Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In April 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt spoke before a large audience in Paris. “The poorest way to face life,” he said, “is with a sneer.” These days, too many Democrats are sneering — not only at President Donald Trump, but also at one another. From the left, many progressives are describing former Vice President Joe Biden as out of touch, old, too conservative, maybe even a bit racist. From the center, many Democrats are describing Senator Elizabeth Warren as unelectable, unlikable, unrealistic, disconnected from the values and beliefs of ordinary Americans. That’s a shame for many reasons, but one in particular is that it threatens to put Democrats in a position akin to that of Trump-era Republicans. A recurring question, mostly faced by Republicans in the age of Trump, is whether to work for a party nominee or an elected official with whom they have intense disagreements. Over the last two years, many Republicans have declined to join the Trump administration, others have been criticized for doing so, and some have been, and now are, torn about whether to resign.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: There are a lot of misconceptions about impeachment. Incompetence isn’t impeachable. It’s terrible for a president to violate the oath of office, but doing so is not, by itself, an impeachable offense. Even posing a danger to the American people isn’t a legitimate basis for impeachment. Under the Constitution, what is necessary is a “high crime or misdemeanor,” meaning an egregious abuse of presidential authority. Some crimes would not count; consider shoplifting or disorderly conduct. An action that is not criminal might be impeachable; consider a six-month vacation, an effort to jail political enemies or an abuse of the pardon power (by, for example, pardoning associates who have engaged in criminal activity at the president’s behest). If you want to understand what counts as impeachable, read the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution’s impeachment provisions were written against the background set by the Declaration. Read against that background, one thing becomes blindingly obvious: If the president has clearly committed an impeachable offense, the House of Representatives is not entitled to look the other way.

Tired of throwing away spoiled produce? Apeel Sciences says it has gotten to the root of the problem and developed a technology that can double or possibly triple the shelf life of many types of produce, including avocados. ... According to Kroger, 40 percent of food produced in the U.S. is thrown away and households waste more than $1,300 in unused food annually. About 160 billion pounds of discarded food ends up in landfills each year, according to Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Having a criminal record can make it harder to find work and housing, but a new local study asks whether it helps to have your record expunged. Expungement erases past arrests and charges, and removes old or low-level convictions from public view. But no empirical data show how much of an impact it has on job or housing prospects, or on the chances of future arrests. Harvard University’s Access to Justice Lab hopes to answer that question by following people who get their records cleared over a seven-year period. Participants in Pennsylvania will come from Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties. Similar research will also be conducted in Kansas. “What we are trying to do is to establish and create rigorous evidence ... about whether expungement does in fact help people,” said Harvard Law School professor Jim Greiner, who is leading the project.  

Chuckie O’Brien should not be confused with Robert O’Brien, the new national security adviser to President Trump whom I wrote about last week. In fact, finding two Americans more different in upbringings and career paths is hard to imagine. There’s a new book out this week about the first O’Brien, and it is the unlikeliest riveting read of the year: “In Hoffa’s Shadow” by Jack Goldsmith — Harvard Law professor, national security law maven and former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. It was Goldsmith who, while in the last role, played Samson in the temple to the Stellarwind surveillance program and its demise during the George W. Bush administration.

In response to reports that President Donald Trump repeatedly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the President and his defenders have been quick to point out that there was never a mention of any kind of “quid pro quo” bribery deal. According to Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, despite reportedly urging Zelensky to initiate the inquiry eight times in one conversation, the lack an explicit tit-for-tat proposition rendered the entire interaction innocuous. ... Similarly, Harvard Law professor and author of the book “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” Laurence Tribe pointed out that Trump’s alleged actions unequivocally constitute a violation of his oath of office. “If Trump was pressing Ukraine to go after Biden’s family at the same time that Trump was withholding aid from Ukraine to defend itself from Russian aggression, that’s enough,” Tribe tweeted Sunday. “No explicit quid pro quo is needed to make this a betrayal of his oath and a ‘High Crime and Misdemeanor.’”

If a secret whistleblower complaint covers President Donald Trump's dealings with the president of Ukraine, as two major newspapers have reported, it raises profound constitutional questions about whether Congress can police the president's conversations with foreign leaders, legal experts say. ... Some legal scholars, such as Harvard's Jack Goldsmith, are making an even broader argument: that the president can say and do anything he wants in the conduct of foreign relations, which is purely an executive branch function. ... "Putting it brutally, Article II gives the president the authority to do, and say, and pledge, awful things in the secret conduct of U.S. foreign policy," Goldsmith, a former Bush Administration lawyer, said on Twitter. "That is a very dangerous discretion, to be sure, but has long been thought worth it on balance."

An article by Niku Jafarnia ’20: On June 2, Walter Lübcke, a German politician who had defended Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming migrants, was murdered by a right-wing extremist. The incident was one of several such attacks against European politicians who had advocated for generous immigration policies, and one of many more right-wing attacks perpetrated directly against immigrant communities. In response to the disturbing trend, a number of policymakers in the United States and in Europe have suggested that immigrants, rather than xenophobia or racism, are at the root of extremist violence. Whether immigrants are the perpetrators or the victims of an act of terrorist violence — and regardless of the ideological motivation behind the attack — their presence is portrayed as the primary problem.

... The Education Department is refunding some student loan payments made by thousands of borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges. A federal judge last year had ordered it to stop collecting on the debt amid an ongoing class action lawsuit. ... Toby Merrill, director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents the Corinthian borrowers in the case, blasted the Trump administration for “an illegal and unacceptable breach of a court order that students won.”

President Donald Trump faces renewed allegations of conflicts of interest between his official office and personal business after a letter from House Democrats revealed the Pentagon had spent more than $184,000 at his Scottish golf club. ... "It’s a clear violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II, which flatly and unconditionally prohibits the president from receiving financial benefits from any state or any part of the federal government over and above his congressionally fixed compensation," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email.

Trump's legal team filed a claim to stop a Manhattan D.A.'s subpoena of his tax returns that said the President cannot be prosecuted or investigated while in office. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence why Trump's lawyers are wrong- and why the tax return subpoena cannot be stopped.

When liberals and progressives cite former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s best and worst rulings of the Barack Obama era, they typically praise his support for same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges while slamming him for his support for unlimited corporate donations in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court obviously isn’t going to be overturning Citizens United anytime soon given its swing to the right, but a group of 50 legal experts have another idea for ending that decision: a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. ...The legal experts, according to the Law & Crime website, have signed a joint letter they plan to release on Constitution Day that calls for a constitutional amendment ending Citizens United. Those who have signed the letter range from former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter to Zephyr Teachout (a law professor at Fordham University in New York City) to two professors at the Harvard Law School: Lawrence Lessig and Laurence Tribe. The letter states, “As attorneys, law professors and former judges with a wide variety of political beliefs and affiliations, we are convinced that our nation’s current election spending framework is a root cause of dysfunction in our political system and requires fundamental reform.”

In august 2013 a devastating chemical-weapons attack on the Damascus suburbs killed some 1,400 people. Faced with a clear breach of the red line he drew a year earlier, President Barack Obama had to decide what to do. He blinked. Rather than ordering reprisals against the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, he opted to ask for Congress’s permission first. And Congress, it turned out, was not keen. Samantha Power, Mr Obama’s new ambassador to the United Nations, faced a choice, too. She had spent her professional life arguing for a more assertive American response to atrocities. She believed her boss should punish this horrendous crime, and indeed earlier ones, with air strikes. Now her idealism confronted the complexities of government. Should she resign, as some critics urged her to do?

An article by Noah Feldman: The Trump administration is gearing up for its next big legal fight, taking on California’s long-established authority to set vehicle emission standards for new cars. Because the state is so large, this effectively creates national miles-per-gallon targets for any manufacturer selling vehicles in the U.S. Trump would like to take this power away from California and set lower national MPG standards. The question is, can he do it? Or is this just another example of presidential overreach in an administration that specializes in going too far?

... Recently, in order to achieve wide exposure to public equity markets, Harvard Management Company (HMC) has come to rely increasingly on pooled investments and commingled funds typically managed by outside investment firms, rather than directly owning stock in individual companies. This has led to a review of ACSR’s [Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility] role and as a result, going forward, the committee will focus on developing guidelines that can help inform Harvard’s external investment managers, and other interested investors, as they vote on a broad array of shareholder resolutions. ... The Gazette recently sat down with outgoing ACSR Chair Howell Jackson, the James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, to better understand some of these changes, and to get a sense of how the ACSR fulfills its role.

The former secretary of state details his frustrations on Iran, Israel, Russia, his revamp of the State Department, and his old boss…

Rex Tillerson had seen and learned much in his 41-year career at ExxonMobil Corp., and some of it proved useful in his 13 months as U.S. secretary of state.  But in the end, most of the thorniest challenges the former chairman of the multinational oil giant faced had more to do with his relationship with his boss, President Donald Trump, than with the complexities of geopolitics. ... In panel interview with Professors Nicholas Burns, who runs the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), Robert Mnookin, chair emeritus of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (HLS), and James Sebenius, who heads the Harvard Negotiation Roundtable at Harvard Business School (HBS), Tillerson’s daylong visit was organized by the American Secretaries of State Project, a joint initiative run by Burns, Mnookin, and Sebenius, who each lead programs on diplomacy and negotiation at all three Schools.

When I started reporting on gig workers in 2014, I was surprised to find some of the people who represented labor organizations would respond to my inquiries with mild irritation. Why would you write about Lyft and Uber’s labor issues, they’d ask me, when there are so many sectors with bigger workforces? ... I ran this idea by Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law who has written extensively about the gig economy. “It seems intuitively possible that the reason this is now possible is that the issue has been hitched to a politically salient group of workers,” he said. That analysis seems all the more accurate because it can be observed in reverse: While blue states like California and blue cities like New York and Seattle have been passing laws that grant gig economy workers more rights, red states have started passing legislation that, for instance, preemptively classifies gig economy workers as independent contractors. “Overall,” he said, the attention paid to the gig economy “could make it more likely to move things.”

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program: When conservative British lawmakers bucked their leader on Brexit, many of us in the United States were left wondering, where are our principled conservatives willing to take on the president? Maybe our conservatives have lost the muscle memory of how to do something like this. It seems unlikely any will take on the president any time soon. But maybe they can begin with smaller steps to start rebuilding that muscle.

Facebook unveiled a series of changes on Tuesday to limit hate speech and extremism on its site, as scrutiny is rising on how the social network may be radicalizing people. ... Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School who studies online speech legislation worldwide, said she was looking to future transparency reports that Facebook provides that will include data on extremist content, to see whether the changes make a difference. “A lot of these reports can be ‘transparency theater’ where they give information and statistics, but without enough context or information to make them meaningful,” she said.

NPR's David Green talks to law professor Jody Freeman, who is an ex-Obama staffer, about the expectation that the administration will revoke California's ability to set tighter environmental rules.