Media Mentions

...We're also going to go deep on the main question facing the Mueller probe. Is it true that a sitting President cannot be indicted? Fair statement? I would argue the answer is yes, you can. But a way better mind than mine says I have it wrong. Professor Larry Tribe has an op-ed racing around the internet and he's here to make the case. ... TRIBE: I think he doesn't know what he's talking about and he's desperate. He's obviously flailing around because he feels the walls closing in. The fact is that the constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States shall be removed from office if he is impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors, including treason and bribery.

Trump might think that he has immunity from prosecution, but Laurence Tribe explains there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents the indictment of a sitting president.

The world is ever more connected via the internet, from cars and power grids to home appliances and toys. That means ever more things are dangerously hackable, security expert Bruce Schneier writes in “Click Here to Kill Everybody.” The title is hyperbolic, but not by much. In some ways, the attack of the killer fridges has already begun. Catastrophe doesn’t have to happen on purpose. Nation states can attack each other’s electricity infrastructure, and cyber criminals seize hospital computers and threaten patients’ lives until ransom is paid. But Schneier, who is chief technology officer at IBM Resilient and a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, also worries about fumbles and surprises. Small-time hackers lose control of their malware and infect bigger systems. Threats emerge not from individually compromised devices but from the unforeseen ways they interact.

To facetiously paraphrase a line that I often hear from global warming deniers: Don't be offended, I'm just asking questions. It’s conventional wisdom that the right to free speech does not permit you to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater – but does that mean you have the right to claim there is no fire when a theater is ablaze? ... “Tempting though the idea is, I would not favor modifying Western legal systems to permit the imposition of financial liability on any individual or organization that is found to have ‘spread incorrect information about man-made climate change,’” Laurence Tribe, an author and constitutional law professor at Harvard, told Salon by email. “The key to my reason for resisting such a modification is in the word ‘found.’ If I ask myself: Whom would I trust to make an authoritative ‘finding’ about which information about a topic as complex as man-made climate change is ‘incorrect,’ I must answer: Nobody. Certainly not any public official or governmental agency or any government-designated private group. I trust the process of open uncensored dialogue among experts and lay persons to generate truthful understandings over time, especially if we enact and enforce requirements of transparency and disclosure about who is funding which assertions. But I would be deeply concerned about anything resembling the identification and empowerment of a Commissar of Truth.”

On Wednesday, Dec. 12, as President Donald Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, he implicated the president in crimes he allegedly committed during the 2016 presidential campaign. Though Trump vehemently denied any involvement and hasn't been officially accused of or charged with any crimes, it brings up the long-standing debate of what legal ramifications might be in store for the commander-in-chief as the FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia heats up. So, can a president be indicted while in office? The short answer: There is no short answer. ...Beyond the technical procedures, constitutionally, some argue that the framers never intended for the president to be exempt from punishment. Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe wrote in a Dec. 10 Boston Globe op-ed that not having the power to indict a sitting president would be unconstitutional.

Literally meaning “economic man,” the origins of the term Homo economicusare somewhat obscure—early references can be traced to the Oxford economist C. S. Devas in 1883—but his characteristics have become all too familiar. .... These insights led to the founding of a new field, behavioral economics, which became a household name 10 years ago, after Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published the best-selling book Nudge and showed how this new understanding of human behavior could have major policy consequences. Last year, Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and promised to spend the $1.1 million in prize money “as irrationally as possible.”

President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for tax fraud and campaign finance violations for helping to orchestrate hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal. It was also announced Wednesday that prosecutors will not charge AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, for the paper's role in silencing McDougal, because the company agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. ...Jim Braude was joined by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, who made such an argument this week in a Boston Globe op-ed, and who is also the author of "To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment."

There’s more proof that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health. That’s the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science, for which researchers reviewed hundreds of scientific papers on climate change published since 2009. ..."[The paper] is a very useful piece of work and it stands in contrast to the arguments against the endangerment finding that have been offered again and again, because those arguments are rarely — if ever — based on science," says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. Goffman worked for the EPA during the Obama administration as the senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, but was not involved in the current research.

Four generations of women, some accompanied by their husbands and children, gathered at Four Points by Sheraton on Dec. 8 for the annual Women Affirming Life Mass and Breakfast. The theme for this year's Mass was "Mary in Advent: Model for All Women Affirming Life." The celebrant was Father David Pignato, director of human formation at St. John's Seminary. ... Frances Hogan introduced the keynote speaker, Professor Mary Ann Glendon. Both Hogan and Glendon are founding members of Women Affirming Life. ...The topic of Glendon's keynote was "The Pro-Life Movement: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." She spoke of Women Affirming Life's inception in 1989 as a response to a "relentless" campaign to portray the pro-life movement as anti-women. "A key part of that idea was to show the true face of the pro-life movement," Glendon said, noting that it "has always been predominantly composed of women."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s three-tweet sequence on Michael CohenThursday morning was different from the usual presidential stream of consciousness. Compact and carefully reasoned, the tweets sound an awful lot like they were written with a lawyer standing at the writer’s shoulder. Taken together, the tweets signal that Trump and his team are genuinely concerned about the possibility of his being indicted after leaving office — totally separate from any danger of impeachment. That’s significant.

The [Massachusetts] Supreme Judicial Court has announced the appointment of eight new members to the Access to Justice Commission. They are: H. Esme Caramello of Harvard Law School; Northeastern Housing Court First Justice Fairlie A. Dalton; Sandra M. Gant of the Committee for Public Counsel Services; Richard Johnston of the Attorney General’s Office; Jennifer G. Miller, counsel to the state Senate; Susan K. Nagl of South Coastal Counties Legal Services; Anthony Owens, clerk-magistrate of the Dorchester Division of the Boston Municipal Court; and Nutter partner Mary K. Ryan.

Consumers are increasingly entrusting online services with all kinds of personal data — but that trust has been repeatedly abused or taken for granted. If a doctor or a lawyer did that, they’d be kicked to the curb, because they have a legally defined duty to protect privileged data. Why don’t Facebook and Google? They might soon, via the Data Care Act. This bill, proposed today by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and co-sponsored by 14 more Democrats in the Senate, would essentially establish a set of consumer protection duties, defined and enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, preventing tech companies from knowingly doing harm to their users. ...The idea has been brought up before, notably by Yale’s Jack Bardin and Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, whom Sen. Schatz has previously cited.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: With Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime lawyer and “fixer,” sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison, it’s worth asking: What will be the verdict of history on his crimes? Specifically, the felony campaign-finance violations connected to the payoffs to two women who said they had sexual affairs with the future president? Cohen said the payoffs were directed by then-candidate Trump — and the prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York agreed. The answer depends on which of two competing paradigms for presidential wrongdoing the Cohen payoffs ultimately fall into.

After witnessing near-biblical calamities, Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. The Cuyahoga river in Ohio caught fire in 1969, the same year 26m fish died in Florida’s Lake Thonotosassa, the largest recorded fish kill, because of pollution from food-processing plants. “Dirty Water”, a song from that era about the repellent Charles river, remains an anthem of Boston sports teams to this day. Since the early 1970s the White House has interpreted the statute in different ways. President Donald Trump’s team, who released a draft rule on December 11th, apparently want to take water law back to the 1980s. ...Organizations like the Farm Bureau, another lobby group, whipped up fears of government asserting authority over ditches and ponds. In truth both the regulation and the original law already contain generous carve-outs for farmers, says Caitlin McCoy, a fellow at Harvard Law School.

While the bankruptcy fight over failed for-profit educator ITT Educational Services continues, the biggest group involved in the legal battle has scored a big victory. In late November, a federal bankruptcy judge in Indianapolis gave final approval to a $600 million settlement that will affect about 750,000 former students of ITT Technical Institute. ... The group of students filed their claims against ITT in bankruptcy court in January 2017. They were represented by the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School and the law firm of Jenner & Block LLP. ...“This settlement has done more for the cheated students of predatory for-profit colleges than [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos has done in her entire administration,” Project on Predatory Student Lending Director Toby Merrill said in a written statement. “At a time when students are being ignored by their government, ITT students stood up to this predatory college themselves and secured the relief they are owed. Now it’s time for Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education to do the right thing and cancel the billions of dollars in remaining fraudulent federal loans.”

An op-ed by James Greiner: It shouldn’t be painfully hard to obtain a divorce that the law says you’re entitled to. And it shouldn’t be that hard only if you’re poor. Ending a marriage requires a lawsuit. To obtain a divorce, one spouse has to sue the other in court. If you’re rich, this isn’t a problem. You just hire a lawyer. But as the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, divorce is just as fundamental to nonwealthy folks as it is to the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies of the world. And if you’re low-income, you probably won’t be able to hire a lawyer because they cost so much. Being trapped in an unwanted marriage can be pretty awful. We define ourselves, and society defines us, by reference to our spouses. Marriage and divorce affect income, property, children, medical care, just about every aspect of life. You can’t marry someone new until you get out of a marriage you’re in.

President Donald Trump’s executive actions aimed at slowing the pace of new regulation and eliminating existing ones (the first part was easier) continued in 2018. ...In effect, this amounted to “an impressive form of self-abnegation” of power, as noted by former Obama OIRA Director Cass Sunstein, since Trump’s own agencies can no longer rely on post-DOJ-memo guidance in court. While some left-of-center observers were dismissive, claiming that it “merely restated well-understood and otherwise uncontroversial black letter law,” the concern has been a longstanding one on an official basis in the eyes of the ACUS, going back decades before its 2017 report. A beneficial effect of the DOJ move is that it could induce other agencies to lean toward notice-and-comment rulemaking instead of exploiting the guidance loophole. Former OIRA Director Sunstein maintained that guidance can be “exceedingly helpful,” but deemed the Associate AG announcement a “welcome move” against guidance inadvertently behaving as a “regulatory cudgel.”

Vanguard’s John Bogle didn’t know it at the time, but when he created the first index fund in 1975 he unleashed a monster. Stock index funds have grown so popular that they now command $4.6 trillion in assets. That might seem like a good thing. After all, index funds have “democratized” investing and simplified the process for the average person. But the truth is that index funds have gotten so big that they now pose a major risk to our economy — and even to capitalism itself. Here are three reasons why. ... Harvard Law School professor John Coates likes to say that index funds create “social benefits” in the form of lower expenses. That’s true, but it is only captures a piece of the picture.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that within the next few months, it becomes clear that President Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses. Does the House of Representatives have discretion to decide whether to impeach him? Or does the Constitution require it to do so? The simplest answer, and the best, is that the Constitution requires the House to do so.

...Kadden, a teacher at Gann Academy, a Jewish high school in the city, is here to explain the work of Alex Green, a fellow at Harvard Law School and local historian, who has for years made it his mission to solve a 60-year-old question: Who is buried in Metfern Cemetery? It's the final resting place of hundreds of people who, like O'Connell, lived in one of two now-defunct institutions in Waltham for people with mental and physical disabilities. Most are buried beneath cinder block-like stones half-sunken into the earth.  Green has collected their names and information in a spreadsheet that gets more and more personal. "It includes who their parents were, what country they came from, if they ever worked jobs, what jobs they had, if they were immigrants, whether they were veterans or not," Green lists off. "It basically tells the story of someone's life in a single row."

An op-ed by Samuel David Garcia ’19 and Victoria Ochoa: Every single morning before the sun rises, Jorge Gonzalez is already hard at work in Mission, Texas, a border town. Gonzalez is a day laborer who focuses on home maintenance. He is also an undocumented immigrant. On the earnest savings that he and his wife have been able to put together, they have been able to afford a modest house in the Rio Grande Valley and assist both of their daughters financially when they went to college. Gonzalez is just one of an estimated 8 million undocumented immigrants who wake up each day and contribute to moving America forward by being a part of our labor force.