Media Mentions

Infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Monica Gandhi and Harvard Law professor and bioethics expert Glenn Cohen join Dr. Ian Smith to discuss taking thymosin alpha-1, a treatment that might show promise but is not FDA approved. Dr. Gandhi shares that she’s really concerned about people taking thymosin alpha-1 because it could lead to something far worse than COVID-19. Plus, Glenn shares that it’s actually unlawful for companies to promote this treatment.

Harvard experts in climate and the environment, including HLS Professor Jody Freeman, see reversals of Trump changes, more global leadership, political hurdles.

There were new additions to classrooms when schools opened this fall. There were plastic shields and cloth facemasks, hand sanitizer and login instructions when learning went online. But something was missing — tens of thousands of students. The coronavirus pandemic has pushed kids out of school for various reasons: health concerns, a parent losing a job causing the family to move, a lack of internet or devices for virtual learning. Because there is no national database, 60 Minutes compiled enrollment data from 78 of the largest school districts in the country and found nearly a quarter of a million students did not showed up when school began. Now, social workers who have spent the last three months searching for those kids expect their job is about to get much harder. A national pause on most evictions is set to expire at the end of the year, and without those protections, children without a home could translate to more students missing from the classroom...While housing insecurity has been a growing concern for years, the pandemic has heightened it. Three quarters of the people who are behind on rent say they cannot make payments because they have experienced an employment-related loss of income. "The pandemic hit on a deep housing affordability crisis and exacerbated the challenges Americans have paying rent," COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project co-founder Sam Gilman '22 told 60 Minutes. "They were one emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and the pandemic was that emergency."

Bob Bauer and Professor Jack L. Goldsmith say experience with President Trump highlights need for long-overdue curbs.

President Donald Trump’s campaign filed notice that it was appealing the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that aimed to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results unless the state invalidated tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. The campaign’s filing on Sunday, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, had been expected. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has said the case should be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority. The move is unlikely to stop Pennsylvania from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state as soon as Monday. Trump has said his goal is to “decertify” the state’s results one way or another...Brann ruled both that the Trump campaign lacked standing to sue, and that it had not raised a valid equal-protection claim since Pennsylvania counties were not prohibited under state law from letting voters fix minor ballot errors. “It’s not law, it’s theater and it’s not very good theater,” Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of Trump, said in a telephone interview. “It’s dangerous and damaging theater because it undermines the confidence of millions of people in our electoral system and legal system” for the president to be “bouncing in and out of court making outlandish claims,” he said. Tribe also said he doesn’t believes the Supreme Court would overturn Brann’s decision, even if it were to agree to hear the case.

Thursday’s meeting of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission started off with expressions of comity between its three commissioners. It ended with another round of dissents from its sole Democrat, who warned of possible legal challenges to FERC decisions approved by its Republican majority over his objections. Questions of political pressure on the avowedly nonpartisan agency have swirled around FERC over the past weeks after the Trump administration demoted Neil Chatterjee from his two-year tenure as FERC chairman to appoint fellow Republican James Danly to the leadership position...Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, noted that FERC’s subsequent actions to impose even more problematic restrictions on state-subsidized resources in the capacity market of mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM may strengthen legal challenges to ISO-NE's CASPR construct. “One of the key legal issues in both proceedings is FERC’s authority to address state policies,” he wrote in a Thursday email. “FERC went further in PJM, and perhaps clean energy interests will be able to make more convincing arguments based on those facts.”

When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 even though 2.8 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton, everyone from Bill De Blasio, to Michael Moore, to Eric Holder and Bill Maher said that at long last we should abolish the electoral college. Then-California Senator Barbara Boxer introduced a bill to amend the U.S. constitution to do just that. A Gallup poll from September of this year showed that 61 percent of Americans support abolishing the electoral college in favor of a national popular vote, although it's an issue that breaks along partisan lines. 77 percent of Republicans want to keep the electoral college, while 89 percent of Democrats said that we should get rid of it. Is the electoral college the best system for electing a president? That was the subject of an online Soho Forum debate held on Wednesday, November 11, 2020. Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, defended the system against Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated. Lessig won the Oxford-Style debate by gaining 14.29 percent of the audience's support. Epstein lost 2.04 percent of his pre-debate votes.

The resurgence of COVID-19 in Massachusetts could prompt Gov. Charlie Baker to again impose aggressive restrictions on businesses using a decades-old statute, but legal experts say courts are likely to give him broad deference in combating the public health crisis. Baker was one of many governors to impose sweeping business closures and other measures in the spring when the virus first surged in the Bay State. Despite the governor's broad popularity, a number of the emergency orders enacted under the Civil Defense Act have drawn legal challenges. While Baker's record in these suits has not been perfect, experts told Law360 the courts are likely to defer to his authority should he decide to snap restrictions back into place. "While there are limits, the emergency powers mirror the nature of the emergency," said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and current Harvard Law School professor, adding that a crisis like COVID-19 would be reviewed by looking at the rational basis of the measures imposed. It's a standard she said the governor is likely to meet. "This is not like mandating motorcycle helmets, which is a public health issue but affects everyone else around the motorcyclist only tangentially in terms of insurance rates and visits to emergency rooms," Gertner said. "This is a direct link where what you do affects me."

For more than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump. She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience, and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage. So it came as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s claims as unreliable and unproven...A question for conservative media that are more independent of Mr. Trump is how much of the market the unabashedly pro-Trump media dominates in the future. Some scholars said they expected that audience to be substantial. “Drudge and Fox can try to pull back from the abyss,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies conservative media. “But the audience is going to get what it wants and reward those who give it to them.”

From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump wasted no time establishing a deregulatory agenda as one of the top priorities for his administration. Just 10 days after taking office, he signed an executive order requiring that two federal regulations be rescinded for every new regulation implemented. “The American dream is back,” he said in a statement from the Roosevelt Room.  In the years that followed, it became clear who was to benefit, and who was to lose, from Trump’s American dream.  His administration has rescinded, rewritten, or replaced over 100 environmental protections, rules, and regulations that reduce toxic pollution and industrial waste, protect endangered species, and draw down the greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating a global climate crisis... “What happened under the Trump administration exposed all of the ways that interpretations of these statutes could be pushed to extremes. The Biden administration can learn from that,” Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra. “It’s not just about putting things back together or returning to the status quo. We need to strengthen regulations, because the climate crisis has accelerated dramatically over the last four years, and we have failed to take action on a federal level. This is an incredible opportunity to think creatively about how we can insulate these rules and regulations from future changes.”

It’s a pressing question not just for higher-education experts and legal wonks. Tens of millions of Americans have a lot riding on the answer: Can the president forgive student debt without Congress? If the president was able to cancel student debt without passing legislation, in theory borrowers could see their balances reduced or eliminated overnight. On the other hand, the chances of Congress agreeing to forgive the loans is, at best, uncertain. Generally, Republicans are not in favor of debt forgiveness. For now, it’s also an open question if President-elect Joe Biden has interest in testing his presidential power in this way...During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to forgive student loans in the first days of her administration, including with her announcement an analysis written by three legal experts, based at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, who described such a move as “lawful and permissible.” Biden, however, has not gone as far...CNBC asked Toby Merrill, founder and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, how she’d explain to a 15-year-old why she believes it’s within the president’s power to do so. “The Constitution gave Congress the authority to control property of the government, like debts owed to it,” she wrote. And Congress, Merrill said, granted the Secretary of Education, who works for the president, “the specific and unrestricted authority to create and to cancel or modify debt owed under federal student loan programs.”

Bloomberg Chief Washington Correspondent Kevin Cirilli delivers insight and analysis on the latest headlines from the White House and Capitol Hill, including conversations with influential lawmakers and key figures in politics and policy. Bloomberg's June Grasso served as guest host. She was joined by Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and founder of Equal Citizens, Jennifer Rie, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Antitrust Litigation Analyst, John Sitilides, Geopolitical strategist at Trilogy Advisors and diplomacy consultant to the State Dept, and Kevin Walling, Democratic Strategist at HG Creative media.

Both Republicans and Democrats have voiced concerns over the past few decades about the expansion of presidential powers — some of it ceded by Congress looking for political cover, much of it a result of White House legal interpretations of constitutional gray areas. The balance of power now tilts in favor of the Oval Office, but since President Richard Nixon leaders have held themselves largely in check, respecting long-established informal rules and norms. Then came President Trump...In a new book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” attorneys Bob Bauer ’73 and Jack L. Goldsmith, veterans of Democratic and Republican White Houses, respectively, propose what they say are long-overdue reforms to the Office of the President that can rein in future presidents who try to exploit the position for their political or personal benefit. Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, served as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration. He writes frequently about national security, government, and politics, and is a founding editor of Lawfare. Bauer, a longtime legal adviser to President Barack Obama who is now advising the Biden campaign, is widely regarded as a leading authority on executive branch powers. He served as White House counsel from 2008 to 2011 and is now a professor of the practice and distinguished scholar in residence at NYU Law.

The Trump administration rolled back over 125 environmental rules during their tenure. These policies protected wildlife and water, and regulated chemicals and greenhouse gases. This hour, we’ll discuss Trump’s environmental and climate legacy. We’ll also look at President-elect Biden’s climate plans and discuss what actions he can take (with or without a democratic Senate) to protect the environment, address our energy needs, and tackle global warming. Joining us are Michael Mann, professor and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, and Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University.

President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes. Trump's latest escalation of his attempt to subvert the result of the election followed a string of knock-backs in the courts and after a statewide audit in Georgia confirmed Biden's victory in the crucial swing state. He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said Michigan lawmakers visiting the White House on Friday could be walking into an illegal meeting. "I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote." Tribe says the Trump campaign has lost more than two dozen lawsuits. "It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: The conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin has tweeted an all caps call for state legislatures to “get ready to do your constitutional duty.” Levin believes they have “the final say” on which slate of presidential electors gets to vote in the Electoral College. Under this theory, even if more people in a state voted for Democrat Joe Biden, their legislature would still have the power to pick a slate of Donald Trump electors. In other words, the Republican legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could all now select a slate of electors for Trump. Needless to say, Levin’s theory has been embraced by many who continue to believe it can give Trump a second term. Levin is wrong about the power of state legislatures. But he’s not making his theory up out of whole cloth. There’s a kernel of truth to Levin’s theory. And it’s important to understand why that truth does not mean that legislatures have the power to do something that no legislature has ever done  —  to veto the results of a popular election and pick a slate of electors for the loser in that popular election. Levin grounds his claim on the part of the Constitution that gives legislatures the power to select the “manner” by which presidential electors are appointed. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court interpreted that power to mean that the legislature could vest the selection of electors in the people — through a popular election — but that it could “take back” that power “at any time.” On Levin’s reading, “at any time” includes after an election. So that after an election, the legislature could say, “Thanks for your input, but we’re going a different way.”

Two Republican canvassers in Michigan’s largest county are attempting to rescind their votes certifying that Joe Biden won there after President Donald Trump personally called them, The Associated Press reported. Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, who represent half of the four-member Wayne County canvassing board, initially refused to certify the election results on Tuesday ― an unprecedented move ― despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. They quickly backtracked, voting later that day to certify the results. Trump reportedly reached out to Palmer and Hartmann later that night after the board certified the results. Now, the two GOP canvassers say they want to rescind their votes. The president’s decision to call them and the canvassers efforts to walk back their votes drew swift backlash from some election and law experts, who raised questions regarding the legality and ethics of it all...Deepak Gupta, a lawyer and Harvard Law School lecturer, called Trump’s actions “truly shocking.” ... Biden won nearly 70% of the votes in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Detroit. But Trump and his allies have falsely declared victory in the state. Trump has baselessly claimed there was widespread voter fraud in Detroit, alleging Wednesday that there were “FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE” in the city. (That’s false: More than 670,000 people live in Detroit. The city said a little more than 250,000 ballots were cast there.) Palmer and Hartmann have said they decided to vote in favor of certification after facing backlash and accusations of being racist over their initial opposition.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In the opening of her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” from 2019, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris writes that, as a law student, she found her “calling” while interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, in Oakland, California, in 1988. Harris then spent nearly three decades in law enforcement, referring to herself as “top cop,” rising from local prosecutor to district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California—the first woman and the first Black person in these jobs—until she joined the U.S. Senate, in 2017. When I was in law school, twenty years ago, prosecution was a form of public service that was thought to carry little controversial baggage. Marked as neither liberal nor conservative, it was also an all-purpose route for young people who aspired to political or judicial positions. In recent decades, former prosecutors have been ubiquitous in public life. President Bill Clinton and multiple Presidential nominees and candidates—John Kerry and Chris Christie, for example—were once prosecutors. So were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and several dozen members of Congress, including Senators Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, Doug Jones, and Josh Hawley. Countless federal judges have been prosecutors, among them Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito, and also President Barack Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, whose prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, for the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, was soon followed by President Clinton’s nomination of Garland to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

An op-ed by Samantha Power: Ever since then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright memorably called the United States “indispensable” more than two decades ago, both Americans and publics abroad have vigorously debated the proposition. Today, as President Donald Trump’s term comes to a close, foreign observers of the United States are more prone to use a different word: “incompetent.” The Trump administration’s response to the most urgent problem in the world today—the coronavirus pandemic—has been worse than that of any other nation. This, in turn, has understandably tarnished perceptions of the United States: according to recent Pew Research Center polling conducted in 13 major economic powers, a median of 84 percent of respondents agreed that the United States has done a poor job of handling COVID-19—by far the most damning appraisal received by any major country or institution. Yet the mishandling of the pandemic is just the latest in a string of lapses in basic competence that have called into question U.S. capabilities among both long-standing allies and countries whose partnership Washington may seek in the years to come. A brand once synonymous with the world-changing creations of Steve Jobs, with feats of strength and ingenuity such as the Berlin airlift and the moon landing, and with the opportunity represented by the Statue of Liberty now projects chaos, polarization, and dysfunction.

Installing partisan loyalists into top defense and National Security Agency posts in a president’s final weeks in office is “completely unprecedented,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” a new book about executive branch reforms.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: Long before Donald Trump became president it was widely believed that he would spark a “constitutional crisis” if elected. And during his term in office there were panicked claims that he was just on the verge of destroying the American constitutional order: when Mr Trump threatened to defy judicial orders related to the Muslim ban, and to fire or stop Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and when he made absolutist executive-power claims in defying congressional subpoenas for his tax returns and urged prosecution of his political enemies. In these and many other contexts, Mr Trump’s verbal assaults and threats, incessant norm-defiance and claims of absolute power provoked four years of vertiginous panic. Mr Trump was so discombobulating that relatively few noticed that these and many other worst-case scenarios never played out. Mr Trump has left enormous damage in his wake—to the psyche of many Americans, to many institutions of American democracy and to beaten-down citizens’ confidence in these institutions. There is much repair work to be done. Yet the most remarkable fact about his presidency is how well the American constitutional system stood up to and survived it. This was true, most importantly, in the recent presidential election. Hundreds of stories and reports warned about foreign hacking, domestic and foreign disinformation, violence, insecure voting machines, voter suppression and pandemic-related problems. Yet more Americans than ever (approximately 150m) voted for president. And the election “was the most secure in American history,” according to federal election infrastructure experts.