Media Mentions

Co-author Sarah Grant’s stories on Steele dossier and Watergate ‘road map’ are much-discussed

Time and again — when President Trump stood by Saudi Arabia after the killing of a Virginia-based journalist, when it looked as if he might intervene in the special counsel’s Russia investigation and when he threatened to declare a national emergency to pay for his border wall — lawmakers on Capitol Hill warned him not to push them too far. This week, in a remarkable series of bipartisan rebukes to the president, Congress pushed back. ... The rejection of Mr. Trump’s national emergency declaration could also give ammunition to a half-dozen legal cases challenging the president’s exercise of that power under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush. “Some judges may count that as evidence of congressional intent,” Mr. Goldsmith said, though he added that he disagreed with that view.

The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Thursday to reinstate a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer Remington, filed by families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. If Remington loses the suit, it would be a landmark ruling that would deal a huge blow to the gun industry. Guest: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

An article by Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker: ... On Wednesday, again, California walked back its commitment to the death penalty. Though it’s not full-fledged abolition, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on capital punishment lasting as long as his tenure in office, insisting that the California death penalty has been an “abject failure” in its discriminatory, ineffective, and inaccurate application. He also declared that the death penalty itself is an immoral practice. Is this latest development in California, like the California Supreme Court’s decision in 1972, just a small roadblock to the continued use of capital punishment? Or is it a harbinger of further decline and perhaps even abolition of the American death penalty? We think the latter.

... Co-founded in 2010 by Harvard Law School (HLS) Professor Jack Goldsmith; Robert Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law; and Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes, the national security website [Lawfare] has become a go-to source for timely expertise on a host of related legal issues, from surveillance and cybersecurity to interrogation and war powers. ... Though its masthead is stocked with seasoned legal firepower from across the country, two of Lawfare’s most widely discussed stories in the past few months — an exhaustive analysis of the so-called Steele dossier and a look at efforts to obstruct justice during Watergate — were co-authored by Sarah Grant, a highly accomplished yet stunningly modest third-year at HLS.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The Senate has now joined the House in approving a resolution to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of a "national emergency" to get billions of dollars that Congress refused to give him for a wall on the southern border. Even Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who led a last-ditch effort to strike a deal with the president, supported the 59-41 congressional rebuke. The resolution is less than a page long and does little to capture the full human stakes of Trump’s latest act of self-aggrandizement. The declaration itself is causing serious harm to our border communities — and that harm can't be undone if Trump vetoes the resolution, as he has vowed he will. Cities like El Paso, Texas, thrive as safe and successful communities precisely because of their cooperative relationship with the Mexican authorities and people.

An article by Jeannie Suk Gersen: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This exhortation by an anti-royalist revolutionary, in “Henry VI, Part II,” remains one of Shakespeare’s most dependable laugh lines. Lawyers are a pain. At some point or another, everyone wants to get rid of them, especially when legalities seem to stand in the way of sweeping social change. Therein lies the bite of the joke. As the Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote, in a footnote to a dissenting opinion, Shakespeare “realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.” It was decidedly unfunny, last month, to see the words “Down w Sullivan!” spray-painted on the doors of Winthrop House, the residence of Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., the first African-American faculty dean of an undergraduate house at Harvard. (Sullivan is also a colleague of mine at Harvard Law School and a renowned defense attorney.)

After the skimpy sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Virginia last week, Wednesday proved satisfying for those straining to see some semblance of equal justice under the law. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me that “the crimes charged appear to be very serious and distinct enough from the federal crimes for which Manafort has been sentenced to avoid any double jeopardy problem either as a matter of New York law or as a matter of federal constitutional law in the event that the Supreme Court were to jettison the separate sovereigns doctrine in Gamble v. United States, currently awaiting decision after the December 6 oral argument.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued a moratorium on executions in the state — granting at least a temporary reprieve for its 737 death row inmates. That represents one quarter of the people on death row in the nation. At a press conference on Wednesday, Governor Newsom talked about wrongful convictions, the $5 billion that the state has spent on the death penalty since 1978, and the racial disparities in sentencing. ... Marisa Lagos, political reporter for KQED and co-host of the podcast Political Breakdown, and Carol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” break down the announcement.

The value of civility is one of the few things Americans can all agree on — right? That's the common assumption. And yet it's an assumption that depends on everyone thinking they're a full member of the community. But what about when they aren't? ... San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel during the national anthem enraged many people — including President Trump. The upward spiral of unarmed black people (mostly men) who have been killed by (mostly) white policemen was unacceptable to the NFL star. He chose to kneel to bring attention to it, and that, says Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, made a lot of the white public furious. "The idea that these athletes were addressing themselves to a burning political issue — that in and of itself made people mad," Kennedy says.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: After the initial shock from the college admissions cheating scandal passes, university administrators will have to face the unenviable problem of whether to throw out the students who got in under false pretenses. You might think the solution is simple: If the parents cheated, the kids should pay the price. But things are a little more complicated, at least from the standpoint of the universities.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The indictment of Paul Manafort by New York state prosecutors on Wednesday is a shot across the bow of the presidency — a warning and possible harbinger of future prosecutions of Donald Trump’s associates, children and even the man himself by the state.

Guest Susan Crawford explains how giant corporations in the United State have held back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward, and she describes how a few cities and towns are fighting to bring the fiber optic revolution to their communities.

A new partnership between Palm Beach County and 10 of its coastal municipalities is hoping to combat the effects of climate change with a particular focus on sea level rise. ... Harvard University Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic is providing pro bono assistance to formalize the collaboration, develop terms for a joint request for proposals and contribute information on climate vulnerability assessment best practices.

With Nancy Pelosi's decision to essentially take impeachment off the table, are House Democrats setting the bar impossibly high for removing a President going forward? Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe joins Katy Tur to discuss.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In an important statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, in response to an interview question, “I’m not for impeachment.” She explained: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.” There is a lot of sense in her comment. But it can easily be read in a way that puts it at odds with the Constitution itself. It’s best to assume that Pelosi did not mean it in that way. But on such a fundamental question, we should get very clear on the constitutional responsibility of the House of Representatives.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Look beyond the juicy stories of rich people and celebrities paying to have their children cheat on the ACT and SAT exams and buying their way into college. The real scandal behind the admissions indictments unveiled Tuesday is the way universities — including some of the greatest on earth — hand off to athletic coaches the power to decide who can attend.

In throwing cold water on the idea of impeachment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in some ways was simply offering a clear-eyed assessment of the state of politics today in the nation’s hyperpolarized capital: There are not enough votes to convict and remove President Trump from office. ... Unlike Mr. Matz, Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who once worked in President Barack Obama’s White House, argued that the Constitution offers lawmakers little choice. “If we have a clear impeachable offense that is not a borderline one but a clear one, the impeachment process is mandatory because the House of Representatives is an agent of ‘we the people,’ the first three words of the Constitution,” said Mr. Sunstein, whose latest book, “On Freedom,” was published last month.

The Delaware Chancery Court bumped its judicial warp speed up by another factor this week with a post-trial ruling that paused a complex merger of Medley Capital Corp. and Sierra Income Corp. just 29 days after the start of litigation, as a court already known for prompt action adapts to what experts say is a busier and more competitive corporate law environment. ... Guhan Subramanian, a professor of law and business at Harvard Law School and a professor of business law at Harvard Business School, said the Chancery Court already has established an impressive reputation for the quality of its decisions in fast-moving disputes. "Business strategies, jobs, and careers can be held in limbo while people wait for the Delaware Court of Chancery to rule, so the court realizes that moving quickly has real value,” Subramanian said.

Around the height of the #MeToo revelations, in the fall of 2017, I interviewed an archivist at a prominent research library for a piece about social-media preservation. It quickly became apparent that he knew less about the subject than I did; he saved Facebook posts by painstakingly copying and pasting them into Word, comment by comment, and manually pressing print. ... The notion that the memory of #MeToo needs preserving—both because it matters and because it could disappear—is also the premise of a much larger archival effort. In June, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, arguably the paramount repository of works on American feminism, announced its intention to collect the millions of tweets and hundreds of thousands of Web pages—news articles, legislation, changing H.R. policies, public apologies—that composed #MeToo and remain as its evidence. (Harvard faculty members of the steering committee for the #MeToo project include Jill Lepore, a staff writer for this magazine, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, a contributing writer.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an angry man in possession of a pricey lawyer must be in want of revenge. Or so it seems, reading the recent complaint filed by a student expelled from Dartmouth College for sexual assault. The young man known as “John Doe” is suing his former college for treating him “unfairly” during the Title IX investigation that led to his expulsion. ... The historical barrier to ending sexual abuse, says law professor Catharine McKinnon, has been “the disbelief and trivializing dehumanization of its victims.” Perpetrators often wield legal systems to intimidate and silence survivors. Custody battles in domestic violence cases, defamation in sexual assault suits, claims of gender discrimination against male offenders—all rely on the misogyny of the general public and use victims’ own trauma responses against them.