Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Free speech on campus is crucially important in a free society, and in some ways under significant threat. But President Donald Trump’s proposal over the weekend to impose free speech on universities isn’t the answer. Rather, any effort from the White House to control campus speech would become part of the problem. Public universities are already bound by the First Amendment. And private ones have their own free speech and free association rights, which presidential intervention would potentially violate. It’s essential to understand that freedom of speech on a university campus isn’t the same as speech in a pure public forum, like on a street corner.

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message. ...As Murdoch’s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox’s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox’s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump’s election, the network’s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.”

Michael Cohen raised a litany of allegations against his former boss, Donald Trump, in explosive testimony before Congress this week, implicating the president and his inner circle in potential criminal wrongdoing on multiple accounts. ...Donald Jr and Weisselberg are also of interest for their role in hush money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 by Cohen to prevent her from speaking out ahead of the 2016 election about her alleged affair with Trump a decade prior. “Don Jr and Allan Weisselberg are both in deep trouble,” said Lawrence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “Cohen’s testimony opened the door to a plethora of questions.”

China’s largest political event of the year, a meeting of legislative delegates and political advisers known as the “two sessions”, gets under way this week and comes at a time when Chinese leader Xi Jinping faces one of the most challenging periods since coming to power. ...There are signs the NPC has gained importance under Xi. Before 2014, the NPC only very occasionally approved significant legislation, according to Changhao Wei, a law student at Harvard University who runs the NPC Observer blog. Most major laws would be made by the more powerful NPC standing committee, which approves laws year round. If the foreign investment law is ratified at this session, this year would be the fifth year the NPC has approved a major piece of legislation.

Beijing is set to announce its economic growth target and endorse new rules around foreign investment in the next two weeks during its major annual parliamentary meeting: the National People's Congress. The gathering of nearly 3,000 representatives from different strata of Chinese society is typically ceremonial in nature. The real power in the country lies in the Communist Party and its Politburo Standing Committee, headed right now by President Xi Jinping. But announcements made during the congress can shed some light on government policy. ... Against that backdrop, work on the proposed new foreign investment law has moved quickly. Less than three months ago, the NPC Standing Committee began soliciting comments on its first draft. NPC Observer, a blog founded by Harvard Law student Changhao Wei ['20], pointed out in a post that the draft is "significantly" shorter than one from the Ministry of Commerce in 2015 and has removed most of the details. The blog noted a second version of the latest draft was released in late January and is similar to the December version.

The nomination of Neomi Rao to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit exposed oft-ignored fissures within the right-wing legal establishment, aggravating social conservatives who feel their priorities have been unfairly eclipsed. ... Professor Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School agreed that social conservatives are becoming less interested in legal method and more interested in pure results. He cited growing skepticism of free market ideology and a feeling of betrayal on issues like abortion as driving the religious right’s reorientation. “I think the real reason social conservatives are becoming more oriented to results is simply mistrust of the corporate, libertarian wing of conservatism,” Vermeule told TheDCNF. “And that mistrust emphatically extends to judicial nominees.”

The crowd that gathered in a Fifth Avenue apartment to hear Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe was as deep blue as the ocean.  John Heilemann, who was filming the event for his Showtime program, “The Circus,” asked the audience to raise their hands if they had voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly everyone raised their hand. “Now raise your hand if you voted for Donald Trump.” One hand went up. ...  Tribe disappointed the faithful at the event, organized by Patricia Duff for the Common Good, when he predicted that President Trump would not be indicted. The lawyer, who has argued 35 cases before the US Supreme Court, also said, “The public is obsessed with impeachment.” He compared the Never Trumpers to children on a long car ride who keep asking, “Are we there yet?”

When Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and convicted felon testified before a House committee, his Republican questioners had one main line of attack: He was a confessed liar who could never be believed. Near the end of Cohen’s testimony, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., compared him to another confessed liar who later appeared before Congress — Special Representative to Venezuela Elliott Abrams. ... Right now, the main difference vis-à-vis false congressional testimony, is that Abrams has been pardoned and Cohen has not. That gives more support for challenging Cohen’s testimony, said Harvard law professor Alex Whiting. But Whiting cautioned that such distinctions are subjective.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Ordinarily it’s bad for democracy when a sitting head of government is notified that he will face corruption charges. But the pending indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the height of an Israeli election season is actually a good thing for the rule of law. ... What’s good about the charges is that they demonstrate that Israel’s governing institutions are robust enough to enforce the criminal laws of the country, even in the face of tremendous political pressure from the country’s longest-serving leader.

For the past two months, people have gathered on a street in Vancouver’s pricey Dunbar neighbourhood, snapping photographs of a $4m mansion with its blinds drawn.  Onlookers are not interested in the exterior of the house — but they are concerned about the fate of its resident, Huawei’s finance chief Meng Wanzhou, who is currently under house arrest awaiting an extradition hearing on US fraud charges. ... Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, said: “In theory the president could direct his attorney-general to drop the investigation.” But he added: “Normally the White House doesn’t interfere so openly at this stage and doing so might undermine the credibility of future extradition requests.”

An op-ed by Sam Garcia ’19: Before 2017, immigrants in Texas were a large but silent group of people who, for the most part, lived in harmony with the community. Although immigrants had every right to access the police if they felt they needed to, it is common knowledge that a slight distrust of the authorities and the specter of being deported kept them from contacting the police in some situations. This distrust grew rapidly in April 2017, when the Texas Legislature voted to pass Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), which ended sanctuary cities in Texas and called for more cooperation with federal authorities. Much like Florida Senate Bill 168, which passed the Judiciary Committee last week, Texas SB 4 was proposed on the idea that it would make it people safer — it did not, though, and it hurt vulnerable victims of domestic abuse the most. Similarly, if SB 168 makes it through the Florida Legislature, Floridians may face the same outcome that Texas has.

It’s been more than a year since the Trump administration declared that coal and nuclear retirements were threatening the electric grid -- and regulators still aren’t rushing to the rescue. ... “The political winds that created this docket -- I don’t know if they’re still blowing or not," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If you’re looking for the most important sentence in Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, here it is: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

Readers discuss whether an article about the Minnesota senator’s reputation as a tough boss was fair or sexist, and whether it should sway voters. A letter from Charles Fried: A saying in the court of Louis XIV had it that “no man is a hero to his valet.” Your lengthy front-page article about Senator Amy Klobuchar suggests that no politician is a saint to her staff. In high-stress jobs every human being is prone to fits of temper and less than perfect fairness to those who work with her in close settings day in and day out.

An op-ed by David Jonathan Benger '20: A swastika was found on my childhood playground in Brighton Beach yesterday. It was drawn onto the very same jungle gym on which I used to play with my sister while my parents and grandparents watched over us to ensure our safety. A culprit is yet to be identified, but this is not an isolated incident. Attacks on Jewish bodies have been escalating in frequency and ferocity in New York and elsewhere over the last few years.

People facing criminal charges in Berkshire County district courts no longer will be required to post bail while awaiting trial — provided that they are not deemed flight risks. Following through on a promise she made on the campaign trail, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington has directed prosecutors to stop requesting that such defendants be held in lieu of bail. The policy officially was announced Friday. ... "I think it's certainly on the forefront of what the DA's offices are doing across the country," Colin Doyle, staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program, said of Harrington's policy. "Whether someone is in jail pretrial or released shouldn't depend on the money they have in their bank account." Through the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Doyle compiles research on bail statutes nationwide. On Monday, the group will release a nearly 100-page "bail guide" for state and local policymakers.

Joshua Matz and Larry Tribe, authors of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” recently wrote: Over time, a focus on impeachment can flatten and distort our politics. Many of [President] Trump’s worst policies can’t properly be squeezed into an impeachment framework. The same might be said about many of Trump’s scariest foreign-policy judgments and public statements. The Muslim ban, family separation, erratic negotiations with North Korea, and inaction on climate change—these are abhorrent policies, but they are not impeachable offenses. When the only worthwhile end game is Trump’s removal from office, justifiable outrage over these issues too quickly recedes into the background, even as we are treated to an endless diet of speculative headlines about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s secret files. And if impeachment were to unfold, with the Senate almost certainly unable to reach a two-thirds majority for removal, what would all of this have accomplished?

Despite American Jews’ generally low observance of Jewish religious traditions, paucity of Jewish knowledge, and relative non-belief in God, many feel remarkably committed. That is the central paradox of contemporary American Jewish life. And Harvard Law School professor Bob Mnookin confesses he is a prime exemplar of the paradox. ... Over the course of a career devoted to conflict resolution, Mnookin has written many well-regarded books and articles on disputes arising from divorce, commercial dealings, and international clashes, including the Israeli-Arab confrontation. Yet “The Jewish American Paradox,” Mnookin confesses, was the most difficult book for him to write. It required him to master a vast literature far afield from his expertise.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: If you are interested in the resolution calling for a “Green New Deal” that Democrats have introduced in the House, you might want to pay attention to one remarkable phrase in particular. It appears in the resolution no less than three times: “as much as is technologically feasible.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A federal district court in Houston has held that because women are now permitted to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military, all women must be obligated to register for the draft, just as men do. This might sound like a straightforward win for feminism, especially from the perspective of the old-fashioned legal-equality feminism championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both as an advocate and as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Yet the court’s decision raises the more complicated question of whether women should simply be offered access to traditionally male roles in the military, like combat positions, or whether they should be forced to assume those jobs.

Major technology companies, software developers, legal scholars and others have filed a flood of amicus briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Google's appeal in the company's yearslong copyright battle with Oracle over use of copyrighted code in Android smartphones. ... The eight law professors are represented by Christopher T. Bavitz of Harvard Law School.