Media Mentions

...Trump is said to be near a “meltdown” in his fury at what he describes as “an attack on our country” — by which he means the ongoing criminal investigation of him. It’s a phrase that he has not used about Russia’s interference with our elections, and my guess is that at some point Trump will fire Robert Mueller, directly or indirectly, or curb his investigation...Trump’s supporters are saying that he could fire Rod Rosenstein, to whom Mueller reports, and appoint an acting replacement who could quietly rein in Mueller. Such a replacement could even go one step further and actually try to “bring an end” to the entire investigation, as Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd urged last month. But it’s not so simple. “Everything about this is legally uncertain,” Jack Goldsmith, who was an assistant attorney general in George W. Bush’s administration and is now a professor at Harvard Law School, told me.

The idea that Donald Trump might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and in so doing spark some kind of constitutional crisis has been gaining traction for months now. Political junkies, especially on the liberal side of the spectrum, have breathlessly discussed the scenario in neighborhood bars and on approximately 1,000 different podcasts...For some context on just how bad things are at this moment compared to October 1973—when an embattled Richard Nixon went on his own firing spree in hopes of scuttling the Watergate probe—I called up my favorite legal scholar, Noah Feldman. The historian and Harvard Law professor is usually pretty measured in assessing Trump's presidency, but he said some things that genuinely frightened me.

...The Justice Network is based in Memphis but has offices in Arkansas and Mississippi. It’s one of several private companies that oversees court fees and fines for people who are arrested. The Justice Network manages the system for the courts, and in turn charge people fees to manage their cases. In 2015, The Justice Network reported charging Arkansas’s Craighead county probationers more than $245,000 in fees. Last year, after 20 years in the county, The Justice Network left town. That was after the probationers were given amnesty days. They formed long lines to have their fees and fines forgiven...According to Chiraag Bains, a fellow at Harvard Law School, the private probation business model presents a conflict of interest because the companies can influence judges. “For example, the company may decide, we’re not getting paid here, we want this person to spend some time in jail and maybe they’ll work harder to pay us,” Bains said.

President Donald Trump all but confirmed that the United States will soon strike the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as he communicated in a threatening Wednesday morning tweet in which he taunted Russia and suggested American missiles were "coming" in Syria...Trump’s taunting tweets are ridiculous and dangerous, as well as totally inconsistent with his stated view that it’s dumb to alert the enemy to what you plan to do and when you plan to do it," Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School told Salon. "Trump has put the United States in a box. If he acts on his threats, he’ll have given Assad, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the [Iranian Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] advance warning and endangered our military.

Their timing could not be better. A day after reports surfaced that President Trump wanted to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in December (in addition to an earlier effort in June), five veteran Republicans have formed a new organization, Republicans for the Rule of Law, seeking to restrain the president from doing exactly that...Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe voices alarm at the prospect that Rosenstein might be on the chopping block. “Trump firing Rosenstein would be part of an ongoing impeachable pattern of presidential obstruction of justice,” he says. “Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing Rosenstein might violate the terms of his recusal but not if there was a genuine justification unrelated to Mueller’s investigation.”

As Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, defends his company's data practices this week before Congress, one of the nation's largest cable companies is asking federal lawmakers for a bill that would rein in social media platforms, search engines and other tech giants that have access to their users' personal data. The proposal by Charter Communications on Monday calls for requiring "greater privacy and data security protections" of companies such as Google and Facebook, whose Cambridge Analytica fiasco has inflamed a debate about Silicon Valley's handling of consumers' personal information...The disarray and tumult afflicting the tech industry is an opportunity for Internet providers to gain a bigger foothold with policymakers, according to Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor. "Charter is using the current kerfuffle over Facebook to divert any regulatory energy that might have been heading its way towards Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google," Crawford said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. The raid on the office of Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, the president’s latest tweet-complaints and related rant, and the White House press secretary's claim that the President believes he has the authority to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, have many people spun up about that possibility that Trump will soon fire Mueller, or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Sen. Chuck Schumer and other Trump critics warned yesterday that firing Rosenstein or Mueller would spark a “constitutional crisis.”...Are we really in or near a constitutional crisis, or even a real confrontation? Will Trump really fire Sessions or Rosenstein or Mueller this time? It sure seems from the news coverage in the last 24 hours that something momentous is about to happen. But might the Republican warnings dissuade the President from acting?

A federal judge in Colorado on Tuesday dismissed a case its plaintiffs hope will eventually bring more clarity to how members of the Electoral College should vote in presidential elections. And a dismissal is actually just what the plaintiffs wanted. They expect an appeal could bring their case before the nation’s highest court...The case will certainly be appealed, said Lawrence Lessig, a well-known national elections attorney based in Massachusetts who represents Colorado’s electoral college members...“Imagine if the state said every elector had to vote for a Democrat,” Lessig told The Colorado Independent. “Being an elector is to have the power to make a choice.” Williams says he was following state law, and also followed instructions from a state judge throughout the process when he told electors to vote for Clinton.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said Tuesday that the fiduciary rule remains a priority for the organization he leads, though he didn’t share an exact time frame for its release...Hal Scott, director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation and the Nomura Professor at Harvard Law School, noted that overall the market structure was sound, “but just needs to be adjusted.” He highlighted problems with market data, in which his committee recommended that the SEC require all self-regulatory organizations to publicly disclose revenues from proprietary data feeds and operating securities operating processors or SIPs, as well as performance data. Speed is a key metric for data consolidators, Scott said, and a “significantly slower SIP would not survive competitive pressure. This change also would level the playing field between those who rely on SIPs and those who use proprietary data feeds.”

As President Trump continued to fume on Tuesday about the Justice Department’s raids on the office and hotel room of his longtime personal lawyer, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made a provocative claim: The president, she said, believes he has the legal authority to fire Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation...Still, Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, said the previous Supreme Court statements did not arise in a context exactly like a situation in which Mr. Trump said he had the constitutional power to fire Mr. Mueller directly and then tried to do it. Mr. Goldsmith said it was unclear what would happen then. “I agree that the proper and most legally sound route would be to order Rosenstein to dismiss Mueller and then fire him if he doesn’t comply,” Mr. Goldsmith said.

Hong Kong’s position as a global financial heavyweight has long been secure. The city-state’s commitment to free market principles has seen it evolve from a mercantile shipping hub into a thriving, service-orientated economy. The adoption of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle in 1997 has allowed Hong Kong to retain its economic freedom while also acting as a gateway to the rapidly growing Chinese market...Aurelio Gurrea-Martínez, a fellow in Corporate Governance and Capital Markets at Harvard Law School, believes dual-class shares, while not necessarily harmful, are open to abuse. “Through the use of dual-class share structures, some shareholders (usually the company’s founder and its top executives) are able to pursue their vision and enjoy the full benefits of control without paying for this privilege,” Gurrea-Martínez explained. “They become what many authors call ‘controlling minority shareholders’. This means that not only will they run the company as they see fit (sometimes for their own interest or portfolio, and not for the interests of the shareholders as a whole), they will also enjoy the private benefits of control.”

...Billed as the first-ever Israel summit at Harvard, the event was held under tight security at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. It attracted more than 400 mostly undergraduate and graduate students from Harvard, as well as other Ivy League institutions and colleges in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. Thousands more watched the summit on live stream...The summit boasted an eclectic cast of speakers, including Amar’e Stoudemire, the six-time NBA All-Star forward who played last year for the Hapoel Jerusalem team after retiring from the NBA; Israeli-born fashion mogul Elie Tahari; Harvard’s president emeritus and former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Lawrence Summers; and Ron Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations...Stoudemire’s talk was “the cherry on top of a great day,” said Daniel Egel-Weiss [`20], a student at Harvard Law School. Hearing Stoudemire speak about his Jewish cultural awakening was fascinating, he said, but the whole day was interesting. “It’s great to have an ambassador [for Israel] in social circles,” Egel-Weiss said.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry downplayed the likelihood that his department would declare a grid emergency and direct financial support to coal and nuclear power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions Corp. (FES), the competitive-generation arm of FirstEnergy Corp. On March 29, FES told Perry that its money-losing coal and nuclear power plants face closure — amounting to a grid emergency — and that the Department of Energy should use its authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to keep them online...If DOE were to issue a 202(c) order, "people would be immediately filing challenges at the D.C. Circuit," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. Such a legal move, which is almost assured from other power generators, natural gas interests and large electricity consumers, among others, would prevent any meaningful "emergency" action to help the FES plants.

An op-ed by fellow Mark Erlich... For the past 40 years, employers have pursued a strategy of shedding obligations to their employees as part of a broader outlook that views labor as one more risky liability to move off a balance sheet. For some, this has meant the purposeful misclassification of employees as independent contractors, a tactic adopted by Beldi’s disreputable construction contractors as well as more high-profile and celebrated firms such as FedEx and Uber. A 2015 General Accounting Office report suggests that “alternative work arrangements”—an expansive phrase that includes part-time employees, independent contractors, free-lancers, temp agency workers, on-call, and contract workers—now constitute more than 40 percent of total reported employment. And the trend is only increasing.

When President Trump upon taking office refused to completely sever his ties to his international business interests, he set in motion events that would inevitably lead to violation(s) of the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution and gross conflicts of interest...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explains: Trump’s refusal to sever his all-entangling business ties throughout the world when he became president was and continues to be both a clear violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause and a profound threat to our nation’s security, which depends on having a president whose only allegiance is to the United States and its people, including of course our Constitution and laws. The way lawyers from the Trump Organization and its often opaque network of nested corporations blatantly intervened in U.S.-Panama relations last month was a classic example of what we get when we elect a president with no respect for the separation of his own and his family’s economic interests from the conduct of America’s foreign policy.

As President Donald Trump has gone on the offensive against China in an attempt to push it to abandon trade practices many companies and governments say are unfair, Beijing has sought to portray the US moves as an attack on the international trading system as a whole...Experts says it's a bizarre state of affairs, given China's own track record on trade..."China is seeking to cast itself as the defender of a rules-based system, but its own past behavior raises doubts about just how committed China is to following the spirit, if not letter, of the law," said Mark Wu, an international trade professor at Harvard Law School.

In an extraordinary series of events, the FBI executed a no-knock raid on President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel...Let us not understate how extraordinary a development this is. The standard of proof required to raid any attorney’s office is exceptionally high. To authorize a raid on the president’s lawyer’s office, a federal judge or magistrate must have seen highly credible evidence of serious crimes and/or evidence Cohen was hiding or destroying evidence, according to legal experts. “The FBI raid was the result of an ongoing criminal investigation *not* by Mueller but by the interim US Attorney personally interviewed and selected by Trump himself, pursuant to a warrant issued under strict standards by a federal judge, subject to approval by the head of the Criminal Division,” said constitutional scholar Larry Tribe.

An op-ed by Alison Omens and Sharon Block. The United States has fallen behind on equal pay. According to JUST Capital’s 2017 Rankings, 78 of the 875 largest publicly-traded U.S. companies have conducted pay equity analyses, while only 54 have established a policy, as well as targets, for diversity and equal opportunity – that’s 9% and 6% of these corporations, respectively. When it comes to pay equity, corporations in the U.S. are not beholden to the same rules as those in other nations, and are lagging when it comes to equal pay for women.

Students who attended for-profit colleges filed more than 98 percent of the requests for student loan forgiveness alleging fraud by their schools, according to an analysis of Education Department data. The study by The Century Foundation represents the most thorough analysis to date of the nearly 100,000 loan forgiveness claims known as borrower defense received by the agency over the past two decades and paints an alarming picture of the state of for-profit higher education in America...“The for-profit college industry scams students across the country and taxpayers and that’s why the industry, including industry insiders who are now staffing the Department of Education, is now fighting so hard against rules that would clarify the borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, a legal services clinic that represents defrauded students. “If for-profit schools don’t want to be responsible for borrower defense claims and reimbursing taxpayers, then they could simply not cheat their students.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Here’s a prediction that is sure to annoy everyone: Now that he’s national security adviser, John Bolton will become more moderate. Some extremists moderate when they take public office because of bureaucratic pushback from the middle. That’s not what I expect for Bolton. He’s made a career of fighting the bureaucracy from the right. I predict Bolton will moderate for the opposite reason: In this stage of President Donald Trump’s administration, there’s almost no one left to push back at Bolton from the center. Without such opposition, Bolton is going to realize that he’s the grown-up in the room, and the closest thing to a realist anywhere in Trump’s foreign policy circles.

...When news of the proposed settlement in the McDonald’s joint employment case broke last week, some folks might have assumed we accidentally dropped a zero from the $170,000 that Mickey D’s is offering a group of workers to resolve their unfair labor practice complaints. Surely, the chance to resolve one of the biggest cases in the labor and employment space without risking a ruling that McDonald’s is a joint employer with its franchisees of franchise restaurant workers could fetch a bigger price tag? “It sounds like they’re getting off awfully cheap,” former NLRB member Sharon Block (D) told me of the settlement. In fact, McDonald’s may wind up resolving the case without paying anything to the 19 or so workers who said they were retaliated against for participating in Fight for $15 demonstrations.