The American Lawyer
Q&A: Legal Industry Leaders Head Back to School
Scott Westfahl, a professor at Harvard Law School and the director of its executive education program, will be busy the next few weeks. On April 30, doors opened for his school's one-week, $15,000 price-tagged program offering lawyers the chance to study law firm management at Harvard. In mid-May the doors will open again for a program targeting in-house lawyers. Westfahl answered ALM's questions about the students, goals and results of the programs, Leadership in Law Firms and Leadership in Corporate Counsel, which are now in their tenth year.
  

The Washington Post
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner aren’t helping to drain the swamp
It’s hard to think of a worse example of the “swamp” that needs draining than a president hiring his unqualified, inexperienced 30-something daughter and son-in-law with a myriad of conflicts (some involving foreign countries) who refuse to fully divest while given broad, undefined duties ranging over the entire government. The nepotism all by itself is regrettable and arguably violates at least the spirit of the anti-nepotism law...An ad from 2012 recently surfaced featuring Ivanka Trump promoting the Trump hotel in the Philippines, a property Trump still owns. In the wake of his bizarre, widely criticized invitation for strongman Rodrigo Duterte to visit, one has to ask whose interests the Trump gang represents. “Despite its age, the Ivanka [ad] serves to remind anyone who’d forgotten that the Trumps have a major Trump-branded property in Duterte-land,” says legal maven Laurence Tribe.
  

Harvard Gazette
‘You can’t let your emotions overtake you so much that you can’t do the work’
For as long as she can remember, Annette Gordon-Reed wanted to write. As a child, she loved words and books, especially biographies, and was all of 7 when she became an author herself. More than four decades later, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” brought a Pulitzer Prize and recognition as a major historian of U.S. slavery. Gordon-Reed’s path to Harvard — she is the Law School’s Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — is every bit as interesting as her pioneering scholarship.
  

National Geographic
We Asked the Government Why Animal Welfare Records Disappeared. They Sent 1,700 Blacked-Out Pages.
...Nearly three months ago, the the USDA removed its database of animal abuse records from its public website, with no explanation. National Geographic wanted to know why. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request in February for records relating to the decision to take the database offline. In bold disregard for transparency, the department’s response Friday consisted of 1,771 pages of completely blacked-out documents....Ongoing litigation is a common reason for redactions in FOIA responses, but Doug Haddix, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, says these full-page blackouts seem “excessive."...Delcianna Winders, of Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program, agrees. “While these bases may be legitimate for deleting portions of the records at issue, they absolutely cannot be used to withhold 1,771 entire pages,” Winders said in an email. She is part of the lawsuit against the USDA.
  

The Harvard Crimson
Law School Expands Junior Deferral Program to Students at All Colleges
Harvard Law School’s Junior Deferral Program will expand to accept applications from undergraduate juniors at colleges and universities nationwide in the fall of 2017, the Law School announced Wednesday...Jessica L. Soban ’02, the Law School’s chief admissions officer, said she felt the program had been sufficiently tested and was suited to expand. “We have been talking for the past several years about this being a pilot and collecting information from students who move through the program to understand what success it has really had for them,” Soban said. “This is the point where we feel like we have moved through an entire cycle with one cohort of participants in the program.”
  

Slate
Red Feed, Blue Feed With Cass Sunstein (audio)
Harvard professor Cass Sunstein returns to discuss his new book #Republic, which looks at polarization in the digital age. While America isn’t more polarized than ever, Sunstein says it’s important to focus on how today’s problems are different and new. “You find yourself in a cocoon, even if you didn’t choose it,” says Sunstein. But he sees hope in sites that are actively trying to sell their readers on content from outside their normal media diet. “In the fullness of time, the non–echo chamber model is going to be producing a lot of revenue.” In the Spiel, we discover what it would have been like if President Trump had been commander in chief during our time of greatest national strife.
  

Bloomberg
Trump Has Decided to Blame Canada
An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump has arrived at his new slogan: “Blame Canada.” But not because anything is actually Canada’s fault. Rather, process of elimination has led Trump to favor symbolic sanctions against America’s closest and best ally. As it turns out, trade is one of the only areas where a president can take significant action unilaterally without violating the Constitution. Trump’s most dramatic executive orders have been struck down by the courts. Congress won’t pass any important legislation. That leaves trade by default -- and since it would be too risky to take on trade with China, the best Trump can do is to make headlines by blaming Canada for trade unfairness on such unexciting products as softwood lumber and dairy.
  

PBS
How Brain Science Is Changing How Long Teens Spend in Prison
In the 1990s, before scientists had the tools to understand the teenage brain, judges around the country sentenced thousands of adolescents to life in prison without the chance for parole. Many of these teens, who are now in their 30s and 40s, committed serious crimes like murder and were punished as adults. At the time, policy makers thought “if you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time,” said Robert Kinscherff, a senior fellow in law and neuroscience at Harvard University. But advances in brain science since the early 2000s have proved that adolescents’ minds are fundamentally different from those of adults.
  

Bloomberg
Hamas Zaps Some Life Into the Peace Process
An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to meet Wednesday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, it appears the two-state solution isn’t dead after all. Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, in a modestly surprising move has said it would accept a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders. The motives for the announcement, which also came with the group’s distancing from the Muslim Brotherhood, are complex. But the key fact is that the statement is an early win for the Trump administration’s nascent attempt a Middle East peace solution. It’s a sign that Hamas, at least, is taking that potential initiative seriously.
  

Huffington Post
Education in the Age of Trump
Last Wednesday President Trump signed yet another executive order, this one aimed at decreasing the role the federal government plays in education, handing states, local school districts, and parents more power. The same day this order was signed I found myself at the Harvard School of Education attending a conference titled “Under the Trump Administration, What Is Next for Education?” wondering what was next...Sandra Cortesi, Director of Youth and Media at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, was a moderator at the event I attended...I asked Cortesi if she thought schools were providing kids the support and scaffolding they need to formalize informal learning. “We have not reached that point yet,” she said.