Media Mentions

On January 20, while the country was focused on the presidential inauguration, the Alaska Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could upend the big money systems that have come to fund the nation's elections. It's time for the rest of the country to pay attention. The case comes from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard and founder of the organization EqualCitizens, who spent Inauguration Day on Zoom arguing against super PACs...Lessig's case asks the Alaska court — and potentially the US Supreme Court — to recognize a different type of corruption. His argument relies on originalism, an interpretive technique that examines how ordinary people would have understood the Constitution back when it was first proposed. In support of his originalist argument, Lessig marshals impressive evidence that the framers' generation had a deep and capacious understanding of political corruption. People back then understood bribery, of course. But they also worried about institutional corruption: even if a particular individual isn't taking bribes, an institution as a whole can become corrupted by an improper dependence on anything other than the support of voters. And super PACs corrupt the system by making politicians far too dependent on a small number of super-wealthy donors.

Friday is the delayed start of the tax filing season. Like everyone else, the already short-staffed IRS had a tough time adjusting to working during in the pandemic, plus it had to figure out how to get two rounds of relief payments out, which put the agency a little behind. In 2020, the filing deadline was extended to July 15 to make things a little easier. This year, the traditional April 15 cutoff is back, so the next few months are likely to be fairly stressful at the IRS, and this year’s tax season is probably going to be a lot more stressful for many filers as well. And the calculations may be a bit more complicated, especially for people who lost their jobs or had their hours cut back. “A lot of people don’t realize that when you get unemployment, it’s taxable. So they might not have had adequate withholding,” said Keith Fogg, a professor at Harvard Law School who also runs the federal tax clinic there. “Last year, a lot of people are pulling money out of their retirement accounts to try to make ends meet, which is creating more taxable income,” he said.

President Joe Biden is hoping to turn the page after the U.S. Senate acquittal of Donald Trump over the deadly storming of the Capitol building, even as Mr. Trump is vowing to stage a political comeback. Mr. Biden declared that the country would learn from the threat to its political system to ensure that such violence never happens again. He is hoping his administration and Congress can now focus on pandemic relief, immigration and his cabinet appointments...Whether Mr. Trump will face criminal charges is unclear. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe contended that, despite Mr. Trump’s acquittal, the trial had made a definitive statement about his unprecedented actions as president. “The impeachment permanently establishes a historical record of how this president was probably the most dangerous in American history,” said Prof. Tribe of Harvard Law School. “His astonishing and long-lasting campaign to overturn a fair election and hold onto power by whatever means possible distinguishes him from any other president.”

Donald Trump, who as president incited a riot in an effort to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, was acquitted by the U.S. Senate on Saturday, putting an end to his second impeachment trial. He was not acquitted because he was innocent. He was acquitted for one reason: Donald Trump and his supporters have a toxic sense of entitlement, believing that they should never lose an election...Harvard Law colleague Laurence Tribe agreed that Trump's acquittal in the first impeachment trial paved the way for the misconduct that got him impeached a second time. "The first impeachment led almost inevitably to the second once Trump, whose whole modus operandi is built on lying, cheating, and stopping at nothing to secure power and fame was validated by the Senate's unfortunate acquittal the first time around," Tribe told Salon by email. "Having thought nothing of exposing the people of Ukraine to slaughter at the hands of Russia by threatening to withhold congressionally appropriated aid in an effort to pressure Ukraine's president Zelensky into injuring Biden by pretending to be investigating him and his son criminally, Trump upped the ante by threatening criminal prosecution of Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensperger in order to get Raffensperger to steal that state's electoral votes from Biden and, when that failed, by inciting insurrection by an armed and angry mob in a treasonous attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election."

Jamie Raskin had finished a face-to-face interview with the Guardian and was on his way home. It was late on Saturday night in October 2018. But then he thought of a point he hadn’t made and, ever fastidious, restarted the conversation by phone. “Straight white men are already a minority in the Democratic caucus but when the big blue wave hits, we’re going to be moving much closer to parity in terms of women and men, at least on the House side,” he said, a prediction that came true a month later in the midterm elections...Raskin graduated from Georgetown day school in 1979 then studied at Harvard and its law school, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and his teachers included Professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe recalls that Raskin and his wife, Sarah, met in his class on the constitution. “He is one of the most impressive students that I have ever come to know and is also an extremely impressive human being,” he said. “The courage that he has shown in the face of unthinkable personal tragedy has been something to behold. As the lead impeachment manager he couldn’t possibly have done a better job. I’ve taught quite a few impressive people, like President Obama and Chief Justice [John] Roberts and Justice [Elena] Kagan, and he is right at the top of the students that I feel very proud to have played at least some small role in educating.” Tribe remains in touch with Raskin, who told him he feels his late son is “with him” during this effort. “He is fully aware of the enormous historical import of this trial and the weight he carries on his shoulders and he’s carried it with grace,” Tribe said. “But for his awareness of that, I think he would be spending more time with his family because they’re still in mourning.”

An op-ed by Gary Corn and Jack Goldsmith: Today the technology and law programs that we supervise at the American University Washington College of Law and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, are publishing a report entitled “Chinese Technology Platforms Operating in the United States.” The report sets forth a framework for understanding the various threats posed by Chinese-owned technology platforms operating in the United States (e.g. TikTok), and for assessing the various costs and benefits of proposed responses to these threats. The report is a joint-product by a group of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives on these matters: Jennifer Daskal, Chris Inglis, Paul Rosenzweig, Samm Sacks, Bruce Schneier, Alex Stamos, Vince Stewart and the two of us. Some background and elaboration: Among the many challenges the Biden administration has inherited, a frayed U.S.-China relationship figures prominently. The Trump administration's approach to China was driven by China’s emergence as a great power competitor, and frictions inherent in that recognition manifested across a range of issues not the least of which were trade and regulation of Chinese technologies. The Trump administration took direct aim at a number of technologies, from Huawei’s 5G to Chinese manufactured small drones. In late 2020 and early 2021, it took steps to effectively ban TikTok, WeChat and other Chinese-owned apps from operating in the United States, at least in their current form.

An op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever: We love Tesla — we’re huge fans of the way the company has made electric cars cool.  The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s Model 3 is probably the most appetizing lower-cost electric vehicle (EV) on the market today, and is well on its way to becoming a massive success. And Tesla’s rapid escalation in battery production has forced down prices of lithium-ion batteries. Yet we’re rejoicing in the news from Schmidt Automotive Research that Tesla has lost market share in the world’s largest EV market, the European Union. We’re rejoicing because this is a clear sign of global interest in EVs. In the European Union, Tesla’s loss in market share derived partly from large incumbent automakers’ increasing vigor in making their own EVs more attractive, through both pricing and design diversity. A broader, deeper market for these fuel-efficient, pollution-free vehicles is good for the planet and will further reduce prices. EVs’ path to further improvement also makes complete sense. In reality, internal combustion engines (ICEs) are today’s horse-and-buggy: well understood, reliable, and with a great infrastructure, but ultimately unable to compete. At the rate at which battery prices (and, by extension, EV prices) are falling and adoption is increasing, all car makers will have commenced publicly phasing out ICEs. General Motors has already taken the plunge and will phase out combustion engines by 2035.

On a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting...Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy. Facebook promised to change that with the Oversight Board...The idea for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution. In 2018, Feldman was staying with his college friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at her home in Menlo Park, California. One day, Feldman was riding a bike in the neighboring hills when, he said, “it suddenly hit me: Facebook needs a Supreme Court.” ... Currently, users can appeal cases in which Facebook has removed a post, called “take-downs,” but not those in which it has left one up, or “keep-ups.” The problem is that many of Facebook’s most pressing issues—conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech—involve keep-ups...“This is a big change from what you promised,” Evelyn Douek, a Harvard graduate student who consulted with the team, fumed, during one meeting. “This is the opposite of what was promised.” Users also currently can’t appeal cases on such issues as political advertising, the company’s algorithms, or the deplatforming of users or group pages. The board can take cases on these matters, including keep-ups, only if they are referred by Facebook, a system that, Douek told me, “stacks the deck” in Facebook’s favor.

Constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman says Republicans are clinging to the constitutionality argument to avoid convicting Trump.

Perry Connelly quickly noticed that something was off when he began working at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, last spring. Managers were unfriendly to the point of not acknowledging employees when they walked past, and they were quick to write people up for infractions that seemed minuscule or made-up, such as too much time “off-task.” “The main thing was just the disrespect,” the 58-year-old told The Daily Beast. Any concern, even one related to safety, went unattended unless it was an emergency, he said...Nearly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer warehouse began a vote this week to determine whether they will become the first Amazon employees in the country to form a union...Just like the town of Bessemer, a large portion of the warehouse employees are Black. “It’s significant that it’s a movement of primarily Black workers and women—the workers that have been most impacted by the pandemic,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, told The Daily Beast. A win at the Bessemer warehouse would be a “huge victory for economic and racial justice,” Sachs said, and workers with positive experiences with unions often go on to unionize other workplaces.

Multiple members of Boston's delegation in the Masachusetts statehouse said Monday that state approval looks likely for the cancellation of a special mayoral election that after Mayor Marty Walsh’s resigns to become U.S. labor secretary. If the current election schedule goes forward, the city would potentially hold four contests — a special election, the regularly scheduled November contest, and preliminary elections preceding each — within five months. But unless the legislature approves Boston's request, the city can't do away with a special election. That got us here at GBH's Curiosity Desk to ask why...Here in Massachusetts, home rule became the law of the land in the 1940s. "Home rule, it sounds great," said Gerald Frug, a professor at Harvard Law School. "You can do what you want. But there’s less there than meets the eye." "There’s a home rule grant to cities that allows them to do certain things without going to the legislature every time. But that’s a limited set. It’s more limited than people think," Frug added. The upshot is that even with home rule, cities and towns still must still seek approval from the legislature for all sorts of things — including, but not limited to, elections.

The young plaintiffs behind an ambitious climate lawsuit are taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite warnings from environmental lawyers that the attempt could backfire. Lawyers for the 21 children and young adults in Juliana v. United States quickly announced plans Wednesday to file a Supreme Court petition after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to revive their claims that the federal government has violated their constitutional right to a stable climate system. Julia Olson, who represents the plaintiffs, said she and her clients were unmoved by detractors who worry a Supreme Court fight would undermine broader environmental litigation...Outside lawyers, many of whom are sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ novel claims, say taking the issue to the high court could spell disaster for environmental interests if the justices agree to review the case. The Ninth Circuit’s rehearing denial is “no doubt enormously disappointing” to the plaintiffs after their more than five-year effort to make the government take action “urgently needed to avoid the truly catastrophic consequences of climate change that the entire planet now faces,” Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus said. “For making clear the depth of the government’s past decades-long lapses in the face of industry malfeasance, the plaintiffs and their lawyers deserve the nation’s thanks,” he said. But Lazarus cautioned that seeking Supreme Court review would be “a serious strategic mistake” for those who care about climate issues. “The result would far more likely be the establishment of binding legal precedent by the Supreme Court that sets back critically important efforts to address the climate issue rather than a Supreme Court ruling that promotes those efforts,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The opening of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial highlighted three realities: The breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a horrific episode that both mainstream political parties reject. Trump’s lawyers are woefully unprepared. And enough Republican senators will claim the trial is unconstitutional to assure that Trump won’t be convicted. So, what’s the point of the rest of the trial? The trial still matters because the theater of impeachment has a deadly serious purpose. In fact, Trump’s lawyers have already begun to fulfill one of its central functions: They are admitting, in a way that Trump himself has not, that the Jan. 6 attempt to disrupt the democratic process was a serious threat to democracy itself. Impeachment is designed to color in the red lines on the map of constitutional democracy. The lines have a purpose and a message: Stay inside them, and you may be voted out of office or otherwise held accountable by the voters. Cross them, and the system is supposed to stand up and take extraordinary steps to punish you. If it doesn’t, the system itself is profoundly weakened. Seen for what it is, the impeachment is an object lesson in delineating the fundamental, unbreakable rules of democracy. It offers civic education in the deepest sense to the entire country, and indeed the world.

From ridesharing to electric cars to self-driving vehicles the line between application, potential and promise is often very blurry. In this episode we take a reality check on the future direction of the automotive industry. Guests: Dr. Wulf Stolle – partner with Kearney (Europe); Dr. Ashley Nunes – senior Research Associate, Harvard Law School; Professor Shirley Meng – Director of Sustainable Power and Energy centre, University of California, San Diego; Nick Kilvert – ABC science reporter.

Megyn Kelly is joined by two legal titans, Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, to talk about all the angles to Trump impeachment #2. They discuss and debate whether it's even legal to impeach a president who is no longer in office, whether Trump has a First Amendment defense, whether Trump can be found guilty of inciting an insurrection, whether he could be charged with dereliction of duty, the push to take Harvard degrees away and disbar Senators Cruz and Hawley, and more.

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are finally here, employers have begun looking ahead to an eventual full return to the workplace in the coming months. But even though their offices may look exactly as they did last spring when most white-collar organizations shifted to remote operations, they will find that things will be very different, say Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty who study the work world. The pandemic has sped up macro trends in consumer behavior, business management, and hiring. That, along with insights gained by months of adjustments to work roles, schedules, routines, and priorities, have prompted employers and employees to reconsider many default assumptions about what they do along with how and why they do it...One year into the pandemic, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal regulatory agency that oversees private sector workplace safety in all 50 states, had not established national COVID safety standards under President Trump, leaving individual companies and industries, like meatpacking, to set their own protocols and policies. “It’s bananas to entrust our public health decisions to disaggregated, atomized employers making their own decisions about what’s good enough and what’s not,” said Terri Ellen Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “With OSHA abdicating its responsibility, that’s been happening in too many places.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Monika Bickert, Vice President of Content Policy at Facebook, takes us inside the decision to indefinitely suspend former President Donald Trump’s account. Host Noah Feldman details what this move means for free expression in the United States and what it tells us about Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968, and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000. In this exclusive briefing organized by the Club of the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, Professor Tribe will provide his insights on the current Trump’s Impeachment Trial. Allan Dodds Frank, former president of the Overseas Press Club contributed his expertise to the moderation of this briefing.

Donald Trump is now on trial in the Senate for inciting a violent insurrection. But what about his collaborators? Fox “News,” Newsmax, One American News, and other right-wing outlets relentlessly pushed the “Big Lie” that led to this attack. On Jan. 4, for example, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson accused “virtually every power center on Earth” of working “tirelessly … to bypass voters and get Joe Biden to the White House.” “If that’s not rigging an election,” he thundered, “there’s no meaning to that phrase.” Where is the accountability for right-wing propagandists like Carlson, who recklessly splashed around the lighter fluid that ignited on Jan. 6? There is, alas, little that can be done to punish their egregious lies — or to make them stop inciting hatred and violence in the future...I also suggested reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC stopped enforcing in 1987, and I still think it’s a good idea, but it may not be possible. The original Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcasters based on the rationale that they were using scarce publicly owned airwaves. It would be much harder under the Supreme Court’s precedents to extend it to cable channels even though fiber-optic cables rely on public rights of way. “The odds that the current Court would permit the revival of the Fairness Doctrine or anything like it are extremely low,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me.

An op-ed by Maria Smith ‘22: For four years, the Trump administration rode roughshod over bedrock values of our democracy, eschewing foundational principles like transparency and accountability. Whether it was obstructing the Mueller investigation or interfering with inspectors general, the consequences of these ethical lapses cannot be overstated. What’s more, there are concerns that during its final months in power, the administration tried to cover its tracks by destroying official records in violation of the Presidential Records Act, or PRA. Now that there is a new administration, President Biden must restore the executive branch’s commitment to a government that is committed to transparency and accountability. He can start by ensuring compliance with the Presidential Records Act by signing an executive order on the issue. Congress passed the PRA in 1978 in response to the Watergate scandal, establishing public ownership of presidential records. (Before then, these records were considered the property of the officeholder.) The law requires the president to document and preserve records related to an administration’s “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies.” Regrettably, it lacks defined enforcement mechanisms, so it in effect operates “as an honor system,” and past presidents have not always fully complied with the it.

An op-ed by Sheila Paylan and Anoush Baghdassarian ‘22: Since the Capitol riots, Twitter has taken more precautions to stop hate speech and incitement to violence, including a purge of more than 70,000 accounts it found were engaged in sharing harmful content. It also permanently suspended President Trump’s account for the risk of further incitement to violence, referencing Twitter’s “public interest framework” which outlines its guidelines towards the profiles of world leaders on its platform. Twitter asserts it will not tolerate “clear and direct threats of violence against an individual” and recently updated its policy to prohibit the “dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, or ethnicity.” On Jan. 21, 2021, it locked the account of China’s US embassy for a tweet defending China’s persecutory policies towards Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. By enacting stricter rules, Twitter thus acknowledges that dehumanizing speech can lead to real-world harm. However, if Twitter does not stop such rhetoric in time, can it face liability for violence incited or enabled through inaction, or atrocity crimes committed in distant wars by despotic regimes that rely on social media to spread violence? Regulations and precedents argue yes. A number of new regulations, from Europe in particular, concern social media giants.