Media Mentions

As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime...Mr. Dershowitz said he intended to model his presentation on an argument put forward at the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson by his chief defense counsel...Mr. Johnson was saved from conviction and removal when the vote fell one short of the necessary supermajority. Mr. Curtis had argued that Mr. Johnson was not accused of committing a legitimate crime, and that removing him absent one would subvert the constitutional structure and make impeachment a routine tool of political struggle. But other legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, a constitutional specialist at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, have argued that Mr. Dershowitz is overreading and misrepresenting this aspect of the Johnson trial...In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Tribe accused Mr. Trump’s legal team of using “bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public or the senators weighing his fate.”

The difference between the protections YouTube offers its advertisers and those it provides consumers is stark. A read of advertiser-friendly content guidelines for videos uploaded to the platform, last updated in June 2019, shows the company has rigorous standards to protect advertisers from harmful content and the algorithmic ability to do so. Yet YouTube does not consistently flag these same videos as problematic to viewers, despite ongoing criticism that the platform allows conspiracy theories, the alt-right, and extremism to flourish....No system of identifying harmful videos can be perfect, and YouTube has been criticized previously for allowing ads to run alongside videos promoting hate and terror. Jonas Kaiser, researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, notes that YouTube faces questions of censorship and freedom of speech when it comes to what videos are permitted on the platform. “The relationship YouTube has with advertisers is more straightforward,” he says, adding that YouTube protects itself from suffering financially by working to remove ads from harmful content.

Harvard Law students question the Kenosha County District Attorney's ethics. This comes after a case involving a Milwaukee teenager accused of murdering her alleged sex trafficker gets national attention as the case awaits trial. In 2018, Chrystul Kizer was charged with shooting and killing Randall Volar in his Kenosha home before setting it on fire. She was 17...Kizer is now 19. In a recent interview from jail with The Washington Post, Kizer said she acted in self-defense and claimed Volar had been trafficking her for sex for almost two years. In response, support for Kizer poured in from all over the country asked the DA to drop the charges. The petition was signed by more than 122,000 people...Now Harvard Law School's National Lawyers Guild is getting involved. They sent a letter to the Graveley that said in part, "your conduct in the Chrystul Kizer case is a cause of concern to us." The letter asked the DA to bring his "conduct in line with professional standards" "by dropping charges." Here is the full letter.

Charles Fried was a fervent, superior officer on the frontlines of the Reagan Revolution. As solicitor general of the United States from 1985 to 1989, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the reining liberal orthodoxies of his day—on abortion, civil rights, executive power and constitutional interpretation. But the Trump Revolution has proven a bridge too far. As he reveals in a scorching interview with Newsweek's Roger Parloff below, Fried has broken ranks. He denounces a president who is "perhaps the most dishonest person to ever sit in the White House." As disgusted as he is by President Donald Trump, Fried is, if possible, even more dismayed by William Barr, Trump's current attorney general, for having stepped up as Trump's chief apologist. Fried says of Barr. "His reputation is gone."

Constitutional scholar Noah Feldman tells Christiane Amanpour that President Trump's legal defense amounts to a "linguistic game."

As President Donald Trump's impeachment trial gets underway on Tuesday, most Democrats will have already come to terms with the reality that the president will almost certainly be cleared of his alleged crimes...However, while Trump's acquittal may feel "inevitable," Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School of Harvard University, told Newsweek on Tuesday, for many voters across the country, the Senate's decision may never feel like a "genuine exoneration" for the president...As Tribe noted, with party lines becoming increasingly divided, expecting lawmakers to vote without party bias feels like wishful thinking for many. The only real hope of keeping the government in check, Tribe said, appears to lie with the American people. "I'm afraid that is very much the message," the scholar said. "That you better not elect a president who is a demagogue wannabe dictator because we don't have a good way of removing the president." Ultimately, Tribe said, the 2020 election may be the only way that Americans can see Trump removed for the crimes he has been accused of committing.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives were able to pass a measure last week expressing opposition to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s borrower-defense rule. But because of politics and both ongoing and upcoming legal battles, the vote did little to clear up what will happen to students who are asking for their loans to be discharged because they were defrauded by colleges. Hardly clear are two questions: how to deal with the backlog of more than 200,000 borrowers, most of whom attended for-profit institutions, who’ve been waiting for the Education Department to process their requests for debt forgiveness. Also uncertain is how cases will be handled in the future. A new rule proposed by DeVos that would make it harder for borrowers to get relief is set to go into effect in July, but it will likely be challenged in the courts before then...Eileen Connor, legal director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, told The New York Times when the new proposal was announced that it would file a legal challenge. Meanwhile, a previous attempt by the Trump administration, in December 2017, to begin giving only partial relief was temporarily blocked in 2019 by a federal court, which ruled that the borrowers' privacy rights were violated because the department used their federal earnings data from the Social Security Administration. That case is still continuing, however.

The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump began Tuesday with a fierce debate over the rules that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put forth for the proceedings. Key sticking points included the questions of whether any witnesses will be called and whether new evidence can be introduced. Republicans maintained that only information learned during the House proceedings should count and Democrats argued it is the Senate’s duty to hear all available evidence. Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School; and Renee Landers, Suffolk Law Professor and constitutional law expert joined Jim Braude Tuesday on Greater Boston to discuss the first day of the president's trial in the Senate.

Forty years ago, when I was a student at Harvard Law School, I enrolled in Alan Dershowitz’s class on professional responsibility. “Everyone is entitled to a lawyer,” he told us. “But not everyone is entitled to me.” Any lawyer in private practice can generally say no when asked to take on a case. So why did Mr. Dershowitz say yes to Donald Trump and agree to represent him in his Senate impeachment trial?...Mr. Dershowitz said that he was defending Mr. Trump to protect the Constitution, but serious constitutional scholars didn’t buy his argument. Another of my former professors, the constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe, responded with an op-ed essay in The Washington Post. “The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject,” he wrote. “There is no evidence that the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ was understood in the 1780s to mean indictable crimes.” Mr. Tribe likewise debunked Mr. Dershowitz’s argument that the president could not be impeached for “abuse of power,” noting, “No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s rules for the impeachment trial of President Trump earned him a new nickname Tuesday: Midnight Mitch. The moniker trended on Twitter to mock the organizing resolution the senator circulated late Monday, which allows each side 24 hours to make opening arguments and could result in testimony continuing past midnight...The memes continued even after McConnell’s resolution was changed to relax the timetable for arguments, stretching the 24 hours of testimony over three days instead of two. The nickname was apparently coined by Carl Bernstein, the former Washington Post reporter whose reporting on the Watergate scandal led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation...Laurence Tribe, a prominent Harvard Law professor, criticized McConnell’s first version of trial rules, saying they “aren’t rules for a real trial at all, much less a fair one.” “They’re rules for a rigged outcome, with #MidnightMitch making sure that as much of the so-called trial as possible takes place in the dark of night,” he said in a tweet.

An article by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s legal defense is putting a lot of weight on a brand-new memo from the Office of Legal Counsel. In fact, the memo appears to have been written specifically as part of the president’s defense strategy. That’s noteworthy because the OLC is part of the Department of Justice: It’s supposed to be legally independent, not partisan, and certainly not part of the president’s defense team. The memo’s reasoning borders on egregious. It concocts a technicality to invalidate the subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives during the impeachment inquiry, making it somehow legitimate for Trump to have obstructed Congress — the basis of one of the articles of impeachment the president faces. And then there’s the timing of the memo. It’s dated January 19, 2020, two days before the impeachment trial was slated to begin, and one day before Trump’s legal team issued its own memo summarizing his defense.

Democrats accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of a "cover-up" after his plan to speed up President Donald Trump's impeachment trial was unveiled. McConnell submitted a resolution Monday that would limit opening arguments to 24 hours over just two days, meaning the trial could stretch past midnight. The plan also gives senators up to 16 hours for questions and four hours of debate. After that, senators would vote whether to allow witnesses and new evidence. Witnesses would be deposed privately and the Senate would then vote whether to allow them to testify publicly. The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on the resolution. Republicans are expected to approve the rules down party lines, according to Politico. Democrats slammed the proposal, warning that the rules are likely to result in key evidence being presented at 2 to 3 am... "These aren't rules for a real trial at all, much less a fair one," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe added. "They're rules for a rigged outcome, with #MidnightMitch making sure that as much of the so-called trial as possible takes place in the dark of night."

Though many leaders in corporate America have gone out of their way to distance themselves from US president Donald Trump, a new working paper shows that public company CEOs still heavily favor Republicans. Researchers at Harvard Law School and Tel Aviv University found that CEOs of the 1,500 largest US public companies donate “disproportionately more” to the Republican party and its candidates, with the median CEO directing 75% of his or her political contributions to Republicans. They also found that Republican-leaning CEOs lead companies with almost twice the asset value of companies led by Democratic-leaning executives. The study looked at campaign contributions by more than 3,800 CEOs of S+P 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017. To be classified as “Republican” or “Democratic,” at least two-thirds of the executive’s donations had to go to either party; otherwise they were classified as “neutral.” Overall, roughly 57% of the CEOs were classified as Republicans, and about 19% as Democrats.

As President Trump’s impeachment trial opens, his lawyers have increasingly emphasized a striking argument: Even if he did abuse his powers in an attempt to bully Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election on his behalf, it would not matter because the House never accused him of committing an ordinary crime. Their argument is widely disputed...Other legal scholars, like Laurence Tribe, a constitutional specialist at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, have argued that Mr. Dershowitz is overreading and misrepresenting this aspect of the Johnson trial, especially against the backdrop of other evidence about the original understanding of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and the range of factors that went into Mr. Johnson’s narrow acquittal. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Mr. Tribe accused Mr. Trump’s legal team of using “bogus legal arguments to mislead the American public or the senators weighing his fate.”

On Monday’s edition of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe excoriated his former colleague Alan Dershowitz’s argument that President Donald Trump’s conduct cannot be impeachable without specific crimes. “We’ve got a president who was shaking down a foreign government for his own benefit, for his own re-election. He was using taxpayer money to do it,” said Tribe. “He is engaged in the kind of abuse that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, any of our framers would have said requires that we end the presidency, especially when the abuse goes to meddling in the next election. And when Alan Dershowitz or anybody, although I don’t know anybody else who really does it, comes up and says, well, it’s an abuse but it’s not a crime or crime-like, and therefore we can’t remove him for it. That really — that’s disgusting. There is no basis in the Constitution or in our history for that.”

As President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial moves along, much of the right-wing media will no doubt be echoing the arguments of the attorneys who are representing Trump during the trial — including Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. But attorney Laurence H. Tribe, an expert on constitutional law and co-author of the book, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” emphasizes in a Washington Post op-ed that Trump’s attorneys are using “bogus” and wildly misleading arguments in his defense. The 78-year-old Tribe is especially critical of Dershowitz in his op-ed. Dershowitz, Tribe notes, has argued that the two articles of impeachment Trump has been indicted on — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — should be dismissed because neither “can count as impeachable offenses.” But in fact, Tribe asserts, both abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are quite impeachable.

QUESTION: Senators who have already said how they are going to vote, and have expressed a bias, are they automatically guilty of perjury when they take their 'impartiality' oath? ANSWER: No, thanks to special protections the Founding Fathers gave to Congress. SOURCES: Robert Ray - partner at Zeichner Ellman & Kraus LLP, James Ziglar - Senior Counsel at Van Newss Feldman LLP, Lawrence Lessig - Professor at Harvard Law School...Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University, referred our researchers to an Opinion piece he penned in The Washington Post. "To swear a false oath is perjury — the crime President Bill Clinton was charged with in his impeachment," Lessig wrote in the Washington Post. "Yet given the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, a senator likely could not be charged with perjury for swearing falsely on the Senate floor. Instead, it is the Senate itself that must police members’ oaths — as it has in the past." So we can verify that senators are not automatically guilty of perjury, if they've already expressed how they will vote on impeachment.

The expanding gig economy offers great flexibility for employers and many workers alike, but it also has an ugly underbelly that is costing thousands of workers pay and benefits and bilking Washington state coffers out of millions of dollars each year, a new study says. The culprit is the misclassification of workers as independent contractors as opposed to treating them as company employees, according to the report by researchers with the Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. The study found that between 2013-2017, the state of Washington lost $152 million in unemployment taxes and the state’s workers’ compensation system lost $268 million via unpaid premiums. “During the five-year period from 2013 to 2017, a conservative estimate of the average worker misclassification rate was 1.3%,” the study notes. “This translates into an average of 44,492 misclassified workers each year, based on an average total workforce of 3,368,815 in the state of Washington.”

Moments after Senate Majority Leader McConnell released his impeachment trial rules, Harvard constitutional law scholar, Laurence Tribe joins MSNBC’s Ari Melber warning Senate Republicans “they will be judged through history” for depriving the American people a fair trial, instead doing it in “the dark of night.” Tribe wonders whether Republicans will “go along with the McConnell cover-up” or “put the brakes on and insist on a real trial.” Alarmed by the accelerated pace of the trial, Tribe argues “justice compressed can be justice destroyed.”

On the eve of Trump’s historic impeachment trial, Harvard University’s Constitutional Law Scholar Laurence Tribe hammers his former Harvard colleague and Trump defense lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. Tribe says he is “very disappointed” in Dershowitz, adding he is taking a “Wizard of Oz” approach to impeachment by claiming his “client is the constitution of the United States.” Tribe calls for the attention to be taken off of the “Dersh-o-mania” of Trump’s defense arguments, and focus on the “solemn proceeding” of impeachment and Trump’s alleged “serious” crimes of “using his power to subvert the integrity of our elections.”

An article by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s lawyers have filed a 110-page memorandum sketching out the defenses they intend to raise at his impeachment trial. Overall, it’s a pretty poor showing. The memo includes some political posturing. It also contains specious claims to the effect that Trump did nothing wrong on his July 25, 2019 phone call. The memo’s centerpiece, however, is a handful of dubious legal arguments about why his impeachment is supposedly illegitimate. There’s nothing here to convince Democrats; and precious little that would give Republicans the cover some may want to vote against removing Trump from office.