Media Mentions

Two college students from Iran have filed civil rights complaints with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, saying they were mistreated and illegally denied entry into the country by federal officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Shahab Dehghani, who attends Northeastern University, and Reihana Emami Arandi, who had been set to start classes at Harvard University, recently filed separate complaints with the agency’s civil rights office, requesting the agency investigate the conduct of Customs and Border Protection officials...Arandi [who is represented by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program], is a 35-year-old incoming graduate student at Harvard’s Divinity School, said in her complaint filed Jan. 30 that she was detained at Logan Airport on Sept. 18 and questioned for nearly eight hours about her work, family, travel and opinions about recent events in the Middle East.

With headlines declaring 2019 the year that the world woke up to climate change, Aminta Ossom ’09 sees hope in approaching the issue from a specific angle: human rights. “Human rights has a lot to offer the climate change movement because it’s a way to humanize the issue. It becomes less scientific or technical and more accessible,” she said. “The human rights approach also says that everyone has a buy-in and should have a say. Everyone is a potential victim of the effects of climate change,” she added. After years working at Amnesty International and the United Nations, Ossom returned to Harvard Law School this fall to teach in the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), where one of her projects focuses on how human rights organizations are advising governments on climate change. The new clinical instructor, who self-identifies as a “regional human rights systems nerd,” had not originally planned on a career in law.

A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed Democratic lawmakers' lawsuit against President Donald Trump alleging he has violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution on technical grounds. ...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and constitutional expert, tweeted after the ruling, “Individual members of the House and Senate lack standing to sue Trump to stop his Foreign Emoluments Clause violations — but the House could sue for institutional injury. It should now do so.”

Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. This month, with Overlooked, we’re adding their stories to our archives. When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. ...“This case is infamous for several reasons,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in a telephone interview. “First, separate is almost never really equal. Second, separate is symbolically and psychologically unequal when it is recognized to have the social meaning that whites are too good to mix with blacks, or that one race is essentially superior to the other.”

Janet Wu joins the conversation as Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe talks about the impeachment and acquittal of the President, and its implications for the future (22:12)

One could hardly be surprised that self-identified pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — who talked herself into supporting the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the grounds that the conservative jurist, picked off a list approved by right-to-lifers, would uphold Roe v. Wade (!) — would concoct some rationalization for voting to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial. In spinning out an embarrassingly weak argument for her decision to side with her party, she confirmed Tuesday on the Senate floor that the notion of an independent-minded New England Republican is as dead as Vermonter Calvin Coolidge. ...“Many GOP Senators announcing their reasons for acquittal on the Senate floor today are relying on alleged process failures or on doubts that Trump did what the House alleges he did,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “That’s misguided and in many instances seems dishonest. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as relying on the wholly unfounded and genuinely crackpot theory that the offenses charged are just not impeachable — either because ‘abuse of power’ as such is an improperly framed ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ or because the specific conduct alleged does not constitute the kind of abuse that is impeachable.”

The US House of Representatives will vote on a bill on Thursday to protect US workers’ right to form and join unions that supporters are calling the “most ambitious pro-labor legislation” in decades and one Republican congressman has dismissed as “the worst bill in congress”. ... “There is a crisis in our country regarding income inequality and workers’ ability to exercise their countervailing power,” said Sharon Block, the co-director of Clean Slate for Worker Power, an initiative of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “I think the Pro Act is the most ambitious pro-labor legislation we’ve seen in years, decades maybe. There is an urgency to start to fix the problem the Pro Act addresses, but it can’t be the end of the conversation of what we need to do for workers to rebuild or build countervailing power, as we see this incredible increase of corporate power, the influence of corporations, and the wealthy’s influence on our political system.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stood stiff and tight-lipped, no hint of a smile, as President Trump stopped to shake hands Tuesday evening in the House chamber, just prior to his State of the Union address. ... Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, a Democrat and a friend of Roberts’ since law school, who sometimes teaches a class with him during the court’s summer break, said, “Perhaps not surprisingly, I think he did an excellent job under perilous conditions.” “Would I personally prefer to see Donald Trump convicted by the Senate? Yes,” Lazarus said. “But that was not the chief’s job. That was the Senate’s job. And the chief did his job well. The Senate did not.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman; Today, the Senate is expected to vote against removing Donald Trump from office. But what will be the verdict of history?In the glass half-empty scenario, Trump’s claims to have been completely exonerated will be embraced by future Americans and their presidents. High crimes and misdemeanors will be defined down to a bare minimum, and maybe out of existence altogether. The impeachment provisions of the Constitution will become more or less a dead letter — except, perhaps, in the extremely unusual circumstance where a president’s party holds less than a third of the seats in the Senate. Future presidents will embrace dirty tricks to win re-election, safe in the knowledge that the Trump precedent makes their removal vanishingly unlikely. The Democratic House’s party-line impeachment will be seen as a partisan act, not a genuine manifestation of constitutional outrage.  

The House is set to vote Thursday on a sweeping plan to overhaul U.S. workplace law in a way that could grow union membership and rejuvenate an ailing labor movement With Democrats holding the chamber’s majority, the legislation ― called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act ― will likely pass but then face certain death in the GOP-controlled Senate. ...The legislation shares a lot in common with a new labor reform plan being passed around progressive circles called Clean Slate for Worker Power, spearheaded by Harvard University law professors Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. While their plan goes much further than the PRO Act ― for instance, Clean Slate calls for worker representation on corporate boards  ― Block and Sachs told HuffPost they see the Democratic legislation as an important first step in fixing a collective bargaining system that dates to the Great Depression and that unions say is broken. “Folks are thinking in a bigger, bolder, more progressive way,” said Block, a former member of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that referees labor disputes. “It enables workers to see that their lives could really be different… rather than the smaller-bore fixes like we’ve tried in the past that didn’t work.”

Following the impeachment and acquittal of President Donald Trump after a bitter partisan battle, Americans now face a new reality that involves serious questions about the ability of the federal government to respect longheld balances of power. ... Now that the president has been acquitted, lawmakers may face a future in which their own decision amounts "to a license for any president to defy congressional oversight on a wholesale basis without any particularities, let alone legally plausible" explanation, long-time constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told Cheddar. "I don't think this is the end of American democracy or separation of powers. I don't think the rule of law is dead or democracy is permanently doomed," said Tribe, who teaches alongside defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School. "On the one hand, I have a deep faith that in the long run we will get past this, just as we got past the Civil War and WWII. On the other hand, I can't give you a path between here and the long run that could overcome the pessimism that says we have huge obstacles in the way."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) produced a great .gif of performative outrage for the #Resistance by ripping up a copy of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening after he rejected her “handshake of friendship.” ...Anti-Trump Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe put a bow on the pro-Trump misinformation campaign against Pelosi’s alleged kayfabe: "What a dumb idea! Not even Bill Barr would fall for that ludicrous misapplication of the federal law criminalizing mutilation of government records. The copy was the Speaker’s own, it wasn’t a government record to begin with, and her action was purely symbolic expression well within the protection of both the speech and debate clause and the first amendment."

Despite its rejection by more than 500 of the nation’s leading legal scholars and the star constitutional scholar who testified on behalf of House Republicans, several Republican senators said they are leaning heavily on arguments made by celebrity defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz for their votes to acquit President Trump on Wednesday. ...Even self-identified conservative scholars dispute the legal case Dershowitz made on the Senate floor. Larry Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law expert, called it a “crackpot theory.”

An article by Molly Coleman '20 and Emma Janger '20: On November 14, 2019, after a year of keeping a low profile, 2,000 people gathered to celebrate Brett Kavanaugh’s unofficial re-emergence into society. The Federalist Society event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., marked his first significant public appearance since his narrow confirmation to the Supreme Court. The event came just two months after yet another allegation of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh surfaced: the New York Times reported that Max Stier, a college classmate of Kavanaugh’s, saw Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” This allegation followed Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school, and Deborah Ramirez’s allegation that in college, she was forced to touch a drunken Kavanaugh’s penis, both of which Kavanaugh has denied. But just as Ford and Ramirez’s allegations were not enough to weaken conservatives’ support for Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, Stier’s allegation was not enough to dampen Kavanaugh’s “welcome back to society” party on that November Thursday.

Everything old is new again. If American workers are ever to emerge from the economic insecurity and political powerlessness that are so characteristic of our second, contemporary Gilded Age, they are likely to rediscover some of the innovations in labor policy and corporate governance that emerged more than a century ago in that first era of social inequality and capitalist excess. That’s because the structure of capitalism today, and the legal framework that sustains it, evokes many of the same social and economic pathologies that made Americans of that bygone era question the future of US democracy itself...A bold and comprehensive report from Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program, “A Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy,” offers twenty-first-century reformers an innovative set of policy ideas challenging corporate power in our time. If any of the carefully crafted proposals put forth in this ninety-one-page report make it into the nation’s laws, working people and their rights will take a giant step forward across the country. And in states like California, which are already innovating above and beyond federal labor law, we will be empowered to do even more to protect and encourage worker power across the economy.

An article by Gerald Neuman: The Human Rights Committee’s Draft General Comment 37 on freedom of assembly is an important contribution to the protection of a right that is very much under threat these days. The Committee has long been conscious of the need to address Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Rapporteur’s initial version and the Committee’s first reading Draft are an excellent start. Now that the Draft is open for comment, it is to be hoped that states and other stakeholders will provide useful input, particularly on practical issues about reconciling the right of peaceful assembly with the rights of others. General Comments are the Human Rights Committee’s most valuable and authoritative pronouncements, because they spell out in direct and concentrated form the Committee’s understanding of state obligations under the ICCPR. General Comments often include passages that clearly intend to provide the Committee’s interpretation of what the Covenant requires, but also passages that recommend best practices for achieving compliance with such obligations. The difference is sometimes marked by use of the verb “must” rather than the verb “should.” A “must” indicates legal obligation, while “should” is more ambiguous and often indicates a softer recommendation.

One could hardly be surprised that self-identified pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — who talked herself into supporting the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the grounds that the conservative jurist, picked off a list approved by right-to-lifers, would uphold Roe v. Wade (!) — would concoct some rationalization for voting to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial... “Many GOP Senators announcing their reasons for acquittal on the Senate floor today are relying on alleged process failures or on doubts that Trump did what the House alleges he did,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “That’s misguided and in many instances seems dishonest. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as relying on the wholly unfounded and genuinely crackpot theory that the offenses charged are just not impeachable — either because ‘abuse of power’ as such is an improperly framed ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ or because the specific conduct alleged does not constitute the kind of abuse that is impeachable.” He continues, “That’s demonstrably wrong, regardless of one’s approach to constitutional interpretation, whether textualist or originalist or evolutionary or functional or eclectic. No reputable constitutional scholar — not one — defends that theory or has defended it from the founding to the present.”

Imagine that your boss calls you and your co-workers into a meeting and announces that you are all getting raises. But before any glasses are raised for a toast, you are told that you’re not getting a raise, exactly, but being offered an opportunity to become an entrepreneur. Because you’re no longer an employee, but a contractor with no benefits, no protections and no real security. Welcome to the experience of precarity in America...There has never been a more critical time to support our workers and demand stronger protections. We have a shared responsibility as a society, as we navigate the shifting environment of the future of work, to create a forward-looking, comprehensive plan that values the economic dignity of each and every worker. Clean Slate for Worker Power aims to do just that. Under the vision and leadership of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, and supported by the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a set of multi-stakeholder working and advisory groups has informed the initiative’s recommendations to reconstruct labor laws to bring balance and fairness to America’s economy. This week, Clean Slate has released a roadmap to build worker power for a more just economy and democracy.

Late last month, the Arizona Supreme Court decided a hotly contested case involving frozen embryos.  It all started in 2014, when Ruby Torres was diagnosed with cancer and became worried about her future fertility. She decided to use her eggs and a donor’s sperm to create embryos that she could then freeze for later use...As this case worked its way through the court system, the Arizona legislature responded by enacting a new law directing judges to grant viable embryos to the “spouse” who will allow them to be born, regardless of any contract providing otherwise. It also sets out what will happen if both spouses want to allow the embryos to develop. But that law did not apply retroactively to control the Torres case. The Arizona law is the first of its kind in the country, and it only applies to married couples...Moreover, as Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen and Brown Med School physician Eli Adashi pointed out, “embryo disputes have become a battlefront for larger conflagrations over the moral status of embryos.” That’s because “underlying most of the conflicts over disposition of embryos is whether one person’s right to procreate should prevail over another person’s right not to procreate,” observes GW Law Professor Sonia Suter. She notes that while courts tend to rule in favor of the party choosing not to procreate, the Arizona statute defied this trend by privileging the right to procreate.

President Trump’s impeachment trial will come to a swift end this week following the Republican-led Senate’s decision to forgo additional witnesses and evidence despite new, pointed allegations from former adviser John Bolton about the President’s actions regarding Ukraine. On the Democratic side, the primary continues apace with the Iowa caucuses, a tradition that some have said is not truly democratic due to its unique rules and format, as well as the primarily white population of Iowa and does not mirror a diversifying America. To discuss all this and more, Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School; and Nadeem Mazen, former Cambridge city councilor and founder of Fabrk.io, a new social networking platform focusing on protecting user data, joined Jim Braude Monday on Greater Boston to discuss this and more.

An article by Noah Feldman: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The public Senate deliberations in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial reminded me of this famous maxim, coined in the 17th century by the French aristocrat and aphorist François de la Rochefoucauld. From a constitutional standpoint, it would be better if Republican senators who plan to vote against removing Trump say they find the evidence unconvincing — even if they are being hypocritical — than for them to say that Trump’s alleged conduct is fine. That’s because the precedent set by Trump’s trial depends heavily on the senators’ public explanations for their votes. If future observers see that the senators redefined impeachment so that it did not include the President abusing his power to cheat in an election and obstruct Congress, that will profoundly weaken the U.S. constitutional system. It will weaken the political virtue of the republic.