Media Mentions

Law and documentary film may seem far apart, but they actually share many connections. Documentary filmmakers confront legal questions about privacy, secrecy, access to public and private spaces, and ownership of images and other materials. With the guidance of filmmaker and producer Joseph Tovares and support from the Hewlett Foundation, 12 Harvard Law School students from eight countries have worked since January on the Legal Lens project, producing the five short films hosted here.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: After just one week of public impeachment hearings, Donald Trump has unmistakably emerged as America's anti-president, the very model of the charlatan George Washington warned might be overtaken by "the insidious wiles of foreign influence." We have learned that Trump is so obsessed with the legitimacy of his 2016 election—and so terrified of becoming a private citizen (subject to indictment and imprisonment) after the 2020 election—that he embraces a conspiratorial myth of Ukrainian responsibility for Russian lawlessness hatched by an oligarch in Vladimir Putin's orbit. We have heard an official's first-hand account of a president so beholden to Putin that he blithely dismisses Russia's aggression as not "big stuff" compared with a public announcement by Ukraine's new president to the effect that, contrary to fact, its government is investigating (nonexistent) corruption by Trump's political rival.

The U.S. Department of Education agreed to hand over department records late Thursday to Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the Democratic chairman of the U.S. House education committee, just hours before Scott was set to subpoena Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for the records. The information relates to the Education Department’s unwillingness to fully forgive the federal student loans of borrowers who say they were defrauded by for-profit colleges, including the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges. ... “Our clients aren’t asking the government for a handout or a bailout. They’re asking the government to follow the existing law,” says Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. The group filed the lawsuit that includes Davis.

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. ... There is still hope for democracy, however. There’s little evidence that targeted ads have the power to 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.

Governments should make a commitment to protect civilians from the harmful impacts of explosive weapons used in towns and cities during conflicts, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today at a diplomatic conference in Geneva. The 23-page report, “A Commitment to Civilians: Precedent for a Political Declaration on Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas,” co-published by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, lays out the components of a new political declaration on explosive weapons, bolstering its case with precedent from existing declarations. ... “We should not look away from today’s victims of conflict, who are all too often civilians living in towns and cities that are under attack from bombs, rockets, artillery shells, and other explosive weapons,” said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Military forces should avoid using explosive weapons in populated areas due to the unacceptable harm they often cause.”

In her new book, “When Should Law Forgive?,” the lawyer and academic Martha Minow looks at several areas where she believes American society has become too punitive and offers ways to fix them. Minow is interested in why some societies have found it easier than others to grant forgiveness to wrongdoers; she is also captivated by how and why certain societies have been able to put into place policies that minimize crime and misbehavior, which in turn help us understand that bad behavior is the result of more than individual choice. As she writes, “Child soldiers and other adolescents accused of criminal law violations may not be entirely innocent, but neither are they responsible for the social conditions in which they make their choices. The same can be said of individuals who are drowning in consumer debt or student loans, and even of sovereign nations, cities, and states in debt. Each is to blame when they violate promises to pay back loans or laws against violence, but each also is embedded in larger social patterns that construct limited and often poor options.”

An op-ed by Martha Minow: Public knowledge about law is vital in the same way that public engagement with politics and society matters. Liberty and democracy depend on informed and motivated communities. Yet crucial questions involving law are too often inaccessible to nonlawyers. Lawyers tend to spend little time educating anyone other than their clients, or other lawyers when they act as judges and administrators. Lawyers also deploy technical words and seldom know how to produce the visual media so effective in shaping public knowledge. For these reasons, I decided to offer a course on documentary filmmaking for students at Harvard Law School. Law and documentary film may seem far apart, but they actually share many connections. Documentary filmmakers confront legal questions about privacy, secrecy, access to public and private spaces, and ownership of images and other materials. Lawyers increasingly use video interviews and computer-generated graphics in hearings and negotiations. Mass media culture informs views of legal decision-makers and everyone’s pictures of courts and law.

Harvard Law School does not lack applicants. But it has made applications to its junior deferral program free in an effort to attract more low-income applicants. The change will save each applicant $300. In the program, students apply during the spring of their junior year and receive an offer of admission prior to the start of senior fall if they agree to defer admission for at least two years after college graduation.

Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump. They are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of commerce. ... The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system. ... Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said Google has poorly defined how often or when it intervenes on search results. The company’s argument that it can’t reveal those details because it is fighting spam “seems nuts,” said Mr. Zittrain. “That argument may have made sense 10 or 15 years ago but not anymore,” he said. “That’s called ‘security through obscurity,’ ” a reference to the now-unfashionable engineering idea that systems can be made more secure by restricting information about how they operate.

Trump attacked ousted Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during her testimony, leading Democrats to accuse Trump of witness intimidation that could create another article of impeachment. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O'Donnell that Trump's tweets shows he needs to be the center of attention: "It's the way he melts down in the process of being impeached that ultimately will lead to a president's downfall."

Since the financial crisis, political figures, academics and financial industry participants increasingly decry the rise of “short-termism” in U.S. stock markets. Short-termism, as usually defined by its proponents, is an ongoing trend of corporate myopia. In which corporate managers, driven by investor demands, focus on near-term earnings and stock price maximization at the expense of long-term value creation. ... The case for short-termism, on its face, seems logical, if not compelling. But Mark J. Roe, the David Berg Professor of Law at Harvard University, is among many academic skeptics of the theory. In a 2018 paper, “Stock Market Short-Termism’s Impact,” Roe highlighted the five most valuable companies as of Sept. 19, 2018. ... And as the op-ed from Buffett and Dimon shows, corporate executives do believe that short-term pressures exist. Even Roe admitted in the interview that the aforementioned study of CFOs who focus on quarterly earnings was the “most convincing” data point in favor of the theory. “If CFOs are saying that they are focused on the short term, who are we to second-guess them?” he asked rhetorically.

The Wall Street Journal compiled and compared auto-complete and organic search results on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in three phases, from July 23-Aug. 8; Aug. 26-31; and Sept. 12-19. We created a set of computers in the cloud, using Amazon Web Services EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which presented new IP addresses, the unique identifier that many webpages use to associate one browser session with another, for each search. The computers were, however, identifiable as working off a server in Virginia, and location could be a factor in our results. ... The Journal reviewed the methodology with Jonathan Zittrain, the faculty director of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and John Bowers, a research associate at the Berkman Klein Center. Google declined to comment on the Journal’s testing.

President Donald Trump inserted himself directly into Friday’s public impeachment hearing, attacking former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Twitter during her live televised testimony before congressional investigators. The series of ill-advised tweets shocked legal experts, many of whom pointed out that the president’s statements constituted witness tampering and would likely be added to the eventual Articles of Impeachment.... Daily Trump critic Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe also weighed in on Trump’s tweets, noting that his conduct will likely find its way to the House’s Articles of Impeachment. “This Trump tweet is criminal witness intimidation. Glad [Rep. Adam Schiff] called it out in real time. This vicious attack on a witness during her testimony may chill weaker souls, but he won’t get away with it. It’ll be part of an Article of Impeachment for obstructing Congress,” Tribe tweeted.

Laurence Tribe on impeachment: It’s about time we pay attention to constitution. Ambassador William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent painted a sobering portrait of a president using the power of his office to advance his personal political agenda by withholding aid from a foreign power.

An op-ed by Eli Nachmany ’22 and Jacob Richards ’22: The conservative legal movement is in its golden age, but you wouldn’t know it from visiting America’s top law schools. At Harvard Law School, for example, which we both currently attend, originalist faculty and right-of-center educational opportunities are conspicuously lacking despite a tremendous amount of student interest. In recent decades, originalism has grown from a niche academic perspective to a widespread interpretive philosophy in the judiciary. Especially given the wave of new federal judges appointed by the current administration, legal practitioners are sure to find themselves arguing in front of judges amenable to originalist reasoning at all levels of the court system. And the success of organizations such as the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (more commonly known as FIRE) demonstrates that there is a need for right-of-center advocacy in various underserved communities that the Left regularly ignores.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: For all the rhetoric and theatrics, the first day of public impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives on Wednesday produced a surprising amount of light. Let’s put partisanship to one side and try to find that light, isolating the relevant issues of law and fact, and bracketing the question of whether Donald Trump is a terrific president or a terrible one. Everyone agrees that if Trump withheld U.S. military aid from Ukraine in order to encourage it to combat corruption in general, there would be no problem. At the same time, almost everyone seems to agree that Trump should be held to account if (1) he withheld the funds from Ukraine in order to get it to mount a baseless criminal investigation of a political rival, Joe Biden, or Biden’s son, Hunter, and (2) Ukraine did in fact launch that investigation.

Robert De Niro says he welcomes disagreement about whether The Irishman is accurate, but wasn’t “conned” into believing the firsthand accounts of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, the mob enforcer he plays in the film. ... But his account has been disputed by some Hoffa insiders. Harvard Law School professor Jack L. Goldsmith, the stepson of Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien (played by Jesse Plemons in The Irishman) told Vanity Fair that “there’s absolutely no basis for Sheeran’s claim and a lot of reasons to think it’s preposterous.” His new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow, offers a different account of the Jimmy Hoffa story than you’ll get from I Heard You Paint Houses or The Irishman.

The U.S. Department of Education agreed to hand over department records late Thursday to Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the Democratic chairman of the U.S. House education committee, just hours before Scott was set to subpoena Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for the records. The information relates to the Education Department's unwillingness to fully forgive the federal student loans of borrowers who say they were defrauded by for-profit colleges, including the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges. ... "Our clients aren't asking the government for a handout or a bailout. They're asking the government to follow the existing law," says Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School. The group filed the lawsuit that includes Davis.

When New York’s climate change lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. went on trial last month in a Manhattan courtroom, the energy giant’s lead lawyer took great pains to emphasize that the state’s allegations weren’t really about climate change. ... Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, said nuisance lawsuits are difficult to make because plaintiffs must “draw the line” from a company’s actions to the damage done. The continued fight over state jurisdiction will be crucial, she said. “If they survive the fights over venue, there will be a continued appetite to bring these cases,” Vizcarra said.

The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world. Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators? ... A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities... I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.

Legal experts are noticing that President Donald Trump wasn’t asking for a real investigation of Joe Biden, only one that could provide fodder for the news media. Witnesses in the impeachment inquiry have testified that Trump wanted Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter in an interview with CNN, in exchange for congressionally approved military aid or a White House visit. “Trump demanding a Zelensky announce an investigation of Biden, ‘in front of a microphone” gives the game away,'” tweeted Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School [and visiting professor at Harvard Law School]. “If the real goal was to investigate corruption, a CNN announcement would be the wrong approach. Genuine investigations are kept secret.”