Media Mentions

Legal experts say the fight over whether White House counsel Don McGahn must testify under subpoena before Congress could be settled at the Senate impeachment trial before it finishes its path through the courts. A federal judge on Monday ruled against the Trump administration, deciding that McGahn must comply with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena seeking his testimony... “Technically, the Senate sets its own rules, including evidentiary ones, and has the power to reject the presiding officer's rulings by majority vote,” said Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School. He added that there’s no guarantee Roberts would be willing to go along with Democrats’ requests for witnesses, even in light of Monday’s ruling against the Trump administration. “The McGahn ruling won't matter one way or the other, except to the extent that Roberts finds its reasoning persuasive,” Tushnet said. “And it may be worth noting that Judge Brown Jackson has a pretty good reputation as a careful — though of course liberal — judge.”

An article by Noah Feldman: The confusing saga of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher seems to be over at last. Gallagher’s demotion has been reversed — a demotion that resulted from his posing with the corpse of a captured Islamic State fighter in Iraq — and he will get to keep his trident, the pin that signifies SEAL membership and that Navy officials wanted to take away. The main political casualty is the secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, who was fired by the secretary of defense after (it would seem) trying to get Trump to stay out of the issue on behalf of the admirals. The whole fight between Trump and his admirals looked remarkably opaque from the outside. That’s because underneath, important and conflicting principles were at stake.

An article by Urs Gasser: From Greta Thunberg’s student-led climate strikes to the youth-driven protests in Hong Kong and Chile, the next generation is increasingly demanding a voice on pressing issues. Youth movements are reenergizing paralyzed debates among adults with fresh perspectives, inconvenient questions, and the rhetorical power of having to live with the long-term fallout of our short-term thinking. With another monumental societal transformation on the horizon—the rise of artificial intelligence—we have an opportunity to engage the power and imagination of youth to shape the world they will inherit...The center I lead at Harvard University, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, works to integrate youth voices into our research. Through our Youth and Media project, we have partnered with young people, educators, researchers, and practitioners to design more than 100 educational tools to teach and engage youth about the digital world.

Federal court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson held that former White House counsel Donald McGahn must appear before Congress pursuant to a lawful subpoena, rejecting President Trump’s entirely unmeritorious claim of absolute immunity. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Judge Jackson rightly and predictably rejected Trump’s extreme claim that McGahn is absolutely immune from having to testify in response to a valid House subpoena. The tough issues of executive privilege and national security secrets remain. She followed the precedent set by a respected conservative judge, John Bates. And she ruled in accord with basic principles of the rule of law.”

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey is hoping to introduce legislation sometime next week aimed at reducing barriers for those who want to donate food. Toomey, R-Pa., on Monday toured New Bethany Ministries, 333 W. Fourth St., Bethlehem and discussed a bill that, if approved, would extend liability protection for reduced-price food and direct donations. Toomey is partnering with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on the bipartisan legislation and is working with local food banks, as well as the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Feeding America, Feeding PA, 412 Food Rescue, and Philabundance to finalize the language of the bill. The announcement comes just days before Thanksgiving and when several Lehigh Valley food banks and pantries are often in need.

Amid the pressure of a House impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump has continued to stoke the idea that he’s the victim of a coup — shorthand for "coup d’etat," a French term that means the overthrow of the government...The key element of a coup is that it is carried out beyond the bounds of legality...Impeachment is explicitly described in the Constitution as the way to remove a president who has committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told us that you can’t get much more within the bounds of legality than an explicit power outlined in the Constitution. "It’s obviously not a coup for the House to launch impeachment proceedings," Klarman told us in early October.

Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, WBUR's legal commentator, and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, walks us through what we learned from the impeachment hearings last week and what's next.

Over the course of a few short years, a technological revolution shook the world. New businesses rose and fell, fortunes were made and lost, the practice of reporting the news was reinvented, and the relationship between leaders and the public was thoroughly transformed, for better and for worse. The years were 1912 to 1927 and the technological revolution was radio...Those models, and the ways they shaped the societies from which they emerged, offer a helpful road map as we consider another technological revolution: the rise of the commercial internet...Facebook and other companies have pioneered sophisticated methods of data collection that allow ads to be precisely targeted to individual people’s consumer habits and preferences...When Facebook users were shown that up to six of their friends had voted, they were 0.39 percent more likely to vote than users who had seen no one vote. While the effect is small, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain observed that even this slight push could influence an election—Facebook could selectively mobilize some voters and not others. Election results could also be influenced by both Facebook and Google if they suppressed information that was damaging to one candidate or disproportionately promoted positive news about another.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Where do dogs come from? What is their relationship to wolves? Where do Homo sapiens come from? What is our relationship to other human species such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus? Why do dogs flourish as wolves struggle to survive? Why are we the only remaining humans? New research suggests that these diverse questions have a single answer. In brief: Dogs are far less likely than wolves to respond to challenges with violence (or by running away). Or, in more technical terms, they show low levels of “reactive aggression” in social interactions. As compared to extinct human species, Homo sapiens show precisely the same thing. As a result, we — you and I — are uniquely capable of trust and cooperation. That’s the basis of our evolutionary triumph.

Harvard Law School Professor and former Dean Martha Minow has taught generations of lawyers – including former President Obama – about the power of the law and how a sentence can best match a crime. She sits down with Michel to discuss how the American legal system, whose rate of incarceration is the highest in the world, could use a little compassion.

A group of conservative-leaning lawyers criticized Attorney General William P. Barr for the expansive view of presidential power he espoused in a recent speech and for his conclusion this spring that President Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation...Mr. Barr’s view on executive power is a misreading of the unitary executive theory, said Charles Fried, a Checks and Balances member and Harvard Law professor who endorsed the theory while he was solicitor general during the Reagan administration. In Mr. Fried’s reading of the theory, “the executive branch cannot be broken up into fragments.” While that branch acts as a unified expression of a president’s priorities, with the president firmly at the helm, “it is also clear that the executive branch is subject to law,” Mr. Fried said. “Barr takes that notion and eliminates the ‘under law’ part.”

An article by Noah Feldman: As a loyal American, I naturally want to side with the Duchess of Sussex (née Meghan Markle) in her growing feud with the British tabloid press. Yet the lawsuit that the Duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, have brought against the Mail on Sunday raises serious questions about the freedom of press. Difficult as it is to find anything sympathetic to say about tabloids, they do consistently test the boundaries of free speech — and in this insistence, there really is reason to think that it would be bad for the free flow of information if the royals were to win their lawsuit. To those accustomed to reading about libel lawsuits focused on salacious facts, the content of the material under dispute in the Sussex lawsuit seems remarkably tame. The central legal claim has to do with a letter the weekend edition of the Daily Mail published from Meghan to her estranged father, presumably provided to the newspaper by the father himself.

Some people are fuming at Facebook for allowing unfiltered political ads, while others are fuming at Twitter for banning them. There’s lots of confusion and speculation, but what we know is that these social media companies have fundamentally changed how people exchange information. What we need to figure out is whether they also change how people spread disinformation — and if so, how to fix it. It’s a question researchers are actively investigating. After “fake news” became the catchphrase of the 2016 election, experts in psychology, political science, computer science and networks stepped up research on disinformation, learning in more detail how it travels through social media and why some things stick in people’s heads...There’s little evidence that targeted ads have the power to change minds or votes, says Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, co-author of the book “Network Propaganda.” Belief in targeted ads in general is more faith-based than evidence-based, he says. Advertisers assume the targeting causes people to buy things — though this is far from proven.

President Lawrence S. Bacow emailed the community on November 21 to announce an “initiative on Harvard and the legacy of slavery,” backed by an initial $5 million in funding and overseen by a faculty committee led by Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Paul professor of constitutional law and professor of history. ... Joining Brown-Nagin and Beckert on the presidential committee are: Annette Gordon-Reed, Warren professor of American legal history and professor of history; ... Martha Minow, 300thAnniversary University Professor (former Law School dean);

The Democrats brought their last witnesses in the public impeachment hearings Thursday, with President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill using her time to directly confront Republicans on the committee who she said have used the television time to push false conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the 2016 election. Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and R.J. Lyman, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Gordon Sondland implicated Trump and other top administration officials refusing to testify in the plot to bribe Ukraine as Democrats weigh the next steps in the impeachment inquiry. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that Democrats should not delay the inquiry while they fight witness subpoenas because Trump's stonewalling can be used as obstruction: "The evidence is all there and there's nothing left to do but collate it into articles of impeachment."

An op-ed by by Joseph Kristol '09 and Stephen Petraeus '21 (Kristol is a former Marine Corps officer. Petraeus is a former Army officer. Both served combat tours in Afghanistan as infantry platoon leaders.): “I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.” So said retired Marine Corps general Jim Mattis during remarks at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco in 2014. The line strikes a chord with us, as we’re sure it would with the great majority of veterans with whom we served. We’ve all, by and large, been trying simply to navigate the sometimes challenging transition to civilian life — finishing school, finding a good job, raising a family — without the added challenge of being perceived by our peers as “damaged goods,” “ticking time bombs” or “killing machines.” While no president could ever shake our pride in our military service, we fear that President Trump’s recent decision to pardon two service members involved in war crimes cases and reverse disciplinary action against another — and his stated motives for doing so — will damage Americans’ perception of the military, encouraging the view that veterans are “broken.”

For decades, when you applied for an apartment, the landlord—or a tenant screening company hired by the landlord—would examine your credit file and pay stubs to verify your ability to pay rent. But today, landlords are using the artificial intelligence revolution to predict something else: Your willingness to pay rent. ... Mutale Nkonde, an AI policy adviser and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, sees “red flags” in algorithmic tenant screening. Bias worms its way into algorithms via “proxies,” or characteristics that are more common to one group of people than another, she said. While companies may claim their algorithms don’t contain such proxies, that is hard to verify. “Because the algorithms are protected by intellectual property laws, we have no way of scrutinizing them,” Ms. Nkonde said.

A 33-year-old orangutan awarded “non-human” personhood rights in a landmark 2015 court decision in Argentina has settled into a new home in Florida...Sandra landed at the center this month because she’s a hybrid of two orangutan subspecies, and Indonesia, one of the native environments for orangutans — where most preferred sanctuaries are located — has banned orangutans like her from its sanctuaries. As part of implementing Sandra's new rights, the Argentinian judge wanted her to live at an accredited facility — and the Florida center was the only one in the Americas that met those standards. Her arrival has raised the hopes of US activists who are trying to match the successes of lawyers who turn to the courts to fight for animal rights around the world...“You almost get a sense that judges are really looking for reasons not to do what he's asking,” said Kristen Stilt, director of the animal law and policy clinic at Harvard Law School. “One of the reasons is they're just being transferred to another form of captivity. They're not being freely released.”

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicated numerous senior officials and President Trump in a plan to extort Ukraine: No White House meeting until the Ukrainians announced an investigation into nonexistent dirt on former vice president Joe Biden...Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to Sondland, played a key role in the plot and in obstruction of Congress. As such, Pompeo needs to appear as a witness or face impeachment himself... “The Sondland testimony puts Pompeo (as well as Trump, of course) squarely inside impeachment territory — and, under a normal Justice Department, in indictment territory as well,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “There is no [Office of Legal Counsel] memo suggesting that a sitting secretary of state is immune from indictment and prosecution, and this one was deeply engaged, if Sondland is to be believed, in a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion, to violate federal election law against foreign interference, and to obstruct justice, including obstructing congressional investigations.”

Since the head of Bolivia’s armed forces “suggested” to Evo Morales that he resign the presidency on Nov. 10, following contested elections in October that were marred by allegations of fraud, Bolivia has been in a tense limbo. Two days after the military’s nudge, Morales arrived in Mexico, where authorities had granted him political asylum. In La Paz, the conservative vice president of the Senate, Jeanine Anez, declared herself his replacement. Street clashes and crackdowns on protesters have escalated since then. Can the new government, which insists it is only transitional while acting otherwise, establish its legitimacy and reduce the risk of deeper unrest? ... “This is part of the dramatic spike in violence in Bolivia since Evo Morales was forced to resign,” said Thomas Becker, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic who has worked extensively on human rights issues in Bolivia. He interviewed the survivors of the Sacaba attack the next day. “I heard dozens of accounts of soldiers shooting unarmed civilians, including individuals providing assistance to other injured people,” he told me. “People reported that soldiers beat protesters while yelling racial slurs at them, which only escalates an already tense situation.”