Media Mentions

Pressure on Facebook is mounting following a live stream of the New Zealand mosque massacre, with the nation’s leader calling for an overhaul of the country’s social-media laws and her Australian counterpart proposing criminal penalties for companies that are slow to remove such content. ... Despite being relatively small markets, Australia and New Zealand may carry more clout in the debate over how Facebook moderates content. “English-speaking countries, at least for now, have a lot bigger impact,” said Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet.

As the entire world now knows, last Friday special counsel Robert Mueller submitted the final version of his report to Attorney General William Barr. ... Why is impeaching Donald Trump viewed by many people -- including prominent Democrats -- as a near-term impossibility? Could impeachment succeed, and under what circumstances? Are congressional investigations and hearings a better way of holding Trump and his administration accountable for their misdeeds and general disregard for democracy? What would happen if Donald Trump were to be impeached and convicted, or if he loses the 2020 presidential election? Would he declare a national emergency in an effort to stay in office? In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Laurence Tribe, a leading scholar of constitutional law and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s decision not to render a legal decision on whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct the Justice Department’s Russia probe underscores the difficulty of proving obstruction of justice cases, said former federal prosecutors and legal experts. ... Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former federal prosecutor, said “obstruction of justice cases are famously hard to prove.”

No collusion? No obstruction. That’s what Attorney General William Barr appears to believe, at least in part. Legal experts say the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller did not find that President Trump and his associates and the Russian government colluded to interfere in the 2016 election appears to have been a major factor in Attorney General William Barr’s decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice. ... “I think he is saying that the fact that there are no underlying substantive criminal charges makes it more difficult to prove the elements of an obstruction charge, and that’s true. Obstruction cases are famously hard to prove, both as a legal matter and to a jury,” Harvard Law Professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor, said in an e-mail.

After nearly two years of investigation, interviews and indictments, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's job is officially done. While his report has not been released to the public, Attorney General William Barr has released a summary, stating that Mueller did not find evidence that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the foreign government’s election interference activities. ... To decipher the impact—for the president, and for the American people—Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School, and commentator Jennifer Braceras of the conservative think tank Independent Women’s Forum.

Health care providers in Mississippi continue to break the law by sending patients large, out-of-pocket medical bills that they don’t have to pay, concludes a Harvard Law School report released March 11. ... In its report, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School found that Mississippi’s anti-balance billing law, which was one of the first and strongest enacted in the country, needs revising.

Predicting that the public will not see the full report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, Senator Lindsey Graham noted Monday that material covered by executive privilege will likely be kept under wraps. ... For Harvard Law professor Alex Whiting, getting the full report won’t change the outcome of its conclusions, which he says clear the president of criminal wrongdoing on both collusion and obstruction. “I think he’s exonerated of the criminal law charges and I think we have to move on. And I actually think that’s actually a good thing,” Whiting said in a phone interview. “I don’t think the Mueller investigation was ever going to topple Trump, legally or politically.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is over. Attorney General William Barr gave his summary of the report's findings Sunday—and said the special counsel did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it attempted to conspire or coordinate with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Republicans nationally and locally are celebrating the news. But Democrats, including those in Massachusetts' congressional delegation, say the four-page summary should not be the final chapter of this story. Guests: Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst. She tweets @ngertner.

The headlines call his report a nothingburger. Our diverse panel of insiders says not so fast. ... Alex Whiting, professor at Harvard Law School, and former federal prosecutor with the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office in Boston: I think the facts contained within the report could be significant politically, but not criminally. With respect to possible criminal charges, the report and Barr’s decision on obstruction effectively exonerate Trump.

An article by Catharine A. MacKinnon: From experience, women often assume that any opposition to power will produce retaliation followed by retrenchment: not only that any progress made will be clawed back, but that those pushing for it will be punished. While often realistic, fear of blowback can impede insistence on change and the collective mobilization it requires. Anxiety about backlash, however well founded, keeps one’s antennae endlessly attuned to giving power what pleases (and please pacifies) it. This contributes to keeping dominance in place.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) faces an uphill battle in his $250 million lawsuit against Twitter and three of its users, legal experts say. ... The tweets from @DevinNunesMom, @DevinCow and Mair cited in the lawsuit could likely be interpreted as opinions or parody, both of which are protected forms of speech, Kendra Albert, a clinical instructional fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, told The Hill.

... Mueller Twitter, for all its vexations and sideshows, has been a helpful resource to interpret the larger meaning of all the indictments, sentencings, bombshells, and reports that fizzled out. ... Below is a rough guide to the voices leading the conversation about the special counsel on Twitter, and who will be essential to pay attention to whenever the Mueller report finally goes public. ... Laurence Tribe: A Harvard law professor and member of the Al Gore legal team that contested the results of the Florida recount, Tribe’s feed consists of huge-if-true takes on all sorts of stories that paint Trump in a negative light.

On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the “principal conclusions” of a report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. ... For some preliminary thoughts on Barr’s letter, I exchanged e-mails with Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. ... What do you make of Mueller’s decision not to come to a judgment on obstruction of justice? I think it was prudent, in light of the deep uncertainties about the law in this area. Barr says Mueller thoroughly laid out the evidence for and against obstruction, but Mueller did not resolve what he viewed as “difficult issues” of both law and fact.

Last June, a team at Harvard Medical School and MIT showed that it’s pretty darn easy to fool an artificial intelligence system analyzing medical images. Researchers modified a few pixels in eye images, skin photos and chest X-rays to trick deep learning systems into confidently classifying perfectly benign images as malignant. ... Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, had similar questions when he read the team’s paper. “I was reminded of the time in the early 2000's when cybersecurity vulnerabilities were readily apparent but not yet often exploited,” Zittrain tells IEEE Spectrum.

Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is already being interpreted in conflicting ways. ... So, what should we believe now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into Mueller’s findings? Politico Magazine surveyed some of the smartest legal minds out there—prosecutors, professors and more—and asked: Is the president in the clear? Here’s what they told us. ... Laurence H. Tribe: As Barr’s summary itself conceded, the president hasn’t been “exonerated.” But that’s not how the nation is likely to see it. Although the House Judiciary Committee must nonetheless call Barr to testify, and must demand to see the full Mueller report including the underlying evidence, I think the focus—as Representative Adam Schiff has stressed for some time now—should be on whether Trump’s economic or other personal interests make him beholden, now and going forward, to Russia or Saudi Arabia or other foreign powers whose interests do not align with ours.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report submitted to Congress on Sunday by Attorney General William Barr can only be described as a significant win for President Donald Trump. Mueller did not find that the Trump campaign coordinated with or colluded with Russian efforts to subvert the 2016 election. And Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump himself committed obstruction of justice.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Critics upset at U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for saying that God might have put Donald Trump in office to protect Israel from Iran should take a step back and look at the big picture. Pompeo was responding to a leading question on the Christian Broadcast Network, and his response was actually pretty diplomatic: “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible.” ... Rather than debating God’s plan for the world, it’s far more pragmatically valuable to ask whether there are defensible non-theological reasons for Trump’s policy toward Israel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: We don’t know what’s in it yet. But we can already say that the Mueller report is a win for democracy. We can say so definitely because on Friday afternoon, special counsel Robert Mueller officially filed a report with Attorney General William Barr on what he has learned about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Lest we forget, that was far from a foregone conclusion throughout much of the past two years.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Attorney General William Barr has produced an exceptionally brief summary of what is undoubtedly a lengthy report from special counsel Robert Mueller. For an issue of this magnitude – involving potentially serious misconduct by a successful presidential campaign and a sitting president – it is best to insist on a principle of neutrality, and to evaluate the summary not in political terms, but as a matter of fact and law.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ attempts to swiftly roll back major Obama-era policies at her agency are hitting a roadblock: federal courts. Judges have rebuffed DeVos’ attempts to change Obama policies dealing with everything from student loan forgiveness to mandatory arbitration agreements to racial disparities in special education programs. ... “It speaks to the Department of Education’s unwillingness or inability to follow the basic law around how federal agencies conduct themselves,” said Toby Merrill, who directs the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has brought some of the lawsuits against DeVos. Every administration has wins and losses in court, Merrill said, but most have done better at making sure they follow the legal rules of the road for rulemaking. “At the very least, they cross their Ts and dot their Is and therefore are less vulnerable to some of the procedural challenges that have been the undoing of so many of this Department of Education’s policies,” she said.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a device that can capture an image of your retina and automatically detect signs of diabetic blindness. This new breed of artificial intelligence technology is rapidly spreading across the medical field, as scientists develop systems that can identify signs of illness and disease in a wide variety of images, from X-rays of the lungs to C.A.T. scans of the brain. These systems promise to help doctors evaluate patients more efficiently, and less expensively, than in the past. ...Ideally, such systems would improve the efficiency of the health care system. But they may carry unintended consequences, a group of researchers at Harvard and M.I.T. warns. In a paper [co-authored by Jonathan Zittrain] published on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers raise the prospect of “adversarial attacks” — manipulations that can change the behavior of A.I. systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an A.I. system into seeing an illness that is not really there, or not seeing one that is.