Media Mentions

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.

With the help of Harvard Law's Entertainment Law Clinic and Recording Artists Project (RAP), students with a passion for music and the arts are following their dream careers in showbiz.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Whatever Huawei Technologies Co. is doing by suing the U.S. government and six cabinet officials, it isn’t trying to win in court. The legal arguments mounted in its brief aren’t based on existing precedent. Although the brief cites the Constitution, as written the arguments are barely legal at all.

The Post reports on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) remarks during an interview about a potential impeachment of President Trump: “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. And he’s just not worth it.” ... The rub is if the evidence is truly compelling but Republicans remain his obstinate defenders. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe argues that in such a case you also have to consider “the danger of NOT impeaching a president whose guilt has become clear just because the Senate seems too beholden to the president to remove him.”

Health care providers in Mississippi continue to break the law by sending patients large, out-of-pocket medical bills that they don’t have to pay, concludes a Harvard Law School report released Monday. ... In its report, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School found that Mississippi’s anti-balance billing law, which was one of the first and strongest enacted in the country, needs revising.

Growing up in South Florida, Rebecca Rechtszaid dreamed of becoming a professional singer, but after a case of pneumonia wrecked her vocal range in college, she settled for the next-best thing. She couldn’t be an artist, but she could become a lawyer for artists. ... That seems to be the case with hundreds of students who have signed up for entertainment law courses and clinics at Harvard Law School (HLS) over the past 20 years. The phenomenon underscores a trend among law students to veer from the conventional paths of corporate law or litigation and look to work in creative industries.

Every day, it seems like people are quitting social media for one reason or another — including fatigue and privacy concerns. Recently, one of my coworkers even told me he had stopped using Instagram because he believed it was listening in on his conversations. ... If tech companies were actually listening in on us without our consent, they'd be in for some serious legal pain. "There is also a federal statute called the Wiretap Act, which prevents people from eavesdropping on oral communications, and that could be a cause of action for a potential plaintiff against the company that was eavesdropping on them," said Kendra Albert, clinical instructional fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

It was announced last week that President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to less than four years behind bars, a punishment decried by many in Washington and in legal circles as too lenient ... To discuss the political and legal significance of the ruling, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Bruce Singal, a defense attorney who worked alongside Robert Mueller in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.

The Chinese telecom giant Huawei is winning the race to build 5G networks worldwide. NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford about why that's a national security threat.

An article by Samuel Garcia '19: A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation reported that immigrants in America have almost double the average rate of entrepreneurship—launching businesses large and small across the country at a high frequency. Dream Across America (DreamxAmerica) is a social enterprise hoping to highlight and grow that entrepreneurial drive by “joining storytelling and impact investing to support immigrant entrepreneurs across America,” in the format of a docuseries. From the team’s home base at the Harvard Innovation Labs, cofounder Andrew Leon Hanna ['19] spoke about DreamxAmerica’s vision ... Currently, the DreamxAmerica team (made up of Harvard Law students, filmmakers, and social entrepreneurs with experience across education, finance, and more) is working closely with its inaugural class of entrepreneurs to launch DreamxNC in 2019.

The biggest tech problem facing the US is that it doesn't have universal access to super-fast fiber-optic internet connections, according to Susan Crawford, a telecommunication expert and professor at Harvard Law School. (Subscription required)

Analysis by Ryan Manucha '19: There exists a little-known dispute resolution venue where the complainant has always won. It doesn’t have a permanent location, nor does it have a standing set of adjudicators. And at this... (Subscription required)

(Transcript) ANA CABRERA (CNN): You have been critical of President Trump. We laid out how unprecedented some of this is. Yet, you say now is not the time for impeachment. What is the threshold for impeachment, in your mind? LAURENCE TRIBE: The threshold has certainly been met in terms of the likely offenses that are emerging from the evidence. But there's no point in impeaching a president when the Senate is really very much in his hip pocket and will not remove him. We really need to investigate thoroughly. So much of what we know, we only know in dribs and drabs. A great deal has been unmasked by Robert Mueller. Much of it will become public, not all of it. Much is being learned in the Southern District of New York. But it's mostly the House of Representatives, the investigations in the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, the Intelligence Committee, that's going to reveal a great deal. Then we'll see. We'll see whether the time has come to pull the impeachment trigger.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One of the fiercest political flashpoints today is whether to take down old memorials that offend current sensibilities. The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering what to do about that very problem. The case involves a World War I memorial in the form of a 40-foot cross, not a statue of a Confederate soldier. There’s a constitutional dimension because of the potential for establishment of religion. But the issues are nevertheless very much similar.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner: I was on the federal bench for 17 years before I retired in 2011 to teach, write and lecture about sentencing. The sentencing of Paul Manafort surprised me. I know how difficult the job of judging is; I am reluctant to second guess another judge’s decision as the public and pundits do. The judge sees the defendant, hears the evidence, evaluates the confidential presentence report. We do not. And since I am a critic of sentencing in U.S. courts for being overly punitive, for disproportionately impacting communities of color, I am loath to challenge any judge for being lenient. Still, I was taken aback Thursday by Manafort’s sentence to 47 months in prison by U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III for cheating on his taxes and for bank fraud.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: A provision of the Affordable Care Act that is strongly supported by Donald Trump’s administration requires calorie labels at U.S. chain restaurants. The basic idea is that if consumers are informed, they will reduce their calorie consumption -- and improve their health. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear that calorie labels are doing much good.