Media Mentions

Harvard Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. talks about his work on criminal justice reform, and the last minute clemency requests to President Obama.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Welcome to the period of “institutional flip-flops” -- sudden abandonment of seemingly firm institutional principles, prompted by just one thing: the political party of the current president. A few months ago, many Republicans were enamored with an eight-member Supreme Court, an idea that Democrats treated as a constitutional atrocity. Now that a Republican is about to become president, prominent Democrats have no problem with a short-handed court, while Republicans treat the very thought as an outrage.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. India’s constitutional democracy has always struggled to tame the country’s religious and caste divisions, especially during elections. The Supreme Court of India has now issued an important ruling that makes things worse, not better. On the surface, the court struck a blow for religious neutrality, holding that referring to religion or caste in a race for office will disqualify the results. In reality, the decision delivered a gift to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party at the expense of India's minority faiths and castes. That’s especially worrisome in our present historical moment, when nationalist parties are challenging free democratic speech around the world.

When Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Donald J. Trump’s choice for attorney general, answers questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, he can expect to revisit a long-ago case that has followed him. In 1985, when Sessions was the United States attorney in West Alabama, he prosecuted three African-American civil rights activists, accusing them of voter fraud...Asked by a grand juror whether she’d voted absentee for the first time in the September primary, a Perry County resident named Fannie Mae Williams answered: “Uh-huh. First and last.” Two other women told the grand jury they were done with voting, according to the book “Lift Every Voice,” by Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School...Hank Sanders organized a team that included defense lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center, including Guinier.

It seems only right that victims of predatory for-profit education companies should have their student loans forgiven. After all, in addition to being left with mountains of debt, former students have worthless degrees from schools that no longer exist, such as those once operated by the defunct Corinthian Colleges or ITT Educational Services. Because taxpayers backed most of these loans, however, the Department of Education has been loath to forgive them. So it was gratifying to see five former ITT students take matters into their own hands this week by petitioning a federal bankruptcy court to consider loan forgiveness as part of the company’s liquidation...on Jan. 3, lawyers at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School filed to intervene in ITT’s liquidation, which is currently being overseen by James M. Carr, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of Indiana...“We’re trying all the angles, all the avenues,” Toby Merrill, founder and director of the Harvard project, said in an interview...“All of these students have filed their own claims with the Education Department,” said Eileen Connor, director of litigation at the Harvard project. “But the Department has been sitting on them, and they are not visible in any way.”

The makeup of President-elect Donald Trump’s trade team suggests he wasn’t joking when he promised voters to shake things up. On the campaign trail, Trump portrayed an America that has been shortchanged by bad trade deals and unscrupulous trading partners, leading to the hollowing out of the nation’s manufacturing sector. He promised to label China a currency manipulator and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico..."It’s clear this wasn’t just campaign rhetoric. The team that the President-elect has put in place was at the core of advising him during the campaign and has a clear playbook of what it wants to implement," said Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who worked in the office of the U.S. trade representative under George W. Bush. "They’ve been pretty straightforward about their view of the status quo, which is that it undermines American economic interests."

An op-ed by Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen. Often with the best of intentions, the federal government in the past six years has presided over the creation of a sex bureaucracy that says its aim is to reduce sexual violence but that is actually enforcing a contested vision of sexual morality and disciplining those who deviate from it. Many observers assume that today’s important campus sexual-assault debate is concerned with forcible or coerced sex, or with taking advantage of someone who is too drunk to be able to consent. But the definition of sexual assault has stretched enormously, in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Indeed, the concept of sexual misconduct has grown to include most voluntary and willing sexual conduct.

The Harvard Law Review, the legal journal Barack Obama helped edit as law student, on Thursday published an article penned by the president focusing on criminal justice reform and some of his accomplishments while in office. Michael Zuckerman, the president of the journal, wrote in an accompanying post on the social publishing platform Medium that Obama’s article, “The President’s Role In Advancing Criminal Justice Reform,” is the first time a sitting president has published a work of legal scholarship anywhere.

As the whole world speculates how US President-elect Donald Trump would shape the destiny of his country and the world, Harvard-based academic Samuel Moyn, who is in the city, tells Express about what might be in store. THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: As Donald Trump gets ready to assume office as the President of the United States, Muslims and immigrants who have been his targets during the election campaign, are seriously concerned about their future, says Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Harvard University. Moyn, a specialist in Human Rights and International Law, was in the city to deliver a lecture on the topic ‘Human Rights and Globalisation’. The lecture was organised by the Department of Law, University of Kerala.

2016 roiled the power sector as a reality TV star ascended to the nation's highest office.... Utility Dive solicited submissions from readers and industry thought leaders for our popular predictions piece. The response was nearly overwhelming, with major power players expecting disruption in state policies and energy markets in the year to come. ... Legal debates will take center stage at FERC: Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School: While lawsuits about the roles of state and federal regulators will continue to grab headlines in 2017, action at FERC will shift the debate away from the legal limits of state action to the scope of federal authority.  FERC recently proposed a rule that will allow distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar and small-scale storage, to participate in wholesale electricity markets.  FERC should finalize this rule in 2017, which will require each market operator to develop a compliance plan for FERC review.

Deborah J. Caruso, the chapter 7 Trustee appointed by the United States Bankruptcy Court to oversee the liquidation of the estate of the failed ITT Educational Services, Inc. and ITT Technical Institute today responded to the purported class action complaint filed by the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School on behalf of all former ITT students: “Since the filing of these chapter 7 cases in September, we have been working with state regulators, the SEC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education to better understand and address the causes of ITT’s collapse and develop a path forward. The Trustee is not ITT. My duty as a fiduciary is to investigate claims, monetize assets, and make distributions to creditors. In this case, the creditors not only include former students, but also a number of other undisputed claimholders, such as landlords and vendors. Resolving these claims is an enormous task for a company in a traditional restructuring, such as a retailer, but it is made even more complicated where there are several thousand potential student claimants – each with a unique, heartfelt story to tell – and no one left at ITT to verify their assertions, or assist in the response to the allegations."

Over the last few weeks, We the People has featured programs held at the National Constitution Center last fall. This week, that review concludes with Michael Klarman, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of The Framers’ Coup, and Patrick Spero, Librarian of the American Philosophical Society and co-editor of The American Revolution Reborn, who offer new perspectives on the American Revolution and the Founding era. Tom Donnelly, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Constitution Center, moderates.

Sixteen Harvard Law School faculty members have joined thousands of other law professors across the country in signing a letter opposing Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions’s nomination as United States Attorney General... Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., who signed the letter, said Sessions’s record on voting rights, especially for minorities, is deeply troubling to him. “The aim of the letter is to raise the significant issues about voting, which is fundamental to our democratic experiment and, once these issues are raised, we hope that the committee and the citizenry in general would not support this nominee,” Sullivan said. “We certainly think that, party affiliation aside, no Attorney General should have taken such a radical view about voting rights laws.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Senate Republicans changed the rules of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation game by blocking President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to make the next move. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled that the Democrats will filibuster almost any nominee proposed by Donald Trump. Although the Republicans could break the filibuster by invoking the so-called nuclear option, it isn’t certain that they will be able to do so. That would leave the court with eight members for the foreseeable future -- and potentially create circumstances where vacancies can only be filled when the president and 60 senators come from the same party.

President Obama is spending his final few weeks in the White House trying to do what he can to preserve his legacy. ... Which is why, when the Harvard Law Review published this week “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform” by Barack Obama — the first time a sitting president has written for the esteem legal publication — it seemed as though this, too, might be a part of that concerted campaign to remind the public what Obama has accomplished. But, it turns out, the idea didn’t come from the president of the United States. Instead, it was the far-fetched pipe dream of the president of the Harvard Law Review, Michael Zuckerman, and the publication’s articles chair, Colin Doyle.

Scientists have shown conclusively that treatment not only improves the health of people infected with HIV, it also stops transmission of the virus that causes AIDS. ...Policy experts say the delay to an Obamacare replacement may give insurance companies little incentive to stick with the Obamacare individual insurance plans. Insurance companies have asked lawmakers to keep subsidies in place and make changes they hope will help stabilize the market, such as delaying deadlines for 2018 plan submissions. "It creates a really difficult environment for insurers to commit to the market," said Carmel Shachar of the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation at Harvard. Shachar co-wrote a letter signed by 174 national, state and local HIV organizations urging members of the senate not to repeal or modify the Affordable Care Act without a clearly defined replacement plan.

Former ITT Tech students filed a lawsuit against the now defunct for-profit college. The students are seeking participation in the company’s bankruptcy proceedings, using testimonials from hundreds of students that claim they were deceived and abused by ITT Tech. In the past ten years, the company has taken over $11 billion from its students in the form of taxpayer-financed grants and loans. ...Former students have applied to the Department of Education to have their federal loans forgiven. Their testimonials have been gathered up by the group Debt Collective and are being represented by the Project on Predatory Lending at the Harvard Law School Legal Services Center.

The makeup of President-elect Donald Trump’s trade team suggests he wasn’t joking when he promised voters to shake things up. ... Since the election, Trump has taken aim at individual companies, warning General Motors Co. this week that it could face a "big border tax" if it doesn’t shift production to the United States from Mexico. And the track records of his top trade officials signal that his administration will take aggressive steps to boost exports, according to trade experts. "It’s clear this wasn’t just campaign rhetoric. The team that the president-elect has put in place was at the core of advising him during the campaign and has a clear playbook of what it wants to implement," said Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who worked in the office of the U.S. trade representative under George W. Bush. "They’ve been pretty straightforward about their view of the status quo, which is that it undermines American economic interests."

President Obama penned an article published online Thursday by the Harvard Law Review in which he lays out the criminal justice reforms his administration has made and outlines the continued path to reform as he sees it. The article, which spans 55 pages of the January print edition, lists specific accomplishments of the past eight years and advocates for more near-term action on key proposals that have earned bipartisan backing in recent years, as well as related issues such as gun control reform and efforts to address the opioid crisis.

In recent weeks, Casey Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea has gone from acclaimed awards contender to near-Oscar lock. The soft-spoken, scraggly-bearded actor has taken the stage at a number of ceremonies already—the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Gotham Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle—ahead of what’s looking like an increasingly likely victory at the Academy Awards. The surge of publicity has brought renewed attention to two sexual harassment lawsuits filed against him in 2010 that alleged he had manhandled women, was verbally abusive, and generally behaved outrageously on the set of his film I’m Still Here, which he directed. Both cases were mediated and eventually settled out of court for undisclosed sums. ...“People carelessly conflate rape with the entire range of sexual misconduct that can occur,” the Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen told the Times. “It’s all repulsive. But both morally and legally there are distinctions—degrees of behavior. Parker was accused of something far more serious.”

President Barack Obama took to the Harvard Law Review to tout his administration’s reforms of the criminal justice system, in an article published Thursday. It’s the second time he’s made history with the legal journal: He was its first black editor as a law student in 1990. And now, Obama is the first sitting president to publish a work of “legal scholarship,” according to the law review’s current editor. ...Obama’s article marks the “first work of legal scholarship of a sitting president,” said Michael Zuckerman, the current editor of the Harvard Law Review. Zuckerman described “an editing experience that we’ll never forget” on the conference call with reporters Wednesday. “We edited the piece in a couple of very quick turnarounds,” he said – during finals.