Media Mentions

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.

In the past year, I’ve been on a mission to pester as many people in my life as possible. The first victim was my editor, whom I abruptly asked one morning to stop messaging me about story ideas on our office’s chat platform, Slack. Instead, I said, let’s talk the ideas out over the phone. ... Guhan Subramanian, the director of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, which teaches business- and law-school students the finer points of conflict resolution, argues that spoken conversation accomplishes far more in a shorter amount of time. In any discussion, “people are asking questions, probing, asking follow-up questions,” he says. “It’s obviously a lot easier to do when you’re over the phone or in person, compared to by email or text.”

Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is introducing a resolution to open an impeachment inquiry over new and expanded allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We discuss what we know, what we don't, and where we go from here. Guests: ... Nancy Gertner, WBUR legal analyst, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Evelyn Douek [S.J.D. candidate and affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society]: You won’t like Facebook’s new Oversight Board. Yesterday, the social-media giant unveiled its “charter” for a 40-person board with the power to review the company’s decisions about which content can appear on Facebook-owned platforms and which rules it applies when taking postings down. Deciding which videos are too violent, which photos too racy, and which behavior too “inauthentic” is a job destined to make the board unpopular. That it can be unpopular—with users, the media, and Facebook employees alike—and still exist is precisely the point.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), in opening remarks before the testimony of Corey Lewandowski, said, “Today’s hearing is entitled ‘Presidential Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Power.’ This hearing is the first one formally designated under the Committee’s procedures adopted last week in connection with our investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment with respect to President Trump.” ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe weighs in: “Communications by the president to a crony asking the latter to carry out a criminal act on the president’s behalf are covered by no privilege and subject to no immunity, and the president’s lawyers as well as the Justice Department lawyers must know as much.” He added, “Today’s spectacle was just another chapter in the ongoing criminal obstruction of justice in which this president has been engaged for well over a year, obstruction of justice designed to cover up the president’s illicit dealings with a hostile foreign power to help him acquire his office and to hold onto it.”

A New York Times piece over the weekend presented a witness account of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulting a young, unnamed woman while they were both in college — a new allegation in addition to those levied against the judge during his confirmation hearing last year. ... Now, some Democrats are calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, saying they are concerned both about continued allegations of sexual misconduct and the possibility that he may have lied under oath. ... To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and James Rappaport, former chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party and director of the New Boston Fund.