Media Mentions

For years, Donald Trump’s critics have charged that any number of nefarious sentiments smouldered beneath the President’s rhetoric. In recent days, the smoke has become fire – and now a president threatened with impeachment may be playing with that fire. ... One way or the other – and very likely both ways – the President’s charges of “treason” and allusions to a “civil war” represent a discernible change in the tone and content of Mr. Trump’s language – a change that matches, or perhaps helped cause, the change in the tone and content of Washington politics generally. “It isn’t normal for American presidents to suggest that their political opponents be arrested for treason, or to make implicit violent threats against a whistleblower,” said Susan Benesch of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, which monitors speech across the globe that has the potential of inciting violence.

Amid the news of the impeachment inquiry, President Trump ran into some trouble with an unlikely foe: Nickelback. A doctored version of the band’s 2007 “Photograph” music video was removed from his Twitter page within 24 hours of posting it. ... Warner Music Group, the copyright owner for “Photograph,” filed the complaint, according to Lumen, an independent research group from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that studies digital removal requests. A representative for Warner declined to comment for this story.

... John Dean, the former Chief White House Counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, said Trump’s actions were contradictory to 230 years of American legal traditions. “URGENT: Trump wants to end America sovereignty by allowing foreign governments to help him win. It is against the law and 230 years of practice,” Dean Tweeted. “He wants American voters to choose elected leaders beholden to foreign powers, not Americans. The act of a dictator!,” he added. ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe’s reaction invoked a similar tone. “So now Trump is openly asking CHINA to go after the Bidens!,” Tribe Tweeted. “He’s poking the nation in the eye and daring us to hold him accountable for repeatedly violating American law and sovereignty. We have no choice but to remove him if we want to preserve our country.”

If you pay any attention to the news around healthcare, you have probably heard it said that your Zip code matters more for your health than your genetic code. It's a platitude that has become the rallying cry for the conversation about social determinants of health; and when social and economic factors, health behaviors, and physical environment accounts for 80 percent of one's life expectancy, this is rightfully so.  ...According to an issue brief released by Lung Cancer Alliance, and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, approximately 3.6 million Americans, in urban and rural settings, miss or delay essential, non-emergency medical care due to transportation barriers every year. It is no surprise that the ability to access the doctor’s office plays a pivotal role in health outcomes, but missed appointments are also an expensive problem. With the rates for patient no-shows as high as 30 percent in some cases, missed appointments cost healthcare systems a prodigious $150 billion every year.

President Donald Trump has encouraged another foreign country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, this time publicly calling on China to look into the 2020 Democratic frontrunner—a move legal experts say is "still illegal." ... Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Newsweek that Trump is "proceeding on the premise that he can get away with murder if he commits it often enough and in front of everybody. It's a daring strategy and one we can't let him pull off if we care about our country and want to have a legal system that applies to everyone."

In a new book, a former dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, opens with this observation on today’s society: “Ours is an unforgiving age, an age of resentment. The supply of forgiveness is deficient.” She wrote the book – “When Should Law Forgive?” – because of what she sees as the limits of the law in dealing with the worst of crimes, such as murder, as well as the difficulty in forgiving crimes “that defy conception.” The book is well timed. On Wednesday in a Dallas County courthouse, a TV camera caught yet another public example of a unilateral act of personal forgiveness to an individual who had committed a heinous crime.

On any given week, Harvard’s campus is host to lectures, exhibitions, and seminars highlighting research by faculty and students conducting their work around the globe. A network of international offices for Harvard Business School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and University interfaculty initiatives maintains Harvard’s presence beyond its geographical boundaries, extending its footprint to almost every continent. As we recently learned, Harvard research extends even to the frigid reach of the South Pole. ... Through Oct. 8, a photo exhibit at the Harvard Law School Wasserstein Campus Center examining the impact of nuclear weapons and progress toward their elimination.

As Congress and the White House are locked in an impeachment battle, the highest court in the third branch of government is set to open its term, and may soon take up big cases — including the Harvard affirmative action case. And might Rep. Richard Neal reveal another whistleblower? The retirement  last year of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored a 2016 opinion that narrowly allowed colleges to consider race among a number of admission factors, has court-watchers predicting a high court victory for the group challenging Harvard’s policy. “If SCOTUS accepts this inevitable appeal, I think [it's] unlikely the Court will continue to recognize diversity as a goal for race-conscious admission,” tweeted Harvard Law School professor Ronald Sullivan.

Many chronic conditions, such as obesity and diabetes, are related to diet and nutrition. Although many diet-related diseases are highly correlated with poor health outcomes, U.S.-trained doctors receive little or no training in nutrition. A new report published last week by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (“FLPC”) aims to address this knowledge gap by recommending increased nutrition education in undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical training. With its report, Doctoring Our Diet: Policy Tools to Include Nutrition in U.S. Medical Training, Harvard’s FLPC focused on integrating “nutrition as an essential component of U.S. medical education” and allowing doctors “to support better outcomes for individual patients and to address the most common and costly health risks facing our country.”

When Brandt Jean hugged the white police officer who had just been convicted of murdering his unarmed brother while he was in his own home, the act sparked a wider conversation about forgiveness, the law, and race in America. And while some saw officer Amber Guyger’s 10-year prison sentence as a fair outcome, others said it was too light a punishment, and pointed to many ways in which the American criminal justice system has systematically incarcerated people of color at high rates and with long sentences. In her new book, "When Should Law Forgive?", Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow examines a range of areas where the legal system offers opportunities for absolution, and asks where they might be used more, and where they should not. Jim Braude was joined by Martha Minow.

While Uber faces legal battles over whether its drivers should be classified as employees or contractors, the tech company unveiled an unexpected new service on Wednesday: Uber Works. ...Despite Uber's new take on temporary employment, Benjamin Sachs, Kestnbaum professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, says it's more of the same. "The connection between Uber Works and the ride-hailing side that I see is this massive company with intense tech resources fueling the degradation of work, rather than to make work meaningful," Sachs told Fortune. Sachs added that once again Uber is defaulting to billing itself as an app that connects people to work opportunities, rather than carrying the burden of being an employer.

Senator Elizabeth Warren extracted an unwitting advertisement for her presidential campaign from Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday. A Warren administration would “suck for us,” he said in leaked audio of a July meeting, referring to Ms. Warren’s proposal to break up big tech companies. “If she gets elected president,” he said, “then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge.” ... Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough, as even Mr. Hughes admits, since it won’t address some of society’s greatest grievances with the platform, argues Evelyn Douek [S.J.D. candidate] in Slate. On the issue of election security, she writes: If we’re worried about Russia or other foreign powers using Facebook and other social media platforms to influence elections — as Sen. Elizabeth Warren mentions when making her case for breakup — then we also need to acknowledge that these influence campaigns are often sophisticated, cross-platform operations that require well-resourced, expert and coordinated responses. No one has made a good case for how breakup and competition would aid these efforts.

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano slammed Donald Trump's "allusions to violence" and reference to a "civil war," arguing that the president's actions toward Ukraine constituted "impeachable behavior." "The president's allusions to violence are palpably dangerous. They will give cover to crazies who crave violence, as other intemperate words of his have done," Napolitano warned in an op-ed published by Fox News on Thursday. He pointed out that "bounties" have already been offered for information that could lead to identifying the anonymous whistleblower at the center of the Ukraine scandal. ... Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that Trump's tweet was grounds for impeachment on its own. "This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment - a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power," he posted to Twitter.

Since the Democrats gained control of the House, the Trump administration has taken the most extreme position on congressional oversight in American history: In essence, it has argued that no demand from Congress, for information about anything, to anyone in the executive branch, is binding on the president. While many presidents have struggled with the reach of congressional oversight, this administration has been particularly defiant. ... As I wrote on Tuesday, the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry should strengthen Congress’s hand as it seeks court enforcement of its demands for information. But should Congress even pursue such requests? Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, (whose recent book, To End a Presidency, co-written with Joshua Matz, explores many political and legal aspects of impeachment) told me in an email: The expectation that the evidence thereby made available will be explosive makes the impeachment process more difficult in circumstances like this, where the publicly known facts already justify a conclusion that the president committed high crimes and misdemeanors. That creates something of a paradox. The way in which a formal impeachment inquiry makes potentially incriminating evidence much more readily available tends to raise expectations and indirectly raises the bar for what it takes to impeach a president who abuses his powers for personal gain.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President Donald Trump is not reluctant to accuse people of treason. On Sunday, Trump targeted Representative Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, proclaiming on Twitter that he wanted the California Democrat “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.” On Monday, he elaborated, musing that a “fake and terrible statement” by Schiff might just be grounds for his “Arrest for Treason? Trump’s tweets are often over-the-top. But these were particularly heinous because they are inconsistent with a key provision of the U.S. Constitution, and call up the very concerns that motivated its drafting. Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the U.S. Constitution: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman;  It’s no surprise that a federal judge has held that Harvard University doesn’t discriminate against Asian Americans in its admissions. This case probably ends here: The Supreme Court would be ill-advised to take up this particular case. Yet there will likely be other cases like this one, and a conservative Supreme Court may well take one of those as an opportunity to rule against diversity-based admissions. Evidence of discrimination by Harvard (where I work) was, in the end, extremely weak. The parties introduced competing statistical models, and even the model preferred by the plaintiffs didn’t show much in the way of disparate admissions outcomes. The main troubling finding, that Asian-American applicants were scored slightly lower on a “personal qualities” metric, appears to be mostly explained by high school teacher recommendations, which might well reflect implicit bias – but not discrimination by Harvard.

A collection of dairy farmers who allege anti-competitive conduct by the nation’s largest dairy cooperative will take their case to a jury trial. A U.S. district court judge late last week denied a motion for summary judgment — which would have wrapped the case up without trial — from defendant Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). ...Yet the farmers in this lawsuit argue that DFA’s growing business as a processor has introduced a conflict of interest in how the co-op generates income. DFA owns many of its own processing facilities, which could mean that the less DFA pays for milk, the more money it makes from its products. As Harvard Law School Professor Einer R. Elhauge, who is serving as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case, put it in court documents, “Reducing raw milk prices [paid to dairy farmers] directly increases DFA’s profit per unit as a processor.”

It's only natural for Americans wrapping their heads around the idea that Donald Trump might actually get impeached to think back to Richard Nixon. This was the premise of the first season of the wildly popular podcast Slow Burn, the animating thread of so many late-night prognostications—on Twitter, at bars, at dinner with your parents—at the height of Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. ...Well, for one thing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has formally launched an impeachment inquiry, a step Democrats never formally took amid Mueller Mania. And as Noah Feldman, a Harvard legal historian who has closely tracked the various investigations into Trump, explained over the course of two conversations this week, Pelosi’s reasoning was transparent: People can understand the idea of Trump bullying someone over the phone to go after a personal rival more easily than they can shadowy political consultants or dimwitted adult sons requesting the aid of hackers backed by Moscow. Or as Feldman—who said we are in "uncharted ground" at this point—put it, "The report produced by the [whistleblower] does in like four pages what Mueller couldn't in 400," adding, "So instead of the Slow Burn, we just had one big download... of the case to impeach."

The percentage of Americans in favor of impeachment is increasing — quickly. It has gone from a clear minority view to a majority or plurality in recent polling. Part of that progress is directly attributable to President Trump acting more unhinged by the day — dishing out profanity, threatening the whistleblower and accusing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) of treason. He sounds like a wounded animal howling in pain. But some of the credit goes to Democrats, who have a much better hand to play than they did in the Russia investigation and have learned from experience. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe agrees. “I think the Intelligence Committee is doing exactly what the situation calls for by treating the refusals by [Attorney General William P.] Barr and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo to let people testify as obstruction of Congress plain and simple,” he says. “If the Trump cabinet members or other officials want to go down the path of the third Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon, that’s a choice the Democratic committee chairs are sensibly leaving to them. The chairs would play into the hands of the stonewalling Trump administration by taking Trump officials to court to seek orders compelling testimony or document production or to enforce subpoenas.” He concludes, “The days for those litigation strategies are now long since behind us.”

Prof. Jack Goldsmith digs into the Jimmy Hoffa case to possibly solve the mystery of the disappearance—and to clear his stepfather’s name.

As the Ukraine controversy continues to unfold, one constitutional law professor has asserted that President Donald Trump is a "threat to national security" and puts the country at risk every day he is in the Oval Office .... The president has slammed the impeachment inquiry as a "Democratic witch hunt." In one tweet, Trump quoted an evangelical pastor who compared removing the president to initiate a "civil war." Harvard Law professor John Coates argued that Trump's tweet itself was actually grounds for impeachment.