Media Mentions

While Republicans like President Donald Trump lauded a Texas judge's decision last week that the Affordable Care Act—colloquially known as Obamacare—needed to be repealed, not everyone in the party is certain that this issue will redound to their political benefit. ... "Judge O’Connor’s opinion was legally indefensible from start to finish," Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "I rarely reach this conclusion, but only a results-driven policy agenda could begin to explain his absurd conclusion that Congress’s 2017 decision to zero out the penalty for not buying the insurance mandated by the ACA while retaining the rest of the ACA somehow rendered the entire ACA unconstitutional."

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith: When President Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign on November 7 and appointed the unqualified Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, just about everyone assumed that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was in trouble. ... These are but the latest in an 18-month-long string of extraordinary achievements by the Department of Justice in investigating the chief executive and his associates despite Trump’s objections, threats, and firings of important DoJ officials. There has been feverish concern that Trump’s actions would destroy the department’s independence. Quite the opposite has happened. Trump’s efforts have failed entirely. And DoJ independence is stronger than ever.

Gareth Evans has warned signing up to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons will “tear up” the United States alliance ahead of a critical contested vote in an otherwise tranquil Labor conference. ... A paper by the International Human Rights Clinic at the Harvard Law School, published in December, concluded if Australia signed the treaty it would have to leave the nuclear umbrella but the US-Australia alliance is otherwise legally compatible with it.

Students at Iowa's Grinnell College pulled back Friday from a campaign to expand their two-year-old union over concerns that a Republican-dominated board in Washington could use it to strip all or most student workers of the right to bargain collectively. ... "This Board has shown that they have a view of the Act that is not very hospitable towards worker organizing," said Sharon Block, a former board member who now directs the Labor and Work Life program at Harvard Law School. "You just can't discount the possibility that they would reverse that docket again."

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has unveiled a proposal to modify the rules on college campus for adjudicating sexual assault cases, citing inequities that erode the rights of the accused. Many feminists are outraged, wary of obstacles sexual assault victims frequently face in gaining justice. ... Harvard University law professor Janet Halley wrote in a 2015 Harvard Law Review—citing “To Kill a Mockingbird” and the Emmett Till case—“American racial history is laced with vendetta-like scandals in which black men are accused of sexually assaulting white women” followed eventually by the revelation “that the accused men were not wrongdoers at all.”

Mayor-elect Adrian Perkins ['18] will takeover as Mayor of Shreveport on December 29th. Ahead of being sworn in, Perkins has announced the members of his 15 person transition team. His team includes business leaders, educators, service men and Harvard faculty members. ... The members of the Mayor-Elect's transition team are: ... Professor Gerald Frug, the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law Professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, discussed his column: "Trump’s Tweeting His Post-Presidency Defense Now."

In the past year, much as been said about a "Trump bump" for law schools, referencing an idea that more people are interested in law school since Donald Trump was elected president. Some support for the theory may be found in ABA data released Friday. ... Among the law schools with some of the largest first-year classes are Harvard Law School, which listed 566 first-year students on its 509 Report. Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University Law Center and George Washington University Law School, listed 581 and 564 first-year students in their 509 reports, respectively.

Now that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and confidant is headed to prison for crimes related to paying off two of the president’s paramours, a vexing question takes on new salience. What happens if prosecutors think that Mr Trump may have broken campaign-finance laws by directing Michael Cohen and American Media Inc (publisher of the "National Enquirer") to send hush-money cheques in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election?  ...Saying otherwise is to put presidents “above the law”. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, agrees. It is “crazy”, Mr Tribe writes, that “even the most criminally corrupt president” may be immune from indictments while in office. The OLC position is not just bad policy, he argues, it’s unconstitutional.

The architect of Obamacare warned the Affordable Care Act could die if the U.S. Supreme Court backs a ruling by a Texas judge calling the law unconstitutional — a decision that would force Massachusetts to strip coverage or pay astronomical bills. ...  Robert Greenwald, director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said nothing will change immediately as a result of the decision by the Texas judge that found the law to be unconstitutional and invalid . “This is certainly not the final word on the Affordable Care Act,” Greenwald said. “Obviously it’s going to be appealed, it’s going to be a long slog on this and other challenges to the ACA.”

The Republican-led Congress approved a massive corporate tax cut last year on the premise that executives would put the money saved to good use. Companies would build new factories. They would hire more workers. Buy new equipment. Get more efficient. Fund more research. Expand. ... Harvard law professor Jesse Fried has done extensive research on buybacks and supports them. Fried said the money spent on buybacks circulates back to workers because people reinvest the cash they get from selling shares to the company. “Shareholders take much of this cash, invest it in capital-hungry private firms, which use it to invest and hire workers,” Fried said. “And while public firms may grab the spotlight, smaller private firms employ twice as many workers and tend to be much more innovative, and can often put this cash to better use.”

...We're also going to go deep on the main question facing the Mueller probe. Is it true that a sitting President cannot be indicted? Fair statement? I would argue the answer is yes, you can. But a way better mind than mine says I have it wrong. Professor Larry Tribe has an op-ed racing around the internet and he's here to make the case. ... TRIBE: I think he doesn't know what he's talking about and he's desperate. He's obviously flailing around because he feels the walls closing in. The fact is that the constitution makes very clear that the President of the United States shall be removed from office if he is impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors, including treason and bribery.

Trump might think that he has immunity from prosecution, but Laurence Tribe explains there's nothing in the Constitution that prevents the indictment of a sitting president.

The world is ever more connected via the internet, from cars and power grids to home appliances and toys. That means ever more things are dangerously hackable, security expert Bruce Schneier writes in “Click Here to Kill Everybody.” The title is hyperbolic, but not by much. In some ways, the attack of the killer fridges has already begun. Catastrophe doesn’t have to happen on purpose. Nation states can attack each other’s electricity infrastructure, and cyber criminals seize hospital computers and threaten patients’ lives until ransom is paid. But Schneier, who is chief technology officer at IBM Resilient and a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, also worries about fumbles and surprises. Small-time hackers lose control of their malware and infect bigger systems. Threats emerge not from individually compromised devices but from the unforeseen ways they interact.

To facetiously paraphrase a line that I often hear from global warming deniers: Don't be offended, I'm just asking questions. It’s conventional wisdom that the right to free speech does not permit you to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater – but does that mean you have the right to claim there is no fire when a theater is ablaze? ... “Tempting though the idea is, I would not favor modifying Western legal systems to permit the imposition of financial liability on any individual or organization that is found to have ‘spread incorrect information about man-made climate change,’” Laurence Tribe, an author and constitutional law professor at Harvard, told Salon by email. “The key to my reason for resisting such a modification is in the word ‘found.’ If I ask myself: Whom would I trust to make an authoritative ‘finding’ about which information about a topic as complex as man-made climate change is ‘incorrect,’ I must answer: Nobody. Certainly not any public official or governmental agency or any government-designated private group. I trust the process of open uncensored dialogue among experts and lay persons to generate truthful understandings over time, especially if we enact and enforce requirements of transparency and disclosure about who is funding which assertions. But I would be deeply concerned about anything resembling the identification and empowerment of a Commissar of Truth.”

On Wednesday, Dec. 12, as President Donald Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, he implicated the president in crimes he allegedly committed during the 2016 presidential campaign. Though Trump vehemently denied any involvement and hasn't been officially accused of or charged with any crimes, it brings up the long-standing debate of what legal ramifications might be in store for the commander-in-chief as the FBI investigation into possible collusion with Russia heats up. So, can a president be indicted while in office? The short answer: There is no short answer. ...Beyond the technical procedures, constitutionally, some argue that the framers never intended for the president to be exempt from punishment. Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe wrote in a Dec. 10 Boston Globe op-ed that not having the power to indict a sitting president would be unconstitutional.

Literally meaning “economic man,” the origins of the term Homo economicusare somewhat obscure—early references can be traced to the Oxford economist C. S. Devas in 1883—but his characteristics have become all too familiar. .... These insights led to the founding of a new field, behavioral economics, which became a household name 10 years ago, after Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published the best-selling book Nudge and showed how this new understanding of human behavior could have major policy consequences. Last year, Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and promised to spend the $1.1 million in prize money “as irrationally as possible.”

President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for tax fraud and campaign finance violations for helping to orchestrate hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal. It was also announced Wednesday that prosecutors will not charge AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, for the paper's role in silencing McDougal, because the company agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. ...Jim Braude was joined by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, who made such an argument this week in a Boston Globe op-ed, and who is also the author of "To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment."

There’s more proof that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health. That’s the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science, for which researchers reviewed hundreds of scientific papers on climate change published since 2009. ..."[The paper] is a very useful piece of work and it stands in contrast to the arguments against the endangerment finding that have been offered again and again, because those arguments are rarely — if ever — based on science," says Joseph Goffman, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. Goffman worked for the EPA during the Obama administration as the senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, but was not involved in the current research.

Four generations of women, some accompanied by their husbands and children, gathered at Four Points by Sheraton on Dec. 8 for the annual Women Affirming Life Mass and Breakfast. The theme for this year's Mass was "Mary in Advent: Model for All Women Affirming Life." The celebrant was Father David Pignato, director of human formation at St. John's Seminary. ... Frances Hogan introduced the keynote speaker, Professor Mary Ann Glendon. Both Hogan and Glendon are founding members of Women Affirming Life. ...The topic of Glendon's keynote was "The Pro-Life Movement: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." She spoke of Women Affirming Life's inception in 1989 as a response to a "relentless" campaign to portray the pro-life movement as anti-women. "A key part of that idea was to show the true face of the pro-life movement," Glendon said, noting that it "has always been predominantly composed of women."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s three-tweet sequence on Michael CohenThursday morning was different from the usual presidential stream of consciousness. Compact and carefully reasoned, the tweets sound an awful lot like they were written with a lawyer standing at the writer’s shoulder. Taken together, the tweets signal that Trump and his team are genuinely concerned about the possibility of his being indicted after leaving office — totally separate from any danger of impeachment. That’s significant.