Google Salary-Sharing Spreadsheets Are All The Rage. Here’s What You Should Know.

January 20, 2020

“What’s the real value of my work?” It’s a question many of us wonder privately when negotiating salaries. Now, that information is becoming more public.
Workers across a number of industries are creating their own widely shared salary databases, with employees anonymously entering their earnings for all to see. In 2019, there were organized efforts to capture industry-wide salary information for arts and museum workers, media workers, baristas in different cities, workers at Jewish nonprofits, academics, design interns, workers in publishing, staff at creative agencies, and paralegals, just to name a few. …“People who are employees, treated as employees, have been able to assert their right as employees. In circulating this spreadsheet, they are acting concertedly, they are joining with their co-workers to say we think pay transparency is important,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “They cannot be fired for that. The law says they have a right to act concertedly.”

Harvard Students Warn Paul Weiss They’d Boycott Over Exxon

January 20, 2020

A Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP recruitment event Wednesday was interrupted by a group of Harvard Law students, who sang, chanted and threatened the global firm with losing future recruits if it continues to represent ExxonMobil Corp. … The group said the move represents a “new front” in the campaign by young people against the fossil fuel industry. One of the protest’s organizers, first-year Harvard law student and former Rhode Island state Rep. Aaron Regunberg called it “a do-or-die moment in human history.” “We have just a few years left to rein in corporate polluters and address the climate crisis,” Regunberg said. “This firm’s enabling of corporations like Exxon to continue blocking climate action and evading accountability for their malfeasance is, simply put, not compatible with a livable future.”

U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Presidential Electoral College Dispute

January 20, 2020

As the 2020 race heats up, the Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a dispute involving the complex U.S. presidential election system focusing on whether Electoral College electors are free to break their pledges to back the candidate who wins their state’s popular vote, an act that could upend an election. …”We are glad the Supreme Court has recognized the paramount importance of clearly determining the rules of the road for presidential electors for the upcoming election and all future elections,” said Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer for the faithless electors sanctioned in Washington and Colorado.

Supreme Court To Hear ‘Faithless Electors’ Case

January 20, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging state attempts to penalize Electoral College delegates who fail to vote for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support. …”This court should resolve this conflict now, before it arises within the context of a contested election,” Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who is the attorney for the Washington state electors, said. “As the demographics of the United States indicate that contests will become even closer, there is a significant probability that such swings could force this court to resolve the question of electoral freedom within the context of an ongoing contest.”

Trump’s lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to use bogus legal arguments on impeachment

January 20, 2020

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The president’s lawyers have made the sweeping assertion that the articles of impeachment against President Trump must be dismissed because they fail to allege that he committed a crime — and are, therefore, as they said in a filing with the Senate, “constitutionally invalid on their face.”
Another of his lawyers, my former Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz, claiming to represent the Constitution rather than the president as such, makes the backup argument that the articles must be dismissed because neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress can count as impeachable offenses. Both of these arguments are baseless. Senators weighing the articles of impeachment shouldn’t think that they offer an excuse for not performing their constitutional duty.

Senators swore an oath of impartiality. So are they guilty of perjury if they have a known bias?

January 17, 2020

QUESTION: Senators who have already said how they are going to vote, and have expressed a bias, are they automatically guilty of perjury when they take their ‘impartiality’ oath? ANSWER: No, thanks to special protections the Founding Fathers gave to Congress. … Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University, referred our researchers to an Opinion piece he penned in The Washington Post. “To swear a false oath is perjury — the crime President Bill Clinton was charged with in his impeachment,” Lessig wrote in the Washington Post. “Yet given the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, a senator likely could not be charged with perjury for swearing falsely on the Senate floor. Instead, it is the Senate itself that must police members’ oaths — as it has in the past.”

Gig economy bills move forward in other blue states, after California clears the way

January 17, 2020

California was the first state to challenge tech companies such as Uber and Lyft with bold laws meant to reshape the gig economy by converting workers into employees.
And now a handful of other states are following its lead. …“It’s a moment in our politics, where people are understanding, especially in progressive states, these tensions between big corporations and corporate money and ordinary people,” Terri Gerstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School. “These work issues and issues of economic inequality have come to such a fever pitch.”

Supreme Court will hear whether states may punish electoral college members who ignore popular vote results

January 17, 2020

The Supreme Court on Friday said it will consider whether states may punish or replace “faithless” presidential electors who refuse to support the winner of their state’s popular vote, or whether the Constitution forbids dictating how such officials cast their ballots. …Challengers say the Constitution leaves up to states the appointment of electors, but that is all. “There is no mechanism for state officials to monitor, control, or dictate electoral votes,” said a brief filed by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and his group Equal Citizens. “Instead, the right to vote in the Constitution and federal law is personal to the electors, and it is supervised by the electors themselves.”