Media Mentions

For communities hoping to expand broadband connectivity, President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for a major infrastructure spending bill could create huge changes, a panel of broadband pundits said...“This is a moment for the happy warriors of telecom policy to get out there and organize and be a part of the infrastructure deal for the Trump administration,” said Susan Crawford, Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “As we build roads and bridges and tunnels, we can include fiber that’s open access. That’s what I’m dreaming of, and that’s where we need to go.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Do you ever call or e-mail abroad? If so, be aware: The government could be listening, and it can use the content of those conversations against you -- without ever getting a warrant. That’s the upshot of an appeals court holding in the case of Mohamed Mohamud, who was convicted of an attempted bombing in Portland, Oregon. The decision is doubtful as a matter of constitutional law, and sooner or later, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to weigh in on the issue.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Those who support aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gases fear that the Donald Trump administration will undo all or most of President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives. But those fears are probably unwarranted. A good guess, based on a close look at the regulations that matter most, is that the Obama administration’s work on climate is more secure than most people realize; for the most part, Trump is unlikely to revisit it.

Are you a Florida presidential elector? Thinking of not voting for Donald Trump? Larry Lessig wants to have a word with you. “Our view is that it doesn’t make sense for an elector to stand out if you’re number 5 standing out,” Lessig said. “But if you’re number 39 standing out? That’s important.” Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and activist who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2015, is offering to provide free, confidential legal advice to presidential electors about the legal ramifications of not voting for Trump – even if their state voted for him, as Florida did...“The Constitution creates electors and protects them to have the freedom to vote their conscience once selected by a state,” Lessig said in a phone interview Wednesday with the Orlando Sentinel.

A federal court in New York is scheduled to hold a hearing Friday on a case that could have implications for the legal boundaries between federal and state authority regarding energy policy....“If the court reaches the merits, it will likely be the first to opine on the meaning of Hughes,” said Ari Peskoe, senior fellow in electricity law at the Environmental Policy Initiative at Harvard Law School and the manager of the Initiative’s State Power Project website.

WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner looks at the ongoing legal battles between Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and ExxonMobil, as well as how President-elect Donald Trump could reshape the Supreme Court, and what that could mean for Massachusetts.

Two-thirds of US states saw their economies grow while they reduced their carbon-dioxide emissions from 2000 to 2014. They did this by relying more on natural gas and nuclear energy for electricity production and less on coal, according to a report published Thursday by the Brookings Institution...Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School, tells the Monitor in an email that state policy has been a major driver in the growth of renewable energy. He cites the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which found that more than half of all growth in renewable electricity generation since 2000 is associated with state's Renewable Portfolio Standards requirements. But federal policies, he added, such as renewable energy tax credits, appliance efficiency standards, and Environmental Protection Agency regulations, probably contributed too.

Lawyers will make more money if they work together — but only if they do it the right way. That’s the premise of Heidi Gardner’s forthcoming book, “Smart Collaboration,” which is set to be released Jan. 3. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant, has spent more than a year analyzing data from time sheets and personnel records of several law firms to dig into that hypothesis. She came to the conclusion: “Collaboration doesn’t just increase revenues, but profits, too.”...Gardner, who studies the legal profession and lectures at Harvard Law School, caught up with Big Law Business for an interview. She spoke about what “smart collaboration” means for big law firms, the research that went into her new book and what she learned from some of the country’s top lawyers along the way.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Mark Wu, assistant professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S. trade negotiator, about how Trump would impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, as he has promised..."There are certain things that would require additional congressional authority - for example, if he wanted to impose a blanket, across-the-board 45 percent tariff. But there's a number of different ways he could impose a tariff without going back to Congress. One would be to do this on a temporary basis, but only up to 15 percent for up to 150 days. Another would be to use existing trade remedies laws to go back at specific Chinese products on a case-by-case basis where the president or a U.S. industry is asserting that China is dumping its goods into the U.S. market or benefiting from illegal subsidies.

Donald Trump loves to tweet. Sure he stopped for a few days before the election but now that he is President-Elect, his tweets are back and some of them are moving stock prices. Should you trade on Trump's tweets? Probably not...According to a December 7 interview with Allen Ferrell, Harvey Greenfield Professor of Securities Law at Harvard Law School, "As I read the STOCK Act, the President is subject to insider trading law."...Ferrell thinks that this rule most likely applies to the President if the tweet is market-moving. "Executive branch employees is defined to include the President in the Act. The question would then be whether he obtained the information "from such person's position as an executive branch employee" -- I think there would be an argument that the answer to that is yes. There is a materiality requirement so this information would have to be sufficiently important," he said.

Donald Trump has given every indication that he wants to dismantle the multitude of environmental rules that President Obama has put in place in the last eight years...Jody Freeman, a Harvard law school professor and former climate adviser to Obama, has been looking at this question extensively. Her view is that this won’t actually be easy for Trump — at least not without substantial help from Congress...I talked with Freeman about the mechanics of a potential Trump administration: how agency rulemaking works, what it would take to revamp Obama’s EPA regulations, why some environmental rules are much more vulnerable than others, and why Trump may not be able to undo everything Obama has done on climate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court gave Samsung Electronics Co. its first good news in a while on Tuesday, reversing a nearly $400 million verdict against it for infringing on Apple Inc.’s iPhone patent. The holding was narrow, and the justices sent the case back to the appeals court to figure out what the correct damages should be. But the thrust of the opinion was that damages could be computed based on the profit Samsung made from specific infringing features of the phone -- not based on the overall profit from all sales of infringing smartphones.

The video was unambiguous: A white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man in the back as the man ran away. But a South Carolina jury was unable to agree on a verdict in one of the nation's ghastliest police shootings, with a lone holdout forcing a mistrial. The outcome stung many African-Americans and others. If that kind of evidence can't produce a conviction, they asked, what can?...Randall Kennedy, a black Harvard University law professor and author of several books on race relations, had difficulty reconciling the law with the mistrial, which he called "frightening." "It appeared as though it was open and shut," said Kennedy, a native of Columbia, South Carolina. "Obviously, this is a case of some criminal action on the part of this police officer. Is it at all plausible that you have a man running and a police officer says, 'I'm firing in self-defense?'"

For the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the massive effort to block the Dakota Access pipeline is about much more than oil or water. It's also about religion. The proposed $3.8 billion, nearly 1,200-mile pipeline runs through sites on the North Dakota prairie the tribe considers sacred..."When I work with tribal leaders, they spend a tremendous amount of time and energy attending consultations with federal agencies, only to find out that the agency gives lip service to the information they have shared and goes ahead with its plans anyway," said Kristen Carpenter, a visiting professor of Indian law at Harvard Law School.

As eight years of zigzagging but ultimately valiant efforts by the Obama administration to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit colleges comes to a close, new documents, released to us under the Freedom of Information Act, shed light on a key chapter in that saga: The 2015 demise of one of the most abusive companies in the industry, Corinthian Colleges...Aided by ace lawyers Toby Merrill and Eileen Connor from Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, Republic Report in September 2015 filed a FOIA request with the U.S. Department of Education seeking, among other things, communications between the Department and Corinthian as the company started to collapse under the weight of government, media, and public scrutiny of its predatory practices.

A new organization is offering pro bono legal assistance to any Electoral College member who decides to break with the will of the people in his or her state, in hopes of derailing President-elect Donald Trump before he is sworn in. The vote to determine who will become president is set to take place on Dec. 19. Christopher Suprun, a paramedic who lives in Texas and is one of the 538 members of the Electoral College, announced this week that he will not cast his vote for the president-elect. Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor heading the project, told The Huffington Post that the law firm Durie Tangri handles intake and may wind up representing Suprun. Durie Tangri generally plans to offer confidential advice to anonymous electors, but Lessing said Suprun’s case was different. “He came to us just as he published his piece in the Times,” he said. “Our assumption is we’re talking to people who want to be anonymous, so he’s an exception. The whole community is going to step in and do what they can to help him.”

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. President Obama’s mantra for the past year has been that Congress is broken, so the executive will act. And now, as the stage is set for the new executive, it is dawning on Democrats that living by that sword may mean dying by it. A President can unilaterally revoke prior Presidents’ unilateral actions, and we may soon see just that, in response to Obama’s moves on immigration, climate change, and gun control. Among the myriad areas subject to upheaval is the President’s administration of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” The civil-rights statute has been the primary federal guarantee of equality in educational opportunity for male and female students.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The University of Kentucky is suing its own student newspaper to stop the publication of documents relating to a report of sexual assault and harassment. The case, which is expected to be resolved this month, pits federally guaranteed student privacy rights against the First Amendment and the public’s right to know. It also involves policy questions about how universities should handle sexual misconduct. Privacy for victims -- and for those who might be accused and then cleared -- is extremely important. But freedom of the press outweighs those interests, especially because universities are at the center of a significant struggle to determine the best way to deter and punish such cases.

Donald Trump's business dealings and his family's ongoing involvement in his finances will make the President-elect "a walking, talking violation of the Constitution" when he takes office, according to a legal expert. Professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard University, claimed Mr Trump's involvement in business could cause conflicts of interest, in line with the US Constitution's "emoluments clause"...But Professor Tribe said the President-elect would need to go further and sell off all his business interests to remove himself of emoluments difficulties. "[Mr Trump] is a constant emolument magnet. He thinks of himself as a babe magnet, but he's an emoluments magnet," Professor Tribe added.

On Sept. 5, 2006, Facebook transformed from a technology platform into a media company. That was the day the social media site replaced its chronological list of friends’ updates with its algorithmic news feed...Facebook’s only chance to escape this kind of responsibility may be to open its News Feed to others, says Jonathan Zittrain, a computer science and law professor at Harvard University...Zittrain suggested third-parties build on top of the existing algorithm, offering the News Feed as a customizable stream that others modify to suit their audiences.

Lawrence Lessig, activist, Harvard law professor, and author of Republic, Lost: The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It (Twelve, 2015), and Walter Olson, senior fellow at Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, preview their debate over the wisdom of convening another Constitutional Convention. Could it bypass the gridlock in Congress?