Media Mentions

Five years ago, animal rights advocates called on federal regulators to improve the conditions of non-human primates used in federally funded research studies. The government still hasn’t responded to their petition, and now a Harvard Law School program, the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, and other animal welfare groups have sued the US Department of Agriculture, alleging that the agency has failed to ensure adequate living conditions for primates, including rhesus macaques, baboons, and marmosets. “We are bringing this case to compel the USDA to put in place clear, enforceable laws that will ease the burden of suffering on non-human primates, some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom,” said Brett Richey, a Harvard Law School student who helped file the lawsuit on behalf of the school’s new Animal Law and Policy Clinic. “These animals deserve our protection.”

Tens of thousands of low-income veterans living in Massachusetts could be eligible for financial assistance but may not know the opportunity exists. A new tool, created by the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School aims to connect veterans to those Chapter 115 Benefits. Officials said Massachusetts is home to about 325,000 veterans and 70,000 of those are likely to be eligible. In recent years, however, only about 14,390 individuals were taking advantage of the program. "The Chapter 115 program also supports survivors and dependents of veterans, but many are unaware of the program," officials at the Legal Services Center said.

In February 2017, the company behind the hit games Candy Crush and Call of Duty signaled optimism in its future and announced a $1 billion program to buy back its own shares — and investors responded by buying heavily. But few of them could know that as they were buying, insiders at the mobile gaming titan Activision Blizzard were selling, and taking home additional profits as the stock price jumped....While many executives have prearranged procedures to sell stock, these plans do not have to be publicly disclosed and can be changed, Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who testified about buybacks at congressional hearings in October, said in a phone interview. He also noted that some insiders are in a position to decide the timing of a buyback announcement, meaning it could be set ahead of a prearranged sale, putting them in a position to benefit from any price rise.

An article by Noah Feldman: Fighting to keep his tax returns secret, President Donald Trump will soon ask the U.S. Supreme Court to grant him “temporary absolute immunity” from any criminal investigation while he’s in office. The case sets up yet another test for the court’s new swing voter, Chief Justice John Roberts, who is devoted to the principle of judicial restraint. The federal appeals court that has already rejected Trump’s claim understood this perfectly. It issued an extremely cautious, narrow opinion targeted straight at Roberts. That opinion, a minor masterpiece of judicial craft, strongly increases the odds that Roberts will reject absolute presidential immunity. In light of that opinion, I cautiously predict that, if the Supreme Court takes the case, it will hold that Trump’s accountant can be subpoenaed by a New York state grand jury to turn over the president’s tax records.

Everything seems bigger in the late 20th and early 21st century, including the potential for widespread harm. With the advent of sweeping disaster comes the complicated question of how properly to compensate the victims. A panel, “Innovative Models for Resolving Disputes after Mass Disasters and Catastrophic Harms,” held at Harvard Law School on Oct. 22, brought together three experts who have helped resolve disputes after recent historic catastrophes. Moderated by Harvard Law Professor Guhan Subramanian ’98 and sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the panel included attorney Kenneth Feinberg, who famously served as special master of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund; Duke University professor Francis McGovern who has litigated cases regarding the BP oil spill and the opioid crisis, and Eric Green ’72 who founded Resolutions LLC, a mediation firm in Boston.

An op-ed by Martha Minow: Last month, after Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in the murder of Botham Jean, the victim’s brother, Brandt Jean, walked across the courtroom, hugged Guyger, and said, “I forgive you.” I joined others around the country, watching in awe at that act of grace. But I also worried. I worried that black people, like Jean, are expected to forgive in ways others are not. Maybe Guyger, a white police officer, received a lesser sentence than others convicted of murder. And yet I also worry that law itself is so severely weighted toward punishment that it is part of the problem. Legal officials fail to exercise tools of forgiveness built right into the law — and as a result, I worry the rest of us replicate societal inequalities, undermining justice and decency. Forgiveness — letting go of justified grievances — is supported by every religious and philosophical tradition, as well as by numerous health studies. Forgiving those who wronged us can actually improve our health. As President Nelson Mandela, who led South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to a democracy, once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Michael Haring recalls losing control when a woman honked her horn as his 6-year-old daughter walked slowly in front of her car in a grocery store parking lot. "She was yelling and gesturing," Haring said. "I dropped my bags down, and I went straight into Baghdad mode." He kicked her car, denting its fender. He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and disorderly conduct...The 42-year-old Army veteran blames the outburst a decade ago near Denver on post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from the year he spent in Iraq searching for roadside bombs. As a veteran with a disability, Haring represents the type of person who is an easy target of a financial scam, according to an October report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office...Veterans account for about 7% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. "They are an economically diverse group," said Betsy Gwin, associate director of Harvard Law School's Veterans Legal Clinic... "A lot of factors can make the difference between success and failure when service members leave the military," Gwin said... "Veterans who don't have a safety net, housing or a job and are unsure of how to apply for military benefits when they leave the service can have a difficult time."

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston heard oral arguments Tuesday on what rights a private college must give to a student accused of sexual assault. The case, John Doe v. Boston College, involves a current male BC student accused of sexually assaulting a female BC student in November of 2018. Doe, the anonymous plaintiff, was suspended for one academic year by BC after officials at the private college conducted an internal investigation into the accuser's Title IX complaint filed earlier this year and allegations against him...Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, who represents Doe, explained after the hearing that the plaintiff contends that both sides in a college sexual assault case should have the right to ask each other questions. Last year, the First Circuit ruled in a separate, narrower case against Boston College that Massachusetts law requires colleges to treat students with "basic fairness" when they face disciplinary charges. In this case, Boston College has argued the U.S. Constitution's due process clause does not apply to private colleges.

We’ve known for several weeks that John Roberts, as the presiding officer in any impeachment trial, is likely to have a major role in deciding the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency. The past few days, though, have crystallized just how significant a part the chief justice will play; not just in the Senate trial itself, but in determining what evidence House investigators will be able to collect even before there is a vote on whether or not to impeach Donald Trump...What will it do to the court’s credibility if Roberts opts to let his court play defense for this president based on Calvinball-grade legal arguments about shooting people in the street? In regard to the lower courts, one might expect there to be some set of rules governing when and how the judicial branch decides to fast-track litigation with such major implications for our democracy and the rule of law. Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me, however, that the decision to hasten or slow-walk vital litigation turns on nothing more than the temperament and preferences of individual district court and appeals court judges who happen to be assigned a case.

Last week, for the second time in recent Massachusetts history, a young woman was charged with manslaughter for texting her boyfriend messages encouraging him to kill himself. Alexander Urtula, 22, and Inyoung You, 21, were both students at Boston College last May when, on graduation day morning, Urtula leaped off a parking garage to his death...Conversations with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and experts suggest cases like these resonate in part because the criminal justice system—and society at large—can't make sense of men experiencing domestic violence at the hands of women. When forced to grapple with that reality, prosecutors risk painting the women in question as having almost supernatural powers with which they manipulate victims. "That's the part of this that is interesting to me, is the notion of causation: the notion that these women were somehow putting a spell on the men so that the men were doing what they would otherwise not have done," said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law lecturer who is on Carter's appellate team. "That's antithetical to most gender stereotypes, though it certainly is a caricature: the witch caricature.”

In early October, President Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent a defiant letter to four leaders of the House of Representatives. No one in the Trump administration, Cipollone declared, would participate in the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened in September after Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came to light. “Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the executive branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the president no choice,” Cipollone concluded...But what if an increasingly conservative judiciary — Trump has had more than 150 judges confirmed — comes down definitively on the side of executive power? “Be careful what you wish for,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and alumnus of George W. Bush’s Justice Department. Congress has powers of its own that it has gotten out of the habit of using, he argued. “Literally everything the executive branch does requires funding,” Goldsmith said. “And of course the House controls spending.”

The White House tried to justify its refusal to comply with Democrats' subpoenas by claiming that their impeachment inquiry is unconstitutional. Laurence Tribe explains to Lawrence O'Donnell why that White House argument is "legally vacuous" and would rebuffed by the courts for putting the president above the law.

A book review by Randall Kennedy: Appointed 28 years ago, Clarence Thomas holds the honor of having held a seat on the Supreme Court longer than any of the other current justices. He is also the nation’s second African American justice, having succeeded the first, Thurgood Marshall, in 1991. Born in Pin Point, Georgia, in 1948, Thomas grew up poor, though not destitute, and in circumstances in which he experienced both anti-black racism and the opportunities pried open by the civil rights movement. He attended Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, pursuant to admissions programs that expressly sought to assist promising black students. Upon graduating from Yale, he associated himself with Jack Danforth, an ambitious, well-connected Republican and future Missouri senator who became a lifelong mentor and door opener. Through his budding ties with the GOP, Thomas steadily rose on the rungs of the political appointee ladder.

Over the course of the past two years — the past 18 months, really — President Trump has talked about insurance policies more than 90 times. This is the sort of thing presidents talk about — who’s covered, who isn’t, closing the gap. But that’s not what Trump’s talking about...He’s instead propagating a conspiracy theory about the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible overlap with his own campaign...That conspiracy theory holds that rogue FBI agents who disliked Trump launched the probe before the election to boot Trump from office once he won...The alleged plot was revealed in a text message made public last year, one of a giant set of messages released as Republicans investigated the agents. Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig saw this coming. Not this particular example, but things like this. In October 2009, he wrote an essay for the New Republic called “Against Transparency,” a provocative title for an insightful assessment of what the Internet would yield. Lessig’s argument was that releasing massive amounts of information onto the Internet for anyone to peruse — a big cache of text messages, for example — would allow people to pick out things that reinforced their own biases.

Since the impeachment inquiry into President Trump began, most Republicans in Congress have made the argument that the president’s decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigating a political opponent was not a quid pro quo or an abuse of power. But after a partisan House vote last week opening up a public phase of the inquiry — and a parade of government officials who testified to Congress that there was a quid pro quo — some in Mr. Trump’s party are testing out a new refrain: Even if a quid pro quo existed, it is not grounds for impeachment. They are merely concerned...Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an author of “To End a Presidency,” a book on impeachment, said the gamble that the most vocal Republicans appeared to be taking was that Mr. Trump — who as a candidate boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it — had succeeded in essentially saying “so what?” before...“I think the logic is the logic of the big lie,” Mr. Tribe said. “That if you repeat something often enough loudly enough to people who are not being critical in their analysis of what they’re hearing, you may just get away with it.”

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor and a leading constitutional law scholar, has written one of the most compelling books on impeachment. Just don’t ask him if President Donald Trump should be impeached. “Of course he should be,” Sunstein writes in the preface to a newly reprinted edition of his book, “Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide.” He adds, “He obstructed justice not once but ten times.” In the next paragraph Sunstein writes: “Alternatively: Of course he shouldn’t be. The very question is ridiculous.” He adds, “This book does not choose between these two views. It does not say whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.”

Interview with Laura Bloomer, Legal Fellow at the HLS Environmental & Energy Law Program: Depuis son arrivée à la Maison-Blanche, Donald Trump accumule les mesures de détricotage des réglementations environnementales américaines. Lundi 4 novembre, il a officiellement informé les Nations Unies la sortie des États-Unis de l’accord de Paris, retrait qui doit prendre effet dans un an, le 4 novembre 2020. Laura Bloomer, conseillère juridique au sein du programme pour l’environnement et l’énergie d’Harvard, suit ces dossiers de très près.

The Trump administration's courtroom defense of its Clean Power Plan repeal could blunt its own efforts to craft standards for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, legal experts say. EPA has taken an unexpected approach to defending its rollback of the Obama-era rule against challenges by states, environmental groups, public health organizations, and even industry and conservative groups in federal court, Joseph Goffman and Caitlin McCoy of Harvard University's Environmental and Energy Law Program wrote in a recent analysis...When an agency presents an argument that it is making a reasonable interpretation of the law, courts will often defer to the agency's expertise under the doctrine known as Chevron deference. But EPA might have trouble defending a rule that says the best approach for states to reduce emissions from existing power plants is to take action at the facility level, or "inside the fence line," Goffman and other legal experts said. EPA could have argued both that the Clean Air Act compelled the agency's interpretation that power plant regulations could only use an "inside the fence line" approach, and that — even in the event that it didn't — EPA had selected a reasonable option among a number of possibilities in developing the ACE rule, Goffman said. "The riddle is, why didn't they do that?" he said. "Why did they just argue that the statutory language is compelled and not argue that it is reasonable?"

President Donald Trump formally began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord on Monday, a move announced in 2017 that will take another year to complete. The State Department formally submitted a request to withdraw from the pact signed by roughly 200 countries on Monday, the earliest date Trump can make the official notification. “With or without the paperwork the administration is doing to withdraw from Paris, they have effectively withdrawn from any kind of commitment already,” said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.

HLS Visiting Professor Jennifer Taub comments on impeachment inquiry.

Lawrence Lessig says voter suppression, gerrymandering, big-money politics, and the Electoral College are undermining our democracy…