Media Mentions

President Donald Trump's attorneys have reportedly warned an accounting firm not to consent to a subpoena directing it to turn over the president's financial information to the House Oversight Committee. ..."It appears that Donald Trump made a practice of wildly exaggerating his wealth and the supposed business acumen that enabled him to amass it," Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, told Salon last month. He added, "Although there are no legal and especially criminal consequences to that kind of exaggeration on reality television or in talking to journalists at places like Forbes in order to cheat one’s way onto various lists of the wealthiest people around, there are very serious criminal consequences indeed when such lies, in the form of fraudulent financial statements, are used either to extract loans from banks or to obtain insurance on favorable terms from various insurance companies."

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg officially launched his 2020 presidential campaign on Sunday and immediately drew comparisons to a young Barack Obama. “The announcement of Pete Buttigieg was the most inspiring I’ve seen since Barack Obama’s,” wrote Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and judicial adviser to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. “His is a campaign not just for an office but for an era.”

Last week, a Greek woman with a history of multiple in-vitro fertilization failures gave birth to a healthy baby with DNA from three biological parents. It was the first successful birth in a clinical trial of a controversial fertility treatment known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, which combines genetic material from the intended mother and father plus a female donor. In the U.S., the procedure is effectively banned because of a congressional amendment passed in 2015 that’s been renewed every year since. But now, a group of scientists, patient advocates, and bioethicists want to see the prohibition lifted. The technique, they say, could help certain women who are carriers of serious genetic diseases have healthy, biologically related children. In the first of a series of meetings meant to draft policy recommendations to Congress, stakeholders will meet Wednesday at Harvard Law School to discuss how to move forward in the U.S. I. Glenn Cohen, one of the organizers of the event and faculty director of the school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, said a public discussion is needed in the wake of revelations late last year that a scientist in China used the gene editing tool CRISPR to modify twin girls as embryos.

An article by Sejal Singh ’20: ...As of 2017, more than 60 million American workers have signed forced-arbitration agreements in their employment contracts, and 81 of the largest 100 US companies have forced-arbitration clauses in contracts with their customers for financial products, cell phones, and more. The game was always rigged against working people—now, they might not get to play at all. That’s why we launched the Pipeline Parity Project, a grassroots campaign of law students fighting to end forced arbitration, stop workplace discrimination, and unrig the legal system. ...When we started Pipeline Parity Project last spring, we were just a small group of Harvard Law School students furious about a rigged justice system. Just one year later, organized students have secured unprecedented disclosure of forced arbitration in the legal profession and forced some of the country’s largest firms to drop arbitration agreements. Now, we’re building a national network of law students who are trying to rewrite the rules that protect the powerful at the expense of the little guy.

When U.S. prosecutors unsealed a March 2018 indictment accusing Julian Assange of conspiring to illegally access a Department of Defense computer system, they sparked more than just an examination of the case and the accused. ...Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler has written about the legal implications of prosecuting WikiLeaks. He told The Guardian he believes the indictment contained “dangerous elements that pose a significant risk to national security reporting. Sections of the indictment are vastly overbroad and could have a significant chilling effect.”

It is a question that thousands of lawyers have faced for decades: can you be a mother and still make partner? Last year, just over half of entrants to law school in the US were women; in Britain, it was two-thirds. Yet in 2018 women made up just 19 per cent of equity partners in British law firms, according to PwC, the consultancy, while a McKinsey study from 2017 showed the same figure. The generally accepted issue is the choice many women face between partnership — on call 24/7 and under pressure to generate business — or starting a family. At the same time, says David Wilkins, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, there are limited equity partnership positions as many firms look to cut costs. These factors combine to have “a disproportionate impact on women because they still bear the majority burden of childcare and childraising, and the sole burden of childbearing,” he says.

Brian talks to Cass Sunstein, the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Sunstein served in the Obama administration as the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012. In his conversation with Brian, he discusses his new book, “How Change Happens,” which answers the question of how social change happens and how change is impacted by social norms.

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Harvard Law School professor Carol Steiker, co-author of Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, to explore recent death penalty cases before the Supreme Court and why the Eighth Amendment has raised tensions among the justices.

Leigh syndrome is a terrible disease. In the worst cases, it emerges shortly after birth and claims one major organ after another. Movement becomes difficult, and then impossible. A tracheotomy and feeding tube are often necessary by toddlerhood, and as the disease progresses, lungs frequently have to be suctioned manually. Most children with the condition die by the age of 5 or 6. ...On Wednesday, the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School will host a round-table discussion, during which the scientists, ethicists and families at the center of this issue will make the first significant attempt to reconcile the federal ban with the federally commissioned report.

A normal president confronted with a news story suggesting he ordered underlings to illegally transport asylum seekers to so-called sanctuary cities in order to retaliate against political enemies would deny knowledge of such a heinous plot. If need be, he’d make light of it, portray it as if it were idle chatter or a joke. That’s what President Trump’s devoted prevaricators (White Houses staffers) did following The Post account. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “If carried out, this offer to pardon high immigration officials if they will break the law on his behalf is the most obviously impeachable action President Trump has taken to date: It would mean this president has seized the power to put not just himself but all who do his bidding beyond the reach of law." He continues, "That doing so is a high crime and misdemeanor is beyond dispute. Any president guilty of such conduct cannot be permitted to remain in office.”

Good Sunday morning, and welcome to a special edition of the DealBook Briefing, where we’ll take a deep dive into Pinterest’s upcoming public offering. It’s the second of many decacorns — $10 billion-plus start-ups — to go public this year. And it could be an indicator of what’s to come during the rest of 2019. ... But the practice is increasingly controversial among governance experts. And Kobi Kastiel and Lucian Bebchuk from Harvard Law School have warned that the dual-class structure may “significantly decrease the economic value of Pinterest’s low-voting shares.”

Nearly a decade after Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shared classified materials with WikiLeaks, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London for his role in the disclosures. The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with three faculty members, including Yochai Benkler, the Harvard Law professor who has publicly defended the disclosure as whistleblowing.

“Reaching out to others is how you find out who you really are,” said Daniel Nagin, vice dean of experiential and clinical education and faculty director of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School (HLS). He was quoting the late HLS Professor Gary Bellow, LL.B. ’60, who in 1979 co-founded the Jamaica Plain center with his wife, senior lecturer in law Jeanne Charn, J.D. ’70. On April 5, Nagin and others celebrated the center’s 40th anniversary, and the quote strikes at the heart of the center’s mission of improving the legal profession through experiential learning while working with community organizations to enact real and lasting change.

Nearly a decade after Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shared classified materials illegally downloaded from Defense Department computers with WikiLeaks, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London for his role in the 2010-11 disclosures. ... To better understand the legal, national security, and journalistic tensions at issue, the Gazette spoke with Harvard faculty members Yochai Benkler, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, and Nicco Mele.

Backing off a confrontation with the Trump administration, judges at the International Criminal Court said Friday that they had rejected their own prosecutor’s request to open an Afghanistan war-crimes investigation, which could have implicated American forces. ... “The perception will be that the court cowed to Washington, but the judges are being realistic,” said Alex Whiting, a former American prosecutor at the court who now teaches at Harvard Law School. He said that lessons drawn from recent setbacks and failed cases at the court showed it must focus on situations where it can succeed. “The prosecution has already come to that realization and now the judges are too,” he said.

An article by Alex Whiting: In a surprise decision, a Pre-Trial Chamber at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has rejected the Prosecutor’s request, filed nearly 18 months ago, to open an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, including of allegations that U.S. forces and the CIA committed acts of torture there. In light of recent threats from both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to retaliate against the ICC if such an investigation proceeded, and the U.S government’s recent cancellation of the ICC Prosecutor’s visa to travel to the U.S., there is already a perception that the Court caved to U.S. pressure. An examination of the larger context of the case, however, and the ICC’s current challenges, suggests that this view is incomplete. In fact, this decision will likely come to be seen as the beginning of a broader effort by the judges and the Prosecutor to orient the Court’s very limited resources toward those investigations where there exists some meaningful prospect of success.

A book review by Randall Kennedy: Valerie Jarrett was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama during both his terms; is a close friend to Michelle Obama; directed an important real estate firm; and has served as chair of the Chicago Transit Authority Board, chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange and chair of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago Medical Center. She chaired the White House Council on Women and Girls and co-chaired the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault. She sits on the boards of directors of Ariel Investments and Lyft and is a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Jarrett is, in short, a big deal.

When more than 100 members of Congress raised worries in 2014 over plans to include Brunei in a sweeping Pacific trade deal, envoys from the tiny sultanate rushed to Washington with a message: We may be thinking about stricter Islamic laws, but we won’t really enforce them. The damage-control mission by Brunei — an oil-and gas-rich patch of coast and rain forest on the island of Borneo — came after its sultan began the first phase of sharia-inspired laws, U.S. officials said. At the time, the Obama administration was deep in negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, with Brunei and others in the historic deal. “It hasn’t come out of nowhere. Brunei has gradually developed in this direction,” said Dominik Müller, a social anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, Germany, and a visiting fellow at Harvard [Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World] who studies Islam’s impact in Southeast Asia. He pointed to a 2011 speech where the sultan said implementing sharia law was a “divine obligation” that he may be “asked about on judgment day.”

The charge sheet accusing Julian Assange of engaging in criminal theft of US state secrets contains a direct assault on fundamental press freedoms and could have a devastating effect on the basic acts of journalism, leading first amendment scholars and advocacy groups have warned. ... Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who wrote the first major legal study of the legal implications of prosecuting WikiLeaks, said the charge sheet contained some “very dangerous elements that pose significant risk to national security reporting. Sections of the indictment are vastly overbroad and could have a significant chilling effect – they ought to be rejected.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London on Thursday, after hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012. U.S. authorities now want to charge the man whose website had published hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents. U.S. lawmakers have long regarded the large-scale leaks published by WikiLeaks as a threat to national security, but it was not entirely clear what crime they would be able to charge him with—Assange himself, so far as anyone knew, had not stolen any information but instead merely published it. ... That was the extent of Assange’s involvement in anything technical—a single failed attempt to help Manning figure out a password. That could make it difficult to pin a CFAA charge on Assange since there’s no evidence that he ever used a stolen password or cracked it (or even really tried to crack it!) to access a computer without authorization. But a person can be found guilty of conspiring to commit a crime even if they do not actually commit that crime, Harvard Law School lecturer Kendra Albert explained. “A successful conspiracy charge does not require you to actually violate the underlying statue,” Albert told me. “The government doesn’t need to prove that the CFAA was actually violated.”

An uphill fight awaits defense lawyers who are representing former congressman Robin Hayes and campaign donor Greg Lindberg in a pending federal corruption case, legal experts say. Still, those lawyers are likely to use court motions to challenge the government’s central assertion — that Hayes, Lindberg and two of Lindberg’s associates took part in a scheme to bribe North Carolina insurance commissioner Mike Causey. ... Several legal experts agreed that at least some of the defendants will likely plead guilty instead of going to trial. That’s what happens in 97 percent of federal criminal cases, said Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge. “In a situation where the government has tapes, the pressure to plead guilty is substantial,” Gertner said.