Media Mentions

Costa Rican magistrate Victor Madrigal-Borloz has served for the past 21 months as the U.N. independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. He will present his report on how laws and cultural norms adversely affect LGBT individuals to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday. The Gazette interviewed Madrigal-Borloz, who is the Eleanor Roosevelt Senior Visiting Researcher with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, to talk about his work and his hopes for the future.

Did ExxonMobil mislead investors about the financial risks of climate change? That's the charge in an unprecedented trial against the oil and gas giant that got underway Tuesday and is likely to feature testimony by Rex Tillerson. The proceedings, which have been described as "historic" by environmental law experts, is expected to see former US secretary of state Tillerson give evidence and will be closely watched by energy companies and climate campaigners...Whatever the outcome of the trial, Hana Vizcarra, an environmental expert at Harvard Law School, says it will impact how large energy companies communicate their climate risk, particularly because Exxon is facing other lawsuits brought against it by shareholders that are yet to come to trial. "Investors and shareholders want more information on the climate and how it affects companies," Vizcarra told AFP. "Almost all oil and gas companies now produce climate-related reports -- the question is what information should be included in these reports," she added.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is the closest thing to a Ken Starr that exists for President Trump's impeachment inquiry — at least for now — lawmakers and committee staff tell Axios. The bottom line: In the absence of an independent or special counsel to manage the Ukraine investigation, Schiff has taken on a dual-hat role, as both a key committee chairman and chief investigator. Much like Starr, Schiff is there at the crux of key interviews behind closed doors and efforts to gather evidence that may further the impeachment inquiry. What they’re saying: Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and a Trump critic, told me Schiff would have been less likely to play this role — and might have had a harder time justifying it — if not for Attorney General Bill Barr. "If Attorney General Barr had accepted [a CIA lawyer’s attempt to make a] criminal referral and opened a meaningful inquiry, presumably with the appointment of a special counsel, he would’ve been in a position to say that the current congressional inquiry had to be put on hold." Tribe says, in hindsight, Trump may have wished that process had been put in place because it might have pre-empted the congressional inquiry and run out the clock between now and the election. "Now it’s too late. The irony is that, by trying to play the role of Roy Cohn to Donald Trump, William Barr has basically screwed his boss. If Trump had half a brain, he would be, well, pissed."

Jamarria Hall stood outside Osborn High School, where he graduated at the top of his class in 2017, now saying that time there was four years lost. Hall knew something was wrong the moment he stepped in the door his freshman year in 2014: the moldy smell of the school hallway, dead mice in the bathroom, water falling from the classroom ceilings into buckets or onto students' heads. Teachers failed to show up for class for days, Hall said, and students were sent to the gymnasium to watch movies. Classrooms lacked textbooks...The long-term impact of a substandard K-12 public education is among several legal arguments raised in a high-profile civil lawsuit before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit on Thursday. It was filed by Hall and six other Detroit school students...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University who is not part of the litigation, said the Detroit case gives the federal court system a chance to consider what he called the "massive body of evidence" demonstrating what under-funded schools do to the children attending them, including making them a "permanent underclass," a term referenced in a prior U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving education. Tribe said every state makes K-12 education mandatory and basic education has been recognized unanimously by the Supreme Court as “necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently" in an open political system.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein: President Trump’s favorite sheriff is back in court. On Wednesday, lawyers for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio will argue a strange federal appeal in San Francisco. Part of what makes it strange: The court was so concerned about the Department of Justice’s position in the case that it appointed an outside special prosecutor. The House’s impeachment inquiry ought to pay attention...It’s tempting for the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry to zero in on Ukraine. The case for focusing the nation’s attention on abuse of power is compelling, but the committee needs to consider broadening whatever article of impeachment accuses the president of abusing his presidential authority to encompass abuses unrelated to the Ukraine fiasco. This broader article should include such abuses as unjustifiably refusing to cooperate with the impeachment process authorized by the Constitution; corruptly seeking to undermine all legitimate inquiries into how the president ascended to his high office in the first instance; and blatantly misusing the pardon power, not to temper justice with mercy, but rather to cover up executive misconduct or to facilitate violations of individual rights. The arguments in Arpaio’s case on Wednesday should remind us that the Constitution is too important to leave only to the courts.

Exxon Mobil Corp. is heading to trial today over "shadow prices." The oil giant is accused of misrepresenting proxy costs of carbon to its investors — hypothetical prices on carbon dioxide that companies all over the world have begun incorporating into their business plans to account for climate change regulations. The use of these theoretical numbers is growing as companies grapple with the possibility that oil revenue could fall as governments address climate change through carbon taxes...But Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney with Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program, cautions against putting detrimental pressure on a burgeoning landscape of corporate climate disclosures. She suggests that attorneys general like James wield their legal power like a "blunt instrument" when used for policymaking, and that complex securities and disclosures laws could put a chilling effect on companies that want to disclose their climate risks. "AGs must walk a thin line to insure companies do not mislead investors and consumers while also not jeopardizing existing investor efforts to encourage more detailed climate-related disclosures from energy companies," Vizcarra wrote in a recent white paper.

On July 25, just a day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress and essentially concluded his investigation of President Donald Trump’s various intersections with Russia, Trump asked Ukraine’s leader to find dirt on a political opponent – indulging in some of the very behavior that Mueller had been investigating but couldn’t prove. In other words, Trump escaped Mueller’s probe and then turned right around and hit a self-destruct button...Laurence Tribe, a professor at the Harvard Law School and a leading constitutional scholar, told me that he sees some method in Trump’s madness on the White House lawn. “He obviously believes that if he commits his felonies in broad daylight and out in the open that he hasn’t done anything wrong -- and that no one would think he’s stupid enough to commit an impeachable offense in front of everyone,” he said. If Trump is muddying the waters by giving Democrats too many impeachable acts to track, Tribe suggests that they focus solely on building their case around two articles of impeachment that involve his Ukraine and Russia dealings: betrayal of country and stonewalling Congress. Trump’s comments Thursday about China can inform those charges, Tribe says, but he thinks it would be a strategic mistake for it to be turned into a standalone article of impeachment.

After a decade of improvements in air pollution, the U.S. is backsliding. And that means more people are dying prematurely, according to new research. The paper authors don’t point to a specific reason why the increase happened, but the numbers are clear that it occurred under the presidency of Donald Trump. A team of economists at Carnegie Mellon University published their working paper Monday with the National Bureau of Economic Research... “Since 2017, the agency, through a variety of actions, has signaled it is going to take a more relaxed approach,” Joe Goffman, former associate administrator for Climate and Senior Counsel at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation who now helps run Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program, told Earther. “This administration has sent enough signals to sources that they are operating under a more lenient regime that could corroborate the data that is the focus of this report.”

Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is getting some attention for her recently released labor platform, which focuses on unions and “sectoral bargaining,” a concept new to most Americans. Sectoral bargaining is when an entire field or industry agrees on basics, such as safety standards or minimum wages, rather than each company bargaining with its own workers. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, said it’s worth noting because union membership has decreased in the United States. He said he thinks that’s partly because of the way businesses or enterprises handle their bargaining now. “The problem with enterprise bargaining,” he said, “is that as soon as you have a union in one enterprise, that puts that enterprise at a competitive disadvantage with all the other enterprises in the same market.”...While fewer Americans are union members than in the past, Sachs argued that doesn’t mean unions are less popular. According to Gallup polling, Americans increasingly have approved of labor unions since 2009, soon after the recession.

President Trump urged his party to “get tougher and fight” against his impeachment Monday as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) distributed a “fact sheet” outlining what her office called a gross abuse of presidential power, including a “shakedown,” “pressure campaign” and “cover up.” A Republican effort to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) for his handling of the inquiry failed Monday, with the House voting along party lines to block a floor vote on the measure...Matz, who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, recently wrote a book, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” with another impeachment scholar Democrats are consulting, Laurence Tribe. Tribe, while not on staff or being paid, has also become a regular source of advice for House Democrats, particularly for his former students who are now in the thick of the impeachment probe: Schiff and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), both of whom studied under Tribe at Harvard Law School.

You've probably seen the ads. “They have spiffy marketing machines that are really good at drawing people in,” says Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard's Legal Services Center. “So, of course people see those ads and think that it's a good opportunity, that's what they're meant to make you think.” Merrill is talking about for-profit colleges. She warns many for-profit schools fail to deliver on the promises they advertise. “What the schools are telling people is that they're providing high quality state of the art training, often times like vocational hands on learning,” explains Merrill. “And either when students enroll they find out that's not true, or often it's even after they leave the school and find out their degree isn't valued by employers.” Merrill says graduates of for-profit colleges are often saddled with a worthless degree, and massive debt.

Pressure is mounting on Senate Republicans to do something about the Trump administration’s human rights violations, blatant corruption, Giuliani-hackery, and mounting counterintelligence problems, mostly thanks to the House Democrats finally opening an impeachment inquiry into the president’s behavior. While the idea of 20 GOP senators openly defecting to support a vote to convict Donald Trump in the Senate still remains whimsical, we’re seeing significant cracks in the wall of support for any and all Trump-y conduct...As professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School (also a Slate contributor) noted in an email to me: "Sen. Graham does seem to be parroting WH talking points, and not the most effective ones, either. Saying he needs to be 'shown' that 'Trump was actually engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call,' is particularly bizarre. What about the call itself? It was hardly chopped liver. Its explicit use of the word 'though' to link (a) the president’s willingness to release the aid that Congress had voted and that Ukraine was desperately seeking to defend itself from Putin’s aggression, to (b) the favor Trump wanted in return was enough in itself to establish that Trump was conditioning the aid package on assistance in his political quest both to erase Russia’s influence on his original election and to undermine his most likely 2020 opponent. If that’s not 'quid pro quo,' nothing is."

With the 2020 race for the White House in full swing, speakers at a Harvard panel on Saturday sharply differed on whether an interstate compact…

The OECD Secretariat’s proposed “unified approach to pillar one,” designed to encourage agreement among countries on how to rewrite the international tax and transfer pricing system to better account for digital business models, was the focus of the sixth annual Tax Sunday event, held October 20 in Washington, D.C. The meeting, co-sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, featured presentations and discussion by leading tax experts from OECD, government organizations, civil society, business, and academia. ... Professor Stephen E. Shay, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Law School, said it is a “fantasy” to believe the tax rewrite “is a 2020 process.” Shay said the OECD’s pillar one unified approach is devoid of details except that it does not apply to extractive industries. Thus, it is not possible to talk about any policy implications. The process should be slowed down so that policymakers can “get it right” for developing countries, Professor Shay said. He also said that each country should determine its own threshold for physical presence and should give away taxing rights only by tax treaty. Further, he noted that although extractive industries are excepted from the rules, these industries can also make use of tax havens.

Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission and current chairman of Making Every Vote Count, jokes that he has a unique boast. He went to high school and law school with the only two people alive today who won the popular vote for U.S. president, but didn't end up getting the job: Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. The reason? The Electoral College, the idiosyncratic presidential election process enshrined in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.  Hundt was one of the more than 20 speakers at “The Electoral College: Open Questions, Paths Forward” conference at Harvard Law School (HLS) this Saturday, organized by professor Lawrence Lessig and the Harvard Law & Policy Review. Lessig, founder of Equal Citizens and Equal Votes, was a candidate for the Democratic party’s nominee for President in 2016, running on a platform of electoral reform. The mismatched popular vote and Electoral College results of that election saw Donald Trump elected as President, despite Hillary Clinton receiving nearly 3 million more votes. Trump’s ascendency has brought the skewed design of the Electoral College under more scrutiny, reignited interest in electoral reform, and added fuel to Lessig’s argument.

Emily Broad Leib wanted to help Mississippi Delta residents through public policy, but what they needed first was a woodchipper.

The White House on Thursday confirmed that next year’s Group of Seven (G-7) summit will be held at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, Florida. The announcement immediately prompted accusations from legal experts that such a move would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney quickly went into damage control mode to defend the decision, saying that President Donald Trump was “not making any profit” by hosting the confab and that his property would accommodate the event “at cost.” ...“Mulvaney’s statement that Trump will not profit personally from this decision is total BS,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe said in an email to Law&Crime and on Twitter. “This will violate the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II for sure. Of course it will also violate the Foreign Emoluments Clause of Article I.”

Max Nisen, Bloomberg Opinion Healthcare Columnist: "The Democrats Are Fighting for Health in 2020" Noah Feldman, Professor at Harvard Law school and a Bloomberg Opinion Columnist: "Forget Giuliani. Trump’s Abuse of Power Is Clear" Justin Fox, Bloomberg Opinion Columnist: "’Peak TV’ Might Also Mean Peak Jobs in TV and Movies" Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg Opinion Columnist: "Why Ocasio-Cortez’s Endorsement Matters" Sarah Green Carmicheal, Bloomberg Opinion Editor: "Men and Women Split on Gender Diversity"

President Trump said on Saturday that he would no longer hold next year’s Group of 7 meeting at his luxury golf club near Miami, a swift reversal after two days of intense criticism over awarding his family company a major diplomatic event. ... Lawyers who have served in both Republican and Democratic administrations objected to the selection of the Doral, including several who emphasized that even though Mr. Trump, as president, is exempt from a federal conflict-of-interest statute, his role in the matter was improper. “It stinks,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan. “It is so completely blatant.” Some Republicans in Congress also questioned Mr. Trump’s move.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted Thursday that President Donald Trump conditioned U.S. aid to Ukraine on a politically motivated investigation into the origins of the allegation that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee. Then he attempted to reverse himself. Regardless of whether the reversal succeeds, Mulvaney’s initial admission signals what looks to become a new direction for defending the president: Admit there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine, but claim the president has the constitutional authority to do such deals with foreign countries. This is a defense that Democrats in charge of the impeachment inquiry should confront head on — sooner rather than later. It’s not enough simply to state that Trump abused his power when he offered Ukraine aid or a White House visit in return for investigating what Trump wanted investigated. The Democrats are going to have to explain why pressuring a foreign power to investigate political rivals subverts the very nature of republican self-government.

The Supreme Court is set to decide next month whether to review Oracle America Corp. and Google LLC’s nine-year fight over copyright fair use. In the meantime, a mash-up of Dr. Seuss children’s books and “Star Trek” television shows might provide the next big appellate test of the fair use doctrine. ... On the other side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others argue that transformative mash-ups deserve fair use protection, and that “Boldly Go” in particular “recasts, recontextualizes, and adds new expression or meaning” to the Dr. Seuss works in ways designed to resonate with “Star Trek” fans. A group of IP scholars featuring Berkeley Law’s Pamela Samuelson, Stanford’s Mark Lemley and Harvard’s Rebecca Tushnet say that a copyright owner must show a likelihood of harm to their traditional, reasonable or likely markets. A mere showing that a copyright owner “maintains a robust licensing program or participates in a seasonal market that the second comer would like to enter” isn’t enough to carry that burden, they argue.