Media Mentions

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.

An article by Michael Klarman: On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will convene a panel of constitutional scholars to provide historical context for the impeachment inquiry and particularly the meaning of the Constitution’s impeachment standard of “treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors.” Were I appearing on that panel, this is what I would say: Much of the research for the statement derives from my work on “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution." On July 25, 2019, President Trump asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for “a favor.” Considering the evidence unearthed by the House Intelligence Committee in its totality, and keeping in mind that impeachment proceedings do not require us to suspend our common sense, it is clear that President Trump conditioned a much sought-after White House visit for the Ukrainian president, as well as the delivery of nearly $400 million appropriated by Congress for Ukrainian defense, on the Ukrainian government’s doing Trump two personal favors.

Some observers of the impeachment hearings conducted under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee bizarrely concluded that the proceedings lacked “pizzazz.” While that is a ridiculous metric for evaluating an inquiry into gross misconduct by the president, no one will find the report on those hearings and on other evidence boring. It’s got pizzazz to spare...Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe comments, “The evidence of those suspicious Giuliani phone calls with [Vladimir] Putin-linked thugs reinforces the overwhelming case that the American president was directing a criminal conspiracy to conscript US military aid and the august powers of his office to benefit himself and his own reelection at the expense of the national security.” He adds, “If this isn’t impeachable and removable conduct, we’re done as a constitutional republic.”

Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, is part of a vanishing breed, a public intellectual equally at ease with writing law review articles, books aimed at both popular and scholarly audiences and regular opinion columns, all leaning left but with a distinct contrarian streak. In October, he declared that the country was in a constitutional crisis, caused by the events that followed the disclosure of a July 25 phone call between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine...With years of teaching constitutional law at some of the country’s most elite institutions, Mr. Feldman will bring a deep analysis of different aspects of the Constitution and a lot of historical context. A prolific writer, he has written eight books and been published broadly, including in The New York Times Magazine and Bloomberg News. And he has been outspoken about his views that the country is in a crisis without a simple solution to resolve it.

You hear it constantly: President Trump is a “Russian dupe.” Republicans spreading lies about Ukrainian interference in 2016 are Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiots.” By getting Trump to adopt those lies rather than admit to Russian interference, the Russian leader has skillfully played on Trump’s “ego.” As the impeachment inquiry heads into its next phase, such phrases will be everywhere. In a New York Times editorial that excoriates Trump and Republicans over the Ukraine lie, we get this: “In Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin found the perfect dupe to promote even the most crackpot of theories.” It’s time for a reconsideration of this concept...We now know that the lie about Ukrainian interference has been a mainstay of self-absolving Russian propaganda for years. But Trump hasn’t been duped into spreading it. He explicitly recognizes an alliance of his own interests with those of Russia in doing so (and in procuring whatever other outside help he can) in corrupting U.S. liberal democracy for his own malevolent self-interested purposes. This has implications for impeachment. As Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman will argue to the Judiciary Committee, impeachment binds the president to the rule of law, as a remedy against abuses of power to advance nakedly corrupt self interest.

An animal rights group has filed a federal complaint against Harvard Medical School after learning that a monkey died of strangulation at a research facility this summer. Stop Animal Exploitation Now filed an official complaint against the school on Nov. 30, saying it failed “to handle animals as expeditiously and carefully as possible in a manner that does not cause trauma” and did not list “any primates used in projects causing unrelieved pain/distress” in annual reports to the US Department of Agriculture...Last month, animal rights advocates, including a Harvard Law School program, sued the US Department of Agriculture, alleging that the agency failed to ensure adequate living conditions for primates, including rhesus macaques, baboons, and marmosets.“We are bringing this case to compel the USDA to put in place clear, enforceable laws that will ease the burden of suffering on non-human primates, some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom,” said Brett Richey '21, a Harvard Law School student who helped file the lawsuit on behalf of the school’s new Animal Law and Policy Clinic. “These animals deserve our protection.”

House Democrats take on the task of deciding whether President Trump’s campaign for Ukraine to launch investigations aimed at American political players constitutes grounds for impeachment, an effort that will put the focus on a cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution and test the unity of the Democratic caucus. The Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee hears Wednesday from four law professors—three called by Democrats and one by Republicans—to help frame the debate...Noah Feldman, a Harvard University law professor who also testifies Wednesday, came to a similar conclusion. “President Trump’s conduct described in the testimony and evidence clearly constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under the Constitution,” he said in prepared testimony. “President Trump abused his office by soliciting the president of Ukraine to investigate his political rivals in order to gain personal political advantage, including in the 2020 presidential election.”

An article by Annie Hollister '20: During my first year at Harvard Law School, a professor of mine won a prestigious academic award. The prize, he told us, was a research grant so large he didn’t know what to do with it. Did we have any suggestions? At the time, the law school was paying me $11.50 per hour to conduct research for him. My professor’s question provided a striking reminder of the gulf between the university’s wealth and power and its treatment of student workers. One week later, I joined thousands of other Harvard students in voting to form the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW. Now, on Tuesday, almost 18 months after our union was certified, we are going on strike to demand a fair first contract.

Noah Feldman literally wrote the book on constitutional law. The Harvard Law School professor, who will be one of four academics testifying Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee as it probes the legal grounds for impeaching President Trump, coauthored the textbook “Constitutional Law.” But that is only the tip of the iceberg of the prolific writing of the prominent public intellectual. He coauthored another textbook, on the First Amendment, as well as seven other nonfiction books that covered topics ranging from President James Madison to America’s “church-state problem” to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. The Boston native is also a Bloomberg News opinion columnist and hosts a podcast called “Deep Background.” He has contributed to the New York Times magazine and New York Review of Books. And he does not shy away from various media appearances. Feldman “specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory,” according to the Harvard Law website.

Republicans have decided that the most corrupt president in U.S. history is an international corruption fighter. Instead of grappling with evidence of Trump’s fixation on former vice president Joe Biden and bag man Rudolph W. Giuliani’s plotting to force Ukraine to smear Biden, the Republicans have decided to ignore uncontradicted evidence...The Republicans’ 123-page report asserts that Trump “has a deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption” and aversion to foreign aid, and that public criticism by Ukrainian officials justified his suspicion. The defense is ludicrous for a batch of reasons. First, for a guy so concerned about corruption, he never mentioned it. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe observes, “Trump never raised a concern with corruption as such on any call with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky or anyone else.” The Obama administration was interested in fighting corruption and deployed Biden to, for example, pressure Ukraine to oust a corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Trump thought this was awful and wanted to investigate Biden for doing this.

The National Association of Law Placement has agreed to start including in its directory information about the use of arbitration and nondisclosure agreements at law firms, according to an announcement Monday by the People's Parity Project, which lobbied for the change. According to the announcement, NALP will include three new questions in its 2020 survey of legal employers, providing attorneys and law students with insight into the organization's policies around workplace misconduct, nondisclosure agreements and mandatory arbitration agreements. "Making information about which firms use forced arbitration more accessible to all law students helps raise awareness of the problem, which gets us one step closer to our goal of ending forced arbitration, once and for all," Sarah Bayer, a student at Harvard Law School who is active with the People's Parity Project, said in a statement...The use of both nondisclosure and arbitration agreements has come under increased scrutiny as a result of the #MeToo movement, with critics saying that such policies make it more difficult for employees to challenge sexist policies and sexual harassment at firms. The People's Parity Project, previously known as the Pipeline Parity Project, was originally launched by Harvard Law School students to push firms to abandon such policies.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee announced on Monday it will call four witnesses, all of them law professors, during the first day of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Hearings in the Democrat-controlled House start Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. Trump, a Republican, and his lawyers were invited earlier to appear, but declined on Sunday, citing a lack of “fundamental fairness.” Here is who will testify: Noah Feldman, a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Feldman, a former clerk for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court, was senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Feldman, in opinion columns for Bloomberg News, has written that Democrats have legitimate grounds to move ahead with impeachment because Trump has abused his power in office.

Three states that have recently settled antitrust claims with T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. over their $26 billion merger are entitled to additional benefits that might be gained from a broader multistate suit against the companies...More than a dozen states led by New York and California remain part of the multistate suit that asserts combining the No. 3 and No. 4 U.S. carriers will lead to higher consumer prices. The case is scheduled to go to trial Dec. 9 in Manhattan federal court...The side settlements won’t impact the upcoming trial involving 13 states and the District of Columbia, James Tierney, the former Maine attorney general, said. “The judge really isn’t going to care how many states show up to trial as a plaintiff,” Tierney, who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law school, said...For T-Mobile, “the only settlements that really matter at the end of the day are New York and California,” since both states are the key drivers pushing the suit forward, Tierney said.

An article by Cass Sunstein: With the coming impeachment vote in the House and a possible trial in the Senate, the U.S. has reached a rare defining moment...In the Federalist No. 65, Hamilton explained that impeachment is designed for offenses proceeding “from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” That explanation was designed to assure We the People that their president, repository of the executive power, would not be a king.

Ben Miller-Gootnick ’21 has won the Gellhorn-Sargentich Law Student Essay Competition, an annual writing competition sponsored by the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. His paper, “Boundaries of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act,” has been cited in the Brennan Canter’s National Task Force report on the Rule of Law & Democracy, in a paperby Stanford Professor Anne Joseph O’Connell prepared for the Administrative Conference of the United States, and was featured in SSRN’s administrative law e-journal. The award, which includes a $5,000 cash prize, recognizes students who write on any topic relating to administrative law. On Nov. 19, Miller-Gootnick traveled to Washington D.C. to talk about his paper to an audience of more than 700 judges, academics, and government lawyers at the section’s annual meeting.