Media Mentions

An op-ed by Eve Howe `21. Many reserve the honorific "hero" for those in the armed services. For them, a hero fearlessly charges into battle, ignoring all risk of death in service of their country. I served as an officer in the United States Navy for five years before coming to Harvard Law School, but I was never a hero. I was never deployed, never even touched a weapon, and never had to make a personal choice between life and liberty. Everything changed when I came out as transgender. Now, the battlefield is America, and I am on the front line, fighting for my life and rights. Transgender lives and rights are under attack. And whether or not I choose to fight this war, I will still face its consequences.

...At the same ceremony, Andrew Leon Hanna [`19] collected the £15,000 Bracken Bower Prize for the best proposal for a business book by an author aged under 35. His book, Twenty-Five Million Sparks, will explore how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas emerge from refugee camps and communities.

The students attended institutions with pragmatic names like the Minnesota School of Business and others whose branding evoked ivy-draped buildings and leafy quads, like Corinthian Colleges. Tens of thousands of them say they are alike in one respect: They were victims of fraud, left with useless degrees and crushing debts. Now the government program meant to forgive the federal loans of cheated students has all but stopped functioning...“This rule is only as good as the administration’s intent to implement it,” said Toby Merrill, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented dozens of borrowers in lawsuits against schools and the Education Department.

Sometime during the night of Oct. 16, 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eliminated more than 80 climate change web pages — many of the last vestiges to the agency's online recognition of climate change..."They're protecting themselves from scrutiny — an uninformed public is key to shielding them from scrutiny," Joe Goffman, a former EPA senior counsel in the Office of Air and Radiation, said in an interview.

After Jeff Sessions' removal, Legal scholar Laurence Tribe warns of a constitutional crisis.

The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, once espoused the view that the courts “are supposed to be the inferior branch” and criticized the Supreme Court’s power to review legislative and executive acts and declare them unconstitutional, the lifeblood of its existence as a coequal branch of government...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said that Mr. Whitaker’s expressed views of the Constitution and the role of the courts “are extreme and the overall picture he presents would have virtually no scholarly support” and would be “destabilizing” to society if he used the power of the attorney general to advance them. Simultaneously criticizing the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review while criticizing cases where it declined to strike down laws regulating economic and health insurance matters was a sign of an “internally contradictory” and “ignorant” philosophy, Mr. Tribe said.

An article by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. The Acting Attorney General is in a position to seriously undermine the Russia investigation. He could potentially take several steps behind closed doors without the public being able to know in a timely manner. Other steps would be immediately visible. In the final analysis, the principal constraints on the Acting Attorney General if he is considering ways to undercut the investigation are the degree to which that individual is concerned about the personal repercussions of violating the most fundamental norms of his profession, the longer term damage to the institutions of justice, and any political blowback from Congress or the public.

Last week, the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School published a digital database of case law documents dating from 1658 to 2018. This initiative, the Caselaw Access Project, has worked for years to digitize all the documents, which consist of more than 40 million pages. We commend the Law School for making this massive trove of legal information available to the Harvard community and the public at large. Such a project is important for increasing legal transparency. As the project’s director, Adam Ziegler, noted, the entire project’s purpose was to address the “real need for ready access to court opinions.” Indeed, the finished project accomplishes that goal, providing access that stretches far in time and scope. Over three hundred and fifty years’ worth of case law documents from many areas of the U.S. judicial system — on the federal, state, and territorial levels — are now available.

The 2018 midterm elections brought significant gains for Democrats, who retook the House of Representatives and snatched several governorships from the grip of Republicans. But some were left questioning why Democrats suffered a series of setbacks that prevented the party from picking up even more seats and, perhaps most consequentially, left the US Senate in Republican hands...“The rise of minority rule in America is now unmistakable,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Especially with a sitting president who won a majority in the electoral college [in 2016] while receiving roughly 3m fewer votes than his opponent, and a supreme court five of whose nine justices were nominated by Republican presidents who collectively received fewer popular votes than their Democratic opponents and were confirmed by Senates similarly skewed.”

Senior Republicans led a chorus of public warnings that the special counsel Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue his Russia investigation after Donald Trump finally fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions....Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Trump’s replacement of Sessions with Whitaker was arguably an impeachable offence in itself. “This rule of law crisis has been a slow-motion train wreck for a long time,” said Tribe.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Jeff Sessions’s term as U.S. attorney general has ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper. In two years, he managed to do significant damage to the independence and standing of the Department of Justice. Yet astonishingly, despite this dubious accomplishment, Sessions also completely failed to satisfy the wishes of his principal, President Donald Trump. You wouldn’t think it was possible to pull off the double feat of alienating both the people who work for you and the person you work for, but Sessions was up to the task.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Looking for the meaning of the midterms? President Donald Trump has defined it in a tweet, threatening a criminal investigation of Democrats if the House Democratic majority uses its powers to investigate him. This statement by the president comes close to a total repudiation of the norms of democratic governance.

The Northern District of California’s new procedural guidance for class action settlements is among the most detailed in the nation, prompting welcome relief to critics but raising fresh concerns for some practitioners...“It’s been my experience that the judges in the Northern District of California have been more attentive to these issues than others in the country,” said William Rubenstein, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Jack J. Lew ’78, Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff under former U.S. President Barack Obama, spoke Wednesday at Harvard Law School about how his Jewish background and beliefs have informed his political pursuits. Lew argued that public servants’ commitment to the nation’s interests should take precedence over their personal religious beliefs...After his lecture, Lew held a public conversation with Law School professor Noah R. Feldman ’92. The two discussed how Democrats and Republicans alike can draw on the same set of religious beliefs when defending their divergent political views.

John Hopkins University professor Martha S. Jones spoke about the history of birthright citizenship in the United States at an event held at the Harvard Law School Wednesday. The talk, hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, garnered a crowd of about 75 attendees. Jones, who teaches history, also discussed her book “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” which she published in May. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Tomiko Brown-Nagin introduced Jones and said the topic of the talk is “timely” given President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that he is considering an executive order that would end birthright citizenship in the United States.

...To gain a sense of how the election played out and what the results may mean going forward, the Gazette interviewed Harvard faculty members who study political history...and election law (Guy-Uriel Charles, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School). Below, they evaluate the results and what those may herald for the 2020 presidential race..."I was surprised and pleased that voters in Florida opted to restore voting rights to ex-felons who have completed their sentences. In fact, there was additional good news as voters in Michigan and Nevada decided to make voting easier in their states by adopting same-day registration and registering voters when they obtain or renew their drivers’ licenses."

An op-ed by Stephen B. Burbank, Richard D. Parker and Lucas A. Powe Jr. The rule of law requires friends who are willing to ignore the partisan din that afflicts our institutions. In that spirit, 20 years ago, we participated in a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court of the United States to reject a claim of privilege by President Bill Clinton, who was seeking to avoid civil litigation alleging sexual misconduct while he was governor of Arkansas. The Supreme Court did reject Clinton’s claim of immunity, vindicating the principle that no person is above the law. Now, President Donald Trump is appealing from an order denying his motion to dismiss a civil case brought against him. The plaintiff, Sumner Zervos, alleges that, while a private citizen, Trump defamed her when he called her a liar for accusing him of sexual misconduct. The president asserts that he has a constitutional privilege that protects him against civil litigation in state court, whether or not the claims relate to his official conduct.

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right? What process lets even the most outlandish conspiracy notions survive and flourish in the right’s echo-chamber ecosystem, in a way they don’t come close to doing elsewhere? Yochai Benkler is a Harvard law professor, the co-director of the university’s center for studying the internet and society, and co-author of a new book with the unmistakably alarming title “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” The book is a work of anatomy, dissecting how this deep disequilibrium is imperiling the nation’s civic and public life. Benkler has also rethought the part that social media play in all of this, beginning with our perceptions of what free speech has come to mean in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

Harvard Law School is home to the world’s largest academic law library, with more than 42,000 volumes. So why not just put it all online for anyone to access?... But let me back up and explain how the database came to be, as described to me by Adam Ziegler, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. Library head Jonathan Zittrain first came up with the idea in 2013, and the lab established a partnership with legal research platform Ravel Law to get it off the ground...“At almost every level, what we were doing was the first time anyone had done it,” Ziegler told me.

Judges have selected three book proposals to go forward to the final of the 2018 Bracken Bower Prize for young business writers. The finalists’ proposed books would tackle diverse challenges: how to create the pre-conditions for positive coincidences; the emergence of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas from refugee camps and communities; and how to integrate people with disabilities or learning and cognitive differences into the modern workplace. The finalists are: ...Andrew Leon Hanna [`19] for Twenty-Five Million Sparks...A panel of expert judges selected the three proposals from a shortlist of entries, drawn from the range of titles submitted for this year’s £15,000 prize, which is open to authors aged under 35. The winner will be announced on November 12 at a dinner in London

Samantha Bee has a new ice cream flavor, and she’s using it to teach her audience about constitutional originalism and campaign finance reform. On a special midterms election episode on Monday, the Full Frontal host dressed up in Colonial-era garb to talk to former FEC chair Ann Ravel and Harvard professor Larry Lessig about what the framers of the United States Constitution thought about money in politics. Both experts agreed that the founders who opposed Parliament’s dependence on the king would not approve of corporate lobbyists influencing members of Congress.