Media Mentions

An article by Laurence Tribe: The case for calling witnesses in the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, and for subpoenaing documents that the White House has withheld from Congress, is now too compelling to deny. There is so much public support for hearing all the relevant evidence, and not just among Democrats, that it is becoming politically toxic for increasingly many senators to resist doing so. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to bury the truth and turn the trial into a whitewash with a quickly delivered foreordained conclusion have all but come to naught, thanks in large part to the patience and savvy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who wisely resisted the pressure to transmit the two articles of impeachment within days of the House vote impeaching Trump. If it’s already clear that the witnesses whom the president has successfully silenced thus far, despite their firsthand knowledge of what he knew and when he knew it in the context of shaking down Ukraine for his personal benefit, are indeed likely to be called, why take the trouble of saying more about the need for them to appear in the impeachment trial?...The reason is that we cannot afford to leave any stone unturned when dealing with as lawless and fickle a presidential administration and its Senate accomplices as the Trump/McConnell cabal has shown itself to be.

One of the talking points that supporters of President Donald Trump have been using in defense of the killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3 is that the killing is no different from the operation that resulted in the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 under President Barack Obama. But bin Laden, unlike Soleimani, was not a government official. And constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe is asserting that the Soleimani killing amounts to a “summary execution without trial” rather than an act of self-defense. Last week on Twitter, the 78-year-old Tribe (who co-founded the American Constitutional Society and teaches at Harvard Law School) posted, "In the fog of war, it’s easy to lose track of what counts. Whether Soleimani posed an ‘imminent’ threat that killing him would assuredly end isn’t just a debate over labels. It’s the difference (between) self-defense to protect Americans and murder to stave off Trump’s impeachment.”

The Seattle City Council voted Monday to ban most political spending by “foreign-influenced corporations,” in a move that could hinder attempts by multinational tech titans to influence the city’s elections. The legislation’s architect, Council President M. Lorena González, has said she believes the ban will apply to Amazon, despite the company being based here, because it will cover businesses substantively owned by foreign investors. The measure will close a loophole because foreign individuals and foreign-based entities already are barred from making contributions in United States elections, González said Monday...Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub encouraged the council to move ahead with the idea, as did Harvard Law School scholar Laurence Tribe. The Seattle Ethics and Election Commission and Washington State Public Disclosure Commission shared support.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up an appeal filed by Michelle Carter of Plainville. Her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, killed himself in 2014 and Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging him to do so. Her team said the conviction violated Carter's First Amendment rights. WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner is part of that defense team — she's also a retired federal judge, and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. She joins us to discuss the case.

In recent days, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has floated the idea that the Senate might vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment against President Trump without ever holding a trial. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, who helped House Democrats draft the articles of impeachment in the first place, told Salon this week McConnell has no right to do that. Senate rules dating to 1886, Tribe said, give the upper chamber of Congress "no jurisdiction to begin its impeachment trial until the articles have been submitted by the House to the Senate." Until that happens, he continued, the Senate "cannot purport to dismiss the articles that would trigger the trial. The House retains jurisdiction, under the rules it has duly enacted, until it selects impeachment managers and transmits the articles of impeachment to the Senate."

Senator Elizabeth Warren announced Tuesday that if elected president, she will use executive authority to cancel student loan debt on her first day in office. Warren introduced a sweeping plan in April to forgive massive amounts of student loan debt for middle-class Americans, but her new proposal argues that the Department of Education already has “broad legal authority” to cancel student debt without Congressional approval. The Secretary of Education has unrestricted authority to cancel existing student loan debt under the Higher Education Act, legal experts at Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center wrote in response to the plan. “This authority provides a safety valve for federal student loan programs, letting the Department of Education use its discretion to wipe away loans even when they do not meet the eligibility criteria for more specific cancellation programs like permanent disability discharge,” Warren said in the plan, released ahead of Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Iowa. Under the plan, Warren would cancel up to $50,000 in debt for about 42 million borrowers as well as ensure that the loan cancellation won’t be taxed as income.

An article by Nancy Gertner: It’s common to hear television commentators intone about how an impeachment trial in the Senate is “just” a political process, not a legal one, as if that means a free for all, the typical horse-trading of a legislative session. While the Constitution is not often specific, when it comes to impeachment, the words are fairly clear, especially on the issues now being debated: Should there be live witnesses at a Senate trial? How impartial should the senators be? Should there be additional evidence in the Senate that was not produced before the House?...One thing, though, hasn’t changed. Jurors then and now take an oath to be impartial — just like the Senate’s impeachment oath...In fact, the reason why the Framers rejected having impeachment in the Supreme Court, according to Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe and Georgetown Law Professor Joshua Matz, was not just that they knew the Court could include justices appointed by the sitting president; they reasoned that the Senate’s sheer size as compared to that of the Court would safeguard against corruption.

President Trump sees federal environmental regulation as “big government at its absolute worst.” Jody Freeman, Director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, joins Ali Velshi to discuss what’s at stake now that President Trump has proposed a complete overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Last October, Attorney General William Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, warned that Barr’s and Trump’s efforts could permanently alter the balance of power among the branches of American government. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a Chief Executive who is more powerful than the king,” Tribe said. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.” ... But his ideology has not changed much, according to friends and former colleagues. “I don’t know why anyone is surprised by his views,” Jack Goldsmith, a law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush Administration, told me. “He has always had a broad view of executive power.”

Malvern, Pennsylvania is the quintessential small-town America: verdant, quiet and lined with 19th-century streetlamps. But just outside the town lies the sprawling campus of Vanguard, a $6tn asset manager that is reshaping the sleepy town and the surrounding area. ... Yet concerns of increasingly concentrated corporate power are unlikely to go away. John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School, points out that despite being a Vanguard fan there is a “governance risk” inherent in one company that may eventually control a big chunk of every major US company. “Then they become the focal point for everyone that is unhappy about how any of these companies are run. There’s a real political risk there,” he says. “It’s a dilemma: What do you do with immense success?”

Ex-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn excoriated the Japanese legal system this week during a two-hour press conference defending his decision to flee the country as he awaited trial for financial crimes tied to the Japanese automaker. “I did not escape justice. I fled injustice and persecution, political persecution,” Ghosn said at a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon on Wednesday. “You're going to die in Japan or you've got to get out.” ... “Pretty much everybody prosecuted gets convicted,” says J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School and a noted authority on Japanese law. Still, he noted, “The Japanese system, it’s basically a fair one.”

On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we’ll discuss Trump administration’s efforts to weaken or dismantle environmental regulations that are meant to protect the environment, public health and curb greenhouse gases. According to Harvard Law School's rollback tracker, the administration has targeted at least 90 environmental rules, including endangered species protections Act, methane emissions, coal plants, cars, light bulbs, public lands and oil and gas drilling. Guests: Caitlin McCoy, Climate, Clean Air, & Energy Fellow for the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University

Fairfield High School alumna Boanne Wassink ['20] is a student at Harvard Law School, where she is a member of a new group dedicated to litigating for animal welfare. In fact, Wassink helped prepare a complaint in recent litigation about primates used in research. Wassink said it was a great experience, and she hopes to work as a litigator on behalf of animals after she graduates from Harvard.

An op-ed by Alister Martin and Cass R. Sunstein: What if long emergency room wait times, an unfortunate fact of life, could also be a key to increasing voter participation among traditionally underrepresented groups in our electorate? The demographic overlap between those who most use the ER for their health care and those who don’t vote presents a potential opportunity. In 2014, a US Census Bureau report found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans were not registered to vote. That’s over 51 million potential voting-age adults, or more than the entire population of Spain, who were not registered to vote in the United States.

Op-ed by Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School:  Crash investigations are a complex affair. When a plane goes down, investigators normally spring into action. Some of these individuals work for the company that built the jet, some for the country where the jet was registered and others for the airline itself. All, however, are looking for clues about what caused the crash and what must be done to prevent another one. They do this with rigour and with attention to detail, because what we can learn from an aviation disaster should make the skies safer. That, however, is not what will happen with the tragic plane crash on Wednesday that killed 176 people, including 63 Canadians.

The Trump administration heralded its latest environmental rollback as an end to drawn-out legal brawls challenging high-profile energy and infrastructure projects. But experts say the legal implications of planned changes to rules surrounding the National Environmental Policy Act would be much less dramatic...Even if the Trump administration's changes usher in a higher threshold for NEPA-based challenges, the proposed regulations wouldn't affect current litigation, said Caitlin McCoy, a climate, clean air and energy fellow with Harvard University's Environmental & Energy Law Program. "Even once finalized, the regulations will not apply retroactively to lower the bar for NEPA analyses that were performed before it was final," she said.

Used to be that the promise of earning a sterling line on a resume and connections to stars of the legal profession was enough to lure Harvard law students to federal clerkships...The expectation is that judges and their clerks will act and make decisions based on the law, not in the interest of ideology or political party, said Charles Fried, a Harvard constitutional law professor and former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “If the only people who will clerk for a Trump-nominated judge are the people who voted for Trump, it will drive things to further extremes,” Fried said. “It’s odd and self-defeating.” Judges without strong experience who may be too ideologically driven need smart law clerks who will offer different perspectives, he said...“We work to share available clerkship opportunities with our students, confident they will apply for the ones that best suit their interests and needs,” said Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School in a statement. “We understand that different judges appeal to different applicants for different reasons.”...Nancy Gertner, a retired Massachusetts federal judge who teaches at Harvard, said neither the president nor students should have narrow slates of judges that they are willing to consider. “You can’t be in a position to say there has to be an orthodoxy to become a judge or work for a judge,” Gertner said.

The potential impact of common ownership reaches beyond antitrust matters to questions about how companies are run. Index fund managers may follow passive investment strategies, but they don’t blindly choose stocks and sit back, says John Coates, a Harvard law professor. Fund companies have multiple tools to influence corporate behavior, such as developing preferred policies on executive compensation, carbon footprints, gender diversity, and other governance matters. They often do this in coordination with other industry leaders, Coates says. “A small number of unelected agents, operating largely behind closed doors, are increasingly important to the lives of millions who barely know of the existence much less the identity or inclinations of those agents,” Coates wrote in a widely cited 2018 paper. The agents, in this case, are the managers of fund companies—and the most important of those are the index giants...Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor, says index fund managers don’t have incentives to invest the time into actively supervising companies. That’s because any effort to increase the value of a company would also increase the value of the index, which in turn benefits every fund that tracks the index. As a result, the fund that pushes management can’t stand out from its peers and attract more money—yet it incurs higher stewardship costs. The concern is that such deference will “result in insufficient checks on corporate managers,” Bebchuk says. In a 2019 paper, he writes that the Big Three spent minuscule amounts on stewardship. According to Morningstar, Vanguard employed 21 people to do the work of corporate oversight at a cost, by Bebchuk’s estimate, of about $6.3 million—a drop in the bucket considering Vanguard’s trillions of dollars under management.

An article by Lawrence Lessig: Before the Senate begins its trial to determine whether the president should be convicted of the charges for which he has been impeached, the jury — the members of the Senate — must be sworn to service. The oath is mandated by the Constitution; its language, set by Senate rules, requires each senator to swear to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.” To swear a false oath is perjury — the crime President Bill Clinton was charged with in his impeachment. Yet given the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, a senator likely could not be charged with perjury for swearing falsely on the Senate floor. Instead, it is the Senate itself that must police members’ oaths — as it has in the past.

An article by Ashley Nunes: Crash investigations are a complex affair. When a plane goes down, investigators normally spring into action. Some of these individuals work for the company that built the jet, some for the country where the jet was registered and others for the airline itself. All, however, are looking for clues about what caused the crash and what must be done to prevent another one. They do this with rigour and with attention to detail, because what we can learn from an aviation disaster should make the skies safer. That, however, is not what will happen with the tragic plane crash on Wednesday that killed 176 people, including 63 Canadians. The jet – operated by Ukraine International Airlines – had left Tehran for what should have been a four-hour flight to Kyiv. It ended up only taking a few minutes. Air traffic controllers lost contact with the jet shortly after takeoff, and the plane’s wreckage was later found on the outskirts of Tehran.

The potential impact of common ownership reaches beyond antitrust matters to questions about how companies are run. Index fund managers may follow passive investment strategies, but they don’t blindly choose stocks and sit back, says John Coates, a Harvard law professor. Fund companies have multiple tools to influence corporate behavior, such as developing preferred policies on executive compensation, carbon footprints, gender diversity, and other governance matters. They often do this in coordination with other industry leaders, Coates says. “A small number of unelected agents, operating largely behind closed doors, are increasingly important to the lives of millions who barely know of the existence much less the identity or inclinations of those agents,” Coates wrote in a widely cited 2018 paper. The agents, in this case, are the managers of fund companies—and the most important of those are the index giants...Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard law professor, says index fund managers don’t have incentives to invest the time into actively supervising companies. That’s because any effort to increase the value of a company would also increase the value of the index, which in turn benefits every fund that tracks the index. As a result, the fund that pushes management can’t stand out from its peers and attract more money—yet it incurs higher stewardship costs. The concern is that such deference will “result in insufficient checks on corporate managers,” Bebchuk says. In a 2019 paper, he writes that the Big Three spent minuscule amounts on stewardship. According to Morningstar, Vanguard employed 21 people to do the work of corporate oversight at a cost, by Bebchuk’s estimate, of about $6.3 million—a drop in the bucket considering Vanguard’s trillions of dollars under management.