Media Mentions

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.

ExxonMobil notched a big win in the New York Supreme Court, but don't expect the victory to inoculate Big Oil against several other courtroom challenges over global warming. A judge ruled yesterday that the state's attorney general failed to show that the oil giant misled investors about the costs of addressing climate change. The decision called the claims "hyperbolic." Big Oil is facing a widening set of legal fights on climate change...The ruling could affect litigants who bring cases with securities fraud claims in other jurisdictions, one expert tells Axios. "While the New York opinion is certainly not precedential in federal courts or another state court, the judge’s opinion will be relevant to other cases considering similar questions," Harvard's Hana V. Vizcarra says. "There is nearly no previous case law directly addressing climate-related information, so this case will definitely be looked to as a reference in cases involving corporate assessments of climate change risks," says Vizcarra, a lawyer with Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

More than four years after Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for killing four people and wounding hundreds more, his attorneys will argue in a Boston courtroom Thursday why his conviction and death sentence should be thrown out. Attorneys for Tsarnev’s defense and the federal government will each have an hour to make their cases in front of three appeals court judges at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston — the same courthouse where Tsarnaev was sentenced in 2015...“This case should not have been tried in Boston." That's the first line of the appeal's introduction...Former federal judge Nancy Gertner said this was a case where Boston, through its iconic marathon, was the victim. "You would never have a trial in the victim's home," she said. "And this is essentially the victim's home."

An article by Noah Feldman: The House Judiciary Committee has announced plans to consider two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Because Democrats control the Committee and the House, it is now very close to a foregone conclusion that Trump will be impeached. It’s remarkable and historically significant that the committee will consider just two very focused articles of impeachment. Andrew Johnson’s impeachment featured 11 articles. Richard Nixon, who managed to resign after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment but before the House adopted them, faced three. Bill Clinton was impeached with two articles — but they contained four and seven subparts respectively, corresponding to four alleged grand jury lies and seven alleged acts of obstruction of justice. In contrast, Trump will face charges that are extraordinarily simple and compact.

Students who are cheated by their colleges will receive full loan forgiveness only if they end up earning far less than their peers, while others will receive relief between 25% and 75% of their debt under new rules unveiled Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department. The policy is a departure from the Obama administration, which provided full loan forgiveness in cases of fraud, and it marks the second time the Trump administration has attempted to provide only partial loan relief...The Project on Predatory Student Lending, a legal advocacy group based at Harvard University, said cheated students are entitled to full relief. “This partial denial scheme will force thousands of families to pay fraudulent debts that never should have existed in the first place. It shows that the Department of Education will stop at nothing to try to extract payments on invalid debts and deny students their rights under law,” said Eileen Connor, the group’s legal director.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is doubling down on a controversial policy of granting partial debt relief to students defrauded by their colleges, despite ongoing legal challenges and a congressional inquiry...A federal judge in May 2018 blocked DeVos’s first attempt to cancel only a portion of the debt amassed by a group of former Corinthian Colleges students, ruling that the department violated federal laws in the way it used earnings data from the Social Security Administration...The Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, a legal aid group representing the Corinthian students, has argued that any partial relief formula is illegal under the 1995 debt relief statute that entitles defrauded students to full loan cancellation. Toby Merrill, director at the Project on Predatory Student Lending, said the formula is also an arbitrary way to grant loan forgiveness. “It still has the same problem of geographic incoherence, timing incoherence,” Merrill said. “What people earn all over the country is so different, so these averages are just going to produce statistically, mathematically nonsensical results as applied to individuals, and really don’t measure the harm they’ve endured.”

On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, marking only the fourth time in American history that a President has faced impeachment charges. They included two specific accusations — one of abusing the power of his office and another of obstructing Congress’s investigation into his relationship with Ukraine — that fall under the umbrella of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”...To understand what the framers thought “high crimes and misdemeanors” meant, Harvard Law professor Jennifer Taub points to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 65, in which he explains the impeachment process. “The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust,” Hamilton wrote in 1788.

A bioethics study published on December 8th calls on crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to ditch campaigns for unproven and unsafe medical procedures. People turn to GoFundMe for help paying for all sorts of medical interventions. These campaigns have brought in over $650 million since 2010. But a subset of the money raised is spent on unproven and even illegal operations...The paper, written by Snyder and his co-author, Harvard Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, suggests steps GoFundMe may take to upend its “ethical problem.” They concede that expecting the platform to independently evaluate evidence for medical claims would be expensive and difficult. Instead, they propose a “white list approach,” only allowing people to raise money for regulated treatments or those cleared by the FDA for a special program called expanded access.

House Democrats summarized their case for the impeachment of President Donald Trump before the Judiciary Committee in a sometimes contentious hearing Monday, as Republicans repeatedly issued motions that interrupted the proceedings, and pushed back on both the process and the body of evidence. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and former state treasurer Joe Malone, who supports Trump.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on impeachment and his testimony to Congress. Hosted by Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on the impeachment of President Trump, and his testimony to Congress. Anand Srinivasan, Senior Semiconductor and…

It was Donald Trump’s calculation that a large percentage of Americans resided in a vegetative state that spawned his candidacy for president...So it no longer shocks that nearly half of America remains untroubled by what House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) described last week as a “one-man crime spree,” conducted by the president of the United States...The Constitution, Trump has proclaimed, permits him “to do whatever I want as president.” Whatever points he earns for candor should surely be subtracted for the open confession to a totalitarian, wholly un-American ideology. This was the point the constitutional scholars called by the Judiciary Committee made effort upon effort to drive home to the American people. The purpose of impeachment, Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman noted, was to prevent a monarchy, to ensure that “Congress could oversee the president’s conduct, hold him accountable and remove him from office if he abused his power.”

The steps of Harvard’s Widener Library might not be the obvious setting for a showdown between the working class and The Man. But so it was last week. The afternoon that I stopped by, perhaps 100 graduate students in the third day of a strike were protesting against what they consider the university’s unfair labor practices. Their union of 4,500 students has been bargaining fruitlessly for 13 months. They are demanding higher pay, better health care, and greater protections against harassment and discrimination. ... “We know that it is our labor that makes this place run, and we are going to withhold that labor until they agree to a fair contract that student workers deserve,” said Rachel Sandalow-Ash, a third-year student at Harvard Law School. “As a research assistant at the law school, I make $12 a hour; that’s the Massachusetts minimum wage. This is a university with a $41 billion endowment and a $5 billion annual operating budget. There’s no reason we should be making that little.”

An Op-Ed by Nancy Gertner:  While an impeachable offense is, as Gerald Ford said, “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be,” and while the usual rules of courtroom evidence don’t apply in impeachment proceedings, Ford’s description doesn’t do justice to the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report released Tuesday. The White House and many Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee say — wrongly — that the impeachment of President Trump is a partisan hit job. But the report outlines evidence of presidential misconduct that would be compelling in any court. In fact, if the evidentiary rules were what Republicans say they are, hardly anyone would ever be convicted of a crime. No, the president isn’t out of the woods because he didn’t fall on his sword and confess, although he came very close. The argument that the case against Trump can’t succeed without a confession by him reminds me of the drug dealers who believed that they couldn’t be convicted if they spoke in code and didn’t say the word “cocaine.”

Days after three out of four prominent legal scholars agreed at a congressional hearing that it’s been shown that President Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses, hundreds of legal scholars–and counting–have signed their names on an open letter to Congress. The letter was published Friday on Medium by the Protect Democracy Project, which styles itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit group “dedicated to fighting attacks, from at home and abroad, on our right to free, fair, and fully informed self-government.” It’s reminiscent of a letter signed by hundreds of former federal prosecutors months ago, which said that Trump would have been charged for obstructing the Mueller Probe if he wasn’t the president. ... Many of the 500-plus names signed on this letter are familiar: Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, Vermont Law Professor Jennifer Taub, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University Zephyr Teachout, Fordham Professor of Law Jed Shugerman, UC Berkeley’s Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School Prof. J.W. Verret, and University of Alabama School of Law Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law Joyce Vance, to name a few.

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.