Media Mentions

As Florida residents struggle to get appointments for COVID-19 vaccines, some are worried the already limited supply may be going to people who don't even live in the state...Under Florida's vaccine plan healthcare workers, long-term care workers and those 65 years and older who are at least part-time residents are eligible to get the vaccine. Data from the Florida Department of Health revealed more than 1.1 million people have been vaccinated in the state. Out of those 1.1 million people, 39,000 reside outside of Florida. It's a new trend being called "vaccine tourism," in which people from outside the state travel to Florida to get vaccinated...Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen, a medical tourism expert, said he wasn't shocked when he heard of vaccine tourism and he sees it growing. "Yeah, I think the best thing we could do would be assisting other countries to meet their rollout and to supply them with vaccines to meet the needs of their population so that we don't create this market where the wealthy and able-bodied can travel," said Cohen. "Unfortunately, we've ended up in a place where every country has its purchase order and every country is doing its own distribution. And that setup is part of what has set the preconditions for this instance of vaccine tourism."

President Joe Biden has installed Obama-era labor official Sharon Block as interim political leader of the White House regulatory review office—an agency she’s recently said needs a worker-oriented overhaul—multiple sources briefed on the appointment told Bloomberg Law. Block, in an April article published by The American Prospect, advocated for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to undergo structural changes to expedite revocation of Trump administration rules that she deemed harmful to workers and progressive interests. Her opinion piece also called for OIRA to take on an expanded role to swiftly advance urgent regulations tied to pandemic recovery, rather than sometimes functioning as a bottleneck for such rules. Block’s title is now OIRA associate administrator, four sources said, meaning she’s the top politically appointed official at the office until Biden nominates someone for administrator, who would then be subject to the Senate confirmation process. By tapping an experienced Democratic hand to steer the White House regulatory office on Wednesday, the new president is signaling a desire to avoid the potential for Senate confirmation delays to stall efforts to undo deregulatory, corporate-friendly regulations issued by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration did not offer comment to the U.S. Supreme Court about a bid by certain coal-producing states to reject the legitimacy of Washington state standing in the way of a coal export terminal, leaving an opportunity for a Biden administration-controlled U.S. Justice Department to give an opinion instead...The justices have not decided whether they will hear the full case; a decision requires the support of at least four justices. In October 2020, the Supreme Court invited the acting solicitor of the U.S. Justice Department to comment on whether the case should be heard. The Trump administration's DOJ had not filed anything as of Jan. 21, the Supreme Court docket shows... The legal arguments could be dividing conservative justices on the court, making it difficult to proceed to oral arguments, according to Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. Following the lead of former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has rarely been willing to recognize the legitimacy of the Dormant Commerce Clause, and newly confirmed Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett may feel similarly. "Given that [Amy Coney Barrett] is apparently a Scalia acolyte, the other four conservative justices would have to decide to hear this case for it to move forward," Peskoe said in a Jan. 21 email. "I don't see it happening. My guess — and it's just a guess — is that the Trump DOJ didn't think this case was worth the effort, given the very long odds."

Hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts immigrants could be impacted by President Biden’s immigration overhaul, which includes a massive bill sent to Congress on Wednesday that was accompanied by a series of executive orders. Those orders, signed after Biden assumed the presidency, will reverse Trump-era travel bans that focused primarily on immigrants from Muslim countries. Another executive order allows young immigrants brought into the country without authorization to once again apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which former president Trump suspended in 2017. A third will reverse a memo signed into law by Trump in 2020 that excluded undocumented immigrants from Census counts...Biden also aims to abolish two long-standing rules for immigrants found to be in the US illegally. Currently, immigrants in the US for more than six months but less than a year are barred from returning for three years. Those who are found to be in the US without authorization for more than one year are barred from reentering for 10 years or more. The three-year and 10-year restrictions prevent many people from being able to get green cards from abroad, since they have to wait for the time limitation to expire, according to Mariam Liberles, a staff attorney with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Law Clinic. “It would really be a tremendous help in their petitions,” she said. That change alone would impact at least a million people nationwide, according to the Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Coalition.

As soon as the videos began streaming in on Jan. 6, it became clear that the nation was experiencing something unprecedented and dangerous but also, in many ways, unsurprising. The storming of the Capitol in the service of false conspiracy theories had no single cause, and no single Biden executive order can undo the threats and divisions it exposed. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to ferret out the causes and game out solutions to America’s disinformation crisis. The Times gathered six writers who have been examining these issues for years...Annette Gordon-Reed: “I would add the loss in status of whites, particularly white males. The talk about political correctness is a cover for this deep concern about a loss of status. Income inequality is part of it, but there’s a group of people like the lawyer couple standing on their lawn with the guns — that just feel lost. The New York Times asked a group of people to suggest books for President Biden. I suggested W.E.B. DuBois’ ‘Black Reconstruction,’ because we’re in a moment where there are people who fear the growing political power of minority groups and Black groups in particular. And this has been a problem from the era that I studied, the early American Republic: Who are the folks who count? One thing that could be done about it would be for the government to actually be efficient, to actually work. We’ve become anti-government since the 1980s. And we have this entity that we pay taxes to that’s not supposed to do anything.” ... Martha Minow: “The Republican Party in particular for 50 years has bet on these divisions. We’ve seen this, sadly, in other countries where there are the ingredients of status anxiety and economic inequality. The question is, what do the leaders do? If leaders appeal to those fears and amplify them, that is a toxic environment. I hate to be grandiose about it, but that has given rise to genocides.”

A federal court ruling on power plant emissions paved the path for President Joe Biden’s climate plans, but future litigation over greenhouse gas regulations could throw up hurdles, attorneys and legal scholars say. Biden’s aggressive climate plans got a leg up Tuesday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which softened greenhouse gas emission regulations for existing power plants. The ruling allows Biden to sidestep a lengthy rulemaking processes that would have been required to dismantle ACE and install a replacement rule. The decision isn’t a total “slam dunk,” Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Program staff attorney Hana Vizcarra told Bloomberg Law. Future legal battles over climate regulations are likely still on the horizon, she said, but the victory does give the new administration an advantage. “It gives them sort of a fresh start in how they approach the regulation of greenhouse gases of existing power plants,” she said. Even with the boost, the Biden administration must contend with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court that may be reluctant to approve sweeping agency actions.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday issued a call for national unity, devoting much of his inaugural address not to the policies and programs to come, but to the “uncivil war” that Americans must put behind them to tackle their myriad national challenges...In response to an Inauguration Day that opens the door to massive shifts in America’s priorities, the Gazette asked Harvard faculty members for their thoughts on Biden’s speech and on his planned policies, as reflected through their specific fields of expertise, along with any advice they have for him in his “rare and difficult hour.” ... Sameer Ahmed: “I am cautiously optimistic for President Biden’s vision as it relates to the future of immigrants in the United States. I am heartened that his inauguration address focused on attempting to achieve ‘the American ideal that we all are created equal’ and push back against ‘the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart.’ This ugly reality was perhaps no more evident than in the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda over the past four years. In his first day in office, President Biden took important steps by issuing a handful of executive actions to address some of the worst aspects of Trump’s policies, including ending the Muslim ban, defunding the border wall, and preserving DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). But President Biden must not only address the harms created by the Trump administration. He should ensure that immigrant communities are stronger and safer than they were four years ago.”

PBS NewsHour is taking a closer look at Inauguration Day with our special, "Celebrating America." Anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff breaks down the historic day with White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, Washington Post senior critic Robin Givhan, filmmaker Ken Burns and Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and law professor at Harvard University.

Opponents of President Trump's climate rule rollbacks rejoiced yesterday after a federal appeals court gave the Biden administration a clean slate to craft a new rule to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit tossed out the Trump EPA's Affordable Clean Energy rule and sent it back to the agency. The court found EPA had too narrowly interpreted its authority to regulate emissions. The court not only gave the green light for President-elect Joe Biden to draft stronger power plant regulations, but also broadly affirmed EPA's authority to craft climate regulations for a range of emissions sources...Asked for a comment on yesterday's court decision, Joseph Goffman, who played a key role in crafting the Clean Power Plan and is part of the EPA transition team for the incoming Biden administration, sent E+E News a link to a recording by the Royal Choral Society of the "Hallelujah" chorus from George Frideric Handel's "Messiah." "Feel free to quote me," he said...EPA took that more challenging legal approach by arguing that the statute was unambiguous in supporting its position. The agency could have instead said it was using its discretion to interpret the law, said Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University. Looking from the outside, it seemed like the best explanation for why Trump's EPA took that position was so that it could block future administrations from "doing anything meaningful" on climate regulation, Freeman said. "It seems like a deep ideological commitment but not the best legal strategy," she said.

The two-month post-election wait used to be four, and constitutional scholar Sandy Levinson thinks it should be shorter still.

In his final full day in office, President Donald Trump is expected to issue a myriad of presidential pardons. Last week, CNN initially reported that Trump planned to pardon close to 100 people before leaving office. Trump already has issued pardons for his former aides, including former adviser Roger Stone, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Some have speculated that Trump will attempt to issue a self-pardon or secret pardons for his family and other aides...However, others believe that pardons were meant to be publicly issued and would not hold up as valid if challenged in a court of law. "I certainly can't say that they are clearly impermissible, but I can say that I think that there is at least a Constitutional cloud over them," Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe said. For one thing, they would be difficult to authenticate. "There would be no way to prove it was issued on a certain date in an official capacity," Tribe said. "If invoked at the time an indictment or prosecution is brought, that would open the possibility for a Constitutional test of whether secret pardons are permitted." Additionally, Tribe said the nature and purpose of pardons implies a public acknowledgment of wrongdoing and forgiveness. "They were supposed to be accompanied with either a confession of guilt or that they implied that the person who accepts the pardon is willing to publicly admit guilt," Tribe said. "And the fact that there's no indication in the discussion of the Constitution when the pardon power, which is already pretty sweeping and subject to abuse, could be hidden behind a veil of secrecy, I would argue that it's validity is up in the air."

A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, paving the way for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to enact new and stronger restrictions on power plants...Environmental groups and legal experts saw the decision as a vindication of the argument that the government does have the authority to tackle climate change. “It’s a massive win,” said Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University who served as a legal counsel in the Obama administration. A core promise of the Biden campaign was to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. With Tuesday’s ruling, the Biden administration will not have to wait for the legal fight over the Trump rule to play out before deciding whether or how to use regulation to tackle climate change, Ms. Freeman said. Instead, she said, the Biden E.P.A. can “go on the offense” immediately. “The real win here is that the Trump administration failed to tie the Biden team’s hands,” Ms. Freeman said. “They wanted to lock in a narrow legal interpretation and make it impossible for a new administration to set ambitious standards for power plants. That was their whole strategy. And it went down to spectacular defeat.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to send the article of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate later this week, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News -- a move that could kick off formal proceedings the next day and opening arguments on the Senate floor the following week. The timing of formal transmission from the House to the Senate is significant, as the Constitution dictates that the trial begins at 1 p.m. the following day. Pushing that procedural step back until after President-elect Joe Biden takes office -- back to Thursday or Friday -- would also give his administration at least a day or two to gain its footing as the Senate begins the balancing act of putting Trump on trial while starting to take up Biden's agenda...Some Democrats worry that Trump simply won't take part in the proceedings and that he'll adopt a similar posture to his administration's broad rejection of congressional oversight and subpoenas during his time in office. "I hope he is competently defended," Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University Law School professor who has advised Democrats on their efforts to impeach Trump, told ABC News. "Otherwise part of what he'll be able to say in claiming victimization is that he was made a pariah ... therefore the verdict was illegitimate -- just as the election wasn't legitimate." "I don't think it helps our history for him to be able to elaborate on that martyr story," Tribe said.

The second impeachment of President Donald Trump has concluded, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Whether it results in a Senate conviction or not, impeachment amounts to a feeble punishment for a man who will have left office anyway. While the forces of decency, democracy and good government prevailed in this impeachment vote, we should ask what gain this battle has wrought. A Senate debate will distract that body at a time when a new president critically needs it to confirm his Cabinet, and to approve a funding package to accelerate vaccinations and Covid-19 relief. Impeachment likely persuaded nobody; on all things Trumpian, it seems, virtually no American appears persuadable. What is needed, rather, is criminal prosecution...Experts appear more divided about whether a president could use the clemency power of Article II of the Constitution to pardon himself in anticipation of prosecution. On its face, nothing in the Constitution precludes a self-pardon. A 1974 internal U.S. Department of Justice memorandum raises doubts, however, invoking “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case,” and has the concurrence of such constitutional experts as Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. Only the Supreme Court can finally resolve the issue, but we must call the question; otherwise, the door will remain open to those who might seek to exploit this uncertainty for tyrannical ends.

While President Trump prepared to issue a spree of pardons, tens of thousands of troops prepared for a high-security transition of power. At least 12 Army National Guard members have been removed from inauguration duties due to ties with militant right-wing groups or extremist postings online. Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Axios politics editor Glen Johnson joined Jim Braude to discuss.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn: After years of Donald Trump’s boorish defiance of presidential norms, his incitement of the violence at the Capitol closed his term with a demented rave that shamed American democracy. Tomorrow Joe Biden will return the presidency to a more decorous and honorable choreography. But in important respects, Biden cannot restore normalcy. Trump’s most profound and least recognized contributions to the office he abused are a reorientation of some of the presidency’s important powers and responsibilities. Once-fringe understandings about the role of the president approached acceptance under Trump in ways that Biden cannot dismiss, and they could transform how the great office functions for years to come. True, Biden’s time in office will witness reversals by conservatives and progressives on some of the uses and limits of presidential power. The Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule predicted at the dawn of the Trump administration that the sides would reverse their positions about aggressive uses of presidential administration. He compared the pattern to two lines of dancers in a Jane Austen novel who move to opposite sides of the ballroom and then continue dancing as before. “The structure of the dance at the group level is preserved; none of the rules of the dance change; but the participants end up facing in opposite directions.”

President Trump’s last-minute pardons betray what the Constitution’s pardon power is all about. While he has not decided to try to pardon himself (at least, not as far as we know), the pardons he issued during his term taken together serve as a microcosm for his presidency. They take a noble part of our Constitution and warp it in the service of Trump’s ego and future personal interests...These final pardons do not arrive shorn of history here. Trump’s prior pardons, like Tuesday’s, largely fall into two buckets. Bucket 1 is friends of Donald Trump — people like Roger Stone, George Papadopoulous, Paul Manafort, Charles Kushner (yes, Jared’s dad) and Michael Flynn. These folks never even bothered formally requesting a pardon; they got one through back channels to the Oval Office. Bucket 2 are rogues who aspire to be in Bucket 1 — people like Dinesh D’Souza and former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio. The conservative Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith examined all of Trump’s pardons before his final days in office and found a whopping 91 percent of them went to people with personal or political connections to Trump. An outsize number of Trump’s pardons were for white-collar criminals, revealing again Trump’s proclivity to benefit those who look and act like him. For decades, criminal justice had been moving in the direction of greater parity between white-collar and other offenders, only to have Trump come along and reverse the trend.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Can a former president be impeached? Can he be convicted? Those are two different constitutional questions. And President Donald Trump, impeached last week while still in office and potentially subject to conviction after departing, has obvious reason to offer a firm “no” to the second question. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives is authorized to impeach a president, and then the Senate is authorized to convict him. But that doesn’t answer the questions about a former president. Let’s start with the text. Article I says this: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” Article II says this: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Under these provisions, it should be clear that the House cannot impeach someone who has never held public office, and who merely aspires to do so.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley shares his predictions and warnings for writing historical narratives about the end of the Trump presidency. He also discusses Trump’s decision to not attend the inauguration and how we should apply the 25th Amendment in the 21st century. This is the first installment in a new Deep Background series focusing on power in different fields and forms.

Like millions around the world, Lincoln Miller, a sixth-grade student in Parkland, Fla, was watching live TV as hundreds of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop Congress from confirming Joseph R. Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election. Five people died in the violence, including two police officers. Miller, 11, was “horrified” as he witnessed the violent mob, he recalls. But as one of 45 kid reporters for Scholastic Kids Press, which reaches 25 million students nationwide, he knew it was important breaking news for his readers. As he continued to watch the riot unfold, Miller pitched the story to his editor. When she gave him the go-ahead, Miller emailed Laurence Tribe ’66, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, to request an interview...Tribe received Miller’s email moments before he was to appear live on CNN. Though he was fielding dozens of media requests from around the world, “This one stood out,” says Tribe, who immediately emailed the young reporter back. “When I got this very sweet and serious inquiry from an eleven-year-old, I didn’t have to think very long before I accepted, and I shoved aside a lot of other things to take part in it,” says Tribe. “Kids were watching what looks like a chaotic and torn nation. Many of them were frightened, understandably, and dispirited and discouraged. I thought something uplifting as well as informative” could help.

On January 6, hundreds of rioters stormed the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Their goal was to disrupt the official counting of electoral votes cast in the 2020 presidential race...To gain a better understanding of the guidance the Constitution offers, I emailed Laurence Tribe, a renowned lawyer and scholar who specializes in the Constitution...What is the main thing you’d like kids to understand about the chaos at the Capitol? “The chaos they witnessed isn’t the way things are supposed to be, and it isn’t the way things are likely to remain. Lots of first responders stepped up to their responsibilities, saved lives, and protected people from injury. If we all care more for our neighbors and try to remember that there are ways of disagreeing, while still respecting those who have strong feelings the other way, things will get better.” When the transfer of power is not peaceful, what guidance does the Constitution provide? “So far, we have been fortunate to have an almost entirely peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next, ever since the transition from John Adams to his archrival Thomas Jefferson in 1801. This is the first time that the individual who was clearly defeated, President Trump, held out for months before agreeing to leave office. Trump refused to acknowledge his loss even after his baseless claims of fraud were rejected by the courts. The unsuccessful attempt at what would have been the first coup in our history stands out as a dark chapter. But the Constitution provides vital guidance in ending each presidential term after four years, exactly at noon on January 20.”