Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the most important political essay of the 20th century, “Politics as a Vocation,” by the German sociologist and legal theorist Max Weber. The essay includes a topical lesson for Americans as candidates announce their plans to take on President Donald Trump in the 2020 election: Politics isn’t the realm of pure, absolute moral conscience, where everything can be described as right or wrong, black or white.

In 1996, the year Congress passed its landmark health privacy law, there was no Apple Watch, no Fitbit, no Facebook support groups or patients tweeting about their medical care. Health data was between you, your doctor, and the health care system. More than two decades later, that law — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — is still the key piece of legislation protecting our medical privacy, despite being woefully inadequate for dealing with the health-related data we constantly generate outside of the health care system. Now, there could be an opportunity for a revamp. ... Worse, HIPAA is a “four-letter word that medical people often use when they don’t want to do anything,” according to [I. Glenn] Cohen, a professor of law at Harvard University. Doctors have used it to avoid giving patients their own medical records, which, he says, “is like working with someone to write an autobiography and then being told you can’t take that biography out of the library.”

The federal government may be open again, but policy watchers say Friday's temporary deal to end the shutdown won't resolve uncertainty over whether the Trump administration can craft rules rolling back Obama-era energy and climate change regulations and successfully defend them in court before the 2020 presidential election. ... Joseph Goffman, who worked with the Obama-era EPA and is another 2013 shutdown veteran, said it's a coin flip whether the latest shutdown was long enough to push back finalization of major rules such as the CPP repeal and its replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, so that the inevitable legal challenges stretch past the 2020 elections.

Hamilton: The Exhibition takes visitors deeper into the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, while at the same time chronicling the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America. ... Hamilton: The Exhibition is a collaboration between Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, creative director and set designer David Korins, producer Jeffrey Seller, orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, and Yale University historian Joanne Freeman. Harvard Law Professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed is also providing historical consultation.

Susan Crawford, Harvard Law professor and former Special Asst. for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy during the Obama administration, discusses her new book, "FIBER: The Coming Tech Revolution—And Why America Might Miss It." Bill Barker, Portfolio Manager of the Motley Fool Small Mid-Cap Growth Fund, on why it’s a good time for both growth and value investors in mid-caps.

An op-ed by Vail Kohnert-Yount ’20, Jared Odessky ’20, and Sejal Singh ’20: In 2018, a record-breaking 609 major employers received perfect scores from the nation’s largest and most visible LGBTQ rights organization for their inclusion of LGBTQ workers. The Human Rights Campaign lauded corporations like Walmart, CVS, Chevron, Verizon, and Amazon for internal policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These changes might be worth applauding—if those companies didn’t also force workers to sign away their right to sue if they experience the very discrimination and harassment that nondiscrimination policies seek to stamp out.

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental and safety rules for the energy sector, government projections show billions of dollars in savings reaped by companies will come at a steep cost: more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, a jump in climate-warming emissions and more severe derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels. ... Joe Goffman, a former EPA official who helped create the clean power plan and now at Harvard Law School, said the omission of international impacts “doesn’t track with reality” given that climate change is a worldwide problem.

Harvard history professor Annette Gordon-Reed previews a lecture she’s giving in Houston on the impact of Confederate symbols on display in the public square. ... In the audio above, Gordon-Reed tells Houston Matters producer Maggie Martinabout the messages—both explicit and hidden—that Confederate icons convey to the public.

Obama studied law at Harvard, Bill Clinton at Yale (alongside Hillary). Nixon learned his way around the law at Duke, while FDR did the same at Columbia. A legal education has long served as a springboard to a political career. But past presidents are one thing—how common is it in 2019? ... Inevitably, some schools are more popular among legislators than others. Topping the table by some way are Harvard and Georgetown, schools whose elected alumni are spread across an array of states.

An article by Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith: President Trump is making noises again about withdrawing the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, which established NATO. Last week the House of Representatives voted 357-22 in support of the NATO Support Act. The bill does three things. First, it states the “sense of Congress” that the president “shall not withdraw the United States from NATO,” and that “the case Goldwater v. Carter is not controlling legal precedent.” Second, it states that “the policy of the United States” is to remain in NATO, to reject efforts to withdraw from NATO, and to work with and support NATO. Third, and most importantly, it prohibits funds “to be appropriated, obligated, or expended to take any action to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty.”

This week we witnessed a jaw-dropping affront to the rule of law and a violation of the president’s oath of office. The New York Times reported: “Michael D. Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump, indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony set for next month, his lawyer said on Wednesday, depriving House Democrats of one of their first big spectacles in their plans to aggressively investigate the Trump administration.” ...So why has this not caused a greater hullabaloo? Constitutional scholar and litigator Larry Tribe said, “It’s emblematic of a larger problem: Shouldn’t ‘high crimes’ (in the Impeachment sense) committed in plain view get at least as much attention as similar abuses committed in the dark and breathlessly unveiled in the form of ‘breaking news’?” He continued, “Many criminal law experts who should know better focus solely and obsessively on the precise language of U.S.C. §1512 (b) [the statute covering witness intimidation]. . . [and] the difficulties of proving the ‘intent’ element of that criminal prohibition beyond a reasonable doubt.” But of course special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in all likelihood will not indict a sitting president, so the real attention should be on whether such action is impeachable. The challenge, Tribe said, is how we “can protect ourselves from the seductively inoculating and anesthetizing effect of drip-by-drip disclosures — like those of Trump’s outrageous witness intimidation vis-a-vis his former fixer Michael Cohen — that generate more yawns than howls and seem unlikely to build up the bipartisan public outrage necessary for the impeachment power to be deployed successfully.”

For two years now we’ve heard, “No collusion!” and “Witch hunt!” Such disparagement of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s work was never viable (e.g. we knew about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 for well over a year); now it’s simply wrong. Perhaps the new phrase, albeit not original, should be: What did President Trump know, and when did he know it? ...If Trump was directing campaign aides to intercede with Stone, and by extension, WikiLeaks, that “would plainly constitute another piece — a big one — in the mosaic of evidence showing that Trump was committing campaign-related crimes in coordination with Russia to rig the presidential election in his favor by knowingly weaponizing stolen information against his opponent,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. “That mosaic could certainly establish a high crime warranting Impeachment. But I still believe that an intense and public fact-finding process by the House, starting now, needs to precede any formal decision on impeachment, without which the essential public consensus favoring Trump’s removal won’t emerge.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The indictment of Roger Stone, who was arrested Friday by the FBI and charged with lying to Congress, provides the first detailed evidence that Stone was a go-between for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. In 2016, WikiLeaks had and released a large numbers of emails that had been stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Stone’s coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks is substantive, from what the court filings show. Stone, a Republican political operative and confidant of Trump, got advance notice of WikiLeaks document releases that he passed on to the Trump campaign. That included information about an “October surprise,” which turned out to be the leaking of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

Daniel Tarullo, a Harvard Law School visiting professor and former Federal Reserve governor, discusses the outlook for Fed monetary policy with Bloomberg's David Westin on "Bloomberg Markets: Balance of Power."

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this episode celebrates King’s life and work, his vision for America, and his fight to pass landmark civil rights laws and realize the promises of the Constitution. Civil rights and constitutional law experts Michael Klarman of Harvard Law and Theodore M. Shaw of UNC Law join host Lana Ulrich to explore King’s constitutional legacy, shed light on the relationship between litigation and activism, and contemplate whether the Civil Rights Movement would have happened without King. PARTICIPANTS: Michael Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School specializing in constitutional law and constitutional history.

Michael Cohen is going to testify before Congress whether he wants to or not. A day after President Trump’s former attorney and “fixer” postponed plans to testify before Congress voluntarily on February 7th, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena that will effectively force Cohen to testify next month. ...As Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe points out on Twitter, it’s hard to argue that Trump’s threats toward Cohen are not in violation of federal law.@tribelaw Trump seems to have violated U.S.C. §1512 (b): “Whoever knowingly uses intimidation . . . with intent to (1) influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The U.S. and about a dozen other countries recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela on Wednesday, even as President Nicolás Maduro maintained his grip on the office. But is that even a thing? Under ordinary principles of constitutional and international law, can one country simply declare that someone who manifestly isn’t the president of the country actually is, and act accordingly? Well, no. Not really. Maduro is a terrible president who has not only broken the Venezuelan economy but also repeatedly broken the Venezuelan constitution himself. His re-election in 2018 by a reported 67.8 percent wasn’t free or fair. It’s defensible as a matter of foreign policy for the U.S. to seek his ouster. But the constitutional argument that Maduro isn’t really president is nothing more than a fig leaf for regime change. Even as fig leaves go, it’s particularly wispy and minimal. The U.S. policy is, in practice, to seek regime change in Venezuela. It would be better to say so directly.  

A tiny fraction of Twitter users spread the vast majority of fake news in 2016, with conservatives and older people sharing misinformation more, a new study finds. Scientists examined more than 16,000 U.S. Twitter accounts and found that 16 of them — less than one-tenth of 1 percent — tweeted out nearly 80 percent of the misinformation masquerading as news, according to a study Thursday in the journal Science. ...Their conclusions are similar to a study earlier this month that looked at the spread of false information on Facebook. It also found that few people shared fakery, but those who did were more likely to be over 65 and conservatives. That makes this study more believable because two groups of researchers using different social media platforms, measuring political affiliation differently and with different panels of users came to the same conclusion, said Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard Law School's center on the internet and society. He wasn't part of either study but praised them, saying they should reduce misguided postelection panic about how "out-of-control technological processes had rendered us as a society incapable of telling truth from fiction."

Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data....Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration and conducted the analysis, said the inflation-adjusted figures represent the lowest since the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established. The decline in civil penalties could undermine EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment. Giles, now a guest fellow at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, questioned whether the new approach can achieve what administration officials promise.

Although more than a dozen Democrats may be running for president in 2020 — including its governor — Washington still has some unfinished legal business from the 2016 election, which the state Supreme Court tackled Tuesday. Three members of the Washington Electoral College in that last election asked the court to void the $1,000 fine the state charged them for breaking their pledge and voting for someone other than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who won the most votes in the state. ..."The question was not whether they were right (to switch). The question is whether they had the right," attorney Lawrence Lessig argued in the hearing. "An elector is a chooser," he said, not a mere robot or clerk.

So far, there are two known grand juries, one in DC and one in Virginia, tasked with hearing testimony and reviewing evidence into Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign collaborated with Moscow. Dozens of anonymous jurors have been behind all 22 indictmentsMueller's team has handed down — and will be central to the investigation's work moving forward. ... Former federal prosecutor and Harvard law professor Alex Whiting told the Washington Post that witnesses not having a defense attorney as a buffer decreases the likelihood of them lying to the jury, but also makes it easier for them to be indicted. "It's very hard to lie when you don't know anything about what the prosecutor knows or what the charges are," he said.