Media Mentions

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.”

The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller’s commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing.  ... On obstruction, Mueller reached no such decision, and he didn’t write a confidential report, either — his report was clearly meant for public consumption. Besides that, he’s a stickler for the rules. “Mueller’s action,” Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School writes at the website Lawfare, “seems inconsistent with what the regulations tried to accomplish, which was to prevent extra-prosecutorial editorializing.”

Amid a global outcry against Brunei’s implementation of Islamic sharia law measures that allow for death by stoning for sex between men and extramarital affairs, the sultanate’s ruler has apparently climbed down from the harshest measures in what some have interpreted as a bid to shield his nation’s besieged overseas commercial interests. ...Dominik Müller, a social anthropologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, told Asia Times that the sultan’s remarks represented a “clarification” rather than a “U-turn”, as reported widely by international media and made explicit “what many government people have long unofficially said and what most Bruneians have assumed.” ... “That said, it is truly remarkable that the sultan said it explicitly in a royal decree. Content-wise this was not surprising, but that he publicly said it, and unambiguously, definitely was and is clearly linked to international reactions,” said the academic, who is also a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program of Law and Society in the Muslim World.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi predicted this weekend that President Donald Trump may not step down from power if he is defeated in the 2020 election. .. Lichtman's concerns were also echoed by Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. "President Trump has sent troubling signals that he might well contest the results of any presidential election he fails to win — and any House or Senate election his preferred candidate fails to win," Tribe told Salon by email. "Trump has even retweeted his agreement with the absurd and indeed radically anti-constitutional claim by Jerry Falwell Jr. that Trump’s first two years as president were 'stolen' from him by the supposedly illegitimate Mueller probe into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. The 'argument,' though I hesitate to call it that, claims that Trump is 'owed' an extra two years as 'reparations' for the distraction of the investigations into what went awry in 2016."

First it was the former White House counsel. Now it is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. In both cases, President Trump — seemingly petrified of witnesses concerning a report in which he claims to have been exonerated — has tried to suppress testimony from those with the most damning evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice. ...So can he stop Mueller from testifying? “Of course there is no way Trump can stop Bob Mueller from testifying,” constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me. “There is no executive privilege between them, and obviously no attorney-client privilege, and Mueller doesn’t even work for Trump.” Tribe continues, “Until he leaves [the Justice Department], he works for Barr. And Barr has no conceivable basis to stop Mueller from testifying.” In any event, Tribe explains, “Mueller is free to leave [Justice] at any time and will then be simply a private citizen.”

In personal style as in haberdashery, U.S. Attorney-General William Barr is conservative in an old-school way: quiet, dutiful, not given to showy demonstrations of emotion except the occasional flash of anger at Democrats and reporters he considers insolent for their probing questions. He walks with the air of a schoolmaster, which his father was, and with the discipline of that often-cheerless trade. ...“In a strictly pragmatic sense, his calculation might prove sound,” Laurence Tribe, the renowned Harvard legal scholar, said. “But the price he will pay in the court of America’s moral accounting will be immense. Sadly, Barr seems indifferent to history’s all-but-certain verdict that he has compromised his integrity, his oath and his sacred honour for no noble purpose.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: "Net neutrality" still gets people mad. Millions have the vague sense that the high prices, frustration over sheer unavailability, awful customer service, and feeling of helplessness associated with internet access in America would be fixed if only net neutrality were the law of the land. As I've written here in the past, that's not exactly true: Without classifying high-speed internet access as a utility and taking meaningful policy steps to ensure publicly overseen, open, reasonably priced, last-mile fiber is in place everywhere, we'll be stuck with the service we’ve got. A rule guaranteeing net neutrality–which would cover only how network providers treat content going over their lines–won’t solve the larger, structural issues of noncompetitive, high-priced access.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: The wires were abuzz last week with news that the presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was returning $30,000 in contributions from lobbyists. He has now joined many other Democratic candidates in swearing off particular kinds of money, whether from corporate Pacs or lobbyists. Since Beto O’Rourke launched his campaign for Senate in 2017, this type of reform-through-abstinence has become a single metric for whether a candidate is a reformer for democracy. If you don’t give up corporate cash, then you can’t be for us. But this is an odd and fake measure of reform. The important question is not how you get elected, but what your fundamental commitment is if you are elected. Money from Pacs and lobbyists is actually among the most moderate, and least polarizing of the money in American politics today. Removing it alone won’t fix democracy. And this obsession with where the money comes from obscures the real questions about what type of reformer a candidate would be.

In the tumultuous few months since students began objecting to Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.’s decision to defend Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein at his rape trial, the college has been reviewing the living climate at Winthrop House, the residential community he leads as faculty dean. But, suffice it to say, the climate is anything but copacetic. ...“It’s a constitutional right that [Weinstein] would have a defense,” Harvard Law professor Janet Halley said. “Some of us would represent Harvey Weinstein. Some of us would never, ever. Telling someone else they can’t do it? Or if they do it they’re not fit to walk the halls of a residential house, that they’re a danger to the community or somehow not respectable anymore? Those are bad things for our leadership to be thinking.”

An article by Jeannie Suk: During Attorney General William Barr’s Senate hearing on Wednesday, he insisted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “work concluded when he sent his report to the Attorney General. At that point, it was my baby.” It sounded as if Mueller had birthed a baby and given up the child to Barr for adoption. (The President had urged abortion, so to speak.) Then, we learned this week, Mueller, as a concerned birth parent, wrote what Barr described as a “snitty” letter with pointed instructions on how better to raise said baby. I happen to be a teacher of constitutional law, criminal law, and family law, but never did I imagine this particular intersection of all three areas.

No wonder President Trump thinks he can defy Congress, tell his aides and former aides to defy Congress, threaten to fire the special counsel and mislead the American people: Attorney General William P. Barr told him (and us) that a president can end any criminal inquiry if he thinks it is unjustified. (Financial fraud? Witness tampering?) The Founders might be surprised to find out that the term of a U.S. president is the equivalent of a “stay out of jail” card, good until he leaves office — but not before pardoning himself, presumably. ... Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me, “Trump has no legal authority whatsoever to prevent McGahn from complying with Congress’s demand for his testimony, nor can McGahn invoke Trump’s gag order as a defense to a subpoena from Congress.” Tribe explains, “Former White House Counsel Don McGahn was never Trump’s personal attorney, and what he told Mueller about what transpired between him and the President with the latter’s public blessing cannot be shielded by whatever executive privilege might have been available at the time.” Moreover, “McGahn’s statements to Mueller are now part of the public record. Any executive privilege arguably attaching to those statements and their contents has been waived and cannot be unwaived.”

Bill McKibben says it might be curtains for humanity. Cass Sunstein says social movements may surprise you, but they shouldn’t. And a look at one controversial social movement: affirmative action. ... Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens: How many people do you think hold your same opinions? And how well do you think you could predict the next social movement? Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein says not to be so certain. His latest book is called How Change Happens.