Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: After oral argument Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court, it seems modestly likely that a majority of the justices is poised to allow the Trump administration to ask a citizenship question on the 2020 census. That would overturn a lower court decision holding, essentially, that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross didn’t state his true reasons for wanting to add the question in the first place.

President Trump has embarked on a strategy of stonewalling, defiance and constitutional nihilism. With stunts such as blocking former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony, he has announced that Congress is not entitled to hear from witnesses relevant to the already substantial mound of evidence of obstruction of justice nor get tax returns that the law says “shall” be turned over to Congress. “Defying congressional subpoenas as a strategy — especially without even a colorable legal argument, and Trump has none that I can see — is surely yet another act of obstruction,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to rig the 2016 presidential election. But legal experts said Thursday that the highly anticipated Mueller report doesn’t shut the door on the question of whether President Trump obstructed the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling. ... Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who teaches at Harvard Law School, noted in an e-mail that the federal obstruction law covers a wide array of actions. “The statute talks not only about actual obstruction but also endeavor to obstruct,” Gertner wrote in an e-mail. “The report suggests that Trump ‘endeavored’ to obstruct but those around him would not comply. And ‘endeavor’ has to come with a corrupt intent. The AG seems to think that if Trump was not conspiring with the Russians, there was no corrupt intent. But the purpose of his attempted obstruction didn’t have to be to stop a Russian conspiracy investigation.”

The Mueller report included substantial evidence that Trump committed the crime of obstruction. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who warned earlier in 2019 that impeachment proceedings ahead of the 2020 election would be “pointless” tells MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber that the conduct evidenced in Mueller’s report, is “impeachable if anything is”.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In September, 2017, a month after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, student protesters at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, shut down a speaker—Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Virginia. A student group had invited Gastañaga to campus to give a talk on the importance of free speech, but, because of the students’ persistent disruptions, she could not proceed. “Blood on your hands,” the protesters shouted, and “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “You protect Hitler.” ... The more that free speech is denounced by the left, the more it is embraced by the right. Two years ago, the University of California, Berkeley, cancelled a lecture by the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, after protests of the event turned violent; President Trump then threatened, in a tweet, to withdraw federal funds from the school. At the time, the President’s suggestion appeared to lack a legal basis. Now he has created one, in the form of an executive order issued last month, in defense of free speech.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: One of the great unresolved questions in American law is whether the president can control the decisions of the “independent” agencies, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission. The Donald Trump administration has just moved in the direction of saying that the answer is yes.

Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council estimate that up to 40% of all food produced in the United States (approximately 1.3 billion tons) is lost or wasted every year. Meanwhile, Feeding America estimates that one out of every eight Americans, or more than 40 million people, is food-insecure (almost 13 million of whom are children). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, each year consumers in wealthy countries allow almost as much food to go to waste (222 million tons) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons).

Harvard Law School professor and former prosecutor Alex Whiting joins the show to break down the Mueller Report from a legal perspective.

A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free exchange of ideas but critics say the bill contradicts a federal law that allows social media platforms to regulate their own content. ... Kendra Albert, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the federal law would likely preempt SB 2373 because the bill is more restrictive. “The federal law contains what we would call a ‘subjective standard,’” said Albert, who specializes in technology law. “It's based on whether the provider thinks that this causes problems, whereas the Texas bill attempts to move it to an objective standard.”

Global M&A deal volume reached nearly $4 trillion in 2018—a hot year for the most lucrative practice at elite law firms. For two of those firms, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the boom pushed profits per equity partner to new heights—$6.53 million at Wachtell and $4.62 million at Cravath. ... Wachtell has previously considered other locations, including London. It had a small office in Chicago, but closed it about two decades ago, according to John Coates, a former Wachtell partner who teaches corporate law and M&A at Harvard Law School. ... Coates, at Harvard, says he sometimes poses a question to law firm partners who attend his seminars: If their own firm had a conflict on a client matter and had to refer it to a global firm or Wachtell, which would they choose? “They always pick Wachtell,” he says, because they believe the firm won’t try to take the whole client relationship.

Conventional wisdom suggested that the report from Robert S. Mueller III on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and President Trump’s efforts to to interfere with Mueller’s investigation would be underwhelming. Didn’t we know most of what was going on? The question, by the way, properly credits the press with getting the key facts right. And yet the overwhelming reaction—even from a few brave Republicans—is one of stunned amazement at the extent of President Trump’s duplicity. ... Laurence Tribe makes a compelling case that even if removal is virtually impossible, “it seems to me an abdication of constitutional responsibility for the House of Representatives to do anything less than impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate, whatever the predicted result.” Tribe advises, “Make every member of the House and Senate stand up and be counted. Who among them take their fidelity to the nation and its Constitution and laws seriously enough to risk losing their perks as senators or representatives? Who among them should be retired by the voters as sellouts?”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Does the ban on workplace discrimination based on “sex,” as laid out in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity? U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up both questions in its October 2019 term, which means we will have legal answers to these questions sometime before June 2020. It’s potentially a big moment for LGBT rights. It’s also a watershed moment for a question the Supreme Court has been struggling with in recent years: What is the right way to interpret statutes passed by Congress?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Why did Robert Mueller pull his punches? In his report, made public Thursday by the Department of Justice, Mueller laid out significant evidence to support the conclusion that President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice. Yet the special counsel stated that no matter what evidence he found, he wouldn’t directly say that Trump had committed a crime.

... Americans throw out more than 400 pounds of food per person annually, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). But it’s not just about the neglected noshes. ... Of course you don’t mean to toss all that food, but truth is, the majority of food waste happens in homes (not restaurants). Here’s step one: Figure out how much you’re wasting. “For one to two weeks, put all the food you’d typically discard into a bin in your fridge or on your counter. Then take stock of what you’ve collected to start making better decisions,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

A prominent political activist speaking in San Rafael on Thursday made a case that there is only one issue of any consequence facing the nation: campaign finance reform. On a day when the national media could talk of nothing but the release of Robert Mueller’s redacted report on the 2016 election and whether Donald Trump conspired with Russia, Lawrence Lessig, speaking to a sold-out house at Dominican University of California, never mentioned the controversy.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Despite Attorney General William Barr’s assurances and President Donald Trump’s boasts, the Mueller report doesn’t come close to exonerating the president of wrongdoing. Instead, it invites Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. It’s time for Congress to heed that invitation. In its extensive discussion of the constitutional issues implicated by special counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month investigation, the report asserts that Congress has the authority to apply law “to all persons – including the President.” Specifically, Congress may “protect its own legislative functions against corrupt efforts designed to impede legitimate fact-gathering and lawmaking efforts.” The authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of power, the report finds, is essential to “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

... When the news broke that he’d been picked, Kennedy had just come from hours sitting in a classroom at Harvard Law. He was already at work on a speech he was writing on his big idea: moral capitalism. A few months earlier, in late 2017, Kennedy had emailed Sharon Block, the director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program and a former Ted Kennedy aide, asking for help in developing his concept, which he was viewing as a kind of working political philosophy. ... In telling me about how it went, Block kept bringing up Ted Kennedy. She tends more toward policy discussions than daydreams, but there’s just something about the family, she insisted, and something that’s made its way down to Joe. “I don’t feel like I have to denigrate other people to say he’s unusual or impressive. This has been a more intense interaction, intellectual exercise,” she said, “than I am used to having with members directly.”

Legal experts Larry Tribe and Robert Bennett debate whether impeachment proceedings should be brought against Trump after the release of the Mueller report.

Andrew Leon Hanna ['19], 27, and David Delaney Mayer, also 27, became fast friends at Duke, based, at least in part, on their shared status as descendants of immigrants they have known. After years of searching, the pair settled on starting a social enterprise called DreamxAmerica to write an empowering narrative of immigrants, creating a film production company that would tell the story of immigrant entrepreneurs and invest in their businesses. Hanna, a Harvard Law student, is a first-generation Egyptian-American. Mayer’s grandfather was a refugee from Germany following World War II; his great grandfather was killed in Auschwitz.