Media Mentions

President Trump's decision to block his Twitter followers for their political views is a violation of the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, saying that Trump's effort to silence his critics is not permissible because the digital space in which he engages with constituents is a public forum...Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, said he thinks the case was wrongly decided and expects it to be reversed. For a public forum to exist, the government has to own or control it, he said, but in this case, Twitter also controls Trump's account.

Federal judges appointed by Republican presidents give black defendants sentences that are, on average, six to seven months longer than the sentences they give to similar white defendants, according to a new working paper from Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School. That racial sentencing disparity is about twice as large as the one observed among judges appointed by Democrats, who give black defendants sentences that are three to four months longer than the sentences they give to white defendants with similar histories who commit similar crimes...“Overall, these results indicate that judicial ideology may be a source of the persistent and large racial and gender disparities in the criminal justice system,” Cohen and Yang conclude.

In an address to Harvard Law School graduates on Wednesday, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake sharpened his critique of President Trump and Congress, which he said “is failing its constitutional obligations to counteract the power of the president, and in so doing is dishonoring itself, at a critical moment in the life of our nation.”

...Politico reports that Trump uses two iPhones. One is Twitter-only. The other only allows him to make calls. Both are customized, issued by the White House department responsible for securing administration telecommunications. One problem identified by Politico, though, is that the Twitter-capable phone wasn’t swapped out on a monthly basis, as requested by Trump’s security team....Security expert Bruce Schneier spoke by phone with The Post and explained why, even if he adhered assiduously to those precautions, the likelihood that Trump’s communications have been compromised is high. If Trump’s calls-only device was a standard iPhone, there’s little question about it. The odds of a foreign adversary having gained access to such a device, according to Schneier? “One” — meaning 100 percent, he said. “The question is how many foreign powers.” The president could assume, he said, “that anything said on unsecured phones is known by — name your top six intelligence agencies.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Wondering what will happen if Justice Anthony Kennedy retires and President Donald Trump gets to pick his successor? The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave a good preview of that possible conservative future. In an extraordinary decision, the court barred workers from bringing collective legal action against employers if their employment contracts require individual arbitration instead. Seen purely in terms of politics, the 5-4 outcome reflected the struggle between the pro-management conservative majority and the pro-labor liberal minority. Employers don’t want class actions filed against them. By making employees sign agreements that require individual arbitration of disputes, businesses can now be sure that they won’t be taken to court when they’ve shortchanged many employees minimally — even if the collective loss to employees is significant. From the perspective of employers, the decision is a major win.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. There has been a great deal of discussion of social division and polarization in recent times, but those terms are inadequate. What besets the United States is much worse. Both the right and the left are increasingly defined by a form of Manichaeism, in which the forces of light are taken to be in a death struggle with the forces of darkness. We are in a Manichaean moment.

Harvard spent $16.4 million on advertising in 2016, tax filings show—enough to book three 30-second primetime spots on Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl LII. But the chances of Harvard actually purchasing such an advertisement are low. Walking around Harvard Square and the Greater Boston area, prospective students and tourists are hard pressed to find the typical trappings of such a sizeable budget—billboards branded with the University’s crest or posters emblazoned in crimson. In many ways, the Harvard name sells itself, according to Law School Director of Executive Education Scott A. Westfahl. Even the University’s newer revenue-generating programs, including executive education and the summer school, benefit from the brand. “I think the hardest part of my job is knowing that the Harvard brand is incredibly powerful,” Westfahl said. “We have to exceed expectations that are already really, really high.”

...Pete D. Davis ’12 [`18], who will graduate from the Law School this month, authored a report on public interest offerings at the school that has since gained widespread attention. The report, timed to coincide with the Law School’s 200th birthday, argues that while public service opportunities have increased and more graduates are opting for careers in the public sector, the school still has an obligation to further incentivize its graduates to pursue careers in public service...In an email, [John] Manning wrote that the Law School is “deeply committed to public interest” and that they “dedicate vast and growing resources to support that commitment.” Manning also pointed to statistics indicating that students in the JD Class of 2018 spent 637 hours on average performing pro bono work during their time at Harvard—more than 12 times the requirement of 50 hours. In this class alone, students logged 376,532 hours of pro bono service, according to Manning...Kenneth H. Lafler, assistant dean for student financial services at the Law School, wrote that LIPP “is among the most flexible and generous loan repayment assistance programs in existence.” “One of LIPP’s many advantages is that it allows graduates to choose when to enter and leave the program,” he added.

When Harvard Law School Constitutional Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 learned that Barack Obama—one of his “best students”—had been elected president of the United States, he reached out immediately to the President-elect to discuss how he might be of service. “The decision that we made together, with [former U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder, was that I would leave Harvard for a little while and start up a new office in the Department of Justice on an understudied and underfunded but really pervasive problem—access to justice,” Tribe said...Tribe was not alone in his decision to head to Washington. Several members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as well as professors from the Law School and the Kennedy School, also left Harvard to take on administrative positions following Obama’s election. In stark contrast, very few Harvard faculty have joined the administration of President Donald Trump.

Almost 50 years after former University President Derek C. Bok’s administration instituted a novel framework for promoting racial diversity throughout the University’s schools, the question of whether Harvard can—or should—pursue race-conscious admissions policies remains unanswered in the national discourse. As the University faces a lawsuit in federal court over their admissions policies from one direction and an investigation led by the Justice Department into these policies from another, the legacy of Bok’s efforts at diversification is on the line, according to University lawyers and affiliates...Michael J. Klarman, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, said the department’s public, formal intervention in a high-profile affirmative action case is in line with previous Justice Department actions. “I don’t think it’s unusual for an administration to weigh in on an important affirmative action case,” Klarman said. “The Reagan administration certainly weighed in against race-based affirmative action. The Carter administration had a decision on Bakke, which was the first of the affirmative action cases of the Supreme Court.”

Raj Salhotra, who will graduate with a J.D. from Harvard Law School (HLS), has always had mentors to show him the way — from his parents to professors to politicians in his native Houston. But Salhotra, 27, knows not everyone is so lucky. And he has a plan to help those less fortunate. “The responsibility of privilege is to pay it forward,” Salhotra said..Salhotra has distinguished himself at HLS, said Mark Jefferson, the School’s director of Community Engagement and Equity. Jefferson, who has known Salhotra throughout his Harvard career, said he is naturally inquisitive and respected by classmates for his ability to make connections. “I think Raj has a unique combination of keen intellectual ability and real emotional intelligence,” Jefferson said.

Last month, 253 men got new jobs. The process was highly publicized, and employers announced new hires to an audience of millions on live television. It’s likely that no one in the Cowboys’ stadium, where the 2018 NFL Draft took place, was thinking about them that way, though...But in the eyes of the law and regulatory systems, professional football players are, in fact, employees of the NFL. That means that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is responsible for overseeing and intervening in health risks to employees, could technically step in and issue rules and regulations to reduce the potential harm caused by the work they do—which, in this case, is play football. “The NFL is many things,” says Glenn Cohen, a professor of health law and bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It’s also a workplace, and it ought to be regulated the way other workplaces are.”

Bob Bauer, Jack Goldsmith and David Kris join Benjamin Wittes to discuss the sequence of events between the Justice Department, the FBI, the House intelligence committee and the White House over the last few days and the resolution arranged at the White House on Monday afternoon.

Former acting attorney general Sally Yates hit the nail on the head on Monday on “Morning Joe.” She explained, “I think what we’re seeing here is the president has taken his all-out assault of the rule of law to a new level and this time he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign. You know, that’s really shocking.”...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me: “The Court’s basic approach to this whole subject turns on the idea that intrinsically legislative activities — including all actions that form an ‘integral part of the deliberative and communicative processes by which members’ take part in committee or floor activities with respect to lawmaking or investigative functions entrusted by the Constitution to Congress — are absolutely protected from civil or criminal inquiry external to Congress. That includes voting, preparing committee reports, and conducting committee hearings.

Most people assume that a conversation with their lawyer will remain confidential. But if the conversation takes place on the phone from the New Orleans jail, it might be used as evidence of a crime. One inmate awaiting trial on drug charges mentioned to his lawyer that he had just gone through detox. The call was recorded by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s office, and his statement was used to prove that a needle the inmate was carrying when he was arrested had been used for illegal drugs, according to the inmate’s lawyer, Thomas Frampton. He was convicted of possession of drug paraphernalia. “It ended up being the critical evidence,” said Mr. Frampton, who was then a public defender in New Orleans and is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Mr. Frampton objected to the inclusion of the evidence, but the judge disagreed.

The phone call used to convict Gerard Howard lasted seven minutes. Howard made the collect call to his attorney from Orleans Parish jail shortly after his March 2015 arrest on possession of heroin and of drug paraphernalia, court records show. It began with a standard disclaimer for jail calls, saying it was subject to recording and monitoring. Then, once connected, public defender Thomas Frampton asked why Howard had been transferred to a different jail building. "Just like after detox or whatever," Howard is heard answering in a recording of the call, obtained by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Prosecutors later dropped the heroin charge, leaving Frampton confident he could prove his client's innocence with lab results showing the two syringes found on Howard were clean. But days before the trial, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office told Frampton prosecutors would use the recording of that jail call, and specifically Howard's utterance of the word "detox," as evidence of the needles being drug paraphernalia. "I was shocked they actually used it in court," recalled Frampton, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Vivek Wadhwa. When Silicon Valley Forum informed me I was to be a recipient of its 21st visionary awards, I was in disbelief. I have long been a critic of the ways of Silicon Valley and am clearly not in the same league as the 100 or so past recipients, who include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Andy Groove, and Gordon Moore. But the Valley makes its own rules.

On Sunday, in an extraordinary series of tweets, President Donald Trump declared that “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” This was in response to stories about the FBI’s use of an informant to examine ties between the Trump campaign and Russia—although the stories pointed out this was not done for political purposes. In response, the Justice Department—in what the Washington Post called “a remarkable step officials hoped might avert a larger clash between the president and federal law enforcement officials”—announced that its inspector general would look into the matter. For perspective on what all this means for the Mueller investigation and the integrity of the Justice Department, I exchanged emails with Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served in and then resigned from the George W. Bush administration’s DOJ.

As President Trump and his allies repeatedly take aim at the Justice Department investigation into his campaign’s possible links to Russia’s election meddling, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the inquiry, has mostly evaded the attacks through inventive maneuvers. To protect the inquiry, Mr. Rosenstein has agreed to meet increasingly onerous demands from Mr. Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill. But legal scholars and former law enforcement officials fear that the measures Mr. Rosenstein has resorted to could weaken the Justice Department’s historic independence, allowing the department to be used as a cudgel to attack the president’s political enemies...“Rosenstein is in the very tricky position of supervising and protecting the integrity of an investigation of the president’s associates even though the president, his boss, possesses lots of constitutional power to control investigations and is trying to wreck this one,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush.

Bloomberg Opinion Weekend Edition hosted by June Grasso. Guests:...Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist: "Sports Betting Is a Victory for States’ Rights."

...Just as Trump did with the entirely bogus “wiretapping” accusation against President Barack Obama, Trump called for the Justice Department to investigate. Here is yet another instance in which, with no factual basis, he has attempted to have investigators, whom he perceives as political enemies, investigated. (Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and co-author of “To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” tweeted: “Telling DOJ what to investigate as though it was [White House] staff — especially when the directive is clearly aimed at outing a top secret national security asset to conceal evidence of presidential wrongdoing — may well be part of an impeachable pattern.”)