Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The key revelation of Michael Cohen’s new guilty plea is this: Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller is one step closer to showing links between Donald Trump’s business interests in Russia and his conduct as a candidate for president...But the main takeaway is that Cohen and others in the Trump organization were actively doing a Russia deal that linked Trump’s emerging presidential candidacy with his business interest in a Moscow Trump Tower. And Trump knew about it, to a degree yet to be revealed.

Jerome B. Karabel ’72, a sociologist at University of California, Berkeley, discussed the history of Harvard’s admissions policies and suggested potential reforms at a Law School lecture Thursday....“In the Asian-American community in the Law School we’re having a conversation about what affirmative action means to us and how we balance understanding that there is a historical need for affirmative action with discrimination that is actively against Asians,” Elizabeth Gyori, a third-year Law student, said. “[We want] to have that conversation in a meaningful way and build solidarity across groups.” The Progressive Jewish Alliance at Harvard Law School organized the event, which was co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Harvard Hillel, the Jewish Law Students Association, the Harvard South Asian Law Students Association, and La Alianza, an organization of Latinx and Latin American law students. “The issue of affirmative action in college admissions is a matter of interest to our community on a variety of levels,” Ian D. Eppler, co-founder and events chair of the Progressive Jewish Alliance at HLS, said. “We wanted to bring a historical perspective to the dialogue.”

A Harvard Law School student group focused on ending harassment and discrimination in the legal profession praised the D.C. Circuit Court for its recent adoption of workplace conduct policies in a statement Thursday. The student group, the Pipeline Parity Project, has been advocating for policy changes that address workplace misconduct in the court system since its founding in April...Organization member and second-year Law student Sejal Singh praised the new policies as a “powerful step forward” in a written statement...Second-year Law student and Pipeline Parity Project member Emma R. Janger said in an interview Thursday that the group set out at its founding to organize in response to Kozinski’s alleged sexual harassment of clerks.

Two experts discuss a new trend in international criminal justice: the setting-up of evidence-gathering bodies by the United Nations when other, immediate, accountability options are lacking. Are they a replacement for a larger failure, or a sign of a resilient international system that adapts to hostile geopolitics?...“In a way they could be seen as a reflection of a larger failure because they are second-best options for these situations,” says Harvard law professor Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “They are stop-gaps because there hasn’t been a referral or a tribunal set up, or any other kind of accountability. So these are a replacement for that failure. On the other hand, I think you could look at it as a sign of growth and development of the international justice project.

Harvard professors decried the Trump administration's asylum policies to a packed room at the Law School Thursday, condemning in particular the administration's treatment of caravans of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States — the latest flashpoint in the country's immigration debate. In the hour-long panel, “The Migrant Caravan and the Law and Politics of the Border,” Anthropology Professor Ieva Jusionyte and Law School Clinical Professor Sabrineh Ardalan spoke about the legal, social, and political issues surrounding migrant caravans. Three Law School student organizations — Harvard Immigration Project, Mexican Law Students Association, and La Alianza — hosted the event...Harvard Law student and La Alianza member Perla F. “Fabi” Alvelais, who attended the event, reiterated the speakers' statements. She said the national discourse surrounding immigrants from Central America is “upsetting” and “completely wrong.”

It’s said that there are no winners in a trade war. But as US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Buenos Aires this weekend, the consensus is that China will sit down in a weaker economic position...Washington has less to worry about than China’s policymakers, who are facing the tough choice between greater fiscal stimulus and economic reform priorities such as deleveraging, said Mark Wu, an expert on international trade and international economic law with Harvard University. “Because of the strong recent economic expansion, US economic policymakers have fewer short term systemic issues about which to worry,” he said. “And President Trump’s voters have been willing to tolerate the negative cost of a trade war given their support for his other domestic policies.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. After a tragedy, it is common for people to send “thoughts and prayers.” Skeptics argue that it’s much better to do something more tangible – to send money, to volunteer, or to press for reforms that will reduce future tragedies. In the context of gun control, the idea of thoughts and prayers has become a parody of ineffectual and even pathetic responses to horrific events. Some people decry thoughts and prayers as doing nothing – except to make bystanders feel better about themselves.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s just one conceivable reason for Paul Manafort’s lawyers to be meeting with President Donald Trump’s during Manafort’s plea negotiations: Manafort was looking for a pardon, and Trump’s lawyers were dangling the possibility, whether expressly or implicitly. Of all the troubling aspects of Trump’s behavior during this investigation, the hint of pardon abuse is the worst.

...My concerns are shared by many academic observers. In a draft paper released in September, Prof. John C. Coates of Harvard Law School wrote that indexing is reshaping corporate governance, and warned that we are tipping toward a point where the voting power will be “controlled by a small number of individuals” who can exercise “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.” Professor Coates does not like what he sees, and offers tentative policy options—some necessary, often painful to contemplate. His conclusion—“The issue is not likely to go away”—is unarguable.

Another Big Law firm is backing away from mandatory arbitration agreements for employees amid renewed pushback on the provisions from a Harvard Law School student group. Sidley Austin said Wednesday that it will no longer require summer associates, associates or staff to sign mandatory arbitration agreements that prohibit them from suing over workplace issues such as harassment and discrimination...“We’re really pleased that firms like Sidley Austin recognize that dropping forced arbitration is the right thing to do for all of their employees,” said Pipeline Parity Project organizer Vail Kohnert-Yount in a statement announcing the change. “Hopefully, the lawyers at these firms will also rethink compelling these types of coercive contracts on behalf of their clients, because it’s obvious that forced arbitration impedes access to justice.”

Five years ago, Caroline Kennedy met with President Barack Obama, offering her services to his administration. Expecting to receive a legal or educational post, instead she was offered the ambassadorship to Japan, where she wound up serving until 2017. Kennedy was the first woman given the ambassadorship, and while in the position she orchestrated Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima, a key moment in U.S.-Japanese relations since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb there during World War II. The daughter of President John F. Kennedy focused on both those discussion points during her Tsai Lecture at Harvard on Tuesday, “Reflections on My Time as Ambassador.” In his introduction, her son, Harvard Law School student Jack Schlossberg, said, “She always tried to understand the Japanese perspective; she was relentless in her pursuit. She embodies an America that was humble and compassionate.”

Two major law firms have changed how they handle cases of sexual harassment and other disputes after students at Harvard Law urged attorneys to boycott the firms in a social media campaign...“We are not going to go work for firms that are going to deny us the right to go to court if we are sexually harassed,” said Sejal Singh, who is in her second year at Harvard Law.

...“These cooperation agreements are written in such a way that you’re much worse off if you do this,”Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor said, arguing that Manafort would have been better off had he had just pleaded guilty without agreeing to cooperate. “You’ve committed additional crimes that could enhance your penalty,” Whiting, who is now a Harvard Law professor, told TPM.

...Legal experts called Manafort’s arrangement “extremely unusual”—and potentially unethical depending on what was discussed between Manafort’s lawyer and Trump’s team. Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC and Boston who focused on organized crime and corruption cases, told me that if Manafort approved of his lawyers sharing information with Trump, then he never fully aligned his interests with the government—and was therefore never fully serious about cooperating. “I think it's likely that … it was all a game to buy time, to obstruct the investigation, and perhaps even to find out more about the investigation,” Whiting said.

The debate over corporations imposing arbitration on shareholders through corporate charters and bylaws is still mostly in the realm of theory and academic furor. The Securities and Exchange Commission, as you know, is contemplating the issue, though SEC Chair Jay Clayton has said he’s in no rush to decide whether the commission will end its longtime policy of squelching proposed mandatory arbitration provisions for companies going public...In the new paper, the securities law professors – including, among other luminaries, John Coffee of Columbia, Lucian Bebchuk and John Coates of Harvard, Ann Lipton of Tulane, James Cox of Duke and Donald Langevoort of Georgetown - contend that federal securities claims are outside the scope of corporate charters and bylaws governed by Delaware law. Corporations can’t impose mandatory arbitration of federal securities claims through charters and bylaws, according to the profs’ argument, because compacts between corporations and shareholders are limited to state law governance issues, not disputes under federal securities law.

As creditors of ITT Educational Services fight over the remaining assets of the defunct for-profit college operator, one group has secured a significant victory in the bankruptcy proceedings: former students...In the meantime, ITT’s estate has notified students who are eligible for the debt cancellation, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, a legal aid group that worked with the law firm Jenner & Block to represent the students. “This settlement does more for the cheated students of predatory for-profit colleges than [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos has done in her entire administration,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending. “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.”

Disclosures over the past few days in the Russia investigation suggest that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has improved his case concerning obstruction of justice and collusion, both of which President Trump continues to deny...The arrangement between Manafort, his lawyers and Trump’s lawyers is unprecedented. “I have no doubt that serving as a mole or double agent inside the office charged with investigating the president, and feeding to the president and to witnesses like Corsi or Stone key information about the investigator’s plans — and about what others are telling the grand jury — after gaining the special counsel’s confidence by ‘flipping’ in order to get a better plea deal meets even the narrowest statutory definition of criminal obstruction of justice and could also constitute still more witness tampering on the part of practiced witness tamperer Paul Manafort,” says constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s too soon to know whether a Chinese researcher who claims to have successfully edited the genomes of newly born twins is telling the truth. But if he is, and if the girls turn out to be healthy and normal, it heralds a significant change in the scientific and ethical status of human gene editing. The outrage might not last long. The consensus in the scientific community now is that human gene editing is medically dangerous and ethically wrong. Both of those beliefs are susceptible to changing, almost as fast as science is capable of progressing.

...Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor, has pushed for the Education Department to revise Obama-era guidelines on how colleges are to respond to sexual harassment and assault. In 2017, she and other Harvard law professors urged the department to rescind a letter that contained the guidelines. "Students would be forced to be interviewed or show up to hearings with no notice of what the charges against them were,” said Halley, who welcomes the proposed changes that give greater protections to the accused. "The fact that the Trump administration is proposing fairness is one of the great paradoxes of our time,” Halley said. “But fairness is fairness."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Democratic House of Representatives isn’t the only branch of the U.S. government headed for a clash with President Donald Trump. The Supreme Court is, too. The most recent evidence is the fight between Trump and Chief Justice John Roberts over whether it’s appropriate to categorize jurists as “Obama judges,” “Bush judges” and “Trump judges.” But the crisis has been building for two years, and the time has come for Roberts to act.

The Catholic Church in the United States has received staggering blows of late. The sinful and criminal behavior of a former leading prelate, the statewide investigations into clergy sex abuse across the country, the Vatican’s confused and vapid response – all have left many of the faithful in despair. Some American Catholics are even questioning their fidelity to Mother Church. It may seem curious, therefore, that comes now a new book recounting the conversion stories of sixteen leading intellectuals. Of course, there are no coincidences in the often-charming world of God. In Mind, Heart, & Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome, Robert George and R.J. Snell offer a refreshing and inspirational reminder from some of today’s greatest minds of the many splendored reasons to be Catholic...Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule matter-of-factly remarks that “the depths of the Church are not disturbed by the storms that pass to and fro on the surface.” Rather, he says , “the Church seems to me an institution whose foundations are as strong as iron. The turmoil will pass away; episodes, scandals and debates will come and go; but the line and witness of Peter’s successors will never fail.”