Media Mentions

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and P. Sabin Willett: Federal officials roaming the states, seizing persons deemed “illegal” under federal law, detaining them, transporting them elsewhere. States objecting; communities declaring themselves “sanctuary cities.” This narrative did not begin with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. It hearkens to an earlier time, an infamous chapter of American history. Once before, residents of Massachusetts and other northern states were deemed “illegal” under federal law, rounded up by federal authorities and shipped south — to the slave states whence they had escaped. While slavery disappeared from Massachusetts soon after the republic was founded, it survived in many southern states. Free or not, Massachusetts citizens were subject to federal law, and that meant the reach of the federal Fugitive Slave Acts, a pair of laws passed in 1793 and 1850.

An op-ed by Joi Ito, an affiliate of the Berkman Center, and is the director of the MIT Media Lab: I was on the board of the International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2004 to 2007. This was a thankless task that I viewed as something like being on jury duty in exchange for being permitted to use the internet, upon which much of my life was built. Maybe people hate ICANN because it seems so bureaucratic, slow, and political, but I will always defend it as the best possible solution to something that is really hard—resolving the problem of allocating names and numbers for the internet when every country and every sector in the world has reasons for believing that they deserve a particular range of IP addresses or the rights to a domain name. ... Originally early Internet pioneer Jon Postel ran the root servers that managed the names and numbers, and he decided who got what. Generally speaking, the rule was first come first serve, but be reasonable about the names you ask for. A move to design a more formal governance process for managing these resources began as the internet became more important and included institutions such as the Berkman Center, where I am a faculty associate. The death of Jon Postel accelerated the process and triggered a somewhat contentious move by the US Commerce Department and others to step in to create ICANN.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  Impeachment has jumped the shark. The episode that proves it is the one in which serious, informed politicians are wondering if President Donald Trump actually wants to be impeached for political advantage and is trying to goad Democrats into obliging him. It would be impossible to imagine a more preposterous scenario under the Constitution and in the history of the presidency. Impeachment was intended by the constitutional framers as a highly serious option reserved for only the most extraordinary, egregious violations of the rule of law. Today’s discussion treats impeachment as a trivialized gambit within the ordinary game of electoral politics. The undermining of the constitutional ideal is near-total. It’s almost laughable.

If and when journalists read the best analysis to date of the second part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, they’ll be in for a shock. ... Enter Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, widely regarded as a leading expert — perhaps the leading expert working today — on national security law. Formerly the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel (where Justice’s brightest minds gather), Goldsmith now teaches at Harvard and writes for the website Lawfare, which he co-founded.Two weeks ago, Goldsmith issued an assessment of the second part of the special counsel’s report; on Thursday, he posted a follow-up to that assessment. In both pieces, with logic and detail, Goldsmith destroys claims of obstruction of justice by those unwilling to come to grips with the fact that the Mueller investigation is over. His analysis is tough, slogging through statutes, opinions and high principles of constitutional law, but at the end of the second essay, Goldsmith bluntly concludes that “the talented lawyers in the special counsel’s office ... include[d] at the center of the legal analysis in Volume II a transparently weak argument — so weak that it has no defenders.”

Despite the fact that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that she hopes Donald Trump’s family or staff will stage an intervention, legal scholar and professor Laurence Tribe said on Saturday that it’s up to Democrats to lead such an intervention. During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Tribe said part of this intervention must be to inform the public of what Trump has done and then hold him accountable for his lawless conduct. “Among the most important purposes of congressional investigations is not only lawmaking but holding the executive branch accountable and informing the American public,” he said. “An uninformed public is in great danger.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested that Donald Trump is harming the country, stopping short of affirming that the president should immediately be impeached. Joy Reid is joined by Harvard University legal scholar Laurence Tribe who alleges, ‘The president it seems to me is committing impeachable offenses before our very eyes.’

As Irma Garcia’s husband’s life hung in the balance, her 17-year-old son took the reins in keeping the family together. Mission native Samuel Garcia will graduate from Harvard Law School on Thursday after overcoming family loss and set an example for students in the Rio Grande Valley. ... “I had a plan from the beginning when I entered college. It was always that I was gonna go to law school, and I was always planning for it… I was always gearing up towards it,” Garcia said. Looking back, he says he saw himself as a “high risk investment at best,” yet other people looked out for him. “The people who wanted to help out, just giving me a little bit of their time, talking with me, actually made a huge difference,” Garcia said.

The New York Times gives prominent placement on its home page to list all of President Trump’s juvenile nicknames for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including the racist Native American slur directed at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). This serves no purpose other than to highlight his name-calling and reinforce his abusive conduct. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe concurs. Cheney “is too smart to believe even a bit of what she’s saying. That makes her prattling away about a ‘coup’ and particularly about ‘treason’ especially pernicious and dangerous,” he says. “Only dictators threaten those who dare to question and investigate their use of power with prosecution for treason.”

An article by Jack Goldsmith: I argued earlier this month that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report misapplied the presidential clear statement rule and improperly exposed many of President Trump’s actions in response to the Russia investigation to potential criminal liability. The argument drew disagreement from Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Kent and Marty Lederman, which in turn provoked a response by Josh Blackman, who holds views similar to mine. Here I offer my final thoughts on this issue. I am more convinced than ever that the Mueller report misapplied the governing clear statement rule.

The barricades are up at the White House, where President Donald Trump has vowed to fight “all the subpoenas” flying from Democrats in the House of Representatives. Early engagements have not gone well for Mr Trump. This week he lost two crucial skirmishes. ... The cases could eventually go to the Supreme Court, where Mr Trump has installed two justices. But Laurence Tribe, a scholar of constitutional law at Harvard University, cannot imagine the president prevailing there. And if the president defies a court order, the constitutional crisis that some Americans have predicted since 2016 will arrive at last.

Ellen Gallagher was stunned when she first learned that immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were sometimes placed in isolation with no human contact for 22 hours a day. It was February 2014, only a few months into her stint as a policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, where she thought she’d be empowered to ensure that the department did not violate the rights of those who came into its crosshairs. ... One of the facilities covered in that report was the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, which the inspector general visited in conjunction with the Buffalo Field Office, according to August 2016 emails obtained by Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and shared with The Intercept. A partially redacted write-up of the meeting at the detention center, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that someone from the inspector general’s office asked whether field office staffers “had any safety concerns about the fact that detention officers aren’t told which detainees have mental health conditions and may act erratically.”

The legal battle for reproductive rights is heating up in the wake of harsh new anti-abortion laws, and several states are already preparing for the potential end of Roe v. Wade. In seven states, so-called “trigger laws” would ban abortion immediately if the Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 court decision that established access to a safe abortion as a constitutional right. ... Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, questions the laws’ effectiveness. “I suppose they might achieve their symbolic purpose. But if their purpose is actually to protect the lives of fetuses, they make no real sense,” he told HuffPost in an email. “It would be easy for the Supreme Court to empty Roe v. Wade of just about all significance without explicitly overruling that landmark decision and thereby triggering such laws.”

Federal courts 2, President Trump 0. That’s the scoreboard this week in cases in which Trump has tried for specious, frivolous reasons to prevent the House from obtaining his financial records. On Monday, Judge Amit J. Mehta ruled that Trump could not block documents from the accounting firm Mazars USA. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in the Southern District of New York slapped down Trump’s attempt to block the House from obtaining records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me: “Like the ruling by Judge Mehta, the ruling by Judge Ramos was clearly right under fully settled law and in my view is quite certain to be upheld on appeal. The extreme rapidity of today’s decision reflects the simple fact that the arguments by Trump’s lawyers in both cases were, to be blunt, entirely insubstantial.” Tribe adds that had Ramos ruled as Trump wanted, Ramos would have been forced to “toss out over a century and a third of Supreme Court precedent requiring federal judges to take Congress’s explanations of its need for information at face value when those explanations are facially plausible, as they certainly were in the Deutsche Bank case as well as in the Mazars case.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The English language needs a word for what happens when a group of people, outraged by some real or imagined transgression, responds in a way that is disproportionate to the occasion, thus ruining the transgressor’s day, month, year or life. We might repurpose an old word: lapidation. Technically, the word is a synonym for stoning, but it sounds much less violent. It is also obscure, which makes it easier to enlist for contemporary purposes. For a recent example of lapidation, consider the case of Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who joined the team of lawyers defending Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein against charges of rape and sexual abuse.

A post by Dr. Ashley Nunes, an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University [Labor & Worklife Program], previously he lead research projects sponsored by the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation. In this article, he argues that ride-sharing companies shouldn't be surprised when its self-employed workers game the system. A storm is brewing in Washington, D.C, and this one doesn’t involve President Trump’s tweets. Uber and Lyft drivers are protesting working conditions. Drivers say after enduring years of pay cuts, action is needed. However, rather than striking, drivers are using a different tactic. As reported by WJLA, drivers band together nightly at the local airport and simultaneously turn off their ride sharing apps. This causes rider fares to surge. When the price peaks, drivers re-power up their app and lock in the higher fare.

Some House Democrats are convinced that they'd have better luck getting testimony and documents if they launch an impeachment inquiry against President Trump — which is why they've been pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi so hard. ... 2) Legislative purpose: It would be harder for the Trump administration to win a court fight by arguing that Congress doesn't have a "legitimate legislative purpose," the reason Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cited in his decision not to release Trump's tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. No one questions the congressional power to impeach, so launching an impeachment inquiry "removes whatever doubt a court might otherwise have about the existence of a legitimate Article I purpose for demanding information of limited facial relevance to possible congressional legislation," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote in an email.

A group met on Wednesday to make sure healthy food is available to everyone in western Massachusetts. The Franklin County Food Council brought together groups from across the state on Wednesday to talk about expanding access to food services. Among those in attendance was the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School, who spearheaded the Food is Medicine State Plan along with Community Servings, a Boston-based nonprofit that provides food services to people with critical and chronic illnesses. "We want to make sure that we bring those resources to western Mass as well. And so the Food is Medicine State Plan is an attempt to do that, right, to figure out where the resources are across our state and where the need is," said Sarah Downer from the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School.

After years of advocating for Vermont prisoners to have access to life-saving medication for Hepatitis C Virus (HCV), the ACLU of Vermont and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, with cooperating counsel James Valente, yesterday filed a class action lawsuit challenging the state’s refusal to treat hundreds of inmates diagnosed with chronic Hepatitis C. The case was filed in the federal district court in Burlington on behalf of two Vermont prisoners, Richard West and Joseph Bruyette, who seek to represent a class of inmates who have been or will be denied treatment without medical justification. ... Kevin Costello is the Director of Litigation for the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School: “Hepatitis C is responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other infectious disease by a mile. There is no medical reason to actively prevent hundreds of incarcerated people from receiving curative medications for Hepatitis C. In fact, the refusal to treat prisoners needlessly prolongs suffering and heightens the risk of serious health problems for a group of people who are completely at the mercy of the State of Vermont to provide their health care.”

People from the Harvard community share their favorite spots on campus. ... Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School: There is no more peaceful place for me around campus than sitting at the bar at Charlie’s, drinking a pint and eating grilled cheese as I watch the Red Sox game. ... Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law; faculty director, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice; co-director of Harvard Law School’s Program in Law and History; and professor of history, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University: I love the sunken garden in Radcliffe Yard. It’s so beautiful and peaceful and brings to mind happy times.

Laurence Tribe talks with Lawrence O'Donnell about the Trump subpoena war with Congress on The Last Word.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: You practically need a scorecard to keep up with all the conflicts between Congress and President Donald Trump over executive…