Media Mentions

At first glance you could be in Singapore. The roads are smooth and well maintained, the city carefully landscaped with plenty of trees and space for pedestrians. Bandar Seri Bagawan - the capital city of Brunei - is safe, orderly and very quiet. It is the conspicuous domes of the mosques, some dazzlingly gilded, the large signs in Arabic script and the prominent pictures showing the bearded figure of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah that tell you this is Brunei. ... Dominik Mueller [Visiting Fellow with the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World] is an expert on Islam in South East Asia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and one of the very few academics to have studied Brunei closely. "The sultan has increasingly turned to religion over the past three decades, especially since his first pilgrimage to Mecca in 1987. He has repeatedly stressed the obligation from Allah to introduce the Sharia penal code, and the blessings this would bring, in this world and the afterlife," he told the BBC.

An article by Evelyn Douek, S.J.D. Candidate: On Thursday, in an eloquent and reflective New York Times op-ed, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes added his voice to the growing chorus calling for the social network to be broken up. Most arguments for antitrust action against Facebook generally focus on its data collection, privacy practices, and effects on innovation, but Hughes emphasizes the unilateral power that Mark Zuckerberg has over 2 billion people’s speech. He calls it “the most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power.” ... We may, as a society, decide that the lack of competition and invasions of privacy might make breaking up big tech worth it. But it’s unlikely that such an approach would solve the speech-related issues. In some cases, it may actually make them worse.

An op-ed by Mihir A. Desai: Uber’s initial public offering — the biggest in a year of blockbusters — is yet another chance for Uber and its detractors to sell their competing ideas of what this company represents. As it heads toward a valuation of about $90 billion — nearly the combined value of General Motors and FedEx — Uber is packaging its new image as a socially oriented company led by a contrite chief executive facing an enormous potential market that it has only begun to explore. Skeptics see a company with significant legal exposure, a corrupt culture, declining profitability and slowing growth that has forced it to make an awkward pivot to less attractive businesses such as Uber Eats and Uber Freight.

... Are we currently in the midst of a genuine constitutional crisis? Would we even know one if it bonked us on the heads? The last time people started throwing the C-words around, it was January of 2017, when the newly inaugurated Trump had just signed an executive order closing America’s borders to travelers and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries. ... Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe agrees that this probably isn’t the time to parse legal language: “Crisis schmisis—what’s in a word? We’re under an ongoing cyberattack from a hostile foreign power that helped install an imbecilic self-seeking con man as our leader, who committed numerous felonies to avoid being held accountable for his illegitimate election, who is encouraging ongoing attacks by that same foreign power and others, who violates his oath of office daily, and who seems secure from removal by virtue of a spineless Senate abetted by a cowardly House. Our constitutional norms are in meltdown as we watch in helpless stupor waiting for the monster to steal or cancel the next election. If this doesn’t qualify as a crisis, the word should be retired forthwith.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: I’ve been in a cave for several weeks crashing to complete my new book and am only now emerging to read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the commentary on it. I’ll hopefully have more to say on the report, especially on its legal analysis of criminal obstruction of justice as applied to the president. But for now I want to comment on the reaction to Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the report in his March 24 letter and his May 1 testimony. It seems over the top to me.

The assertion of privilege is not an actual “conclusive” assertion of executive privilege; it is only a “protective” assertion. ... What does that even mean? And why would the administration take such an action? A bit of background helps explain what is really happening here.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President Donald Trump’s “protective assertion of executive privilege,” in response to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, is creating a great deal of confusion. To dispel it, we have to see the trees, not the forest. To do that, it is crucial to understand that the subpoena called not only for the unredacted version of the Mueller report, but also for “[a]ll documents referenced in the Report” and “[a]ll documents obtained and investigative materials created by the Special Counsel’s office.”

... 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."