Media Mentions

A pair of energy-producing states may face ideological challenges in their quest for a high court review of Washington state's blockade against the last major coal export project on the West Coast. Wyoming and Montana argued in a Supreme Court petition yesterday that Washington regulators violated constitutional protections on interstate commerce when they denied a Clean Water Act permit for the Millennium Bulk Terminals project in Longview, Wash. ... Justices for the Supreme Court will be more interested in evaluating Washington's denial of the terminal's Clean Water Act permit, rather than any alleged intent to further control global greenhouse gas emissions, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. He said the states' claims of discrimination are weak because they compare support for different products: apples versus coal.

The third day of President Trump's Senate impeachment trial. Law experts share their take on the president’s case – and what’s at stake for the Constitution and the country. Guests: Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School. Co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment and the Constitution."

Food insecurity and hunger cost the Commonwealth of Massachusetts nearly $1.9 billion in avoidable health care costs every year. Today, a team of attorneys from the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) and Community Servings, a nonprofit food and nutrition program, testified at a hearing on proposed legislation to establish a food and health pilot program in the state of Massachusetts. Harvard Law School Clinical Instructor and CHLPI staff attorney Katie Garfield ’11 and Jean Terranova, Community Servings’ director of food and health policy, testified before the Joint Committee on Public Health at the Massachusetts State House.

More than 70 scholars, union leaders, economists and activists called on Thursday for a far-reaching overhaul of American labor laws to vastly increase workers’ power on the job and in politics, recommending new laws to make unionizing easier and to elect worker representatives to corporate boards. ... The Clean Slate report, nearly two years in the making, aims to rethink American labor law from scratch. “We firmly believe that we’re past the point of tinkering around the edges, that to really fix the problems in our economy and political system we need a fundamental rethinking of labor law,” said Sharon Block, one of the report’s main authors and executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. ... “This is an attempt to lay out a comprehensive vision of what labor law reform ought to look like,” said Ben Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the report’s main authors. “We need this as a kind of North Star to know where we’re going when we have a chance to do reform of any kind.”

American workers have had the right to unionize since 1935, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his first term as president and the Great Depression was ravaging the economy. But the parameters haven’t changed much in 85 years. Not as the treatment of women and people of color became more equitable. Not as businesses employed more independent contractors who weren’t protected by labor laws. And not as the gulf between the haves and have-nots expanded. On Thursday, two Harvard Law School faculty members unveiled a sweeping proposal to rewrite US labor law, aimed not at updating what’s on the books but at starting over. ... “ ‘Clean Slate’ is our vision for what labor law would look like if it were actually designed to enable workers to build an equitable economy,” said Benjamin Sachs, Harvard Law School professor and coauthor of the report. “It’s not a project designed to garner bipartisan support. It’s not a project designed to get the maximum amount of business endorsement.” ... The project is not just about unions, said coauthor Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, who served in the US Labor Department under President Obama. It’s also intended to reform democracy, including proposals to promote workers’ civic engagement by mandating same-day voter registration and granting paid time off to vote and attend meetings.

Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program, and Benjamin Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School (HLS) are calling for an overhaul of American labor law. The Gazette sat down with Block and Sachs to talk about their report “Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Democracy and Economy,” which was released today.

Right now, too many rideshare drivers are teetering on the edge of the road. Nearly 80% of American workers report living paycheck to paycheck, but we live ride to ride. Despite recent legislative actions in New York and California to bring some stability to the rideshare industry, companies like Uber and Lyft still have too much power over our lives. ... A new blueprint released this week called “Clean Slate for Worker Power” [a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program]  fundamentally rewrites our nation’s labor law and provides a roadmap for a fairer future that would give rideshare drivers like me a seat at the table with the app-based titans.

An article by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs: Running throughout the Democratic presidential debates has been a consistent theme: We are living in an era of deep economic and political inequality, and these dual crises now threaten to undermine our democracy. What does economic inequality look like today? Well, it would take an average Amazon worker 3.8 million years, working full time, to earn what CEO Jeff Bezos now possesses. And the country's wealthiest 20 people own more wealth than half of the nation combined—20 people with more wealth than 152 million others. On the political front, the facts are just as stark. Political scientists increasingly believe that our government no longer responds to the views of anyone but the wealthy. Of course, these forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing: As economic wealth gets more concentrated, the wealthy build greater and greater political power that they, in turn, translate into favorable policies that lead to even more profound concentrations of wealth. And on and on.

An article by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump is on trial in the Senate. But the Senate is on trial, too — to see if it’s capable of fulfilling its constitutional duty to hold a credible impeachment trial. James Madison thought the Supreme Court, not the Senate, should try presidential impeachments. Until now, the other framers’ rejection of Madison’s idea seemed to have been wise. Yet the unprecedented degree of partisanship in Trump’s “trial,” and the possibility that for the first time there will be no witnesses, raises the possibility that the framers’ impeachment design has hit a dead end.

An Iranian student enrolled at Northeastern University who was deported from Logan Airport on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is hardly the first to end up sent home after arriving here. Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi was deported on Monday night despite a federal judge’s order that he remain in Customs and Border Protection custody and not be deported as his case was being considered...Reihana Emami Arandi, an incoming Harvard Divinity School student, was denied entry in September. She had spent almost four months getting her student visa vetted, with additional security checks. When she was pulled aside at Logan Airport, she was confused...Because she refused to sign the statement prepared by customs officials, Arandi said, she is barred from reentering the US for five years. Her paperwork says that customs agents concluded that she came to the US to stay, not to study...Arandi believes she was deported because she’s Iranian. Since her deportation, Cambridge immigration attorney Susan Church and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic have stepped in to represent her in a federal case, which is pending.

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.