Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The indictment of Paul Manafort by New York state prosecutors on Wednesday is a shot across the bow of the presidency — a warning and possible harbinger of future prosecutions of Donald Trump’s associates, children and even the man himself by the state.

Guest Susan Crawford explains how giant corporations in the United State have held back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward, and she describes how a few cities and towns are fighting to bring the fiber optic revolution to their communities.

A new partnership between Palm Beach County and 10 of its coastal municipalities is hoping to combat the effects of climate change with a particular focus on sea level rise. ... Harvard University Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic is providing pro bono assistance to formalize the collaboration, develop terms for a joint request for proposals and contribute information on climate vulnerability assessment best practices.

With Nancy Pelosi's decision to essentially take impeachment off the table, are House Democrats setting the bar impossibly high for removing a President going forward? Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe joins Katy Tur to discuss.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: In an important statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, in response to an interview question, “I’m not for impeachment.” She explained: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.” There is a lot of sense in her comment. But it can easily be read in a way that puts it at odds with the Constitution itself. It’s best to assume that Pelosi did not mean it in that way. But on such a fundamental question, we should get very clear on the constitutional responsibility of the House of Representatives.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Look beyond the juicy stories of rich people and celebrities paying to have their children cheat on the ACT and SAT exams and buying their way into college. The real scandal behind the admissions indictments unveiled Tuesday is the way universities — including some of the greatest on earth — hand off to athletic coaches the power to decide who can attend.

In throwing cold water on the idea of impeachment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in some ways was simply offering a clear-eyed assessment of the state of politics today in the nation’s hyperpolarized capital: There are not enough votes to convict and remove President Trump from office. ... Unlike Mr. Matz, Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who once worked in President Barack Obama’s White House, argued that the Constitution offers lawmakers little choice. “If we have a clear impeachable offense that is not a borderline one but a clear one, the impeachment process is mandatory because the House of Representatives is an agent of ‘we the people,’ the first three words of the Constitution,” said Mr. Sunstein, whose latest book, “On Freedom,” was published last month.

The Delaware Chancery Court bumped its judicial warp speed up by another factor this week with a post-trial ruling that paused a complex merger of Medley Capital Corp. and Sierra Income Corp. just 29 days after the start of litigation, as a court already known for prompt action adapts to what experts say is a busier and more competitive corporate law environment. ... Guhan Subramanian, a professor of law and business at Harvard Law School and a professor of business law at Harvard Business School, said the Chancery Court already has established an impressive reputation for the quality of its decisions in fast-moving disputes. "Business strategies, jobs, and careers can be held in limbo while people wait for the Delaware Court of Chancery to rule, so the court realizes that moving quickly has real value,” Subramanian said.

Around the height of the #MeToo revelations, in the fall of 2017, I interviewed an archivist at a prominent research library for a piece about social-media preservation. It quickly became apparent that he knew less about the subject than I did; he saved Facebook posts by painstakingly copying and pasting them into Word, comment by comment, and manually pressing print. ... The notion that the memory of #MeToo needs preserving—both because it matters and because it could disappear—is also the premise of a much larger archival effort. In June, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, arguably the paramount repository of works on American feminism, announced its intention to collect the millions of tweets and hundreds of thousands of Web pages—news articles, legislation, changing H.R. policies, public apologies—that composed #MeToo and remain as its evidence. (Harvard faculty members of the steering committee for the #MeToo project include Jill Lepore, a staff writer for this magazine, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, a contributing writer.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an angry man in possession of a pricey lawyer must be in want of revenge. Or so it seems, reading the recent complaint filed by a student expelled from Dartmouth College for sexual assault. The young man known as “John Doe” is suing his former college for treating him “unfairly” during the Title IX investigation that led to his expulsion. ... The historical barrier to ending sexual abuse, says law professor Catharine McKinnon, has been “the disbelief and trivializing dehumanization of its victims.” Perpetrators often wield legal systems to intimidate and silence survivors. Custody battles in domestic violence cases, defamation in sexual assault suits, claims of gender discrimination against male offenders—all rely on the misogyny of the general public and use victims’ own trauma responses against them.

With the help of Harvard Law's Entertainment Law Clinic and Recording Artists Project (RAP), students with a passion for music and the arts are following their dream careers in showbiz.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Whatever Huawei Technologies Co. is doing by suing the U.S. government and six cabinet officials, it isn’t trying to win in court. The legal arguments mounted in its brief aren’t based on existing precedent. Although the brief cites the Constitution, as written the arguments are barely legal at all.

The Post reports on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) remarks during an interview about a potential impeachment of President Trump: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.” ... The rub is if the evidence is truly compelling but Republicans remain his obstinate defenders. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe argues that in such a case you also have to consider “the danger of NOT impeaching a president whose guilt has become clear just because the Senate seems too beholden to the president to remove him.”

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 Monday. ... 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.

Growing up in South Florida, Rebecca Rechtszaid dreamed of becoming a professional singer, but after a case of pneumonia wrecked her vocal range in college, she settled for the next-best thing. She couldn’t be an artist, but she could become a lawyer for artists. ... That seems to be the case with hundreds of students who have signed up for entertainment law courses and clinics at Harvard Law School (HLS) over the past 20 years. The phenomenon underscores a trend among law students to veer from the conventional paths of corporate law or litigation and look to work in creative industries.

Every day, it seems like people are quitting social media for one reason or another — including fatigue and privacy concerns. Recently, one of my coworkers even told me he had stopped using Instagram because he believed it was listening in on his conversations. ... If tech companies were actually listening in on us without our consent, they'd be in for some serious legal pain. "There is also a federal statute called the Wiretap Act, which prevents people from eavesdropping on oral communications, and that could be a cause of action for a potential plaintiff against the company that was eavesdropping on them," said Kendra Albert, clinical instructional fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

It was announced last week that President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to less than four years behind bars, a punishment decried by many in Washington and in legal circles as too lenient ... To discuss the political and legal significance of the ruling, Jim Braude was joined by retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Bruce Singal, a defense attorney who worked alongside Robert Mueller in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.

The Chinese telecom giant Huawei is winning the race to build 5G networks worldwide. NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford about why that's a national security threat.

An article by Samuel Garcia '19: A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation reported that immigrants in America have almost double the average rate of entrepreneurship—launching businesses large and small across the country at a high frequency. Dream Across America (DreamxAmerica) is a social enterprise hoping to highlight and grow that entrepreneurial drive by “joining storytelling and impact investing to support immigrant entrepreneurs across America,” in the format of a docuseries. From the team’s home base at the Harvard Innovation Labs, cofounder Andrew Leon Hanna ['19] spoke about DreamxAmerica’s vision ... Currently, the DreamxAmerica team (made up of Harvard Law students, filmmakers, and social entrepreneurs with experience across education, finance, and more) is working closely with its inaugural class of entrepreneurs to launch DreamxNC in 2019.

The biggest tech problem facing the US is that it doesn't have universal access to super-fast fiber-optic internet connections, according to Susan Crawford, a telecommunication expert and professor at Harvard Law School. (Subscription required)

Analysis by Ryan Manucha '19: There exists a little-known dispute resolution venue where the complainant has always won. It doesn’t have a permanent location, nor does it have a standing set of adjudicators. And at this... (Subscription required)