Media Mentions

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe explained Friday why he believes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) plan to coordinate with President Donald Trump’s defense team in a Senate impeachment trial may backfire. ...Tribe told MSNBC’s Ari Melber the next day on “The Beat” that it was “disgusting” that McConnell looked like he “is going to conduct this trial as though he’s a member of the defense team.” “You know, it’s an ancient principle — centuries-old, actually over a millennium old — that you can’t be a judge on your own case, and effectively, to allow Donald Trump to call the shots violates that principle,” said the scholar, who has been advising top House Democrats on the impeachment process.

Donald Trump appears to have the full support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, leading many to believe that an impeachment trial in the Senate could never result in a conviction. Laurence Tribe, constitutional scholar and author of, ‘To End a Presidency,’ joins Joy Reid to discuss saying, ‘I do think the Democrats should press hard to make this a real trial.’

In recent years, the Northeast region has discussed matching state-driven climate ambitions with ISO-NE's market design. States are working to deploy greater amounts of renewable resources, and a group of U.S. senators from New England wrote ISO-NE about the adoption of renewable energy in the region on Nov. 18. Their letter came after many renewables advocates and states in the region were dismayed to see federal regulators allow a fuel capacity rule go into effect in ISO-NE... "It is not easy to engage on these issues, they're very technical," Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard University's Electricity Law Initiative, told Utility Dive. "A first step is just making people aware of the existence of this organization."

An article by Krista Oehlke '20: The Department of Justice on Oct. 15 proposed a rule that would enable the DNA collection of noncitizens in immigration detention and the transfer of that information into a national criminal database. The rule would affect the more than 40,000 people currently held in immigration detention facilities. Civil rights groups have already warned that the rule may implicate serious privacy concerns and denigrates the civil rights and liberties of the most vulnerable.

One of the biggest divides in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is whether Donald Trump is a cause or a symptom of the current dysfunction in American politics... Two new books -- "They Don't Represent Us," by Lawrence Lessig, and "The Great Democracy," by Ganesh Sitaraman -- are firmly in the big, structural change camp, making a strong case that there is no normal to go back to. "The crisis in America is not its president," Lessig writes in his opening pages. "Its president is the consequence of a crisis much more fundamental." That crisis is the state of democracy itself. You could fill an entire bookshelf with works about the crisis of democracy in the Trump era, but Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been eloquently hammering this point longer than most. He isolates the problem with American democracy to one word: "unrepresentativeness." Voter suppression undermines free and fair elections, gerrymandering allows politicians to pick their preferred electorate, the Senate and the Electoral College favor small states and swing states over the rest of the country and the post-Citizens United campaign-finance system gives a tiny handful of billionaires far more clout than the average small donor. "In every dimension, the core principle of a representative democracy has been compromised," he writes. This is by now a familiar critique, but Lessig tells it with skill, citing a plethora of studies and historical examples to make a persuasive case about the unrepresentativeness of America's political institutions. He suggests a wide range of policies to fix this, ranging from practical ideas like universal automatic voter registration and a $100 "democracy coupon" for every voter, to more controversial ones, like scrapping the Electoral College and reducing federal funding for states like Georgia that disenfranchise their voters.

In the future, the medication you take will not only be a matter between you and your doctor. Pills with built-in electronic sensors are already a reality in both Europe and the US, and in the future, they will fill pharmacy shelves. The new electronic pills can collect data, for example, on the state of the stomach and intestines, and this creates new opportunities for diagnosing diseases. The pills can also be used to monitor medication e.g. in patients with mental disorders. In an article published in Nature Electronics, a group of researchers point out that the use of the new electronic pills is not without problems. The researchers, Professor Timo Minssen and Assistant Professor Helen Yu from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen, together with Professor Glenn Cohen and CeBIL’s Research Fellow Sara Gerke from Harvard Law School, point out that the new methods of treatment create both ethical and legal challenges.

Hosted by June Grasso. Guests: Liam Denning, Bloomberg Opinion energy columnist: "Saudi Aramco’s $2 Trillion Dream Isn’t About Oil." Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "We Know What the Framers Thought About Impeachment." Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Facebook Just Can’t Seem to Beat the Russians." Faye Flam, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Satellites Are Changing the Night Sky as We Know It." Joe Nocera, Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Fannie and Freddie Make 30-Year Mortgages Possible."

This week, the House Judiciary Committee announced and approved two articles of impeachment. Why two instead of 10? Why is this process moving so quickly? And why are Democrats prioritizing trade deals the same week as impeachment? Vox’s Jen Kirby answers the key questions on Impeachment, Explained. Noah Feldman is a Harvard Law professor and one of the constitutional scholars who testified at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing. He joins me to talk about what he saw, what he learned, and the Republican argument that truly scared him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at combating anti-Semitism on college campuses. What could possibly be wrong with that? The answer is nothing — provided the directive is applied in a way that doesn’t infringe on the free speech rights of student groups that are critical of Israel. But the way the executive order is written opens the possibility for misuse, and the danger of chilling student speech on campus in a way that doesn’t serve the cause of fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism.

Advocates for students and veterans lauded a record $191 million settlement reached in a case against one of the country’s largest for-profit college chains this week as an important step forward in protecting students, but said the compensation was “a drop in the bucket” compared to the total debt borrowers owe. ... Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said federal student loans were "by far the largest component of debt created" by for-profit schools. "Unfortunately, because such enforcement actions are directed against the school, they don't directly cancel the loan debt," she said.

Every day, companies like Google remove links to online content in response to court orders, influencing the Internet search results we see. But what happens if bad actors deliberately falsify and submit court documents requesting the removal of content? Research using the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s Lumen database shows the problem is larger than previously understood. ... “From its inception and through its evolution, Lumen has played a foundational role in helping us to understand what’s behind what we see — and don’t see — online,” says Jonathan Zittrain ’95, the Berkman Klein Center’s faculty director, who worked with Wendy Seltzer to get the fledgling project off the ground in 2000.

On Cuomo Prime Time, Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted with the Democrats on drafting the articles of impeachment against President Trump, explains why they did not include bribery and extortion in the articles.

In the days before articles of impeachment were unveiled against President Donald Trump, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot claimed that a Trump impeachment would be the first of its kind. ..."Every scholar concedes that the presence or absence of a federal crime is beside the point when it comes to constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. "

It has often been observed that one of President Trump’s biggest allies in the impeachment battle is Fox News — that if Richard Nixon had enjoyed the benefit of such a powerful purveyor of propaganda, he wouldn’t have been driven from office. ... It’s not. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write, the framers designated the Senate for impeachment trials to create an “extraordinary court” composed of “the nation’s leading statesmen,” one up to the gravity of weighing “great offenses against the people.” The Senate would not be prone to factional pressure (senators have six-year terms) and would be independent of the president.

When you say someone has “no case,” it is usually meant figuratively, as in “they have a weak legal or factual position.” In the case of President Trump, Senate Republicans are making it clear that he literally has no case, no defense. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who has provided advice to House Democrats, tells me, “In a manner of speaking, perhaps this witness-free drama would be a ‘trial,’ but it wouldn’t be a trial as any ordinary speaker of English would use that word.” He adds, “True, under Nixon v. U.S., the Supreme Court wouldn’t interfere with the Senate’s determination, in its ‘sole power to try’ impeachments, that such an evidence-free proceeding constitutes a ‘trial.’ But reasonable people would surely know better.” He concludes, “The undeniable fact that the Supreme Court would let the Senate get away with such a fake ‘trial’ does not mean that it would actually comply with the genuine sense and basic purpose of the Constitution.”

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe discusses the theory of the case against Donald Trump amid the House’s consideration of the articles of impeachment.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Wednesday took apart a key Republican argument against the impeachment of President Donald Trump over the Ukraine scandal. Tribe, appearing on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” said some Republicans were “missing the point” by claiming abuse of power (one of two articles of impeachment that House Democrats have released against Trump, the other being obstruction of Congress) is “not a crime.” “It is the highest crime against the Constitution,” said Tribe. “And in this case the impeachment articles are carefully written to show the aggregating circumstances.” “This isn’t just using the president’s power to benefit himself,” Tribe added. “But it’s doing that in a way that endangers our national security and that corrupts the electoral process by inviting foreign involvement.” Tribe, who advised the House Judiciary Committee on how to draft the articles of impeachment, earlier explained why the articles were “the classic high crimes and misdemeanors.”

An article by Michael Klarman: The topic of this article is not politics or policy but rather democracy. Regardless of what one thinks of building walls at the border with Mexico, repealing Obamacare, or withdrawing the United States from the Paris accords on global climate change, one would think that Americans could agree on the importance of respecting certain basic norms of democracy. The evidence I cite in this article suggests that Trump is an existential threat to those norms. Yet he continues to enjoy strong backing from a little more than 40 percent of the American public and from 85 to 90 percent of the Republican Party. How can this be?

On Thursday, lawyers representing convicted 26-year-old Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, will go before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals to argue that their client did not receive a fair trial in 2015...They will further argue that Judge George O'Toole should not have allowed the trial to be held in Boston, since the city was widely viewed as a "victim" in the attack...O'Toole's former colleague on the federal bench, Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, said that keeping the case in Boston complicated the task of impaneling an impartial jury. "Boston was the victim and not just conceptually, but also everyone was victimized by the lockdown" that was ordered as police searched for the bombing suspects," Gertner said. "So there was a substantial question about whether the case should have been brought in Boston and a substantial question about timing, because the trial was actually taking place during the end of the second anniversary of the bombing when you couldn't go around the city without seeing 'Boston Strong.'"

As the semester ends, instructors at universities and community colleges around the country will begin placing their orders for next year’s textbooks. But not all professors will pay enough attention to something that students complain about: the outlandish prices of the books we assign...Teaching is a profession with its own ethical duties; students are both our charges and a captive market. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with assigning an expensive book if it is really worth the money and the alternatives are inadequate. But we at least owe our students the time to make sure we aren’t just absent-mindedly ripping them off. I long felt guilty teaching first-year criminal law out of a mediocre book that was both detested by my students and priced at $235. I gave up and switched to a free book from Harvard’s H2O project. It required work to switch, but it saved my students money and felt like a sweet liberation from a nasty racket.

In her new book, “When Should Law Forgive?,” Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor, explores the possibilities for the U.S. legal system to become…