Media Mentions

A group of conservative-leaning lawyers criticized Attorney General William P. Barr for the expansive view of presidential power he espoused in a recent speech and for his conclusion this spring that President Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation...Mr. Barr’s view on executive power is a misreading of the unitary executive theory, said Charles Fried, a Checks and Balances member and Harvard Law professor who endorsed the theory while he was solicitor general during the Reagan administration. In Mr. Fried’s reading of the theory, “the executive branch cannot be broken up into fragments.” While that branch acts as a unified expression of a president’s priorities, with the president firmly at the helm, “it is also clear that the executive branch is subject to law,” Mr. Fried said. “Barr takes that notion and eliminates the ‘under law’ part.”

An article by Noah Feldman: As a loyal American, I naturally want to side with the Duchess of Sussex (née Meghan Markle) in her growing feud with the British tabloid press. Yet the lawsuit that the Duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, have brought against the Mail on Sunday raises serious questions about the freedom of press. Difficult as it is to find anything sympathetic to say about tabloids, they do consistently test the boundaries of free speech — and in this insistence, there really is reason to think that it would be bad for the free flow of information if the royals were to win their lawsuit. To those accustomed to reading about libel lawsuits focused on salacious facts, the content of the material under dispute in the Sussex lawsuit seems remarkably tame. The central legal claim has to do with a letter the weekend edition of the Daily Mail published from Meghan to her estranged father, presumably provided to the newspaper by the father himself.

Some people are fuming at Facebook for allowing unfiltered political ads, while others are fuming at Twitter for banning them. There’s lots of confusion and speculation, but what we know is that these social media companies have fundamentally changed how people exchange information. What we need to figure out is whether they also change how people spread disinformation — and if so, how to fix it. It’s a question researchers are actively investigating. After “fake news” became the catchphrase of the 2016 election, experts in psychology, political science, computer science and networks stepped up research on disinformation, learning in more detail how it travels through social media and why some things stick in people’s heads...There’s little evidence that targeted ads have the power to change minds or votes, says Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, co-author of the book “Network Propaganda.” Belief in targeted ads in general is more faith-based than evidence-based, he says. Advertisers assume the targeting causes people to buy things — though this is far from proven.

President Lawrence S. Bacow emailed the community on November 21 to announce an “initiative on Harvard and the legacy of slavery,” backed by an initial $5 million in funding and overseen by a faculty committee led by Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Paul professor of constitutional law and professor of history. ... Joining Brown-Nagin and Beckert on the presidential committee are: Annette Gordon-Reed, Warren professor of American legal history and professor of history; ... Martha Minow, 300thAnniversary University Professor (former Law School dean);

The Democrats brought their last witnesses in the public impeachment hearings Thursday, with President Donald Trump’s former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill using her time to directly confront Republicans on the committee who she said have used the television time to push false conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the 2016 election. Jim Braude was joined by retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and R.J. Lyman, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Gordon Sondland implicated Trump and other top administration officials refusing to testify in the plot to bribe Ukraine as Democrats weigh the next steps in the impeachment inquiry. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that Democrats should not delay the inquiry while they fight witness subpoenas because Trump's stonewalling can be used as obstruction: "The evidence is all there and there's nothing left to do but collate it into articles of impeachment."

An op-ed by by Joseph Kristol '09 and Stephen Petraeus '21 (Kristol is a former Marine Corps officer. Petraeus is a former Army officer. Both served combat tours in Afghanistan as infantry platoon leaders.): “I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.” So said retired Marine Corps general Jim Mattis during remarks at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco in 2014. The line strikes a chord with us, as we’re sure it would with the great majority of veterans with whom we served. We’ve all, by and large, been trying simply to navigate the sometimes challenging transition to civilian life — finishing school, finding a good job, raising a family — without the added challenge of being perceived by our peers as “damaged goods,” “ticking time bombs” or “killing machines.” While no president could ever shake our pride in our military service, we fear that President Trump’s recent decision to pardon two service members involved in war crimes cases and reverse disciplinary action against another — and his stated motives for doing so — will damage Americans’ perception of the military, encouraging the view that veterans are “broken.”

For decades, when you applied for an apartment, the landlord—or a tenant screening company hired by the landlord—would examine your credit file and pay stubs to verify your ability to pay rent. But today, landlords are using the artificial intelligence revolution to predict something else: Your willingness to pay rent. ... Mutale Nkonde, an AI policy adviser and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, sees “red flags” in algorithmic tenant screening. Bias worms its way into algorithms via “proxies,” or characteristics that are more common to one group of people than another, she said. While companies may claim their algorithms don’t contain such proxies, that is hard to verify. “Because the algorithms are protected by intellectual property laws, we have no way of scrutinizing them,” Ms. Nkonde said.

A 33-year-old orangutan awarded “non-human” personhood rights in a landmark 2015 court decision in Argentina has settled into a new home in Florida...Sandra landed at the center this month because she’s a hybrid of two orangutan subspecies, and Indonesia, one of the native environments for orangutans — where most preferred sanctuaries are located — has banned orangutans like her from its sanctuaries. As part of implementing Sandra's new rights, the Argentinian judge wanted her to live at an accredited facility — and the Florida center was the only one in the Americas that met those standards. Her arrival has raised the hopes of US activists who are trying to match the successes of lawyers who turn to the courts to fight for animal rights around the world...“You almost get a sense that judges are really looking for reasons not to do what he's asking,” said Kristen Stilt, director of the animal law and policy clinic at Harvard Law School. “One of the reasons is they're just being transferred to another form of captivity. They're not being freely released.”

U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland implicated numerous senior officials and President Trump in a plan to extort Ukraine: No White House meeting until the Ukrainians announced an investigation into nonexistent dirt on former vice president Joe Biden...Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to Sondland, played a key role in the plot and in obstruction of Congress. As such, Pompeo needs to appear as a witness or face impeachment himself... “The Sondland testimony puts Pompeo (as well as Trump, of course) squarely inside impeachment territory — and, under a normal Justice Department, in indictment territory as well,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “There is no [Office of Legal Counsel] memo suggesting that a sitting secretary of state is immune from indictment and prosecution, and this one was deeply engaged, if Sondland is to be believed, in a conspiracy to commit bribery and extortion, to violate federal election law against foreign interference, and to obstruct justice, including obstructing congressional investigations.”

Since the head of Bolivia’s armed forces “suggested” to Evo Morales that he resign the presidency on Nov. 10, following contested elections in October that were marred by allegations of fraud, Bolivia has been in a tense limbo. Two days after the military’s nudge, Morales arrived in Mexico, where authorities had granted him political asylum. In La Paz, the conservative vice president of the Senate, Jeanine Anez, declared herself his replacement. Street clashes and crackdowns on protesters have escalated since then. Can the new government, which insists it is only transitional while acting otherwise, establish its legitimacy and reduce the risk of deeper unrest? ... “This is part of the dramatic spike in violence in Bolivia since Evo Morales was forced to resign,” said Thomas Becker, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic who has worked extensively on human rights issues in Bolivia. He interviewed the survivors of the Sacaba attack the next day. “I heard dozens of accounts of soldiers shooting unarmed civilians, including individuals providing assistance to other injured people,” he told me. “People reported that soldiers beat protesters while yelling racial slurs at them, which only escalates an already tense situation.”

An article by Noah Feldman: A liberal group has criticized Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh for meeting last month with an anti-gay-rights activist whose organization had filed a “friend of the court” brief in a major gay-rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The group’s director has even called for the justices to recuse themselves. Brian Brown, the activist who met with the justices and runs the National Organization for Marriage, would appear to hold some seriously wrong beliefs. But the objection to justices meeting with people who have filed such briefs is misconceived. Friends of the court aren’t parties to a litigation in the ordinary sense. They’re independent groups or individuals sharing their views with the justices. There’s no scandal if justices interact with them. More fundamentally, the justices shouldn’t be shuttered away from the world like cloistered monks and nuns. It’s valuable for them to meet and talk with all kinds of people, including ideological advocates.

In his new book, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that American democracy is broken not only because of partisanship in Washington, but also because the American system of government does not properly ensure representation under the ideal of "one person, one vote." To discuss what ails us — and how to potentially fix it — Jim Braude was joined by Lessig to discuss "They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy."

As Etelvina Ramos Mamani recovered from giving birth in her home in the rural highlands of Bolivia, a military sharpshooter fired a single bullet through her small bedroom window, striking her 8-year-old daughter Marlene in the chest. The woman held her daughter as she died. The 2003 killing was one of many atrocities committed during a period of unrest in Bolivia sparked by the government's exploitation of the country's natural gas deposits...A federal jury in Fort Lauderdale unanimously found the officials liable for the slayings and awarded damages to the families of eight victims in April 2018. But the judge, saying the evidence presented during the monthlong trial wasn't enough to sustain the verdict, later overturned the jury's finding. The victims' families appealed the judge's decision, and their attorneys will present oral arguments before three judges this morning in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. "We are asking the court to reinstate the jury verdict," says Beth Stephens, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that has been litigating the case together with the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and various private firms.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was once very reluctant on impeachment, but has now used the term ‘bribery’ to describe communications between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, in discussion of possible impeachable offenses. Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to discuss this and more regarding the impeachment inquiry of the president.

An article by Ashley Nunes: Canadians worry about distracted driving and rightly so. Studies show that taking your eyes off the road – even for a few seconds – dramatically raises the odds of a crash. In 2016, distracted driving was implicated in some 21 per cent of fatal accidents and 27 per cent of serious injury collisions (instances where the car’s occupants were hurt but not killed). The growing ubiquity of this phenomenon has alarmed legislators, law enforcement organizations and safety advocacy groups who – keen to save lives – are asking Canadians to stay focused on the road...It turns out that while we agree distracted driving is dangerous, we aren’t willing to give it up. Nearly 50 per cent of Canadians admit to using cell phones while driving while 30 per cent report taking their eyes off the road to do things such as rummaging through personal belongings, smoking and eating. Texting while driving has increased by 50 per cent since 2010. During the same time period, support for banning cellphone use while driving has fallen by 50 per cent.

For decades, Vermont-based Ben and Jerry’s has enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s most progressive, forward-thinking companies...In recent years, however, the business started by two friends in a converted Burlington gas station has faced criticism over its own production methods, including a pair of lawsuits accusing the longtime ice cream purveyor of misleading consumers about just how humane its products really are...falsely claiming the milk used in its ice cream comes exclusively from “happy cows” and so-called humane “Caring Dairy” farms....In California, a San Francisco judge tossed out a suit brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals accusing the California Milk Advisory Board of false advertising in a “Happy Cows” campaign — ruling that government entities aren’t subject to false advertising laws. But the allegations laid out in last month’s suit paint a compelling picture, says Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet, who specializes in advertising law. One of the key issues at hand, she says, will be whether the company’s “Caring Dairies” can be considered a factual claim or just marketing puffery. “By defining what ‘Caring Dairies’ means,” Tushnet says, “Ben and Jerry’s may well have made a factual claim that could be shown to be true or false.”

An article by Noah Feldman: The U.S. Supreme Court last week allowed a lawsuit against Remington Arms Co. by families of victims in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting to go forward, despite a federal law that on its face seemed to block the suit. That raises a challenging question for the manufacturer of the XM15-E2S weapon that gunman Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, back in 2012. Should Remington now fight the case in state court, arguing to a judge and jury that it shouldn’t be held liable under state and federal law? Or should it settle the case and hope that other states don’t follow Connecticut in interpreting federal law to allow for such lawsuits?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: U.S.-born Hoda Muthana should be in an American prison for joining Islamic State, the caliphate that terrorized, murdered and raped innocent civilians. Instead, she and her 2-year-old son are stuck in a refugee camp in Syria — because the U.S. government, relying on a technicality, has stripped her of her passport and told her that she and her son are not citizens. A federal judge has just held that government had the authority to do so. It’s hard to feel sympathy for Muthana. But the judge’s decisions, and the government’s before that, set a terrible precedent for others whom the government might try to strip of their citizenship in the future. A person who reasonably believes she was born a citizen, and has been issued a passport on that understanding by the government, should be treated as a citizen unless she has lied to get that passport in the first place.

An op-ed by John Ketcham '21: Upon graduation from Harvard Law School, I will return to live in my childhood home in Astoria, Queens with my mother, grandmother, and younger brother. I could pay $3,000 a month for a small one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but that’s impractical when I could live with my family and save money. What’s more, living where I grew up means that I can participate in the community that has shaped me. Perhaps I’m a stereotypical millennial, failing to launch, but I feel it’s the right decision. In fact, Americans increasingly embrace this way of life. According to Pew, a record 64 million Americans, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, now live in multigenerational homes—a rate not seen since the fifties. Apart from giving people greater access to housing in expensive markets, this arrangement offers a variety of economic and social benefits. As urban planners and policymakers debate future residential development, multigenerational living should be part of the mix.

This week brought the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Next week, they will continue with many more witnesses set to testify. The hearings have been long – at times riveting, at times tedious — with partisan bickering on full display. They are also historic. It’s a rare thing for Congress to use this tool crafted by the framers to hold the president’s power in check. My guest, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, says that’s a good thing. Sunstein is the author of “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.” Diane spoke with Sunstein Friday morning as Marie Yovanovitch testified in Congress. She asked what our founding documents say should – and should not – be considered an impeachable offense.