Media Mentions

Conventional wisdom suggested that the report from Robert S. Mueller III on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and President Trump’s efforts to to interfere with Mueller’s investigation would be underwhelming. Didn’t we know most of what was going on? The question, by the way, properly credits the press with getting the key facts right. And yet the overwhelming reaction—even from a few brave Republicans—is one of stunned amazement at the extent of President Trump’s duplicity. ... Laurence Tribe makes a compelling case that even if removal is virtually impossible, “it seems to me an abdication of constitutional responsibility for the House of Representatives to do anything less than impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate, whatever the predicted result.” Tribe advises, “Make every member of the House and Senate stand up and be counted. Who among them take their fidelity to the nation and its Constitution and laws seriously enough to risk losing their perks as senators or representatives? Who among them should be retired by the voters as sellouts?”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Does the ban on workplace discrimination based on “sex,” as laid out in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity? U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up both questions in its October 2019 term, which means we will have legal answers to these questions sometime before June 2020. It’s potentially a big moment for LGBT rights. It’s also a watershed moment for a question the Supreme Court has been struggling with in recent years: What is the right way to interpret statutes passed by Congress?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Why did Robert Mueller pull his punches? In his report, made public Thursday by the Department of Justice, Mueller laid out significant evidence to support the conclusion that President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice. Yet the special counsel stated that no matter what evidence he found, he wouldn’t directly say that Trump had committed a crime.

... Americans throw out more than 400 pounds of food per person annually, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). But it’s not just about the neglected noshes. ... Of course you don’t mean to toss all that food, but truth is, the majority of food waste happens in homes (not restaurants). Here’s step one: Figure out how much you’re wasting. “For one to two weeks, put all the food you’d typically discard into a bin in your fridge or on your counter. Then take stock of what you’ve collected to start making better decisions,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

A prominent political activist speaking in San Rafael on Thursday made a case that there is only one issue of any consequence facing the nation: campaign finance reform. On a day when the national media could talk of nothing but the release of Robert Mueller’s redacted report on the 2016 election and whether Donald Trump conspired with Russia, Lawrence Lessig, speaking to a sold-out house at Dominican University of California, never mentioned the controversy.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Despite Attorney General William Barr’s assurances and President Donald Trump’s boasts, the Mueller report doesn’t come close to exonerating the president of wrongdoing. Instead, it invites Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. It’s time for Congress to heed that invitation. In its extensive discussion of the constitutional issues implicated by special counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month investigation, the report asserts that Congress has the authority to apply law “to all persons – including the President.” Specifically, Congress may “protect its own legislative functions against corrupt efforts designed to impede legitimate fact-gathering and lawmaking efforts.” The authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of power, the report finds, is essential to “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

... When the news broke that he’d been picked, Kennedy had just come from hours sitting in a classroom at Harvard Law. He was already at work on a speech he was writing on his big idea: moral capitalism. A few months earlier, in late 2017, Kennedy had emailed Sharon Block, the director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program and a former Ted Kennedy aide, asking for help in developing his concept, which he was viewing as a kind of working political philosophy. ... In telling me about how it went, Block kept bringing up Ted Kennedy. She tends more toward policy discussions than daydreams, but there’s just something about the family, she insisted, and something that’s made its way down to Joe. “I don’t feel like I have to denigrate other people to say he’s unusual or impressive. This has been a more intense interaction, intellectual exercise,” she said, “than I am used to having with members directly.”

Legal experts Larry Tribe and Robert Bennett debate whether impeachment proceedings should be brought against Trump after the release of the Mueller report.

Andrew Leon Hanna ['19], 27, and David Delaney Mayer, also 27, became fast friends at Duke, based, at least in part, on their shared status as descendants of immigrants they have known. After years of searching, the pair settled on starting a social enterprise called DreamxAmerica to write an empowering narrative of immigrants, creating a film production company that would tell the story of immigrant entrepreneurs and invest in their businesses. Hanna, a Harvard Law student, is a first-generation Egyptian-American. Mayer’s grandfather was a refugee from Germany following World War II; his great grandfather was killed in Auschwitz.

In the coming days and weeks, reporters and legal analysts will comprehensively analyze Robert S. Muller III’s report laying out in excruciating detail Russia’s attempt to interfere with our election, President Trump’s team’s willingness to benefit from such interference and even obtain Hillary Clinton’s purloined emails, and Trump’s systematic, continual efforts to thwart the investigation.  ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Volume II provides a perfect roadmap for impeaching this president for obstruction of justice if the House opts to pursue that path.” He continues, “Although Attorney General Barr did his darnedest to get in the way, and may have succeeded in creating a narrative that will protect the president, he had no way to erase or scrub that roadmap into oblivion.” Tribe points out that “it’s not just that the Mueller Report on p. 8 of the second volume says the Special Counsel’s Office is ‘unable to reach [the] judgment’ that ‘the President clearly did not commit [the crime of] obstruction of justice’ but that the Report elaborates numerous shocking instances of what any objective observer would have to describe as such obstruction.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, as redacted by the Department of Justice, is now released. Here are some early reactions from legal and intelligence experts. For additional background, see our “Hot Topics” archive on the Russia investigation. ... Alex Whiting (@alexgwhiting), Professor at Harvard Law School and member of the board of editors of Just Security. He served as a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, also hones in on obstruction, including several ways in which Mueller’s report is more damaging to the President than Barr’s summary implied: Four things jump out from an initial read of the obstruction section of the Mueller report. First, Mueller declined to make a call on whether the President committed criminal acts of obstruction solely because of the Justice Department’s current policy that a sitting President cannot be indicted, not because he concluded that such charges could not be supported legally or factually. In fact, he says that they would have stated if they found that he “clearly did not commit obstruction of justice.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In coming to terms with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, we should adopt a principle of neutrality and put entirely to one side our enthusiasm, or our lack of enthusiasm, for President Donald Trump. It is also essential to emphasize that the report, running to two volumes and some 448 pages, will take some time to absorb. Even so, the most puzzling thing about it is unquestionably a single sentence, repeated several times: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, neither does it exonerate him.” That is a singularly opaque sentence. What on earth does it mean? That’s a genuine mystery.

Nearly a month after special counsel Robert Mueller handed in his report to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on the 22-month investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the public finally got its first look at the document Thursday. ...To start to make sense of it all, hours after the report was released, the Gazette spoke with former prosecutor Alex Whiting, a professor of practice at Harvard Law School who teaches issues and procedures related to domestic and international criminal prosecutions. He serves on the board of editors and writes regularly for Just Security, a popular U.S. national security law and policy website. From 2010 to 2013, Whiting supervised prosecutions in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The redacted version of the Mueller Report is out, and we've spent all day reading through the 448 pages. We discuss the report and what we've absorbed of it thus far, and try to make sense of what it all means.Guests: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner; Donald Stern, former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts from 1993 to 2001, and managing director of corporate monitoring and consulting services at Affiliated Monitors.; David Gergen, adviser to four U.S. Presidents — Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton — and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He tweets @David_Gergen. and Joe Battenfeld, Political columnist at the Boston Herald and host of "Battenfeld" on Boston Herald Radio. He tweets @joebattenfeld.

For 21 minutes on Thursday morning, with the nation watching, President Trump had the loyal attorney general he had always longed for. ... Mr. Barr’s untrammeled view of executive power goes back to the Bush administration, when he counseled Mr. Bush that he had the right to start a major war in the Persian Gulf without the authorization of Congress. Mr. Bush, more cautious than his deputy attorney general at the time, asked Congress for a vote to support the war. “Bill Barr is arguably going back to his worst instincts,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School and an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. “He is bending over backward to serve as an advocate for the president and the presidency.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In the latest setback to the Guantanamo military commissions, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday threw out some three years of pretrial rulings by the military judge presiding over the case of the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. The decision was based on an inexcusable procedural problem: The military judge was pursuing a job in the executive branch while sitting on a case involving charges brought by the executive branch. The appeals court opinion featured a stinging attack on “all elements of the military commission system” for failing “to live up to” the “shared responsibility” of ensuring criminal justice. The ruling highlights an important evolution in the challenges facing the military commissions, which were set up to bring to justice the U.S. detainees at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The 2019 proxy season is well underway, and it will be a memorable one for many reasons. Initially, the government shutdown stalled the staff’s review process by closing the Division of Corporation Finance for most of January, thereby putting some issuers at risk of acting on proxy matters without definitive guidance. Issuers must also deal with a new staff legal bulletin that adds complexity, requiring board input on two common exclusionary bases. ... Roundtable participants from both the issuer and investment communities agreed that the proxy system faces several structural problems. As Professor John Coates of Harvard Law School said at the roundtable, “there’s room for improvement; no one, I think, has ever said publicly that they would create the system that we have today if they were doing it from scratch.”

The Mueller will be released Thursday morning. We lay out what's at stake politically and legally. McKay Coppins, staff writer for The Atlantic. Author of "The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House." (@mckaycoppins) Nancy Gertner, retired Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. (@ngertner) Mark Updegrove, author, presidential historian for ABC News. President and CEO of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. Director of the LBJ Presidential Library from 2009 to 2017.

When Jamaican children catch a cold, mothers rub cannabis oil on their chests. Rastafarians smoke cannabis as a religious custom. Some believe that it grew on King Solomon’s tomb. Encouraged by the tropical climate, cannabis grows in many household gardens. ... But it dare not appear too friendly. Jamaican banks that do business with cannabis companies risk having their accounts at American banks shut down. If that happened on a large scale, Jamaica could be cut off from access to American dollars, which would devastate the economy. Jamaica received $2.3bn in remittances in 2017, more than its income from exports of goods. Jamaican officials also risk losing their access to American visas if the country is found to be flouting the United States’ drug laws, says Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School.

Would you eat a six-month-old yoghurt? This is a question you may have asked if you read the recent story about a US grocer and his year-long experiment eating expired food. ...Clearly, this lack of clarity has implications for both the health of the environment and the health of the nation. What you don’t eat, you’ll end up binning, even if you could have safely eaten it; and what you don’t know not to eat could make you sick. A joint report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School in 2013 said that 40% of American food goes uneaten each year, and the disorienting effect of the US date labelling system is in large part to blame. At the same time, said the report, that system fails to convey important food safety information, “despite the appearance of doing so”.