Media Mentions

Innocent victim or background contributor? Facebook now faces questions from authorities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean after news reports in The Guardian and The New York Times this week revealed that a psychologist illicitly gave data from 50 million Facebook users to a political consulting firm that tailored political ads to many users during the 2016 U.S. presidential election...Vivek Krishnamurthy studies international issues in internet governance as a clinical attorney at Harvard Law School’s Cyber Law Clinic. He spoke with the Gazette about the legal implications of the breach for Facebook, the laxity in U.S. privacy protections, and how Facebook’s difficulties may mark the end of the tech industry’s long deregulation honeymoon in this country.

Further revealing how far the Trump administration is willing to go to "actively make workers' lives worse," Bloomberg Law reported on Wednesday that White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney personally approved the Labor Department's decision to delete an internal analysis showing that its proposed "tip-sharing rule" would allow companies to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from their employees per year...Mulvaney ultimately sided with Acosta, and the Labor Department scrubbed its internal analysis from the final proposal. "The story about how Secretary Acosta pushed out the tip stealing rule while hiding the cost from the public keeps getting uglier," Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, wrote in response to Bloomberg Law's reporting. "Having to go so far up the chain to get the okay to flout the rules shows that Acosta knew that they were trying to get away with something."

An interview with Cass Sunstein. On The Gist, before Donald Trump’s headline-hogging presidency, things like bridge collapses made news for more than a few days. In the interview, Cass Sunstein’s new book asks if the U.S. is fundamentally immune to authoritarianism, or whether president Trump has proved the opposite. His new book—Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America—puts the question to more than a dozen leading writers.

Breitbart, the alt-right news site whose executive chairman Steve Bannon was pushed out in January after feuding with President Donald Trump, has lost about half its readership according to comScore, raising questions about its future...Rob Faris, the research director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that Breitbart’s rise was in some ways facilitated by Fox News being slow to embrace Trump. “A big part of Breitbart’s success was that there was a niche to be filled that Fox News was not able to fill at that point,” said Faris, who co-authored a study on the conservative media ecosystem during the election. But now, with Fox‘s primetime hosts having fully embraced the president, he says, “The role, the importance of Breitbart is diminished.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was easy to miss it, what with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson being fired and President Donald Trump fueling rumors of more personnel shake-ups. But last week Jared Kushner, presidential adviser and son-in-law, presided over a highly unusual White House conference on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Who participated was noteworthy: Israel was there, alongside Arab states with which it does not have diplomatic relations, such as Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Stormy Daniels's attorney has been all over TV and radio in recent weeks, saying the porn star should be free to discuss her alleged affair with President Trump because Trump neglected to sign their 2016 nondisclosure agreement...This contention is central to a lawsuit in which Daniels has asked a court to invalidate the contract — and it is probably a losing argument, according to legal experts. “The idea that it's null and void, I don't think that goes anywhere,” said Charles Fried, a former U.S. solicitor general who teaches contract law at Harvard Law School.

As rumors swirled over the weekend that the White House would soon undermine and eventually remove special counsel Robert Mueller, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted on CNN that doing so would be the beginning of the end for the Trump presidency. “We’re a rule-of-law nation,” he declared...Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith has speculated that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Mueller directly by invoking his constitutional Article II powers to “bypass or invalidate” Justice Department procedure. But other experts disagree, and even Mr. Goldsmith says the president would be “committing political suicide” if he were to go down this path.

An op-ed by Finale Doshi-Velez and clinical fellow Mason Kortz. A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a woman on Sunday in Tempe, Arizona. Few details have emerged, but it’s reportedly the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle. In January, a Pittsburgh car crash sent two people to the hospital; the accident involved a self-driving Fusion from Ford-backed Argo AI. The Fusion was hit by a truck that ran a red light, and at the last second, the human back-up driver reportedly took the car out of autonomous mode and took control of the Fusion’s wheel. Could these crashes have been avoided?

When Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein found out on March 14 that he was this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize, he said he was both surprised and gratified. “It felt like squash had been made an Olympic sport, and I had been informed that I made the team,” Sunstein said. “Meaning, very surprising and slightly surreal—and a great honor.” The Holberg Prize is a Norwegian award given annually to a researcher who has made great contributions to the arts and humanities, the social sciences, law, or theology. Sunstein is a researcher in behavioral science and political theory, and his work explores the intersection of the two fields...Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who taught Sunstein, wrote in an email that Sunstein “is a national treasure.” “His breadth and depth of insight across disciplines is unparalleled, as is his productivity. That he credits me as his mentor is humbling but enormously gratifying,” he wrote.

The White House is preparing to crack down on what it says are improper Chinese trade practices by making it significantly more difficult for Chinese firms to acquire advanced U.S. technology or invest in American companies, individuals involved in the planning said. The administration plans to release on Thursday a package of proposed punitive measures aimed at China that include tariffs on imports worth at least $30 billion...Whatever the political blowback, Harvard law professor Mark Wu, a trade expert, says that the White House has authority to impose tariffs under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. “In situations where the U.S. Trade Representative deems unfair trade practices to fall outside the scope of a WTO-covered agreement, then the statute permits the executive branch to take action directly without first seeking recourse through WTO dispute settlement” procedures, he said.

...Today, the political atmosphere is different enough that if President Donald Trump triggers the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller, the fate of the Russia investigation would be thrown in doubt...Former prosecutors and legal analysts disagree about the fallout of a possible firing of Mueller, who led the FBI first during the administration of Republican President George W. Bush and then Democratic President Barack Obama...Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, also a former assistant attorney general, does not believe the situation would be so dire, if it comes to that. He predicted that current FBI Director Christopher Wray would continue the Russia investigation and that a new special counsel would be named. Goldsmith also emphasized the legal hurdle Trump faces. "If Trump wished to stop the Mueller investigation, he couldn't just tweet a declaration that it is over," Goldsmith wrote in a Lawfare column earlier this year.

The extraordinary legal battle between the president of the United States and a former adult-film star has been building for seven years. The standoff is rapidly escalating, as the porn actress, Stephanie Clifford, seeks to go public with details of her claims of an extramarital affair, and President Donald Trump and his attorneys fight to stop her...The allegations pivot on whether the payment was made to influence the election to Mr. Trump’s benefit, said Thomas Frampton, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It may be one of the least scintillating issues that Ms. Clifford could speak about, but from the perspective of Cohen’s and the president’s legal liability, it could be the most dangerous,” he said.

A federal court judge said Monday he won't re-issue proposed instructions to a jury that will hear the case of two Boston city officials who are accused of conspiracy and extortion in an effort to strong-arm the music festival Boston Calling into hiring union workers. Prosecutors say the instructions could sink their case. For more on the decision and on the upcoming trial, WBUR legal analyst and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner joined Morning Edition.

A progressive group that says it wants to expose misconduct by President Trump and his Cabinet is taking on the president through his favorite form of communication: Twitter. The Shadow Cabinet, a group of 21 scholars, activists and former officials, announced Tuesday morning that it’s launching “We the Constitution."...In a statement, Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who serves as the citizen attorney general in the Shadow Cabinet, said Trump’s conduct in office raises profound questions about the survival of a democracy in which all are constrained by the rule of law. “This president defies legal rules, standards, principles, and norms — including how he even looks away when our system of government is under attack by a hostile foreign power — to an alarming degree,” he said.

A group of former students defrauded by for-profit colleges is claiming in court that the Education Department illegally obtained and used their Social Security data to limit their student loan relief...But a motion filed by several former Corinthian students over the weekend claims that the agency had obtained the figures from the Social Security Administration in violation of several laws as well as the Constitution. Attorneys with the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University representing the students say the agency should have turned to the students for their data as well as notified them of its actions in order to give them a chance to react. The department “has secretly and illegally coopted Social Security data to try to argue for something less than the complete cancellation and refund that these borrowers are due,” said attorney Joshua Rovenger.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The horrendous actions by Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company, and Aleksander Kogan, a Russian-American researcher, raise serious questions about privacy, social media, democracy and fraud. Amidst the justified furor, one temptation should be firmly resisted: for public and private institutions to lock their data down, blocking researchers and developers from providing the many benefits that it promises – for health, safety, and democracy itself.

How many agencies does it take to regulate a financial system? In United States, about half a dozen at least. And this fragmented system made dealing with the 2008 financial crisis more difficult. Regulators struggled to figure out who had authority to do what, and there was no one figure overseeing the efforts to right the U.S. economy...Who regulates financial institutions depends on their charters. Before you can open up a bank, you must receive a bank charter. But where you go to get that charter depends on what kind of institution you’re operating, said Hal Scott, international financial systems professor at Harvard Law School. “There are just a lot of different regulators, and they overlap in their authorities,” he explained.

In 1954, presumably with no feminist agenda and decades before the phrase would enter the consciousness, John Cheever wrote “The Five-Forty-Eight,” inadvertently outlining the mechanics of sexual harassment as they have only now come to be better understood. The story would go on to become one of his best known, a wounding abrasion to the surface view of postwar American fortitude. Intended as a chilling admonition against female volatility, read 64 years later, amid the current reckoning, it presents itself least ambiguously as a chilling admonition against male entitlement...Cheever’s story appears nowhere in “Sexual Harassment of Working Women,” Catharine A. MacKinnon’s influential work of legal scholarship published in 1979, but it offers the clearest possible illustration of the dynamics that MacKinnon believed were central to the American workplace, a system in which women were judged by the standards imposed on wives and concubines, used and discarded similarly.

The Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, a legal services clinic, has asked a federal judge to stop Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Education Department from using earnings data to grant only partial student loan forgiveness to defrauded borrowers...Project lawyers say the Education Department has no right to use the data, which is supplied by the Social Security Administration, for any purpose other than to evaluate vocational programs. And denying full relief to Corinthian students under the law is illegal, they argue. “The Department of Education had already unfairly and unlawfully refused to cancel these bogus loans for so long,” said Joshua Rovenger, a lawyer at the Project. “Now, it has secretly and illegally co-opted Social Security data to try to argue for something less than the complete cancellation and refund that these borrowers are due.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Suppose President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is random. I mean really random: Like random luck, designed only in so far as to fluctuate wildly between different, opposing strategic views. In this thought experiment, it’s not a bug but a feature that the U.S. is pulling away from a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran even as it seeks to negotiate one with North Korea. Similarly, it’s an intentional accident that Trump might replace the realist National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with the conservative idealist John Bolton.

In The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Sullivan reviews “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” by Cass R. Sunstein, and “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” edited by Sunstein. Sullivan writes: It’s really hard to impeach a president. The founders included the provision, from the very start, as the weakest, “break the glass in case of emergency” mechanism for reining in an out-of-control executive. He was already subject to a four-year term, so he would remain answerable to the people, and to two other branches of government, which could box him in constitutionally.