In the Media

By Tim Wu and Stuart A. Thompson
“Big tech” companies like Google and Facebook are, in reality, the products of hundreds of mergers. Each root below represents a company acquired by a tech giant at a particular moment in its history. A vast majority of these acquisitions, funded by public markets, have received minimal media coverage and limited regulatory scrutiny. But that is changing, given new concerns about consolidation in the tech industries.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s decision in Taggart v. Lorenzen will not go down as one of the major decisions of the term, but it should provide some useful guidance in an area as to which the Supreme Court has not previously spoken: the standards for punishing creditors that violate the discharge that bankruptcy provides to debtors.

By David Pozen, Eric Talley, and Julian Nyarko
Elected officials from both parties appeal routinely to the nation’s foundational document. But, far from serving as a symbol of “unity and common purpose,” the Constitution has come to enable, or even exacerbate, partisan strife. In political debates such as the Trump tax tussle, it often feels as if the United States has two legal charters, one for Republicans and another for Democrats.

In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw Professor of Law at Columbia University and UCLA coined the term Intersectionality. . . . Kimberlé Crenshaw joins Tina Daheley with Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Head of Equalities and Learning at Public and Commercial Services Union and Co-founder of UK Black Pride to explain how the term has developed, how it has been misunderstood and why it’s important.

By Michael Burger
As the Green New Deal continues to attract attention on both the left and right, a key element has been missing from the conversation: What the law behind all these big ideas might actually look like.

By Charles Sabel and Dani Rodrik
The strategy we have in mind would comprise three mutually reinforcing components: an increase in the skill level and productivity of existing jobs, by providing extension services to improve management or cooperative programs to advance technology; an increase in the number of good jobs by supporting the expansion of existing, local firms or attracting investment by outsiders; and active labor-market policies or workforce-development programs to help workers, especially from at-risk groups, master the skills required to obtain good jobs.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s opinion in Mission Product Holdings Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC resolved a long-standing disagreement in the lower courts about what happens when a debtor exercises its statutory right to reject a contract in bankruptcy. . . . Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion for the Supreme Court gives us a clear answer: Rejection breaches but does not rescind the contract in question.

By Philip Bobbitt
. . . one can’t help questioning whether what has happened in recent years is a refusal to see what is required to defend the values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and human rights—or whether it is adherence to the values themselves that is changing.

AARTI SHAHANI: Tim Wu figured Facebook would hire someone who was the opposite of Newstead.
TIM WU: I was a little shocked, taken aback.
SHAHANI: Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, once met the incoming Facebook lawyer at a party. They'd both clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and he was the host. Wu is a privacy advocate. He says Facebook needs to clean up its reputation, prove to users the company wants to protect them - by bringing in a Patriot Act architect.