Media Mentions

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.

President Donald Trump might end one conflict with Congress over funding for his long-sought Mexican border wall by invoking national emergency powers, but he’s almost certain to ignite another, with repercussions Republicans may regret in the future. ... "Something that supposedly becomes a ‘national emergency’ only when Congress fails to give the president what he demands, but hasn’t been an emergency until that point, is obviously no emergency at all,” said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent Trump critic. "The claim that there’s an immigration crisis at the border is totally fake -- apart from the humanitarian crisis created by President Trump himself."

The enduring legacies of Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Patricia Roberts Harris and countless other graduates of the Howard University School of Law (HUSL) are on full display this year as the historic school celebrates its Sesquicentennial anniversary. ... Dr. David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said that Howard Law School is a critical piece of legal framework in the country.

QUESTION: Can Congress pass a spending bill to end the shutdown without the President? ANSWER: Yes. ... Under Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution, the president can veto a bill, but Congress can override the president's veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers. The clause is meant "to strike a balance between Congress and the Presidency," Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School explained.  "The Framers’ view was that they wanted a check on Congress," Amanda Frost, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, said. "The Framers were worried about Congress having too much power, though for the last 50 years I believe the problem is that the President has accrued too much power."

... In 2012, the Iowa legislature passed a law banning the collection of evidence of crimes like those. And Iowa isn’t alone. Several states have passed — and many others have considered — so-called “ag gag” laws, which criminalize the undercover investigations that reveal abuses on farms. Legislators have been forthright about their motives too. They’re worried that evidence of what goes on on these farms will outrage Americans — so they want to ban it. ... That means that in practice, no misconduct can ever be proven on only the first day of investigating. “Say you have a DEA agent who spends months undercover to infiltrate a drug cartel,” Chris Green, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Program, told me. “This is like requiring them to reveal themselves the first time they see a $5 drug buy.” You’ll never get to the heart of the abuses that way — which, of course, may be exactly what the industry, which backs quick-reporting, wants.

Two blockbuster stories have cast an entirely new light, and new urgency, on the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Muller III. ... Mueller inherited the FBI investigation, meaning whatever the FBI learned or concluded went into his bank of evidence in an investigation that was both a criminal and a counterintelligence inquiry. Constitutional scholar Larry Tribe tells me, “Under settled FBI protocol, no such investigation, whose purposes include protecting America from future attack, can be opened without a strong evidentiary basis and careful internal clearance or closed without either effectively ‘neutralizing’ its target — an impossibility with a sitting president as long as he remains in office — or clearing that target.”

House Democrats are aggressively exploring a possible legal challenge should President Trump declare a national emergency to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall, scouring federal law and court precedents — including a recent attempt by a Republican-controlled House to undermine the Obama-era health-care law. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, said in an email that the Burwell ruling “does indeed provide a strong argument the House could make to support its standing to sue President Trump if he were to carry out this threat to spend money pursuant to a declaration of national emergency.”