Media Mentions

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…

Livestock production needs to reach its peak within the next decade in order to tackle the climate emergency, scientists have warned. They are calling for governments in all but the poorest countries to set a date for “peak meat” because animal agriculture is a significant and fast-growing source of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle and sheep emit large amounts of methane while forests are destroyed to create pasture and grow the grains that are fed to intensively reared animals... “Countries should be looking for peak livestock within the next 10 years,” said Helen Harwatt, a fellow at Harvard Law School in the US and lead author of the letter. “This is because we need steep and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as we are reaching dangerous temperature tipping points.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The articles of impeachment under consideration by the House clearly allege high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution. Apart from the factual truth of allegations, the articles comport with the definition of impeachable conduct. Start with abuse of office for personal advantage or gain, directly aimed at distorting the electoral process. For the Framers, this conduct was the classic form of a high crime or misdemeanor. Their words demonstrate as much. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, George Mason of Virginia warned of the “danger” that presidential electors could be “corrupted by the candidates.” Corruption meant the conferral of improper benefits for personal gain. James Madison worried about the presidency being used for a scheme of “peculation,” in other words, self-dealing or embezzlement for personal advantage. What is more, the two impeachment trials best known to the Framers both involved abuse of office for improper personal gain.

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 also ask that the death penalty in the case be rescinded. Tsarnaev's legal team will argue that their client received neither a fair nor impartial trial and sentencing. The court is being asked to consider whether Judge George O'Toole acted properly, whether the nondisclosure of social media postings compromised jury selection and whether the death penalty decision was influenced by juror bias...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."

When we think about food waste, we usually think about individual households. Example: those sad looking carrots at the bottom of the fridge drawer. Your fault, your loss. Not a broader concern. But those carrots are part of a systemic problem, one with grave implications for climate change. Project Drawdown ranked reducing food waste as the third most important step out of 80 proposed solutions...Milan, Italy has been a global leader in the rescue movement since 2015. That year, 15 tons of food was given to homeless people in just a few weeks when the chef Massimo Bottura helped organize an anti-waste campaign. Since then, the city has written the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, an international food waste protocol for cities, and led a charge that helped to get the national government to pass food waste legislation... “Once you tell people they can’t throw food away, they start making different, creative decisions with it,” said Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: As the Democratic Primary kicks into high gear, it is increasingly clear that 2020 could give America a choice that it has not had since Richard Nixon resigned: An election that promises critical change to our political system. At least 7 of the remaining candidates in the Democratic primary have committed to making fundamental government reform their first priority in office. We have not been this close to real change of America's politics since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is therefore time that the candidates' plans -- and how they differ -- become the focus of more media attention. Michael Bennet, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang have promised both to make this reform happen, and to happen first. This itself is a first in the history of American politics.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that you believe (as I do) that President Donald Trump has abused his power and thus committed impeachable offenses. If so, you should take one concern very seriously: As the House of Representatives proceeds, there’s a risk that the nation will become the United States of Impeachment. Fortunately, the risk is diminished by the narrowness of the current text of the two articles of impeachment that were released on Tuesday. The first article focuses solely and narrowly on the effort to influence Ukraine to announce a criminal investigation of Joe Biden and of “a discredited theory promoted by Russia alleging that Ukraine – rather than Russia – interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election.” The second article focuses solely and narrowly on obstruction of Congress through Trump’s categorical refusal to respond to its impeachment inquiry.

An article by Noah Feldman: When President Donald Trump appointed Bill Barr as attorney general back in February, it seemed like good news for the Department of Justice. The department had suffered some serious damage to its public reputation under attorney general Jeff Sessions — much of it inflicted by Trump himself. The president had systematically attacked the department and the FBI, depicting choices of investigation and prosecution as partisan and political. Trump had fired the FBI director, James Comey, and excoriated Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation that Comey had begun. The appointment of Barr, who held the same job under George H. W. Bush, held out the prospect of a strong attorney general who would protect the department and its institutional integrity.

On Tuesday, Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives announced that they would move forward with two articles of impeachment — involving abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — against President Donald Trump...Those two articles, in the words of Laurence Tribe, the eminent Harvard Law professor and constitutional expert, “charge President Trump with massive crimes against the Constitution and against the American people.” Tribe shared his thoughts on the House Judiciary Committee’s proposed articles with Salon by email on Tuesday morning, saying they lay out the most serious abuses of power ever alleged against a sitting president. "The abuses of power they charge, including unforgivable and ongoing obstruction of congressional efforts to invoke the impeachment power to hold the President accountable to his Oath of Office, with ‘actions . . . consistent with [his] previous efforts to undermine United States Government investigations into foreign interference with United States elections’ in 2016, are the most serious ever charged against any sitting president. And the evidence supporting the two charges, which the Articles clearly and unambiguously summarize, is so overwhelming that only an unwillingness or inability to face the facts could lead anyone to conclude that President Trump is innocent of the accusations soberly leveled in the Articles."

A ninth-generation farmer, Mr. Lamport, 47, shut down his dairy business in September...His struggle is a familiar one for America’s dairy farmers, who have been battered over the past decade by a nationwide drop in milk consumption, the rise of dairy-free and plant-based alternatives and the trade war with China...But Mr. Lamport says there is another factor pushing down milk prices and harming farmers: the business practices of Dairy Farmers of America, a farmer-owned cooperative...The co-op is in talks to acquire Dean Foods, the century-old milk processing company that sought bankruptcy protection in November. No agreement has been reached, but the prospect of D.F.A.’s taking control of Dean Foods, the co-op’s biggest customer, has raised new antitrust concerns...An expert witness for the plaintiffs, the Harvard Law School antitrust specialist Einer Elhauge, calculated that D.F.A.’s business practices have reduced the price of milk by nearly 80 cents per hundred pounds sold, costing dairy farmers a total of millions of dollars every month. While those losses affect D.F.A. members and nonmembers alike, Mr. Lamport, a plaintiff in the case, said his milk profits declined soon after he joined the co-op in 2017.

Thousands of students who took out federal loans to attend schools that lured them with fraudulent claims will still have to repay a portion of their debts, the Education Department said Tuesday — a new attempt to water down a loan-forgiveness program that the department’s leader has long deplored. The change creates a complicated sliding scale on which defrauded students’ relief is calculated using group earnings data. Debts will be fully forgiven only if students in a particular program earned far less than those from similar programs at other schools...An advocacy group that has represented borrowers in lawsuits against the Education Department said it would fight the new policy in court. “Under law, cheated students have the right to have their loans fully canceled,” said Eileen Connor, the legal director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.