Media Mentions

Harvard Law School Professor, Laurence Tribe, joins MSNBC's Katy Tur to discuss the legal process surrounding declaring a national emergency and what could happen next.

1/ The essential problem with the widespread notion that Trump is declaring an emergency when there is no emergency is this: — Jack Goldsmith (@jacklgoldsmith)…

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: In retrospect, it seems obvious that President Donald Trump would want to have his cake and eat it, too. That’s essentially what he’s doing Friday by both signing a government funding bill that provides $1.375 billion for a barrier with Mexico and also declaring a national emergency to allocate other federal funds for the same purpose.

An article by Shailin Thomas '21 and Arthur Caplan, PhD: The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was first passed in 1983 to address the concern that pharmaceutical manufacturers were not pursuing drug development for diseases that affect limited patient populations. The concern was in part that companies viewed pursuing these therapies as undesirable because the markets for them are small in comparison with the markets for more widespread chronic diseases. To promote the development of orphan drug therapies, the ODA provided companies that engaged in research for drugs with populations of fewer than 200 000 patients with tax incentives, research subsidies, and extended patent protection.

U.S. News & World Report plans to launch a new law school ranking—one that will sort schools according to the “scholarly impact” of their faculties. The new ranking, announced Wednesday, will be separate from the closely watched “Best Law Schools” ranking, at least initially. ... Every three years, they update their citations data to show the most cited faculties and individual scholars. (The 2018 update showed Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago to have the greatest scholarly impact.)

Legal challenges to President Trump’s planned national-emergency declaration to build a border wall are likely to come fast and furious — but legal experts caution the law is “murky” on the extent of his powers. ... Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman said the Constitution is intentionally “murky” on what constitutes a national emergency and what powers the president has during one. “A lot of these laws are not super clear and that gives a lot of space to the president,” Feldman said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: The U.S. government should not regulate social media. It should stay far away from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the rest. Any regulatory effort might well violate the First Amendment. Even if it turned out to be constitutional, it would squelch creativity and innovation in the very places where they are most needed.  Until recently, I would have endorsed every sentence in the above paragraph. But as Baron Bramwell, the English judge, once put it, “The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.”

Last year, while promoting his debut thriller, “The Woman in the Window,” Dan Mallory praised the tradition of literary mimicry: “It is often said that ‘good writers borrow, great writers steal,’” he said in an interview with The Guardian, borrowing a phrase from T. S. Eliot. In retrospect, his choice of words was both surprisingly honest, and perhaps a clue to the depth of his deception. ... “The courts hold out the possibility that it could be infringement without a language overlap,” said Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert at Harvard Law School. “If you did the exact same things in the exact same sequence all the way through, the court wouldn’t have that much trouble finding infringement.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump is reportedly close to issuing an executive order that would ban Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies Co. from building 5G wireless networks in the U.S. The significance of such an order goes beyond its obvious implications for American telecommunications companies.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Maddie McMahon '20: “I don’t think there’ll be a report,” President Trump’s former attorney, John Dowd, recently told ABC News. “I will be shocked if anything regarding the president is made public, other than ‘We’re done.’” Referring to a possible report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Dowd suggested Mueller won’t release a detailed public accounting of the results of the investigation because he has nothing on Trump. Another reason there might not be a public report—or, at least, not much of one—is because William Barr, who will likely be attorney general by the end of the week, might not release one.

The world of fiber optics is expanding the reach and power of the internet — and has the potential to revolutionize our homes and businesses. Fiber optics carry virtually unlimited amounts of data and will radically transform health care, education, stores and the way our cities and town are run. But, Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford argues it's a tech revolution that America is at risk of missing.

Community members will gather Tuesday in Richmond to remember Lillie A. Estes. The longtime civic leader engaged countless local residents and was recognized nationally for her work. WCVE’s Catherine Komp spoke to friends and collaborators about her impact. ... David Harris: There are people and individuals in every community in this country who are doing work on the ground to rebuild their communities in the face of kind of devastation wrought by a system of racism and Injustice. Estes worked closely with David Harris and Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute as she built a framework for Community Justice in Richmond. Harris: She understood and was determined to do things differently. From my perspective and in terms of what we think of as Community Justice, that's what we need.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The trial of a dozen leading Catalan politicians in Madrid on charges of rebellion isn’t something you expect to see in a functioning European democracy. The events of fall 2017 weren’t a rebellion in the ordinary sense of the word. It was nonviolent political grandstanding that the Spanish state easily shut down. The effort shouldn’t have succeeded, but it also shouldn’t be harshly criminalized.

The recent government shutdown damaged the Internal Revenue Service, an agency already struggling with budget cuts and aging computer systems, according to the IRS’s in-house watchdog. ... Keith Fogg, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, said Tuesday that if 1% or 2% of taxpayers shift to owing money at filing time, that can create lots of extra work for the IRS as employees negotiate installment plans and respond to collections notices.

Just as Special Counsel Mueller‘s probe has begun to wind down, a new debate is ramping up: What if the public never gets to see his report? ... “It’s sort of uncharted waters,” says Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School. “If McKeever goes the way the Justice Department argues, it could become a very serious impediment” to the public seeing a detailed report from Mueller.

The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is conducting a hearing on election security tomorrow. It’s part of a series the new Democratic majority in the House is holding related to the H.R. 1 legislation on election security, campaign funding, and government ethics, entitled the “For the People Act.” ... Just Security asked several experts what questions they think would be fruitful for discussion at the hearing. ... Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

The U.S. president has joined Kentucky's governor and the coal state's U.S. senators in trying to pressure the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep a 49-year-old coal-fired power plant operating, even though the nation's largest public electric utility has concluded that the plant is unreliable, no longer needed and too expensive to repair and operate. ... What study the governor was referring to isn't clear, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, who follows FERC proceedings.

When China joined the World Trade Organization, the global fraternity of cross-border commerce, it promised to open itself up to foreigners in lucrative businesses like banking, telecommunications and electronic-payment processing. More than 17 years later, China’s telecommunications industry remains firmly under government control. ... “At this point, a full-scale accord seems unlikely,” said Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor and former United States trade official.

... Another issue is that classical universities often don’t give people the necessary knowledge. In addition, students spend 4-5 years passing the full-time education process, and after university, they should look for additional knowledge that they will be able to apply in practice. Here, such schools as Stanford Law School, Pritzker School of Law, Harvard Law School, and others are adopting innovations in their programmes that may help students find their professional way. ... Harvard University created Harvard Law School Clinics, which help students to get knowledge in interviewing and advising clients, representing clients in court, conducting legal writing and research, drafting policy, investigating and analyzing facts, and developing negotiation skills.

The Supreme Court’s late-night, two-paragraph order that sent a Muslim inmate in Alabama to his execution last week has become the court’s most controversial act of the term, drawing intense criticism from the political right and the left. ... Added Amir H. Ali, Supreme Court and appellate counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the court’s order was in contrast with recent decisions that have protected religious rights. “Consider the opposite circumstance — a Christian person who is told that, during the final moments of his life, he can have only the services of an imam,” Ali wrote in an email.

An article by Randall Kennedy: A series of dismaying events has transpired at Augsburg University, in Minneapolis. According to several undisputed news reports, it began in October, when a student read a sentence in class from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time ... Airing the N-word caused a commotion. The professor leading the class, Philip Adamo, asked the students if they felt it was appropriate to voice the word Baldwin had written.