Media Mentions

In just the last few weeks, activists have helped shut down fraternities at Swarthmore, ousted a dormitory leader at Harvard who had signed on as a lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and pushed Princeton to review the way it handles sexual assault complaints. Administrators have initiated talks with the protesters to address their concerns...Janet Halley, a legal and feminist scholar at Harvard, said she supported the right of students to demand that Ronald Sullivan Jr., a fellow law professor, be removed from his dormitory position for representing Mr. Weinstein. But she thought it “cowardly” of the university not to be more forceful in defending the legal principle at stake. “We’re living in a hyper-polarized time,” Dr. Halley said. “If we can all be fired because of people who can be offended, there’s going to be a gigantic housecleaning around here.”

Harvard Law School has formed a new partnership with Service to School’s VetLink program, an initiative that directly connects transitioning military veterans seeking higher education with partner schools that align with their academic goals, aspirations, and potential. This partnership aims to further grow the veteran student body of HLS, and provide guidance and opportunity to veterans who may be considering a law degree...Hailing from all services and both the officer and enlisted ranks, veterans form an important and growing community at Harvard Law School...During the 2018-2019 academic year, 45 U.S. military veterans were enrolled at HLS. This fall, HLS is projected to have approximately 20 veterans in the incoming class, the largest group in recent years.

Just hours before a panel of prosecutors and former Watergate figure John Dean was set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, its chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), announced that a deal had been struck to make available the “most important” underlying materials that were the basis for report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. ... Third, strong supporters of impeachment have put out a false narrative that casts the House as relatively helpless. Far from it. The House can get relief in the courts. Moreover, it seems Barr thinks that being held in contempt of Congress is enough of a threat to pry loose at least some evidence. “At least at first glance, this is a very promising development. It strongly suggests that even Bill Bar has his limits in terms of facing down a threat of being held in contempt by the House of Representatives,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe. “This is incremental movement, and the pace is glacial, but the glass, though far from half full, no longer seems entirely empty.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: President Trump’s delegation of a narrowly defined declassification authority to Attorney General Bill Barr has attracted criticism, notably on this site by my colleagues David Kris and Benjamin Wittes. I think these criticisms tell only one side of the story, and that the matter is more complicated than they let on.

In March the religious journal First Things published a short manifesto, signed by a group of notable conservative writers and academics, titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” The consensus that the manifesto came to bury belonged to conservatism as it existed between the time of William F. Buckley Jr. and the rise of Donald Trump: An ideology that packaged limited government, free markets, a hawkish foreign policy and cultural conservatism together, and that assumed that business interests and religious conservatives and ambitious American-empire builders belonged naturally to the same coalition...Then alongside these practical power plays and policy moves, the post-fusionists want something bigger: A philosophical reconsideration of where the liberal order has ended up. How radical that reconsideration ought to be varies with the thinker...Maybe it means reinventing the Catholic anti-liberalism of the 19th century, and embracing the “integralism” championed by, among others, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Increased scrutiny from antitrust regulators represents a meaningful threat for the biggest tech companies. That’s what the market seems to believe: Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. 1 all lost value Monday, presumably on the expectation that all have at least some monopolistic features that might be reined in by newly vigilant regulators. But keep in mind that there’s a big difference between President Donald Trump’s administration stepping up regulation and the existential threat of breakup. The way to think of the difference is this: Under existing antitrust law, the big tech companies won’t be broken up. If, however, regulators and the courts decide to reimagine antitrust law in new ways, then the risk of breakup would rise precipitously.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Senate Republicans are learning to rue the day Congress gave presidents extensive authority in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The latest nail in the coffin of legislative influence is President Donald Trump’s invocation of his emergency powers to impose a tariff on Mexican products to force the country to crackdown on Central American asylum-seekers trying to reach the U.S.  No Senate Republican has come out in support of Trump’s action, and many are vocally opposed. Yet despite the certainty of legal challenges if the tariff goes into effect as planned Monday, odds are reasonably high that Trump can get away with it.

A real estate firm owned in part by Jared Kushner reportedly received $90 million in foreign funding from "an opaque offshore vehicle" after the son-in-law of President Donald Trump began working as a senior adviser at the White House. ... "The conflicts that have swirled around Jared Kushner have only grown more distressing with time," Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email. "Besides being the president’s son-in-law, he is a scion of a family, whose wealth is intertwined with Jared’s many roles in the Trump administration, roles that have put him virtually in bed with, among other bloody despots, Saudi Crown Prince MBS, with whom Jared hobnobbed right after MBS sent a team of thugs to brutally torture, murder and dismember a Washington Post critic of the Saudi regime. It would take a long time to enumerate the conflicts we know about. Those we don’t yet know about are neatly hidden away in the Cadre company, in which Kushner apparently has holdings valued at as much as $50 million."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  New Zealand’s Labour coalition government has done something that could prove historic. Led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it has produced the world’s first “well-being” budget, focused explicitly on a single goal: using its limited funds to promote the well-being of its citizens.  Among other things, a lot of money will be devoted to three problems: mental illness, child poverty and family violence.

In the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s public statement that he was not confident President Donald Trump did not commit a crime, calls for impeachment have grown increasingly louder. ... Trump’s contention that the courts would bar Congress from impeaching him garnered a great deal of backlash in the press and amongst legal scholars, many of whom pointed out that the courts do not play a role in the impeachment process. Harvard law professor emeritus and frequent Trump defender Alan Dershowitz, however, penned an op-ed for The Hill on Friday arguing that the Supreme Court could, indeed, overrule the impeachment. ... Laurence Tribe, a renowned constitutional law professor at Harvard who recently authored the book To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, previously told Time that Trump’s suggestion about judicial intervention was “idiocy,” adding that the Supreme Court is “very good at slapping down attempts to drag things out by bringing it into a dispute where it has no jurisdiction.”

Two veterans of the Microsoft antitrust battle that raged 20 years ago have some advice for government regulators seeking to curb the power of today's tech giants. In conversations with Business Insider, Lawrence Lessig, who briefly served as a special master in the Microsoft case, and Alan Kusinitz, who headed up the legal team representing state governments, stressed the importance of policing anticompetitive behavior even if it falls short of a company break-up, the outcome that never materialized in the Microsoft case....The case "was extraordinarily important in creating an environment where people felt free to innovate without the fear of being destroyed by Microsoft," said Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School.

On All In, Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe walks through his proposal on how to impeach Donald Trump by avoiding Mitch McConnell.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: It is possible to argue that impeaching President Trump and removing him from office before the 2020 election would be unwise, even if he did cheat his way into office, and even if he is abusing the powers of that office to enrich himself, cover up his crimes and leave our national security vulnerable to repeated foreign attacks. Those who make this argument rest their case either on the proposition that impeachment would be dangerously divisive in a nation as politically broken as ours, or on the notion that it would be undemocratic to get rid of a president whose flaws were obvious before he was elected. Rightly or wrongly — I think rightly — much of the House Democratic caucus, at least one Republican member of that chamber (Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan) and more than a third of the nation’s voters disagree. They treat the impeachment power as a vital constitutional safeguard against a potentially dangerous and fundamentally tyrannical president and view it as a power that would be all but ripped out of the Constitution if it were deemed unavailable against even this president. That is my view, as well.

Everything you ever wanted to know about impeachment(but were too afraid to ask) with Harvard Law School Professor and author of To End a Presidency, Laurence Tribe. Plus a powerhouse panel featuring Politico’s Marc Caputo and Michael Grunwald, and MSNBC legal whiz Katie Phang.

Donald Trump could be impeached in the House but not tried in the Senate for the sole purpose of presidential censure, Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence Tribe tells AM JOY with Joy Reid.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: ... But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability can be made relevant to a fetus, then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights—like people. This move imbues the fetus with rights that the pregnant person—and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate. What is really at stake is an idea of fetal personhood. ... Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being.

The Harvard Law School Class of 2019 gathered this week for Commencement festivities, featuring an address by Roberta Kaplan, a send-off from Dean John F. Manning '85, and the presentation of various awards to students, staff and faculty.

An article by Sharon Block: The Trump era has not been an easy time for workers who want to stand up for themselves and have a voice in their workplaces and our economy. This administration has made anti-union appointments to federal agencies, repealed rules designed to protect workers' lives and livelihoods, and successfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny basic workplace rights in cases such as Epic Systems v. Lewis and Janus v. AFSCME. Surprisingly to many, American workers have met the challenge of the Trump administration with a big wave of activism and collective action — teachers marching on state capitols, Uber drivers turning off the app, and tech workers refusing to develop software used to repress people in other countries or immigrants at our border.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: Jan Crawford’s extraordinary CBS interview with Attorney General William Barr was released on Friday, May 31. In it Barr said some good things about why his investigation of the Trump campaign investigation is needed. He also said some bad things about his attitude toward his investigation that reveal the depressingly ugly state of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement institutions.

President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations on the way out under Mr. Trump...The Trump administration has often used a “one-two punch” when rolling back environmental rules, said Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks regulatory rollbacks. “First a delay rule to buy some time, and then a final substantive rule.”

While other states are embracing renewable energy, Ohio is heading in the opposite direction. A bill passed this week by the Ohio House would subsidize nuclear and coal power while cutting state support for renewable energy and energy efficiency, with the utilities' customers footing the bill.. The Ohio bill begins to make sense only as a bailout for one company as opposed to comprehensive energy plan, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. That company is FirstEnergy Solutions, the owner of the state's only two nuclear plants and the leading architect of the bill. It's a subsidiary of Akron-based FirstEnergy that FirstEnergy is in the process of spinning off..."FirstEnergy has really been a failure in the generation business, and so it's been looking for a bailout," Peskoe said.