Media Mentions

An op-ed 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. Here are a few highlights: - The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation required both cars and trucks to become a lot more fuel-efficient. The greening of the fleet produced substantial cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  It was weirdly cold in the room — that was the only thing everyone could agree on. Somehow, despite the bright lights and television cameras in the hearing room where I and three other law professors were testifying on the potential impeachment of President Donald Trump, the temperature remained somewhere between freezing and seriously freezing. It was so cold that the ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, Doug Collins, took valuable time out of his opening statement to complain about it. The spectacle of four law professors trying to speak on behalf of the Constitution affected each viewer differently. I’ve never received so many warm, supportive messages before; it’s also been years since I’ve been the target of so much raw hate and contempt, much of it along exactly the lines you’d imagine. It’s also a fascinating experience to be subjected to truly bizarre and spontaneously invented conspiracy theories. But that’s a topic for another day.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Of particular interest to me in this week’s House impeachment hearing was a moment when the chief counsel for the Republicans read aloud a quote about the dangers of a purely partisan, policy-based impeachment of a sitting president. This was from page 140 of my book with Joshua Matz, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.” The passage continued by describing the even greater dangers posed by a purely partisan, personality-driven refusal to impeach and remove a president who has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the Republican counsel left out that part. After weeks of House impeachment hearings that resume Monday, Republican defenders of President Donald Trump have contented themselves with pointless, time-wasting calls for roll call votes; baseless complaints about the process, which was the most protective of a sitting president in the nation’s history; and deliberate distortions of what others had written or said. It all amounted to nonsense in the face of a deadly serious matter.

Some of the country’s largest foundations and billionaire philanthropists want to upend the very system that allowed them to build massive endowments and personal fortunes. Among wealthy donors and foundation heads there is a growing belief that capitalism, the financial engine that put Ford cars in driveways and Hewlett-Packard printers on office desktops nationwide needs to be rewired. The relentless pressure on companies to serve up quarterly profits to shareholders has widened the gap between the superrich and the rest of the country, they say, and made one of philanthropy’s main jobs — fixing social problems — even harder. ... Omidyar has also supported policy change. The grant maker is also pushing for rules to allow employees to unionize industrywide, rather than employer by employer and has expressed an interest in the work of Clean Slate for Worker Power, a program at Harvard University that will present a proposed revamp of national labor policy in January.

An expanded form of the testimony Noah Feldman delivered to the House Judiciary Committee on December 4, 2019. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: I’m here today at the request of the Committee to describe why the framers of our Constitution included a provision for impeaching the president; what that provision means; and how it applies to the pressing question before you and the American people: whether President Donald J. Trump has committed impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I will begin by stating my conclusions: The framers provided for impeachment of the president because they wanted the president, unlike the king, to be controlled by law, and because they feared that a president might abuse the power of his office to gain personal advantage, corrupt the electoral process, and keep himself in office. “High crimes and misdemeanors” are abuses of power and public trust connected to the office of the presidency. On the basis of the testimony presented to the House Intelligence Committee, President Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors by corruptly abusing the office of the presidency. Specifically, President Trump abused his office by corruptly soliciting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals in order to gain personal advantage, including in the 2020 presidential election.

Imagine you have before you a blank sheet of paper. All existing copyright legislation, the whole history of property laws relating to creative works, has been completely erased. It’s up to you to rewrite it from scratch. Where would you start?...As Harvard law scholar Ruth Okediji put it in her brilliant keynote lecture on the festival’s Friday afternoon, “in important material respects, copyright law has written out creators.” Musicians, she claimed, were far more likely to find themselves the victims of copyright law than its beneficiaries – especially musicians from indigenous communities, or from the global south, or from impoverished communities in the global north. This is at least partly due to what Okediji called copyright’s “literary bias”. Copyright law was initially created to deal with written works and only somewhat uneasily transposed to the realm of music. Since then, the question of what is copyrightable in a work of music has tended to repeat this literary bias by favouring those elements that can easily be represented in writing – that is, for the most part, the melody and the harmony. The dots on the stave. But this is a prejudice catastrophically unfit for purpose when dealing with pop music. It has, in Okediji’s words, “created a hierarchy within creative circles” and “systematically underserved the vast majority of world cultures.”

Here's the Radio Boston rundown for Dec. 5. Tiziana Dearing is our host...As Speaker Pelosi moves forward with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, we check in with WBUR senior news correspondent Kimberly Atkins and retired federal judge, senior lecturer and Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

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."