Media Mentions

Dean Baquet wasn't bluffing. The New York Times executive editor said during a visit to Harvard in September that he would risk jail to publish Donald Trump's tax returns. He made good on his word Saturday night when the Times published Trump tax documents from 1995, which show the Republican presidential nominee claimed losses of $916 million that year - enough to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years afterward..."The courts could say, if the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes," said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School. Zittrain told me that "if the New York Times received the return information not from the government after it was filed but from a private citizen, such as one working for Trump, and from Trump's own records, criminal liability may be less clear. Which could mean that ascertaining where the material didn't come from is as important as where it did."

...The international adoption system can be murky. Critics say it is not in the best interests of children to be adopted by families from another country and to grow up outside their native culture. But supporters insist if children are given a loving home, that in itself is in a child’s best interest...On this episode of The Stream, we speak with...Elizabeth Bartholet, Director, Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School.

The threat of rain did not deter nearly 400 Harvard affiliates from marching in front of Massachusetts Hall Friday afternoon in support of Harvard’s dining workers, who announced earlier in the day that they intend to strike next Wednesday should the University not comply with their demands...Following the rally Friday evening, workers, union representatives, and students converged on Harvard Law School’s student lounge for a "speakout” event hosted by the Harvard National Lawyers Guild. Several HUDS workers shared with supporters their personal experiences of working at Harvard in a discussion moderated by Law student and Reclaim Harvard Law member Marco R. Castanos [`18]...“We recognize that the struggles of people from marginalized communities and people of color are universal, they’re not just confined to students. So it wouldn’t make sense for Reclaim and the strike not to stand in solidarity with one another,” Castanos said in an interview. “The struggles that they’re going for, to me at least, they’re synonymous.”

Since 2008, Darryl Dewayne Edwards has been a guest of the federal prison system, serving a sentence of life without parole. Though he had a fairly minor criminal record at the time of his arrest on drug and weapons charges, he received a mandatory life sentence after rejecting a plea bargain, and exercising his right to go to trial...Edwards’s release — and those of two other federal prisoners so far — was won by a group of young legal advocates. A group of Harvard Law School students, supervised by attorneys from the law firm of Goodwin Procter, has filed clemency petitions for more than a dozen federal prisoners who could qualify for release under guidelines set forth by the Justice Department...Among those answering the call was Larry Schwartztol, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School...Two of his students, Lark Turner and Molly Bunke, have worked on successful petitions...Turner said she went to law school with the hope of eventually influencing policy on mass incarceration. “The idea that you can go to law school and in your first year you can start working on things that matter so much it’s pretty incredible,” she said...“I think this experience taught me a lot about being an effective advocate,” Bunke said. “That’s why I came here, and that’s what I want to do when I leave.”

...the Gazette asked scholars from across Harvard to reflect on the leadership of our 44th president: what they most admired, what was disappointing, and what most surprised them...Carol Steiker: Most admire: The Affordable Care Act was a signal achievement — seemingly impossible at the outset but now the law of the land and making a huge difference in the lives of millions. The ACA will be remembered as one of Obama’s most important legacies. Disappointing: Obama did not make criminal justice reform a major priority, and his administration has made only modest contributions to addressing this area of gross injustice and shameful waste of capital, both financial and human. Surprising: I would not have predicted the utter impasse that Obama has reached with Congress, in which both ordinary legislation and the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court nominees have ground to halt, despite the president’s efforts to seek bipartisan solutions.

The prospects for a more competitive broadband market have grown grimmer of late, if it's even possible. Americans already have little, if any, choice when it comes to broadband providers...AT&T is also front in center in another fight aimed at forestalling competition: denying would-be competitors access to utility poles. Many cities do not have authority over their own poles, which are often controlled by utilities or the telecom companies. If a new service provider wants to move into an area and string fiber, it faces two bureaucratic nightmares: getting an agreement in place with the pole owners, and then getting the physical access to the poles to string a new wire. Susan Crawford calls these two sources of delays and spiraling costs Swamp One and Swamp Two. "A handful of companies  --  the usual villains in the internet access story  --  is very interested in keeping the status quo in place by quietly making sure that access to these vertical conflict zones is fraught with difficulties," Crawford says.

Nearly 80,000 students of defunct for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges are facing some form of debt collection, even though the U.S. Department of Education unearthed enough evidence of fraud to forgive their student loans, according to an investigation by the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)....“The department knows that these borrowers, who have already been cheated of an education, are entitled to relief,” said Deanne Loonin, an attorney at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, who is working on the case. “Williams is asking for a court decision that the widespread fraud of Corinthian is a bar to the collection of defaulted loans from former Corinthian students through the mechanism of Treasury offset.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal appeals court this week upheld an Alabama law that bans political action committees from making donations to other political action committees. That should be good news for Democrats, who generally oppose the Citizens United decision and the flood of political spending it released. But the twist is that the law was devised to interfere with the work of the Alabama Democratic Conference, and it was the losing party in the lawsuit.

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. White that police do not have blanket authority to seize cellphones in criminal investigations. The case had to do with police officers investigating an armed robbery and fatal shooting in 2010. The officers seized a suspect's cellphone from his high school without a search warrant. In order to do so, the officers needed probable cause that a warrant would have been approved, but the court ruled the suspicion that a phone may have contained evidence of the crime is insufficient. Guest: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

For the first time, the world’s highest criminal court ruled this week that destroying cultural antiquities is a war crime. The case, handled by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, spotlights the risk to historic sites in places controlled by Islamic extremists, who have traded plundered antiquities on the black market or destroyed them in a twisted interpretation of religious law. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda, was sentenced to nine years in prison for organizing the destruction of centuries-old Muslim shrines in Timbuktu, Mali...The case against Mr. Mahdi “does signal that these sorts of cases are on the court’s radar,” said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former senior official in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. “The court is very much a court of opportunity,” he added. “It’s a court with very little power, little resources to investigate and very few tools to collect evidence. Is cultural heritage something the court will now focus on? Now that they’ve done one case, a second, similar case is unlikely.”

In seeking to defuse the firestorm over its sham accounts, Wells Fargo & Co.’s board turned to an old, but obscure gambit – getting its top leader to pay up. John Stumpf, the bank's chairman and CEO, will forfeit about $41 million of unvested stock awards and forgo his salary while the company investigates its retail banking sales practices...Companies’ general reluctance to claw back pay may stem from their desire to retain top executives, avoid litigation by departed executives, and minimize bad publicity, says Jesse Fried, professor of law at Harvard Law School. Some companies may choose to reduce a CEO’s current pay rather than claw back already-received pay. “It is much less embarrassing for the CEO,” Fried says. Dodd-Frank “will require companies to recoup excess pay arising in connection with a (financial) restatement. There will be a lot more clawbacks because companies will not have discretion to forgo recoupment when a covered executive has received excess pay,” Fried says.

...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.