Media Mentions

Amid a global outcry against Brunei’s implementation of Islamic sharia law measures that allow for death by stoning for sex between men and extramarital affairs, the sultanate’s ruler has apparently climbed down from the harshest measures in what some have interpreted as a bid to shield his nation’s besieged overseas commercial interests. ...Dominik Müller, a social anthropologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute, told Asia Times that the sultan’s remarks represented a “clarification” rather than a “U-turn”, as reported widely by international media and made explicit “what many government people have long unofficially said and what most Bruneians have assumed.” ... “That said, it is truly remarkable that the sultan said it explicitly in a royal decree. Content-wise this was not surprising, but that he publicly said it, and unambiguously, definitely was and is clearly linked to international reactions,” said the academic, who is also a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program of Law and Society in the Muslim World.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi predicted this weekend that President Donald Trump may not step down from power if he is defeated in the 2020 election. .. Lichtman's concerns were also echoed by Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. "President Trump has sent troubling signals that he might well contest the results of any presidential election he fails to win — and any House or Senate election his preferred candidate fails to win," Tribe told Salon by email. "Trump has even retweeted his agreement with the absurd and indeed radically anti-constitutional claim by Jerry Falwell Jr. that Trump’s first two years as president were 'stolen' from him by the supposedly illegitimate Mueller probe into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. The 'argument,' though I hesitate to call it that, claims that Trump is 'owed' an extra two years as 'reparations' for the distraction of the investigations into what went awry in 2016."

First it was the former White House counsel. Now it is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. In both cases, President Trump — seemingly petrified of witnesses concerning a report in which he claims to have been exonerated — has tried to suppress testimony from those with the most damning evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice. ...So can he stop Mueller from testifying? “Of course there is no way Trump can stop Bob Mueller from testifying,” constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me. “There is no executive privilege between them, and obviously no attorney-client privilege, and Mueller doesn’t even work for Trump.” Tribe continues, “Until he leaves [the Justice Department], he works for Barr. And Barr has no conceivable basis to stop Mueller from testifying.” In any event, Tribe explains, “Mueller is free to leave [Justice] at any time and will then be simply a private citizen.”

In personal style as in haberdashery, U.S. Attorney-General William Barr is conservative in an old-school way: quiet, dutiful, not given to showy demonstrations of emotion except the occasional flash of anger at Democrats and reporters he considers insolent for their probing questions. He walks with the air of a schoolmaster, which his father was, and with the discipline of that often-cheerless trade. ...“In a strictly pragmatic sense, his calculation might prove sound,” Laurence Tribe, the renowned Harvard legal scholar, said. “But the price he will pay in the court of America’s moral accounting will be immense. Sadly, Barr seems indifferent to history’s all-but-certain verdict that he has compromised his integrity, his oath and his sacred honour for no noble purpose.”

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: "Net neutrality" still gets people mad. Millions have the vague sense that the high prices, frustration over sheer unavailability, awful customer service, and feeling of helplessness associated with internet access in America would be fixed if only net neutrality were the law of the land. As I've written here in the past, that's not exactly true: Without classifying high-speed internet access as a utility and taking meaningful policy steps to ensure publicly overseen, open, reasonably priced, last-mile fiber is in place everywhere, we'll be stuck with the service we’ve got. A rule guaranteeing net neutrality–which would cover only how network providers treat content going over their lines–won’t solve the larger, structural issues of noncompetitive, high-priced access.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: The wires were abuzz last week with news that the presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was returning $30,000 in contributions from lobbyists. He has now joined many other Democratic candidates in swearing off particular kinds of money, whether from corporate Pacs or lobbyists. Since Beto O’Rourke launched his campaign for Senate in 2017, this type of reform-through-abstinence has become a single metric for whether a candidate is a reformer for democracy. If you don’t give up corporate cash, then you can’t be for us. But this is an odd and fake measure of reform. The important question is not how you get elected, but what your fundamental commitment is if you are elected. Money from Pacs and lobbyists is actually among the most moderate, and least polarizing of the money in American politics today. Removing it alone won’t fix democracy. And this obsession with where the money comes from obscures the real questions about what type of reformer a candidate would be.

In the tumultuous few months since students began objecting to Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.’s decision to defend Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein at his rape trial, the college has been reviewing the living climate at Winthrop House, the residential community he leads as faculty dean. But, suffice it to say, the climate is anything but copacetic. ...“It’s a constitutional right that [Weinstein] would have a defense,” Harvard Law professor Janet Halley said. “Some of us would represent Harvey Weinstein. Some of us would never, ever. Telling someone else they can’t do it? Or if they do it they’re not fit to walk the halls of a residential house, that they’re a danger to the community or somehow not respectable anymore? Those are bad things for our leadership to be thinking.”

An article by Jeannie Suk: During Attorney General William Barr’s Senate hearing on Wednesday, he insisted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “work concluded when he sent his report to the Attorney General. At that point, it was my baby.” It sounded as if Mueller had birthed a baby and given up the child to Barr for adoption. (The President had urged abortion, so to speak.) Then, we learned this week, Mueller, as a concerned birth parent, wrote what Barr described as a “snitty” letter with pointed instructions on how better to raise said baby. I happen to be a teacher of constitutional law, criminal law, and family law, but never did I imagine this particular intersection of all three areas.

No wonder President Trump thinks he can defy Congress, tell his aides and former aides to defy Congress, threaten to fire the special counsel and mislead the American people: Attorney General William P. Barr told him (and us) that a president can end any criminal inquiry if he thinks it is unjustified. (Financial fraud? Witness tampering?) The Founders might be surprised to find out that the term of a U.S. president is the equivalent of a “stay out of jail” card, good until he leaves office — but not before pardoning himself, presumably. ... Constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me, “Trump has no legal authority whatsoever to prevent McGahn from complying with Congress’s demand for his testimony, nor can McGahn invoke Trump’s gag order as a defense to a subpoena from Congress.” Tribe explains, “Former White House Counsel Don McGahn was never Trump’s personal attorney, and what he told Mueller about what transpired between him and the President with the latter’s public blessing cannot be shielded by whatever executive privilege might have been available at the time.” Moreover, “McGahn’s statements to Mueller are now part of the public record. Any executive privilege arguably attaching to those statements and their contents has been waived and cannot be unwaived.”

Bill McKibben says it might be curtains for humanity. Cass Sunstein says social movements may surprise you, but they shouldn’t. And a look at one controversial social movement: affirmative action. ... Cass Sunstein, How Change Happens: How many people do you think hold your same opinions? And how well do you think you could predict the next social movement? Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein says not to be so certain. His latest book is called How Change Happens.

Last month, Brunei implemented part of a harsh new criminal code based on Islamic law that stipulates, among other things, a potential sentence of death by stoning for those convicted of gay sex and adultery. The move drew swift condemnation from LGBT rights groups as well as the broader international community, with some prominent celebrities like George Clooney and Ellen DeGeneres calling for a boycott of certain Brunei-owned businesses. But according to [Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World Visiting Fellow] Dominik Müller, an expert on Islam in Southeast Asia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, important aspects of the legal and social reality facing Brunei’s LGBT community get left out of this criticism. In an interview with WPR, he discusses the long history of Sharia in Brunei, how Islamic thought in Brunei has been shaped by foreign influence, and how international criticism is being received in the country.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:The speaker of the House has accused the U.S. attorney general of committing a crime by lying to Congress. That’s a huge deal … isn’t it? In principle, it should be. Such public accusations are supposed to reflect strong evidence of criminal conduct and intent. And an accusation against the nation’s top law enforcement officer should have special weight. For one thing, if the attorney general is credibly accused of a crime, there needs to be someone independent of his authority installed to investigate and charge him, like a special counsel or an independent prosecutor. Yet it’s hard to escape the thought that the accusation Nancy Pelosi made Thursday against William Barr shouldn’t be treated so seriously. The circumstances — and the content of the accusation — raise the strong possibility that Pelosi is making a political move in a political game.

“Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts?” Those questions were posed by a University of Queensland science professor who has found some stomach-churning, high-concept alternatives to meat and dairy products. The professor, Louwrens Hoffman, said the global livestock industry won’t be able to continue meeting the demand for meat. He said people may soon have to swallow some unusual, but equally delicious, dishes. “The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources,” he said. ... Up to 40% of food goes uneaten in the U.S. Americans throw away $165 billion in wasted food every year, according to Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental action group. Some 160 billion pounds of discarded food also clogs up landfills. “Food waste is responsible for over 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, making it a key challenge in tackling climate change,” the United Nations says.

During his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Attorney General Bill Barr distilled his controversial views on executive power and obstruction into their simplest form yet – and left legal experts stunned. ...But beyond the concerns with Barr’s legal rationale, experts said his hypothetical didn’t apply to the facts of what Trump actually did. “I think it undermines the President’s case, not support it, because it is so far from what the President did here,” Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former federal prosecutor, told TPM.

William Barr is facing impeachment calls from Democrats over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation, but experts warn that removing an attorney general is just as difficult as removing the president. In fact, it’s never been done before. ...But Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Newsweek that while Barr’s behavior “might in theory” warrant calls for removal, it “seems exceedingly unlikely.” "Barr’s manifestly misleading and obfuscatory testimony, whether or not impeachable, is certainly disqualifying for any attorney general. He really needs to resign," Tribe added.

An op-ed by Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Fellow Mary L. Gray: If you live in the United States, May 1 is generally a typical workday. But in most of the industrialized world, it is a national holiday commemorating the lives lost in the 1886 Chicago Haymarket massacre, which eventually ushered in the eight-hour workday in the United States and many other countries. Those who enjoy a salary may work more than eight hours if they choose but, thanks to battles fought more than a century ago, they do not have to work more than that to retain their jobs. Yet that hard-won victory to control work hours is slipping away around the world. Temporary staffing services that contract workers for projects are driving significant economic growth. Full-time, salaried positions are the exception in countries such as India, where an estimated 85 percentof the workers are paid in cash. In the United States, where formal employment is still the norm, 1 in 6 people employed full time still contend with irregular work schedules.

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler:  Industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence. On 10 May, letters of intent are due to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new funding programme for projects on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon. In April, after the European Commission released the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, an academic member of the expert group that produced them described their creation as industry-dominated “ethics washing”. In March, Google formed an AI ethics board, which was dissolved a week later amid controversy. In January, Facebook invested US$7.5 million in a centre on ethics and AI at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Companies’ input in shaping the future of AI is essential, but they cannot retain the power they have gained to frame research on how their systems impact society or on how we evaluate the effect morally. Governments and publicly accountable entities must support independent research, and insist that industry shares enough data for it to be kept accountable.

On several occasions, President Donald Trump has used the word “coup” to describe efforts by law enforcement to investigate influence by Russia on the 2016 election. “This was a coup,” Trump said during an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News in April. “This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government.” ...Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor, told PolitiFact that the Russia investigation “is not a coup, because the FBI had very good reasons for commencing an investigation of Trump. It beggars belief that anyone in the FBI had the intention of subverting a duly elected president.”

A former congressman. Law professors. Advocates for campaign finance reform. But no Republicans. The so-called Citizens Commission, created by Question 2 on the November ballot, now has all 15 of its members. The ballot question, which passed with 71% of the vote, established a commission to research and advocate for a constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United. That decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing a candidate as long as they do not coordinate directly with the candidate. ...The commission includes three professors — Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub, of Northampton; Harvard Law School professor Nikolas Bowie, of Cambridge; and Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos, of Wellesley.

There are growing calls for US Attorney General William Barr to resign or be impeached over his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report. It's been revealed that Robert Mueller was dissatisfied with William Barr's four page summary of the report in which he concluded that President Donald Trump did not collude with Russia to win the 2016 election and did not commit obstruction of justice. In the bombshell revelation, Robert Mueller said the Attorney General's summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of his work. ...It comes as William Barr today testified on Capitol Hill about the Mueller investigation. Guest: Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University Producer:Linda Lopresti

The Post reports: Democrats in Congress can move ahead with their lawsuit against President Trump alleging that his private business violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who consulted on the case, told me the ruling is “very gratifying but not surprising. It’s the president’s corrupt financial entanglements with foreign governments that I’ve always believed would bring him down in the end. The Constitution told us to follow the money — and that’s exactly what we’re doing."