Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: It’s Election Day, and there are already lawsuits challenging votes and voting procedures. Some of them are invoking the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which effectively handed that year’s presidential election to George W. Bush. We should expect a lot more to come. Bush v. Gore is widely misunderstood. It rested on exceedingly narrow grounds. As the court put it, the key issue was “whether the use of standardless manual recounts violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.” The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a recount that would require votes to be counted in accordance with the “intent” of the voter. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem was that Florida’s high court failed to lay down specific standards to ensure “equal application” of that principle. And indeed, the standards for accepting or rejecting ballots ended up varying widely, not only from one county to another, but even from one recount team to another. Back in 2000, many Florida voters used punch cards, and many of their votes produced only partly punched ballots, leaving those famous “hanging chads.” Should those ballots have counted? Different recount teams used different standards. That meant that whether a person’s vote would count depended on a kind of lottery — the specific recount team that was doing the counting. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s view, this was unequal treatment, and it violated the equal protection clause. At the same time, the court was careful to say that its ruling was limited to very rare and specific circumstances. “The recount process,” it said, “is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the fundamental right of each voter in the special instance of a statewide recount under the authority of a single state judicial officer.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Noah Feldman is a guest on this episode of Axios Today, giving listeners a taste of what to expect for election night.

Kenneth Mack, a historian and Harvard Law School professor, weighs in on the unusual history of America's first woman presidential nominee and its first Black vice presidential pick in 1872, just seven years after the end of the Civil War.

An op-ed by Isaac Green '22 and Malina Simard-Halm: We grew up in a world that was not ready for families like the ones in which we were raised. On Wednesday, the justices of the Supreme Court will consider whether that’s still true. We are among the first generation of children raised by two gay dads or two lesbian moms. Before we had learned to read, we learned our families were different—even despised by some. But the gay slurs, hostile glares, and bullying paled in comparison to the realization that our government did not stand behind us and our families—forbidding marriage and curbing parental rights, passing state constitutional amendments expressly denying our parents equal protection, and even criminalizing their sexual relationships. Over the past two decades the Supreme Court struck down these discriminatory laws and policies. But the question of whether our families fully belong is again before the court. On Wednesday, the court will hear arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a case testing  whether discrimination against LGBTQ+ would-be adopters can be justified on religious grounds. Catholic Social Services, a religiously-affiliated child placing agency that refuses to work with same-sex couples, is asking the court to require Philadelphia to work with and fund it—even though Philadelphia otherwise requires that city-sponsored foster agencies deal with prospective families on a nondiscriminatory basis. If the court rules in favor of Catholic Social Services, it will send a clear message to people like us: that our parents are not good enough and our families are not worthy of the respect other families receive. Anyone is free to hold that view, but no appeal to religion should allow—much less require—our government to endorse it. We fear that this case could become the first salvo in a series of reactionary decisions from a newly reinforced conservative majority that would undermine the LGBTQ+ community’s hard-fought victories.

The US debate over the future of capitalism continues to flare with a proposal for new legislation that would shift companies away from “shareholder primacy” and into the realm of “stakeholder governance”. A newly published white paper, from non-profit organisations B Lab and The Shareholder Commons, proposes the US push through a Stakeholder Capitalism Act containing measures to give both company directors and investors revised fiduciary duties. In an article for the Harvard Law School governance blog, the paper’s authors argue that there is a need for urgent reform while insisting the best elements of capitalism must be retained. They say their policy measures are “designed to maintain the market mechanism inherent in profit-seeking but correct market failures that allow for profits derived by extracting value from common resources and communities, including workers.” Their legal reforms, they say, consist of “revised fiduciary considerations that extend beyond responsibility for financial return…” Among the key changes, the writers call for reforms that give investors a requirement to consider the “economic, social and environmental” implications of their decisions. The white paper also calls on investors to report on how they have met these new responsibilities...In the US, the debate around stakeholderism, or “purposeful” business, has been ongoing for some time. But in August last year the discussion was jet-fuelled when the Business Roundtable—a club for corporate leaders at some of the largest US corporates—declared its members would become “purpose-driven” corporates. A year on and a blizzard of articles have poured cold water on the idea that anything is different. Perhaps the most notable comes from academics Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, who say they found little evidence of change in Roundtable members. “Notwithstanding statements to the contrary, corporate leaders are generally still focused on shareholder value. They can be expected to protect other stakeholders only to the extent that doing so would not hurt share value,” they write in the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the urgent pressure of COVID-19 and other crises brought to us by 2020, stakeholder capitalism — the idea that corporations should take into account the interests of their stakeholders, not just shareholders — has remained at the top of the corporate news cycle. On the recent 50th anniversary of economist Milton Friedman's essay "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" — which established shareholder primacy as the prime corporate directive — many legal, business and economic leaders challenged Friedman's legacy, favoring stakeholder capitalism over shareholder primacy. We think that it isn't an either/or situation. Stakeholder capitalism can work to benefit shareholders as well, but there must be collaboration between business and government in order to achieve the desired goals. In fact, a review of recent history shows us that collaboration between business and government is the optimal way to determine what is in the best interests of the stakeholders...How can we restore confidence? Stakeholder capitalism can help, by increasing the accountability of institutions for the constituencies they affect. However, in order for stakeholder capitalism to work, the government needs to take a central role, because corporations are not legally accountable to any parties other than their shareholders and the government. Moreover, corporate leaders are not incented to prioritize the interests of stakeholders, as concluded in a recent study by Harvard professors Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita. And under corporate law in Delaware, where most large corporations are incorporated, directors have fiduciary duties to make decisions in the best interests of shareholders — not stakeholders. Delaware public benefit corporations allow directors to weigh a public benefit alongside shareholder interests, but do not provide for broader accountability.

Donald Trump is fighting to hold on to the White House. If he loses, an outcome that is growing increasingly likely, the protections afforded to him by the presidency will vanish. His status as president has protected him so far, but Trump could be slammed with a pile of personal lawsuits should he fail to secure re-election. The businessman and reality TV star is likely to face a litany of potential criminal suits, ranging from emoluments to rape charges, if Joe Biden secures enough electoral college votes on Tuesday. Trump's biographer David Johnston has even warned that the incumbent could face jail time once he leaves the Oval Office... “There are likely to be many federal crimes that investigation following Trump’s departure from office would reveal – crimes involving federal income tax evasion, wire fraud, bank fraud, insurance fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard University, told Middle East Eye. The New York attorneys on the case have filed a subpoena for eight years of Trump's taxes, which the president tried blocking multiple times. In July, Trump lost an appeal that ruled he is not liable to a subpoena from a state grand jury. Tribe said that "no presidential pardon could operate to shield Trump or anyone else from such state prosecutions".

In June, the hashtag #DCblackout erupted on Twitter. A series of tweets claimed authorities had blocked protesters from communicating on their smartphones in order to tamp down on unrest around police brutality and the killing of George Floyd. Images circulated of an inferno raging beside the Washington Monument, illuminating the landmark dramatically in the nighttime. It was all false. The images were doctored. Local officials rushed to correct the misinformation. Twitter said it was investigating the situation and had already suspended hundreds of spammy accounts using the hashtag. It turned out the deception was the result of a sophisticated campaign that employed a combination of hacked accounts and fake accounts...Groups such as Win Black/Pa’lante have been working in recent months ahead of the election to monitor disinformation targeted at Black and Latino voters. Activists with the group have launched educational campaigns aimed at arming Black and Latino voters with tools to detect and avoid online manipulation. “These foreign agents pretend to be Black activists online, using Black cultural tones and norms most relevant to Black audiences, and ultimately depressing those votes by pretending or impersonating voices of Black activists and then turning on the candidates,” said Ashley Bryant, a co-founder of the group. Bryant said the group is closely watching efforts to amplify false claims of voter fraud — even from the Trump administration. The president, through tweets as well as news conferences and interviews, was the main source of falsehoods spreading about mail-in voter fraud, according to a recent working paper by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

A new report finds that President Trump and the Republican Party are driving online misinformation this election, not shady actors on Facebook or Russian trolls. When it comes to false claims about mail-in voting, Trump’s Twitter account functions as a press release, says Yochai Benkler, who led the team of researchers at Harvard University's Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. Trump’s tweets make their way into headlines, which are amplified by the Republican National Committee, his campaign staff and the White House communication team, Benkler says. Both right-wing outlets and mainstream media have helped Trump spread false messages, Benkler says. Journalists don’t want to take sides or appear biased, he says, so Trump’s “outrageous” claims are put in headlines with a fact-check saying they’re false a few paragraphs down in the story. In August, the researchers started seeing more use of the truth sandwich. “Early on, this basic desire to grab a headline really helped him get his message outside of those inside the propaganda feedback loop and into the more mainstream,” Benkler says. A Cornell University study that analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic found mentions of Trump made up nearly 38% of what they call “the misinformation conversation.” This makes the president the largest driver of falsehoods about the pandemic around the world. And here in the United States, Benkler’s team finds Trump and other Republicans are the biggest drivers of falsehoods about voting. Many media outlets have adopted a “dual-track” where they report Trump’s claims to look balanced and then go back to fact check, Benkler says. But what’s initially reported matters most, he says. “Nobody reads the fact check except for people who already want to find out that the president is lying,” he says. “You really do need to do the fact-checking before the headline is written. And the headline and the lead need to teach the audience what you're about to hear is false. Then you can really contain it.”

Axios' Margaret Talev and Mike Allen walk us through what they're preparing for on election night. Plus, how the election could come down to Pennsylvania's mail-in ballots. And, why voting is a sacred right. Guests: Axios' Margaret Talev and Mike Allen; Noah Feldman, constitutional law professor at Harvard University; and Rev. Otis Moss, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.

A few years ago, Steve Bannon promised at the Conservative Political Action Conference that President Trump would "deconstruct the administrative state." "Every day is going to be a fight," the former White House chief strategist declared to an appreciative CPAC crowd. It was February 2017, and Trump and his top aides had just arrived in Washington, with lofty promises to dismantle the U.S. regulatory system. During the campaign, Trump vowed to achieve "energy dominance" and sideline "extreme" environmental activists who he claimed had been writing the rules for industry for too long. He said he wanted to make oilman Harold Hamm richer and keep American workers employed...Even though Trump was a government novice, it was not lost on him that regulations were the key policy levers available to him. Eleven days in office, Trump directed agency chiefs to toss two regulations for every new one established. Later that year, Trump convened a White House event where a line of red tape was strung in front of tall stacks of papers, symbolizing the exorbitant number of federal regulations. "Let's cut the red tape," he declared. "Let's set free our dreams.” ... Perhaps most important, his critics point out Trump and his top officials have marginalized scientific experts working on policy at EPA and the Interior Department, slow-walked environmental enforcement, undermined public participation in environmental review, and jettisoned the words "climate change" from government parlance. "The administration went about its business methodically," said Joe Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. "What the leadership at EPA and Interior did was change the role in which scientific experts played in the administration process." They also ousted scientific experts from science advisory boards, he said, and sought to wholly diminish the power of the agencies. In many ways, Goffman thought, "Bannon got his wish."

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen: During Donald Trump’s Presidency, we have called political events “constitutional crises” far more often than in any period in memory. Before 2016, the term was used rarely, and the last time there was concern about a possible constitutional crisis was in the aftermath of the Presidential election of 2000, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, more than a month after Election Day. As we approach the decision’s twentieth anniversary, with a President who has promised to take the election results to the Court, we may be facing a possible repeat of those events—and perhaps a genuine constitutional crisis around the Presidential election, which could prove much more chaotic and difficult to resolve. A constitutional crisis is not merely an instance of the Constitution being disobeyed or going unenforced. It is, rather, a much more confounding situation, in which two branches of government are in an active conflict with each other but our constitutional rules and norms do not tell us how to resolve it. There was a true constitutional crisis around the Presidential election of 1876, when neither Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat, nor Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, won a majority of the Electoral College. (Tilden won the popular vote.) In Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where vote counts were close and products of manipulation, rival Democratic and Republican electors attempted to get Congress to recognize their votes. To end a months-long political conflict, which was marked by intimidation, disenfranchisement, and threats of violence, Congress appointed a bipartisan electoral commission, consisting of members of each house and the Supreme Court. The commission reached an ugly compromise, to withdraw federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction, in exchange for awarding the disputed states’ electoral votes to Hayes, who became President.

Donald Trump has changed the ideological cast of our entire federal court system, appointing the most appellate-court judges in a single term since Jimmy Carter, along with three conservative Justices to the Supreme Court. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School, unpacks the complicated question of court-packing. Joe Biden’s cautious engagement with the strategy, she thinks, is smart politics. The Supreme Court’s members “do not want to see Congress mess with the number of Justices on the Court or the terms,” she tells David Remnick. “So they now also understand . . . that they’re being watched with an idea that the institution can change without their being able to control it.”

This year’s riven, pandemic-complicated election has been unusual on many fronts and undeniably historic, marking the first time a woman of color has been nominated for vice president by a major political party. But there have been other surprising contests in the nation’s history. American saw its first woman presidential nominee and its first Black vice presidential pick in 1872, just seven years after the end of the Civil War. All of it was owing in large part to the women’s suffrage movement and radical feminist Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president against the incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, as the nominee of the Equal Rights Party and chose (without his knowledge or consent) abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. For Woodhull, a polarizing political activist who was considered an eccentric by many, it would be the latest of many firsts — a self-declared clairvoyant, she had already been the first woman in the country to own a brokerage firm and to start a weekly newspaper...But while Woodhull was clear about her presidential intentions, she never informed her running mate, Douglass, who never even acknowledged he had been nominated...Douglass also likely didn’t recognize the vice presidential nomination in 1872 because he was already supporting a different presidential candidate, said Kenneth Mack, a historian and Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School...Douglass was a lifelong supporter of women’s suffrage despite splitting with activists in his support of the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the vote but left women disenfranchised. “Thousands of Black people were being murdered across the South. And Douglass gave his famous speech saying, ‘This is a matter of life and death,’ and he really meant life and death,” said Mack...What would Douglass have thought of the country’s recent elections? “It’s impossible to translate from the 19th century to today … but certainly the principle that Douglass stood for, that the most vulnerable people in our society should have access to the ballot in order to protect their interests, that ballot access should be expanded rather than contracted, was his position all the way through. And he supported women’s suffrage because he thought that women needed the ability to look out for their own interests rather than to supposedly have men look out for them,” said Mack.

Lawsuits over voter access and vote counts have already become a major battleground of the 2020 general election. If results are close, then post-election court rulings may be the deciding factor in whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is sworn in as president next year. This past week the president said he wants courts to step in and prevent ballots from being counted beyond election night. The Trump and Biden campaigns ought to be on a level playing field in any court dispute, just as they should be at the ballot box. But what if the president wields the Justice Department as a sword to influence the courts’ decision-making? ... The first way Barr could co-opt the Justice Department to aid Trump’s reelection campaign would be by having the department directly intervene in any resulting litigation. This would be an unparalleled and deeply inappropriate action, but one that is not a terribly far leap from Barr’s current attempt to use the Justice Department to personally defend and protect Donald Trump. When asked about the possibility of such a court intervention, constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who served as a lead counsel for then-Vice President Al Gore in litigation over the 2000 Florida election recount, told us, “I would’ve been shocked and appalled to see Clinton’s DOJ weighing in during Bush v. Gore.” ... However, the extreme nature of Justice Department intervention in the issue might not be enough to stop Barr ... This would cause a variety of harms. First, having the Justice Department intervene would improperly aid the Trump campaign’s arguments in court, granting an added air of legitimacy and potentially tipping the scales of justice in what is supposed to be an even dispute between campaigns. According to Tribe, “the credibility, personnel, and financial resources of the department exceed those of any private attorney or firm, and the fact that it speaks in the name of the United States gives it enormous influence. Its arguments come with the cloak of official legitimacy even when its interests are in fact those of the incumbent president who seeks reelection.”

As the CEOs of Twitter, Google, and Facebook testified before the US Senate just weeks before the election, the Facebook page of right-wing commentator Dan Bongino, which boasts more than 3.7 million followers, gleefully shared clips of Republican senators grilling the execs. But instead of sending people to watch the videos on Bongino’s popular YouTube channel, his page referred them to rumble.com, a relatively unknown video site that has become the darling of right-wing figures including Bongino, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, writer John Solomon, Rep. Devin Nunes, and pro-Trump commentators Diamond and Silk...Prior to its influx of conservatives, Rumble's partners included news organization Reuters, venerable viral video outfit America’s Funniest Home Videos, television station owner E.W. Scripps, and fact-checking site Snopes. Its new content creators are more controversial. Solomon’s previous work for the Hill resulted in a damning internal inquiry, while Diamond and Silk have at times been flagged by Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers. The New York Times also noted that Bongino was a proponent of the “Spygate,” which it called “a dubious conspiracy theory about an illegal Democratic plot to spy on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.” That means Rumble will soon have more difficult content moderation decisions to make, according to evelyn douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “If Rumble doesn't want to be a haven for hate speech or harmful health misinformation or upset its user base and genuinely wants to moderate responsibly, it needs to think ahead about how it's going to draw lines and, just as importantly, how it's going to clearly communicate those lines to its users,” she told BuzzFeed News. “These decisions can be genuinely hard.”

Don could run out of Teflon if he loses the election. Trailing in the polls a day before the election, President Trump faces the very real prospect of swapping the White House for the Big House. He’s directly implicated in campaign finance crimes and is under investigation by both Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York State Attorney General Letitia James for alleged fraud in his business dealings. On top of that, he faces civil defamation lawsuits from women accusing him of sexual assault...Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said the James and Vance investigations should be of “greatest concern” to Trump. The scholar, who advised top House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment, said it’s “almost inevitable” that the president will be criminally charged should he lose the election. “The investigations of greatest concern would focus on Trump’s seemingly criminal financial manipulations — bank and insurance fraud in knowingly falsifying his income, his wealth and the value of various assets,” Tribe said... “The degree to which post-presidential prosecution is discussed during the current election tells us that this has been a presidency so mired in apparent criminality, from the top on down, that just about everyone knows a major incentive for Trump to stay in office as long as he can is to exploit the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president,” Tribe said.

An article by Beatrice Lindstrom and Joey Bui ‘21: Ten years ago this month, Haiti confirmed the arrival of a deadly cholera epidemic that killed more than 10,000 people. The disease — and the United Nations’ response to it — has caused immeasurable harm in Haiti and undermined the UN’s moral standing when it is sorely needed. As victims in Haiti pause to commemorate their loved ones and reaffirm their fight for justice, the UN must compensate victims and ensure stronger accountability in the future. When cholera broke out in 2010, the source was quickly traced to a UN peacekeeping base where faulty waste management leaked contaminated sewage into Haiti’s largest river. Rather than conduct an independent investigation or respond to the evidence in good faith, the UN denied responsibility, released false statements and discredited people who called for truth. The cover-up compounded the sense of injury in Haiti and became an embarrassment for the UN. It took six years of lawsuits and civil society-led advocacy campaigns for Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general at the time, to shift course and publicly apologize for the UN’s role. In doing so, he acknowledged the damage to the UN’s reputation and committed to taking a “new approach” to bring long-overdue assistance to victims. Today, four years later, the plan is funded at only 5 percent, and though elimination of cholera finally appears within reach, the only assistance for victims has taken the form of a few symbolic community projects that are not targeted at addressing victims’ injuries. The lack of follow-through on the new approach and reluctance to provide compensation has further undermined the UN’s standing in Haiti, the region and far beyond.

As nationalism, misinformation and the pandemic have emerged as threats to democracy — and a presidential election has roiled the United States — the relatively small nation of Bolivia, in political upheaval for most its 195-year history, managed a free and fair vote. It did this amid extreme polarization and racial division, on the back of violent protests, while battling voter distrust and fighting one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world. Luis Arce, a former economy minister, won with 55 percent of the vote, a clear sign that much of the country embraced his party’s socialist project. The feared mass protests and violence never happened. And voter turnout hit a historic high at nearly 90 percent...Approaching its Oct. 18 election, Bolivia was intensely divided between supporters and critics of Evo Morales, a larger-than-life former leader who had been the country’s first Indigenous president...In late 2019, his attempt to run for a fourth term ended in allegations of electoral fraud, and in demands from protesters that he step down. The police and armed forces soon joined the call, and he fled the country. Supporters called his ouster a coup. In the turbulent year that followed, the country was run by a temporary president, Jeanine Añez, who persecuted Mr. Morales’s allies and terrified much of the Indigenous population with harsh anti-Morales rhetoric. After Ms. Añez took power, at least 23 Indigenous civilians were killed during pro-Morales demonstrations. State agents were responsible, according to a recent report by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the University Network for Human Rights. No one has been held accountable. Many Indigenous Bolivians feared that a future with Ms. Añez — or any conservative candidate — meant a return to the past.

The President was despondent. Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options...The downfall of Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1974, was, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relate in “The Final Days,” one of the most dramatic in American history...No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish...Though Trump doesn’t have the power to pardon or commute a New York State court conviction, he can pardon virtually anyone facing federal charges—including, arguably, himself. When Nixon, a lawyer, was in the White House, he concluded that he had this power, though he felt that he would disgrace himself if he attempted to use it. Nixon’s own Justice Department disagreed with him when it was asked whether a President could, in fact, self-pardon. The acting Assistant Attorney General, Mary C. Lawton, issued a memo proclaiming, in one sentence with virtually no analysis, that, “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative.” However, the memo went on to suggest that, if the President were declared temporarily unable to perform the duties of the office, the Vice-President would become the acting President, and in that capacity could pardon the President, who could then either resign or resume the duties of the office. To date, that is the only known government opinion on the issue, according to Jack Goldsmith, who, under George W. Bush, headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and now teaches at Harvard Law School. Recently, Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, a White House counsel under Barack Obama, co-wrote “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” in which the bipartisan pair offer a blueprint for remedying some of the structural weaknesses exposed by Trump. Among their proposals is a rule explicitly prohibiting Presidents from pardoning themselves. They also propose that bribery statutes be amended to prevent Presidents from using pardons to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice. Such reforms would likely come too late to stop Trump, Goldsmith noted: “If he loses—if—we can expect that he’ll roll out pardons promiscuously, including to himself.”

Paul Farrell has spent his career tackling one of the state’s most intractable environmental problems — dirty air — clocking 27 years at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection alone, the last two as director of air planning. So when Farrell says, “I think the environmental stakes of the upcoming election are as significant as I’ve ever seen in my career,” he knows what he’s talking about. To be clear, the state’s battle with the Trump administration isn’t its first but, as Farrell points out, it’s one for the books. “I’m tracking right now somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 different environmental actions EPA has taken in different areas,” Farrell said. “Without a doubt, they’re all weakening some standards in some form or fashion.” And that’s just air quality issues. In nearly four years, the Trump administration has endeavored to roll back some 100 environmental regulations and policies as documented by The New York Times from databases at Harvard University, Columbia University and others. Then there are a hefty number of new regulations and policies. And let’s not forget the court actions...Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard, who has also served in numerous environmental roles in government, called the Trump administration approach to weakening environmental rules “horrifying.” “Whenever it does a rule that weakens pollution standards, it goes the route of articulating a new legal theory that has the effect of restricting EPA’s authority at the threshold,” he said. “They’re trying to create a legacy for their successor of an EPA and a Clean Air Act that are much less powerful as toolboxes for dealing with air pollution and climate change.” Such concerns have given rise to speculation about whether a second Trump administration would go after some of the biggest bedrocks, not just of environmental law, but also of administrative law... “The effect of the Trump rollbacks of climate regulation is that we will have lost time and we have lost another increment of climate stability that we will not be able to recover,” Goffman said, noting the greenhouse gas emissions of the Trump era so far will remain in the atmosphere for a long time. “The five years of emissions that we will have to see – there’s no way to offset them. There’s no way to reel them back.”