Media Mentions

...On Tuesday, 10 judges of the D.C. Circuit gathered to hear oral arguments in the sweeping legal challenge to the plan, which was filed last year by 27 Republican-governed states, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the coal industry. The hearing was careful, sometimes agitated, and unusually long: Excluding a short break for lunch, the arguments ran almost seven hours....Tatel, who is blind, asked Rivkin if the Americans with Disabilities Act would also abuse the state’s local permitting powers. (The ADA more or less forces states to approve certain curb or wheelchair ramp designs.) Rivkin could not supply a coherent answer. But Larry Tribe could. Tribe, Obama’s one-time legal mentor and a lion of liberal constitutional law, has famously become one of the Clean Power Plan’s most unrelenting critics. The ADA itself was perfectly legal, he said. The better comparison would be if an executive agency went to the states and forced them each to pass a mini-ADA or give in to federal control...Tribe’s larger argument is that the Clean Power Plan abuses the separation of federal powers. “The solution is to go to Congress. The structural integrity of our federal government can’t depend on this court’s evaluation of whether Congress is being productive or not,” he said.

When restaurants and grocery stores end up with scraps and other leftovers that cannot be donated to food banks, what happens to them? A lot end up in landfills, contributing to the already massive amounts of food waste that emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as it breaks down. But a growing amount is being used to feed farm animals...A new report from Harvard University and University of Arkansas researchers published last month aims to address any confusion about the practice by laying out all of the federal- and state-level rules and suggesting best practices for safe and effective implementation. “We want to show people that this is what you can do and this is how you do it, to encourage people to start this process again,” said Christina Rice, a clinical fellow at Harvard’s Food and Policy Law Center and one of the report’s authors. Rice believes that the practice will continue to become more common, and as that happens, she is confident many current obstacles will dissipate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Strippers have constitutional rights too -- or at least that’s the claim of three New Orleans women challenging a Louisiana law that requires erotic dancers to be 21 to expose their breasts or buttocks. It may sound absurd, but the legal argument is pretty powerful. The law facially discriminates on the basis of sex, and arguably infringes on that classic First Amendment right to express yourself by dancing without clothes.

After a pre-screening of the upcoming film “Deepwater Horizon” in Davis Square, Harvard faculty and other law experts offered insight into the the 2010 oil spill of the same namesake in the Gulf of Mexico and the extensive legal aftermath. The film was screened in Somerville Theater on Wednesday for those with a Harvard ID and a guest. Panelists included Law School professor Richard J. Lazarus, who chaired President Barack Obama’s Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill...“This was an unbelievable disaster that shouldn’t have happened,” Lazarus said of the spill. “What happened is that [BP] got complacent. They hadn’t had a disaster in a long time.”

A Q&A with Jeannie Suk Gersen...I have taught a course at Harvard on Performing Arts and Law, with my friend Damian Woetzel, Director of the Vail Dance Festival and former Principal Dancer of the New York City Ballet. We were both students at the School of American Ballet, though of course he continued dancing and I did not. For years I watched his incredible performances at Lincoln Center – I thought he was a god. When I was teaching law students with Damian, I had to pinch myself. The course actually had a lot of law, and also involved Damian teaching the students the steps of certain dances. I remember Judge Michael Boudin ofthe First Circuit, who’s a ballet fan, came to class one day, and I loved seeing him join in to dance the beginning of Balanchine’s Serenade. That has been one of my favorite teaching experiences.

Technologies too complex to be easily understood by the layperson can be playgrounds for unscrupulous politicians. That’s become the case with the Internet’s internal digital plumbing, which has come into the crosshairs of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Donald Trump. Cruz and Trump, along with a passel of other Republicans on Capitol Hill, have decided to throw a conniption fit over a routine, if complicated, transition in the technical governance of the Internet scheduled to take place Saturday — if a last-ditch maneuver in the House of Representatives doesn’t block it...As Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet expert at Harvard who has served on an ICANN advisory committee, observed in 2014 after the Obama White House issued its transition plan, ICANN had virtually no authority over how Internet users behaved online. You could register the website www.gap.clothing “through an ICANN-approved process,” he wrote; but ICANN would have no jurisdiction if you “sell fake Gap clothing on your website goodclothes.clothing.”

Following years of debate over U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard arguments yesterday in the lawsuit challenging the rule. During today's OnPoint, Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, professors at Harvard Law School, discuss the reactions coming from the 10-judge panel on the key issues and arguments in the case. They also explain why they believe the court's final ruling will more than likely favor EPA.

Wells Fargo & Co's unprecedented move to strip Chief Executive John Stumpf of $41 million in stock awards has sent a chill through Wall Street with bankers fearful that a hardening political climate against corporate wrongdoing will encourage boards to be more aggressive about making them forfeit pay...."The Wells Fargo board made a mistake by not recouping some of the CEO's pay until after the firestorm developed," said Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried. "Other boards will learn from this mistake."

An op-ed by Simon Hedlin `19. This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the popular notion of Asian-Americans as an exceptionally successful bunch. On January 9, 1966, sociology professor William Petersen published the highly influential essay, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” in which he proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, rather than being a “problem minority,” had within a short timespan emerged as a “model minority.” Today, the model minority label is as alive and well as ever, the only difference being that the high praise now extends to every American of Asian descent. By both the political left and right, Asian-Americans are frequently lauded for high educational attainment and household incomes. Implicit in this stereotype is the belief that America would be better off if other ethnic groups tried to emulate those of us who have Asian roots. Given my Taiwanese origin and Asian-American identity, I should perhaps be flattered by the model minority account and accept it as a compliment. But, in fact, I find it deeply problematic.

Harvard Law School debuted a remodeled Title IX training for new students this fall in response to student criticisms and recommendations from a University-wide task force on sexual assault prevention. While Deputy Title IX Coordinator and Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells heralded the training as an improvement over previous iterations, she and Law School students said it was still flawed, and emphasized the need for further changes to the programming...Minjoo Kim, a second-year Law School student who became involved in brainstorming Title IX training reforms after creating the student government’s Health and Wellness Title IX subcommittee, found the process disappointing. With many students and administrators intently focused on activism surrounding race and diversity at the school last year, Kim said she felt Title IX issues were not accorded the attention they deserved...First-year student Devony Schmidt thought both the online and in-person programs focused too heavily on procedure while failing to address rape culture and bystander intervention strategies.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t come up Monday in the first presidential debate, and so far, it hasn’t been an important campaign issue. Given the unprecedented vacancy during an election season, that seems weird. But there is an explanation: The election’s consequences for the court are asymmetrical for the two political parties. If the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, is elected, it will change the court’s balance, either through the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, in the lame-duck session or with the appointment of Garland or another liberal after she takes office. If the Republican, Donald Trump, is elected, all he can do is replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with another conservative. That won’t change the court’s political balance.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Why do so many Americans oppose immigration, and why has it become a central issue in the presidential campaign? A growing body of research suggests that the answer isn't economic anxiety, or concerns about public spending, or even general nationalism. It is more specific -- and more disturbing. The question of what drives anti-immigrant sentiment is put in sharp relief by an extensive report released last week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report finds that immigration has positive effects on economic growth -- and doesn't hurt the employment or wages of native-born workers.

President Obama’s signature effort to combat global warming was alternately lauded as a reasonable attempt to move the nation toward cleaner energy sources and faulted as an unconstitutional, job-killing power grab during seven hours of vigorous legal arguments Tuesday....Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and former teacher of President Obama, argued against the plan on behalf of Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company. Tribe said the EPA is inappropriately stepping in where Congress has failed to act on climate change. Doing so created fundamental concerns about overreach by the executive branch, he said. “There’s a reason 27 states are on the petitioners’ side and 19 are on the other,” Tribe asserted.

The Senate and the House are expected to vote this week on whether to override President Obama’s veto of a bill that would allow families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role it had in the terrorist operations. The lawmakers should let the veto stand. The legislation, called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, would expand an exception to sovereign immunity, the legal principle that protects foreign countries and their diplomats from lawsuits in the American legal system. While the aim — to give the families their day in court — is compassionate, the bill complicates the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia and could expose the American government, citizens and corporations to lawsuits abroad. Moreover, legal experts like Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas School of Law and Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School doubt that the legislation would actually achieve its goal.

The nation’s second-most powerful court grappled Tuesday with the intractable and potentially catastrophic problem of climate change, weighing whether constitutional questions surrounding President Obama’s climate change regulations should trump the moral obligations of upholding a plan to curb global warming...Among the most prominent opponents of the plan is Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional authority who was Mr. Obama’s mentor at Harvard Law School. “This action by the E.P.A. is impermissible,” Mr. Tribe told the court. Judge David Tatel, an Obama appointee, appeared to disagree. He likened the rule to the Americans With Disabilities Act, in which the federal government set standards for states to make public spaces accessible to people with disabilities, and supplied states with federally devised plans for doing so. Tribe pushed back at that comparison. “Imagine if Congress had been unable to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, as it was unable to pass cap-and-trade, and if instead that same agency told states they had to each pass a mini-A.D.A., and said if they don’t, we will use executive authority to put it into place?” he said.

A case against President Obama's Clean Power Plan will be heard today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit — 28 mostly Republican states, along with over 100 companies and labor and industry groups, will be fighting to overturn the plan, which was stayed by the Supreme Court back in February. Jody Freeman joins The Takeaway to explain what's next for this case. She's a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Law School environmental law program. She also served as the White House counselor for energy and climate change from 2009 to 2010.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a case that evokes a modern-day hangman’s mask, a pharmacy that provides lethal drugs for carrying out the death penalty is arguing that it has a constitutional right to anonymity. The argument should fail, because there’s no right to confidentiality in providing government services. But it shows just how dangerously far the idea of corporate constitutional rights has gone in the era of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.

Republican lawmakers are accusing the Obama administration of allowing countries like Russia, China and Iran to take control over the Internet. Their beef with the administration focuses on a relatively obscure nonprofit overseen by the U.S. government that is scheduled to become fully independent Saturday. The organization is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short. Its history traces back to a graduate student at UCLA named Jon Postel. He started keeping track of the unique numbers assigned to particular computers using the Internet, during its early days. Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet law professor at Harvard, says Postel kept a clipboard to make sure no user had the same number — sort of like a phone book. "It was just sort of an honor system that would stop Caltech from coming in, or Bulgaria, from saying, 'You know what, we're going to start using those numbers,' " Zittrain says. "It's just something that would be a way of coordinating as people came online and needed to use numbers and, later, names."

An op-ed by Winston Shi `19. A few nights ago, I stayed up way too late drawing up a CV of my various professional failures. For most of America’s existence, we’ve made a point to celebrate risk-taking, boldness, and even sometimes failure, and I wanted to get a sense of how I stacked up. But what I learned from that exercise was absolutely not what I had expected: While I make a lot of mistakes and get rejected from a lot of opportunities, in the grand scheme of things, I frankly don’t think I’ve failed enough.

A book review by Samuel Moyn. During World War I, Roger Nash Baldwin was running a rag tag organization called the American Union against Militarism when he decided to create a civil liberties bureau, in part because he felt that defending conscientious objection to conscription would serve his wider pacifist goals. He knew that there was no mention of “civil liberties” in the United States Constitution—and that even the phrase itself would be unfamiliar, since it had not much figured in political rhetoric before...Over the course of those three decades, as the story is usually told, Americans were convinced to honor free speech in new ways thanks to heroic judges who had the good sense to agree with civil libertarians. The starring role in this tale is given to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes...Laura Weinrib overturns this simple narrative in her utterly brilliant new book. “The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise” shows that civil libertarian politics originated out of a trade-unionist movement for economic justice, and that its conscious choice to frame itself as serving constitutional principles above the political fray ironically disarmed the progressive movement out of which it was born.

History, as a rule, unfolds slowly at the Supreme Court. The Justices serve for decades. The cases take years. The Court’s languorous work schedule includes three months of downtime every summer. But the death of Antonin Scalia, earlier this year, jolted the institution and affirmed, once again, a venerable truism, attributed to the late Justice Byron White: “When you change one Justice, you change the whole Court.”...“There has not been a definitively liberal majority on the Supreme Court since Nixon was President,” Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, said. “Ever since then, liberals have sometimes managed to cobble together majorities to avoid losing—on issues like affirmative action and abortion—but the energy and the initiative have been on the conservative side. That stopped, at least for now, this year.”