Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: To understand where the impeachment inquiry has gone so far, and where it’s likely to go next, you need to keep in mind one key concept. Hint: it’s not quid pro quo. It’s momentum. To date, House Democrats have built on the original whistle-blower’s document by eliciting behind-closed-doors depositions from those officials in the State Department, Defense Department, and White House who are willing to defy Donald Trump’s order not to participate. By leaking the headlines of their testimony, the Democrats have been able to dominate the news cycle for weeks.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court and the Education Department must pay a $100,000 fine after a federal judge ruled it failed to stop collecting student loans on a now-defunct college. The rare rebuke came after U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim was "astounded" to discover that DeVos and her department continued to chase more than 16,000 former students from the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc. for funds allegedly owed earlier this month despite a 2018 order to stop. ...In an interview with Newsweek prior to this week's hearing, Harvard lawyer Toby Merrill said that such a finding would be inevitable as there was "no factual question" that DeVos violated the 2018 order. Merrill is the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University who brought about the class action suit on behalf of 80,000 affected students against the Education Department. ..."Taking this rare and powerful action to hold the Secretary of Education in contempt of court shows the extreme harm Betsy DeVos' actions have caused students defrauded by for-profit colleges," she said. "Secretary DeVos has repeatedly and brazenly violated the law to collect for-profit college students' debts and deny their rights, and today she has been held accountable.  

Professor Laurence Tribe told Anderson Cooper if there were ever an example of a high crime or misdemeanor the call President Trump had with Ukrainian President Zelensky is it. Tribe said Wednesday night the Ukraine call makes the "Nixon situation" look silly in comparison. "If there were ever a model case for an impeachable offense, a high crime and misdemeanor that includes bribery this is it," Tribe declared. "This is just the most transparently clear abuse of power and an impeachable offense that I can remember in the history of the United States," Tribe said. "And I've studied it pretty thoroughly. This makes the Nixon situation look silly by comparison. This is way more serious."

Defenders of President Donald Trump have gone past their “no quid pro quo” claim to allege “hearsay” to denounce the testimony of acting ambassador William Taylor that further implicated the president in the growing Ukranian scandal. Also on the defensive, Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters Thursday that he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will introduce a resolution to condemn the impeachment inquiry. He is urging the House to make the hearings public and allow for cross-examination — something Democrats are reportedly planning to do sometime in November. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard Law this semester who also serves on the Board of Advisors for the group Impeach Trump Now, and William Weinreb, former acting U.S. Attorney and lead prosecutor of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James B. Stewart ’76 talks about his new book, “Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law," and the president's ongoing battle with the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.

...Only a few years ago, such “deepfakes” were a novelty, created by hobbyist coders. Today, they are increasingly commodified as yet another service available to those with even a little disposable cash. ...One way to deal with this would be through enacting clear regulation. Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, was among those involved in helping draft the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject (DEEPFAKES) to Accountability Act. “It became incredibly important to enter a piece of legislation,” she says. “As we move towards 2020, we may be subject to supposed video evidence and we need a way of identifying what may look real [but is not].” She says that there are fears that both China and Iran could turn to deepfakes as a tool to attack the US.

In the summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton was heavily favored to become the next president of the United States. And one story was dominating coverage of her campaign: her emails. Following Donald Trump’s election, researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society found that media coverage of the Clinton campaign overwhelmingly focused on scandals surrounding her campaign, rather than policy issues. Coverage of the Trump campaign, on the other hand, favored policy over scandals.

Facial-recognition software correctly matched photos of research volunteers to unidentified medical scans of their heads, in a new study of images that are commonly used in brain research. The finding draws attention to a privacy threat that will increase with technology improvements and the growth of health-care data, experts in medical imaging and facial recognition said. ...The findings suggest existing privacy protections don’t go far enough, the study’s authors said. They also point to the continuing challenge of anticipating new risks from emerging technology, as well as to the need for caution in handling medical data, said I. Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard University’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics. “Our imaginations are only so good,” he said.

Two student advocacy groups have filed separate lawsuits against Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, one alleging her Department of Education allowed an operator of for-profit schools to mislead students and sack them with debt they are now unable to repay, and another that accused her of continuing to refuse to discharge the student loan debt of borrowers previously enrolled in for-profit schools that abruptly shuttered. ... The Project on Predatory Student Lending, part of the Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School, also filed a lawsuit Tuesday against DeVos on behalf of approximately 7,200 former students enrolled in now-defunct for-profit schools in Massachusetts operated by Corinthian Colleges, demanding department officials cancel their student loans.

In November, Seattle will elect a new city council. It is the second election in which the city’s democracy vouchers are in play, a first-of-its-kind financing program for taxpayers, which is either, depending on who you ask, the roadmap to fixing big money in politics across America or responsible for a $3 million jump in PAC spending. In 2015, Seattle overwhelmingly passed Initiative 112  with 63 percent of the vote. The idea first surfaced in the broader public sphere in 2011, 13 months after the Citizens United decision allowed a new flood of corporate money into politics. Harvard law professor Lawerence Lessig proposed a counterbalance in a New York Times op-ed: “more money.” Lessig argued that if corporations were able to classify vast sums of money as protected speech, it might be time to start asking how to match that capitalistic tide with money from ‘the people.’ “[I]magine a system that gave a rebate of that first $50 [we pay in taxes] in the form of a ‘democracy voucher,'” Lessig proposed.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe shares with CNN's Anderson Cooper why he thinks President Donald Trump's decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine amounts to an impeachable offense.

Aexander hamilton warned in 1788 that impeachment risks “agitat[ing] the passions of the whole community” and spurring “pre-existing factions” to “animosities, partialities, influence and interest”. The process, he wrote, carries the “greatest danger” that “real demonstrations of innocence or guilt” will amount to little in the face of raw political calculations. But the constitution carves a path around the maelstrom, Hamilton insisted: the United States Senate will have the “sole power to try all impeachments” sent its way by the House of Representatives. ...Keeping the Senate proceedings “civil and orderly”—a task that the constitution assigns to the chief justice—may be a struggle, says Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and co-author of “To End a Presidency”. The previous chief justice, William Rehnquist, said of his role in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1999 that “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well.” John Roberts, the chief today, faces a more partisan environment but, Mr Tribe says, will seek to emulate his predecessor.

Laurence Tribe on Wednesday suggested that Democrats are now in possession of the “smoking Howitzer” with which to impeach President Donald Trump. The Harvard constitutional law professor told CNN’s Anderson Cooper he believed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was “wise to hold off” until last month to begin an impeachment investigation, after she had “what amounts to not just a smoking gun, but a smoking Howitzer.”

Former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday attempted to defend President Donald Trump against the onslaught of increasingly inculpatory evidence emerging from Democrats’ impeachment inquiry by claiming that abusing the power of the presidency is not a crime. Appearing on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Whitaker argued that Trump’s conduct was not criminal and therefore not impeachable...Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, described Whitaker’s comments as “the epitome of ignorance.” “Matt Whitaker’s statement that ‘abuse of power is not a crime’ is the epitome of ignorance – ignorance of the Constitution, ignorance of the purposes and history of the Impeachment Clause, ignorance of America’s history, ignorance of the law,” Tribe told Law and Crime. “Impeachable offenses, which the Constitution quaintly calls ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ are offenses against the nation and its Constitution, not necessarily violations of criminal statutes.”

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…

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 to effectively disable the Electoral College and move to a national popular vote offers an antidote to problems with the presidential selection system. “We are not seeking perfection. We are seeking a more perfect union,” National Popular Vote advocate Rob Richie said during the discussion, part of a conference at Harvard Law School on the history and future of the Electoral College hosted by the Harvard Law & Policy Review...While he backs the compact, in a keynote speech Lawrence Lessig, the Roy. L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, outlined a new proposal for a constitutional amendment he suggested could garner broader support. The proposal would award the support of each state’s electors to the top two candidates on a “fractional proportional” basis, meaning they would receive votes equal to their percentage of the overall state results. It also includes a provision aimed at lessening what some critics consider the unfair advantage small states enjoy in the allotment of electoral votes. “If we had fractional proportional allocation by states, the swing-state problem disappears,” Lessig said. “Presidential candidates would … at least try to campaign to everyone throughout the whole country.”

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.