Media Mentions

Facebook reveals new attacks on the 2018 U.S. Midterm elections that they describe as “consistent” with the Russian election meddling in 2016. Terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance tells Ari Melber that “the nation is under attack” and Congress must take it “seriously”. Harvard Law School’s Yochai Benkler says foreigners trying to influence U.S. Elections are “trolling us” and trying to make Americans think “our democracy is not safe”, but “largely they’re not driving the effect”.

...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and Supreme Court litigator, points out that a favorable outcome for Mueller is no slam dunk at the Supreme Court. Therefore, Tribe reasons, “he might want at least to try reaching a resolution, even if suboptimal, that doesn’t require going all the way to the Supreme Court, where he might not find five justices prepared to follow U.S. v Nixon, at least in the context of subpoenaing more than documents.”

President Trump’s lack of self-control has never been so apparent. At a time when reports suggest that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is looking at tweets for evidence of “corrupt intent’ — a necessary element of the crime of obstruction of justice — Trump serves up tweets that evidence corrupt intent...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar and Supreme Court advocate, likewise cautions that “what Trump has said about Sessions isn’t equivalent to telling the attorney general ‘You’re fired unless you direct your deputy discharge Mueller by close of business today.’ ”

An op-ed by Vartan Shadarevian `20. The White House has recently stated that it is considering revoking the security clearances of several former high ranking public officials...Such a move would be unprecedented, and the repercussions are potentially far-reaching.

It is no longer remotely newsworthy when President Donald Trump tells lies. It is, however, newsworthy when his own Department of Justice calls him out for having lied. That is essentially what happened when Benjamin Wittes, the journalist behind the blog Lawfare, filed Freedom of Information Act requests in April 2017 to find out whether there was any truth to this statement made by Trump in his February 2017 State of the Union address...Salon reached out to [Laurence] Tribe to unpack his thoughts on the deeper meaning behind both Trump's lie about immigrants and the seemingly remarkable fact that his own government has been forced to acknowledge the untruth.

An op-ed by Anupam B. Jena, Cass R. Sunstein and Tanner R. Hicks. Justice is blind — or at least that’s the ideal. Across the United States, the law is administered by a million police officers and more than 30,000 state and federal judges. While these officials usually have good intentions, there’s increasing awareness of the role that racial and other biases often play in law enforcement decisions. What’s less well known is how idiosyncratic factors can shape how people are treated.

Students and alumni of Harvard Law School appear to be divided over the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. Students at the school, where Kavanaugh taught as a visiting professor for many years, have circulated two contrasting letters in recent weeks — one praising Kavanaugh’s character and another opposing his nomination...Haley Adams [`20], a signatory of the letter opposing Kavanaugh’s nomination, wrote in an email Wednesday that the purpose of the letter was to show that a “large portion” of the Law School community did not support the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.“The letter was meant to make it clear that a large portion of HLS did not feel represented by the administration's celebration of Kavanaugh's nomination, nor by the students who spoke out lauding his teaching style,” Adams wrote.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman. The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation moved Thursday to fulfill President Trump’s promise to undo landmark Obama-era rules requiring automakers to steadily reduce greenhouse gas pollution from cars and trucks and improve fuel efficiency through 2025. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, with the biggest share coming from cars and trucks. Yet the government now plans to freeze fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards indefinitely at levels set for 2020, thwarting progress on addressing climate change. To make sure it accomplishes that goal, the Trump administration also wants to strip California of its authority to set stricter greenhouse gas standards for vehicles sold within its borders, which the state is authorized to do under a longstanding provision of the Clean Air Act.

...Not all economic and financial analysts see buybacks as problematic. “Far from being starved of resources, S&P 500 companies are at near-peak levels of investment and have huge stockpiles of cash available for even more,” argue Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang in the Harvard Business Review. “The proportion of income available for investment that went to shareholders of the 500 over the past 10 years was a modest 41.5 percent—less than half the amount claimed by critics.” Plus, if buybacks merely transferred money from businesses to investors who then reallocated that money to other, more dynamic businesses, the overall effect on the economy might be muted.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Whether something seems bad, unethical or horrifying depends on what else is happening out there. That helps explain why we often fail to appreciate amazing social progress — and why we can miss it when things are falling apart. To understand these points, consider a stunning new paper by a team of psychologists, led by David Levari of Harvard University. Their central idea has an unlovely name: “prevalence-induced concept change.” Their findings, based on a series of experiments, are profoundly reassuring in some respects, but also ominous in light of current political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Rudy Giuliani can’t seem to get the law right. The president’s lawyer suggested Monday on CNN and Fox News that Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime even if he colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign by encouraging them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server. “I don't even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani put it. “You start analyzing the crime – the hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking." That's just wrong.

By Joshua A. Geltzer and Matthew G. Olsen. These days, it takes little imagination — none at all, in fact — to conceive of a hostile foreign actor hungry for detailed information about millions of U.S. voters and determined to undermine Americans’ confidence in their democratic institutions. What does require just a bit of vision is recognizing that there is a fast-approaching opportunity for such actors to advance their agendas: the upcoming census. That’s because the 2020 Census will be the first electronic census in U.S. history. Going digital will enable the process to become cheaper and more inclusive — both good things. But it also provides the opportunity for bad actors to exploit any cybersecurity vulnerabilities that this digitized approach might generate.

...The moves against China are part of Mr. Trump’s wider effort to upend longstanding U.S. policy on trade and also the international institutions and agreements that govern trade. Whether the administration’s shift is a much-needed corrective or a disastrous reversal depends in large part on how one views the original decision to bring China into the international trade regime...Greater economic growth led to greater political control, said Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School whose research focuses on China and the WTO. China’s leaders believed that they needed unchallenged authority to carry out economic reform in the face of opposition from entrenched interests. According to Mr. Wu, the point of freer markets, in their view, was to encourage competition and prevent the system from becoming sclerotic, not to bolster individual rights.

To prove that Mr. Manafort defrauded banks, prosecutors need to show he deliberately lied about financial facts, said Nancy Gertner, a former United States District Judge and a professor at Harvard Law School.

The Trump administration has drafted a plan to freeze fuel-efficiency standards for the nation’s cars and light trucks, reversing the Obama-era push for cleaner vehicles and marking one of President Trump’s most significant regulatory rollbacks to date. As part of the far-reaching proposal expected to be released this week, the White House will also attempt to revoke California’s ability to set stricter tailpipe standards than those of the federal government...“It’s had a transformational impact,” said Jody Freeman, an expert in environmental law and a professor at Harvard Law School. “It was directly responsible for many advancements that make cars better, stronger and more efficient.”

...With the retirement of the Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who often served as a swing vote on the court, Mr. Trump has nominated a judge to succeed him, Brett Kavanaugh, who is considered more reliably conservative. “They may well feel emboldened by the fact that Kennedy is retired, and they will likely see more conservative justices,” said Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard and a former adviser to President Barack Obama. However, Ms. Freeman noted that previous efforts to pre-empt such state-level authority have failed, a fact that also concerns Mr. Wheeler, according to people familiar with his thinking. “We’ve never seen a state-level waiver being revoked, and it’s not clear how that would work,” Ms. Freeman said.

There’s trouble in Trumpland, and California is caught in the middle..Revoking the waiver “would be unprecedented,” says Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor. “There have been dozens of waivers that California has gotten over the decades since the 1970s, and [the EPA] has never revoked one.”

Contemporary liberalism holds itself aloof from the deeper sources of human flourishing in religion, family, tradition, and culture and has become a fideistic dogma of choice and autonomy for their own sakes...The brilliant Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule tells us that liberalism is sacramental in character, and is a public ritual of overcoming superstition and bigotry in the name of reason and rationality. It needs a villain, someone to publicly condemn as a defeated enemy on its unending path to progress. Vermeule says liberalism needs enemies and voraciously — that is, rationally — searches for and destroys them. Liberalism’s gallows are always swinging.

A book review by Cass Sunstein. Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government. In such a time, we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.

The Post reports on the resolution introduced by 11 members of the House Freedom Caucus to impeach — yes, impeach — Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein...“It’s a PR stunt that nobody who knows anything about impeachment could take seriously,” says constitutional scholar Larry Tribe. “But it will do great harm anyway by contributing to the degradation of the impeachment power, making it harder to use when it is truly needed to rein in a would be-dictator.”

If substantiated, Michael Cohen’s new assertion—that Donald Trump knew in advance about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Kremlin-connected individuals—would prove that the Trump campaign sought to aid a Russian-influence operation aimed at putting Trump in office. But Cohen’s word on its own is not enough to prove anything...“I think the implications are both political and legal,” said Alex Whiting, a law professor at Harvard and a former federal prosecutor. “Trump’s public denials that he knew about the meeting are not themselves criminal, even if he knew them to be false. But they could be part of a larger obstruction-of-justice case nonetheless. Mueller could allege that Trump’s false statements were part of an effort to orchestrate a false narrative that would be fed to investigators.”