Media Mentions

The framers of the 232-year-old U.S. Constitution played a central role in Wednesday’s impeachment hearing as constitutional law professors outlined the case for, and against, ousting Republican President Donald Trump...Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman said he believed the framers of the Constitution “would identify President Trump’s conduct as exactly the kind of abuse of office, high crimes and misdemeanors, that they were worried about. “And they would want the House of Representatives to take appropriate action and to impeach.”

In a somber six minute address to the nation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin drafting impeachment articles against the President of the United States because he violated his oath of office, and compromised US national security. In interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Laurence Tribe discussesTrump dismantling checks and balances.

As Democrats announce they're moving forward with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, we check in with WBUR senior news correspondent and retired federal judge and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: As the House of Representatives moves toward formulating articles of impeachment, it is vital that the options on the table not be misframed. It’s a dangerously false choice to think that the House Judiciary Committee must either adopt a broad, kitchen-sink approach or take a narrow, laser-focused perspective. Yes, narrow is better than broad for the purposes of focus and public understanding. But narrow mustn’t mean myopic. What makes President Trump uniquely dangerous is not that he has committed a single terrible act that meets the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense. Neither Russia-gate nor Ukraine-gate was a one-night stand, and the obstruction of justice that enabled Trump to get away with asking for and benefiting from Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election is of a piece with his defiance of congressional investigations that might enable him to get away with demanding Ukraine’s intervention in 2020.

Harvard University alum Madelyn Petersen explored her passions for business and human rights and community lawyering at Harvard Law School. She is currently interning with the Corporate Accountability Lab in Chicago before starting a clerkship with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Law professor Jonathan Turley, Republicans’ witness testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, did not make an impressive case against impeachment. He blatantly contradicted his position pre-President Trump that a criminal violation was not required for impeachment. Moreover, his main argument, namely that the House was moving too fast, leaves open the question as to whether in a few weeks or a month he might support impeachment. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe gave Turley poor marks, commenting on Twitter that Turley’s “call for solid evidence was a truism. He gave no reason at all to regard the evidence gathered by [Rep. Adam B. Schiff] as insufficient to establish impeachable offenses.” Tribe also tweeted that Turley made a fatal error in pointing out a “French mistress” would be a “thing of value” in a bribery case. Tribe observed, “Fake dirt on Biden was of way more value to Trump than any number of French (or Russian) mistresses. [Turley] has cooked Trump’s French goose.”

When Americans are not equally represented in our government, our democracy is endangered. That’s what’s happening now, argues law professor Lawrence Lessig in his latest book, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. “They,” Lessig tells me, refers both to our elected representatives, as well as the “voice” that they are representing. Lessig has been an outspoken critic of the Electoral College, campaign financing, and gerrymandering, and is a frequent commentator on these issues. In 2016, he took matters into his own hands, running for president on a platform of campaign finance reform. In his book, Lessig proposes some solutions to these problems, including penalties on states that suppress voters, incentives to end gerrymandering, and “civic juries,” which would be a system to have representative bodies make decisions on behalf of constituents. I spoke to Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, about the role of education in democracy and about why campaign funding is a critical obstacle to democracy, among other subjects. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Since the hearings began in earnest three weeks ago, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have argued over and over that President Trump’s behavior in asking Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden falls short of justifying the extreme sanction of impeachment. ... Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School told the committee that Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate Biden, a prospective 2020 opponent, “constitutes a corrupt abuse of the power of the presidency.” Quoting William Richardson Davie, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Feldman said Trump’s request embodies the framers’ central worry that a sitting president would “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself reelected.”

And now, here come the academics: Four of them, trailing their curricula vitae like billowing robes, ready to act as counsel for the Founding Fathers, who remain very dead but continue to haunt us. What would the founders think of us? What would they think of President Donald J. Trump, and the effort to impeach him? To find out, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a sort of seance Wednesday. “Some day we will no longer be alive, and we’ll go wherever it is we go — the good place or the other place,” said one of the Democrats’ witnesses, Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “And, you know, we may meet there [James] Madison and [Alexander] Hamilton, and they will ask us: ‘When the president of the United States acted to corrupt the structure of the republic, what did you do?’ ”

For another look at the story we've been covering all day. The House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on the impeachment inquiry. For more on what the law says about impeachment, we spoke to Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law Professor & Author of 'Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide'.

U.S. power industry stakeholders were sharply divided on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's proposal to relax its rules implementing the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, a more than 40-year-old law that requires electric utilities to buy power from cogeneration and small renewable energy plants. ... Meanwhile, comments submitted by Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative argued that the NOPR "pays lip service" to PURPA's requirement that the commission issue rules it "determines necessary to encourage" the development of QFs. "The commission suggests that in response to industry changes it may divorce the statute from its plain meaning and issue rules that will restrain QF growth," Harvard said. "But Congress's mandate to the commission is not contingent on industry conditions and does not expire."

About four hours into yesterday’s marathon impeachment hearings, Republican lawyer for the Judiciary Committee Paul Taylor delivered a sharp rebuke to the Democrats’ case for bringing articles of impeachment. For nearly nine hours, the committee would hear from four experts in constitutional law, three of whom testified in favor of impeaching Donald Trump. But Taylor had a trick up his sleeve: damning passages that he said came from two influential books on impeachment, written by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe and Washington superlawyer Neal Katyal, respectively. The problem: Neither passage was correct.

An article by Peter Brann: For many years, Maine’s gubernatorial election was held in the September of presidential election years. That made it a bellwether for the subsequent presidential election two months later — leading to the phrase, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Maine no longer conducts its gubernatorial election in September or even in presidential years. But Maine has taken the lead in a new way. In 2018, Maine became the first state in the country to conduct federal congressional elections using ranked-choice voting. Our experience shows that voters can and will embrace new ways of conducting elections, which could help improve voter turnout. Indeed, Maine saw more than 47 percent of its eligible voters cast ballots in the first general election using ranked-choice voting — a half-century high for midterm elections and substantially higher than the national average.

In an effort to educate the community about the impeachment process of President Donald Trump, Bennington College will host Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub in a public conversation on the impeachment hearings this Sunday at 6 p.m...Taub told the Banner she plans to orient people to where the impeachment process stands now, look at language pertaining to impeachment in the Constitution, and consider what the articles of impeachment were in the cases of former presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. "And [we'll] talk about where I think the House Judiciary Committee is going to head, in terms of articles [of impeachment] here," Taub said. "And then I also want to answer people's questions," she said. "I want to spend a lot of time doing that, because I think folks have a lot of questions. There's a lot coming at us."

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe explained during an MSNBC appearance that the reason Democrats are so intent on a speedy trial is that President Donald Trump is trying to fix the election for 2020 right now. Speaking to Lawrence O’Donnell, Tribe said that one of the strongest reasons for impeaching Trump is that he continues to do what he did with Russia because special counsel Robert Mueller said that he couldn’t indict Trump. In the case of Russia, there was an argument that the Trump team didn’t know what they were doing. By now, they should know that it is illegal to work with a foreign government on a US election. Yet, that’s what they’re doing by trying to manipulate Ukraine.

A religious discrimination lawsuit filed last month in federal court against a local union and Boston College is being hailed by anti-union groups for upholding individual workers' rights — and railed against by union advocates who say it's an attempt to weaken organized labor. The plaintiff, a Muslim electrician and member of Service Employees International Union 32BJ District 615, informed the school and the union last fall that his religious beliefs conflicted with being part of the union...The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation was involved in the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision, which made it illegal for public-sector unions to charge fees to workers who choose not to be union members, which is expected to drive down revenues. Labor advocates fear that if a similar case involving private-sector unions makes it to the Supreme Court, it could be devastating for the labor movement. The National Right to Work movement and its supporters are “trying to get cases before the Supreme Court to push the impact and the consequence of Janus as far as possible," said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday she would deliver an unusual public statement on the status of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Pelosi met behind closed doors with her Democratic caucus, asking, "Are you ready?" The answer was a resounding yes, according to those in the room...Three leading legal scholars testified Wednesday to the House Judiciary Committee that Trump's attempts to have Ukraine investigate Democratic rivals are grounds for impeachment, bolstering the Democrats' case...Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, said he considered it clear that the president's conduct met the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Said Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, "If what we're talking about is not impeachable ... then nothing is impeachable."

Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the framers of the Constitution created impeachment for actions that align "precisely" with what President Trump is accused of doing. "The framers reserved impeachment for situations where the president abused his office. … In particular, they were specifically worried about a situation where the president used his office to facilitate his own reelection," Feldman said. "... That is precisely what the framers anticipated."

When asked if there was sufficient evidence to charge President Trump with the high crime and misdemeanor of obstruction of Congress, Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School argued that "putting yourself above the law as president" is an impeachable offense.

Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on why he thinks President Donald Trump’s actions are impeachable.

An article by Cass Sunstein: What if the U.S. already had a Green New Deal, and nobody noticed? Between 2009 and 2016, that’s exactly what happened. The U.S. government did a great deal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a lot of fanfare, it restructured major components of the national economy in the process...A more ambitious step, going well beyond the first Green New Deal, would be to introduce new legislation calling for carbon taxes, the best and most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. The political obstacles would be formidable, but such taxes – starting low and increasing over time – could be a major part of a legislative climate package in early 2021.