Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The trial of a dozen leading Catalan politicians in Madrid on charges of rebellion isn’t something you expect to see in a functioning European democracy. The events of fall 2017 weren’t a rebellion in the ordinary sense of the word. It was nonviolent political grandstanding that the Spanish state easily shut down. The effort shouldn’t have succeeded, but it also shouldn’t be harshly criminalized.

The recent government shutdown damaged the Internal Revenue Service, an agency already struggling with budget cuts and aging computer systems, according to the IRS’s in-house watchdog. ... Keith Fogg, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, said Tuesday that if 1% or 2% of taxpayers shift to owing money at filing time, that can create lots of extra work for the IRS as employees negotiate installment plans and respond to collections notices.

Just as Special Counsel Mueller‘s probe has begun to wind down, a new debate is ramping up: What if the public never gets to see his report? ... “It’s sort of uncharted waters,” says Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School. “If McKeever goes the way the Justice Department argues, it could become a very serious impediment” to the public seeing a detailed report from Mueller.

The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is conducting a hearing on election security tomorrow. It’s part of a series the new Democratic majority in the House is holding related to the H.R. 1 legislation on election security, campaign funding, and government ethics, entitled the “For the People Act.” ... Just Security asked several experts what questions they think would be fruitful for discussion at the hearing. ... Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

The U.S. president has joined Kentucky's governor and the coal state's U.S. senators in trying to pressure the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep a 49-year-old coal-fired power plant operating, even though the nation's largest public electric utility has concluded that the plant is unreliable, no longer needed and too expensive to repair and operate. ... What study the governor was referring to isn't clear, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, who follows FERC proceedings.

When China joined the World Trade Organization, the global fraternity of cross-border commerce, it promised to open itself up to foreigners in lucrative businesses like banking, telecommunications and electronic-payment processing. More than 17 years later, China’s telecommunications industry remains firmly under government control. ... “At this point, a full-scale accord seems unlikely,” said Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor and former United States trade official.

... Another issue is that classical universities often don’t give people the necessary knowledge. In addition, students spend 4-5 years passing the full-time education process, and after university, they should look for additional knowledge that they will be able to apply in practice. Here, such schools as Stanford Law School, Pritzker School of Law, Harvard Law School, and others are adopting innovations in their programmes that may help students find their professional way. ... Harvard University created Harvard Law School Clinics, which help students to get knowledge in interviewing and advising clients, representing clients in court, conducting legal writing and research, drafting policy, investigating and analyzing facts, and developing negotiation skills.

The Supreme Court’s late-night, two-paragraph order that sent a Muslim inmate in Alabama to his execution last week has become the court’s most controversial act of the term, drawing intense criticism from the political right and the left. ... Added Amir H. Ali, Supreme Court and appellate counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the court’s order was in contrast with recent decisions that have protected religious rights. “Consider the opposite circumstance — a Christian person who is told that, during the final moments of his life, he can have only the services of an imam,” Ali wrote in an email.

An article by Randall Kennedy: A series of dismaying events has transpired at Augsburg University, in Minneapolis. According to several undisputed news reports, it began in October, when a student read a sentence in class from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time ... Airing the N-word caused a commotion. The professor leading the class, Philip Adamo, asked the students if they felt it was appropriate to voice the word Baldwin had written.

Virginia’s Democratic governor declared this weekend that he’s “not going anywhere.” Refusing to resign, the 59-year-old promised to pursue racial equality during the final three years of his term. ... More than a dozen scholars sent suggestions for what the governor should be reading. ... To understand that awful chapter, Ayers recommends Northam looks at “Life in Black and White,” which focuses on Northern Virginia, by Brenda Stevenson. He also suggests “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” by Annette Gordon-Reed. ... Gordon-Reed, a Harvard historian who earned the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Hemingses,” suggests a book by Philip Morgan that might appeal to Northam: “Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: By a 5-4 vote Thursday night, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have made abortion all but impossible in the state — at least until the court can hear the merits of the case. The most important fact about this result is that Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote to stop the law from taking effect. That doesn’t tell you how he’ll ultimately vote on whether the law is constitutional. But it does tell you that Roberts cares about a fair process.

A second woman came forward Friday with claims that she had been sexually assaulted by Lt. Gov. Justin E. Fairfax of Virginia, intensifying the weeklong political crisis in the state and leading top fellow Democrats to call for Mr. Fairfax to resign. ... “Everything she said in her statement was exactly what she told me when we talked,” said Diane L. Rosenfeld, a founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, who said Dr. Tyson told her of the alleged assault in December 2017.

“What does Larry want to hear?” Anthony Scaramucci once asked himself. He was explaining to me his final exam strategy that led to an A- in Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe’s Constitutional Law class. “He wants to hear left-leaning judicial activism. So I wrote left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths.” Tribe shared his thoughts on this, below. ... "An exam filled with what Anthony Scaramucci told you was ‘left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths’ wouldn’t have received a grade as high as an A-, and exams that did a good job explicating an originalist position would’ve received very high grades."

An op-ed by Samuel David Garcia '19 and Joseph Gallardo '19: “Could you describe your time in the immigration detention center?” The young woman and her son nervously shuffled at the sound of this question. After taking a second to gather herself, she responded in Spanish, “Well, some guards were nice and others were very mean. I am just glad to have my family out of ‘El Congelador.’” “El Congelador” is Spanish for “the freezer.” Other immigrants had a different name for the Customs and Border Protection holding center they were in — “La Hielera” (the Ice Box). Many assume it is an ironic play on words, since ICE stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but those who have been in the center know “La Hielera” is no joke. In a lawsuit filed against CBP, a woman claims to have been so cold that her lips chapped and split, and her sister’s extremities began to turn blue.

... Much as “Hamilton” gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obama-era musical, “What the Constitution Means to Me” captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. ... The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama’s legal mentor at Harvard Law School, heard about the show from his eleven-year-old granddaughter and went with his family in December. “I thought, This is something that needs a huge audience,” he told me.

A Ninth Circuit judge suggested Friday that the Trump administration’s Education Department used a flawed formula to make defrauded students pay back at least some loan debt to the federal government. ... On Friday, a lawyer representing a nationwide class of more than 100,000 student borrowers argued the department’s new “Average Earnings” rule used an unfair formula to rescind the government’s previous offer of full debt relief. Attorney Joshua Rovenger, of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, said the department only used earnings data from 2014, when some students were still in school, and compared it to average earnings of graduates from other colleges, including those who now work minimum-wage jobs with their degrees and certificates.

An op-ed by Adam Holland, project manager at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: In April 2018, the scandal over how Cambridge Analytica gained access to personal data of 50 million Facebook users led to CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. A September 2018 security breach involved the personal information of at least 30 million users. ... A promising way forward comes from Professors Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Jack M. Balkin of Yale Law School, whose work was incorporated into draft federal legislation.

During the 18 months of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation, a cadre of legal experts have helped the public decipher the tight-lipped former FBI chief’s ongoing probe. We’ll be checking in with these “Muellerologists” periodically at Washingtonian. ... Alex Whiting, professor at Harvard Law School and former federal prosecutor with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office in Boston. "The Stone indictment indicates that the Mueller investigation has developed evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and foreign sources of influence, including the Russians. The indictment alleges that after the first release of hacked DNC emails by Wikileaks—when it was already publicly known that the Russians had done the hacking—members of the Trump campaign asked Stone to obtain information about future releases from Julian Assange. These actions could amount to criminal violations of campaign finance laws, which prohibit the solicitation of a thing of value (the DNC emails qualify) from a foreign source."

Despite the years that have since passed, many of Elizabeth Warren’s former students at Harvard Law School share the same distinct memory: it was their very first day at the prestigious institution, and for many, their very first class. ...Years later, when clips of Warren grilling corporate CEOs and cabinet officials from the US Senate went viral, her former students would fire off emails and texts to one another joking about what it was like to be at the receiving end. “We could all empathize with the witness in the hot seat,” said Andrew Crespo, a former student of Warren’s who is an associate professor at Harvard. ... Her research in bankruptcy law – and the impact on the average person’s medical bills, mortgage payments and other installments – led Warren to become a leading expert on the subject and rise in the academia world. “These are the issues she still cares about,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped recruit Warren to its faculty. “I think she is extraordinary for this reason, that she got into politics because she cared about some issues. ... “When we brought her to Harvard, no one had a clue that she thought of herself as Native American,” said Laurence Tribe, the school’s professor of constitutional law.“I think she’s had an unfair rap,” he added. “I don’t think it’s the case that she ever exploited her family’s background or ancestry in a way that some people seem to think she did.”

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was slammed in The Washington Poston Thursday for abruptly threatening to not attend his scheduled testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin described Whitaker’s actions as a “stunt.” “The real issue here is Whitaker’s fear of appearing and being forced to answer questions under threat of congressional contempt, which could occur if he is under subpoena,” Rubin explained. She interviewed constitutional expert Laurence Tribe, who has taught at Harvard Law for 50 years and has argued three-dozen cases before the United States Supreme Court. “This is outrageous,” Tribe said. “Whitaker seems to think he is entitled to dictate the terms on which he is invited to testify. He is not.”

A hundred years later, the Bauhaus is everywhere. Much of today’s “mod” furniture — from teak and tubular tables to simple yet graceful sofas to chairs and lamps that blend form and function — has its origins in the Bauhaus, the 20th century German modern art/crafts and design school turned major cultural movement. ...Gropius also founded The Architects Collaborative, an architectural based firm in Cambridge that designed the Harvard Graduate Center in 1950, the first modern building on Harvard’s campus. The structure at  was renamed the Caspersen Center, a cluster of simple, flat-roofed, sleek dormitories of steel and concrete arranged around a small courtyard. Gropius wanted the building to mimic the “quadrangle structure so central to the Harvard tradition, but in a very modernist language,” said Muir. Gropius also wanted the building to incorporate contemporary art and pushed for a budget that would cover the cost of such art there.