Media Mentions

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.”

Some groundbreaking state laws aimed at improving worker conditions have been blocked by courts, just as they were set to take effect early this year, a sign that industry groups will continue to fight measures that they say could upend business models and upset the status quo. A judge temporarily blocked parts of a law that provides new protections for agricultural workers in New York; the trucking industry in California successfully fended off enforcement of a new test for determining when a worker is a contractor; and a separate California law that would limit mandatory arbitration agreements was similarly halted... “There are different factual and legal issues in these cases, but they have some common threads,” said Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program. “Business and industry groups have lost in the political realm, so now they’re trying the courts. But in the end, there’s an urgent need for change right now. Economic inequality has gotten so extreme, and working conditions have become so degraded for many people, that there’s clear will among policymakers and the public to do something.” Gerstein said the industry should instead focus on complying with the new laws.

Terming its as a "gross violation of human rights" around 400 Indian students studying in various American universities have condemned the "brutal police violence unleashed against students" of Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University last Sunday. They have also called upon Union Home Minister Amit Shah to immediately take the necessary steps to curb police brutality or resign... "By every account, it appears that police and paramilitary, both at Jamia and at AMU, have used violence and pursued unlawful and reckless tactics against student protesters in violation of protections under the Constitution of India and international human rights law," the statement released through Jhalak M. Kakkar '19 of Harvard Law School said. They also termed the entry of police and paramilitary in university premises, indiscriminate attacks within the campuses, releasing tear gas in libraries and brutal use of force against civilians "as a blatant violation of the law and can only shock the conscience of any democratic society".

An article by Laurence Tribe: The greatest chief justice of the United States, by common consent, was John Marshall. In McCulloch v. Maryland, the 1819 decision laying down the foundations of our government structure, Marshall wisely insisted that “we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” That meant, among other things, that we should not confuse the Constitution for an abstruse “legal code” intended to be deciphered only by specially ordained experts. Its basic structures and provisions must be interpreted so as to “be understood by the public,” in Marshall's words, to be consistent with “the common affairs of the world.” In propounding their sometimes idiosyncratic constructions of the Constitution’s basic terms, a few current or former academic stars seem to have forgotten that most essential truth. Specifically, they would have us believe that, when the Constitution assigns to the House of Representatives “the sole Power of Impeachment,” those words “actually mean” that the House can “impeach” the president only by formally transmitting to the Senate its articles of impeachment, as English legislatures of the late Middle Ages transmitted them to the House of Lords.

President Trump said he would sign the recently negotiated phase-one trade deal with China in Washington on Jan. 15 — marking a formal truce in the U.S-China trade war — and would later travel to Beijing to negotiate a broader pact...Mr. Trump has focused most of his attention on the Chinese farm purchases. According to U.S. negotiators, China has agreed to buy an average of at least $40 billion annually in agricultural goods starting in 2020...In addition, the U.S. has claimed, China has agreed to increase overall imports of U.S. goods and services by $200 billion over the next two years — a growth spurt that China hasn’t come close to reaching in the years since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001...Both sides say that any purchases must conform to WTO rules — a requirement that could give China a way to argue that it can’t meet purchase goals. For instance, soybean purchases diverted from Brazil to the U.S. could violate WTO rules. “The trick is for the agreement to be crafted in a manner that’s ambiguous enough so as not to raise WTO challenges, but is clear enough to satisfy the U.S. that the Chinese government will use the tools available to it to direct farm purchases to the U.S.,” said Mark Wu, a WTO expert at Harvard Law School.

When faced with the worst of the internet — trolls, Russian propaganda machines or global terrorism — Facebook turns to Monika Bickert. Bickert is Facebook's vice president of global policy management. Her team oversees the social media giant's rules for what types of content are and aren't allowed on the platform. This past fall, Bickert taught Harvard Law School students about the challenges of managing online content in a course called "Social Media and the Law." It's an issue that's one of Facebook's biggest challenges. The company has repeatedly faced criticism for allowing misinformation and hate speech to spread on its platform, and has shifted strategies under public pressure and rising scrutiny — especially since the 2016 election. Here's what Bickert, a Harvard Law School alum, had to say about her class, and how Facebook is now tackling the problems she discusses.

A cabal of doctors is hiding the cure for cancer, berries are more effective than vaccines, and eating instant noodles can kill you: These are some of the claims from the internet's most viral fake health news in 2019. Health misinformation was a big deal this year...The impact of health misinformation can be enormous. The most common concerns among health professionals are compliance with health treatments or prevention efforts, said Nat Gyenes, who leads the Digital Health Lab at the technology nonprofit Meedan and researches technology and health at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. "It can lead to vaccination levels below herd immunity, harmful impacts on minors whose parents are responsible for their health care and well-being, engaging in alternative or homeopathic treatments as a primary approach and only complying with necessary medical treatments at a time where effectiveness is decreased," Gyenes said.