Media Mentions

President Trump's deregulatory boss is now seated on one of the most powerful courts in the nation, where she'll have lifetime tenure to influence environmental policy and other issues. Neomi Rao will be sworn in this afternoon to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a forum with broad authority to review regulations and federal agency decisions, among other things. ...  Joseph Goffman, an Obama-era EPA official and executive director of Harvard Law School's Environment and Energy Law Program, pointed out that like her predecessor, Rao built her career among "extremely conservative members of the legal community centered around the Federalist Society." Another Kavanaugh-style judge on the powerful court is not good news for environmental litigants, Driscoll said. "In terms of political ideology, she's right there with him," he said. "I don't think we'll expect any better outcomes with her on the bench."

Time is running out for Michael Cohen, who has less than two months until he reports to prison. ...Cohen’s credibility is under siege after he admitted that he lied to lawmakers. Prosecutors have already pored through Cohen’s seized electronics and documents for evidence. If Cohen does have a magic bullet, it would have to be unique information providing prosecutors an investigative road map against Trump, said former federal judge Nancy Gertner. “If he testified about information on the inner workings of the Trump business that they wouldn’t otherwise have, that would be very helpful to investigators” and Cohen, said Gertner, who teaches at Harvard Law School.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has raised concerns that President Donald Trump could go to extreme lengths to hold onto power after 2020. Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard Law School, appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy with host Joy Reid on Sunday. During the interview, the legal expert warned that Trump, in his opinion, presents unique threats to the country and democracy. “Elections happen every four years,” Tribe explained. “And sometimes some leaders are much too dangerous to leave in power — and this may be such a case. The fact is by 2020, the amount of damage that will have been done to our rule of law, to constitutional norms will be very great and we can’t count on him [Trump] being out of office in 2020.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that while Donald Trump is not fit to serve, impeachment would divide the country. Joy Reid and Harvard professor of constitutional law Laurence Tribe discuss if and when impeachment could serve America.

YouTube has tried to keep violent and hateful videos off its service for years. The Google unit hired thousands of human moderators and put some of the best minds in artificial intelligence on the problem. ... He posted a manifesto filled with references to internet and alt-right culture, most likely designed to give journalists more material to work with and therefore spread his notoriety further, said Jonas Kaiser, a researcher affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “The patterns seem to be very similar to prior events,” Kaiser said.

.... While teaching, I saw repeatedly the extent to which my students’ ethics — or ethical lapses — were shaped by their helicopter parents. Now, I’d love to be the one to put a learning on those adults. ...“The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education,” by Lani Guinier. Harvard law professor Guinier delivers an uplifting vision for higher education. She demands we abandon America’s “Testocracy,” which obsesses over standardized test scores that measure little more than access to privilege, in favor of a truly collaborative approach to admissions and education that emphasizes people’s holistic competence. This wake-up call asks America to shatter its current higher education paradigm, because it is neither equitable nor effective.

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.