Media Mentions

For decades after Watergate, the White House treated the Justice Department with the softest of gloves, fearful that any appearance of political interference would resurrect the specter of Attorney General John Mitchell helping President Richard M. Nixon carry out a criminal conspiracy for political ends...For the most part, modern presidents have stayed away from cases involving their friends or associates, at least publicly...One notable exception was President Barack Obama, who during the 2016 presidential campaign said that he did not believe that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a private email server but was guilty only of carelessness — remarks that Republicans immediately criticized as interference with an open F.B.I. investigation...But while Mr. Obama was guilty of a single lapse, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, Mr. Trump has continually injected himself into federal investigations and prosecutions involving his political friends and enemies. “Even assuming that Bill Barr is acting with integrity, it is impossible for people to believe that because the president is making him look like his political lap dog,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “Trump makes it impossible to have confidence in the department’s judgment.”

A federal judge gave his blessing to the US $26.5 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint on Feb. 11, several months after the deal got final antitrust approval from the U.S. government. A group of attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia had sued to try to block the merger, arguing it would reduce competition in the telecommunications industry and raise customer prices by billions of dollars. Let me add a third reason the judge should have blocked the deal: It will likely increase economic inequality....Anti-competitive behavior frequently arises when there is common ownership of corporations. The airline industry provides a great illustration of this. From 2013 to 2015, the same seven shareholders controlled 60% of United Airlines, 27.5% of Delta, 27.3% of JetBlue and 23.3% of Southwest. Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge argues this kind of common ownership of multiple companies in an industry is very likely to lead to anti-competitive prices. And that’s exactly what researchers have found. A 2018 paper showed that ticket prices are 3% to 11% higher due to common ownership, and studies of the banking and other industries have found similar effects.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Tuesday that landmark legislation passed in 1998 to protect innovation and free speech on the internet while still fighting copyright infringement needs to be updated and that he wants to craft a reform bill by the end of the year. Tillis, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s intellectual property panel, kick-started the process of updating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by convening a hearing with experts who talked about the pros and cons of the law as it operates today...There has been an exploding number of take-down notices under the law’s safe harbors, known as Section 512, he said....But Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment professor at Harvard Law School, opposed making the kinds of changes sought by those two witnesses, saying that even though “the system is by no means perfect ... like democracy, it's better than most of the alternatives that have been tried.” “Changes to 512 would be likely to make things much worse,” she said. Tushnet recommended, among other things, focusing on antitrust in copyright and telecom in any reform of the 1998 law.

Puppy toys should have nothing to do with car engines. But a recent court complaint says Amazon.com Inc. halted sales of a “puppy sleep aid” after being told a storefront selling on its marketplace infringed two patents—one registered in 1895, and another directed to a Japanese “combustion device.” “Neither patent is enforceable. Neither patent is owned by any Defendant,” the complaint says. As Amazon expands its reign over e-commerce and gets more aggressive about rooting out counterfeiting, it’s taking a more active role in judging intellectual property disputes between merchants on its platform... “Amazon, with its size, now substitutes for government in a lot of what it does,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment and copyright law professor at Harvard University. “It is being asked to run a judicial system, without the commitments to transparency and precedent of a real judicial system.” ...But “many of its initial attempts to deal with bad actors on its site, while clearly done in good faith, assumed that the initial set of bad actors (counterfeiters) was the problem to be dealt with, and its response then created a new set of opportunities for new kinds of bad behavior,” Tushnet said.

An article by Noah Feldman: Following a presidential tweet, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is poised to betray Robert Mueller’s independence — after the fact. Reportedly, Justice will retract the sentencing recommendation that was made yesterday to sentence Roger Stone for seven to nine years for lying to Congress and witness tampering. All four prosecutors quickly resigned from the case. The whole point of Mueller’s status as special prosecutor was to protect his investigation from improper White House influence. Now, Stone’s sentencing is being hijacked by direct presidential influence. None of this is normal. It’s not normal for the Justice Department to reverse a sentencing recommendation already submitted to court. It’s especially not normal when the decision follows the president tweeting that the sentence sought was too high. And it’s the trifecta of non-normalness when the person being sentenced was convicted of lying to protect the president in an investigation of whether the president colluded with a foreign power to get elected.

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: Twenty years ago at a Silicon Valley product launch, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy dismissed concern about digital privacy as a red herring: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” “Zero privacy” was meant to placate us, suggesting that we have a fixed amount of stuff about ourselves that we’d like to keep private. Once we realized that stuff had already been exposed and, yet, the world still turned, we would see that it was no big deal. But what poses as unsentimental truth telling isn’t cynical enough about the parlous state of our privacy. That’s because the barrel of privacy invasion has no bottom. The rallying cry for privacy should begin with the strangely heartening fact that it can always get worse. Even now there’s something yet to lose, something often worth fiercely defending. For a recent example, consider Clearview AI: a tiny, secretive startup that became the subject of a recent investigation by Kashmir Hill in The New York Times.

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: Last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously ripped up her copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on camera after he finished delivering it. Later, the president retweeted a video based on it. The video the president retweeted (and pinned) had been edited to appear like the speaker had been ripping up pages throughout the speech, as if reacting contemptuously to each American credited by name, like Tuskeegee Airman Charles McGee. An official from the speaker's office has publicly sought to have Facebook and Twitter take down the video, since it's not depicting something real. So should Twitter and Facebook take it down? As a starting point for thinking about this, it helps to know that the video isn't legally actionable. It's political expression that could be said to be rearranging the video sequence in order to make a point that ripping up the speech at the end was, in effect, ripping up every topic that the speech had covered.

Companies that sell your cellphone location data to marketers are also selling that information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the government body known for detaining children in cages. According to a new report by the Wall Street Journal, ICE and its affiliated organizations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been using location information for “millions” of cellphones bought from marketers to track down and arrest undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border...The data they’re using doesn’t include personally identifiable information like a user’s name, but rather an anonymized alphanumeric ID. Still, as a New York Times investigation into this type of data showed late last year, it’s pretty easy to figure out who someone is based solely on their location... “Even though they say it’s anonymous, when compiling different datasets together it gives you a very detailed picture of who you are, better than even you have,” Dragana Kaurin, a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, told Recode. “This data can be used to discriminate against people by race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation or class,” she added, giving the example of how you could figure out someone is, say, Muslim based on their shopping at Halal markets or visiting mosques.

Facebook and Twitter have rejected a request by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remove a video posted by President Trump that was edited to make it appear as though she were ripping a copy of his State of the Union address as he honored a Tuskegee airman and other guests. The decision highlighted the tension between critics who want social media platforms to crack down on the spread of misinformation and others who argue that political speech should be given wide latitude, even if it’s deceptive or false...The video isn’t legally actionable and shouldn’t be taken down, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and a founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. But, he said, Facebook and Twitter should probably label the video. “It’s important for social media sites that have massive reach to make and enforce policies concerning manipulated content, rather than abdicating all responsibility,” Professor Zittrain said. Labeling is helpful, he added, because “even something that to most people clearly appears to be satire can be taken seriously by others.”

2040. Sure, it sounds like a long way off, but in a quick two decades today's law students and fresh-faced associates will be the ones presiding over a legal industry that could be almost unrecognizable from the one we see today. Just consider the massive amount of change that has happened since the turn of the century. The iPhone has put lawyers on a shorter tether to clients and given associates and judges alike a legal library in the palm of their hands. The recession and globalization have given in-house counsel a higher standing in the legal hierarchy and driven BigLaw firms into a race to get bigger and cover more international ground, all while upending the traditional partnership track. “My own sense is that the change we have seen over the last 20 years is likely to look very small compared to the changes coming over the next 20 years,” said David Wilkins, director of Harvard University’s Center on the Legal Profession.

There's no disputing that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caused quite a stir when she tore up her copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech at the end of his address. Pelosi said she decided to shred what she saw as a “compilation of falsehoods” to make a statement ”that clearly indicates to the American people that this is not the truth." Trump and his Republican allies, for their part, saw Pelosi's action as an act of disrespect — and an illegal one at that. Legal experts disagreed, saying the speech was Pelosi's to do with what she wanted...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Pelosi did not violate 18 U.S. Code Section 2071, the federal law defining the deliberate destruction of an official record that has been filed with a court or other government agency — a felony punishable by a prison term and by forfeiture of office.

An article by Cass Sunstein: How do you debunk a conspiracy theory? Suppose people think that Israel carried out the 9/11 attacks or that the moon landing was faked. Or that Koch money or Hillary Clinton or Pete Buttigieg was behind the Iowa caucus fiasco, or that the coronavirus comes from a fiendish plot by multinational corporations. Conspiracy theorists tend to be emotionally invested in their beliefs, meaning that if you contradict them, you might make them angry. And if you offer them evidence that they’re wrong, you might make them angrier still – and so strengthen their commitment to their belief. Social scientists have found that, in some contexts, corrections actually backfire. If, for example, people still think that the Affordable Care Act contains death panels, a correction can make those people even more certain that the law contains death panels. One reason is that when people are told they’re wrong, they are immediately put on the defensive, and they work hard to defend their beliefs. Another reason is pure suspicion: Why would anyone bother to deny it, if it isn’t true?

On Jan. 29, attorneys from the Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC) submitted a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on behalf of their client, Reihana Emami Arandi, an Iranian student who was denied entry to the United States despite having a valid visa to attend the Harvard Divinity School. The complaint details extensive discriminatory behavior and regulatory violations by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that began upon Ms. Emami Arandi’s arrival at Logan Airport on September 18, 2019...“Ms. Emami Arandi suffered, and continues to suffer, lasting trauma due to CBP’s egregious violations of its own regulations and procedures,” said Sabi Ardalan ’02, clinic director. “CBP’s abuse of discretion in repeatedly denying entry and revoking valid visas of students from the Middle East based on unfounded allegations of immigrant intent requires investigation.”

Two college students from Iran have filed civil rights complaints with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, saying they were mistreated and illegally denied entry into the country by federal officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Shahab Dehghani, who attends Northeastern University, and Reihana Emami Arandi, who had been set to start classes at Harvard University, recently filed separate complaints with the agency’s civil rights office, requesting the agency investigate the conduct of Customs and Border Protection officials...Arandi [who is represented by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program], is a 35-year-old incoming graduate student at Harvard’s Divinity School, said in her complaint filed Jan. 30 that she was detained at Logan Airport on Sept. 18 and questioned for nearly eight hours about her work, family, travel and opinions about recent events in the Middle East.

With headlines declaring 2019 the year that the world woke up to climate change, Aminta Ossom ’09 sees hope in approaching the issue from a specific angle: human rights. “Human rights has a lot to offer the climate change movement because it’s a way to humanize the issue. It becomes less scientific or technical and more accessible,” she said. “The human rights approach also says that everyone has a buy-in and should have a say. Everyone is a potential victim of the effects of climate change,” she added. After years working at Amnesty International and the United Nations, Ossom returned to Harvard Law School this fall to teach in the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), where one of her projects focuses on how human rights organizations are advising governments on climate change. The new clinical instructor, who self-identifies as a “regional human rights systems nerd,” had not originally planned on a career in law.

A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed Democratic lawmakers' lawsuit against President Donald Trump alleging he has violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution on technical grounds. ...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and constitutional expert, tweeted after the ruling, “Individual members of the House and Senate lack standing to sue Trump to stop his Foreign Emoluments Clause violations — but the House could sue for institutional injury. It should now do so.”

Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. This month, with Overlooked, we’re adding their stories to our archives. When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. ...“This case is infamous for several reasons,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in a telephone interview. “First, separate is almost never really equal. Second, separate is symbolically and psychologically unequal when it is recognized to have the social meaning that whites are too good to mix with blacks, or that one race is essentially superior to the other.”

Janet Wu joins the conversation as Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe talks about the impeachment and acquittal of the President, and its implications for the future (22:12)

One could hardly be surprised that self-identified pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — who talked herself into supporting the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the grounds that the conservative jurist, picked off a list approved by right-to-lifers, would uphold Roe v. Wade (!) — would concoct some rationalization for voting to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial. In spinning out an embarrassingly weak argument for her decision to side with her party, she confirmed Tuesday on the Senate floor that the notion of an independent-minded New England Republican is as dead as Vermonter Calvin Coolidge. ...“Many GOP Senators announcing their reasons for acquittal on the Senate floor today are relying on alleged process failures or on doubts that Trump did what the House alleges he did,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “That’s misguided and in many instances seems dishonest. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as relying on the wholly unfounded and genuinely crackpot theory that the offenses charged are just not impeachable — either because ‘abuse of power’ as such is an improperly framed ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ or because the specific conduct alleged does not constitute the kind of abuse that is impeachable.”

The US House of Representatives will vote on a bill on Thursday to protect US workers’ right to form and join unions that supporters are calling the “most ambitious pro-labor legislation” in decades and one Republican congressman has dismissed as “the worst bill in congress”. ... “There is a crisis in our country regarding income inequality and workers’ ability to exercise their countervailing power,” said Sharon Block, the co-director of Clean Slate for Worker Power, an initiative of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. “I think the Pro Act is the most ambitious pro-labor legislation we’ve seen in years, decades maybe. There is an urgency to start to fix the problem the Pro Act addresses, but it can’t be the end of the conversation of what we need to do for workers to rebuild or build countervailing power, as we see this incredible increase of corporate power, the influence of corporations, and the wealthy’s influence on our political system.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stood stiff and tight-lipped, no hint of a smile, as President Trump stopped to shake hands Tuesday evening in the House chamber, just prior to his State of the Union address. ... Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, a Democrat and a friend of Roberts’ since law school, who sometimes teaches a class with him during the court’s summer break, said, “Perhaps not surprisingly, I think he did an excellent job under perilous conditions.” “Would I personally prefer to see Donald Trump convicted by the Senate? Yes,” Lazarus said. “But that was not the chief’s job. That was the Senate’s job. And the chief did his job well. The Senate did not.”