Media Mentions

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey is hoping to introduce legislation sometime next week aimed at reducing barriers for those who want to donate food. Toomey, R-Pa., on Monday toured New Bethany Ministries, 333 W. Fourth St., Bethlehem and discussed a bill that, if approved, would extend liability protection for reduced-price food and direct donations. Toomey is partnering with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on the bipartisan legislation and is working with local food banks, as well as the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Feeding America, Feeding PA, 412 Food Rescue, and Philabundance to finalize the language of the bill. The announcement comes just days before Thanksgiving and when several Lehigh Valley food banks and pantries are often in need.

Amid the pressure of a House impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump has continued to stoke the idea that he’s the victim of a coup — shorthand for "coup d’etat," a French term that means the overthrow of the government...The key element of a coup is that it is carried out beyond the bounds of legality...Impeachment is explicitly described in the Constitution as the way to remove a president who has committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told us that you can’t get much more within the bounds of legality than an explicit power outlined in the Constitution. "It’s obviously not a coup for the House to launch impeachment proceedings," Klarman told us in early October.

Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, WBUR's legal commentator, and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, walks us through what we learned from the impeachment hearings last week and what's next.

Over the course of a few short years, a technological revolution shook the world. New businesses rose and fell, fortunes were made and lost, the practice of reporting the news was reinvented, and the relationship between leaders and the public was thoroughly transformed, for better and for worse. The years were 1912 to 1927 and the technological revolution was radio...Those models, and the ways they shaped the societies from which they emerged, offer a helpful road map as we consider another technological revolution: the rise of the commercial internet...Facebook and other companies have pioneered sophisticated methods of data collection that allow ads to be precisely targeted to individual people’s consumer habits and preferences...When Facebook users were shown that up to six of their friends had voted, they were 0.39 percent more likely to vote than users who had seen no one vote. While the effect is small, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain observed that even this slight push could influence an election—Facebook could selectively mobilize some voters and not others. Election results could also be influenced by both Facebook and Google if they suppressed information that was damaging to one candidate or disproportionately promoted positive news about another.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Where do dogs come from? What is their relationship to wolves? Where do Homo sapiens come from? What is our relationship to other human species such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus? Why do dogs flourish as wolves struggle to survive? Why are we the only remaining humans? New research suggests that these diverse questions have a single answer. In brief: Dogs are far less likely than wolves to respond to challenges with violence (or by running away). Or, in more technical terms, they show low levels of “reactive aggression” in social interactions. As compared to extinct human species, Homo sapiens show precisely the same thing. As a result, we — you and I — are uniquely capable of trust and cooperation. That’s the basis of our evolutionary triumph.

Harvard Law School Professor and former Dean Martha Minow has taught generations of lawyers – including former President Obama – about the power of the law and how a sentence can best match a crime. She sits down with Michel to discuss how the American legal system, whose rate of incarceration is the highest in the world, could use a little compassion.

A group of conservative-leaning lawyers criticized Attorney General William P. Barr for the expansive view of presidential power he espoused in a recent speech and for his conclusion this spring that President Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation...Mr. Barr’s view on executive power is a misreading of the unitary executive theory, said Charles Fried, a Checks and Balances member and Harvard Law professor who endorsed the theory while he was solicitor general during the Reagan administration. In Mr. Fried’s reading of the theory, “the executive branch cannot be broken up into fragments.” While that branch acts as a unified expression of a president’s priorities, with the president firmly at the helm, “it is also clear that the executive branch is subject to law,” Mr. Fried said. “Barr takes that notion and eliminates the ‘under law’ part.”

An article by Noah Feldman: As a loyal American, I naturally want to side with the Duchess of Sussex (née Meghan Markle) in her growing feud with the British tabloid press. Yet the lawsuit that the Duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, have brought against the Mail on Sunday raises serious questions about the freedom of press. Difficult as it is to find anything sympathetic to say about tabloids, they do consistently test the boundaries of free speech — and in this insistence, there really is reason to think that it would be bad for the free flow of information if the royals were to win their lawsuit. To those accustomed to reading about libel lawsuits focused on salacious facts, the content of the material under dispute in the Sussex lawsuit seems remarkably tame. The central legal claim has to do with a letter the weekend edition of the Daily Mail published from Meghan to her estranged father, presumably provided to the newspaper by the father himself.

Some people are fuming at Facebook for allowing unfiltered political ads, while others are fuming at Twitter for banning them. There’s lots of confusion and speculation, but what we know is that these social media companies have fundamentally changed how people exchange information. What we need to figure out is whether they also change how people spread disinformation — and if so, how to fix it. It’s a question researchers are actively investigating. After “fake news” became the catchphrase of the 2016 election, experts in psychology, political science, computer science and networks stepped up research on disinformation, learning in more detail how it travels through social media and why some things stick in people’s heads...There’s little evidence that targeted ads have the power to change minds or votes, says Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, co-author of the book “Network Propaganda.” Belief in targeted ads in general is more faith-based than evidence-based, he says. Advertisers assume the targeting causes people to buy things — though this is far from proven.

President Lawrence S. Bacow emailed the community on November 21 to announce an “initiative on Harvard and the legacy of slavery,” backed by an initial $5 million in funding and overseen by a faculty committee led by Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Paul professor of constitutional law and professor of history. ... Joining Brown-Nagin and Beckert on the presidential committee are: Annette Gordon-Reed, Warren professor of American legal history and professor of history; ... Martha Minow, 300thAnniversary University Professor (former Law School dean);

The Democrats brought their last witnesses in the public impeachment hearings Thursday, with President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill using her time to directly confront Republicans on the committee who she said have used the television time to push false conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the 2016 election. Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and R.J. Lyman, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Gordon Sondland implicated Trump and other top administration officials refusing to testify in the plot to bribe Ukraine as Democrats weigh the next steps in the impeachment inquiry. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that Democrats should not delay the inquiry while they fight witness subpoenas because Trump's stonewalling can be used as obstruction: "The evidence is all there and there's nothing left to do but collate it into articles of impeachment."

An op-ed by by Joseph Kristol '09 and Stephen Petraeus '21 (Kristol is a former Marine Corps officer. Petraeus is a former Army officer. Both served combat tours in Afghanistan as infantry platoon leaders.): “I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.” So said retired Marine Corps general Jim Mattis during remarks at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco in 2014. The line strikes a chord with us, as we’re sure it would with the great majority of veterans with whom we served. We’ve all, by and large, been trying simply to navigate the sometimes challenging transition to civilian life — finishing school, finding a good job, raising a family — without the added challenge of being perceived by our peers as “damaged goods,” “ticking time bombs” or “killing machines.” While no president could ever shake our pride in our military service, we fear that President Trump’s recent decision to pardon two service members involved in war crimes cases and reverse disciplinary action against another — and his stated motives for doing so — will damage Americans’ perception of the military, encouraging the view that veterans are “broken.”

For decades, when you applied for an apartment, the landlord—or a tenant screening company hired by the landlord—would examine your credit file and pay stubs to verify your ability to pay rent. But today, landlords are using the artificial intelligence revolution to predict something else: Your willingness to pay rent. ... Mutale Nkonde, an AI policy adviser and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, sees “red flags” in algorithmic tenant screening. Bias worms its way into algorithms via “proxies,” or characteristics that are more common to one group of people than another, she said. While companies may claim their algorithms don’t contain such proxies, that is hard to verify. “Because the algorithms are protected by intellectual property laws, we have no way of scrutinizing them,” Ms. Nkonde said.

A 33-year-old orangutan awarded “non-human” personhood rights in a landmark 2015 court decision in Argentina has settled into a new home in Florida...Sandra landed at the center this month because she’s a hybrid of two orangutan subspecies, and Indonesia, one of the native environments for orangutans — where most preferred sanctuaries are located — has banned orangutans like her from its sanctuaries. As part of implementing Sandra's new rights, the Argentinian judge wanted her to live at an accredited facility — and the Florida center was the only one in the Americas that met those standards. Her arrival has raised the hopes of US activists who are trying to match the successes of lawyers who turn to the courts to fight for animal rights around the world...“You almost get a sense that judges are really looking for reasons not to do what he's asking,” said Kristen Stilt, director of the animal law and policy clinic at Harvard Law School. “One of the reasons is they're just being transferred to another form of captivity. They're not being freely released.”

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicated numerous senior officials and President Trump in a plan to extort Ukraine: No White House meeting until the Ukrainians announced an investigation into nonexistent dirt on former vice president Joe Biden...Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to Sondland, played a key role in the plot and in obstruction of Congress. As such, Pompeo needs to appear as a witness or face impeachment himself... “The Sondland testimony puts Pompeo (as well as Trump, of course) squarely inside impeachment territory — and, under a normal Justice Department, in indictment territory as well,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “There is no [Office of Legal Counsel] memo suggesting that a sitting secretary of state is immune from indictment and prosecution, and this one was deeply engaged, if Sondland is to be believed, in a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion, to violate federal election law against foreign interference, and to obstruct justice, including obstructing congressional investigations.”

Since the head of Bolivia’s armed forces “suggested” to Evo Morales that he resign the presidency on Nov. 10, following contested elections in October that were marred by allegations of fraud, Bolivia has been in a tense limbo. Two days after the military’s nudge, Morales arrived in Mexico, where authorities had granted him political asylum. In La Paz, the conservative vice president of the Senate, Jeanine Anez, declared herself his replacement. Street clashes and crackdowns on protesters have escalated since then. Can the new government, which insists it is only transitional while acting otherwise, establish its legitimacy and reduce the risk of deeper unrest? ... “This is part of the dramatic spike in violence in Bolivia since Evo Morales was forced to resign,” said Thomas Becker, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic who has worked extensively on human rights issues in Bolivia. He interviewed the survivors of the Sacaba attack the next day. “I heard dozens of accounts of soldiers shooting unarmed civilians, including individuals providing assistance to other injured people,” he told me. “People reported that soldiers beat protesters while yelling racial slurs at them, which only escalates an already tense situation.”

An article by Noah Feldman: A liberal group has criticized Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh for meeting last month with an anti-gay-rights activist whose organization had filed a “friend of the court” brief in a major gay-rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The group’s director has even called for the justices to recuse themselves. Brian Brown, the activist who met with the justices and runs the National Organization for Marriage, would appear to hold some seriously wrong beliefs. But the objection to justices meeting with people who have filed such briefs is misconceived. Friends of the court aren’t parties to a litigation in the ordinary sense. They’re independent groups or individuals sharing their views with the justices. There’s no scandal if justices interact with them. More fundamentally, the justices shouldn’t be shuttered away from the world like cloistered monks and nuns. It’s valuable for them to meet and talk with all kinds of people, including ideological advocates.

In his new book, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that American democracy is broken not only because of partisanship in Washington, but also because the American system of government does not properly ensure representation under the ideal of "one person, one vote." To discuss what ails us — and how to potentially fix it — Jim Braude was joined by Lessig to discuss "They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy."

As Etelvina Ramos Mamani recovered from giving birth in her home in the rural highlands of Bolivia, a military sharpshooter fired a single bullet through her small bedroom window, striking her 8-year-old daughter Marlene in the chest. The woman held her daughter as she died. The 2003 killing was one of many atrocities committed during a period of unrest in Bolivia sparked by the government's exploitation of the country's natural gas deposits...A federal jury in Fort Lauderdale unanimously found the officials liable for the slayings and awarded damages to the families of eight victims in April 2018. But the judge, saying the evidence presented during the monthlong trial wasn't enough to sustain the verdict, later overturned the jury's finding. The victims' families appealed the judge's decision, and their attorneys will present oral arguments before three judges this morning in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. "We are asking the court to reinstate the jury verdict," says Beth Stephens, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that has been litigating the case together with the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and various private firms.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was once very reluctant on impeachment, but has now used the term ‘bribery’ to describe communications between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, in discussion of possible impeachable offenses. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to discuss this and more regarding the impeachment inquiry of the president.