Media Mentions

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.

“What’s the real value of my work?” It’s a question many of us wonder privately when negotiating salaries. Now, that information is becoming more public. Workers across a number of industries are creating their own widely shared salary databases, with employees anonymously entering their earnings for all to see. In 2019, there were organized efforts to capture industry-wide salary information for arts and museum workers, media workers, baristas in different cities, workers at Jewish nonprofits, academics, design interns, workers in publishing, staff at creative agencies, and paralegals, just to name a few. ...“People who are employees, treated as employees, have been able to assert their right as employees. In circulating this spreadsheet, they are acting concertedly, they are joining with their co-workers to say we think pay transparency is important,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “They cannot be fired for that. The law says they have a right to act concertedly.”

A Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP recruitment event Wednesday was interrupted by a group of Harvard Law students, who sang, chanted and threatened the global firm with losing future recruits if it continues to represent ExxonMobil Corp. ... The group said the move represents a "new front" in the campaign by young people against the fossil fuel industry. One of the protest's organizers, first-year Harvard law student and former Rhode Island state Rep. Aaron Regunberg called it "a do-or-die moment in human history." "We have just a few years left to rein in corporate polluters and address the climate crisis," Regunberg said. "This firm's enabling of corporations like Exxon to continue blocking climate action and evading accountability for their malfeasance is, simply put, not compatible with a livable future."

As the 2020 race heats up, the Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a dispute involving the complex U.S. presidential election system focusing on whether Electoral College electors are free to break their pledges to back the candidate who wins their state's popular vote, an act that could upend an election. ..."We are glad the Supreme Court has recognized the paramount importance of clearly determining the rules of the road for presidential electors for the upcoming election and all future elections," said Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer for the faithless electors sanctioned in Washington and Colorado.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging state attempts to penalize Electoral College delegates who fail to vote for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support. ..."This court should resolve this conflict now, before it arises within the context of a contested election," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who is the attorney for the Washington state electors, said. "As the demographics of the United States indicate that contests will become even closer, there is a significant probability that such swings could force this court to resolve the question of electoral freedom within the context of an ongoing contest."

Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe looks at Alan Dershowitz’s likely defense of Trump ahead of the Senate impeachment trial: “Alan is completely wacko on this.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The president’s lawyers have made the sweeping assertion that the articles of impeachment against President Trump must be dismissed because they fail to allege that he committed a crime — and are, therefore, as they said in a filing with the Senate, “constitutionally invalid on their face.” Another of his lawyers, my former Harvard Law School colleague Alan Dershowitz, claiming to represent the Constitution rather than the president as such, makes the backup argument that the articles must be dismissed because neither abuse of power nor obstruction of Congress can count as impeachable offenses. Both of these arguments are baseless. Senators weighing the articles of impeachment shouldn’t think that they offer an excuse for not performing their constitutional duty.

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. ... 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."

California was the first state to challenge tech companies such as Uber and Lyft with bold laws meant to reshape the gig economy by converting workers into employees. And now a handful of other states are following its lead. ...“It’s a moment in our politics, where people are understanding, especially in progressive states, these tensions between big corporations and corporate money and ordinary people,” Terri Gerstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard Law School. “These work issues and issues of economic inequality have come to such a fever pitch.”

The Supreme Court on Friday said it will consider whether states may punish or replace “faithless” presidential electors who refuse to support the winner of their state’s popular vote, or whether the Constitution forbids dictating how such officials cast their ballots. ...Challengers say the Constitution leaves up to states the appointment of electors, but that is all. “There is no mechanism for state officials to monitor, control, or dictate electoral votes,” said a brief filed by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and his group Equal Citizens. “Instead, the right to vote in the Constitution and federal law is personal to the electors, and it is supervised by the electors themselves.”

We speak with Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who said he will present oral arguments during President Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate. Plus, WBUR Legal Analyst, retired federal judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School Nancy Gertner provides analysis.