Media Mentions

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. This is the story of a dramatic failure of imagination and vision at the state level: Governor Charlie Baker’s apparent insistence that Massachusetts relegate small towns to second-rate, high-priced, monopoly-controlled (and unregulated) communications capacity. It’s a slow-rolling tragedy that will blight Western MA for generations. The likely outcome: Only those plucky, scrappy towns that elect to build on their own will escape the grip of unconstrained pricing for awful service. The rest will fade into irrelevance. What new American generations will stay in a place that is essentially unconnected to the world? What new businesses and ways of making a living will emerge there? None and none.

An op-ed by Yaacov Jake Meiseles `19. Rockland County Executive Ed Day is on a mission to keep 67-year-old Judith Clark behind bars. Clark was the getaway driver in the infamous 1981 Brink’s robbery in Nyack, in which a Brink’s guard and two police officers were shot and killed by her co-defendants. Clark was subsequently sentenced to 75-years-to-life in prison — one of the longest sentences of her six co-defendants. In a profound display of mercy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently commuted Clark’s sentence to 35-years-to-life. Consequently, a parole board will review her imprisonment status this March. Day has taken on the mission of keeping Clark locked up as his personal crusade.

(Translated from Spanish.)...Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, told BBC World, “Whether you agree with President-elect Trump’s tactics or not, the U.S. does indeed face a number of serious trade problems with China.” “These include China’s use of subsidies for certain sectors, China’s dumping of its excess capacity of its steel products overseas, and China’s imposition of export restraints on certain raw materials. These benefit Chinese producers at the expense of American firms and workers.” For the Harvard scholar, the key issue is that China’s economy is structured in such a way that not all trade problems can be dealt with effectively through litigation at the WTO. “The crucial question is: What is the best way to deal with these problems to ensure that China does not get a disproportionate share of the gains from trade at the expense of the United States?” “The incoming Trump Administration’s view is that only by taking a harder line and raising the threat of a trade war will China change its practices.”

When Maddy Moore arrived at Georgetown University as a freshman almost four years ago, she signed up to be a peer educator on sexual assault. At that time, there was growing momentum behind the issue on college campuses across the country...But with the election of Donald Trump, who confided on tape to a reporter that he can kiss and grab women by the genitals without their consent, Moore, now a senior, and her peers are concerned...For opponents of the 2011 directive, having schools step in for courts doesn't create a fair system of justice and may treat alleged perpetrators unfairly. Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who signed the May letter, said the new interpretation of the scope of Title IX has lowered the bar to serious consequences, such as expulsion. "Clearly [sexual assault] is a problem and should be addressed," Bartholet said in a phone interview. "At the same time, what the Obama Administration did in the Dear Colleague letter has gone way beyond."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If American conservatives have an intellectual hero, it might well be Friedrich Hayek -- and rightly so. More clearly than anyone else, Hayek elaborated the case against government planning and collectivism, and mounted a vigorous argument for free markets. As it turns out, Hayek simultaneously identified a serious problem with the political creed of President-elect Donald Trump. One of Hayek’s most important arguments in his great classic, "The Road to Serfdom," involves the Rule of Law, which he defined to mean “that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand.” Because of the Rule of Law, “the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it lawful to deport immigrants who commit “aggravated felonies”? Or is that language unconstitutionally vague? The U.S. Supreme Court considered the question Tuesday, in a case that’s proof of De Tocqueville’s dictum, “There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one." Although the legal issues are subtle, the atmospherics of the case are all about Donald Trump’s warnings of “bad hombres” illegally entering the U.S.

In the rapidly changing legal industry, it is no surprise that broad conceptions of what it means to be a rainmaker are also evolving. Dr. Heidi Gardner, Lecturer and Distinguished Fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, has been conducting research over the past decade on collaboration in law firms. Her findings have also revealed insights into rainmakers: what makes them successful, how their roles changed over time, and how the next generation of rainmakers can be primed to succeed...Based on her decades long research, Dr. Gardner’s answer to whether rainmakers are born is a resounding no. What makes someone a successful rainmaker is their ability to exhibit other sides of their personality, or other strengths and traits, depending on their audience.

The conflict between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community could have profound repercussions. We spoke recently about the issue to Matthew Olsen, who spent two decades working in senior posts in intelligence and national security for Democrat and Republican administrations. Olsen, 54, served most recently (from 2011 to 2014) as director of the intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center. Before that, he was the general counsel of the National Security Agency. In 2009, he was executive director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force for the Justice Department...Today, he’s an executive at IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm he co-founded, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

There is a growing movement in criminal justice reform to re-examine how bail and pretrial detention is used...Pennsylvania may soon join that movement. As part of justice reinvestment in the state, a recommendation has been made to review how bail is handled. “Our view is that rethinking the bail system provides significant opportunities for making it more effective, doing a better job in ensuring the integrity of the justice system and ensuring the safety of the community, at the same time solving these really intractable problems when systems use money which just results in unfair outcomes,” said Larry Schwartztol, executive director of the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program. Harvard did not contribute to Pennsylvania’s justice reinvestment recommendations but has focused research on bail extensively.

As President Barack Obama prepares to leave the Oval Office, we ask experts how the 44th president of the United States will be remembered. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the Daniel P.S. Paul professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law; and Jim Demers, a political consultant with The Demers Group in New Hampshire join Under the Radar to discuss how Obama’s policies, popularity and grassroots revolution changed American politics.

Law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy has an extra play in its client-relations playbook, which points to the growth of a new arena in business development, and also a new market for executive education providers. Milbank invites and pays for clients it seeks to build relationships with to attend a 4-day business and leadership executive education program at Harvard, including modules in strategy, finance, accounting, leadership, and macroeconomics. The program is developed and run in association with the Harvard Law School (HLS) Executive Education, with crossover to the business school...Milbank specifically invites the General Counsel or Senior General Counsel of its client firms, in other words its key relationship holder inside the target firm. It had 23 such client delegates from across Asia, Europe, South America and the U.S. on its Corporate Counsel program in 2015, and the same numbers again on a second program in 2016.

A letter by Delcianna Winders, fellow. To be clear, we animal advocates aren't "cheering the end of the circus" per se ("It's a sad day when the circus music stops," 1/16), but the end of nearly 150 years of abuse and exploitation by Ringling Bros. We've long lauded the many circuses that featuring only consenting human performers and will continue to do so. If we're going to honestly "reflect on what the show has provided America since its origin in the 1880s," we would be remiss to overlook the fact that Ringling has profited off the backs of virtually enslaved African Americans, humans with all manner of congenital anomalies, and elephants, lions, tigers, and other animals who have spent many hours and even days on end tightly confined and who have been forced to perform through violent, routine beatings.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects people 40 and older. But is it ageism to discriminate against people over 50 compared with those in the 40-to-50 bracket? A federal appeals court has said yes -- but because several other circuit courts have said no, the case is very likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future. The issue raises questions about how discrimination should be measured when it might exist along a continuum.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Muslim girls can be required to participate in swimming classes alongside boys despite their parents’ religious objections, according to the European Court of Human Rights. The outcome would have been the opposite in most U.S. jurisdictions, which have emphasized students’ rights ever since Jehovah’s Witnesses were exempted from the Pledge of Allegiance during World War II. The decision made this week marks the very different situation in contemporary Europe, where children’s interests are contrasted with their parents’ rights, and the schools’ goal of “integration” is getting special weight amid a wave of Muslim immigration.

As we reported, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, announced at a press conference on Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump’s “fix” to his ethics and emoluments clause problems didn’t fix anything...Laurence Tribe also sees this as thinly veiled intimidation. “For a member of Congress to make veiled threats to the federal ethics chief for publicly criticizing the President-elect’s plan to comply with the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause and to avoid ethical conflicts – a plan that Director Shaub of the Office of Government Ethics rightly slammed as meaningless – is profoundly disturbing,” said the legal scholar and litigator. “Such threats can only chill fully protected speech and expression of opinion that is vital to our republic. Nothing about the job description of the Director imposes a gag or compels him to keep his concerns to himself or to limit those concerns to purely internal government memos. Chaffetz has truly gone off the reservation here.”

Dear Betsy: Even students who’ve been accused of sexual assault deserve the chance to defend themselves. Betsy DeVos is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education...In an information vacuum, all sexual assault cases look the same. As Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen declared in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month, “In essence, the federal government has created a sex bureaucracy that has in turn conscripted officials at colleges as bureaucrats of desire, responsible for defining healthy, permissible sex and disciplining deviations from those supposed norms.”

...you’d expect the Obama Department of Education to be doing whatever it could to nurture, support, and protect colleges and universities. But instead, it seems to be acting almost as if it were controlled by . . . a cabal of its enemies. For example, in the area of Title IX enforcement Obama’s Department of Education has taken a statute that simply reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” and turned it into an Orwellian nightmare of what Harvard law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk call bureaucratic sex creep.”

At long last, Donald Trump on Wednesday unveiled his plan to separate himself from his business interests while president, something he previously promised would be oh-so simple to do at the same time he was finding reasons to delay taking any clear action on the matter. Based on what Trump shared Wednesday, the plan wasn’t worth the wait...“His elaborate-looking scheme constitutes at best a Potemkin trust, to coin a semi-Russian phrase,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Slate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The world's most dangerous flashpoint got much more dangerous Thursday when China sent its lone aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan scrambled fighter jets in response. This is how accidental wars start: provocation and counterprovocation in an environment with too much uncertainty. The uncertainty arises from not knowing the Donald Trump administration’s answer to a pressing foreign policy question: Would the U.S. defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Republicans are putting a great deal of pressure on President-elect Donald Trump to fire Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He should resist that pressure. Any effort to discharge Cordray would be illegal -- and it might even precipitate something close to a constitutional crisis.

It didn’t take long after BuzzFeed leaked an intelligence dossier detailing shocking allegations of collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign (as well as claims that Russia has sexual blackmail against Donald Trump himself) for critics of the president-elect to start dropping the “t” word...But when I asked a few lawyers specializing in national security about the BuzzFeed memorandum, they mentioned that its contents — if true, which is a very big “if” indeed — could bring other laws into play. It’s much too early to speculate about actual indictments, but if the dossier is confirmed, there are a few statutes that would be worth examining. One, according to Harvard law professor and Lawfare co-founder Jack Goldsmith, is the Logan Act, an obscure 1799 law that prohibits citizens of the United States from negotiating with foreign governments and trying to influence their policies vis-a-vis a dispute with the United States...Many legal observers don’t take the Logan Act particularly seriously, however, given that it seems to rather clearly violate the First Amendment and would stand a good chance of being struck down should it even actually lead to a prosecution, according to Goldsmith and other legal observers