deeply conservative state also held a moment of silence for the "millions of babies" who are aborted every year...Khiara Bridges, a visiting professor of law at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview that the state is playing "the long game" for the potential repeal of Roe under the administration of President Donald Trump. "The language is capacious enough to conflict with an abortion right or be consistent with it," she said. "It's like they want to have their cake and eat it too."

The Minnesota Department of Human Services is probing the Mayo Clinic for possible violations of civil- and human-rights laws by putting a higher priority on patients with commercial insurance...But the practice does raise some ethical questions, especially as Washington is debating major changes to Medicaid that health policy experts say would put millions at risk of losing coverage. It also raises questions about the cost of care in the United States, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, executive director of the Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center. "I think it's challenging and troubling to say that we are going to prioritize people who can pay more over people who can pay less," she said. "Better approaches would be a focus on the quality of care for less cost."

Writers frequently debate whether or not the Oxford comma is a necessary piece of punctuation. In an unlikely turn of events, a group of Maine dairy drivers have yielded the answer: Yes, it is. A case brought by the dairy drivers against Oakhurst Dairy and Dairy Farmers of America Inc. about whether or not they qualified for overtime hinged on the lack of a comma in a sentence outlining duties that were exempted from overtime pay...Because a comma does not appear after "shipment," U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Judge David Barron reasoned it is unclear if "packing for shipping or distribution" is one activity or if "packing for shipping" is separate from "distribution."...Ian Samuel, Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, says at least one prominent legal text, written by Justice Antonin Scalia and his co-author, Bryan Garner, recommends that "courts should not rely much if any" on text omitting an Oxford comma because some legislative style guides follow newspaper style, which often doesn't use the comma.

In the recent issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, the target article addresses the ethics of finding participants for clinical trials on social media sites. The authors, from Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School, analyzed the particular ethical issues that occur in the online setting compared to in-person recruitment and provide practical recommendations for investigators and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). "Recruitment to clinical trials is extremely challenging, raising distinctively practical and ethical issues, and social media is beginning to show real promise as a recruitment tool, due largely to its ubiquity and use among just about every demographic," Professor [fellow] Luke Gelinas of Harvard Law School told Phys.org.

In a move that illustrates how the professional services market is changing, about half of General Electric’s tax department — once described as as ‘the world’s best tax law firm’ — is moving to PwC in April...David Wilkins, a Harvard Law Professor who is researching the Big Four, said it is an example of how these firms have expanded beyond accounting, and gained a foothold in the legal market by selling their expertise across a broad range of areas well beyond tax, and into compliance, regulatory planning and other specialties. “It is the evolution of the professional service firm model,” said Wilkins, who is faculty director of the Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession.

Daniel Ramirez Medina has been locked in a Tacoma, Washington, immigrant-detention center for a month. Neither he nor his attorneys are entirely sure why. Ramirez’s parents brought him into the country illegally as a child, but he is now a beneficiary of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program...“The government’s position is that the liberty of a human being can be treated as nothing,” he said. But that can’t be right. “If any process at all is protected by the Constitution,” [Laurence] Tribe continued, “then that was violated here. Given that [DACA recipients have] lawful presence, doesn’t that at least mean that they can’t simply be snatched up arbitrarily and put, essentially, in a prison? They are entitled to rely on government’s promise of liberty.”

San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell has assembled a group of business, privacy and academic experts to discuss crucial, early-stage questions surrounding Farrell’s plan to wire the city with high-speed Internet service...Farrell will serve as the panel’s co-chair alongside Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford. Crawford, who teaches courses on municipal uses of technology, Internet law and communications law, worked as an assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy in Barack Obama’s administration and co-led the FCC’s transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations...Crawford called Internet access the “the key economic and social justice issue of the 21st century. Whether it’s educating kids, providing advanced health care, moderating our use of energy and making it possible for people to work where they live — all of that is going to be helped by a better, faster and far cheaper data network,” she said.

A study of 1.25 million media stories says a Breitbart-centered media ecosystem fostered the sharing of stories that were, at their core, misleading. Steve Inskeep talks to researcher Yochai Benkler.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. I’m not sure who decided that the Democratic critique of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch would be that he doesn’t side with the little guy. It’s a truly terrible idea. Like other liberals, I’m still shocked and upset that Judge Merrick Garland never got the vote he deserved after his nomination by President Barack Obama, and I’d rather have a progressive justice join the court. But the thing is, siding with workers against employers isn’t a jurisprudential position. It’s a political stance. And justices -- including progressive justices -- shouldn’t decide cases based on who the parties are. They should decide cases based on their beliefs about how the law should be interpreted.

A little over a year ago, Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare, made the case that Donald Trump, as a Republican presidential candidate, represented nothing less than a national-security threat...The warning was an early sign of the opposition to Trump that has since hardened among the national-security professionals and observers for whom Lawfare serves as a kind of bulletin board...Lawfare observes rules that most publications don’t, including a pledge never to publish classified information. Contributors generally tend to be hawkish and “more sympathetic to the executive, and more accepting of the seriousness of the counterterrorism threat and the need for tools like targeting and surveillance, than a lot of writers in the national-security space,” [Jack] Goldsmith says.

Rural Alaska runs on diesel. Although many communities are open to alternative energy ideas, they don’t have the funding to even explore them. But help could come in the form of graduate students from Harvard University, who have been tasked with the assignment of solving some of Alaska’s fossil fuel energy woes. Harvard law student Mike Maruca [`18] may sound like he’s describing a spring break trip. “We also got to drive out to Seward and went skiing at Alyeska,” Maruca said. “We managed to catch the northern lights last night, sort of. They were not very clear.” But Maruca’s actually in Alaska for a class that’s looking for practical solutions to reduce the use of fossil fuels, especially in low-income, under-served communities.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Many critics of President Trump, including a sizable number of Democrats in the Republican-controlled Congress, are wary about the incipient congressional investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possibly related Russian entanglements with the Trump administration and campaign. They suspect that an independent investigation from outside the government is the only hope for checking a president who seems oblivious to press criticism, whose party controls Congress and who has the executive branch under his thumb. These worries are understandable but misplaced.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Just a handful of newsflashes have come home to me in such a way that I never forgot where I was when I heard them. Most were disasters, like the Challenger explosion or the attacks of September 11. In February 2010, I was sitting in my office in Ann Arbor when another event made the list — but this one surprised and delighted me. I cheered. Google had announced its fiber experiment, a plan to wire at least 50,000 homes with fast, bountiful connections. Finally, someone was going to try to unstick the monopolistic, stagnant, second-rate market for high-capacity internet access in the US.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. With a one-sentence order last week, the Supreme Court dashed hopes of a big transgender-rights decision this term. The Court was supposed to review the case of Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen-age boy who sued the Gloucester County School Board for the right to use the boys’ bathroom and won, in the Fourth Circuit. But the basis of the Fourth Circuit’s decision was the Obama Administration’s view that Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex,” requires schools to treat transgender students in a way consistent with their gender identity.

As President Trump last week issued a new executive order preventing citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, Harvard continued to ramp up efforts to support international students and scholars in understanding and coping with the policy shift...Resources include a website that provides a centralized source of information for undocumented members of the Harvard community, weekly support groups where students can talk with a counselor, and legal assistance through the Immigration and Refugee Clinic, which recently hired attorney Jason Corral to represent undocumented students and those with legal status obtained through the DACA initiative. “We’ve been advising people since the first set of executive orders came out in January pretty consistently until now,” said Sabrineh Ardalan, the clinic’s assistant director.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Small businesses and startups are responsible for a big chunk of U.S. economic growth and job creation. Unfortunately, many of them are stymied by state and federal regulation. The good news is that the Regulatory Flexibility Act, originally enacted in 1980, could provide a lot of help. If the administration of President Donald Trump starts to pay attention to it, it could give that tired old law a lot more energy – and promote important economic goals.

Thanks to some fine work by two Bloomberg news reporters, David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby, we now know that a major Chinese financial services firm may invest $4 billion in a Manhattan skyscraper owned by the family of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner...In the eyes of some legal experts, the simple fact that Trump accepted the trademarks is a violation of the Constitution’s mandate against presidents accepting payments of any kind from foreign governments. “If the trademark has value in contributing to Trump’s wealth, the amount of the forbidden emolument might not be ascertainable before the transaction closes, but the constitutional prohibition doesn’t turn on how large the emolument turns out to be,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email.

Last year, an “extremely enthusiastic” charitable nonprofit foundation based in India approached Education Management Corp. with an offer. Hoping to break into the United States, the Ritnand Balved Education Foundation wanted to buy the Pittsburgh for-profit education provider’s two largest art institutes — the New England Institute of Art, in Brookline, Mass., and the Art Institute of New York City — and keep them open as nonprofit institutions, according to letters and emails exchanged between EDMC and Massachusetts education officials...EDMC’s programs “burden graduates with unmanageable student loan debt — programs that will be subject to even less federal oversight once they have been sold to a nonprofit,” said Toby Merrill, an attorney and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When the boss asks you to resign, should you say yes or make him fire you? In the executive branch of the federal government, there’s a strong tradition of stepping down, especially if you’re a political appointee of the other party. Yet Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, made President Donald Trump fire him, as did Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who refused to defend Trump’s original executive order on immigration back in January.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye was officially removed from office Friday after the constitutional court affirmed her impeachment by the national assembly. It’s a remarkable outcome for a relatively new democracy, and the scandal holds some important lessons for how impeachment can take place in a political culture deeply dominated by partisanship. Park’s removal depended on three key elements: peaceful, sustained popular protests; a corruption scandal so egregious that even politicians from Park’s party were forced to admit it merited impeachment; and an orderly constitutional process for removal that was followed to the letter.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Trump administration is considering a new assault on American legal and constitutional structures by taking on federalism -- and vehicle emissions. Specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency reportedly will try to revoke a waiver that California has enjoyed for 45 years, which allows the state -- and any state that wants to copy it -- to regulate tailpipe emissions more stringently than the federal government does.