Media Mentions

Trump returns to U.S. amid bombshell report he tried to fire Mueller. Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe on why that firing would be a “crime” and whether Trump could now be indicted for obstructing justice.

The saga of Donald Trump and Robert Mueller took a dramatic new turn on Thursday night when the New York Times first reported that the president had ordered the special counsel to be fired in June last year...We asked legal experts whether they think Mueller now has enough evidence to pursue obstruction of justice charges against the president, or if a different outcome is more likely...[Laurence Tribe]: The president’s foiled effort to rid himself of the Mueller investigation in June 2017, and his now-exposed invention of patently phony excuses for doing so—much as he had invented fake reasons for firing Comey before admitting his actual Russia-related reason on national television—eliminates any possible defense that Trump was clueless about the relevant rules...[Alan Dershowitz]: A president cannot be accused of obstruction for merely exercising his constitutional authority regardless of his motive...[Alex Whiting]: In an obstruction case against President Trump, it is unlikely that there will be a single piece of smoking-gun evidence.

It wasn't until 1979 that the term "sexual harrassment" was recognised as a legal concept. Julian Marshall speaks to the woman who made it possible to challenge abuse in the workplace - Professor Catharine MacKinnon.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. A performative contradiction is a statement whose effect goes against its intended meaning. A canonical example is Donald Trump’s January 6th tweet in which he insisted that he is a “very stable genius.” Speaking last week about the President’s first physical exam in office, Ronny L. Jackson, the White House physician, stated that he “found no reason whatsoever to think the President has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly seeking testimony from President Donald Trump, who recently said that “he would love to” testify and that he would do so under oath – though he needs to speak with his lawyers. The qualification is important and wise. For any high-level public official, testimony under oath comes with serious risks. For the commander-in-chief, the risks are multiplied, not only because of the overriding importance of his office, but also because foolish steps, establishing precedents, could have long-term effects on future presidents as well.

Montana’s Medicaid program requirements are blocking hepatitis C patients from treatment, according to a national report released Thursday...Robert Greenwald, clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and the director of the school’s health law center, agreed that the state’s rules around patient sobriety is “medically unfounded” and said it puts others at risk. “Even though the opioid crisis is exacerbating the hepatitis C epidemic, Montana is preventing patients who have used drugs in the past six months, the population most likely to spread this highly communicable disease, from accessing a cure,” Greenwald said.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. For over a decade, civil libertarians have been fighting government mass surveillance of innocent Americans over the Internet. We’ve just lost an important battle. On Jan. 18, when President Trump signed the renewal of Section 702, domestic mass surveillance became effectively a permanent part of U.S. law.

An interview with Jack Goldsmith. The Harvard law professor shares his perspective on the state of American institutions during the Trump presidency.

When you miss deadlines in tax matters, the consequences vary. Sometimes it is "no harm, no foul", sometimes there is a mild financial penalty, sometimes there is a severe financial penalty. And then there is the Tax Court. If you miss the initial Tax Court deadline for filing petition, that's it...A lot of pro se litigants miss the deadlines. That led to an amicus brief by Linda Jean Matuszak. Ms. Matuszak was tripped up in a similar manner. The brief was prepared by Carlton Smith and Professor T. Keith Fogg, Director Harvard Federal Tax Clinic, which gives students at Harvard Law School the opportunity to do some tax litigation for the other 95%. They are making a push on the deadline issue.

In its determination to reverse a two-decade slump in U.S. stock listings, a regulator might offer companies an extreme incentive to go public: the ability to bar aggrieved shareholders from suing. The Securities and Exchange Commission in its long history has never allowed companies to sell shares in initial public offerings while also letting them ban investors from seeking big financial damages through class-action lawsuits...“The question is who is going to be the first company because they’re going to be the lightening rod of criticism,” said Hal Scott, a professor at Harvard Law School who has long argued that shareholder lawsuits should be reined in. “It would definitely be controversial, there’s no doubt about it. But, it’s something they should endure the controversy over because it’s worth it.”

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is claiming credit for beginning the end of what President Donald Trump has termed “American Carnage,” a spike in violent crime during 2015 and 2016, the final two years of the Obama administration. In an opinion piece published Tuesday in USA Today, Sessions pointed to preliminary FBI data showing that violent crime in the United States decreased by 0.9 percent during the first half of last year and that the increase in the murder rate had slowed...But Thomas Abt, a former federal prosecutor now a senior fellow at Harvard Law School and Kennedy School of Government, noted that the decline came before Trump announced his first wave of U.S. attorneys in June. “It’s simply not honest to say that aggressive federal prosecution was responsible for the crime decline when the federal prosecutors that Trump nominated weren’t even in office at the time,” Abt said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Whether prosecutors and FBI agents are allowed to have political views is a question now of interest on both sides of the political spectrum. Liberals are outraged that President Donald Trump asked Andrew McCabe, then acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who he had voted for when they met last May in the Oval Office. Conservatives are angry about anti-Trump text messages sent by an FBI agent who was working for the special counsel’s investigation.

Members of a student committee helping guide Harvard’s search for its 29th president met “in person” with the official search committee last semester to discuss their findings, though the committee has yet to produce a final report. The main task of the committee, formed in Sept. 2017, is to “provide advice to the presidential search committee” and “assist in ensuring broad outreach to the wider Harvard community,” according to the University...“We had the opportunity to share our findings with the Search Committee last semester and are currently in the process of capturing those findings in a final report, which we also plan to share with the new president,” advisory committee chair Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 [`18] wrote in an emailed statement Wednesday.

The outcome of the major U.S. Supreme Court case over whether companies can ban class actions in employment agreements holds new importance as women join together to speak out against sexual misconduct in the workplace, former National Labor Relations Board general counsel Richard Griffin said Wednesday...Griffin and fellow experts on labor and employment, former NLRB member Sharon Block, Epstein, Becker & Green member Paul DeCamp and Seyfarth Shaw partner Alexander Passantino, spoke on Wednesday’s panel...Block, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, said forcing workers to bring claims as individuals could have the effect of taking away the rights outlined in Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects concerted speech. “It can eliminate protections for workers who need that protection the most,” Block said.

Litigants claiming that President Donald Trump’s business empire violates the Constitution suffered a major loss in federal court in New York last year, but on Thursday, they’ll get another chance. Lawyers for the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, Brian Frosh and Karl Racine, respectively, will argue before a federal judge in Greenbelt, Maryland, that Trump is violating two clauses in the Constitution designed to prevent corruption: the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments clauses...“I think the AGs are the only plaintiffs who have a shot at standing,” said James Tierney, a former Democratic attorney general from Maine, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. That’s because, he explained, states have unique standing to challenge the federal government.

A federal judge approved a settlement Wednesday allowing former students at ITT Technical Institute to participate in the bankruptcy proceedings of its parent company, giving them a shot at the remaining assets of one of the nation’s largest for-profit college operators...“Students are now stakeholders in this bankruptcy,” said Eileen Connor, attorney for the students...Connor, who is also an attorney at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said Wednesday’s settlement builds a case for the Education Department to grant full relief.

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. But clearly, he never met Samantha Power. Part jet-setting diplomat, part sneaker-clad advocate, the Harvard human-rights champion and scholar first shot to fame in 2003, when she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on genocide, “A Problem from Hell.”...More than eight years later, Power has returned to Harvard as the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at HKS and professor of practice at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes. Jonathan Swan of Axios reported Monday night, based on “three sources with direct knowledge,” that FBI Director Chris Wray “threatened to resign” if FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe “was removed” from office. The threat apparently came in response to pressure on Wray by “Attorney General Jeff Sessions—at the public urging of President Donald Trump” to fire McCabe.

Business advocates who have been pressing the federal government for years to increase its regulation of worker centers like Fight for $15 are more hopeful than ever that they'll get their way after a string of reversals of Obama-era National Labor Relations Board precedent..."There's been a continuity to this issue across different administrations,” said Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program Executive Director Sharon Block, who was a DOL policy official in the Obama administration. "[Acosta] injected this uncertainty into what I think had no uncertainty."

The Congressional budget deal that re-opened the federal government last night has left undecided the fate of hundreds of thousands of “dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children)—including several dozen Harvard students...Referring to the dreamers’ uncertain status and the recent, separate revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans who have been permitted to live in the United States since a massive earthquake struck that country in 2001, Jason Corral, an attorney for the Harvard Immigration Refugee and Clinical Program, said, “The elimination of DACA and the elimination of TPS on top of that will drastically impact the Harvard community.” Corral was hired last year to provide legal services to undocumented Harvard affiliates.

As some other states scramble to find workarounds to mitigate impacts of the new federal tax law, Massachusetts lawmakers got a yellow light Tuesday from experts they invited to weigh on paths they might take...Taxpayers whose children do not have Social Security numbers will no longer be eligible for the child tax credit, said Keith Fogg, director of the federal tax clinic at Harvard Law School's Legal Services Center. Fogg said the law expanded the child tax credit to make up for the loss of dependency exemptions, but some filers who were eligible for the exemption will not be able to receive the credit. He gave the example of a married couple with dependent children aged 17 and 19. "If you play out the math in terms of how their tax return is going to map out, they're going to be losers, because they've lost the value of the dependent exemption and they're not getting any child tax credit to come in and give them the benefit," Fogg said.