Media Mentions

President Trump’s stunning new promise to end birthright citizenship by executive order is roiling the midterm debate at the eleventh hour, fanning the flames of an already explosive immigration fight — and dividing Republican message-makers — just days before voters head to the polls...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said in an email that the president can no more eliminate birthright citizenship “than he could wipe out the First Amendment (or the Second, for that matter).” “Even Trump and his lawyers surely realize that this off-the-wall threat has the weakest possible legal legs to stand on and wouldn’t be likely to get the votes even of the most stalwart judicial conservatives,” Tribe said. “And they must realize as well that this threat, while legally all but empty, nonetheless strikes fear in the hearts of a vast number of legal immigrants and current citizens — both naturalized and by birth.”

One of the reasons you're able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant is because you're not too worried that it's clean in the kitchen. That's because you know that restaurants have to meet a minimum standard of cleanliness, or risk being shut down. The restaurant is obligated to act in the best interests of its diners. This is one example used by Jonathan Zittrain to argue that it may be time to create a similar kind of obligation for social media platforms and other tech giants who hold our personal data. Along with Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin, Zittrain has long floated the idea that today's online tech platforms become 'information fiduciaries'.

Come election time, it's popular for Illinois Republicans and Democrats, when political circumstances suit them, to clamor for the state's top lawyer to investigate corruption—almost always, to no avail...Yet candidates often cannot resist taking up the cudgel of anti-corruption, sometimes identifying their targets by name. "If I say, 'Elect me and I'll go after Donald Trump or Speaker (Mike) Madigan or Jared Kushner,' anyone who says that is absolutely wrong," said James Tierney, former attorney general of Maine and now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. "That is the opposite of what our criminal justice system is supposed to be about."

Launching today is the capstone to a massive project executed over the last three years to digitize all U.S. case law, some 6.4 million cases dating all the way back to 1658, a span of 360 years. The Caselaw Access Project site launching today makes all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public in a consistent digitized format. The site is the product of a partnership started in 2015 between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and legal research service Ravel Law to digitize Harvard’s entire collection of U.S. case law, which Harvard says it the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere outside the Library of Congress...On Friday, I visited the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School and met with Adam Ziegler, director, and Jack Cushman, senior developer, who have me a preview of the site.

In a significant milestone for public access to the law, the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School on Monday published more than 40 million pages of U.S. court decisions online. The publication, which represents nearly 6.5 million state and federal court cases, is the culmination of a five-year project that saw Harvard slice the spines off a vast collection of legal reporter books in order to digitize them...According to Adam Ziegler, Director of the Library Innovation Lab, the library is also working with state governments to help them ensure all future decisions are published online in a machine-readable fashion with a neutral citation system. Ziegler also noted the Caselaw Access Project will be a treasure trove for legal scholars, especially those who employ big data techniques to parse the corpus. “It’s an opportunity to reconstruct the law as a data source, and write computer programs to peruse millions of cases,” he said.

A letter by Joseph Gallardo `19. Bret, sorry to hear about how much you let people’s opinion of you affect you — especially because, well, your name is Bret Stephens, and I doubt your appearance sets off many affirmative action flags. I can’t imagine how you’d deal if you were, say, black or Latino. I’m a student at Harvard Law School. Before this, I was a homeless high school dropout who took six years to graduate — ranked second to last in my graduating class. The road traveled to Harvard was paved with hard work, sacrifice and, yes, presumably the help of affirmative action. Contrary to your suggestion that I may never know my own worth, I know I deserve to be a soon-to-be alumnus of this school.

Did the FBI cover up the bomb suspect's van to hide conservative stickers?..."That strikes me as completely standard to protect the integrity of the evidence," Alex Whiting, professor of criminal law at Harvard said. "They will likely examine the van for fingerprints, hair and fiber, and bomb residue."

With nine days before the election, the New Hampshire Supreme Court's move to permit voter registration requirements to go forward unleashed a torrent of reactions from supporters and opponents of the controversial 2017 law....Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law School professor who founded Equal Citizens and led statewide marches through New Hampshire for campaign finance reform. "Instead of moving towards a 21st century democracy that promotes an equal freedom to vote, the New Hampshire Legislature and courts have chosen to make casting a ballot even harder," Lessig said. "We should be engaging voters, especially young voters, in the political process, not, as today's decision has done, stifle it."

Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos said Friday he’s considering withdrawing his plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller after learning “certain information” during an interview with House Republicans on Thursday...Professor Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School expert on criminal law, called it “virtually impossible.” “When he pled guilty he would have been required to answer questions that would now make it almost impossible for him to succeed,” Whiting said. Whiting said Papadopoulos would have to show that his plea was not voluntary, but was coerced, or that he received ineffective assistance of counsel. “The grounds are narrow and the guilty plea process is designed to ensure that all of the potential grounds are addressed and therefore it is extremely difficult for a defendant to undo a guilty plea,” he said.

A shift to to the right is a near certainty for the U.S. Supreme Court. How quickly it will happen is up to Chief Justice John Roberts. With Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Roberts is now in firm control of the court’s throttle, positioned to decide whether and when to overturn liberal precedents..."His record shows a consistently conservative view of the law," said Allison Orr Larsen, a constitutional law professor teaching at Harvard Law School this semester. At the same time, he "seems to care very much about the court as an institution, and he is particularly aware of the fragility of the court when all eyes are watching and people view the justices as just politicians in robes."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Is President Donald Trump responsible, in some sense, for the mailing of bombs to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders? Is he responsible, in some sense, for the slaughter at the Pittsburgh synagogue? If we are speaking in terms of causation, the most reasonable answer to both questions, and the safest, is: We don’t really know. More specifically, we don’t know whether these particular crimes would have occurred in the absence of Trump’s hateful and vicious rhetoric (including his enthusiasm for the despicable cry, “Lock her up!”). But it’s also safe, and plenty reasonable, to insist that across the American population, hateful and vicious rhetoric from the president of the United States is bound to increase risks of violence.

The 2018 midterm elections are on November 6 and will give voters the opportunity to weigh in on what’s going on in Washington...According to [Professor Michael Klarman, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, Democrats swept the 1874 midterms, essentially ending Reconstruction. The period following was sometimes referred to as “deconstruction,” which Klarman tells Teen Vogue “virtually ensured the demise of Reconstruction” and meant “no new civil rights legislation.”

An op-ed by Stephen B. Burbank, Richard D. Parker and Lucas A. Powe Jr. The rule of law requires friends who are willing to ignore the partisan din that afflicts our institutions. In that spirit, 20 years ago, we participated in a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court of the United States to reject a claim of privilege by President Bill Clinton, who was seeking to avoid civil litigation alleging sexual misconduct while he was governor of Arkansas. The Supreme Court did reject Clinton’s claim of immunity, vindicating the principle that no person is above the law. Now, President Donald Trump is appealing from an order denying his motion to dismiss a civil case brought against him. The plaintiff, Sumner Zervos, alleges that, while a private citizen, Trump defamed her when he called her a liar for accusing him of sexual misconduct. The president asserts that he has a constitutional privilege that protects him against civil litigation in state court, whether or not the claims relate to his official conduct.

A new ruling from the Librarian of Congress is good news for video game preservation. In an 85-page ruling that covered everything from electronic aircraft controls to farm equipment diagnostic software, the Librarian of Congress carved out fair use exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for video games and software in general..."These rules are a big win," Kendra Albert, a Clinical Instructional Fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, told Motherboard. Albert represented the Software Preservation Network, which was one of the parties arguing for the change at the Copyright Office. "The 2015 rules cracked the door open for many things, but the exemptions that were granted here are potentially much, much broader."

Former U.S. presidential candidate and attorney Ralph Nader spoke at the Harvard Law Forum Thursday to discuss the need for more public interest lawyers and his belief in Harvard Law School’s obligation to support public interest careers among its graduates...Katherine J. Thoreson, a third-year law student and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Record, said she has worked with Nader before. In addition to being a former editor-in-chief of the publication, he still publishes contributing opinion articles. “He’s just been a very supportive voice in the work that The Record does,” Thoreson said. “I think that he made a lot of salient points about the failures of this institution as well as the power that this institution has to change some of the problems in the legal landscape.” Laurel A. Petrulionis [`21] said she was "inspired" by the end. “I came to law school to make a difference in the world, and through orientation the student government really pushed this notion of challenging the corporate pull,” Laurel A. Petrulionis said.

A course offered by Harvard University Law School for the spring 2019 semester will focus on ways to “push back against” strategies employed by President Donald Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Harvard professor Laurence Tribe will be teaching the course, titled "Constitutional Strategies For the McConnell/Trump/Kavanaugh Era.”..."Law students who are interested — from whatever ideological perspective — in what the current political and legal landscape might mean for the litigation and/or legislation they may consider becoming involved in (whether defensively or offensively) after they graduate deserve well-informed guidance as they navigate this complex new terrain. My new seminar is designed to offer that guidance," Tribe told Campus Reform in an email.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. By temperament and by training, I am optimistic most of the time. In that room, though, I sensed the assumptions of our age operating in high, silent gear: Business is the most important agent of change in society; government exists to "cooperate" and is mostly incapable and toothless (while simultaneously, if ineptly, threatening); nothing is going to be done about the harrowing, multiple, structural unfairnesses of our time; women who want to survive and be invited to future panel discussions need to be appropriately deferential; and our destiny as a society is being charted by people who never use public transportation. Or fly commercial. I did speak up, politely, that afternoon. I said many things are profoundly wrong with the way we live in America, and that what we really need to do is make sure government has the capacity and resources to ensure—using technology as a tool, but mostly through sound policy—that everyone with a belly button can lead a thriving life.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. With respect to politics, ours is an age of Manichaeism. Many people think and act as if the forces of light are assembled against the forces of darkness, and the only serious question is this: What side are you on? “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” offers an optimistic perspective on how the U.S. might get past that question. Produced by More in Common, an international initiative seeking to reduce social divisions, the report describes seven American “tribes.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rebranded late in her career as the Notorious RBG, has recently been getting all the love due to a pioneering woman Supreme Court justice. But her colleague Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who announced Tuesday that she is stepping out of public life at age 88 because of creeping dementia, is just as important in the history of the Constitution. Indeed, measured in terms of impact on the court, O’Connor had a much greater historical effect than Ginsburg, much of whose importance so far comes from her pioneering women’s rights work as a litigator.

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler...But research I helped conduct has found that the fundamental driver of disinformation in American politics of the past three years has not been Russia, but Fox News and the insular right-wing media ecosystem it anchors. All the Russians did was jump on the right-wing propaganda bandwagon: Their efforts were small in scope, relative to homegrown media efforts. And what propaganda victories the Russians achieved occurred only when the right-wing media machine picked up stories and, often, embellished them.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Nearly a century ago, Harvard College moved away from admitting students based solely on measures of academic performance. In the nineteen-twenties, the concept of diversity in admissions arose in response to the fear of being overrun by Jewish students, who were considered strong on academic metrics but lacking in qualities of character and personality. As the proportion of Jews threatened to exceed a quarter of each class, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body. Other Harvard officials balked at such overt discrimination, believing it to be inconsistent with Harvard’s liberal tradition, and, instead, formulated a new, inclusive “policy of equal opportunity” that would lead to the same outcome as Lowell’s proposal. It introduced the consideration of qualitative factors such as personality and background, including “geographical diversity,” as part of the admissions process. Representing the diversity of the country meant recruiting and admitting more Midwestern and Southern students, who counterbalanced the droves of Jewish applicants from the Northeast. By the class of 1930, as a result of the new plan, Jewish students made up only ten per cent of Harvard’s undergraduates.