Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan sang, in “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing.

The imposing architecture of New York City’s courts give the impression that the law is immutable. The long-serving district attorneys who marshal that law are similarly so permanent as to be like statues, their names unshakably on the ballot. But Ken Thompson’s brief tenure as Brooklyn district attorney threatened to change that, by bringing the zeal of a reformer to the borough’s courts. He quickly drew national attention for halting prosecutions for most low-level marijuana possession in 2014, for example...Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. had been the chief public defender in the DC court system. An adversarial judicial system traditionally puts defense attorneys on the other side of a deep divide from prosecutors. Sullivan had done academic work on exoneration and the potential for errors in certain types of convictions. “The first time he called, I had to make sure that he had the right guy,” Sullivan says...For Sullivan, one of the crucial changes embedded in the CRU was prosecutors being encouraged to think of themselves as “ministers of justice.”

Wells Fargo...has come under fire for deceptive sales practices that led to the opening of about 2 million accounts without customer authorization. After facing a grilling on Capitol Hill, CEO John Stumpf retired effective immediately on Wednesday...For Hal Scott, Harvard Law professor and author of "Connectedness and Contagion," the black mark on Wall Street could have serious repercussions. "It really affects the ability of the federal government, and in particular the Fed, to be a lender of last resort to Wall Street if we go into another crisis," he said. "The more unpopular Wall Street becomes, the less possible it is for the Fed to support it in a crisis."

Four sections of Law School students voted to use discretionary funds to host lunch events with striking dining hall workers, despite the reservations of school administrators...First-year law student and social committee member Zach Sosa said some students raised concerns about the use of funds potentially alienating students who disagreed with the strike...For first-year Law student Alexandra Rawlings, using section funds rather than personal contributions was part of the point of the proposal.“Half of the point was like ‘Hey, you guys won’t use your money to take care of your employees, but we want to use it to do that’ so that symbolic decision—which didn’t actually happen for my section—was pretty important,” she said.

At the Conference on Race and Justice in the Age of Obama, academics, activists, and government officials engaged in a heated debate about whether President Barack Obama effectively addressed race-related issues during his administration...Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, argued that despite Obama’s limited executive powers, his administration’s Justice Department is working resolutely to advance civil liberties. “A president can’t wave a magic wand and say, ‘Civil rights, repair!’ That doesn’t happen. The executive is constrained in very real ways,” he said.

Donald Trump reiterated Thursday that he’s preparing a lawsuit against The New York Times after the paper published what he called a “fabricated” account of new sexual assault allegations against the Republican nominee....“Trump has no case at all,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, told The New Republic in an email. “It’s really not even debatable,” said Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Both Tribe and Strossen said Trump would need to meet the legal standard of the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and prove, in Tribe’s words, that the story “was factually false and that the Times either knew that it was false or was reckless in the story’s creation and reporting.” “Trump could not possibly meet that standard,” Tribe said, “and his case would be dead on arrival. It wouldn’t even reach the discovery stage.”

An op-ed by Jonas Monast, Sarah Adair and Kate Konschnik. "What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs, while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?" Like it or not, the next president will need an answer to this question, posed by audience member Ken Bone in the second presidential debate, in the early days of his or her administration. The electricity sector that powers our country is undergoing its most significant transition since mass electrification. Last year, for the first time ever, the United States generated as much electricity from natural gas as from coal, thanks to the shale gas boom and historically low natural gas prices...Decisions by the next president will shape how the electricity sector responds to these and other changes that carry with them wide-ranging economic and environmental consequences. Yet energy policy has barely registered as an issue this election cycle despite dramatic differences in the candidates’ platforms.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of the most stunning rulings in recent years on separation of powers, the prestigious federal court of appeals in Washington, DC, on Tuesday struck down the law creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- at least as the independent agency that Congress designed. To cure what it saw as a constitutional defect, the court ruled that the bureau’s head must not be independent of the president, but must serve at his pleasure and be subject to his complete control. It’s an appealing idea, elaborated with an unusual level of scholarship, clarity, and even passion. But as a matter of constitutional law, it’s a bit wild. The Supreme Court shouldn't accept it -- and probably won't.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it unlawful race discrimination for a company to ban dreadlocks in the workplace? In a decision that has become a topic of debate among law professors, a federal appeals court said no last month. The case is so important because the court defined race as biology, emphasizing “immutable characteristics” as the subject of anti-discrimination law. But for more than 75 years, scholars have understood that race is as much or more a matter of culture than it is about biological reality. The decision in EEOC v. Catastrophic Management Solutions is therefore built on quicksand -- and it’s a mistake to embrace it, even if on some level the result might seem like common sense.

An op-ed by Raymond Flynn and Mary Ann Glendon. “You can get all A’s and still flunk life,” wrote the great 20th-century Catholic novelist Walker Percy. The authors of this paper have done Catholic educators and families a tremendous service by explaining precisely why the secularized Common Core national standards, which were devised primarily for public schools, are incompatible with and unsuited for a traditional Catholic education. There are many similarities between Catholic schooling and its public K-12 educational counterpart, but the two have fundamental and profound differences. In addition to providing students with the academic knowledge and skills they need to prosper, Catholic schools have a unique spiritual and moral mission to nurture faith and prepare students to live lives illuminated by a Catholic worldview. It is that religious focus that makes the Common Core standards particularly ill-suited for Catholic schools.

Acid water, dust, air pollution, destruction of arable land and intimidation of environmental activists are just some of the concerns raised in two damning reports released this week, one of them a submission to the UN Human Rights Council...The submission coincides with a second equally damning report, also released yesterday, by the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic. This report claims South Africa has "failed to meet its human rights obligations to address the environmental and health effects of gold mining in Johannesburg."...Bonnie Docherty, senior clinical instructor at UNHRC and the report's lead author, said South Africa was failing to fulfil human rights commitments made when apartheid ended. "The government should act immediately to address the on-going threats from gold mining, and it should develop a more complete solution to prevent future harm," Docherty said.

Since Harvard’s dining service workers began their historic strike last week, the University and the union that represents those employees have publicly sparred over proposed health care plans and wage increases. While both parties are far from agreement on those issues, negotiators are making progress on a proposal that until recently has received little attention: the creation of a HUDS-specific diversity task force...While the proposal has been on the table since June, students groups at the Law School have recently advocated to make diversity a more central issue in the negotiations. Last Friday, Harvard Law student groups Reclaim Harvard Law and the Harvard National Lawyers Guild released a statement endorsing the task force proposal. The groups, which have a history of race-related activism, aim to cast the strike as a racial justice “struggle” and tie it to Reclaim Harvard Law’s own movement...“The challenges that HUDS workers are facing are unique in a way that distinguishes them from the challenges that the rest of the community faces in terms of racial justice," said second-year Law student Collin P. Poirot [`18], a member of both Reclaim Harvard Law and the Harvard National Lawyers Guild.

Donald Trump’s threat to sic a special prosecutor on Hillary Clinton should he win the presidency has prompted a group of Republican former Justice Department officials to call for the GOP presidential nominee’s defeat in November. “We believe that Donald Trump’s impulsive treatment, flair for controversy, vindictive approach to his opponents and alarming views outside the constitutional mainstream ill suit him to oversee the execution of the laws in a fair and evenhanded manner,” reads the letter, signed by about two dozen former officials who served under five Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. “None of us will vote for Mr. Trump and all believe he must be defeated at the polls.”...signers included...former Solicitor General Charles Fried (Reagan).

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. At the end of the recently-opened Expo Line in Los Angeles — and you’ll want to take that snazzy light rail, because the I-10 freeway running between downtown and the coast is one of the 10 most-congested roadways in the world — you’re in Santa Monica, California. You’re at the Colorado Esplanade stop, a stunning platform of pedestrian- and bike-friendly multi-modality that feels open and available. It’s just one of many great things about my hometown...And there is the city’s most recent source of civic pride: its street lights and traffic signal poles. Don’t laugh. I think of them as the Colorado Esplanade in the sky. No, I am not celebrating their function as providers of light. Their real power comes from a transformation — into neutral platforms that provide the tools of connectivity to everyone.

As college students cope with concerns about grades and fitting in, they are also confronting one of the most painful issues playing out on their campuses every day — sexual assault. Studies show most campus sexual assaults happen in the fall term, a period experts call "the red zone." Recent years have seen aggressive government action to try to protect alleged victims and fix a system that some say is hostile and skeptical of their claims. And now some are raising difficult questions about how those solutions are panning out...But other experts say the well-intentioned rush to ramp up enforcement has created a broken system, creating a problem for alleged victims and alleged perpetrators. "Under pressure from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, schools across the country have thrown due process out the window," said Harvard law school professor, Janet Halley.

As cab companies in Boston and Cambridge push a legal effort to have Uber drivers held to the same rules as taxis, a similar case in Chicago has run into a judicial roadblock. A federal appeals court in Illinois ruled last week that Chicago can subject ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft to different regulations than taxis. Even though the services look similar, Judge Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit wrote there are enough differences to warrant different rules. For explanation, Posner used the example of pet licenses that municipalities issue...The Chicago decision doesn’t set a precedent for the Massachusetts cases, but it could influence their outcome, according to legal experts. For example, without precedent from their own First Circuit Court of Appeals, judges in Boston may naturally look to the Chicago decision for guidance, said Harvard Law School professor Bruce Hay. “The Seventh Circuit is an indicator, not a conclusive indicator but a persuasive indicator,” of how judges here “would view the case,” he said.

Kendra K. Albert, an affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, urged audience members at a Harvard Law School event Tuesday to examine critically the use of legal terminology in casual settings outside the court of law. Albert defined these “legal talismans” as “a legal term of art, out of place, invoked to make or justify substantive decisions that do not involve formal legal processes.” Albert, a 2016 Law School graduate, cited free speech and defamation as two examples of terms that individuals and organizations frequently cite outside legal contexts to defend their non-legal decisions. They added that the use of "legal talismans" leads individuals to lose sight of the often discriminatory history of the laws they are casually referencing. “Defamation’s gorgeous traditional design hides deeply sexist, racist, and whorephobic, which means ‘anti-sex worker,’ connotations,” Albert said.

Four Massachusetts churches contend in a federal lawsuit that a new state law could force them to allow transgender people to use the church bathrooms, changing rooms, and shower facilities of their choice, violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional right to freely practice their religion...Joseph Singer, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the suit presents “a really interesting, hard issue.” Churches that hold spaghetti dinners may be thinking about converting members of the public, “but if they really are inviting anyone in the public to come in, without any religious test, then it looks like it’s not really a religious thing. “The courts then have to figure out,” he continued, “how do they draw a line between what seems more secular-oriented, open to the public ... versus having something that’s more central to their religious mission.”

South Africa is failing to uphold citizens’ human rights by allowing toxic waste from huge mine dumps in and around Johannesburg to seep into rivers, according to Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. The government hasn’t done enough to mitigate the impact of contaminated water from abandoned mines and dust storms from radioactive waste dumps, the IHRC said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday. While a long-term plan announced in May to spend 12 billion rand ($843 million) cleaning water from mines is a positive, it came more than a decade after polluted water began seeping out west of Johannesburg, the clinic said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A Saudi airstrike that destroyed a funeral hall and killed 140 people Saturday in Yemen is a scenario U.S. lawyers have been worried about under international law. Documents obtained by Reuters reveal that State Department lawyers were concerned that arms sales to the Saudis might make the U.S. liable for war crimes the Saudis might commit. The U.S. hasn’t been giving targets to the Saudis but, problematically, it has provided a no-strike list including critical infrastructure. In effect, that may make the U.S. complicit in targeting decisions like the one that tragically hit the funeral hall. Worse, the U.S. has been refueling Saudi warplanes for strikes in Yemen.

Before Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe went to war with the Obama administration in court, he wanted a job as a top White House lawyer, new leaked emails reveal. The legal heavyweight and former mentor to President Obama has gained notoriety in some liberal and environmental circles for representing the coal industry in a lawsuit attacking President Obama's signature climate change policy. That might have turned out differently if Obama had given him one of the administration jobs he asked for back in 2008...Asked about his 2008 emails, Tribe said today in an interview, "I wanted to be helpful to the administration, and it turned out that the position that made the most sense both to the president and the attorney general ... was as the first senior counselor to access to justice." He said he was glad he had held that job and wasn't afraid then to speak up when his views conflicted with administration policies. "I didn't always agree with the legal initiatives that the president was taking," he said.