Media Mentions

Republican antics concerning the memo drafted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threaten to damage our national security, the FBI and the entire congressional oversight process. Meanwhile, President Trump faces a constant drip-drip-drip of new revelations giving heft to a possible obstruction-of-justice charge...Taking a step back, the Nunes lunacy concerning release of the memo may well do more harm to Republicans and implicate both the White House and Nunes himself. Constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe says, “Both the President’s release of the memo despite the warning of FBI Director [Christopher] Wray and the actions of Nunes in concocting a phony smear of Rosenstein seem to me to be important parts of an ongoing conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

The story of President Trump's energy policy centers on removing regulations. He says he's good at it — even the best. "We have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history," Trump said in his first State of the Union address. That's not necessarily true. But in some ways, it's not necessarily false...Much of the focus has been on EPA, where Pruitt has proved a deft field general, said Jody Freeman, another Obama climate adviser. After a delayed start, he's now staffed up with political pros and EPA veterans familiar with the rules they're tasked with changing or undoing..."Scott Pruitt has been among the most disciplined, so that's why people are really worried," said Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School. "There's the contrast — Rick Perry over there shooting from the hip, and here's Scott Pruitt being careful."

An op-ed by fellow Francis Shen. As final preparations are made for the Super Bowl Sunday, traditional excitement for the game is being countered by criticism about player safety...As a professor whose research is devoted to the intersection of neuroscience and law, I have often found myself at the heart of these football debates. I have testified multiple times in front of the state Legislature, and teach a seminar devoted entirely to “sports concussions and the law.” Given this background, I often get surprised looks when I defend the value of collision sports. Some find it hard to reconcile my love of the brain with a policy stance that they think promotes brain damage. But I think you can embrace neuroscience and the NFL.

The Justice Department has effectively shuttered an Obama-era office dedicated to making legal aid accessible to all citizens, according to two people familiar with the situation. The division, the Office for Access to Justice, began as an initiative in 2010 under former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to increase and improve legal resources for indigent litigants in civil, criminal and tribal courts...The office gained prominence when the Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe became a senior counselor, a position created by the Obama administration.

It’s not easy to feel good watching the NFL. CTE may or may not be destroying players’ lives as they play their hearts out for the fans...Is it ethical to watch the Super Bowl at all?...[Glenn Cohen]: Yes. But while watching fans should consider what they can do to help protect and promote the health of NFL players. As you know, my team released a major 493 page report that received national coverage “Protecting and Promoting the Health of NFL Players: Legal and Ethical Analysis and Recommendations.” In that report we consider the ethical role of 20 separate stakeholders in promoting and protecting NFL player health and make.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s highly unusual for the FBI director to confront the president publicly -- because technically, the director works for the president. That’s why Christopher Wray generated immediate attention and controversy Wednesday for the bureau’s open statement urging Donald Trump not to release the classified Republican House committee memo that reportedly criticizes efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign adviser.

An op-ed by Toby Merrill and Eileen Connor. For years, predatory for-profit colleges have exploited the promise of higher education, cheating students and leaving them in mountains of debt they never should have had. Making it worse, the industry has been enabled by a Department of Education that has made excuse after excuse about why it can not step in to help students. Last week, the Education Department ran out of excuses.

My guest for this episode of Fast Forward is Lawrence Lessig, a professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, where we recorded the show. In 1999, he wrote Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace; he has since updated that book and written many others. He's also the co-founder of Creative Commons and made a run for president in 2016, which he sadly did not win. He's also the creator of the Lessig Method of Presentation. I encourage you to Google it and look at the YouTube videos; it will change the way you give presentations. I know it changed the way I give mine.

The Education Department’s plan to provide only partial loan forgiveness to some students defrauded by for-profit colleges could reduce overall payments by about 60 percent, according to a preliminary analysis obtained by The Associated Press...The department said some students will now be getting only partial loan forgiveness to make the process fair and protect taxpayers from excessive costs...Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded Corinthian students, criticized the projections. “I think that is terrible. It’s another example of the Department of Education picking the side of fraudulent schools and not doing right by those who have been hurt by them,” Connor said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Over the weekend some conservative commentators pushed back on my tweet-claim that President Trump has “threaten[ed] DOJ/FBI over and over in gross violation of independence norms.” The Justice Department and its component the FBI “aren’t independent, nor should they be,” argued Sean Davis of The Federalist. “Few things are more damaging to a democratic republic than men with guns and badges and wiretaps believing they are accountable to no one,” he added. Or, as Kurt Schlichter of Townhall stated more succinctly, “When did bureaucrats become ‘independent’ of elected officials. Never.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. By now we’re accustomed to hearing President Donald Trump complain that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation don’t do what he tells them. The basis for his frustration is a serious mismatch between the U.S. Constitution as it’s written and the unwritten constitutional norms that Trump is blamed for breaking. The written Constitution puts the Justice Department and the FBI squarely under the president’s control. The unwritten, lower case “c” constitution says that the president may not politicize criminal investigations and prosecutions.

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist … courtesy of artificial intelligence...Experts say the use of these risk assessments may be the biggest shift in courtroom decision-making since American judges began accepting social science and other expert evidence more than a century ago. Christopher Griffin, a research director at Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, calls the new digital tools “the next step in that revolution.”

Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, will form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States, the three companies have announced. Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, will form an independent health care company for their employees in the United States, the three companies have announced...In a statement emailed to Healio.com, Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and professor at Harvard Law School, said the venture pointed to a systemic issue with American health care. “We have failed as a nation to produce a health care delivery system that affords comprehensive health coverage to everybody, Greenwald wrote.

Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a joint partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to create an independent health care company for their employees, putting an end to months of speculation that the technology giant was eyeing a foray into the medical industry...“Amazon already has huge amounts of our data — we give it to them in exchange for two-day shipping,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in health law policy. “But what happens when you add in actual health care data? Many people are already concerned about who has access to that information, and this exacerbates those concerns.”

Twelve of the top 100 most-cited law professors of all time teach at Harvard Law School, according to the Social Science Research Network—and professors Lucian A. Bebchuk and Steven Shavell took the first two spots. An electronic service that aims to make research papers and scholarly articles easily accessible, the SSRN contains over 650,000 documents by more than 360,000 authors...“The rankings reflect the significant impact that the Harvard Law School faculty has on policy research and the legal academy,” Bebchuk wrote in an email. Law Professor Cass R. Sunstein ’75, who ranks in fourth place with 1,484 citations, said he thinks there is a significant benefit to publishing work on SSRN. “I think it’s a good thing if you have a paper that’s published and that could benefit from the comments and criticisms of others,” Sunstein said...The list also includes Law professors Louis Kaplow, Reinier H. Kraakman ’71, Mark J. Roe, Jesse M. Fried ’86, Alma Cohen, Allen Ferrell, John Coates IV, Oren Bar-Gill, and J. Mark Ramseyer.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. On January 3, the world learned about a series of major security vulnerabilities in modern microprocessors. Called Spectre and Meltdown, these vulnerabilities were discovered by several different researchers last summer, disclosed to the microprocessors’ manufacturers, and patched—at least to the extent possible. This news isn’t really any different from the usual endless stream of security vulnerabilities and patches, but it’s also a harbinger of the sorts of security problems we’re going to be seeing in the coming years.

After reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at the direction of the president, unsuccessfully applied pressure on FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, McCabe has announced that he intends to depart earlier than planned...So what does this all mean? “If it turns out that McCabe was pressed to accelerate his planned early retirement by a month or so by Sessions or on behalf of Trump, this would strengthen the argument for a pattern of obstruction of justice,” constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “But without proof of such pressure, this development isn’t likely to have major significance.”

Last fall, Justice Elena Kagan touted the advantages of an experienced U.S. Supreme Court Bar—the “repeat players” who know what the court likes. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seems to think criminal defense lawyers still aren’t getting the message...Lamenting the lack of diversity on the high court itself, Sotomayor said in 2013 she was bothered by the fact judges rarely come to the bench from the defense bar or with civil rights experiences. “We’re missing a huge amount of diversity on the bench,” she said. A 2016 study by Harvard Law School’s Andrew Crespo analyzed what he called the high court’s institutional shift over the last four decades toward the prosecution. One part of that shift, Crespo found, was the “rise of a sharp advocacy gap between criminal defendants and the rest of the increasingly expert Supreme Court bar, including expert advocates for the prosecution.”

In the days immediately following the 2017 Women’s March, members of the Harvard University Cyberlaw Clinic and their colleagues at metaLAB learned that a number of artists who’d created some of the iconic images from the march were facing challenges, mostly brought on by the fact that work they’d created for themselves and their close circles had gone viral and was appearing all across the internet. “When you’re getting that kind of attention, you want to have your ducks in a row, and we realized that there wasn’t really a good resource for folks to get their questions answered,” said organizer Jessica Fjeld, in an email interview with Hyperallergic.

The Declaration of Independence doesn’t mince words when it states that “all men are created equal.” And yet the country’s other foundational document – The Constitution – protected the most unequal of institutions in slavery. Harvard Law Professor Annette Gordon-Reed joins us to talk about how America has struggled since its founding to reconcile these conflicting ideas. Her essay “America’s Original Sin” appears in Foreign Affairs magazine.

...Are workers employees or independent contractors? Some of the first major labor cases before the Supreme Court focused on that issue—such as whether newspaper delivery people were considered contractors or employees. Sharon Block, a former NLRB member and now executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, had this to say: “I think there is a tendency to get distracted by the bright, shiny object of technology. To assume that because technology is involved doesn’t mean that standards don’t apply. The standards of the relationship isn’t changed.”