Media Mentions

An op-ed by Stephen L. Carter:  If you’re able to shift your attention for a moment from the drama being played out in Washington, take a moment to worry about the drama being played out in Cambridge, where a professor at Harvard Law School is under fire for choosing to represent an unpopular client. The professor in question is Ronald Sullivan, an experienced criminal defense lawyer, and the client in question is Harvey Weinstein, which of course means that the fat was in the fire from the first. For signing on to defend one of the most hated men in America, Sullivan (so say a group of Harvard students) should no longer be permitted to serve as a faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of several residence halls for Harvard undergraduates. Ron Sullivan is a friend of long standing, and one of the most generous and decent men I have ever known. The things his critics are saying about him have nothing to do with what kind of person he is; they all stem from his choice of clients. So let’s focus on that.

More than four years ago, Liat Malka waited anxiously for a sperm sample from a deceased man she had never met to fertilize her solitary egg in a hospital petri dish. ... Historically, reproduction has remained sensitive in the U.S. because of the politicization of abortion rights, experts say. Further, Shelly Simana, an Israeli doctoral degree candidate at Harvard Law School, said that posthumous reproduction presents an especially off-putting predicament for Americans since they tend to “not like to think about death.” The American Society for Reproductive Medicine ethics committee has mirrored the Israeli guidelines prioritizing the spouse over parents of the deceased and requiring a waiting period before the material can be used. But because laws in this realm are inconsistent and difficult to enforce, there have been several cases of parents using their deceased children’s genetic material to create a child, said Simana.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy: Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is the faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of the 12 undergraduate dormitories in which most students live during their final three years at Harvard College. The faculty deans are mentors, guardians, and counselors — truly in loco parentis. They are responsible for their house’s overall social environment and manage a staff charged with facilitating the well-being of the students. Sullivan, the first black faculty dean at Harvard, is also a clinical professor at Harvard Law School, where I have taught for over three decades. In addition to those roles, Sullivan engages in private legal practice. He helped win an acquittal in the double-murder prosecution of the professional football player Aaron Hernandez (a convicted murderer in a different case, who eventually committed suicide). He represented the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., fueled the Black Lives Matter movement. At the invitation of the Brooklyn district attorney, he designed and adopted a conviction-review program that freed scores of improperly imprisoned people. Sullivan is, in short, an imposing, deeply respected figure in the legal community.

In a groundbreaking announcement, the House Judiciary Committee has opened a far-reaching investigation into President Trump and his associates ...“Of all the scandals that have enveloped the Trump administration, the one theme that keeps returning time and again is his attempt to politicize law enforcement,” says former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “This is just another example of how he sees DOJ as his personal enforcement agent, there to punish his enemies and reward his friends, and it is the grossest abuse of power possible.” Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe agrees, telling me, “If Trump did order Cohn to take that action, it would’ve been a clear abuse of presidential power in violation of the First Amendment.”

The law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is among the most accomplished people at Harvard. He has helped to overturn scores of wrongful convictions and to free thousands from wrongful incarceration. ... Sullivan faces this “clamor of popular suspicions and prejudices” because he agreed to act as a criminal-defense attorney for an object of scorn and hatred: Harvey Weinstein. ... Catharine MacKinnon, Harvard’s James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law, emailed: The issue is not whether Ron can represent reviled clients accused of crimes and still be the faculty dean of a college. Of course he can. The issue is substantive. ...The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig echoes the argument that it’s possible to be a survivor of sexual assault and feel comfortable with Sullivan’s choice. ...“The skills, capacities, and dispositions that would help to make a person a valued defense counsel are also the skills, capacities, and dispositions that would help to make a person a valued Faculty Dean,” [Randall Kennedy] argued.  ... The Harvard professor Jeannie Suk Gersen emailed me her concerns with such “processes”: "Professor Sullivan has chosen to represent and defend persons whom many people would not defend. Strong disagreement with those choices is of course part of the exploration of differences of principle and opinion that we’d hope for in a university." ... “Little more than half a century ago, mainstream lawyers were frightened away from defending alleged Communists who faced congressional witch hunts, blacklisting, criminal trials, and even execution,” Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz wrote. ... The Harvard professor Janet Halley calls Harvard’s actions “deeply disturbing.” She explained in an email: The right to counsel even for the most despised defendants, the basic role of counsel in our legal order, the presumption of innocence, academic freedom, and the right of University employees to assist persons accused in the University’s Title IX proceedings—are all implicated here. ... The Harvard law professor Scott Westfahl, however, defended the idea of a climate review, also by email. ... “We are all better off as a result,” and he noted, “I completely support the right of Professor Sullivan, an extremely talented defense lawyer, to take on a very difficult case. Should Mr. Weinstein be convicted, there will be absolutely no doubt that he received a fair hearing with the best possible defense counsel.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Free speech on campus is crucially important in a free society, and in some ways under significant threat. But President Donald Trump’s proposal over the weekend to impose free speech on universities isn’t the answer. Rather, any effort from the White House to control campus speech would become part of the problem. Public universities are already bound by the First Amendment. And private ones have their own free speech and free association rights, which presidential intervention would potentially violate. It’s essential to understand that freedom of speech on a university campus isn’t the same as speech in a pure public forum, like on a street corner.

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message. ...As Murdoch’s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox’s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox’s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.”

Michael Cohen raised a litany of allegations against his former boss, Donald Trump, in explosive testimony before Congress this week, implicating the president and his inner circle in potential criminal wrongdoing on multiple accounts. ...Donald Jr and Weisselberg are also of interest for their role in hush money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen to prevent her from speaking out ahead of the 2016 election about her alleged affair with Trump a decade prior. “Don Jr and Allan Weisselberg are both in deep trouble,” said Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “Cohen’s testimony opened the door to a plethora of questions.”

China’s largest political event of the year, a meeting of legislative delegates and political advisers known as the “two sessions”, gets under way this week and comes at a time when Chinese leader Xi Jinping faces one of the most challenging periods since coming to power. ...There are signs the NPC has gained importance under Xi. Before 2014, the NPC only very occasionally approved significant legislation, according to Changhao Wei, a law student at Harvard University who runs the NPC Observer blog. Most major laws would be made by the more powerful NPC standing committee, which approves laws year round. If the foreign investment law is ratified at this session, this year would be the fifth year the NPC has approved a major piece of legislation.

Beijing is set to announce its economic growth target and endorse new rules around foreign investment in the next two weeks during its major annual parliamentary meeting: the National People's Congress. The gathering of nearly 3,000 representatives from different strata of Chinese society is typically ceremonial in nature. The real power in the country lies in the Communist Party and its Politburo Standing Committee, headed right now by President Xi Jinping. But announcements made during the congress can shed some light on government policy. ... Against that backdrop, work on the proposed new foreign investment law has moved quickly. Less than three months ago, the NPC Standing Committee began soliciting comments on its first draft. NPC Observer, a blog founded by Harvard Law student Changhao Wei ['20], pointed out in a post that the draft is "significantly" shorter than one from the Ministry of Commerce in 2015 and has removed most of the details. The blog noted a second version of the latest draft was released in late January and is similar to the December version.

The nomination of Neomi Rao to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit exposed oft-ignored fissures within the right-wing legal establishment, aggravating social conservatives who feel their priorities have been unfairly eclipsed. ... Professor Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School agreed that social conservatives are becoming less interested in legal method and more interested in pure results. He cited growing skepticism of free market ideology and a feeling of betrayal on issues like abortion as driving the religious right’s reorientation. “I think the real reason social conservatives are becoming more oriented to results is simply mistrust of the corporate, libertarian wing of conservatism,” Vermeule told TheDCNF. “And that mistrust emphatically extends to judicial nominees.”

The crowd that gathered in a Fifth Avenue apartment to hear Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe was as deep blue as the ocean.  John Heilemann, who was filming the event for his Showtime program, “The Circus,” asked the audience to raise their hands if they had voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly everyone raised their hand. “Now raise your hand if you voted for Donald Trump.” One hand went up. ...  Tribe disappointed the faithful at the event, organized by Patricia Duff for the Common Good, when he predicted that President Trump would not be indicted. The lawyer, who has argued 35 cases before the US Supreme Court, also said, “The public is obsessed with impeachment.” He compared the Never Trumpers to children on a long car ride who keep asking, “Are we there yet?”

When Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and convicted felon testified before a House committee, his Republican questioners had one main line of attack: He was a confessed liar who could never be believed. Near the end of Cohen’s testimony, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., compared him to another confessed liar who later appeared before Congress — Special Representative to Venezuela Elliott Abrams. ... Right now, the main difference vis-à-vis false congressional testimony, is that Abrams has been pardoned and Cohen has not. That gives more support for challenging Cohen’s testimony, said Harvard law professor Alex Whiting. But Whiting cautioned that such distinctions are subjective.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Ordinarily it’s bad for democracy when a sitting head of government is notified that he will face corruption charges. But the pending indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the height of an Israeli election season is actually a good thing for the rule of law. ... What’s good about the charges is that they demonstrate that Israel’s governing institutions are robust enough to enforce the criminal laws of the country, even in the face of tremendous political pressure from the country’s longest-serving leader.

For the past two months, people have gathered on a street in Vancouver’s pricey Dunbar neighbourhood, snapping photographs of a $4m mansion with its blinds drawn.  Onlookers are not interested in the exterior of the house — but they are concerned about the fate of its resident, Huawei’s finance chief Meng Wanzhou, who is currently under house arrest awaiting an extradition hearing on US fraud charges. ... Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, said: “In theory the president could direct his attorney-general to drop the investigation.” But he added: “Normally the White House doesn’t interfere so openly at this stage and doing so might undermine the credibility of future extradition requests.”

An op-ed by Sam Garcia ’19: Before 2017, immigrants in Texas were a large but silent group of people who, for the most part, lived in harmony with the community. Although immigrants had every right to access the police if they felt they needed to, it is common knowledge that a slight distrust of the authorities and the specter of being deported kept them from contacting the police in some situations. This distrust grew rapidly in April 2017, when the Texas Legislature voted to pass Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), which ended sanctuary cities in Texas and called for more cooperation with federal authorities. Much like Florida Senate Bill 168, which passed the Judiciary Committee last week, Texas SB 4 was proposed on the idea that it would make it people safer — it did not, though, and it hurt vulnerable victims of domestic abuse the most. Similarly, if SB 168 makes it through the Florida Legislature, Floridians may face the same outcome that Texas has.

It’s been more than a year since the Trump administration declared that coal and nuclear retirements were threatening the electric grid -- and regulators still aren’t rushing to the rescue. ... “The political winds that created this docket -- I don’t know if they’re still blowing or not," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If you’re looking for the most important sentence in Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, here it is: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

Readers discuss whether an article about the Minnesota senator’s reputation as a tough boss was fair or sexist, and whether it should sway voters. A letter from Charles Fried: A saying in the court of Louis XIV had it that “no man is a hero to his valet.” Your lengthy front-page article about Senator Amy Klobuchar suggests that no politician is a saint to her staff. In high-stress jobs every human being is prone to fits of temper and less than perfect fairness to those who work with her in close settings day in and day out.

An op-ed by David Jonathan Benger '20: A swastika was found on my childhood playground in Brighton Beach yesterday. It was drawn onto the very same jungle gym on which I used to play with my sister while my parents and grandparents watched over us to ensure our safety. A culprit is yet to be identified, but this is not an isolated incident. Attacks on Jewish bodies have been escalating in frequency and ferocity in New York and elsewhere over the last few years.

People facing criminal charges in Berkshire County district courts no longer will be required to post bail while awaiting trial — provided that they are not deemed flight risks. Following through on a promise she made on the campaign trail, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington has directed prosecutors to stop requesting that such defendants be held in lieu of bail. The policy officially was announced Friday. ... "I think it's certainly on the forefront of what the DA's offices are doing across the country," Colin Doyle, staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program, said of Harrington's policy. "Whether someone is in jail pretrial or released shouldn't depend on the money they have in their bank account." Through the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Doyle compiles research on bail statutes nationwide. On Monday, the group will release a nearly 100-page "bail guide" for state and local policymakers.