Media Mentions

The White House tried to justify its refusal to comply with Democrats' subpoenas by claiming that their impeachment inquiry is unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe explains to Lawrence O'Donnell why that White House argument is "legally vacuous" and would rebuffed by the courts for putting the president above the law.

A book review by Randall Kennedy: Appointed 28 years ago, Clarence Thomas holds the honor of having held a seat on the Supreme Court longer than any of the other current justices. He is also the nation’s second African American justice, having succeeded the first, Thurgood Marshall, in 1991. Born in Pin Point, Georgia, in 1948, Thomas grew up poor, though not destitute, and in circumstances in which he experienced both anti-black racism and the opportunities pried open by the civil rights movement. He attended Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, pursuant to admissions programs that expressly sought to assist promising black students. Upon graduating from Yale, he associated himself with Jack Danforth, an ambitious, well-connected Republican and future Missouri senator who became a lifelong mentor and door opener. Through his budding ties with the GOP, Thomas steadily rose on the rungs of the political appointee ladder.

Over the course of the past two years — the past 18 months, really — President Trump has talked about insurance policies more than 90 times. This is the sort of thing presidents talk about — who’s covered, who isn’t, closing the gap. But that’s not what Trump’s talking about...He’s instead propagating a conspiracy theory about the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible overlap with his own campaign...That conspiracy theory holds that rogue FBI agents who disliked Trump launched the probe before the election to boot Trump from office once he won...The alleged plot was revealed in a text message made public last year, one of a giant set of messages released as Republicans investigated the agents. Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig saw this coming. Not this particular example, but things like this. In October 2009, he wrote an essay for the New Republic called “Against Transparency,” a provocative title for an insightful assessment of what the Internet would yield. Lessig’s argument was that releasing massive amounts of information onto the Internet for anyone to peruse — a big cache of text messages, for example — would allow people to pick out things that reinforced their own biases.

Since the impeachment inquiry into President Trump began, most Republicans in Congress have made the argument that the president’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigating a political opponent was not a quid pro quo or an abuse of power. But after a partisan House vote last week opening up a public phase of the inquiry — and a parade of government officials who testified to Congress that there was a quid pro quo — some in Mr. Trump’s party are testing out a new refrain: Even if a quid pro quo existed, it is not grounds for impeachment. They are merely concerned...Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an author of “To End a Presidency,” a book on impeachment, said the gamble that the most vocal Republicans appeared to be taking was that Mr. Trump — who as a candidate boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it — had succeeded in essentially saying “so what?” before...“I think the logic is the logic of the big lie,” Mr. Tribe said. “That if you repeat something often enough loudly enough to people who are not being critical in their analysis of what they’re hearing, you may just get away with it.”

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and a leading constitutional law scholar, has written one of the most compelling books on impeachment. Just don’t ask him if President Donald Trump should be impeached. “Of course he should be,” Sunstein writes in the preface to a newly reprinted edition of his book, “Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide.” He adds, “He obstructed justice not once but ten times.” In the next paragraph Sunstein writes: “Alternatively: Of course he shouldn’t be. The very question is ridiculous.” He adds, “This book does not choose between these two views. It does not say whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.”

Interview with Laura Bloomer, Legal Fellow at the HLS Environmental & Energy Law Program: Depuis son arrivée à la Maison-Blanche, Donald Trump accumule les mesures de détricotage des réglementations environnementales américaines. Lundi 4 novembre, il a officiellement informé les Nations Unies la sortie des États-Unis de l’accord de Paris, retrait qui doit prendre effet dans un an, le 4 novembre 2020. Laura Bloomer, conseillère juridique au sein du programme pour l’environnement et l’énergie d’Harvard, suit ces dossiers de très près.

The Trump administration's courtroom defense of its Clean Power Plan repeal could blunt its own efforts to craft standards for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, legal experts say. EPA has taken an unexpected approach to defending its rollback of the Obama-era rule against challenges by states, environmental groups, public health organizations, and even industry and conservative groups in federal court, Joseph Goffman and Caitlin McCoy of Harvard University's Environmental and Energy Law Program wrote in a recent analysis...When an agency presents an argument that it is making a reasonable interpretation of the law, courts will often defer to the agency's expertise under the doctrine known as Chevron deference. But EPA might have trouble defending a rule that says the best approach for states to reduce emissions from existing power plants is to take action at the facility level, or "inside the fence line," Goffman and other legal experts said. EPA could have argued both that the Clean Air Act compelled the agency's interpretation that power plant regulations could only use an "inside the fence line" approach, and that — even in the event that it didn't — EPA had selected a reasonable option among a number of possibilities in developing the ACE rule, Goffman said. "The riddle is, why didn't they do that?" he said. "Why did they just argue that the statutory language is compelled and not argue that it is reasonable?"

President Donald Trump formally began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord on Monday, a move announced in 2017 that will take another year to complete. The State Department formally submitted a request to withdraw from the pact signed by roughly 200 countries on Monday, the earliest date Trump can make the official notification. “With or without the paperwork the administration is doing to withdraw from Paris, they have effectively withdrawn from any kind of commitment already,” said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.

HLS Visiting Professor Jennifer Taub comments on impeachment inquiry.

Lawrence Lessig says voter suppression, gerrymandering, big-money politics, and the Electoral College are undermining our democracy…

Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe on Friday spoke with CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a wide-ranging discussion, beginning with Tribe’s formative academic years as a mathematician and ending with an in-depth discussion of President Donald Trump’s tumultuous tenure in office. Tribe, who wrote the 2018 book “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” — which he co-authored with attorney Joshua Matz, the latest addition to House Democrats’ impeachment legal team — has made no secret of his opposition to President Trump. The constitutional scholar on Friday made his case for impeachment, addressing some of the common defenses against it as he went.

Walmart is getting out of the vaping business, but still sells cigarettes. It is working to reduce plastic packaging for the products on its shelves, but continues to use plastic grocery bags in its checkout lines. After a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this summer, the retailer said it would no longer offer certain types of ammunition, but stopped short of banning customers from carrying their guns into stores. When navigating the nation’s culture wars, Walmart follows a strategy is has honed for years: alienate as few customers as possible and do no harm to its core business...The same year Walmart raised its starting wage, the company also eliminated health care coverage for tens of thousands of part-time employees. The company says it provides health insurance to 1.1 million workers and their family members. “Their strategy is to give a little here and there, but not provide the thing that is most valuable to workers, which is collective bargaining,” said Sharon Block, who ran the policy office at the Labor Department during the Obama administration and now teaches at Harvard Law School. “That is the only way Walmart workers are going to make any real gains.”

An article by Noah Feldman:  A growing number of cities and states want to turn climate change lawsuits against oil companies into the next tobacco or opioid litigation. In principle, that seems like a truly terrible idea. Such lawsuits will likely do even less to remedy the effects of climate change than similar suits did for lung cancer or opioid addiction. Yet on closer analysis, the climate change lawsuits may be the worst solution to mitigating climate change — except for all the others. The analogy to Winston Churchill’s notorious defense of democracy isn’t an accident. In the American form of democracy, oil companies enjoy an almost unparalleled capacity to influence Congress and federal government regulators.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  What divides the right and the left? Not 50 years ago, or 20 or even 10 years ago, but right now? Here’s one speculation: Conservatives tend to be localists; they focus on their families, their towns, their states and their nation. Progressives are far more likely to be universalists who focus on human beings as such. New evidence strongly supports this speculation, and explains a lot about current political divisions, not only in the U.S. and Canada but also in Europe and elsewhere. It also offers concrete lessons for aspiring politicians, whether they’re on the right or the left.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Why is it that when you check out of a hotel the bill is always so much larger than expected? It’s the assortment of unexpected fees — resort fees, destination fees, cleaning fees, hotel fees and more — that no one mentions until you’re leaving. Congress wants to do something about this. The House of Representatives is considering legislation that would increase transparency by requiring a room’s advertised rate to include all mandatory fees except those imposed by government. This bipartisan Hotel Transparency Act of 2019 is a terrific idea.

An article by Ashley Nunes, Senior Research Associate, Labor and Worklife Program:  Boeing executives faced a grilling on Capitol Hill this week. In separate hearings over two days, members of both the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee pressed chief executive Dennis Muilenburg and lead engineer John Hamilton about Boeing’s internal workings, its relationship with federal officials and its commitment to air safety. The hearings come after two Boeing jets — both the 737 Max model — crashed within months of each another. In Indonesia one year ago, the plane plungedinto the Java Sea shortly after takeoff, killing all 189 passengers and crew on board. In Ethiopia earlier this year, a similar crash killed all 157 people aboard. Government regulators including those in China, Canada and the United States banned the jet from flying in their airspace after both crashes were linked to the same automation system, effectively grounding the Max. U.S. lawmakers now want answers about what went wrong and how to fix the regulatory system to avert another crash.

As is true of many legal concepts, “contempt of court” can be inexact in its definitions or implications. But that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her department’s treatment of thousands of students defrauded by the for-profit company Corinthian Colleges. U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim in San Francisco on Oct. 24 slapped DeVos and her agency with a $100,000 sanction for civil contempt. ... “The sector feels like they’ve never had a better friend in the federal government than Betsy DeVos,” says Eileen Connor of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, who represents plaintiffs in the lawsuit over the Corinthian settlement.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joined us Thursday for a regular check-in as the state's top law enforcement official. We discussed the recent impeachment vote in the House of Representatives, Governor Baker's vaping ban, and her office's lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and ExxonMobil. But, first, we hear the latest on impeachment from our legal analyst. Guests: ... Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

President Trump has sought to intimidate witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, attacking them as “Never Trumpers” and badgering an anonymous whistleblower. He has directed the White House to withhold documents and block testimony requested by Congress. And he has labored to publicly discredit the investigation as a “scam” overseen by “a totally compromised kangaroo court.” ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard Law School who has informally advised some Democratic House leaders, said Trump’s actions are unprecedented. “I know of no instance when a president subject to a serious impeachment effort, whether Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, has essentially tried to lower the curtain entirely — treating the whole impeachment process as illegitimate, deriding it as a ‘lynching’ and calling it a ‘kangaroo court,’” Tribe said.

Officials at Harvard Law School in Massachusetts sent a message to students with an unusual request: please don't feed the loose bird in the library. Visitors to the Harvard Law School Library reported spotted a small bird flying around among the stacks in recent days, and officials said they are working on a plan to capture and remove the academic avian.

One year ago on November 1, tens of thousands of Google workers spilled out of their offices around the world, protesting sexual harassment, misconduct and a lack of transparency at one of the most powerful tech companies in the world. In New York City, hundreds of workers gathered in a park near Google HQ, holding signs like "Women's rights are human rights" and chanting "time is up." Organizers took turns using a megaphone to address the crowd, reading anonymous stories from colleagues who said they'd been treated unfairly by the company. ... While the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects some organizing by employees outside of a union, the law has many weaknesses, said Sharon Block, an executive director of Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program. "The law is pretty narrow," said Block, a former policy office head at the Department of Labor under President Barack Obama. She added that there's some understanding that workers are protected if they organize related to something that has an "immediate nexus to their working conditions."