Media Mentions

Avid hiker Alexis Wheeler '09 founded the Harvard Club of Seattle's Crimson Achievement Program (CAP) in 2018. The initiative helps illuminate the path to college for high-potential ninth- and 10th-graders from Western Washington school districts in low-income areas

Let’s start this piece with two provocative claims. The first, which is hotly contested by legal experts, is that President Donald Trump broke the law when he ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian paramilitary leader. The second claim is that it doesn’t matter...There’s a great deal of disagreement among legal experts regarding when a president may lawfully target another nation. Some believe that, with rare exceptions, Congress must vote to permit such a strike. Others take a more permissive approach, arguing the president should be able to act to prevent sudden attacks on US personnel... One consequence of judicial deference is that there is fairly little case law explaining when the executive branch can and cannot take military action. Instead, most of the legal opinions in this space were drafted by executive branch officials. According to Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, “Practically all of the law in this area has been developed by executive branch lawyers justifying unilateral presidential uses of force.” These lawyers, Goldsmith warned, “view unilateral presidential power very broadly.”

Former national security adviser John Bolton said Monday that he is “prepared to testify” if called as a witness by the Senate. Bolton’s attorney previously said he would be guided by the courts on whether to testify in the impeachment proceedings...Why Bolton would now decide to make himself available will be a matter of speculation...Whatever the reason, Bolton’s announcement on Monday put Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), not to mention other persuadable Republican senators, in a box. Facts subsequent to the House impeachment have become known that directly pertain to Trump’s conduct and, to boot, a critical witness is now suddenly available. Do Senate Republicans try to sweep all that under the rug, risking that Bolton will later tell his story publicly and incriminate a president whose misdeeds the Senate helped cover up? That would seem intensely unwise. “This means that only McConnell and his GOP caucus stand between what Bolton says he’s ready to testify under oath in a Senate trial and the American people,” tweeted constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “Your move, Mitch.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is in the driver’s seat because she wisely held up the articles of impeachment. She can now turn to the Senate and say: Agree upon rules for the trial that guarantee Bolton’s and other key witnesses’ appearance or we will hold on to the articles and subpoena Bolton ourselves.

Ten Republican senators have signed onto Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposal to change the Senate rules to enable the chamber to dismiss President Donald Trump’s impeachment. The Missouri Republican’s proposed rules change would empower the Senate to dismiss articles of impeachment if the House fails to deliver them within 25 days of its impeachment vote. Hawley’s resolution, unveiled Monday, is a response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to withhold the articles of impeachment against Trump...A change to the Senate rules requires a two-thirds majority of 67 votes. Republicans only hold 53 seats in the Senate, but Hawley hinted Monday that Republicans could bypass the requirement through a tactic often referred to as the nuclear option...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who advised House Democrats during the impeachment process, warned that any efforts to bypass the 67-votes requirement would be “not just nuclear but thermonuclear. As long as there are any cloture rules at all, a simple majority cannot suffice to amend the Senate’s standing rules. Without cloture rules, the Senate would cease to be the Senate.” On top of that, Tribe said that if Hawley’s proposal received the 67 votes required to change a Senate rule it could apply to future impeachments but not necessarily Trump’s impeachment.

According to the American Library Association (ALA), about one fifth of the books sold in the U.S. are eBooks. Some publishers are worried that the ease of borrowing a digital book from a library is hurting sales and have decided to limit how and when libraries can access digital books. Now, libraries in Massachusetts and nationwide are vowing to fight back. They say the practices are not just unfair and unethical, but they might be illegal...Librarians are also hopeful that relief will come from a Congressional antitrust subcommittee investigating competition in digital markets...Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert at Harvard Law School, has looked into this topic. “Antitrust law is basically competition law. It’s a law that regulates how firms can compete with each other,” he said. “So, it’s similar to a referee in a sports competition.” Elhauge parsed the arguments, and as far as he can tell from all the media reports, libraries would not have an easy time winning this case. The publishers do not seem to be violating the rules. There’s no single publishing house with monopoly power. Publishers are not “meeting in a smoke-filled room and agreeing to do the same thing,” he said.

On a freezing night in 2017, two white Boston police officers were searching for a shooting suspect. They drove up to a black teenager in Roxbury, determined he was acting suspiciously, and tried to question him. When they got out of their cruiser, the teenager fled. The Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday will hear a case, Commonwealth v. Tykorie Evelyn, about a 17-year-old charged with murder and unlawful possession of a firearm, that centers on questions related to racial bias in policing...“Black youth have been accustomed to — and therefore expect — to be treated with suspicion by police, regardless of whether they committed a crime,” attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School wrote in an amicus brief in support of Evelyn. “And Black youth are confronted regularly with the potentially deadly consequences of noncompliance, or even perceived noncompliance, with police.”

President Donald Trump's confrontation with Iran is posing a gut check for Congress, brazenly testing whether the House and Senate will exert their own authority over U.S. military strategy or cede more war powers to the White House. As tensions rise at home and abroad, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold House votes this week to limit Trump’s ability to engage Iran militarily after the surprise U.S. airstrike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani...Yet Congress has shown time and again it is unable to exert its ability to authorize — or halt — the use of military force. With their inaction, lawmakers have begrudgingly allowed the commander in chief to all but disregard Congress...Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School, said both parties in Congress have for years gone along with an expansion of presidential war powers, especially with regard to the conflicts in the Middle East. "In short, our country has — through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence — given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war," Goldsmith said in an essay in Lawfare, an online newsletter he co-founded. “That is our system: One person decides.”

Many communities, and many of us in the health care profession, may feel helpless in the face of the strife and struggle occurring at our nation’s southern border. We expect that many readers of Harvard Medicine do, too. But we also know that communities, including the community of medicine, can and do get involved in supporting those who seek refuge in this country. According to the 2019 Global Trends report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United States receives the greatest number of first-time asylum applications in the world. Many of those seeking asylum flee their homes because they fear persecution, torture, or even death...Organizations that help connect lawyers with physicians can be a tremendous aid to asylum seekers...The Harvard community is part of this movement. In 2016, the HMS student chapter of PHR established the Harvard Student Human Rights Collaborative. One component of the collaborative is a student-run asylum clinic. The principal aims of HSHRC include using medicine as a platform to raise awareness about human rights violations and advocating on behalf of vulnerable and persecuted people. It collaborates frequently with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Harvard Law School, both on cases and on education and training events.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that a nation, a company or an individual wants to give a lot of money to a university, a nonprofit group or an individual researcher. Suppose that many people think that the potential donor is morally abhorrent, or has done morally abhorrent things. Is it wrong to take the money?

In the old days, when you wanted to borrow a book, you trudged down to your local library and checked it out. Now, if you want an e-book or an audiobook, you can sit on your couch at home, open your library's app, and download it. Viola! According to the American Library Association (ALA), about one fifth of the books sold in the U.S. are eBooks. Some publishers are worried that the ease of borrowing a digital book from a library is hurting sales and have decided to limit how and when libraries can access digital books. Now, libraries in Massachusetts and nationwide are vowing to fight back. They say the practices are not just unfair and unethical, but they might be illegal. ... Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert at Harvard Law School, has looked into this topic. “Antitrust law is basically competition law. It’s a law that regulates how firms can compete with each other,” he said. “So, it’s similar to a referee in a sports competition.” Elhauge parsed the arguments, and as far as he can tell from all the media reports, libraries would not have an easy time winning this case. The publishers do not seem to be violating the rules. There’s no single publishing house with monopoly power. Publishers are not “meeting in a smoke-filled room and agreeing to do the same thing,” he said.

“Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: one person decides,” Jack Goldmith, a Harvard Law professor and Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, writing on Twitter.

A veterans group said the Pentagon has stopped releasing information that helps former service members to contest less-than-honorable discharges from the military. The Defense Department has been breaking the law since April, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Virginia by the National Veterans Legal Services Program. ... Dana Montalto, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Veterans Legal Clinic, backed up the lawsuit's claim that discharge decisions have not been available. ...  Veterans can lose some or all of the benefits that are available depending on the level of their discharge status. “It would shock many people to learn that veterans are waiting years to get a decision from a review board, during which time they’re often shut out from receiving critical healthcare and support services that they desperately need,” she said.

The EPA’s science advisers say the agency’s proposal to change the way science feeds into rulemaking could politicize the rulemaking process and wasn’t fully thought through, according to a draft report published Dec. 31. The Environmental Protection Agency’s April 2018 Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science (RIN:2080-AA14) proposal, also known as the “secret science” rule, would bar the agency from using scientific research that isn’t or can’t be made public. Blocking the use of that type of research would represent a sharp break from the EPA’s decades-old approach. Critics have said the proposal is a bid to sideline the science that the EPA uses in regulations because the agency wouldn’t be able to rely on epidemiological studies, which often draw on private medical information. “Given the lack of clarity, the proposed rule could be viewed as a license to politicize the scientific evaluation required under the statute,” wrote the Science Advisory Board, a group of outside experts who review the quality of the science the EPA uses in regulations...Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said, “What’s really interesting is that the report echoes what an absolute legion of commenters from the science community have said about the proposal. There’s something at least in the ballpark of consensus that the proposal is really flawed.”

An article by Charles Fried: Over the last few years, teams of law students from several schools as well as volunteers from a variety of organizations staffed phone banks or traveled to Alabama to help educate people with felony convictions, who had served their terms, about their restored voting rights and to help them register to vote. These volunteers reported that this was one of their most gratifying experiences as students or lawyers. Many of the people they contacted were surprised that their fellow citizens took the effort to reengage them in the political process. But more than that, many of these individuals expressed joy that their right to vote represented to them the full restoration of their citizenship. Perhaps some of these volunteers remembered the line from Hebrews: “Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them."

President Donald Trump has taken historically unprecedented action to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution. The administration has targeted about 85 environmental rules, according to Harvard Law School’s rollback tracker. Existing environment regulations are meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect land and animals from oil and gas drilling and development, as well as limit pollution and toxic waste runoff into the country’s water. The administration views many of them as onerous to fossil fuel companies and other major industries.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Depersonalization is a dissociative disorder characterized by a sense of observing one’s self from outside one’s body. Those with the condition often report an experience akin to watching yourself in a movie. My 86-year-old stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien, does not suffer from depersonalization. But for more than half his life, 44 years, he has watched himself portrayed in news articles, books and motion pictures — most recently, in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — as someone he is not. The effect on his life has been devastating.

An article by Richard Parker: A while back, a member of Congress compared our supposedly dysfunctional politics to the American Revolution. “It feels,” she said, “like a 1776 kind of fight.” She’s right; it does.  Because our politics, too, exemplifies a phenomenon of democratic renewal: a populist uprising. That is, a mobilization of ordinary people — not privileged,  not usual political activists — to rebel against an entrenched political establishment. The establishment, in turn, is seen to be an elite, a “political class,” alienated from a critical mass of the people, unresponsive to them because it’s disdainful of them. Behind every populist uprising is elite failure. Such elite failure, in a democracy, tends to metastasize through the body politic. Such an uprising is the proven immunotherapy.

It was early last year and Pete Buttigieg, still a bit player in the Democratic presidential race, was taking questions from the audience after a book event in Philadelphia...a man stood up in the back and made a rather audacious ask: "Would you support a packing of the courts — to expand the Supreme Court by four members?”...Buttigieg offered a surprising reply. “I don’t think we should be laughing at it," he said. "Because in some ways, it’s no more a shattering of norms than what’s already been done to get the judiciary to where it is today"...The comment turned into a bit of a moment for the then little-known mayor of South Bend, Ind. Lefty Twitter declared itself impressed. The reaction spoke to a growing desire, in some corners of the party, for Democrats to play more of what scholars call “constitutional hardball,” using tactics that are technically legal, but break with decades- and even centuries-old traditions of fair play...Mark Tushnet, A Harvard law professor, coined the phrase “constitutional hardball” in an obscure academic journal in 2004. He says the increasingly aggressive use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations struck him as a noteworthy break from what had come before.

During the final presidential debate of 2019, one of the moderators posed a question about a topic that rarely gets attention on the debate stage: What steps would candidates take to help disabled people get more integrated into the workforce and their local communities? For Andrew Yang, the question was both political and personal. His oldest son, Christopher, is on the autism spectrum...At the event in Salem, Yang rolled out a new plan to fund research and support children with disabilities and their families. Ari Ne'eman, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School's Project on Disability and a co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said he welcomed some parts of Yang's plan, including his commitment to ending seclusion as a punishment in schools. He also praised Yang's call for increased funding for the federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which gives every child the right to services and accommodations that will allow them to learn.

Running for president four years ago, Donald Trump called John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, “an absolute disaster” and “a nightmare for conservatives." Now Trump faces an impeachment trial in the US Senate in which his political fate could rest in the hands of the presiding judge: Roberts. The chief justice’s role in impeachment is broadly described in the constitution. But there are few guidelines and little precedent indicating what duties, precisely, the chief justice can or might discharge... “I think a lot of this is going to depend on the role that the chief justice decides to play,” said Hilary Hurd '20, a JD candidate at Harvard Law who has written about past impeachment trials. “We don’t know whether there’s going to be a tie on any particular motion. There could be, and we know from precedent that the chief justice is empowered to break a tie.”

As more evidence has come to light concerning President Trump’s withholding of U.S. aid to Ukraine and the concerns of members of the administration about its effect on national security and dubious legality, the decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate looks smarter by the day...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The documents made available in unredacted form for the first time destroy any remaining argument for waiting until mid-trial to decide whether witnesses like [Office of Management and Budget official Michael] Duffey, [Defense Secretary Mark T.] Esper, [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo, [acting White House chief of staff Mick] Mulvaney and Bolton should be called, by subpoena if necessary, to testify at the forthcoming impeachment trial and whether key documents should be demanded from the White House, OMB, the State Department and the Pentagon.”