Media Mentions

The human body generates antibodies when it senses invasion from a harmful source. So, too, in our body politic, when a malign force such as an authoritarian executive attacks the foundation of a democracy, a healthy democracy will respond. That process of fighting a dangerous executive — President Trump — began on Friday when he declared an national emergency to justify spending that Congress had declined to authorize (a funding bill the president had signed, by the way). ...Many of these suits, as well as any brought by landowners whose property is taken to build the wall, are likely to make it past the first skirmishes on “standing.” Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “The House has standing to challenge the circumvention of its appropriations power under the district court’s holding in House v. Burwell [challenging Obamacare].” He adds, “Others with standing are those concretely injured by either the impending withdrawal of funds (as with states like California), the threatened uses of eminent domain (as with ranchers on the border) or the defamatory lies about their safety as communities (as with El Paso).”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: A full evaluation of the legality of President Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency, and to order the building of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, is best deferred until the appearance of a supporting memorandum from the Justice Department. But even now, four points are clear – and they are at risk of getting lost in the national discussion. 1. It is wrong to say that if Trump can declare a national emergency, he can necessarily order the Defense secretary to build a wall.

Many critics claim that anti-trust enforcement has dangerously weakened since the 1980s, often citing the dominance of the tech giants as evidence of this. They argue that any benefit gained from Google’s free services or Amazon’s low prices is outweighed by their chokehold on suppliers, their possession of mountains of personal data, and more. Others have noted rising concentration outside of tech: two-thirds of U.S. industries became more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. ...Horizontal shareholding therefore hurts competition because, as Einer Elhauge of Harvard Law School has argued, it reduces “each individual firm’s incentives to cut prices or expand output by increasing the costs [to shareholders, and thus managers] of taking away sales from rivals.” These issues are easy to imagine with direct investors (such as activist hedge funds) who typically have more concentrated holdings and thus greater ability to influence practices within a company or industry.

A CNN legal analyst rebuked President Donald Trump's response to recent remarks from Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, calling prominent public officials critiqued by Trump "patriotic." ... Other legal scholars criticized Trump's tweets. Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, also called McCabe a patriot. "By Donald Trump’s ignorant and constitutionally illiterate definition of 'treason,' it’s he and not Rosenstein or McCabe who’s committing it almost daily. They are patriots. He’s the one betraying our country," Tribe tweeted.

Long controversial, the practice by which public corporations use spare cash to buy back their own stock has turned into a policy flash point for both Democrats and Republicans. The basic allegation is that profits devoted to stock buybacks — $583 billion by S&P 500 companies during the first three quarters of 2018 — are profits not plowed back into new plants, equipment or higher wages. This is especially galling now, the critics argue, given that last year U.S. corporations got a huge tax cut, whose Republican authors advertised it as a boon to productivity and investment. ... Undoubtedly, stock buybacks favor corporate executives lucky enough to cash out, but to the extent this increases inequality, it mainly favors the very rich (CEOs) over the somewhat rich (shareholders). Opponents of buybacks commonly cite figures showing that they swallowed up 96 percent of S&P 500 profits between 2007 and 2016; research by Harvard professors Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang, however, suggests that the actual figure is more like 41.5 percent after accounting for new stock issuance and expenses for research and development. Contrary to the concerns about diverting investment funds, U.S. nonresidential investment and job creation have been rising for most of the past decade. When shareholders get cash for their stocks, the money doesn’t disappear; it flows through the economy, often as productive investment elsewhere.

After weeks of sparring with Congress, President Donald Trump invoked a national emergency Friday in an attempt to secure money for a barrier along the United States’ border with Mexico. The declaration came a day after the passage of a bipartisan spending bill that caps funding for the wall, a key Trump campaign promise, at just under $1.4 billion.... But declarations like Obama’s have not been wielded as a means to skirt Congress over funding disputes. “This is an unusual situation … because here a president asked for something and Congress said no, essentially, and now he’s going to declare an emergency to do what he couldn’t get Congress to do,” said Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet. “That is new.”

A farming conference will address the implications of the rise in plant-based food for the environment, land use and Britain's farmers. The Grow Green conference, held at the British Library in London on 11 April, will explore how a plant-strong future can help meet climate change targets and what policies might support a transition towards it. It will see the launch of research findings from the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School, modelling alternative agriculture production in the UK. The research will show the impact of a shift to plant-strong farming on national food sovereignty, protected forest and heathland areas, and carbon sequestration.

Democratic lawmakers, states and others mulling legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to obtain funds to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall face an uphill and probably losing battle in a showdown likely to be decided by the conservative-majority Supreme Court, legal experts said. ...Trump is running for re-election next year and a loss would mean his presidency ends in January 2021. It is possible the legal fight over the emergency declaration might not be resolved by then. “My guess is the money, the significant amount of money, won’t flow before the 2020 election,” Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet said.

Despite all the Victorian-era townhouses and quaint colonial streets, Boston owes more than you might think to the Bauhaus. ...The Busch-Reisinger Museum exhibit is not the only exhibit to catch in this Bauhaus 100th birthday year. In the University Research Gallery at Harvard, Hans Arp’s “Constellations II” is on view for the first time in 15 years. Commissioned by Gropius for a dining room in the Harvard Graduate Center, it consists of 13 biomorphic shapes inspired, in part, by the grouping of stars in the night sky. Other Harvard exhibits include “The Bauhaus at Home and Abroad: Selections from the Papers of Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, and Andor Weininger” on view in the Amy Lowell Room at Houghton Library through May 24 and “Creating Community: Harvard Law School and the Bauhaus,” on display in the Caspersen Room at Harvard Law's Langdell Hall through July 31.

Harvard Law School Professor, Laurence Tribe, joins MSNBC's Katy Tur to discuss the legal process surrounding declaring a national emergency and what could happen next.

1/ The essential problem with the widespread notion that Trump is declaring an emergency when there is no emergency is this: — Jack Goldsmith (@jacklgoldsmith)…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In retrospect, it seems obvious that President Donald Trump would want to have his cake and eat it, too. That’s essentially what he’s doing Friday by both signing a government funding bill that provides $1.375 billion for a barrier with Mexico and also declaring a national emergency to allocate other federal funds for the same purpose.

An article by Shailin Thomas '21 and Arthur Caplan, PhD: The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was first passed in 1983 to address the concern that pharmaceutical manufacturers were not pursuing drug development for diseases that affect limited patient populations. The concern was in part that companies viewed pursuing these therapies as undesirable because the markets for them are small in comparison with the markets for more widespread chronic diseases. To promote the development of orphan drug therapies, the ODA provided companies that engaged in research for drugs with populations of fewer than 200 000 patients with tax incentives, research subsidies, and extended patent protection.

U.S. News & World Report plans to launch a new law school ranking—one that will sort schools according to the “scholarly impact” of their faculties. The new ranking, announced Wednesday, will be separate from the closely watched “Best Law Schools” ranking, at least initially. ... Every three years, they update their citations data to show the most cited faculties and individual scholars. (The 2018 update showed Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago to have the greatest scholarly impact.)

Legal challenges to President Trump’s planned national-emergency declaration to build a border wall are likely to come fast and furious — but legal experts caution the law is “murky” on the extent of his powers. ... Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman said the Constitution is intentionally “murky” on what constitutes a national emergency and what powers the president has during one. “A lot of these laws are not super clear and that gives a lot of space to the president,” Feldman said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The U.S. government should not regulate social media. It should stay far away from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the rest. Any regulatory effort might well violate the First Amendment. Even if it turned out to be constitutional, it would squelch creativity and innovation in the very places where they are most needed.  Until recently, I would have endorsed every sentence in the above paragraph. But as Baron Bramwell, the English judge, once put it, “The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.”

Last year, while promoting his debut thriller, “The Woman in the Window,” Dan Mallory praised the tradition of literary mimicry: “It is often said that ‘good writers borrow, great writers steal,’” he said in an interview with The Guardian, borrowing a phrase from T. S. Eliot. In retrospect, his choice of words was both surprisingly honest, and perhaps a clue to the depth of his deception. ... “The courts hold out the possibility that it could be infringement without a language overlap,” said Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert at Harvard Law School. “If you did the exact same things in the exact same sequence all the way through, the court wouldn’t have that much trouble finding infringement.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump is reportedly close to issuing an executive order that would ban Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies Co. from building 5G wireless networks in the U.S. The significance of such an order goes beyond its obvious implications for American telecommunications companies.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Maddie McMahon '20: “I don’t think there’ll be a report,” President Trump’s former attorney, John Dowd, recently told ABC News. “I will be shocked if anything regarding the president is made public, other than ‘We’re done.’” Referring to a possible report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Dowd suggested Mueller won’t release a detailed public accounting of the results of the investigation because he has nothing on Trump. Another reason there might not be a public report—or, at least, not much of one—is because William Barr, who will likely be attorney general by the end of the week, might not release one.

The world of fiber optics is expanding the reach and power of the internet — and has the potential to revolutionize our homes and businesses. Fiber optics carry virtually unlimited amounts of data and will radically transform health care, education, stores and the way our cities and town are run. But, Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford argues it's a tech revolution that America is at risk of missing.

Community members will gather Tuesday in Richmond to remember Lillie A. Estes. The longtime civic leader engaged countless local residents and was recognized nationally for her work. WCVE’s Catherine Komp spoke to friends and collaborators about her impact. ... David Harris: There are people and individuals in every community in this country who are doing work on the ground to rebuild their communities in the face of kind of devastation wrought by a system of racism and Injustice. Estes worked closely with David Harris and Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute as she built a framework for Community Justice in Richmond. Harris: She understood and was determined to do things differently. From my perspective and in terms of what we think of as Community Justice, that's what we need.