Media Mentions

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had a plan to quickly dispose of the articles of impeachment just approved by the House: He would hold a two-week sham trial without any witnesses, and then the Senate Republican majority would acquit President Trump, despite the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that he is guilty as charged of abusing his power and obstructing Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), acting on an idea suggested by Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe in a Post op-ed, has thrown a spanner into the works by refusing to appoint impeachment managers until there is some guarantee of a fair trial in the Senate.

Federal energy regulators issued an order Thursday that likely will tilt the market to favor coal and natural gas power plants in the nation's largest power grid region, stretching from New Jersey to Illinois. Critics say that it effectively creates a new subsidy to prop up uneconomical fossil fuel plants and that it will hurt renewable energy growth and, ultimately, consumers. The new rules, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, are designed to counteract state subsidies that support the growth of renewable energy and use of nuclear power. The rules involve what are known as "capacity markets," where power plants bid to provide electricity to the grid. The change would require higher minimum bids for power plants that receive such subsidies, giving fossil fuel plants an advantage...Ultimately, consumers will pay several times over, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. "The major loser here is consumers," he said.

The night before she boarded a plane to the United States last month, Etelvina Ramos Mamani awoke from a terrible dream. “I saw Marlene,” she said, referring to her 8-year-old daughter. The girl was killed more than a decade ago, on Sept. 20, 2003, by a single bullet through the chest. It had strayed through their bedroom window in their hometown, Warisata, a rural village in Bolivia’s highlands, north of the capital, and pierced the wall behind her. This dream was difficult for her mother to talk about. It’s these painful memories that prompted Etelvina and her husband, Eloy Rojas Mamani, to board a plane for Miami the next day. They were on their way to attend a court hearing — the latest chapter in their yearslong quest to seek justice for their daughter’s killing...The civil lawsuit charges Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzain with "extrajudicial killings, crimes against humanity, and wrongful death."The act has been used several times against government officials. But what makes the Mamanis’ case unique, according to their lawyers at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, is that it involves a living former head of state, sitting in the same courtroom with his accusers.

America incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other nation in the world. In "When Should Law Forgive?," 300th Anniversary University Professor and former Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow analyzes the tools of forgiveness that are already built into our criminal justice system, and how they could be better utilized to create a more restorative society. On Boston Public Radio on Thursday, Minow said forgiveness in the context of law means "letting go of justified grievances" to focus less on revenge and more on repairing harm. "The focus is forward-looking rather than retrospective," she said. "The focus is actually restoring some sense of peace and developing some norms within the community where people actually participate, not just one-on-one, but as a collective on how do we prevent conflict and how do we actually build a stronger community."

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of President Trump, argued Wednesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., should not send the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate and claimed that it was unconstitutional for the Senate to demand the articles "immediately." "Senate rules requiring the House to 'immediately' present its articles of impeachment to the Senate clearly violate the constitutional clause in Article I giving each house the sole power to make its own rules," Tribe tweeted on Wednesday. "It’s up to the House when and how to prosecute its case in the Senate," he added, just hours before House Democrats voted to approve two articles of impeachment.

On Wednesday, Dec. 18, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump, making him the third president since the founding of the United States to face this sanction. Trump’s impeachment now sets up a trial in the U.S. Senate, where support from two-thirds majority of senators present would be necessary to convict and remove the president from office. As required by the Constitution, the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts ’79, will preside over the Senate impeachment trial. Harvard Law faculty have testified in the impeachment process and have offered constitutional and historical perspective as the hearings unfolded in the House. Below, a number of faculty weigh in on how we got to Wednesday’s impeachment vote, and what we should expect when the proceedings move to the Senate.

After the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the articles of impeachment may temporarily be withheld from the U.S. Senate. The idea of delaying—or even withholding transmittal to the Senate—has been pitched by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who advised the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment process, the Washington Postreports.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Thursday explained why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) decision to delay sending the articles of impeachment of President Donald Trump to the Senate is smart. Tribe, appearing on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” told host Lawrence O’Donnell he believed Pelosi was handling the situation “just brilliantly.” In an op-ed for The Washington Post published Monday, Tribe suggested the House vote to impeach Trump over the Ukraine scandal, but then hold off on transmitting the articles. He predicted it would strengthen Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) hand “in bargaining over trial rules” with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ― amid concerns of potential bias in a trial by Republicans ― because McConnell and Trump want “to get this whole business behind them.” McConnell has vowed to continue working with Trump’s defense team for the trial. O’Donnell on Thursday asked Tribe if this is “where you hoped we would be at this stage after passing the articles of impeachment?” “Exactly,” Tribe responded. “I hoped that my op-ed would encourage a dialogue generated by the fact that for the first time we have a majority leader who is going to be essentially the foreman of the jury and who promises to have his fingers crossed when he takes the oath.”

An article by Noah Feldman: Now that the House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald Trump, what is the constitutional status of the two articles of impeachment? Must they be transmitted to the Senate to trigger a trial, or could they be held back by the House until the Senate decides what the trial will look like, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has hinted? The Constitution doesn’t say how fast the articles must go to the Senate. Some modest delay is not inconsistent with the Constitution, or how both chambers usually work. But an indefinite delay would pose a serious problem. 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. Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution: The House must actually send the articles and send managers to the Senate to prosecute the impeachment. And the Senate must actually hold a trial.

Elizabeth Warren had a list for Hillary. In December 2014, Clinton’s team began worrying that Warren was reconsidering a presidential run and arranged a meeting between the two principals at Clinton’s home in Washington. Warren came in “aggressive” and “firing on all cylinders” catching Clinton off guard, said a Clinton official familiar with the meeting. She pressed Clinton to commit to not appointing Wall Street-friendly people to her administration, as Warren felt Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had done. After the meeting, Warren sent Clinton a list of people she wanted the campaign team to consult on economic policy in order to broaden their horizons beyond people like Robert Rubin and Michael Froman, high-ranking officials in the Bill Clinton and Obama administrations who had also worked at Citigroup. The list, recompiled by POLITICO based on the accounts of those involved, included a hodgepodge of sometimes obscure liberal academics and economists including MIT’s Simon Johnson, UConn’s James Kwak, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, Vanderbilt’s Ganesh Sitaraman (policy director for Warren’s 2012 campaign), University of Chicago’s Amir Sufi, U.C. Irvine’s Katie Porter and Vermont Law School’s Jennifer Taub [currently a visiting professor at HLS].

There’s been a lot of talk recently about what actually happened to former criminal and labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa following the release of “The Irishman.” Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, former senior U. S. Department of Justice official and author of “In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth,” joins host Ryan Wrecker to tell us what he knows about his family ties to the case. Next, we transition back to impeachment coverage featuring opinions from the listeners.

Harvard experts ponder some of the toughest questions in play for the presidency, Congress, public…

Moments after a historic vote to impeach President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House could at least temporarily withhold the articles from the Senate - a decision, she suggested, that could depend on how the other chamber chooses to conduct its trial on Trump's removal...The notion has been most prominently advocated by Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who has advised the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment process. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that "the public has a right to observe a meaningful trial rather than simply learn that the result is a verdict of not guilty."

An article by Cass Sunstein: Senator McConnell, meet Alexander Hamilton. In the last weeks, a lot of people who followed the hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives became familiar with Hamilton's definition of an impeachable offense as "the abuse of violation of some public trust." But nearly everyone has neglected Hamilton's brisk, essential discussion of the obligations of the U.S. Senate in impeachment trials - a discussion that casts a bright light on what Republicans and Democrats are obliged to do. The date was March 7, 1788. The occasion was the Federalist Papers - specifically, No. 65.

An article by Noah Feldman: The House of Representatives’ historic vote to impeach President Donald Trump comes near the end of the president’s third tumultuous year in office — which is also the third year of the prolonged stress test he’s been giving to the U.S. Constitution. It’s an occasion to check in on the most basic question that can be asked in a democracy: What is the state of our Constitution? The short answer is that the Constitution is, so far, holding up in the face of the most extended challenge to its principles and norms that it has confronted since World War II. The impeachment itself is actually a significant improvement in the Constitution’s performance. It signals that at least half the legislative branch — the House — is now taking seriously its own responsibility to uphold the Constitution in the face of presidential contempt for it.

Our Supreme Court will hear Donald Trump’s claim that if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue police could not investigate him. Yes, these are crazy times. In fighting a New York City investigation into whether Trump is a serial tax cheat, one of his lawyers argued in October that should he murder someone the authorities could not even collect evidence. However, lawyer George Consovoy added, Trump could be prosecuted after he leaves office...Indictment and trial are different from investigation. There is a reasonable argument that a sitting president cannot be tried criminally in a state court. The argument is that a  single state or county could tie up the federal government, undoing our Constitution’s scheme. Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, arguably our most eminent Constitutional scholar, says a president can be indicted, especially for a heinous criminal offense such as murder. There is fairly broad agreement among leading Constitutional scholars, and even Trump’s own lawyer Consovoy, that a president can be tried once he leaves office.

Two Minnesota agencies are ramping up their efforts to root out wage fraud by adding staffers to enforce a new state law that penalizes employers for exploiting their workers. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has added two lawyers to his office who will handle cases where companies are accused of cheating employees out of money they’re owed. Meanwhile, the state Department of Labor and Industry is hiring seven new staffers who will exclusively investigate such claims, after the state passed one of the nation’s toughest wage theft laws in August...Terri Gerstein, who helps states navigate wage and labor laws at Harvard’s School of Law, said cities and states nationwide are passing laws. “States and cities are really standing up in this area and feeling the need to be leaders and take action and protect their people because of the way the federal government is rolling back workers’ rights and has been less aggressive in protecting workers’ rights in some ways,” she said.

Some House Democrats are pushing Speaker Nancy Pelosi to withhold the articles of impeachment that are expected to be approved by the House Wednesday, an idea that has been championed by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe. The notion of impeaching Trump but holding the articles in the House, which could delay a trial in the Senate for months, has gained traction among some of the political left... "Senate rules requiring the House to 'immediately' present its articles of impeachment to the Senate clearly violate the constitutional clause in Article I giving each house the sole power to make its own rules. It's up to the House when and how to prosecute its case in the Senate," Tribe said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to commit Wednesday to delivering articles of impeachment to the Senate, citing concerns about an unfair trial on removing President Donald Trump from office. Senior Democratic aides said the House was “very unlikely” to take the steps necessary to send the articles to the Senate until at least early January, a delay of at least two weeks and perhaps longer...Pelosi’s remarks follow similar comments from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking lawmaker in the House, who said Democrats must discuss a last-ditch gambit to delay sending articles of impeachment to the Senate...Hoyer said Democratic colleagues have approached him in recent days, citing an op-ed by constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe in which he calls on Democrats to delay sending impeachment articles to the Senate until McConnell agrees to run a fairer process. “Under the current circumstances, such a proceeding would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal,” Tribe wrote. Notably, House Judiciary Committee Democrats huddled with Tribe earlier this month as they practiced behind closed doors for their series of impeachment hearings.

On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California and the Speaker of the House, opened the floor debate in an irreconcilable House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Donald Trump...The final tally will also exhibit anew the country’s unrelenting political divisions. In all likelihood, Trump will be acquitted next month, in a similarly one-sided, partisan manner, in the Senate. It is a depressingly predictable set of outcomes and one that will, inevitably, raise questions about both the point of the entire exercise and the wisdom of Pelosi’s decision to pursue impeachment in the first place...For all the second-guessing of Pelosi’s actions, it is difficult to conceive of a responsible alternative path to the one she chose...impeachment cannot function properly in an age of hyper-partisanship. “To succeed, an impeachment must transcend party conflict,” Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write in their book “To End a Presidency.” “Since the 1990s, however, impeachment has become increasingly entangled with the daily grind of partisan politics. As a result, the president’s political opponents are quick to frame their major disagreements in terms of impeachment. The president’s supporters, in turn, are quick to dismiss even legitimate impeachment talk as a partisan conspiracy to nullify the last election.”

Firing a customer isn't uncommon. But few can say they've done it under such an intense media spotlight - and personal internal struggle - as Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. This past August, the man accused of a mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, posted his manifesto on the online message-board 8Chan. Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and security firm, counted 8Chan among its thousands of customers. Weeks before taking his company public, Prince suddenly found himself in the middle of a national debate about free speech, wrestling with the decision to pull Cloudflare's services, which would practically assure 8Chan's removal from the internet. Prince didn't think his company should decide who can and can't publish on the web. Still, after debating the issue for 24 hours with his team, he ultimately decided 8Chan wasn't following the rule of law. Cloudflare would no longer offer the site its support services...his thoughtful decision making has been met with respect by others in the industry. Evelyn Douek, an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, commended Prince for "embracing the storm," and noted "he is committed to the hard task of defining a policy that Cloudflare can enforce transparently and consistently going forward."