Media Mentions

... On Wednesday, the House judiciary committee voted to hold the president’s attorney general, William Barr, in contempt of Congress. It was a seminal moment in Democrats’ legal battle with the White House over access to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on how Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says: “This is more than minor fireworks. It’s a fundamental challenge to the structure of checks and balances. In particular, the president’s wholesale, blunderbuss assertion of executive privilege over the entirety of the Mueller report is legally groundless to the point of being preposterous.”

The new hard line taken by China in trade talks—surprising the White House and threatening to derail negotiations—came after Beijing interpreted recent statements and actions by President Trump as a sign the U.S. was ready to make concessions, said people familiar with the thinking of the Chinese side. ... “The U.S. is correct to seek a multiprong approach of not relying solely on commitments but also actually changes to the laws, so as to ensure Chinese leadership intentions are fully conveyed down to all local levels of government,” said Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu.

An article by Ashley Nunes [Senior Research Associate, Labor and Worklife Program]: Uber Technologies is set to go public this week, an event that has been described as the most anticipated technology filing since Facebook in 2012. Some forecasters expect that the ride-hailing giant could sell up to US$10-billion worth of stock. Self-driving technology features prominently in the company’s investor prospectus — after all, the company is bleeding cash, and most of the money goes towards paying its drivers. Automating the task of driving should boost the company’s balance sheets.

Harvard professor and constitutional law scholar, Laurence Tribe, joined us by phone to give us the latest in the fight for the unredacted Mueller Report, and for Trump’s tax records.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Is President Donald Trump legally entitled to withhold his tax returns from the House Committee on Ways and Means? Probably not – but it’s not simple. The governing legal text, known as section 6103, is buried in a lengthy set of provisions governing confidentiality and disclosure of tax returns. ... Representative Richard Neal, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, invoked section 6103 on April 3, when he asked for Trump’s federal income tax returns for 2013 through 2018 – along with the returns for eight organizations owned by or associated with Trump. At first glance, section 6103 authorizes Neal to get those returns.

Law professors explain what it would mean for Congress to hold Trump attorney general William Barr in contempt—and what House Democrats are likely to do next. ... An across-the-board stonewalling strategy places what is supposed to be a basic element of American tripartite democracy—the checks and balances each branch imposes on the others—in serious jeopardy. "The Trump administration's refusal to cooperate represents a challenge to the very idea that Congress provides oversight of the president," Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Noah Feldman told me. "Anyone elected president, by definition, has a lot of power. Unless someone is in a position to provide oversight, the president functions as above the law." ... In the alternative, Congress can enforce its own contempt findings by ordering the House sergeant-at-arms to arrest an uncooperative witness who, as the Supreme Court put it in a landmark 1935 opinion, "obstruct[s] the performance of the duties of the legislature." Lawmakers haven't invoked this "inherent contempt power" in nearly a century, notes Larry Tribe, Feldman's colleague at Harvard Law School, which can make it sound a little outlandish to modern ears. "But you have to realize we are not living in normal times," he says. "In confronting this kind of unrestrained White House occupant, Congress might have to reach back into its toolbox."

First-year law student Mara Chin Loy didn’t follow a traditional path to Harvard. The first person in her family to go to law school, she majored in human biology and minored in Italian at Stanford. Though her job as a domestic-violence program associate with the Center for Court Innovation in New York City familiarized her with some aspects of the legal system, she didn’t know quite what to expect when she was accepted to HLS. “I was not very familiar with law school as a process,” Chin Loy recalls. But by the time Chin Loy arrived on campus, she felt well-prepared for her first semester. That’s because she—along with all first-year J.D. students (called “1Ls”) and all LL.M. students—participated in Zero-L, a new, 10-hour online course featuring a dazzling array of HLS professors. Zero-L provides a grounding in things like the separation of powers, the basics of American constitutional law, and the stages of civil litigation. It also covers how to read a case and explains the Socratic method, offering tips on how to speak in class in response to a cold call.

One standard criticism of Trump’s emphasis on bilateral trade—and reducing the bilateral trade deficit—is that it’s leading China back toward a world of managed trade. ...Forget the formal structure of “trade”—tariffs, quotas and the like. They don’t matter much when the bulk of China’s imports are carried out by state owned companies, or by private companies that can only import with a license from China’s state. Go back and re-read Mark Wu's rightly celebrated article on China, Inc's challenge to the global trading rules.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s administration invoked executive privilege Wednesday to explain why Attorney General William Barr won’t hand over special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report to Congress. There’s just one problem: Executive privilege has nothing whatsoever to do with the parts of the report that were redacted in its earlier release.

In the 1980s, China was beginning a long economic boom that would transform the global trading system, and Michael Korchmar decided to go there to launch a joint venture. He quickly soured on the country. ... Consider this: China has more companies in the Fortune 500 than any country except the United States. More than half of those firms are controlled by a single government agency, the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, wrote Harvard Law Professor Mark Wu, in a 2016 article, "The 'China, Inc.' Challenge To Global trade Governance."

Uber’s IPO is about to hit the market. Ride-hail drivers head out on strike for better wages and working conditions. We look at the gig economy now. Guests: ... Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, which is Harvard’s forum for research and teaching on the world of work and its implications for society.

Harvard Law School’s incoming class of students will get a head start on their legal studies this summer. The school will soon launch the second iteration of its Zero-L program—a first-of-its kind curriculum of online courses designed to give new students some legal basics and a roadmap of what to expect once they arrive on campus. I caught up with professor Glenn Cohen, who developed Zero-L with associate dean for strategic initiatives Jessica Soban at the direction of Dean John Manning, to talk about the program and how it’s evolving after the pilot last summer.

The House Judiciary Committee is set to vote on holding Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress, for failing to provide a full and unredacted copy of the Mueller report. It’s the latest in a series of clashes between the legislative and executive branches—clashes that don’t show any signs of letting up. Was our 230-year-old Constitution designed for this highly partisan, highly confrontational moment? Guest: Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School professor and host of Deep Background, available on Luminary.

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday to hold Attorney General Barr in contempt for refusing to release the full unredacted Mueller report to Congress as Democrats threaten to hold former White House Counsel Don McGahn in contempt. Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O'Donnell that impeachment proceedings should begin: "There is a point when caution becomes cowardice and a point when cowardice becomes betrayal of the Constitution."

Over the past several months, legislators in Washington have engaged in heated conversations about the Green New Deal, the potential plan to help the United States to cool the planet by quickly and equitably curbing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning to cleaner energy sources. ... The good news is that any effort to bring the Green New Deal to fruition wouldn’t need to start from scratch. Proponents can, and should, look to states and cities for help and inspiration, says Caitlin McCoy, a fellow at Harvard Law School who specializes in in climate, clean air and energy. McCoy just authored a new policy paper that shows areas where state and local governments have been leading and how understanding their progress is crucial to crafting any new sweeping federal legislation. “States are an experimental testing ground for policies that could one day be adopted at a federal level,” she says. Green New Deal backers, she adds, “would be wise to do an accounting of what’s happening at a state and local level and see where they might be able to plug federal policies and programs into existing architecture and frameworks. And any big federal policy to operationalize the principles of the Green New Deal would necessarily need to build on state action, because a lot of the areas that the deal seems to be seeking to reach are areas of traditional state and local control.”

Attorney General William P. Barr refused to play it straight with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. Instead of presenting the report objectively, he substituted his own view of the facts. Instead of adhering to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo, he made up a new rule: A prosecutor can opine on indictment of a president even if he cannot indict him. Instead of looking at the mound of evidence of obstruction, he denied that there was a basis for bringing a case and went still further in parroting President Trump’s insistence that he had been cleared. Instead of responding dispassionately that no, there was no evidence of improper surveillance of Trump’s campaign, he invoked the ominous word “spying” and doubled down when asked about it under oath. ...Barr and Trump’s problem doesn’t end there. If Barr (and Mueller) can offer their views on Trump’s criminal liability, so can the Southern District of New York prosecutors investigating Trump’s possible financial wrongdoing. “I think they could,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah, a signatory to the prosecutors’ letter, tells me. “I don’t know if they will.” Other legal experts, including former prosecutor Joyce White Vance (who also signed the letter) and constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe, agree. “They clearly should,” Tribe says. “I see no legal, ethical, or political downside. And these days it’s really rare to encounter a way forward that yields no minuses, but some distinct pluses.”

The largest U.S. companies are beginning to pay heed to the demands of investors focused on environmental and social issues, a shift for shareholders long relegated to the sidelines. Oreo cookie maker Mondelez International Inc. last year said all its wrappers would be recyclable by 2025. The move came four years after Parnassus Investments, a small San Francisco-based money manager, and other investors began pushing Mondelez to assess the environmental impact of its packaging. ... The Center for Political Accountability’s push for better political-spending disclosure started in 2003. Proposals to improve political-spending transparency made up the biggest single category of shareholder proposals among S&P 500 companies from 2005 through 2018, partly prompted by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that ended longstanding limits on corporate political spending. Such proposals accounted for 626 of 5,092 in all, according to an analysis by researchers at Harvard and Tel Aviv universities.

President Trump has a superpower. With just a few taps to the screen of his iPhone, he can transform his staunchest adversaries into . . . Donald Trump. No one loves a good conspiracy theory as much as the man in the Oval Office. Indeed, that is how he launched his political career. He was the chief propagator for a shameful lie that the nation’s first African American president was not born in this country. ... No less a figure than Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe wrote, “This is as loud a warning as anyone could ask for: Trump has no intention of leaving his sinecure and exposing himself to jail time.” But Tribe also acknowledged: “If he plans to stage his own coup, I’d count on the judiciary, the military, and, ultimately, a popular uprising to stop him. Best = landslide.”

On the question of impeaching President Trump, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe said that “We might lose our souls and our constitutional democracy if we do nothing."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: If you are concerned about climate change, you are likely enthusiastic about renewable fuels, such as solar and wind, and about laws that require their use. For example, the Green New Deal calls for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Unfortunately, new research shows that renewable-fuel mandates are an unusually expensive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The expense comes in the form of increased electricity prices, which are a particular problem for low-income consumers. A strong majority of states now have “renewable portfolio standards,” which require that a specified percentage of the electricity supply must come from renewables. In California, the 2030 target is 60 percent. In New York, it is 50 percent.

An article by Labor Work Life Program Fellow Ashley Nunes: In what has been called the most anticipated technology filing since Facebook, Uber is set to go public this week. A decade after the company’s founding, Uber could be valued at nearly $100 billion.Not everyone is cheering, though. Uber’s public listing coincides with a planned global work stoppage, which some of its drivers organized to protest low pay. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) backed their effort, tweeting, “People who work for multibillion-dollar companies should not have to work 70 or 80 hours a week to get by.”