Media Mentions

Judith Donath, author of "The Social Machine" and adviser at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and Boston Globe tech writer Hiawatha Bray join us as we look at some of the major moments in technology, social media, and artificial intelligence from the last 10 years, as well as look beyond 2020.

Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar at Harvard University who specializes in constitutional law, told Salon on Sunday that President Donald Trump "has violated yet another law" by tweeting the name of a man believed by some to be the whistleblower who drew attention to the Ukraine scandal. "If by 'legal ramifications' you mean to ask me whether Donald Trump has violated yet another law, my answer is yes," Tribe told Salon by email when asked whether there could be legal ramifications to the president's tweeting. "The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (ICWPA) outlaws actions by government officials or agencies that directly or indirectly encourage retaliatory actions against employees who legitimately perform a whistleblower role in the intelligence community, as the whistleblower in this case clearly did regarding a matter of urgent concern, as determined by the Inspector General." Tribe added that Trump "violated the letter and spirit of the ICWPA" by sharing a name that he held to be that of the whistleblower with over 60 million people on Twitter "for vengeful reasons."

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Frank Wilkinson, Bloomberg Opinion Editor, on gun control. Max Nisen, Bloomberg Opinion health care columnist, on Medicare for All. Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on the impeachment hearings. Shira Ovide, Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, on "techlash." Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on automation.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Here’s what movie fans and insiders have been waiting for: the 2019 winners of the Behavioral Economics Oscars, known as the Becons. Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain – where would they be without a prestigious Becon? This year has been a spectacular one for movies, and the secretive Becons Award Committee (said, by some, to consist of just one person) has had to make some especially tough choices.

An article by Noah Feldman: The year in impeachment was a true roller coaster ride: A slow build to a high peak at the time of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report; a deep and fast dive in its aftermath; a rocket-like ascent following the whistle-blower’s report of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine; and now, at year’s end, a harrowing run to an impeachment that itself will likely end in the “pffft” of a Senate vote not to remove the president...But the ride won’t end when the year does. January 2020 will see the Senate trial. It’s hard to imagine that the trial will feel like any kind of roller coast ride at all. The outcome is as close to foregone as it gets in U.S. politics.

An article by Noah Feldman: A presidential impeachment trial in the Senate is one man’s worst nightmare. That man isn’t President Donald Trump, however. He’ll take it in stride. It’s Chief Justice John Roberts, who will have to preside. Roberts has devoted his whole career to trying to keep the Supreme Court from being seen as a partisan body. That started with the famous baseball analogy he offered at his Senate confirmation, according to which the justices are like umpires who call balls and strikes. The comparison is pretty dubious: balls and strikes aren’t infused with controversial moral questions like when life begins and who can marry whom. But Roberts was trying to illustrate his ideal of a justice who stays out of the partisan fray of team spirit.

An article by Noah Feldman: The 2010s will go down in history as a contradictory period at the Supreme Court. The decade featured one liberal decision — the gay marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges — that will be read as long as the justices’ opinions are taught in law schools. Yet the decade also saw the emergence of important new libertarian trends in First Amendment law, regarding both free speech and religious liberty, that are widely seen as conservative. And although the court shifted rightward over the last ten years, that may seem mild compared to the rightward shift we could see in the 2020s.

An op-ed by Roberto Unger: South America is falling apart. The popular rebellion in Chile — a country often held up as an example of success predicated on good behavior — is only the most extreme instance of a discontent that is either breaking out or simmering in almost every South American nation. The struggle between the right and the left has intensified. But so far nothing that contributes to socially inclusive economic growth has resulted from these protests. What does it all mean? And how do South America’s troubles mirror the United States’ own?

Adiós, 2010s. The 2020s are here. But before the clock strikes midnight on the decade, the Gazette asked Harvard experts to weigh in on the biggest events and most important cultural shifts of the past 10 years.... Equally important, unlike with Brown, Obergefell failed to produce a wave of massive resistance. To be sure, a county clerk in eastern Kentucky briefly went to jail rather than grant marriage licenses to gay couples, and a state Supreme Court justice in Alabama shouted defiance at the Supreme Court’s ruling (much as an Alabama governor had shouted defiance of Brown more than 50 years earlier). But almost everywhere else in the U.S., the court’s ruling was peacefully implemented. The sky did not fall, and gay and lesbian couples began to enjoy a basic human right that had long been wrongfully denied to them. Michael Klarman Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School and the author of “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (2013).

Lawyers for former Corinthian College students are asking a federal judge in San Francisco to increase the amount of sanctions the Department of Education must pay for violating a court order barring the collection of certain student loan payments. Lawyers at Housing and Economic Rights Advocates in Oakland and the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School have asked U.S. District Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the Northern District of California to reconsider the $100,000 sanction order she issued in October. Kim in May issued an order putting a hold on all government collection on loans that were subject to “borrower defense” to repayment, or the contention that borrowers were defrauded by the for-profit school. The judge held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Education Department in contempt and sanctioned them in October for continuing to collect on loans despite her order.

Historian Jon Meacham, Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon-Reed and CNN Presidential Historian Tim Naftali discuss with Fareed what makes President Trump's impeachment unique to past presidents. Naftali tells Fareed the House withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate has never happened before in an impeachment crisis because this is the first time control of Congress has been split during an impeachment.

Top Democrats on Sunday renewed their demands for witnesses to testify at President Trump’s impeachment trial, citing newly released emails showing that the White House asked officials to keep quiet over the suspension of military aid to Ukraine just 90 minutes after Mr. Trump leaned on that country’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The emails, released late Friday by the Trump administration to the Center for Public Integrity, shed new light on Mr. Trump’s effort to solicit Ukraine to help him win re-election in 2020, the matter at the heart of the House’s vote on Wednesday to impeach him...At least one academic, Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who testified as an expert for Democrats during the impeachment inquiry, has argued that Mr. Trump will not be impeached until the articles are transmitted. Republicans have cited that position in their demands for Ms. Pelosi to move forward.

Denial can be an ill-advised, if effective, strategy for temporary coping over the holidays, and it’s one that the White House is reportedly contemplating as part of its impeachment messaging. Like a spouse going off to “work” post-layoff, the White House may soon be arguing that everything is fine and nothing of particular note has happened in the past few weeks. According to CBS News, the Trump administration is considering arguing that Trump has not yet officially been impeached. The idea comes down to a technicality: Because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not transmitted the two articles of impeachment to the Senate, Trump officials may claim that the process has not yet been finalized in the House. The argument emerges from an op-ed by Harvard Law professor and House Judiciary Impeachment witness Noah Feldman. “If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president,” Feldman, who has endorsed Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, wrote in Bloomberg. “If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.”

The holidays can be emotionally taxing for many people, but especially so for Sarah Montana. It’s been more than a decade since her brother and mother were murdered in her childhood home in Dale City, VA...Montana, who was 21 at the time of the murders, says she’s forgiven Pinckney. She hasn’t said it to his face — he’s serving a life sentence in a Virginia prison with no possibility of parole — but she’s sent him a letter...Forgiveness has never been less fashionable, particularly in this era of social media, when people score points for being nasty to each other. “Forgiveness often requires proximity,” says Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor and author of the recently released book “When Should Law Forgive?” The lack of eye contact in digital media, along with the disinhibition effect, makes it easier to choose rage over forgiving. “It takes time and patience to forgive someone,” she says. “You have to actually listen and hear the apology and decide if it’s trustworthy. You can’t do that online.” Montana agrees that it’s more difficult to forgive in the culture of fear that’s only encouraged online.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Call me old fashioned or naïve, but I think my job is to explain what the U.S. Constitution actually means, no matter who likes it or doesn’t. That led me to explain recently that under the Constitution as it was understood by the framers and as it still should be understood today, impeachment isn’t complete when the House of Representatives votes to impeach. Constitutionally, impeachment becomes official when the House sends word of that impeachment to the Senate, triggering a Senate trial. Impeachment was originally understood to take place when someone from the House formally impeached the president “at the bar of the Senate,” which meant a member of the House formally stated to the Senate that the president (or judge, or other officer) was impeached. That practice lasted from the late middle ages until 1912. Since then, the House has instead sent a written message to the Senate stating that the House “has impeached” the defendant, a message that triggers the trial procedures in the Senate.

Maybe President Trump has not been impeached after all, or at least not yet. Impeachment happens, according to Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, only when the House transmits the articles of impeachment to the Senate. So “technically speaking,” he said, “the president still hasn’t been impeached.” That idea has left much of the legal academy unconvinced, including Laurence H. Tribe, one of Professor Feldman’s colleagues at Harvard. “The argument is textually bizarre, historically inaccurate, structurally misguided and functionally misleading,” Professor Tribe said. Professor Feldman was one of three constitutional scholars to testify in favor of impeachment before the House Judiciary Committee this month.

Greater Boston takes a look back at the biggest stories of the Trump presidency in 2019, from the Mueller investigation and impeachment, to the family separation policy and debates about gun control following mass shootings, and more. Jim Braude was joined by LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Joe Malone, former state treasurer for Massachusetts and current Trump supporter.

President Trump lashed out Friday at Democrats and an evangelical magazine that has called for his removal from office, as the timing and scope of his impeachment trial in the Senate remained in limbo and he prepared to head to Florida for the holidays. ...Republicans have seized on a notion advanced by a law professor called by Democrats to testify during the impeachment inquiry that technically Trump would not be “impeached” if the House does not send articles of impeachment to the Senate. Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial,” Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman wrote in a Bloomberg column on Thursday. “Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution ... If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.” Feldman’s argument received pushback from other legal scholars, including Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard. In a tweet on Thursday night, Tribe said Feldman is “making a clever but wholly mistaken point” about the possibility that Trump won’t be impeached. “Under Art. I, Sec. 2, Clause 5, he was impeached on Dec 18, 2019. He will forever remain impeached. Period,” Tribe wrote.

A book review by Kenneth Mack; Clifford Thompson’s “What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues” is a story of innocence betrayed. Thompson is an award-winning essayist, a novelist and an author of a previous literary memoir of growing up in the post-civil-rights era. He describes himself, with a bit of irony, as “the only nonracist black person in America,” meaning that he tries to bring very few preconceptions to his encounters with individual white people. Thompson also celebrates what he calls his rootedness — his childhood in a Washington neighborhood where everyone he knew or encountered was black. Yet in college he suddenly felt the pull of individualism, discovering that he was entirely comfortable in white social settings. He eventually married a “slender and blond” woman and began raising biracial children — heresy in the eyes of some, such as a black woman on the New York subway who gives him a withering look of betrayal. When a white neighbor reports him to the police as a possible intruder, the officers don’t mistreat him, as one might expect. Instead, they laugh it off after seeing him with his white spouse. “Things that make other people angry merely cause me to marvel,” he reports.

Sen. Schumer said he’s hoping to get some Republican Senators to join him in asking for witnesses and documents in Trump’s impeachment trial. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that “the evidence supporting the impeachment articles is extremely strong” but adds that there are no good reasons not to hear from additional firsthand witnesses in the Senate trial and thinks it will be a hard sell from some vulnerable Republican Senators.

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe on Thursday about “the most influential op-ed piece yet about impeachment. On Monday, The Washington Post published Tribe’s op-ed titled, “Don’t let Mitch McConnell conduct a Potemkin impeachment trial.” Tribe, who was taught at Harvard Law for half a century and has argued three-dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi delay transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate.