Media Mentions

Leah Plunkett ’06 shares some tips from her new book, ‘Sharenthood’.

President Trump has been on quite a losing streak in court, especially. Last Friday, he lost a total of five cases concerning his snatching funds from the Pentagon to pay for his border wall, Congress’s power to subpoena documents from the accounting firm Mazars USA, and his attempt to expand the definition of public charge, which would have denied green cards to those who used government benefits to which they were legally entitled. His losing streak continued on Tuesday. The Post reports: “A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a lawsuit claiming that President Trump is illegally profiting from foreign and state government visitors at his hotel in downtown Washington. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed to rehear the lawsuit, brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District, which was dismissed over the summer by a three-judge panel of the court.” The case will be heard on Dec. 12 and breathes life into one of three ongoing suits against Trump for receipt of foreign emoluments...Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe (who is counsel in a different emoluments case) tells me, “I was convinced the panel’s decision denying standing to Maryland and D.C. in the Emoluments Clause challenge was legally wrong and am pleased to see the full Fourth Circuit seems inclined to agree, bringing it in line with the Second Circuit.” Tribe noted Trump’s run of court losses. “With the stonewall the president had interposed to the impeachment inquiry crumbling as Fiona Hill and others testify despite Trump’s effort to silence them, it’s hard not to sense the tide turning rapidly and decisively.”

An article by Ben Saul:  Human rights and counterterrorism have been dramatically politicized and undermined at the United Nations over the past 18 months. In a spate of recent resolutions, the 47-member Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva and the General Assembly in New York have both retreated markedly from many of the hard-won normative gains in their earlier resolutions after 9/11, following concerted lobbying by the likes of Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia—regimes not known for respecting rights in counterterrorism. The rot started in the HRC in 2017 and then spread to the General Assembly in 2018 and was repeated in the HRC in September 2019. The issues will erupt again at the General Assembly at its 74th session, with a new resolution expected in December 2019.

An article by Jacques Singer-Emery JD '20 and Jack Goldsmith:  One of the most damning allegations in the whistleblower complaint is that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son by withholding congressionally approved military aid.  The amounts include $250 million from the Defense Department and $141 million from the State Department. As debates swirl over the existence and significance of a presidential quid pro quo, it is worth examining the underlying mechanics of how the White House might have withheld the money. The answer lies in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for overseeing all executive agency spending. That is why on Oct. 7 the chairmen of three House Committees—Oversight and Reform, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs—sent letters to subpoena documents from the acting director of OMB, Russell Vought, in addition to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. The subpoena to Vought ordered him to produce “all documents and communications in your custody, possession, or control referring or relating to” various matters linked to the withholding or deferral of congressionally appropriated funds to Ukraine. The deadline to respond to the subpoena was Oct. 15, yesterday, and Vought made clear that he would not comply.

An article by Noah Feldman:  If you’re following the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, you may be wondering why you aren’t seeing video clips of testimony by crucial witnesses. The answer is: it’s all happening in secret, not so much to protect national security, but to manage the political process of the inquiry. There are some plausible reasons to justify the ongoing secrecy of depositions being made before the House Intelligence Committee. But the secrecy can’t go on indefinitely. As the contours of the case against Trump become known, it’s time for House Democrats to start moving towards public testimony and a more transparent inquiry.

When the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, accused California of allowing “piles of human feces” on city streets to contaminate sewer systems, leaders of the agency’s West Coast region hastily convened an all-hands meeting of the San Francisco staff. At that meeting, E.P.A. officials informed staff members that Mr. Wheeler’s torrent of allegations about the state’s water pollution were exaggerated, according to five current and former E.P.A. officials briefed on internal discussions... Critics of the Trump administration have accused E.P.A. officials in Washington of clamping down on environmental standards in California while averting their gaze from similar or worse situations elsewhere. “There’s no question here that the administration is targeting California, because, ironically, California has played an outsize role as an aggressive regulator of environmental pollution,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University.

The impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump is proceeding apace this week with closed-door testimonies each day from various actors within the Trump administration, including former Europe advisor Fiona Hill yesterday and Ambassador Gordon Sondland on schedule for Thursday. Hill’s testimony yesterday revealed the sharp divisions within the White House this summer over Rudy Giuliani’s shadow agenda in Ukraine, including former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s deepening distrust of Trump's attorney’s activities. To discuss all this and more, Jim Braude was joined by Jennifer Braceras, a senior fellow with the conservative organization Independent Women’s Forum, and retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School.

Attorneys for President Donald Trump were wrong to think they should have the right to cross-examine witnesses, and call their own individuals, in the impeachment inquiry from Democrats in Congress, prominent legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Tuesday evening. That was part of Sunstein’s comments at an event held by the New York State Bar Association at Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, was invited to speak by the State Bar to talk about the legal process and ramifications of impeachment, which has been on the minds of many as Democrats continue their formal inquiry into Trump this week...“The argument was that the president has been denied due process because there’s no cross examination going on in the House,” Sunstein said. “The first thing to say is that it’s not a criminal trial and there’s no right in these things to cross examination.”

An op-ed by Alan Dershowitz: What is an impeachable offense? Rep. Maxine Waters, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says the definition is purely political: “whatever Congress says it is—there is no law.” She’s wrong. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers debated impeachment of a president. Some argued for the power of Congress to remove the president for “maladministration” or other open-ended terms that appeared in several state constitutions. Others, including James Madison, opposed such vague criteria, fearful that they would turn the republic into a British-style parliamentary system, in which Congress could remove a president over political differences—effectively a vote of no confidence. That, Madison argued, would be the “equivalent to tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” The Framers wanted an independent president who could be removed only for genuine wrongdoing. So they agreed to the criteria that became part of the Constitution: “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by all-star SCOTUS experts to walk us through this week’s biggest legal and constitutional developments. First, Laurence Tribe answers the questions Amicus listeners have been asking about the next steps in the impeachment process. Next, Pamela Karlan takes us inside the chamber for Tuesday’s oral arguments in a trio of Title VII cases at the high court.

Donald Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the House’s impeachment inquiry, in addition to his decisions on Syria, are the types of actions many believe could drive the president towards being impeached as an inevitable consequence. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to discuss.Oct. 12, 2019

President Donald Trump who pledged in April to fight “all the subpoenas”, has been dealt another blow in his battle to keep his tax returns private. In May, a federal judge in Washington, DC refused to quash a subpoena directing Mazars USA, the president's accounting firm, to give eight years of financial records to the House of Representatives. Mr Trump called that ruling “crazy”, blamed it on “an Obama-appointed judge” and took his case to the Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit. ... Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, expects “at least five votes” among the justices to affirm Judge Tatel’s ruling. He does not reckon that Justices Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh—Mr Trump’s two high-court appointees—would agree with Judge Rao's analysis.

An article by Noah Feldman:  The news that two associates of Rudy Giuliani have been charged with funneling illegal campaign contributions from Ukraine to the United States is inevitably intriguing to Democrats leading an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. But it’s important to avoid going down a rabbit hole of Ukraine-Trump connections. That could distract the public from the core issue: That Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in exchange for releasing military aid.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  The discussion of President Donald Trump’s record on regulation is distressingly tribal. Emphasizing the importance of environmental protection, worker safety and civil rights, his harshest critics see deregulation as a dirty word. Complaining of regulation run riot in the past, his most enthusiastic supporters celebrate the smallest changes as heroic efforts to restore freedom to a nation that lies prostrate and humiliated before all-powerful bureaucrats. But on some occasions, the administration does something that all tribes should be willing to endorse. That was the case last week when Trump issued two executive orders designed to improve the operation of the regulatory state. They aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but in terms of the operations of the U.S. government, they are unquestionably important.

When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, his campaign was strikingly pro-labor...Several candidates have pledged to ban noncompete agreements, which hold down wages for workers, and mandatory-arbitration clauses, which prohibit lawsuits against employers...Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communications Workers of America and a top volunteer adviser to Mr. Sanders in 2016 and now, said that he has been touting the importance of sectoral bargaining to Mr. Sanders in recent years...Mr. Cohen has also been involved in an effort by two faculty members at Harvard Law School, known as the Clean Slate for Worker Power project, to convene dozens of labor experts, activists and organizers to reimagine labor law from the ground up. The group won’t publish its recommendations until January, but in the meantime it has worked to disseminate ideas like sectoral bargaining across the campaigns. Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs, the Harvard faculty members involved, have weighed in with several campaigns that have embraced this approach, according to aides to Ms. Warren, Mr. Buttigieg, Mr. O’Rourke and Mr. Booker. Ms. Block, a former Obama administration official and congressional staff member who is a veteran of legislative efforts to make unionizing and collective bargaining easier, said experience had taught her that advancing labor interests through provisions like card check doesn’t work: Such measures tend to be too small to matter substantively, and they fail to generate political excitement among those who would benefit. “The folks who don’t want this to happen will fight just as hard whether it’s small or big,” Ms. Block said. “But doing something bigger makes moving legislation easier because you have the potential to have a much bigger constituency behind it.”

The 2016 presidential campaign showcased the worst of Facebook. Remember the headline “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president”? That story had nearly 1 million Facebook impressions by Election Day, prompting the pope to call such fake news a “sin” and a “sickness.”...A new Facebook decision, though, could play havoc with the 2020 election. Facebook executive Nick Clegg announced that the company’s 30,000 contracted content moderators are no longer fact-checking political ads, which he said amounted to censorship. Moderators will block “previously debunked content” — but fresh lies will be allowed. As Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein noted, having the company stay out of fact-checking will make it less likely to face claims of political bias for keeping certain allegations off its platform.

Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School professor and the author of Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide (Penguin Books, 2019), and Henry Greenberg, president of the New York State Bar Association and partner at Greenberg Traurig, LLP, discuss the legal issues surrounding impeachment.

In the history of the earth’s climate two years is a infinitesimal blip, but in the recent history of investor-led efforts to push for action on climate change from corporations, two years has meant a great deal. In 2017, the two biggest U.S.-based fund managers, BlackRockand Vanguard — which control a combined $12 trillion in assets — both voted to require Exxon Mobil to produce a report on climate change. It was a seen as watershed moment showing what can occur when the biggest index funds punch their weight at the annual meetings of corporations, and join other shareholders in supporting proxy proposals covering social issues. Until it wasn’t the watershed everybody thought it was. Since that 2017 vote, multiple analyses of proxy votes have shown BlackRock and Vanguard to have among the worst voting records when it comes to social issues supported by other shareholders, including many of their peers among the world’s largest asset managers...Concerns about conflicts of interest were recently studied by Harvard Law School corporate governance expert Lucian Bebchuk and Boston University law professor Scott Hirst, who also is the director of institutional investor research at Harvard Law’s corporate governance program. They concluded there were incentives for the biggest index fund companies to “defer excessively” to corporate managers. While they looked at “say-on-pay” proposals where the big index funds were more pro-management than actively managed funds, similar reasoning would apply to environmental issues.

Following the enactment of the Food Safety and Modernization Act (“FSMA”) in 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) embarked on a series of regulatory efforts to increase the safety of America’s food supply. Later this month, the agency will host a public meeting to discuss its plans for “A New Era of Smarter Food Safety.”...The nation’s food safety system is a concern for many stakeholders, from consumers to producers and regulators. The Government Accountability Office has labeled food safety a “high risk issue” for years, noting that the “patchwork nature of federal oversight of food safety may make it difficult to ensure that the government is effectively promoting the safety and integrity of the nation’s food supply.” Harvard Law’s Emily M. Broad Leib and Pace Law’s Margot J. Pollans recently published an article detailing the ways in which the “current narrow approach to food safety is inadequate” to respond to broader issues of health and welfare throughout the food system.

Power shutdowns intended to prevent more devastating California wildfires are raising new concerns about another longstanding environmental threat: air pollution. As utilities halted service to more than 2 million people this week, lines formed at hardware stores selling portable generators, while many hospitals and businesses fired up their own. The prospect of emissions belching from untold numbers of the machines, some powered by diesel and gasoline as well as propane and natural gas, was troubling in a state already burdened with some of the nation's worst air quality...It could be hard to quantify the effects of power shutdowns on air quality because of the many factors to consider, including how to weigh the pollution they cause against the pollution avoided by preventing wildfires, said Joe Goffman, a former assistant administrator with EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during the Obama administration. "The kinds of fires California has seen in recent years have been major, catastrophic polluters in and of themselves," said Goffman, now director of the Harvard Law School Environment and Energy Law Program. "These shutdowns are being done precisely to prevent that from happening."

Democratic presidential contenders are coming under increased pressure from their base to take a page from Donald Trump’s 2016 playbook and release a shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees — one part of a larger strategy from party activists to make the courts a central issue in the 2020 race. Demand Justice, a group founded to counteract the conservative wing’s decades-long advantage over liberals in judicial fights, will release a list of 32 suggested Supreme Court nominees for any future Democratic president as they ramp up their push for the 2020 contenders to do the same. The slate of potential high court picks includes current and former members of Congress, top litigators battling the Trump administration’s initiatives in court, professors at the nation’s top law schools and public defenders. Eight are sitting judges. They have established track records in liberal causes that Demand Justice hopes will energize the liberal base...The full list from Demand Justice includes...Sharon Block, the executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard Law School and former member of the National Labor Relations Board.