Media Mentions

Last month, the California Labor Commission ruled that an individual Uber driver was an employee. Today, the Department of Labor has issued a set of guidelines that suggests that all of them might be. ...Harvard labor law professor Benjamin Sachs told BuzzFeed News that the memo “clarifies the DOL’s view of what it means to be an employee for purposes of minimum wage, overtime, and family leave. Courts that defer to this interpretation are likely to conclude that Uber and Lyft drivers — and most other on-demand workers — fit the bill. After all, according to the labor department, you can be an ‘employee’ even if you set your own schedule and even if your work is never directly supervised.” But, Sachs added, while the guidelines do make a statement, it would be “not that radical” for a court to come to a decision that was not in alignment with the DOL’s new guidelines.

[Randall] Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, is the author of "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." In this book, subtitled "Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law," Kennedy offers a firm argument explaining why he sees affirmative action as a necessity in this country. Looking back on his own academic history as a student at St. Albans School for Boys, Princeton University and Yale Law School from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Kennedy explains, "An affirmative action ethos played a role in my admittance and flourishing at each of these selective, expensive, and powerful institutions. This ethos consists of a desire to make amends for past injustices, a commitment to counter present but hidden prejudices, a wish to forestall social disruption, and an intuition that racial integration will enrich institutions from which marginalized groups have largely been absent."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. An executive order from President Barack Obama requires that the Environmental Protection Agency analyze the costs and benefits of its regulations. But how exactly can it measure the economic benefits of the coming restrictions on greenhouse gases? For both policy and law (including the inevitable court challenges), it's a crucial question. This month, the administration provided a big part of the answer with a new report from its Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, which is intended to capture in dollar terms the damage from 1 ton of carbon emissions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump's anti-immigrant views have done a good deal for his presidential polling numbers. There's also reason think he's done the country a favor, by forcing politicians on the right to repudiate that anti-immigrant sentiment. In Europe when such rhetoric rises, it's bad news. Anti-immigrant politics are usually there to stay, and the xenophobia pushes the whole political scene rightward. Denmark is a textbook case. But in the U.S., the opposite seems to be happening. Sure, the anti-immigrant sentiment is playing well in polls for now. But instead of following Trump, or copying him, the right-leaning candidates with more political experience are staking out pro-immigrant territory or at least anti-anti-immigrant positions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The European political project is looking rather shaky in the wake of the will-they-or-won't-they Greek bailout. But you’d never know it from the Iran deal announced Tuesday. In its fine print, the nuclear pact gives the European Union the immediate power to make the treaty into an offer the U.S. can’t refuse. And, going forward, it gives the EU the crucial vote in determining whether Iran is complying with its promise not to make a nuclear weapon.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Today is the worst day of the George W. Bush administration. The deal U.S. President Barack Obama has struck with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program amounts to a pragmatic recognition that Iran has joined the U.S. as a crucial regional player not just in the Persian Gulf but also in the whole Middle East. Iran's rise wouldn't have been possible -- and the deal wouldn't have been necessary -- had the U.S. not unleashed Iran from the regional power that did the most to contain it: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The Twitter takeover hoax this week is indicative of an overvalued stock market...One study by Laura Frieder of Purdue University and Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University, found that the stocks mentioned in those otherwise annoying emails experienced a huge price increase, as well as a big jump in volume, after the messages were sent. Clearly, investors’ skepticism is being trumped by an eagerness to believe. As Zittrain told me: “Greed all too easily colors our objectivity,” and this is true for all types of investors.

A book review by Randall Kennedy. In 1992, a law professor named Monroe Freedman published an article in Legal Times, a magazine for practitioners. He asserted that Atticus Finch, the iconic hero of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys...Dismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman’s impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself. The most dramatic feature of her “new” novel, “Go Set a Watchman” — written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” but published 55 years afterward — is the revelation that Atticus, the supposed paragon of probity, courage and wisdom, was a white supremacist.

It began as a typical college hookup: two students at UC San Diego met at a party last year, began drinking and ended up in bed. The encounter snowballed into a sexual assault complaint, university investigation and a finding that the male student should be suspended. But the accused student fought back in court and won — marking what is believed to be the first judicial ruling in recent years that a university failed to provide a fair trial in a sexual misconduct case. Some legal experts said Tuesday that the finding could have a broad national impact...Last fall, 28 Harvard Law School faculty members wrote an article criticizing their campus procedures on sexual assault cases as lacking "the most basic elements of fairness and due process" and "overwhelmingly stacked against the accused." They forged an agreement with Harvard to develop their own process for law school cases, including the right to appointed counsel, stronger procedures for cross-examination and selection of independent investigators without university ties, according to Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor.

A letter by Tommy Tobin `16. While many young people are enjoying the sun this summer, more than 250,000 are at risk of hunger. When school’s out for the summer, low-income students and their families face the challenge of making their limited food dollars go even further. South Carolina’s summer nutrition programs provide much-needed assistance for low-income children and their families over the summer, when free or reduced-price lunches at school are less available. They fed more than 67,000 children last summer.

An op-ed by Michael Klarman. The Supreme Court reflects shifting social mores at least as much as it influences them. Rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell were inconceivable until enormous changes in the surrounding social and political context had first occurred. Before Brown, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the first black general in American history, President Harry S Truman issued executive orders desegregating the federal military and the civil service, and Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball. Even in the South, black voter registration increased from 3 percent in 1940 to 20 percent in 1950, and blacks began serving on juries and in local political offices for the first time since Reconstruction. Justice Sherman Minton noted “a different world today” with regard to race, during the Brown deliberations, and Felix Frankfurter remarked upon “the great changes in the relations between white and [black] people.”

Eighteen years ago, Vitomir Spiric, his wife and young daughter arrived in Phoenix to start over. They're Bosnian Serbs who were displaced by the Balkan wars in the 1990s. The US government awarded them refugee status...Spiric and his family settled into their new life in Phoenix. Then, about a decade ago, US immigration officials discovered his name on the militia’s rosters. That’s when Spiric’s American dream came crashing down. The US government prosecuted Spiric for making a false statement on his immigration form and initiated deportation proceedings...Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting says these deportation cases are necessary to uphold the integrity of the US refugee system. “People do not have a right to come into the country and fail to disclose relevant pertinent information that is required of them,” Whiting says.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Thursday, July 9, announced major staff appointments to focus attention on environmental, consumer protection, and civil rights priorities within the office...Max Weinstein will serve as Chief of the Consumer Protection Division...Weinstein will join the Attorney General’s Office following his role as Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer at Law at Harvard Law School. Working as part of the Predatory Lending/Consumer Protection Clinic, Weinstein litigated consumer protection claims on behalf of low-income consumers across the Commonwealth and practiced in areas including mortgage origination and servicing, foreclosure, and student loan collection and servicing.

More than 100 people were swept up in an unprecedented police crackdown on mainland human rights advocates on the weekend, with six – including four lawyers – criminally detained in what state media said was a nationwide operation to smash a “criminal gang.”...Teng Biao, visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, said the Qingan incident was only a pretext for action against rights lawyers and activists, who have long been seen as a thorn in the side of the authorities. He said the crackdown on the lawyers made a mockery of the authorities’ claim to “rule the country by law”.

...[Bernie] Sanders, an Independent running for the Democratic presidential nomination, characterized the law as providing immunity for gun manufacturers from being sued when a gun is misused by a third party. It’s as if a hammer manufacturer were be held responsible if someone used the hammer to beat someone else, he said....While the law provides protections that no other industry has, courts have been reluctant to impose liability on manufacturers for third-party misuse of the product, said John Goldberg, Harvard Law School professor who specializes in product liability. So the types of lawsuits that Sanders mentioned (for hammers or guns) didn’t have a slam-dunk chance in court before this law came about. Instead, this law ensures that those types of lawsuits can’t be brought against gun manufacturers.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Last week's Supreme Court decision striking down a federal regulation on mercury and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants is a temporary setback for those who seek to reduce air pollution. At the same time, however, it should be welcomed as a ringing endorsement of cost-benefit analysis by government agencies. It's a kind of rifle shot, with potentially major effects on a host of future regulations that have nothing to do with the environment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Will Xi Jinping, who has consolidated power more than any Chinese leader since the 1980s, pay a political price for the big decline in the Chinese stock market over the last week? In the very short term, market losses are likely to harm rich and powerful Chinese who might otherwise be pushing back against his increased authority, so it might conceivably help him. But in the medium to long term, this correction is going to be costly for Xi -- because it’s going to help ordinary Chinese learn the painful lesson that no government, however centralized and powerful, can guarantee the stability of assets when the markets think they are overvalued.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you’ve been following the crisis in Greece, you may not have noticed, but President Barack Obama held a news conference Monday at the Pentagon that will be significant for his legacy. What was important was not so much what he said as what he didn’t say: that there’s any chance of defeating Islamic State in the foreseeable future. Instead, the president emphasized that the fight against the Sunni Muslim insurgent group will be “long” and that experience has shown that it can be “degraded” only with effective local ground forces.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Nonprofit groups are supposed to exist to promote the public welfare, not to run political campaigns. IRS rules say that tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations, which are allowed to campaign consistent with their welfare-promoting missions, can’t have politicking as their primary activity. But because those rules aren’t being enforced, presidential campaigns now feature such nonprofits. Why is this happening? And what -- if anything -- can be done to stop it?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. No U.S. state has defaulted on its bonds since the Great Depression -- yet Puerto Rico, a commonwealth that operates much like a state without being one, is on the brink. Is there any connection between Puerto Rico’s unique constitutional status and it economic woes? If not, what does that say about the prospect for future default by any of the actual 50 states of the union?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. On the surface, there was nothing shocking about Monday's decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to strike down a Puerto Rico law that would’ve let the commonwealth’s municipalities and utilities declare bankruptcy. A federal district court had already held in February that Puerto Rico’s proposed Recovery Act was pre-empted by the federal bankruptcy code. But from a long-term perspective, the court’s decision was fairly extraordinary. Over an outraged concurrence by Judge Juan Torruella -- the only Puerto Rican on the federal appeals court that's responsible for cases from the island -- the court held that Puerto Rico is uniquely legally disabled from managing its financial problems.