Media Mentions

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that a Salvadoran woman who came to the U.S. in 2014 to escape an abusive husband did not qualify for asylum under United States law. An immigration court had previously granted her asylum, allowing her to remain in the country legally, but Sessions reconsidered the finding, as part of a broader rethinking of whether or not victims of domestic abuse can qualify for protection under U.S. asylum law. The decision means that the U.S. can now begin to turn away tens of thousands of women who arrive in this country every year, seeking safety from violence and abuse at home. “He could be repealing sixty to seventy per cent of asylum jurisprudence,” Deborah Anker, an immigration expert at Harvard Law School, told me, speaking about Sessions, before the decision was announced. “Its ramifications are extraordinary.”

An op-ed by Ian Samuel and Leah Litman. Earlier today, the Justice Department filed a document in a case about the Affordable Care Act that was so radical, and so self-evidently without merit, that career lawyers in that agency would not sign their names to it. In fact, the document is such a transparent embarrassment that three career lawyers involved in the case withdrew their appearance before it was filed, presumably to avoid the taint of being listed on a docket where it appeared. Reading the filing is enough to explain why none of them could stomach it. The document is not so much a brief as the establishing shots of a heist.

The Trump administration's latest bid to boost troubled coal and nuclear plants is certain to spark a legal war if it's ever finalized. After details of a rescue proposal leaked ahead of a National Security Council meeting Friday, energy experts set to work unpacking the legal issues and gaming out potential litigation scenarios. The draft memo out of the Department of Energy, first published by Bloomberg News, proposes using two federal laws focused on emergencies and wartime needs to extend the life of coal and nuclear power plants at risk of retiring soon...While federal courts have issued decisions about contract disputes and other specific issues under the law, they haven't reached any broad rulings about the scope of authority the DPA gives DOE, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting and Renato Mariotti. How strong is the evidence that Paul Manafort tampered with witnesses in his criminal case, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller now alleges in his motion to revoke Manafort’s bail or modify his conditions of release? Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare claims that the evidence is “thin,” and on the basis of that conclusion engages in a bit of “speculation” (his word) that Mueller is feeling “pressure” from President Donald Trump, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or the public to move more quickly, and is therefore seeking to “ramp up the pressure” on Manafort in a seemingly desperate bid to get him to cooperate. We disagree.

For decades, President Trump has presented himself as a master dealmaker. "I've made a lot of deals," Trump told reporters last month. "I know deals, I think, better than anybody knows deals." That was part of the shtick on Trump's long-running TV show, The Apprentice. And it's the subject of his bestselling 1987 book, The Art of the Deal..."Although his Art of the Deal sold a lot of copies, I don't think he's a very impressive negotiator," said Robert Mnookin, who directs the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. Mnookin, who wrote his own book on negotiation called Bargaining with the Devil, says Trump often goes from tough and adversarial one minute to ingratiating the next. He used to call Kim Jong Un "Little Rocket Man." Now he praises the dictator as "very honorable." The president calls that flexibility. Mnookin says it makes Trump hard to trust.

...So, when during an Inc42 Facebook Live AMA, academic, researcher, writer, and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa painted a grim picture of a world in which social media has gone all twisted, I had a #ThursdayThrowback to the Netflix series Black Mirror. Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow and Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Black Mirror is “a sci-fi anthology series that explores a twisted, high-tech near-future where humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide,” and Wadhwa’s view that social media has come to a point where too much technology is ruining our lives seemed quite in line with the situations Black Mirror depicts.

Harvard Law School professor Larry Tribe discusses his new book, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” which explores when, if ever, U.S. Presidents should be impeached.

Students at Yale Law School and 13 of the nation’s other top legal institutions made waves last month when they announced that they would require law firms interviewing on campus to complete a survey and openly disclose whether they will require summer associates to submit to forced arbitration provisions and related nondisclosure agreements. On Monday, students from those law schools released the results of that survey, which found that, while many firms will not require their summer associates to sign arbitration agreements, some are still pushing such deals on their young legal talent...“Almost half of the firms who received the survey—nearly two hundred—have decided to hide behind a wall of secrecy,” said a statement from Molly Coleman [`20], a rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School and one of the organizers of the campaign. “Especially in the #MeToo era, we are disheartened that they are unwilling to take a simple step to engage on this important issue.”

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ramped up the pressure on Paul Manafort on Friday, releasing a new indictment accusing President Trump’s former campaign chairman of obstructing justice and conspiring to do so by contacting potential witnesses in his case. Manafort was already facing two rounds of previous indictments, starting in October, with nearly two dozen charges of financial crimes, including tax evasion and bank fraud related to his lobbying for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to face trial in Virginia next month and in Washington later this year...Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal prosecutor who has written about the special counsel case with Mariotti, said Mueller is moving forward “by the book.” “There is no overcharging, no nefarious strategy,” he said. “This is how it’s done day in, day out, in federal court.”

Hundreds of the city’s black and Latino kids have found a pipeline to success that Mayor de Blasio doesn’t mention...Their secret? A handful of nonprofit organizations scour the five boroughs to identify and recruit the brightest kids of color, put them through rigorous summer and weekend classes, and push them to excel...Caribbean-born Michael Thomas [`19] was shuttled into Manhattan’s Trinity School for the program while attending 6th grade in a Canarsie public school. Through Prep, he was admitted into Dalton in 7th grade, where he became a “peer leader” and football team captain. Thomas has since graduated from Princeton University and now goes to Harvard Law School. In February, he was elected the 132nd president of the Harvard Law Review — a post once held by Barack Obama. “Above and beyond the fantastic teachers and its rigorous academic program, the organization’s greatest power is its ability to raise expectations,” Thomas told The Post. “Though I didn’t always know that I wanted to pursue a law degree, Prep did everything in its power to help me reach my aspirations.”

Computers will keep getting smarter. And so must US workers, if they want to hang onto their jobs. That was the consensus of politicians, academics, and entrepreneurs who discussed the disruptive effects of technology at two panel discussions sponsored by the Boston Globe Friday afternoon. Although the panelists stressed that better education will help ensure that US workers don’t lose out to computers and robots, Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun warned that today’s colleges aren’t prepared to deliver the kind of training workers will need...Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford said the Trump administration hasn’t slashed science and technology funding as much as she feared, but added, “There really isn’t anybody in the West Wing who is qualified to give advice on science and technology policy. Unless we have that, it’s hard to see that the United States is going to make a lot of progress.”

Crooked.com Editor in Chief Brian Beutler talks to Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of To End a Presidency about constitutional law, the history of impeachment, and whether Republicans have made themselves immune from it.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has temporarily halted relieving the debt of some student borrowers who were defrauded by the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges, after a federal judge found her department misused earnings data to calculate loan forgiveness...The halt came after Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of Federal District Court in San Francisco found that the department had violated the Privacy Act by sharing student borrower information, such as Social Security numbers and birth dates, with the Social Security Administration to obtain earnings data. The judge ordered the Education Department to end the practice and its collection of Corinthian student debts...Judge Kim’s ruling resulted from a class-action lawsuit filed by the Project on Predatory Student Lending of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and the group Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, which challenged Ms. DeVos’s partial-relief system shortly after it was announced. They argued that the new policy was arbitrary, capricious and illegal...“The court has already ruled that the Department of Education must immediately stop using its illegal partial denial rule,” said Eileen Connor, litigation director for the Project on Predatory Student Lending.

For nearly a year, President Trump has been relentlessly attacking his handpicked attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation that has so nettled him. And so in that sense, his tweet on Tuesday morning was simply the latest in a long string. “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined … and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!”...Still, even some scholars who are not on Mr. Trump’s payroll argue that the legal situation is not that clear-cut, even if the intent of Tuesday’s tweet was. The president, in this view, does not need to browbeat Mr. Sessions about ending the investigation when he could simply order it scuttled on his own. “Yes, that is an explicit statement that Trump wanted an attorney general who would shut down the Russia investigation and is mad at Sessions for recusing himself and not shutting it down,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush.

With the president and his lawyers claiming he is shielded from prosecution and simultaneously able to pardon himself for any federal crime, are there any checks on Donald Trump’s actions at all from the courts? And what happens if the courts rule against him on a matter he believes could threaten his presidency or even his liberty? As Trump’s claims of overarching, even regal powers have grown more fervid in recent weeks, those questions have become increasingly worrisome to constitutional experts...“There certainly is such a worry,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Nikolas Bowie. Ever since NFL owners announced last month that they plan to fine players who protest on the field during the national anthem, critics have conducted a scavenger hunt of sorts looking for evidence that the NFL’s policy is unconstitutional. Benjamin Sachs has written that the First Amendment, which generally applies only to governments, should apply to the NFL’s policy because the policy was the product of demands by government officials, including the president. Daniel Hemel has suggested that the First Amendment might apply to the NFL’s stadiums because of all the government subsidies used to pay for them. But these critics may be looking for unconstitutionality in the wrong place: It’s a much clearer case that the NFL policy violates a host of state constitutions.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Would you like your doctor to give you the results of genetic tests, informing you if you are susceptible to serious diseases, such as cancer and heart disease? Before long, that question is going to be relevant to millions of people. Primary-care doctors will increasingly be in a position to offer genetic testing as part of routine care – just as they check your blood pressure and cholesterol levels. In most contexts, it’s tempting to think: the more information, the better. But that’s much too simple.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As more and more of our speech takes place on social media, courts are beginning to experiment with expanding the First Amendment, proposing that its protection of political speech applies even in privately controlled virtual spaces. The most recent example is a federal court in New York that held last month that President Trump cannot block anyone from following his Twitter account because it functions as a public forum. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the First Amendment has ever been applied to a private platform. On the surface, this apparent expansion of free speech may seem sensible, even exciting. After all, if social media is where we do our political talking, it would seem logical to bring the Constitution to bear there.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Win by animus; lose by animus. That’s the message of the highly anticipated Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday that a baker could not be found liable for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had treated him with “hostility” based on his religious beliefs. The decision, however, is not as bad for gay rights as it could have been. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, has spent the past 25 years developing a theory of gay rights according to which the government could not treat gay people with animus, but must respect the equal dignity of all. In this opinion, he applied a version of the same theory to the Christian baker who was found to have violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination law – and found that the baker had been subject to hostility.

This week brought some interesting developments out of Big Law that will play out in August as firms flock to campuses to recruit the next crop of summer associates. First was news that Quinn Emanuel is returning to on-campus interviewing after a six-year absence. After foregoing OCI in 2012, the firm nixed its summer associate program in 2015 and instead recruited third-year law students and former federal clerks. But now Quinn Emanuel says that it doesn’t want to miss out on promising 2Ls with an interest in litigation...So what does this all mean for the upcoming recruitment cycle? I reached out to Harvard Law School assistant dean for career services Mark Weber—who has been placing Harvard student in jobs for nearly 20 years—for his thoughts. He was enthusiastic about those developments, but let’s start with Quinn Emanuel, which has Harvard on the list of 19 campuses it’s hitting. (Harvard is one of the firm’s biggest feeders.)

In closing 8,000 stores for anti-bias training last week, Starbucks aimed to demonstrate that it’s serious about banishing racism and other forms of prejudice from its coffee shops. But the company’s high-profile move also prompted a moment of self-reflection among local business owners: Could the kind of ugly display of discrimination that occurred at a Starbucks in Philadelphia this spring happen at their coffee counters? Some are taking action to ensure that it won’t...David Hoffman, who teaches a course in diversity and dispute resolution at Harvard Law School, said the demand for cultural sensitivity and implicit-bias training has taken off in recent months. Lawyers, mental health professionals, and human resources consultants are responding with a growing array of training options, he said. “Part of the upsurge in interest comes from the political environment, the presidential election, and the Black Lives Matter movement, and another part of it is that a younger cohort is entering the workforce” — people who are more attuned to diversity issues, Hoffman said.