Media Mentions

"Lieu v. FCC is the Court’s first opportunity to consider the decision that is truly responsible for the dark money nightmare that most people blame, mistakenly so far, on Citizens United. Ever since the Court in Buckley v. Valeo said Congress could limit campaign contributions but not campaign expenses, there was an unresolved tension in First Amendment doctrine. With the D.C. Circuit’s decision in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, that tension became an impossible contradiction that only Supreme Court review of that unwarranted extension of Citizens United can resolve. I’m convinced this is the case in which it should do just that." — Professor Laurence Tribe. Rarely has the Roberts Court found a campaign finance law that it likes. The Court has rendered rulings in eight such cases; sustaining the First Amendment claim in all of them (save for a disclosure requirement upheld in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Five of those eight cases were decided by a 5-4 vote. (Collins + Hudson, “The Roberts Court — Its First Amendment Free Expression Jurisprudence: 2005-2020,” forthcoming). Against that backdrop comes a cert. petition that could be every bit as important as the ones submitted in Citizens United and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014). It is a case being brought by a distinguished group of law professors. In addition to the name of the lead counsel (Professor Jeffrey L. Fisher), the other names on the cert. petition filed by the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic in Lieu v. Federal Election Commission are: Pamela S. Karlan (Stanford Law School); Brian Fletcher (Stanford Law School); Laurence Tribe (Harvard Law School).

In Bolivia, thousands of protesters marched Tuesday in the city of El Alto demanding the right to elect a new president, after the government of right-wing interim leader Jeanine Áñez said it would postpone elections for the second time this year, citing the pandemic. Unions and Indigenous groups accuse Áñez of continuing the coup d’état that ousted former President Evo Morales last November. Protester: “We will not allow this de facto government to embezzle our Plurinational State of Bolivia. In this council, we determined we will carry on with protests until the September 6 elections are ratified.” Following the coup, Bolivia has experienced one of its deadliest and most repressive periods in decades as the government carries out summary executions and arbitrary detentions, according to a new report by Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights. James Cavallaro, the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said, “These abuses mirror the authoritarian behavior of the dictatorships of the 1970s in the Americas. This must stop.”

Asked this past spring whether the November 3 presidential election might need to be rescheduled due to the coronavirus, Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner replied, “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other.” The response didn’t inspire confidence...In fact, Covid-19 election nightmare scenarios are already playing out in other countries around the world. And perhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than in Bolivia...Last week, Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal postponed the country’s presidential election—for the third time. In November 2019, leftist President Evo Morales was forced out of the country by the armed forces after domestic opponents and influential international observers alleged he stole an election for an unprecedented fourth term the month before. Jeanine Añez, a far-right evangelical who had served as the Vice President of the Bolivian Senate, took over. Almost immediately, the government cracked down harshly on Morales supporters in Movement for Socialism (MAS), the party he helped build into a national political powerhouse advocating for indigenous rights, the nationalization of key industries, and wealth redistribution...A 90-page report entitled “They Shot Us Like Animals”—Black November & Bolivia’s Interim Government, released July 27 by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights, summed up the events since Morales’s ouster in chilling detail. “State-sponsored violence, restrictions on free speech, and arbitrary detentions have all contributed to a climate of fear and misinformation that has undermined the rule of law as well as the prospects of fair and open elections,” the authors wrote, noting multiple instances of state forces opening fire on nonviolent indigenous protesters, “para-state groups” beating and detaining people in neighborhoods near the protests, and a case in which police tortured children in their custody. Police even charged an artist with sedition for carrying fliers with messages like, “Flowers for the oligarchy, and bullets for the people” and “We are the people.” The report repeatedly asserts the interim government’s complicity, including Añez herself, in ongoing paramilitary violence against opponents.

On Monday, Twitter removed a video from President Trump's account in which a group doctors made blatantly false claims about the novel coronavirus and alleged that medical experts were involved in a conspiracy. It's unclear how many of the president's 84 million followers saw the video before it was taken down, but Donald Trump Jr. quickly shared a version of the video before Twitter responded by removing it and temporarily restricting his account. Facebook and YouTube have also taken down versions of the video. The video, originally published by Breitbart News, showed a group of doctors claiming that masks are not necessary to contain the virus and that a combination of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and the antibiotic azithromycin can cure it...Salon also reached out to legal experts about whether the de-platforming of the video constitutes an infringement of free speech. Trump and his supporters have accused social media platforms of violating free speech rights on previous occasions when they have flagged or removed content posted by Trump and his movement...  "Twitter is a private platform even though, as one federal circuit court rightly held, its use by a public official like the president can create public forum duties on the part of that official," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email. "Certainly Twitter's own decision to take down a medically misleading and thus dangerous video, by Breitbart or by President Trump or by Donald Trump Jr. or by anyone else, raises no First Amendment issue — any more than a decision by a television network to refuse to run a particular video as an ad would create a First Amendment issue." He added, "In my view, what Twitter does in taking down what it deems a misleading or otherwise dangerous video or other posting does not interfere with the free speech rights either of the tweeter or of what might be called the tweetees — those who read and view Twitter posts."

The 2007–2008 global financial crisis presented the paradoxical question: Should shareholders be given greater influence over company activities? The current pandemic, COVID-19, highlights again the need for review and reevaluation of corporate governance frameworks and the creation of a new regulatory framework aimed at increasing shareholders' control...Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School argued extensively in his research paper "Letting Shareholders Set the Rules" that shareholders should enjoy the "power to initiate, and approve by vote, major corporate decisions." Consequently, arguments for shareholder empowerment are likely to be "convincing" post 2007–2008...According to Bebchuk, shareholders may be reluctant to use any greater powers granted to them for fear of economic consequences. However, the Aviva case study reveals that shareholders will be prepared to use powers to control the board, and thus one might take the view that extending shareholder powers is unnecessary. Section 439 of the U.K.'s Companies Act 2006 does not give shareholders the power to prevent payouts made under remuneration policies, simply to state their disapproval; however, the Aviva case study demonstrates that mere disapproval itself will be sufficient to prevent payouts and indeed control corporate activities. While this adds further support to Bebchuk's argument that the threat of action can be enough to ensure boards behave responsibly and that further empowering of shareholders is unnecessary, caution is advised.

Renowned historian, Pulitzer winner, receives highest Harvard faculty honor.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: For the next couple of weeks on Deep Background, we’re bringing you a special series exploring questions of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech, To kick off our series, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of Pen America and author of the book Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, explains why she thinks that the drive towards equality is not at odds with protections for free speech. Plus, in his Playback column, Noah discusses Trump’s decision to send federal officers to Portland, Oregon.

A federal court ruling that rejected the Bureau of Land Management's rollback of Obama-era methane controls raises questions about whether the Trump administration is undermining its own rules by downplaying the economic impacts of climate change. A decision this month by District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers reinstated the Obama-era BLM waste prevention rule after determining that the Trump administration's interim social cost of methane was less scientifically rigorous than the version it was replacing. The Trump figure counts only the climate damages in the U.S. that stem from methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, rather than its effects globally. The result: Those effects are estimated to be 25 times smaller under Trump than Obama...But she said their success will likely depend on the court and on the details of each case. In the BLM case, the agency had already provided an analysis for the waste prevention rule that incorporated the Obama-era social cost of methane. So it fell to BLM to show why it had erred. "There's a heightened standard when you've already finalized a rule to really show why your decisionmaking in the prior rulemaking — why you're changing your mind as an agency. And they just didn't do that," said Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. A court might have afforded BLM more deference if it was issuing a new rule rather than seeking to rescind an old one, she said. Vizcarra said the California decision was an example of the Trump administration's track record of cutting corners in crafting its regulations, only to be rebuked by the courts.

Employees planning a return to their workplaces face a series of obstacles thanks in part to failures by the federal government, three experts said recently during a panel discussion at Duke...Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, added that “every workplace [should] have a safety monitor who can provide information and confidential advice to workers about their right to a safe workplace.” Both Martinez and Block are concerned about federal regulators’ failure to step up in this pandemic. “There are no OSHA regulations specific to coronavirus transmission,” Ms. Block says.  “In the past,” she said, OSHA has “looked at CDC guidance and said to employers, this is the best thing that we know … in short order about how to protect workers. So we're going to enforce CDC guidance.” But during this outbreak it hasn’t done that. Martinez agrees that “OSHA has been completely missing in action throughout the … pandemic.” In this vacuum, “We're seeing states start to step up and … come up with their own standards,” Block said, adding that without strong federal protection, workers in other states, can be left vulnerable. This is especially true for workers with underlying conditions. “It’s hard to … find the balance between what [employers] can do for an individual to protect them,” Bouvier said. In other words, there will be some employees for whom being in the workplace will simply be too risky. Block noted that the Americans with Disabilities Act does require employers to give workers “reasonable accommodation” to allow them to do their jobs. “But you have to be able to come to work” to access these protections, she cautioned. “There’s just no way around that there has to be a level of government support for people who can’t work safely.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard Law School and professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty honor. One of the nation’s most accomplished historians and legal scholars, Gordon-Reed is admired throughout academia for the cross-disciplinary lens through which she studies American history. Her scholarship has reframed the historical dialogue about slavery and enslaved peoples in the United States by enhancing America’s understanding of race in the Colonial era, and her biographies of key figures in American history, including the Hemings family of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Johnson, have brought a new light to the contemporary interpretations of their lives and work. “Annette Gordon-Reed has changed how people think about America,” said Harvard President Larry Bacow. “Through her extraordinarily incisive scholarship, she carefully reveals truth and, in the process, urges all of us to confront our past and present so that we might imagine a better future. Her voice has never been more important to our national conversation, and I am thrilled that she will join the ranks of the University’s most celebrated faculty members.” John F. Manning, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and professor of law at Harvard Law School, said, “I am delighted that the University has recognized my colleague Annette Gordon-Reed with the honor of serving as the Carl M. Loeb University Professor. Professor Gordon-Reed is a superb historian who has fundamentally remade our understanding of family and domestic relations in the history of enslaved people in the United States and prompted a profound reckoning with contradictions in the life of Thomas Jefferson. Professor Gordon-Reed is also an exceptional and tireless contributor to the Harvard community, willing time and time again to bring her tremendous skill, wisdom, and integrity to critical assignments on behalf of both the Law School and the University.”

An article by Todd Carney '21: The Kosovo-Serbia conflict ended formally on June 20, 1999, but tensions have nonetheless percolated from time to time in the intervening 21 years. The journey to a permanent resolution to the conflict faced another roadblock a few weeks ago when Kosovar President Hashim Thaci was indicted on war crimes stemming from Thaci’s actions during the war between Kosovo and Serbia that occurred in the late 1990s over Kosovo’s efforts to secede from Serbia. The charges come from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, a prosecutorial body set up through Kosovo’s parliament. The Kosovar legislature intended for this body to have jurisdiction over atrocities committed during the Kosovo-Serbia conflict between January 1998 and December 2000. Thaci was indicted for a “range of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture,” which occurred during the conflict. The indictment came right before Thaci was scheduled to come to the White House to meet with Serbian leaders to discuss how to end the conflict. Thaci’s indictment further complicates an already messy situation. The U.S.’s role in the talks between Kosovo and Serbia has attracted scorn from EU leaders. And the U.S.’s relationship with Kosovo remains complicated, as it seeks to balance support for Kosovo with other regional interests—namely, avoiding antagonizing Serbia due to Serbia’s close relationship with Russia. The indictment has important implications for U.S. diplomatic involvement in the region and highlights the complexities of the U.S. role in the Balkans.

As part of the next round of pandemic relief, House Republicans are pushing new incentives for companies to bring home offshore intellectual property — something that they contend could boost job growth but that critics see as another corporate giveaway. The legislation, proposed by Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., would eliminate some of the tax consequences for companies to unwind the offshore tax structures that hold valuable intangible assets, often in low-tax jurisdictions. While the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act  overhauled the federal tax code and eliminated many of the incentives for offshore income-shifting, it left the structures themselves intact, and companies have been reluctant to undo them as the law remains young...Aside from manufacturing, encouraging IP ownership in the U.S. would make it easier for companies to use that technology in research and development, according to House Republicans. In theory, that could spark the creation of new intellectual property, now held in the U.S. The bill would allow companies to "continue to hold and use formerly foreign IP within the U.S. to support U.S. production and associated research and development," supporting "high-paying jobs in production and applied research and, ultimately, a higher standard of living for all Americans." Critics view it as a tax giveaway, however. "This is almost pure paper shuffling," said Stephen Shay, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former Treasury official. "Awful, awful tax policy with zero benefit to the U.S. economy."

Across the country, violence by police against Black and brown people has stirred up concerns about our nation’s philosophy of policing. Discussions are proliferating about shrinking or abolishing the current system, and even in some quarters, there are calls to “re-fund the police—smarter.” As Massachusetts considers legislation to address police abuses and racial injustice, some stakeholder groups, such as the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ) and Families for Justice as Healing, are questioning the efficacy of these reforms. They warn that a commission-heavy bill will not create real change for communities most devastated by police violence—for one, there is no ban on excessive force without exceptions, nor have lawmakers even considered excessive force in prisons. Whether or not those concerns affect legislation in Mass, they certainly echo the arguments laid out in Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s new book, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (New Press, 2020). Schenwar and Law describe the futility of “reformist reforms,” which is what they label policies advertised as “progressive” that nevertheless end up worsening problems... The book asks what kinds of true alternatives could help remove criminalization from the equation and get us away from the need “to create new Somewhere Elses to put people,” a concept they attribute to activist Mariame Kaba. This, I found, was the most frustrating part of the book...In sum, Prison by Any Other Name offers us a deeper understanding of the way racial and social controls keep people disenfranchised and locked up even if they are no longer behind bars. It asks us to change our thinking, and such a request could not come at a more opportune or turbulent time.

The fundamentals are clear: Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and is poised to lose it again in 2020. His only hope is to squeak out an Electoral College margin in the only states that matter—and only through a multifarious campaign of voter suppression which exploits the pandemic to undermine democracy itself. Failing that, he can use bogus charges of voter fraud to question results in key states, including those where a surfeit of mail-in ballots delays a final count. The battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all narrowly favored Trump in 2016; recent polls show him trailing Joe Biden in all six. But many Democrats now believe that, with money and effort, they can flip three other states that Trump carried easily in 2016: Ohio and, more surprisingly, Georgia and Texas. At a time when the coronavirus has deep-sixed Trump’s approval ratings, flipping states that Trump barely won would seem like a relatively easy task. But the coronavirus has severely complicated the electoral landscape by making voting on Election Day a potentially serious public health risk...But the pandemic-driven recourse to voting by mail has resulted in further efforts to protect the GOP from the ravages of democracy...Hence the GOP’s effort to underfund the agency charged with delivering mail-in ballots in a timely manner: the U.S. Postal Service. Addressing these efforts, Laurence Tribe warned that funding the USPS is “vital if voting isn’t to become a form of Russian roulette. People died for the right to vote. They shouldn’t have to die to exercise it.”

The USDA could choke innovation and free speech by barring cell-cultured meat makers from labeling their products as "beef" or "poultry," according to the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic. The Harvard clinic petitioned the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection last month, proposing an approach to labeling lab-grown meat at odds with one advocated by the U.S. Cattlemen's Association. The USDA responded to the petition Thursday, saying it intends to write a labeling law and will consider the issues raised by the clinic. Cell-cultured meat hasn't hit the market yet, but likely will soon, according to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office...The U.S. Cattlemen's Association asked the USDA two years ago to restrict the words "meat" and "beef" to animal products "harvested in the traditional manner." Labeling something grown outside an animal as "meat" would be misbranding, according to the cattlemen. The Harvard clinic says limiting those words to "slaughter-based meat" would likely violate the First Amendment. "Such restrictions also could create consumer confusion, stifle promising innovation and drive companies abroad," according to the clinic's petition. Cell-cultured meat begins with taking bits of tissue from an animal. The cells are put in a container with chemicals and they multiply. One company has made a $600 hamburger patty and a $1,200 meatball, according to the GAO. Companies are holding their trade secrets closely, the GAO reported. The products may have hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified organisms. One company said it's prototype meat is 90% plant based. "Agency officials (from USDA) told us that without knowing the composition of a cell-cultured meat product, it is impossible to predict how food safety and labeling requirements will apply," the GAO report stated. Some 17 states adopted laws in 2019 prohibiting plant-based or cell-based products from being labeled "meat," according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Idaho, Oregon and Washington were not among those states.

President Donald Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday that he had tens of thousands of federal agents at the ready to deploy to major US cities — though he said they'd "have to be invited in." Barry Friedman, a law professor who is the faculty director of New York University's Policing Project, which works with communities to ensure police accountability, echoed that point, saying the president needs the consent of the state to send in federal agents...Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard Law School, excoriated the motives behind what he described as the "deliberately vague terms" behind deploying federal agents to major US cities. In an email to Business Insider, Tribe wrote that the situation "would have been utterly unthinkable to those who fought a bloody revolution and founded a republic to preserve the 'blessings of liberty,' to those who gave 'the last full measure of devotion' to preserve the Union, or to those who sacrificed their lives in two World Wars to keep authoritarian regimes from our shores." "To call this astonishing takeover of the streets and spaces for peaceful protest unconstitutional is a dramatic understatement," Tribe wrote in the email. "And the cynicism of those disguising these moves in the garb of essential peacekeeping, which might well succeed for some time in holding judicial relief at bay, is especially disgusting."

One of the nation’s leading constitutional law experts blasted President Donald Trump as a “monster” for the deployment of Department of Homeland Security agents to Portland, Oregon. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi interviewed Laurence Tribe during “The Last Word” on Friday evening. Tribe has taught at Harvard Law School for fifty years and has argued three-dozen cases before the United States Supreme Court. “The president and the Homeland Security acting director, Chad Wolf, and the attorney general are deploying paramilitaries on the streets of America, sweeping up lawful protesters, targeting the press — essentially creating a nation that was the worst nightmare of the framers,” Tribe explained. “The people who fought a revolution to preserve this new republic, the people who gave their last measure of devotion in the Civil War, the people who fought fascism in World War II would not recognize what the president is doing as consistent with America.” “The American tradition is being shattered before our very eyes,” he warned. “People have a right to protest, they have a right to go to the streets and this is the time to do it.” “It’s not an abstract right,” Velshi interjected. “It’s what’s written in the Constitution.” “It’s more than just written in the constitution, it’s written in blood in the history of our country,” Tribe replied. “People have given their lives to live in freedom and this president who claims that he stands for law and order is destroying freedom before our very eyes.” “We cannot stand still through this,” Tribe counseled.

An article by Andrew Manuel Crespo: Over the past few days, millions of people have seen a now-viral video in which two federal agents dressed in full combat gear removed an apparently peaceful protester from the streets of Portland, Ore., and carried him away in an unmarked van. Stories have emerged of other people being taken or pursued by federal agents in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, troubling videos show federal agents in Portland beating a peacefully resolute U.S. Navy veteran and, on a separate occasion, shooting a man in the face with a nonlethal munition, which broke his skull. As criticism of these events rolled in—including from virtually every relevant state and local official in Oregon—the Department of Homeland Security scheduled a press conference earlier this week to try to reclaim the narrative. If the point of that press conference was to reassure an anxious nation that this unfamiliar and recently constituted federal police force is following the law, it likely achieved the opposite effect. In particular, there is a two-minute segment of the press conference that is both revealing and highly disturbing. It shows that one of the top commanders of this new paramilitary federal police force—Kris Cline, Deputy Director of the Federal Protective Service—apparently does not know what the word “arrest” means. To say as much might seem like harping on semantics or, worse, like picking on Cline for speaking inartfully. But it is absolutely critical to unpack and examine Cline’s words—because the word arrest is one of the most important words in the constitutional law of policing.Simply put, for an arrest to be constitutional it must be supported by probable cause. This means that the arresting officer must be able to point to specific facts that would cause a reasonable officer to believe that the person being arrested has committed a specific crime.

The narrative of content moderation, especially over the past few months, goes something like this: Extremists and conspiracy theorists peddle misinformation and dangerous content, Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) cracks down on said content by removing the offending posts and accounts, onlookers largely commend the platform, and it’s on to the next group of baddies. This week, that target became QAnon, a group of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who push fabrications about Satanist “deep state” elites who run a child sex trafficking ring while also plotting to overthrow the current administration...Yet the problem here is that Twitter’s plans—at least the ones available to the public—are rather vague, leaving the door open for confusion, inconsistent enforcement, and future content moderation debacles. “I get concerned when there’s sort of unquestioning praise for Twitter’s actions here, and it earns itself a good news cycle,” said Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School and affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She worries the move in the long term is detrimental to the project of pushing Twitter to become “more accountable and consistent in the way that they exercise their power.” There are two main places Twitter’s plans fall short. The first is that the platform, as a Twitter spokesperson told NBC News, has decided to classify QAnon behavior with a new, undefined designation: “coordinated harmful activity.” Twitter has yet to provide any information on what this term means or explain how it differs from its preexisting standards on harassment, abusive behavior, and violent groups. “We’re going to see a lot of things, I think, on Twitter that look coordinated and harmful, and we’re going to ask: Is this an example of this new designation?” said Douek. “And we don’t know—Twitter can just decide in the moment whether it is, and we can’t hold onto anything because we have absolutely no details.”

An article by Evelyn Douek: Are the days of the Wild Wild Web over? In recent weeks, social media platforms have unveiled a series of high-profile enforcement actions and deplatformings. All the major platforms rolled out hardline policies against pandemic-related misinformation. Facebook banned hundreds of accounts, groups and pages associated with the boogaloo movement, Snap removed President Trump’s account from its promoted content and YouTube shut down several far-right channels, including that of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. And the hits keep coming: most recently, on July 21, Twitter announced it was taking broad action against content related to the conspiracy theory QAnon. But however welcome Twitter’s response to QAnon may be, these actions do not signify a new era of accountability in content moderation. If anything, it’s a show of how powerful and unaccountable these companies are that they can change their policies in an instant and provide little by way of detail or explanation. Twitter’s announcement about QAnon content was indeed sweeping. More than 7,000 accounts were taken down, and another 150,000 were prevented from being promoted as “trending” on the site or as recommended accounts for people to follow. URLs “associated with” QAnon are now blocked from being shared on the platform. QAnon accounts immediately started trying to come up with ways to evade the ban, kicking off what is sure to be an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse, or moved to other networks.

Enforcing law and order in U.S. cities, traditionally the function of local, county and state police, is a new priority of the federal government. President Donald Trump said the deployment of federal agents in Portland, Oregon, will be replicated in Chicago, Seattle and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to help combat violent crime and civil unrest. At least some state and local leaders say they don’t welcome the assistance. Isn’t policing a local issue? Generally speaking, yes -- the U.S. Constitution reserves police powers for states to exercise. The federal government’s involvement at the local level is limited to specific purposes such as combating crimes covered by federal law (examples are bank robbery, kidnapping, weapons possession and counterfeiting), protecting federal properties like courthouses and safeguarding U.S. constitutional rights...Can cities decline help or kick out federal officers? Again, not if those officers are protecting federal rights and enforcing federal crimes such as vandalizing a courthouse or post office. “Portland can’t say, ‘We don’t want you in our cities -- go home,’” said Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School. Federal authority generally prevails under the Constitution when it conflicts with state authority, he said. More plausible legal challenges might focus on the conduct of the officers -- for instance, whether they are violating free-speech rights by discouraging demonstrations or protections against unreasonable seizures and searches. Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, unsuccessfully sought a court order to block federal agents from detaining protesters without explanation.