Media Mentions

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe talks to Ari Melber about what Bill Barr must do as attorney general if he follows the 2000 OLC policy against indicting a sitting president.

The General Services Administration “ignored” concerns that President Trump’s lease on a government-owned building — the one that houses his Trump International Hotel in Washington — might violate the Constitution when it allowed Trump to keep the lease after he took office, according to a new report from the agency’s inspector general. . .  The report does not recommend that Trump’s lease be canceled. Instead, the inspector general recommends a new legal review of the deal. ... Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe finds that “It’s notable and admirable that GSA has recognized, however belatedly, that all public officials and agencies — from the president on down — are bound by Article VI to follow the U.S. Constitution.” He tells me: “That GSA should have addressed the constitutionality of the lease itself, given that the president was both landlord and tenant, is true, but I wouldn’t let the perfect be

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and presidents of three colleges in the city are lining up against a Trump administration proposal to offer more protections to students accused of sexual assault. ... "The single-investigator model ... is a star chamber," said former federal Judge Nancy Gertner, who's now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. "[It] is an enormously unfair model. It doesn't offer any protections to either side. It's not the way you get at the truth."

... Larry Tribe, professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law School, says that as long as Pelosi is opposed to the State of the Union happening, as scheduled, on Jan. 29, it won’t happen. “Pelosi was basically uninviting the President, but doing it diplomatically,” Tribe tells Fortune. “The form in which the State of the Union address is delivered isn’t constitutionally specified, but if it’s to be delivered as a Joint Session of Congress as has become the custom, the House and Senate must jointly adopt a resolution to schedule it. Without that, he can’t come. Neither chamber has adopted such a resolution yet, and as long as Pelosi opposes it, it’s DOA.”

Attorney general nominee William P. Barr generally acquitted himself well during the long day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. He gave the impression of someone who is his own man, unlikely to comply with the president’s orders, if any, to interfere with investigations. He stood up for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, contradicting President Trump’s characterization of him and his investigation. However, in one regard, his answer was off-target and worrisome. ... “Bill Barr seemed to be channeling the awkward experience Justice Gorsuch had when he commented, as a not-yet-confirmed Supreme Court nominee, that the president’s attacks on ‘so-called judges’ were troubling to him,” says constitutional expert Larry Tribe. “Trump’s musings about pulling the Gorsuch nomination in the wake of that comment may have led Barr to avoid criticizing Trump’s intemperate and destructive attacks on the Department of Justice.”

Former Attorney General William Barr underwent his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee under the new chairmanship of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and emerged without a scratch, scrape or bruise. He came across as a consummate professional and a deeply knowledgeable, capable, and very experienced attorney – someone former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has called “probably the best-qualified nominee for U.S. attorney general since Robert Jackson in 1940.” ... Barr did not back down during the hearing in explaining his view on this issue, which former Justice Department Assistant Attorney General and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says has “significant support in Supreme Court case law and executive branch precedent.”

CFA Society India, in collaboration with CFA Institute, the global association of investment professionals, hosted its 9th India Investment Conference in Mumbai with the theme being Investing Insights for Uncertain Times. ... Speaking in his session on 'The Wisdom of Finance', Mihir Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, Harvard Business School; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School said, "The gulf between finance and the humanities is a real loss. Finance can use the humanisation provided by humanities. Investors are fearful of uncertainties around capitalism. However, they forget how capitalism has benefitted economies around the world. Let's improve practice of finance by reconnecting practitioners with elements of humanity."

Three weeks of no pay and lots of uncertainty has changed how aerospace engineer Robert Sprayberry thinks about his job. He joined the Federal Aviation Administration a decade ago because it promised him a stable career with steady hours. He might not earn as much money as he could in the private sector, but he could be home more to help raise three young children. ... Others are avoiding the federal government from the start. Jim Tierney, who teaches at Harvard Law School, said he’s noticed a spike in interest in his state attorneys general law clinic under Trump. He attributed the change to Trump’s frequent attacks on the federal Justice Department and drastic curtailment at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The internet revolution changed American political, social and cultural life. But as Harvard Law School professor and author Susan Crawford argues, the United States is still far behind other countries in taking that change to the next level, with a nationwide fiber optic network similar to other public utilities. As a result, she writes, we are missing out on upgrades in our education system, civic life and economy that we need to truly compete in the 21st century.

... Nominee Andrew Wheeler became acting EPA administrator after his predecessor and former boss, Scott Pruitt, resigned in July amid a cloud of self-serving ethics scandals. Wheeler, 54, doesn't carry Pruitt's ethical baggage, but he has devoted himself to a disciplined rollback of environmental safeguards. Wheeler is one of 188 former lobbyists working in the administration, according to ProPublica, and a fox-guarding-the-hen-house example of someone regulating an industry that once paid him handsomely. ... "He's spent his career carrying out someone else's agenda," Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School's environmental law program, says of Wheeler.

There is an actual art (and science) to deal making. And after three-plus weeks of government shutdown, it should be clear by now ― if it wasn’t already― that President Donald Trump is uniquely terrible at the practice.  Trump is so out of the ordinary when it comes to negotiation, in fact, that the quarterly published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, devoted its latest issue to him. For the first time in the Negotiation Journal’s 35-year history, it’s used a whole issue to talk about a U.S. president.

... Remy, an orange tabby, wanders the school in search of patches of sunlight, snuggly boxes, and friendly interactions. He’s wildly popular — a Facebook page dedicated to “Remy the Humanities Cat” has more than 2,500 followers. He was featured in a Harvard Gazette article in the fall that was among the campus news site’s best-read stories of 2018. And he recently was the star of his own Twitter moment. ... Still, not everyone is familiar with Remy. Law professor Annette Gordon-Reed tweeted a photo Tuesday of Remy slinking along a hallway at the law school and said this was the first time she had seen the feline on campus. Remy’s many fans and supporters quickly spoke up to let Gordon-Reed know that the kitty is well-traveled and a Remy appreciation fest promptly began.

More than 25 years after serving as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, William Barr is set to return to the role this week. What should we expect? And what should the senators at the confirmation hearing be asking? Guest: Noah Feldman, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University and columnist at Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump is set to face intense political opposition through the end of his term in 2021, under the cloud of an ongoing investigation into his ties to Russia — which has resulted in the indictments or pleas of several close aides — and with newly empowered Democrats in Congress. Even so, as history shows, a sitting commander-in-chief resigning or being ousted early is highly unlikely. “The framers of the Constitution realized that you couldn’t just get rid of a president because you disagree with him. That would change our whole system of government,” Larry Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, tells PEOPLE.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Does President Donald Trump have the legal authority to declare a national emergency, and order the military to build a wall between Mexico and the United States? We are dealing with a novel question here, which means that any judgment has to have a degree of tentativeness. But the best answer appears to be no.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: William Barr, President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, has a worrisome theory of executive power. He’s wrong to say that part of the federal obstruction of justice statute isn’t applicable to the president. But on the eve of Barr’s Senate confirmation hearings, it’s also important to recognize that Barr’s view of executive power is not extreme, or at least not outside the range of opinions commonly held by lawyers who have worked for presidents.

Our digital learning community needs a cause. Some fight that strikes an optimal balance between self-interest and doing the right thing. Reading Susan Crawford's deeply reported and passionately argued Fiber, I think the battle for universal fiber broadband might be the fight we need.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Whenever the Trump administration proposes to eliminate a regulation, many people are tempted to give it a standing ovation. Many others are tempted to boo and hiss. Sometimes it’s right to do one or the other. But with respect to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to rethink its controversial mercury regulation — well, it’s complicated and unusually interesting.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: ... For better or worse, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that someone can be convicted of the crime of material support just by teaching English in coordination with a terrorist group, even if that person never went near a weapon or battlefield. In this instance, however, the best legal option may not be a very good fit for the American’s conduct.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: This past week, we saw the first concrete evidence that Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia — and it seemed as if no one cared. That’s a reason to ask a disturbing question: What if the slow burn of Robert Mueller’s investigation ends with a fizzle, not an explosion? What if Mueller, in his role as special counsel, uncovers meaningful proof that the Trump campaign for president knowingly and actively cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected — and the public treats the news as completely unremarkable? That would mark a radical transformation in the nature of contemporary U.S. politics.

An article by Jack Goldsmith: The New York Times reported on Jan. 11 that the FBI “began investigating whether President Trump had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests” soon after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. In other words, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on the president. ... If the story is accurate, then what the FBI did was unprecedented and possibly—I emphasize possibly, since many relevant facts are not included in the Times reporting—an overstep, or at least imprudent. The reason the FBI step might have been imprudent is that it was premised on an inversion of the normal assumptions of Article II of the Constitution.