Media Mentions

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.

In the coming days and weeks, reporters and legal analysts will comprehensively analyze Robert S. Muller III’s report laying out in excruciating detail Russia’s attempt to interfere with our election, President Trump’s team’s willingness to benefit from such interference and even obtain Hillary Clinton’s purloined emails, and Trump’s systematic, continual efforts to thwart the investigation.  ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Volume II provides a perfect roadmap for impeaching this president for obstruction of justice if the House opts to pursue that path.” He continues, “Although Attorney General Barr did his darnedest to get in the way, and may have succeeded in creating a narrative that will protect the president, he had no way to erase or scrub that roadmap into oblivion.” Tribe points out that “it’s not just that the Mueller Report on p. 8 of the second volume says the Special Counsel’s Office is ‘unable to reach [the] judgment’ that ‘the President clearly did not commit [the crime of] obstruction of justice’ but that the Report elaborates numerous shocking instances of what any objective observer would have to describe as such obstruction.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, as redacted by the Department of Justice, is now released. Here are some early reactions from legal and intelligence experts. For additional background, see our “Hot Topics” archive on the Russia investigation. ... Alex Whiting (@alexgwhiting), Professor at Harvard Law School and member of the board of editors of Just Security. He served as a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, also hones in on obstruction, including several ways in which Mueller’s report is more damaging to the President than Barr’s summary implied: Four things jump out from an initial read of the obstruction section of the Mueller report. First, Mueller declined to make a call on whether the President committed criminal acts of obstruction solely because of the Justice Department’s current policy that a sitting President cannot be indicted, not because he concluded that such charges could not be supported legally or factually. In fact, he says that they would have stated if they found that he “clearly did not commit obstruction of justice.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In coming to terms with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, we should adopt a principle of neutrality and put entirely to one side our enthusiasm, or our lack of enthusiasm, for President Donald Trump. It is also essential to emphasize that the report, running to two volumes and some 448 pages, will take some time to absorb. Even so, the most puzzling thing about it is unquestionably a single sentence, repeated several times: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, neither does it exonerate him.” That is a singularly opaque sentence. What on earth does it mean? That’s a genuine mystery.

Nearly a month after special counsel Robert Mueller handed in his report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on the 22-month investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the public finally got its first look at the document Thursday. ...To start to make sense of it all, hours after the report was released, the Gazette spoke with former prosecutor Alex Whiting, a professor of practice at Harvard Law School who teaches issues and procedures related to domestic and international criminal prosecutions. He serves on the board of editors and writes regularly for Just Security, a popular U.S. national security law and policy website. From 2010 to 2013, Whiting supervised prosecutions in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.