Media Mentions

Two veterans of the Microsoft antitrust battle that raged 20 years ago have some advice for government regulators seeking to curb the power of today's tech giants. In conversations with Business Insider, Lawrence Lessig, who briefly served as a special master in the Microsoft case, and Alan Kusinitz, who headed up the legal team representing state governments, stressed the importance of policing anticompetitive behavior even if it falls short of a company break-up, the outcome that never materialized in the Microsoft case....The case "was extraordinarily important in creating an environment where people felt free to innovate without the fear of being destroyed by Microsoft," said Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School.

On All In, Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe walks through his proposal on how to impeach Donald Trump by avoiding Mitch McConnell.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: It is possible to argue that impeaching President Trump and removing him from office before the 2020 election would be unwise, even if he did cheat his way into office, and even if he is abusing the powers of that office to enrich himself, cover up his crimes and leave our national security vulnerable to repeated foreign attacks. Those who make this argument rest their case either on the proposition that impeachment would be dangerously divisive in a nation as politically broken as ours, or on the notion that it would be undemocratic to get rid of a president whose flaws were obvious before he was elected. Rightly or wrongly — I think rightly — much of the House Democratic caucus, at least one Republican member of that chamber (Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan) and more than a third of the nation’s voters disagree. They treat the impeachment power as a vital constitutional safeguard against a potentially dangerous and fundamentally tyrannical president and view it as a power that would be all but ripped out of the Constitution if it were deemed unavailable against even this president. That is my view, as well.

Everything you ever wanted to know about impeachment(but were too afraid to ask) with Harvard Law School Professor and author of To End a Presidency, Laurence Tribe. Plus a powerhouse panel featuring Politico’s Marc Caputo and Michael Grunwald, and MSNBC legal whiz Katie Phang.

Donald Trump could be impeached in the House but not tried in the Senate for the sole purpose of presidential censure, Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence Tribe tells AM JOY with Joy Reid.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: ... But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability can be made relevant to a fetus, then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights—like people. This move imbues the fetus with rights that the pregnant person—and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate. What is really at stake is an idea of fetal personhood. ... Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being.

The Harvard Law School Class of 2019 gathered this week for Commencement festivities, featuring an address by Roberta Kaplan, a send-off from Dean John F. Manning '85, and the presentation of various awards to students, staff and faculty.

An article by Sharon Block: The Trump era has not been an easy time for workers who want to stand up for themselves and have a voice in their workplaces and our economy. This administration has made anti-union appointments to federal agencies, repealed rules designed to protect workers' lives and livelihoods, and successfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny basic workplace rights in cases such as Epic Systems v. Lewis and Janus v. AFSCME. Surprisingly to many, American workers have met the challenge of the Trump administration with a big wave of activism and collective action — teachers marching on state capitols, Uber drivers turning off the app, and tech workers refusing to develop software used to repress people in other countries or immigrants at our border.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Jan Crawford’s extraordinary CBS interview with Attorney General William Barr was released on Friday, May 31. In it Barr said some good things about why his investigation of the Trump campaign investigation is needed. He also said some bad things about his attitude toward his investigation that reveal the depressingly ugly state of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement institutions.

President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations on the way out under Mr. Trump...The Trump administration has often used a “one-two punch” when rolling back environmental rules, said Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks regulatory rollbacks. “First a delay rule to buy some time, and then a final substantive rule.”

While other states are embracing renewable energy, Ohio is heading in the opposite direction. A bill passed this week by the Ohio House would subsidize nuclear and coal power while cutting state support for renewable energy and energy efficiency, with the utilities' customers footing the bill.. The Ohio bill begins to make sense only as a bailout for one company as opposed to comprehensive energy plan, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. That company is FirstEnergy Solutions, the owner of the state's only two nuclear plants and the leading architect of the bill. It's a subsidiary of Akron-based FirstEnergy that FirstEnergy is in the process of spinning off..."FirstEnergy has really been a failure in the generation business, and so it's been looking for a bailout," Peskoe said.

The grisly news that the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un allegedly executed his envoy for nuclear talks with the United States didn’t come as a total surprise. Rumors have swirled for weeks that Kim purged his negotiating team over the collapse of his second summit with President Donald Trump in February...Here was the ruthless totalitarian whom the American president has professed to admire and trust (“We fell in love”) and whose latest missile tests Trump has doggedly downplayed, despite the concerns of his allies in Asia and his own advisers (Kim “knows that I am with him & does not want to break his promise to me. Deal will happen!”). Just last week, Trump gleefully applauded Kim for calling former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden “a low IQ individual.”...When I asked William Ury, a co-author of the business-negotiation bible Getting to Yes, about Trump’s perplexing praise for Kim, he told me that he saw a clear method to the president’s seeming madness—one that he felt was deliberate because Trump has exhibited a pattern of behavior, even amid overwhelming criticism.Trump appears to be operating with the philosophy “The cheapest concession you can make in a negotiation is to give the other fellow a little respect,” which buys you a counterpart willing to hear you out and maybe even work with you, said Ury, who is also a co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. “I’ve found that to be true over 40 years of being in this field, whether you’re talking family, business, or high-stakes nuclear showdowns.”

Imagine you need a divorce, but you've heard it costs a fortune to hire an attorney. Money's already tight as it is, now that you've separated from your partner, so you decide to represent yourself in court. There's no kids and not much property after a short marriage that both of you want to end.  How much of a difference would a lawyer make anyway? The answer is "too much," according to a November 2018 study by Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab. Titled "Trapped in Marriage," the three-year study found that when a legal aid group directed low income divorce-seekers in Philadelphia County to use self-help materials, just 5% managed to end their marriages, unless they ended up with legal counsel or their spouse initiated the suit. Those offered volunteer pro bono lawyers were five times more likely to get divorced in the same time frame. Jim Greiner, a Harvard Law professor and co-author of "Trapped in Marriage," said the vast disparity can't be explained by those who claim divorces that may seem simple are actually complex due to child custody, support and alimony issues. "This was basically a bunch of very severely poor people who didn't have much in the way of property or assets to fight about," he said.

A book review by Samuel Moyn: Whenever I need to drive somewhere, I use Waze. The app saves me a lot of trouble, because it aggregates information to which I have no access and even plans how to distribute the traffic rationally to avoid clogging the roads. It has a lot of pop-up ads, but I try to ignore them because they seem a minor annoyance...But whatever its drawbacks, Waze marks a triumph for “navigability,” the ungainly term that Cass Sunstein uses in his new book, On Freedom, to describe how easy or difficult it is to get from here to there and, in the metaphorical sense, to achieve a goal once you’ve set one for yourself. For Sunstein, government ought to be more like Waze, helping people fulfill their desires and dreams, especially when they themselves are blocking that fulfillment. But any inquiry into navigability is inseparable from a much bigger theory of where our desires come from and how society fits them together not just with others’ but also into a common scheme of life. For too long, liberals have abstained from inquiring into what people want and have ignored how most obstructions come from neither the state nor the self but from a deregulated market and an unreformed society in which oppression is the rule.

The 21 children and young adults suing the federal government over climate change argue that they and their generation are already suffering the consequences of climate change, from worsening allergies and asthma to the health risks and stress that come with hurricanes, wildfires and sea level rise threatening their homes. As their case heads back to court this week, some of the heaviest hitters in the public health arena—including 15 major health organization and two former U.S. surgeons general—are publicly backing them up..."There's a really robust body of scientific literature that supports each of these different kinds of health impacts that are already being observed and are projected to get worse and worse," said Shaun Goho, deputy director of the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School and one of the attorneys who filed the amicus brief."The Juliana generation is going to feel and suffer from those impacts in a way that's really different and more extreme than what any previous generation has felt," Goho said.

Criminal prosecution exacts punishment; impeachment upholds the Constitution and prevents further assaults on it. Many Americans, but far from a majority, think President Trump has committed impeachable acts but are wary of impeaching without hope of removal. However, if there is an indication that severe damage to the Constitution will occur unless Trump is removed, the House must act, and then engage public opinion to pressure the Senate. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Even if the district court’s order to release the Flynn-Kislyak transcripts goes further than justified by the sentencing matter before the court, I would’ve thought that, in a government of laws, the only way to avoid compliance is to take an appeal to a higher court.” The government made its arguments to the court, did not obtain a stay to our knowledge and did not seek an emergency appeal. From all appearances, the Trump administration has deliberately and willfully defied a court order.

An oped by Noah Feldman: When the government takes your property, the Constitution entitles you to “just compensation.” But should the value of your property be computed based on market value, which would normally incorporate predictions about future government action? Or should the value of your property be determined without any reference to what the government might do — including take your property?

The Jewish festival of Purim was in full swing: Music was blasting, family and friends were bouncing to the beat, and 6-foot-3 Cory Booker was laughing and dancing while carrying a 5-foot-6 Orthodox rabbi in a clown suit on his back. ... “Within about five minutes of meeting Cory, I went over to someone and said, ‘Let me introduce you to the guy who is going to be the first black president of the United States,’ ” said Noah Feldman, now a Harvard Law School professor.

BlackRock Inc. (BLK), Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors, a division of State Street Corporation (STT), were the subject of a May 2019 treatise from Harvard’s John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business. The report, entitled “The Specter of the Giant Three,” asserts that corporate voting will be dominated by the “the big three,” given that index funds are expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace. Report writers Lucian A. Bebchuk and Scott Hirst “document that the Big Three have almost quadrupled their collective ownership stake in S&P 500 companies over the past two decades.” More importantly, “they have captured the overwhelming majority of the inflows into the asset management industry over the past decade.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Parody and satire are a legitimate part of public debate. Doctored videos are all over the place. Some are funny. Some are meant to make a point. Arguments of this kind are being made to support Facebook’s decision not to take down the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which she was made to appear drunk or otherwise impaired. One version, posted on the Facebook page Politics WatchDog, was seen over two million times in just a few days. There is no question that many viewers thought that the video was real. Acknowledging that it was fake, Facebook said, “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The sphinx finally spoke: But much like his ancient predecessor, special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t resolve any mysteries. At his surprise news conference Wednesday to announce his retirement, Mueller essentially repeated what he had written in his report. He didn’t take questions. He said he didn’t plan to say anything more in public. And he warned Congress that if called to testify, he wouldn’t say anything beyond what was in the report — which he called “my testimony.”