Media Mentions

An article by Annie Hollister '20: During my first year at Harvard Law School, a professor of mine won a prestigious academic award. The prize, he told us, was a research grant so large he didn’t know what to do with it. Did we have any suggestions? At the time, the law school was paying me $11.50 per hour to conduct research for him. My professor’s question provided a striking reminder of the gulf between the university’s wealth and power and its treatment of student workers. One week later, I joined thousands of other Harvard students in voting to form the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW. Now, on Tuesday, almost 18 months after our union was certified, we are going on strike to demand a fair first contract.

Noah Feldman literally wrote the book on constitutional law. The Harvard Law School professor, who will be one of four academics testifying Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee as it probes the legal grounds for impeaching President Trump, coauthored the textbook “Constitutional Law.” But that is only the tip of the iceberg of the prolific writing of the prominent public intellectual. He coauthored another textbook, on the First Amendment, as well as seven other nonfiction books that covered topics ranging from President James Madison to America’s “church-state problem” to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. The Boston native is also a Bloomberg News opinion columnist and hosts a podcast called “Deep Background.” He has contributed to the New York Times magazine and New York Review of Books. And he does not shy away from various media appearances. Feldman “specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory,” according to the Harvard Law website.

Republicans have decided that the most corrupt president in U.S. history is an international corruption fighter. Instead of grappling with evidence of Trump’s fixation on former vice president Joe Biden and bag man Rudolph W. Giuliani’s plotting to force Ukraine to smear Biden, the Republicans have decided to ignore uncontradicted evidence...The Republicans’ 123-page report asserts that Trump “has a deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption” and aversion to foreign aid, and that public criticism by Ukrainian officials justified his suspicion. The defense is ludicrous for a batch of reasons. First, for a guy so concerned about corruption, he never mentioned it. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe observes, “Trump never raised a concern with corruption as such on any call with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky or anyone else.” The Obama administration was interested in fighting corruption and deployed Biden to, for example, pressure Ukraine to oust a corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Trump thought this was awful and wanted to investigate Biden for doing this.

The National Association of Law Placement has agreed to start including in its directory information about the use of arbitration and nondisclosure agreements at law firms, according to an announcement Monday by the People's Parity Project, which lobbied for the change. According to the announcement, NALP will include three new questions in its 2020 survey of legal employers, providing attorneys and law students with insight into the organization's policies around workplace misconduct, nondisclosure agreements and mandatory arbitration agreements. "Making information about which firms use forced arbitration more accessible to all law students helps raise awareness of the problem, which gets us one step closer to our goal of ending forced arbitration, once and for all," Sarah Bayer, a student at Harvard Law School who is active with the People's Parity Project, said in a statement...The use of both nondisclosure and arbitration agreements has come under increased scrutiny as a result of the #MeToo movement, with critics saying that such policies make it more difficult for employees to challenge sexist policies and sexual harassment at firms. The People's Parity Project, previously known as the Pipeline Parity Project, was originally launched by Harvard Law School students to push firms to abandon such policies.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee announced on Monday it will call four witnesses, all of them law professors, during the first day of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Hearings in the Democrat-controlled House start Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. Trump, a Republican, and his lawyers were invited earlier to appear, but declined on Sunday, citing a lack of “fundamental fairness.” Here is who will testify: Noah Feldman, a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Feldman, a former clerk for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court, was senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Feldman, in opinion columns for Bloomberg News, has written that Democrats have legitimate grounds to move ahead with impeachment because Trump has abused his power in office.

Three states that have recently settled antitrust claims with T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp. over their $26 billion merger are entitled to additional benefits that might be gained from a broader multistate suit against the companies...More than a dozen states led by New York and California remain part of the multistate suit that asserts combining the No. 3 and No. 4 U.S. carriers will lead to higher consumer prices. The case is scheduled to go to trial Dec. 9 in Manhattan federal court...The side settlements won’t impact the upcoming trial involving 13 states and the District of Columbia, James Tierney, the former Maine attorney general, said. “The judge really isn’t going to care how many states show up to trial as a plaintiff,” Tierney, who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law school, said...For T-Mobile, “the only settlements that really matter at the end of the day are New York and California,” since both states are the key drivers pushing the suit forward, Tierney said.

An article by Cass Sunstein: With the coming impeachment vote in the House and a possible trial in the Senate, the U.S. has reached a rare defining moment...In the Federalist No. 65, Hamilton explained that impeachment is designed for offenses proceeding “from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” That explanation was designed to assure We the People that their president, repository of the executive power, would not be a king.

Ben Miller-Gootnick ’21 has won the Gellhorn-Sargentich Law Student Essay Competition, an annual writing competition sponsored by the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. His paper, “Boundaries of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act,” has been cited in the Brennan Canter’s National Task Force report on the Rule of Law & Democracy, in a paperby Stanford Professor Anne Joseph O’Connell prepared for the Administrative Conference of the United States, and was featured in SSRN’s administrative law e-journal. The award, which includes a $5,000 cash prize, recognizes students who write on any topic relating to administrative law. On Nov. 19, Miller-Gootnick traveled to Washington D.C. to talk about his paper to an audience of more than 700 judges, academics, and government lawyers at the section’s annual meeting.

A longtime leading conservative voice slammed President  on Thursday as “ignorant and foul-mouthed,” and warned the nation is in a constitutional crisis. Charles Fried, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University who was solicitor general to President , told ’s  how he fled Czechoslovakia when the Nazis took over and eventually settled in the United States. “I’ve had a wonderful life here. I love it, as do my children and my grandchildren,” he said. “And this man terrifies me.” Fried added: [Trump] says that the Constitution said ― and he said this to a bunch of high school students ― ‘I can do whatever I want, that’s what Article II says.’ Well it doesn’t, any lawyer knows that, any lawyer except maybe [Attorney General] Bill Barr and Mr. Cipollone [White House counsel Pat Cipollone]. “Our fidelity is to the law, and to the office,” Fried said. “Not to a man.”

In a 65-page critique of early decisions made by William H. Rehnquist, who was then an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, Harvard Law School professor David L. Shapiro wasted no time getting to his point — which he tucked at the end of his first paragraph. Basing his view on the justice’s written opinions and votes, Mr. Shapiro wrote in 1976 that while Rehnquist was “a man of considerable intellectual power and independence of mind, the unyielding character of his ideology has had a substantial adverse effect” on his work. Mr. Shapiro, the law school’s William Nelson Cromwell professor emeritus when he died at 87 on Nov. 19, was considered a leading intellectual light in the field of federal courts philosophy and theory. And for nearly a half-century he coedited editions of “The Federal Courts and the Federal System,” a key text for law students.“David was the heart and soul of ‘The Federal Courts and the Federal System,’ ” John F. Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, said in a statement. “He really shaped the field of federal courts. David was able to bring out the complexity and nuance of the law for judges, scholars, and practitioners, and he always did so with clarity and insight,” added Manning, who had joined Mr. Shapiro as a co-editor of the book’s sixth edition, published in 2010...Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who, as solicitor general in the Reagan administration, hired Mr. Shapiro to serve as one of his deputies, recalled that some critics questioned the wisdom of hiring “somebody who had been so critical of the chief justice. Well, I knew Rehnquist and I think he couldn’t give a damn and it wouldn’t bother him a bit. It turned out there was no issue.”

David L. Shapiro ’57, an icon of federal courts jurisprudence, died Tuesday, November 19. He was 87 years old. A longtime professor of law at Harvard Law School, Shapiro co-edited the leading casebook in the field of federal jurisdiction, Hart and Wechsler’s “The Federal Courts and the Federal System” (Foundation Press). For nearly five decades, from the second edition in 1973 to the supplement to the 7th edition in 2019, he served as a link back to the roots of federal courts as a legal discipline at Harvard Law School decades earlier. “David was the heart and soul of ‘The Federal Courts and the Federal System,’” said Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85. “He really shaped the field of federal courts,” said Manning, who joined Shapiro as a co-editor on the Hart and Wechsler casebook for the 6th edition in 2010. “David was able to bring out the complexity and nuance of the law for judges, scholars, and practitioners, and he always did so with clarity and insight.”

Legal experts say the fight over whether White House counsel Don McGahn must testify under subpoena before Congress could be settled at the Senate impeachment trial before it finishes its path through the courts. A federal judge on Monday ruled against the Trump administration, deciding that McGahn must comply with a House Judiciary Committee subpoena seeking his testimony... “Technically, the Senate sets its own rules, including evidentiary ones, and has the power to reject the presiding officer's rulings by majority vote,” said Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School. He added that there’s no guarantee Roberts would be willing to go along with Democrats’ requests for witnesses, even in light of Monday’s ruling against the Trump administration. “The McGahn ruling won't matter one way or the other, except to the extent that Roberts finds its reasoning persuasive,” Tushnet said. “And it may be worth noting that Judge Brown Jackson has a pretty good reputation as a careful — though of course liberal — judge.”

An article by Noah Feldman: The confusing saga of Donald Trump’s intervention in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher seems to be over at last. Gallagher’s demotion has been reversed — a demotion that resulted from his posing with the corpse of a captured Islamic State fighter in Iraq — and he will get to keep his trident, the pin that signifies SEAL membership and that Navy officials wanted to take away. The main political casualty is the secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, who was fired by the secretary of defense after (it would seem) trying to get Trump to stay out of the issue on behalf of the admirals. The whole fight between Trump and his admirals looked remarkably opaque from the outside. That’s because underneath, important and conflicting principles were at stake.

An article by Urs Gasser: From Greta Thunberg’s student-led climate strikes to the youth-driven protests in Hong Kong and Chile, the next generation is increasingly demanding a voice on pressing issues. Youth movements are reenergizing paralyzed debates among adults with fresh perspectives, inconvenient questions, and the rhetorical power of having to live with the long-term fallout of our short-term thinking. With another monumental societal transformation on the horizon—the rise of artificial intelligence—we have an opportunity to engage the power and imagination of youth to shape the world they will inherit...The center I lead at Harvard University, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, works to integrate youth voices into our research. Through our Youth and Media project, we have partnered with young people, educators, researchers, and practitioners to design more than 100 educational tools to teach and engage youth about the digital world.

Federal court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson held that former White House counsel Donald McGahn must appear before Congress pursuant to a lawful subpoena, rejecting President Trump’s entirely unmeritorious claim of absolute immunity. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Judge Jackson rightly and predictably rejected Trump’s extreme claim that McGahn is absolutely immune from having to testify in response to a valid House subpoena. The tough issues of executive privilege and national security secrets remain. She followed the precedent set by a respected conservative judge, John Bates. And she ruled in accord with basic principles of the rule of law.”

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey is hoping to introduce legislation sometime next week aimed at reducing barriers for those who want to donate food. Toomey, R-Pa., on Monday toured New Bethany Ministries, 333 W. Fourth St., Bethlehem and discussed a bill that, if approved, would extend liability protection for reduced-price food and direct donations. Toomey is partnering with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on the bipartisan legislation and is working with local food banks, as well as the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Feeding America, Feeding PA, 412 Food Rescue, and Philabundance to finalize the language of the bill. The announcement comes just days before Thanksgiving and when several Lehigh Valley food banks and pantries are often in need.

Amid the pressure of a House impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump has continued to stoke the idea that he’s the victim of a coup — shorthand for "coup d’etat," a French term that means the overthrow of the government...The key element of a coup is that it is carried out beyond the bounds of legality...Impeachment is explicitly described in the Constitution as the way to remove a president who has committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told us that you can’t get much more within the bounds of legality than an explicit power outlined in the Constitution. "It’s obviously not a coup for the House to launch impeachment proceedings," Klarman told us in early October.

Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, WBUR's legal commentator, and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, walks us through what we learned from the impeachment hearings last week and what's next.

Over the course of a few short years, a technological revolution shook the world. New businesses rose and fell, fortunes were made and lost, the practice of reporting the news was reinvented, and the relationship between leaders and the public was thoroughly transformed, for better and for worse. The years were 1912 to 1927 and the technological revolution was radio...Those models, and the ways they shaped the societies from which they emerged, offer a helpful road map as we consider another technological revolution: the rise of the commercial internet...Facebook and other companies have pioneered sophisticated methods of data collection that allow ads to be precisely targeted to individual people’s consumer habits and preferences...When Facebook users were shown that up to six of their friends had voted, they were 0.39 percent more likely to vote than users who had seen no one vote. While the effect is small, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain observed that even this slight push could influence an election—Facebook could selectively mobilize some voters and not others. Election results could also be influenced by both Facebook and Google if they suppressed information that was damaging to one candidate or disproportionately promoted positive news about another.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Where do dogs come from? What is their relationship to wolves? Where do Homo sapiens come from? What is our relationship to other human species such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus? Why do dogs flourish as wolves struggle to survive? Why are we the only remaining humans? New research suggests that these diverse questions have a single answer. In brief: Dogs are far less likely than wolves to respond to challenges with violence (or by running away). Or, in more technical terms, they show low levels of “reactive aggression” in social interactions. As compared to extinct human species, Homo sapiens show precisely the same thing. As a result, we — you and I — are uniquely capable of trust and cooperation. That’s the basis of our evolutionary triumph.

Harvard Law School Professor and former Dean Martha Minow has taught generations of lawyers – including former President Obama – about the power of the law and how a sentence can best match a crime. She sits down with Michel to discuss how the American legal system, whose rate of incarceration is the highest in the world, could use a little compassion.