Media Mentions

A bioethics study published on December 8th calls on crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to ditch campaigns for unproven and unsafe medical procedures. People turn to GoFundMe for help paying for all sorts of medical interventions. These campaigns have brought in over $650 million since 2010. But a subset of the money raised is spent on unproven and even illegal operations...The paper, written by Snyder and his co-author, Harvard Law professor I. Glenn Cohen, suggests steps GoFundMe may take to upend its “ethical problem.” They concede that expecting the platform to independently evaluate evidence for medical claims would be expensive and difficult. Instead, they propose a “white list approach,” only allowing people to raise money for regulated treatments or those cleared by the FDA for a special program called expanded access.

House Democrats summarized their case for the impeachment of President Donald Trump before the Judiciary Committee in a sometimes contentious hearing Monday, as Republicans repeatedly issued motions that interrupted the proceedings, and pushed back on both the process and the body of evidence. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and former state treasurer Joe Malone, who supports Trump.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on impeachment and his testimony to Congress. Hosted by Lisa Abramowicz and Paul Sweeney.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, on the impeachment of President Trump, and his testimony to Congress. Anand Srinivasan, Senior Semiconductor and…

It was Donald Trump’s calculation that a large percentage of Americans resided in a vegetative state that spawned his candidacy for president...So it no longer shocks that nearly half of America remains untroubled by what House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) described last week as a “one-man crime spree,” conducted by the president of the United States...The Constitution, Trump has proclaimed, permits him “to do whatever I want as president.” Whatever points he earns for candor should surely be subtracted for the open confession to a totalitarian, wholly un-American ideology. This was the point the constitutional scholars called by the Judiciary Committee made effort upon effort to drive home to the American people. The purpose of impeachment, Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman noted, was to prevent a monarchy, to ensure that “Congress could oversee the president’s conduct, hold him accountable and remove him from office if he abused his power.”

The steps of Harvard’s Widener Library might not be the obvious setting for a showdown between the working class and The Man. But so it was last week. The afternoon that I stopped by, perhaps 100 graduate students in the third day of a strike were protesting against what they consider the university’s unfair labor practices. Their union of 4,500 students has been bargaining fruitlessly for 13 months. They are demanding higher pay, better health care, and greater protections against harassment and discrimination. ... “We know that it is our labor that makes this place run, and we are going to withhold that labor until they agree to a fair contract that student workers deserve,” said Rachel Sandalow-Ash, a third-year student at Harvard Law School. “As a research assistant at the law school, I make $12 a hour; that’s the Massachusetts minimum wage. This is a university with a $41 billion endowment and a $5 billion annual operating budget. There’s no reason we should be making that little.”

An Op-Ed by Nancy Gertner:  While an impeachable offense is, as Gerald Ford said, “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be,” and while the usual rules of courtroom evidence don’t apply in impeachment proceedings, Ford’s description doesn’t do justice to the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report released Tuesday. The White House and many Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee say — wrongly — that the impeachment of President Trump is a partisan hit job. But the report outlines evidence of presidential misconduct that would be compelling in any court. In fact, if the evidentiary rules were what Republicans say they are, hardly anyone would ever be convicted of a crime. No, the president isn’t out of the woods because he didn’t fall on his sword and confess, although he came very close. The argument that the case against Trump can’t succeed without a confession by him reminds me of the drug dealers who believed that they couldn’t be convicted if they spoke in code and didn’t say the word “cocaine.”

Days after three out of four prominent legal scholars agreed at a congressional hearing that it’s been shown that President Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses, hundreds of legal scholars–and counting–have signed their names on an open letter to Congress. The letter was published Friday on Medium by the Protect Democracy Project, which styles itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit group “dedicated to fighting attacks, from at home and abroad, on our right to free, fair, and fully informed self-government.” It’s reminiscent of a letter signed by hundreds of former federal prosecutors months ago, which said that Trump would have been charged for obstructing the Mueller Probe if he wasn’t the president. ... Many of the 500-plus names signed on this letter are familiar: Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, Vermont Law Professor Jennifer Taub, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University Zephyr Teachout, Fordham Professor of Law Jed Shugerman, UC Berkeley’s Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School Prof. J.W. Verret, and University of Alabama School of Law Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law Joyce Vance, to name a few.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein; What if the U.S. already had a Green New Deal, and nobody noticed? Between 2009 and 2016, that’s exactly what happened. The U.S. government did a great deal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a lot of fanfare, it restructured major components of the national economy in the process. Here are a few highlights: - The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation required both cars and trucks to become a lot more fuel-efficient. The greening of the fleet produced substantial cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  It was weirdly cold in the room — that was the only thing everyone could agree on. Somehow, despite the bright lights and television cameras in the hearing room where I and three other law professors were testifying on the potential impeachment of President Donald Trump, the temperature remained somewhere between freezing and seriously freezing. It was so cold that the ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, Doug Collins, took valuable time out of his opening statement to complain about it. The spectacle of four law professors trying to speak on behalf of the Constitution affected each viewer differently. I’ve never received so many warm, supportive messages before; it’s also been years since I’ve been the target of so much raw hate and contempt, much of it along exactly the lines you’d imagine. It’s also a fascinating experience to be subjected to truly bizarre and spontaneously invented conspiracy theories. But that’s a topic for another day.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Of particular interest to me in this week’s House impeachment hearing was a moment when the chief counsel for the Republicans read aloud a quote about the dangers of a purely partisan, policy-based impeachment of a sitting president. This was from page 140 of my book with Joshua Matz, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.” The passage continued by describing the even greater dangers posed by a purely partisan, personality-driven refusal to impeach and remove a president who has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the Republican counsel left out that part. After weeks of House impeachment hearings that resume Monday, Republican defenders of President Donald Trump have contented themselves with pointless, time-wasting calls for roll call votes; baseless complaints about the process, which was the most protective of a sitting president in the nation’s history; and deliberate distortions of what others had written or said. It all amounted to nonsense in the face of a deadly serious matter.

Some of the country’s largest foundations and billionaire philanthropists want to upend the very system that allowed them to build massive endowments and personal fortunes. Among wealthy donors and foundation heads there is a growing belief that capitalism, the financial engine that put Ford cars in driveways and Hewlett-Packard printers on office desktops nationwide needs to be rewired. The relentless pressure on companies to serve up quarterly profits to shareholders has widened the gap between the superrich and the rest of the country, they say, and made one of philanthropy’s main jobs — fixing social problems — even harder. ... Omidyar has also supported policy change. The grant maker is also pushing for rules to allow employees to unionize industrywide, rather than employer by employer and has expressed an interest in the work of Clean Slate for Worker Power, a program at Harvard University that will present a proposed revamp of national labor policy in January.

An expanded form of the testimony Noah Feldman delivered to the House Judiciary Committee on December 4, 2019. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: I’m here today at the request of the Committee to describe why the framers of our Constitution included a provision for impeaching the president; what that provision means; and how it applies to the pressing question before you and the American people: whether President Donald J. Trump has committed impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I will begin by stating my conclusions: The framers provided for impeachment of the president because they wanted the president, unlike the king, to be controlled by law, and because they feared that a president might abuse the power of his office to gain personal advantage, corrupt the electoral process, and keep himself in office. “High crimes and misdemeanors” are abuses of power and public trust connected to the office of the presidency. On the basis of the testimony presented to the House Intelligence Committee, President Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors by corruptly abusing the office of the presidency. Specifically, President Trump abused his office by corruptly soliciting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals in order to gain personal advantage, including in the 2020 presidential election.

Imagine you have before you a blank sheet of paper. All existing copyright legislation, the whole history of property laws relating to creative works, has been completely erased. It’s up to you to rewrite it from scratch. Where would you start?...As Harvard law scholar Ruth Okediji put it in her brilliant keynote lecture on the festival’s Friday afternoon, “in important material respects, copyright law has written out creators.” Musicians, she claimed, were far more likely to find themselves the victims of copyright law than its beneficiaries – especially musicians from indigenous communities, or from the global south, or from impoverished communities in the global north. This is at least partly due to what Okediji called copyright’s “literary bias”. Copyright law was initially created to deal with written works and only somewhat uneasily transposed to the realm of music. Since then, the question of what is copyrightable in a work of music has tended to repeat this literary bias by favouring those elements that can easily be represented in writing – that is, for the most part, the melody and the harmony. The dots on the stave. But this is a prejudice catastrophically unfit for purpose when dealing with pop music. It has, in Okediji’s words, “created a hierarchy within creative circles” and “systematically underserved the vast majority of world cultures.”

Here's the Radio Boston rundown for Dec. 5. Tiziana Dearing is our host...As Speaker Pelosi moves forward with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, we check in with WBUR senior news correspondent Kimberly Atkins and retired federal judge, senior lecturer and Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

The framers of the 232-year-old U.S. Constitution played a central role in Wednesday’s impeachment hearing as constitutional law professors outlined the case for, and against, ousting Republican President Donald Trump...Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman said he believed the framers of the Constitution “would identify President Trump’s conduct as exactly the kind of abuse of office, high crimes and misdemeanors, that they were worried about. “And they would want the House of Representatives to take appropriate action and to impeach.”

In a somber six minute address to the nation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin drafting impeachment articles against the President of the United States because he violated his oath of office, and compromised US national security. In interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Laurence Tribe discussesTrump dismantling checks and balances.

As Democrats announce they're moving forward with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, we check in with WBUR senior news correspondent and retired federal judge and WBUR legal analyst Nancy Gertner.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: As the House of Representatives moves toward formulating articles of impeachment, it is vital that the options on the table not be misframed. It’s a dangerously false choice to think that the House Judiciary Committee must either adopt a broad, kitchen-sink approach or take a narrow, laser-focused perspective. Yes, narrow is better than broad for the purposes of focus and public understanding. But narrow mustn’t mean myopic. What makes President Trump uniquely dangerous is not that he has committed a single terrible act that meets the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense. Neither Russia-gate nor Ukraine-gate was a one-night stand, and the obstruction of justice that enabled Trump to get away with asking for and benefiting from Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election is of a piece with his defiance of congressional investigations that might enable him to get away with demanding Ukraine’s intervention in 2020.

Harvard University alum Madelyn Petersen explored her passions for business and human rights and community lawyering at Harvard Law School. She is currently interning with the Corporate Accountability Lab in Chicago before starting a clerkship with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Law professor Jonathan Turley, Republicans’ witness testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, did not make an impressive case against impeachment. He blatantly contradicted his position pre-President Trump that a criminal violation was not required for impeachment. Moreover, his main argument, namely that the House was moving too fast, leaves open the question as to whether in a few weeks or a month he might support impeachment. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe gave Turley poor marks, commenting on Twitter that Turley’s “call for solid evidence was a truism. He gave no reason at all to regard the evidence gathered by [Rep. Adam B. Schiff] as insufficient to establish impeachable offenses.” Tribe also tweeted that Turley made a fatal error in pointing out a “French mistress” would be a “thing of value” in a bribery case. Tribe observed, “Fake dirt on Biden was of way more value to Trump than any number of French (or Russian) mistresses. [Turley] has cooked Trump’s French goose.”