Media Mentions

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.”)

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe warned against impeaching President Trump on Sunday, implying the process could worsen political dysfunction and polarization. "It's important that we not exacerbate the dysfunction and the polarization in the society that helped Donald Trump rise to power in the first place," Tribe told CNN's Fareed Zakaria. "If we were to use the impeachment power simply as a substitute for buyer's remorse, saying 'We thought this guy was terrible, but he's even worse,' if we were going to use it against ambient badness, rather than clear abuse of power — we would really use the impeachment power to undermine, rather than save, our democracy," he continued.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is stirring panic in immigrant communities by moving to limit who can get asylum in the United States. Perhaps no one is more alarmed than one Salvadoran woman living in the Carolinas. Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship. The attorney general has been highly critical of the asylum system in recent months. Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship. The attorney general has been highly critical of the asylum system in recent months...Over the years, immigration lawyers in the U.S. have argued that all sorts of people deserve asylum as persecuted members of a "particular social group." "There was a beginning of a shift, and a new awareness that women could get asylum, and that rape was a form of harm that constituted persecution," said Deborah Anker, a professor at Harvard Law School and the founding director of the Harvard Immigration Refugee Clinical program.

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein and Sharon Block. The Supreme Court has just told the nation’s workers: If you’re underpaid at work, or if you face discrimination on the job, you’re on your own. Federal labor law protects the right of workers to join together to improve their conditions, whether through a union or other means. But the court has now carved out a big exception to that longstanding principle. In a 5-4 decision on Monday, the court said that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to bar workers from joining forces in legal actions over problems in the workplace. In other words, workers who are underpaid, harassed or discriminated against will have to press their cases alone in arbitration, rather than with their colleagues in a class-action case, or even with their own lawsuit.

The Justice Department has asked its internal watchdog to review President Trump's charge on Twitter that the FBI spied on his 2016 election campaign. Amna Nawaz gets analysis and reaction from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith and retired FBI agent Frank Montoya.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the death of Pablo Avendano, a 34-year old bike messenger who was killed while delivering food for Caviar, the app-based food delivery service. Because Avendano was classified as an independent contractor and not an employee, his family will not be entitled to workers compensation benefits that they could otherwise collect...If gig workers – Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, and Caviar delivery people – get reclassified as employees, that status will not require the firms to take away all the workers’ flexibility. In fact, the trope gets the relationship between control and employee status exactly backwards. The way the law works is this: if a firm exercises sufficient control over a worker, then the worker may be an employee.

A US expert in Islamic law says agricultural ministers and clerics in Kuwait and Qatar would be unlikely to view summer transport of sheep as halal-approved if they were shown the crowded conditions and animals forced to stand for weeks in their own excrement. Agriculture Minister David Littleproud flew to the Middle East yesterday to reassure ministers and importers in both countries that Australia’s live sheep trade would continue during the northern hemisphere summer, but under new conditions recommended by the veterinarian-led McCarthy review he initiated...But Harvard University professor Kristen Stilt, an expert and author of Animal Welfare in ­Islamic law, who has studied the Australian livestock trade, warns that the end of live exports could be hastened by a failure to meet Islamic food requirements and animal welfare laws signed by the Gulf Co-operation Council. She says even adopting a 28 per cent increase in pen space recommended by the McCarthy review is unlikely to satisfy strict Islamic law about “everything surrounding the consumption of meat by Muslims”. “It is clear to me that the footage we saw from the ships — the overcrowding, the inability of animals to lie down and rest, and the heat stress — does not comply with the requirements of Islamic law,” she said. Sheep standing or lying in their own excrement for weeks are at risk of contracting diseases and producing meat that is not halal, she says. “The same is true for animals confined in pens where other animals are becoming sick and dying. “This is not something that is considered discretionary, but rather a crucial part of living by the requirements of Islam.”

Animals Australia has urged Agriculture Minister David Littleproud to show shocking footage of cruelty on live export ships to his Middle Eastern counterparts. The minister is visiting Kuwait and Qatar to reassure those countries Australia will continue the trade of live sheep after a crackdown on dodgy exporters. In a letter to Mr Littleproud seen by AAP, Animals Australia chief executive Glenys Oogjes asks him to show the vision of sheep dying in their own filth on an August 2016 voyage to the Middle East. Almost 2500 animals died on that voyage...It comes after a US expert in Islamic law raised concerns about Middle Eastern countries supporting the trade if they were shown the conditions during the northern hemisphere summer. Harvard University professor Kristen Stilt said the overcrowding and heat stress present in the footage did not comply with Islamic law. "The sheep standing or lying in their own excrement for three weeks are also at risk for contracting diseases and producing meat that is not halal," she said.

...Today, the impeachment of Donald Trump exists on the brink of plausibility. The sine qua non of an impeachment investigation, to say nothing of actual votes to charge and remove the President, is a Democratic takeover of the House in the November elections. Such a change now looks better than possible, maybe even probable...Ultimately, every consideration of impeachment returns to the standard established in the Constitution...As in the nineteen-seventies and the nineteen-nineties, the prospect of a Presidential impeachment has spurred renewed academic interest in the subject, resulting in two recent volumes by well-known Harvard law professors. Last year, Cass Sunstein, who served in the Obama Administration, released “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” and Laurence Tribe, the noted liberal academic and litigator, has just published “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” written with Joshua Matz...Laurence Tribe told me that he would regard some forms of misbehavior as impeachable, such as “a pattern of abusing the bully pulpit of the Presidency, one of its most potent if informal powers—especially when amplified by social media—to stir division within the electorate to the point of violence, to give permission to white supremacists to weaponize their hatred, and otherwise to undermine the foundations of our republic.”

Like clockwork, Washington has whipped itself into a frenzy over rumors of a possible retirement on the Supreme Court. All eyes are on Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, who reportedly considered calling it quits last spring. As the court’s current term winds to a close, speculation about his plans has again swept the capital, with court watchers searching for clues...But Ian Samuel, a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law, who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said the small number of cases the court has granted could signal Kennedy is throwing in the towel. The court has only agreed to hear 15 cases so far next term. “One possibility is they are not granting cases because they don’t know who their ninth member is going to be. … You could imagine Kennedy telling the chief, ‘I’d like to keep this between us, but I’d like to retire,’ and the chief saying, ‘Let’s see who Kennedy’s replacement is before we grant all these cases,’” Samuel said.

...Costly medicines can give rise to misplaced expectations for patients and doctors navigating America’s Byzantine health care system. And the problem is compounded by well-intentioned regulators trying to help desperate patients whose medical needs are unmet. “The problem is the way the system creates incentives for both drug makers and insurers to act as they do,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who is an expert in bioethics and health law policy. “When you allow private insurers to make decisions with only a patchwork of state regulations, they will choose not to cover every drug approved by the FDA. And drug companies are for-profit entities that set prices based on market conditions. This is why you have debates over coverage.”