Media Mentions

Lawrence talks with Laurence Tribe about Tribe’s view that Trump’s promised pardon to a right-wing commentator who pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions is "an elephant-whistle to Michael Cohen and all who know damning things about Trump” to protect the President- or else.

On the May 26 episode of Slate’s Supreme Court podcast Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Laurence Tribe about the philosophical, practical, and tactical considerations surrounding Donald Trump’s possible impeachment. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard, is the co-author of To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.

The single mother whose touching Instagram message and photographs went viral after she graduated from Harvard Law School last month, her daughter in her arms, hopes that her experience will serve as a reminder to others that they, too, can achieve their goals — no matter the odds. Briana Williams, 24, said she didn’t expect her recent social media post to ricochet around the Internet like it has (it has been liked more than 22,000 times and she’s amassed thousands of new followers), but she has been moved by the outpouring of support and encouragement she’s received since sharing images from the commencement ceremony at the prestigious law school in May. “I never share my personal thoughts on Instagram — I’m not open with my audience,” she said in a telephone interview with the Globe. “I didn’t know I could have this kind of effect on other people.”

An interview with Noah Feldman. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same sex couple's wedding. The decision has been called narrow, and does not address some of the larger free speech or religious liberty issues that were heard during oral arguments.

Before President Trump authorized U.S. airstrikes on three Syrian military sites in April, the Justice Department advised him that the strikes were legal because he had “reasonably” determined they were “in the national interest” and would not constitute a war, according to a department document released Friday. In a broad interpretation of presidential powers, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) told Trump that he did not need congressional authorization...Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, who served as assistant attorney general in the OLC and special counsel to the Defense Department under President George W. Bush, noted that the new Justice Department document also outlines an expanded definition of “national interest” that again dates to the Obama administration. The OLC opinion, signed by Assistant Attorney General Steven A. Engel of the OLC, refers to a previously unpublished Obama-era opinion that approves “an interest in mitigating humanitarian disaster as a basis for unilateral presidential force,” Goldsmith wrote Friday on the Lawfare blog, even if no Americans are affected by it.

Paul Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, has been trying to meet the terms of his $10 million bail agreement since he was first indicted by the special counsel Robert Mueller last October. And he seemed close to making it until Mueller's office accused him on Monday of attempting to influence witness testimony as part of the Russia investigation. The special counsel subsequently asked a court to revoke or revise Manafort's conditions of release...Moreover, judges tend to view witness tampering as a serious offense because it goes to the integrity of the justice system. If prosecutors introduce the charge at Manafort's trial, "it will change the feel of the case with respect to the judge," said Alex Whiting, a former assistant US attorney from Boston and Washington, DC who is now a professor at Harvard Law School.

A federal judge has blocked Education Secretary Besty DeVos’ plan to force more than 60,000 defrauded students to repay loans for education programs that some borrowers describe as “worthless.”...Plaintiffs’ lawyer Eileen Connor, of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, praised the ruling as an important step in providing relief to students who the school duped into wasting valuable time and money on a “valueless” education. “These people were targeted specifically because they were economically vulnerable,” Connor said in an interview. “The department’s delay and denial of loan cancellation is harming them in a way that can’t be repaired, and that harm accrues on a daily basis.”

If Donald Trump prevails in his clash with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, one of his legacies may be to redefine the limits of presidential power -- a constitutional concept so amorphous that even his own lawyers’ views on the matter appear to evolve. A private letter from Trump’s legal team to Mueller, written in January, asserted what amounts to an unlimited right to halt federal investigations and issue pardons, concluding that a president cannot obstruct justice...In an email, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of Trump, called the letter "flatly wrong legally and indefensible constitutionally." "Trump’s lawyers’ sweepingly Nixonian claim of unbounded presidential power is inconsistent with the core American principle that no-one is above the law," Tribe wrote on Twitter. "It would mean that even pardoning someone in return for a bribe is just fine. That’s simply wrong."

...And then, for 50 years — a half-century of memories and myths — men and women of a certain age, and millions of Americans uncertain of what might have been, have disagreed about the meaning of Robert F. Kennedy’s life but have a curious, almost eerie, agreement about the meaning of that presidential campaign. Many he touched, and even some who were not moved by his insurgency against a sitting president of his own party, cursed his death at the time — and today almost inevitably employ a four-letter word to describe the meaning of his final years...“He represented the possibility of hope in politics,’’ said Martha Minow, former dean of the Harvard Law School.

Last year, I predicted the government’s case to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner would most likely be the antitrust case of the decade. That may prove to be an understatement. Since then, a pipeline has filled with megadeals awaiting the case’s outcome, which the judge presiding over the fight has said will come in less than two weeks...A number of influential antitrust experts have rallied to the government’s side, and some, like Harvard Law School’s Susan Crawford, have gone so far as to predict a Justice Department victory...“What Trump expressed in the campaign is the feeling of the American people that five companies have too much control,” said Ms. Crawford, author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” The case “raises issues that hit both American pocketbooks and ideals.”

Ask people with deep knowledge of the US justice department about the damage Donald Trump might be doing to the country, and the conversation quickly flips back to Watergate. Following Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to pull the plug on a special prosecutor who turned out to be on to something, the need for investigators to work free from White House interference was recognized by the public and reinforced by elected officials. But now Trump is president, the public can seem apathetic or amnesiac and the norms governing justice department independence are being tested...“We’ve never had a president attack the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that work for him in this way,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former assistant attorney general under George W Bush, said in an email.

President Trump’s lawyers have for months quietly waged a campaign to keep the special counsel from trying to force him to answer questions in the investigation into whether he obstructed justice, asserting that he cannot be compelled to testify and arguing in a confidential letter that he could not possibly have committed obstruction because he has unfettered authority over all federal investigations. In a brash assertion of presidential power, the 20-page letter — sent to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and obtained by The New York Times — contends that the president cannot illegally obstruct any aspect of the investigation into Russia’s election meddling because the Constitution empowers him to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”...“We don’t know what the law is on the intersection between the obstruction statutes and the president exercising his constitutional power to supervise an investigation in the Justice Department,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. “It’s an open question.”

If the special counsel Robert Mueller finds substantial evidence that President Donald Trump was involved in criminal activity, the fight could play out on one of two battlefields: Congress or the courts. And in recent weeks, Trump's defense team has made it clear that it is prepared to duke it out with the special counsel in either arena...Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, pointed out that while the question of whether a president can be subpoenaed to testify in a criminal proceeding is unresolved, most legal experts believe he can and that a court of law would most likely come to the same conclusion. He also pointed to the memo's bombshell admission that Trump dictated a misleading statement his son, Donald Trump Jr., put out in response to reports about his meeting with a Russian lawyer at the height of the campaign.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. Just when we have finally come to see the opioid crisis as both a public health and public safety problem, Governor Charlie Baker and others would have us careen in the opposite direction. Take the case of Manuel Soto-Vittini of Peabody. Salem Superior Court Judge Timothy Feeley sentenced Soto-Vittini to probation for possession with intent to distribute 15 grams of heroin and a small amount of cocaine. Soto-Vittini had no criminal convictions, just a dismissed drug-possession charge from a decade ago, when he was 22.

The New York Times reports on an encounter between President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in March 2017...If the report is accurate, Mueller is looking at a possible obstruction of justice claim based on conduct over a substantial period of time — from Trump’s failed effort to extract a pledge of loyalty from former FBI director James B. Comey, to asking Comey to lay off fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, to Comey’s firing, to Trump holding a threat of imaginary “tapes” over Comey’s head, to drafting on Air Force One a phony explanation of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Pushing for Sessions to reverse his recusal, like any other single action, is unlikely to support an obstruction charge...The fight over Sessions’s recusal marks another instance in which the White House has reached down into the Justice Department in ways no other administration has done. “Asking Sessions to ‘unrecuse’ himself despite his conflict of interest, in palpable violation of the Department of Justice recusal rules, can only have one purpose: the corrupt obstruction of justice,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last month the F.B.I. issued an urgent warning: Everyone with home internet routers should reboot them to shed them of malware from “foreign cyberactors.” Putting aside the strangeness that for once power-cycling a device could perform an effective exorcism upon it, the episode reveals more than just the potential for disruption of internet access for people using equipment they never expect to have to physically manage. It also underscores how unprepared we are to manage downstream-networked devices and appliances — the “internet of things” — that are vulnerable to attack. A longstanding ethos of internet development lets anyone build and share new code and services, with consequences to be dealt with later. I call this the “procrastination principle,” and I don’t regret supporting it. But it’s hard to feel the same way about the internet of things.

In a few short decades, Frida Kahlo has gone from mainly known as the wife of of prominent Mexican painter Diego Rivera to becoming a pop culture icon. These days, she has far surpassed her husband’s fame. Converse, Forever 21 and Zara have sold shoes and clothes with Frida’s image. In a few short decades, Frida Kahlo has gone from mainly known as the wife of of prominent Mexican painter Diego Rivera to becoming a pop culture icon. These days, she has far surpassed her husband’s fame. Converse, Forever 21 and Zara have sold shoes and clothes with Frida’s image...The toymaker Mattel launched the Frida Kahlo Barbie as part of its “inspiring women” series. But some of Frida’s descendants say the doll betrays Frida’s very essence by eliminating her signature unibrow, lightening her eyes and thinning her hips. “The question really is who controls how people are interpreted. And when you can be made into a cultural icon,” says Rebecca Tushnet, who teaches intellectual property law at Harvard University.

President Donald Trump might be dead certain that he has the "absolute right to PARDON myself," but experts are divided. No American president has ever tested the idea. Nor has a court has ever ruled on the question of whether such an extreme action is allowed under the U.S. Constitution. But 44 years ago, when the Justice Department was faced with the possibility that President Richard Nixon might try to pardon himself, a top lawyer in the department in a memorandum to the deputy attorney general said the answer to that question was an unequivocal "No."...Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School: "The constitutional arguments about self-pardoning are ... complex, and no one should have strongly held views about the correct analysis," Tushnet told CNBC.

...It’s impossible to expect a true sense of privacy among 55,000 people, but users and bioethicists alike have lingering questions about Facebook’s use of data. “How much of Facebook is truly closed?” asked Glenn Cohen director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology and Bioethics. “How visible are your posts? Could someone take a screenshot of something you said and repost it?”...Cohen is also concerned about the possibility of so-called anonymized data being used for commercial reasons. Imagine what kind of connections future data miners could make based on your social media posts, fitness trackers, voting record, purchasing history and perhaps even genetic data.

You may think of your virtual assistant as a kind of trusty companion, giving out weather forecasts, recipes, news and all sorts of ephemera on request. But these devices also pose a host of security risks that render users vulnerable to hacks, eavesdropping, data siphoning and other threats that might not be immediately apparent. That danger was highlighted Thursday when Amazon.com Inc. said one of its Echo home speakers mistakenly recorded a private conversation and sent it to someone in the owners’ contact list...Don’t buy one at all. “That is my personal solution,” says Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert who lectures on public policy at Harvard University. For Mr. Schneier, the real threat to our privacy is companies like Google and Amazon, which are also vulnerable to hacks and whose privacy policies can be vague and hard to decipher.

Today, the European Union cements its status as the global leader in data privacy. The E.U.’s sweeping new data privacy law is taking effect, ushering in new restrictions on what companies can do with people’s personal data and setting tough penalties for those that break the rules...The European law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, requires companies that collect data on E.U. citizens to use simple language to explain how they handle it. Companies must get explicit consent from consumers before doing anything with their information and allow them to request copies of their data or delete it entirely. The law also mandates that companies report data breaches on strict timelines. Fines for violations could cost them 4 percent of their global profits...What’s more, the GDPR’s ripple effects in the United States may have gone far enough, said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “In some ways Europe may be doing the job for us,” he said, “since companies above a certain size will be adopting GDPR-friendly practices for all users, not just Europeans.”