Media Mentions

The crowd that gathered in a Fifth Avenue apartment to hear Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe was as deep blue as the ocean.  John Heilemann, who was filming the event for his Showtime program, “The Circus,” asked the audience to raise their hands if they had voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly everyone raised their hand. “Now raise your hand if you voted for Donald Trump.” One hand went up. ...  Tribe disappointed the faithful at the event, organized by Patricia Duff for the Common Good, when he predicted that President Trump would not be indicted. The lawyer, who has argued 35 cases before the US Supreme Court, also said, “The public is obsessed with impeachment.” He compared the Never Trumpers to children on a long car ride who keep asking, “Are we there yet?”

When Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and convicted felon testified before a House committee, his Republican questioners had one main line of attack: He was a confessed liar who could never be believed. Near the end of Cohen’s testimony, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., compared him to another confessed liar who later appeared before Congress — Special Representative to Venezuela Elliott Abrams. ... Right now, the main difference vis-à-vis false congressional testimony, is that Abrams has been pardoned and Cohen has not. That gives more support for challenging Cohen’s testimony, said Harvard law professor Alex Whiting. But Whiting cautioned that such distinctions are subjective.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Ordinarily it’s bad for democracy when a sitting head of government is notified that he will face corruption charges. But the pending indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the height of an Israeli election season is actually a good thing for the rule of law. ... What’s good about the charges is that they demonstrate that Israel’s governing institutions are robust enough to enforce the criminal laws of the country, even in the face of tremendous political pressure from the country’s longest-serving leader.

For the past two months, people have gathered on a street in Vancouver’s pricey Dunbar neighbourhood, snapping photographs of a $4m mansion with its blinds drawn.  Onlookers are not interested in the exterior of the house — but they are concerned about the fate of its resident, Huawei’s finance chief Meng Wanzhou, who is currently under house arrest awaiting an extradition hearing on US fraud charges. ... Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, said: “In theory the president could direct his attorney-general to drop the investigation.” But he added: “Normally the White House doesn’t interfere so openly at this stage and doing so might undermine the credibility of future extradition requests.”

An op-ed by Sam Garcia ’19: Before 2017, immigrants in Texas were a large but silent group of people who, for the most part, lived in harmony with the community. Although immigrants had every right to access the police if they felt they needed to, it is common knowledge that a slight distrust of the authorities and the specter of being deported kept them from contacting the police in some situations. This distrust grew rapidly in April 2017, when the Texas Legislature voted to pass Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), which ended sanctuary cities in Texas and called for more cooperation with federal authorities. Much like Florida Senate Bill 168, which passed the Judiciary Committee last week, Texas SB 4 was proposed on the idea that it would make it people safer — it did not, though, and it hurt vulnerable victims of domestic abuse the most. Similarly, if SB 168 makes it through the Florida Legislature, Floridians may face the same outcome that Texas has.

It’s been more than a year since the Trump administration declared that coal and nuclear retirements were threatening the electric grid -- and regulators still aren’t rushing to the rescue. ... “The political winds that created this docket -- I don’t know if they’re still blowing or not," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: If you’re looking for the most important sentence in Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, here it is: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

Readers discuss whether an article about the Minnesota senator’s reputation as a tough boss was fair or sexist, and whether it should sway voters. A letter from Charles Fried: A saying in the court of Louis XIV had it that “no man is a hero to his valet.” Your lengthy front-page article about Senator Amy Klobuchar suggests that no politician is a saint to her staff. In high-stress jobs every human being is prone to fits of temper and less than perfect fairness to those who work with her in close settings day in and day out.

An op-ed by David Jonathan Benger '20: A swastika was found on my childhood playground in Brighton Beach yesterday. It was drawn onto the very same jungle gym on which I used to play with my sister while my parents and grandparents watched over us to ensure our safety. A culprit is yet to be identified, but this is not an isolated incident. Attacks on Jewish bodies have been escalating in frequency and ferocity in New York and elsewhere over the last few years.

People facing criminal charges in Berkshire County district courts no longer will be required to post bail while awaiting trial — provided that they are not deemed flight risks. Following through on a promise she made on the campaign trail, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington has directed prosecutors to stop requesting that such defendants be held in lieu of bail. The policy officially was announced Friday. ... "I think it's certainly on the forefront of what the DA's offices are doing across the country," Colin Doyle, staff attorney at Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program, said of Harrington's policy. "Whether someone is in jail pretrial or released shouldn't depend on the money they have in their bank account." Through the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Doyle compiles research on bail statutes nationwide. On Monday, the group will release a nearly 100-page "bail guide" for state and local policymakers.

Joshua Matz and Larry Tribe, authors of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” recently wrote: Over time, a focus on impeachment can flatten and distort our politics. Many of [President] Trump’s worst policies can’t properly be squeezed into an impeachment framework. The same might be said about many of Trump’s scariest foreign-policy judgments and public statements. The Muslim ban, family separation, erratic negotiations with North Korea, and inaction on climate change—these are abhorrent policies, but they are not impeachable offenses. When the only worthwhile end game is Trump’s removal from office, justifiable outrage over these issues too quickly recedes into the background, even as we are treated to an endless diet of speculative headlines about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s secret files. And if impeachment were to unfold, with the Senate almost certainly unable to reach a two-thirds majority for removal, what would all of this have accomplished?

Despite American Jews’ generally low observance of Jewish religious traditions, paucity of Jewish knowledge, and relative non-belief in God, many feel remarkably committed. That is the central paradox of contemporary American Jewish life. And Harvard Law School professor Bob Mnookin confesses he is a prime exemplar of the paradox. ... Over the course of a career devoted to conflict resolution, Mnookin has written many well-regarded books and articles on disputes arising from divorce, commercial dealings, and international clashes, including the Israeli-Arab confrontation. Yet “The Jewish American Paradox,” Mnookin confesses, was the most difficult book for him to write. It required him to master a vast literature far afield from his expertise.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: If you are interested in the resolution calling for a “Green New Deal” that Democrats have introduced in the House, you might want to pay attention to one remarkable phrase in particular. It appears in the resolution no less than three times: “as much as is technologically feasible.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: A federal district court in Houston has held that because women are now permitted to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military, all women must be obligated to register for the draft, just as men do. This might sound like a straightforward win for feminism, especially from the perspective of the old-fashioned legal-equality feminism championed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both as an advocate and as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Yet the court’s decision raises the more complicated question of whether women should simply be offered access to traditionally male roles in the military, like combat positions, or whether they should be forced to assume those jobs.

Major technology companies, software developers, legal scholars and others have filed a flood of amicus briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Google's appeal in the company's yearslong copyright battle with Oracle over use of copyrighted code in Android smartphones. ... The eight law professors are represented by Christopher T. Bavitz of Harvard Law School.

When patients enroll in health insurance, they are often met with a stark reality: Even with insurance, they can’t afford their treatment. With the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions in limbo once again, it’s important to remember that those with such conditions need more than health insurance. They also need to be protected from discriminatory pricing so that they can afford the medications they need. ... A 2019 report by Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation found that some insurers continue to price all recommended H.I.V. regimens in a way that makes them prohibitively expensive.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: One word holds the key to the major Trump-related court cases that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the next few months: deference. In the lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s border wall, and in the U.S. Supreme Court case over whether the census will include a question about citizenship, a central issue will be whether the courts should defer to the assertions that the Trump administration says provide a basis for the decisions they’ve taken.

For most of his life, Donald Trump has managed to stay a step ahead of the courts, the cops and the accountants. Two years into his presidency, however, he appears to be nearing a crossroads of accountability. Reports flew this week that special counsel Robert Mueller was preparing to close up shop. ... Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor on the international criminal court, said a conclusion of the Mueller investigation would “open up space” for congressional inquiries to take the lead, “and that would start a whole new phase of this information becoming public and being investigated”.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford: You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world’s supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese used in everything from smartphones to electric cars. ... But you may not know that China is also on track to control most of the world's flow of high-capacity online services—the new industries, relying on the immediate communication among humans and machines, that will provide the jobs and opportunities of the future.

Animal law advocates from a variety of backgrounds are planning to gather at Harvard Law School this week for the school’s fifth annual Animal Law Week. ... The free lectures are scheduled for noon each day and are open to the public. The week is sponsored by the Harvard Law School Animal Law Society.

As Donald Trump faces mounting court trouble over his decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border, one attorney involved in suing the administration ridiculed the president’s legal team. “Honestly, I have never had an opponent who was quite as helpful,” Laurence Tribe said during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “And I find it odd to say, 'Thank you, Mr. Trump!'” Tribe, a constitutional law expert from Harvard Law School, has argued more than 30 cases in front of the Supreme Court. His latest case is against the White House: He is representing El Paso County, Texas, in a lawsuit to block Trump’s national emergency declaration. Tribe called the county "ground zero" in Trump's attack on the border.