Media Mentions

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the United States Senate will take a dramatic turn on Saturday as the president's lawyers preview their defence of the president. For three days, Democrats of the House of Representatives have unleashed a torrent of facts and legal logic, peppered with video clips and underpinned by slideshow presentations to show that Trump orchestrated an improper pressure campaign on Ukraine, covered it up and should be removed from office...Most constitutional scholars reject the executive privilege and immunity arguments Trump's lawyers have claimed so far and the issue is not likely to be resolved in the Republican-controlled Senate. "The president will do everything he can to silence Bolton. He will invoke executive privilege," said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. "Even if Bolton resists, Trump will try to go to court and there will be an issue whether it has jurisdiction or the Senate itself has to make a decision. There could be protracted litigation," Tribe told Al Jazeera.

Ammar was 16 years old when his high school headmaster in his hometown about 60 miles outside of Baghdad signed him up to join the local government militia...The government had established local militias across the country, often exploiting the service of teenage boys who had little choice but to join...As a 28-year-old asylum seeker, Ammar learned that his high school headmaster’s decision to compel him to join the militia would likely result in his deportation back to Iraq. Ammar’s case is not exceptional. The challenges he faced in applying for asylum are indicative of the ways in which exclusions to refugee status in U.S. law — originally developed to prevent Nazi war criminals from attaining asylum — have dramatically expanded in scope, preventing many innocent refugees from successfully applying for asylum and resettlement in the United States...Sabi Ardalan, assistant director of the Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, described the ubiquitous nature of these terrorism- and persecutor-related rejections for Middle Easterners fleeing persecution: “Pretty much any client from the Middle East who’s from a country where there’s any form of activity that the U.S. considers to be ‘terrorism-related’ has ended up with accusations of providing material support to terrorists.” And where the terrorism bar may not apply, such as in the case of the government-run militia into which Ammar was forcibly conscripted in high school, Ardalan says, the U.S. may try to apply what’s known as the “persecutor bar” — a bar to asylum for those who have “persecuted others” in their lifetime.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor who testified at the House Impeachment trial, and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, discusses how the GOP Senate impeachment trial will impact the rule of law. Hosted by Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.

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. Plessy was a racially mixed shoemaker who had agreed to take part in an act of civil disobedience orchestrated by a New Orleans civil rights organization. On that hot, sticky afternoon he walked into the Press Street Depot, purchased a first-class ticket and took a seat in the whites-only car. The civil rights group had chosen Plessy because he could pass for a white man. It was asserted later in a legal brief that he was seven-eighths white. But a conductor, who was also part of the scheme, stopped him and asked if he was “colored.” Plessy responded that he was. “Then you will have to retire to the colored car,” the conductor ordered. Plessy refused... “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.” He added: “The ruling suggested that if people of color feel inferior as a result of these laws, it is their own fault. It is essentially part of blaming the victim and pretending that the feeling of subjugation and subordination is simply a problem in the mind of the person on the receiving end.”

The federal judiciary charges 10 cents per page to pull up court files from its online record repository. The fees can add up quickly, and users must consider whether each click to view a public record is worth the cost. But a lawsuit in court on Monday in Washington challenges the government’s paywall to search online for case documents through the service known as PACER, an acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. “The best policy is to make PACER free,” a group of retired federal judges told the court. Judicial records should be “as widely available as possible” and “wealth should not control access to justice,” according to a brief from the former judges, including Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. Court proceedings are open to the public, and case records can be reviewed free of charge in courthouse clerks’ offices during business hours. But downloading more than a handful of electronic records from your desk comes at a cost.

In 2017, in the kind of ruling that may not happen in the future, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had improperly downplayed the enormous climate impacts of the $3.5 billion Southeast Market Pipelines Project, which included the 515-mile Sabal Trail pipeline. The decision was a major victory for environmentalists at the time. The pipeline was to move fracked gas through Alabama and Georgia on its way to power plants in Florida, mainly cutting through communities of color. The Sierra Club sued FERC over its decision to approve the pipeline, successfully arguing that the agency violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to consider the downstream emissions of the project—what NEPA calls a “foreseeable outcome” of the pipeline’s construction. ... “NEPA has a special place in the hearts of environmental attorneys and activists because it was this early attempt to require agencies to think carefully about the impact they are having on the environment when they permit or otherwise undertake these projects themselves,” Caitlin McCoy, a fellow for the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra. “By cutting back the amount of projects that go into this process and by tightening up the scope of the review, and by making it easier to exclude consideration of certain effects and reduce the amount of alternatives to be considered, you’re cutting back the whole purpose of NEPA.”

Senator Rand Paul on Thursday stormed out of President Trump’s impeachment trial in anger after Chief Justice John Roberts declined to read a question he’d prepared because it would have named the CIA employee who prominent conservatives have accused of being the whistleblower whose complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General touched off the impeachment inquiry into the president. While the US Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause protects members of congress from any liability for official acts, Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe told BeltwayBreakfast that Paul’s decision to leave the Senate floor during trial proceedings could subject him to punishment and leave him without the immunity he would ordinarily enjoy. “I do think that he dropped the shield of the speech and debate clause when he did that for any number of reasons,” said Tribe, who has been advising House Democrats’ team of impeachment managers on constitutional questions.

Republicans hoping to end the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump and Democrats seeking to extend it with witnesses and documents may be looking to one man Friday: Chief Justice John Roberts. With Republicans increasingly confident they have the votes to block any additional testimony that could delay the trial and jeopardize Trump's likely acquittal, the mild-mannered jurist sitting as presiding officer has emerged as Democrats' last hope. ... But that interpretation of Senate rules is disputed by a range of experts, including Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. "The text refers only to orders 'authorized' by the rules or by the Senate, and that in turn begs the question whether such authorization exists," Tribe said. "The Senate parliamentarian seems to believe it doesn’t, and the chief is likely to defer to her."

An article by Cass Sunstein: Former Solicitor General and federal judge Kenneth Starr made a simple argument this week on behalf of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense. We are living in the “age of impeachment,” he said on Monday, urging the Senate to acquit Trump and “return to norms” that counsel against using impeachment as a political weapon. If Trump is removed from office, Starr was suggesting, every future president will be vulnerable, at least if the House of Representatives is controlled by the opposing political party, and if the Senate can be persuaded to go along. A president named Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might well be exposed to a horrific impeachment battle, simply because of the Trump precedent.

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe criticized the attempt made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to name the alleged whistleblower who exposed the Ukraine scandal during President Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate as a "shameful gambit" of "dubious legality." "Rand Paul's effort to name the whistleblower in the Senate trial was disgraceful. Doing so would have been of dubious legality and of no utility," Tribe told Salon by email Thursday. "The speech and debate clause would have shielded Senator Paul from concrete adverse consequences, but the harm his shameful gambit could've done not just to the whistleblower but to the important public service that whistleblowers perform would've been incalculable."

The debate over impeachment from two of Harvard Law School’s most well-known faculty continued on Wednesday as senators asked questions during President Donald Trump’s trial. Harvard Law constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has been publicly debating Trump defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is a professor emeritus at the school.

An article by Noah Feldman: As Republicans scramble to argue that they don’t need to call witnesses in President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, one argument seems to be gaining traction: that witnesses are irrelevant, because even if Trump did everything he’s accused of doing, abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. This argument isn’t merely wrong. It is the single most dangerous argument that any of Trump’s defenders have made during the entire impeachment process. If abuse of power isn’t impeachable, what is?

Alan Dershowitz, a member of President Trump's legal team, cited Harvard Law Professor Nikolas Bowie as a scholar who supports the argument that abuse of power doesn't warrant impeachment. Bowie told CNN's Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin that Dershowitz is wrong.

Facebook is a step away from creating its global Oversight Board for content moderation. The bylaws for the board, released on Jan. 28, lay out the blueprint for an unprecedented experiment in corporate self-governance for the tech sector. While there’s good reason to be skeptical of whether Facebook itself can fix problems like hate speech and disinformation on the platform, we should pay closer attention to how the board proposes to make decisions. ... When I spoke with Noah Feldman from Harvard Law School, who came up with the Supreme Court for Facebook concept and advises Zuckerberg, he imagined that other tech companies might one day bring their predicaments to the Oversight Board if they agreed the decision would be binding.

John F. Cogan Jr. ’52, a legal leader, civic activist and dedicated supporter of Harvard Law School, has died. He was 93. Cogan was a longtime attorney of the Boston law firm Hale & Dorr, now WilmerHale, joining the firm in 1952. During his nearly 50-year career, he served as chairman of the firm’s corporate department and was a member of the executive committee. He was managing partner from 1976 to 1984 and was chairman from 1984 to 1996. After retiring as of counsel in 1999, Cogan remained connected to the firm.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Prosecuting a case in front of a trial jury comes naturally to Representative Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and the lead House manager in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Schiff has urged senators to think of themselves as “impartial jurors” with a constitutional responsibility “to hold a fair and thorough trial.” But, more than a week into the trial, the question of the President’s guilt of the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress has been upstaged by suspense over whether the Senate will vote to allow the process for examining evidence that we ordinarily associate with a “trial”—particularly, hearing witness testimony. Once the allotted time for speeches by both sides has run, and after senators have a chance to put questions to each side, Democrats want the Senate to issue subpoenas for evidence, while Republicans aim to move immediately to a vote to acquit.

Clean energy advocates have issued numerous warnings that a controversial December decision by federal regulators to raise the floor price for state-subsidized resources bidding in the PJM Interconnection's capacity market would harm the ability of new clean energy technologies to enter the market. But options to challenge the order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in court are extremely limited. Stakeholders from the grid operator to confectioner Hershey have filed requests with FERC for a rehearing of the Dec. 19 order, but language in the Federal Power Act shields regulators from litigation when they delay responses to such requests...However, it's become a norm for FERC to delay, or toll, rehearing requests received on its orders, according to several attorneys... "There's been a lot of grumbling about FERC's practices of sitting on these rehearing requests," Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative, told Utility Dive.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe urged the GOP-controlled Senate to allow witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump ― or risk setting a “terrible” precedent for the country. On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Tribe argued the only way to hold a fair trial was for lawmakers to vote to hear from Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton “and other witnesses and the evidence.” Bolton reportedly confirms the Democrats’ case for impeachment in his forthcoming book “The Room Where It Happened,” in which he writes Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to its announcement of a probe into Joe Biden. Tribe described the defense argument being made by Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz as “remarkably absurd and extreme and dangerous.” “Namely, it doesn’t matter if a president uses the vast powers of his office to shake down an ally and help an adversary in order to get dirt on an enemy and corrupt an election,” he said, summarizing Dershowitz’s argument.

By many accounts, the 2020 election cycle features the most debate about labor we’ve seen in decades. There is widespread agreement that workers are struggling in today’s economy, that worker organizing must be supported and that all workers should have the right to equitable opportunities and just jobs. When workers can come together collectively, they counterbalance the forces that generate inequality—and our labor laws play a key role in shaping access to opportunity and power. In a time when we are seeing record levels of economic inequality and concentration of economic power by corporations and the wealthy, the stifling of worker power in our economy threatens the very viability of American democracy...A redesign of U.S. labor law released this week by the Clean Slate for Worker Power coalition takes an important step forward by arguing that we need to overhaul our labor laws. Critically, the report argues that the starting point for this redesign needs to be contesting the systems of oppression so foundational to our existing labor laws that they often feel inevitable.

For the past 45 years, just about all of the income gains of America’s increasing productivity have gone to the elite and upper-middle class, while real worker wages have remained roughly flat. Today, the top one-tenth percent of earners, those earning more than $1.5m a year, own as much of the nation’s wealth as the entire bottom 90%. This obscene concentration of wealth, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression, is unsustainable and a threat to our democracy....With enthusiasm, we join the Clean Slate for Worker Power project out of Harvard Law School, and endorse the slate of recommendations stemming from this project that are due out this week. This bold vision is necessary to bring about a more equitable and engaged society that rebalances the power in the workplace that has left so many workers vulnerable to the whims of a so-called “trickle down” that for the past 45 years our neoliberal political economy has yet to deliver.

Every year, I teach a class on labor and workplace policy for graduate students at Columbia University. And every year, I begin class by asking students what comes to mind when they think about the labor movement. When I first started teaching, students mainly described unions as organizations that were once important, but probably out of date in the current economy. "Good for people who made cars," quipped one student. This year the answers could not have been more different. Thanks to a massive wave of strikes and new efforts to unionize across tech companies and media outlets, my students saw unions in a different light. They were now interested in what unions could offer them in terms of better wages and benefits and voice on the job...Unions are thinking bigger, too: Both the American Federation of Labor and Service Employees International Union have announced proposals for broadening the scope of labor cooperation and bargaining at the sector-wide level. And the Clean Slate for Worker Power initiative at Harvard Law School recently released a sweeping set of proposals aimed at empowering workers — both by expanding traditional unions but also by creating other alternative mechanisms for worker voice.