Media Mentions

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.

When Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself on Facebook in June, a sharp-eyed observer spotted a piece of tape covering his laptop’s camera. The irony didn’t go unnoticed: A man whose $350 billion company relies on users feeding it intimate details about their lives is worried about his own privacy. But Zuckerberg is smart to take precautions. Even those of us who don’t control large corporations have reason to worry about surveillance, both licit and illicit. Here’s how governments, terrorists, corporations, identity thieves, spammers, and personal enemies could observe us in the future, and how we might respond...Perhaps we’ll also see a shifting of social norms. If everyone’s embarrassing behavior is accessible in perpetuity, we may become inured to employees’ college benders and even to senators’ sexts. Will paranoia reduce misbehavior, or will humans be humans and maintain our blithe and blundering ways? “It’s hard to change our daily habits,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “I don’t know if that’s a reason for optimism, because it means we’re not going to be chilled, or pessimism, because we appear to be resigned to losing our privacy without thinking it through first.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It takes a lot to turn a publisher of sex ads into a First Amendment hero. But the attorney general of California has managed the feat. By charging Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com, with pimping and sex trafficking in minors, Kamala Harris has seriously breached the constitutional wall meant to protect the free press. Ferrer -- and the two controlling shareholders of the online classified marketplace Backpage -- aren’t charged with actually arranging sex for pay. They’ve been criminally charged based on a claim that Backpage is designed to, and does, publish third-party ads for sex trafficking. On this theory, essentially any publication that sells ads could be outlawed -- and that’s almost any publication on earth.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump’s threat in Sunday night’s presidential debate to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server is legally empty -- but it’s genuinely dangerous nevertheless. Federal regulations give the appointment power to the attorney general, not the president, precisely to protect us against a president who uses the special prosecutor as a political tool. What separates functioning democracies from weak or failed ones is that political parties alternate in power without jailing the opponents they beat in elections. That sometimes means giving a pass to potentially criminal conduct, but that’s a worthwhile sacrifice for making republican government work.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as “the other side.” If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

Not long after he was elected district attorney for Brooklyn, New York, in 2013, Kenneth Thompson cold-called a Harvard law professor and former public defender to ask for help digging through old cases for people who had been wrongly convicted. At first, the professor thought Thompson had made a mistake: Why would a prosecutor want to hire someone who made a living exposing the justice system's flaws? But Professor Ronald Sullivan quickly realized that Thompson was not a typical DA. He wanted his Conviction Review Unit to find true justice, even if it meant unraveling old guilty verdicts, or exposing wrongdoing. That meant having an outsider run it. "It's the right thing to do, and I'm committed to doing it the right way," Sullivan recalled Thompson telling him before he took the job.Sullivan recalled that conversation Monday as a sort of requiem. The night before, Thompson had died of cancer, five days after announcing he was ill.

An op-ed by Winston Shi `19...Rightly or not, though, Stanford gets the nation’s lowest undergrad admission rate, which tends to swell people’s heads. And isn’t our little war of admission rates at the heart of why this column matters? At the end of the day, you’re reading this because Stanford gets the (highly annoying) subtitle in American pop culture as “that plucky little school in Palo Alto that’s challenging Harvard to become number one.” All of this excruciating drama even though by Week 5 it is clear that your admission to any of these schools owes far more to luck than it ever could have to fate. Getting into Harvard/Stanford/[insert school here] is not a sign that you are God’s gift to mankind: it is your first lesson that the forces of destiny are blind.

An op-ed by Larry Schwartztol and Abby Shafroth...Silva’s experience highlights an increasingly fundamental fact about encounters with the criminal justice system: long after a formal sentence ends, the punishment continues. As his story shows, a criminal sentence is no longer a singular penalty pronounced by a judge as a proportionate response to a criminal conviction. These convictions often spark a cascade of economic consequences that persist for years after the formal sentence is over and threaten a person’s ability to successfully and self-sufficiently re-enter society. These debts force individuals to navigate a maze of onerous systems and actors—criminal courts and prisons, but also private debt collectors, DMVs, credit reporting companies, and bankruptcy courts.

In a presidential campaign featuring many firsts, one of the most startling came Sunday night when Republican nominee Donald Trump, to scattered cheers from the audience, pledged to have the Democratic nominee investigated criminally, should he prevail in November...some prominent lawyers and legal scholars took umbrage at the threat and expressed alarm. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Fortune that even threatening such a thing was “incompatible with the survival of a stable constitutional republic,” while carrying out such a threat would constitute an “impeachable offense.”

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed would like to make clear that she likes “Hamilton,” the Broadway hip-hop musical phenomenon about Alexander Hamilton, which audiences and critics have adored and some scholars and writers have scorned. But she would like to make clearer that she found the show problematic in its portrayals of Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Fathers, and the issue of slavery...“A Broadway show is not a documentary,” said Gordon-Reed, a history professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who also holds the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Facebook has been in talks for months with U.S. government officials and wireless carriers with an eye toward unveiling an American version of an app that has caused controversy abroad, according to multiple people familiar with the matter...U.S. Internet advocates have called on the Federal Communications Commission to regulate zero-rating under its net neutrality rules. The practice, they argue, risks tilting the online marketplace to benefit large, established firms, or the corporate partners of those firms. “Zero-rating is pernicious, unfair and unnecessary,” said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard who has advocated for strong regulation of the broadband industry. Permitting the practice would simply enable “the gameplaying of companies who have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo.”