Media Mentions

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed. It promised to be a spectacle in a period that had seen its share of them. Three years after the end of a bloody civil war that had sundered the Union, and nearly three years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the United States had triggered the most serious process in the constitutional mechanism: the power of impeachment. On February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted along party lines, 126 to 47, to impeach President Andrew Johnson for having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Days later, a House committee drew up nine articles of impeachment against the 17th president...The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day.

An article by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. In September, we shared our plan to hold a symposium at Harvard Law on the question of whether it is time to end labor preemption. The symposium brought together leading labor law scholars and practitioners to wrestle with this big question. To help give context to the symposium discussion, we had asked several thought leaders to help paint the picture of what is at stake in this debate by exploring ways that workers are already organizing outside of the confines of the National Labor Relations Act and models that they might pursue, if given the opportunity.

...Medical tourism thus presents both opportunities and risks. At its best, the industry can help India grow its health care system, using the revenues generated from international patients to improve local care. At its worst, it risks shifting resources to private hospitals catering to elites at the expense of public institutions serving the poor. “What’s the effect on health care for Indians? Here, the answer is the story is kind of messy,” says Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on medical tourism. “But there’s some reason to be concerned.”

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook influence more of our lives every year. Congress has talked about regulating the tech giants without taking action. In Europe, it's a different story. Just before Christmas, the European Union's highest court issued a ruling against Uber. European courts have also said that Google has to remove some search results at a person's request. It's known as the right to be forgotten. To talk with us about why Europe is regulating these tech companies more aggressively than the U.S., Jonathan Zittrain joins us now. He's a professor of law and computer science at Harvard.

Years after majoring in classics, David Ferris went to Rare Book School, where he learned the endless ways that an old book — through its paper and type and watermarks and dozens of historical clues — writes about itself. The road to curator of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts at Harvard’s Law School Library is not a linear one, but David found it. Mary Person, a library colleague, worked side by side with David, almost forensically. "Books have so much to tell you," she said. "There are so many secrets. There’s something about this work that has real sleuthing involved. I think he really had fun."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may think his year-end summary of U.S. foreign policy is a tale of success. But the remarkable op-ed article in the New York Times in fact illustrates the opposite: It shows in chapter and verse how the U.S. lacks leverage over many of the critical challenges it faces globally. From North Korea to China to Russia and the Middle East, American objectives are clear -- and the Donald Trump administration has no credible road map to achieve them.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If Olympic medals were awarded for the most powerful tools in behavioral economics, what would win the gold? The answer is clear: default rules, which decide what happens if people do nothing at all...Though people are free to change the default, they usually don’t -- which helps explain why that automatic enrollment in retirement programs or in energy plans can have a huge impact.

An op-ed by Catharine Mackinnon. Women’s voices recounting sexual abuse being heard, believed, and acted on is a real change. The accountability for sexual harassment seen today, termed “voluntary compliance” in the discrimination field, has been driven primarily by mainstream and social media, not by litigation. But make no mistake. If sexual harassment had not been recognized as a legal claim for sex discrimination decades ago, powerful, prominent men would not be losing their lucrative jobs, political and academic positions, deals and reputations. Transforming a privilege of power into a disgrace so despicable that not even many white upper-class men feel they can afford to be associated with it took decades of risk, punishment and work, including legal work.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Paul Butler. To say that President Trump cannot be charged with obstruction of justice in connection with James Comey’s firing just because the president had the authority to fire him — as Trump’s counsel John Dowd says — is simply wrong.

Asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. through Tijuana are out of luck for now, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reached capacity at its San Diego ports of entry, an agency spokesman told KPBS in an email on Wednesday...Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and founder of the Harvard Law School's Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, said the move is a violation of Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. "There's no question that this violates the statute, it violates our treaty obligations," she said. "You can't turn people away at the border. That's very fundamental ... It's not a gray area."

A sleeping media giant may be about to wake up: Fox News’ website — known for its high traffic, but not strong identity —is staffing up and sharpening its voice in hopes of equaling the impact of its increasingly pro-Trump television partner. A website that had been more closely identified with Shepard Smith’s brand of reporting has now moved closer to the mold of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, according to former staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity...Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor, was part of the group with MIT that studied how readers consumed news online during the 2016 election, and said that Fox News has an incentive to move to the right. Analyzing linking and sharing patterns of 1.25 million stories, his group found that Fox News and Breitbart formed the heart of “a relatively insular and self-referential” online news ecosystem...“Fox News became less prominent, fewer Twitter shares, fewer Facebook shares,” he said. But that changed during the general election. “It’s only when they line up, after Trump essentially wins out, that they return to their position of prominence,” he said. “In many senses, it was a capitulation of Fox News to the Breitbart line.”

In North Carolina, it costs inmates $10 a day to stay in jail before they’re even found guilty of a crime. Yet most people jailed pretrial are there because they can’t afford bail. It’s a predicament Mecklenburg County Public Defender Kevin Tully points out time and again to judges: that those who can’t buy their own freedom are charged for their own confinement...Starting last month, they committed to consulting a “bench card” during every case—a piece of paper they use to remind themselves to thoroughly assess a defendant’s ability to pay before setting a fine or fee, as well as which ones are waivable or can be reduced on a sliding scale. It’s a simple act, but one that could have significant consequences for low-income defendants and their families...The Mecklenburg judges think there could be safety in numbers. The judges brought in lawyers from Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Debt initiative who helped them develop the bench cards they now refer to...Mitali Nagrecha, director of the Harvard initiative, said that the cards were intended to “clarify” the law and “reset the tone.” She said other counties have expressed interest, and she hopes to release a statewide version in the coming months.

President Donald Trump’s recent tweets about current or former FBI officials could violate laws meant to protect witnesses, according to two former White House ethics lawyers. In recent days, Trump has criticized former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and outgoing FBI general counsel James Baker...But Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, pointed out to Ryan that to violate the witness intimidation law, Trump’s remarks must cross “the line from the ordinary kinds of attacks that investigation targets or defendants might make...over to statements designed to interfere with a witness’s testimony.”

..."How do you build a platform that allows the adversely impacted community members to step into their power?" At a time when many are feeling defeated as they try to fight against a racist and non-responsive government, many justice advocates around the country are asking this critical question. They recognize that nothing less than a total sea change in perspective will work: In order to create new policies and enhance community life, community justice organizers must turn to those most impacted..."Community justice grows out of the idea that entire communities are repressed, oppressed and held voiceless," said David Harris of Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ).

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions retracted an Obama-era guidance to state courts that was meant to end debtors’ prisons, where people who are too poor to pay fines are sent. This practice is blatantly unconstitutional, and the guidance had helped jump-start reform around the country. Its withdrawal is the latest sign that the federal government is retreating from protecting civil rights for the most vulnerable among us.

In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy...“I was interested in the mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. One of most remarkable stories of 2017 was the extent to which President Donald Trump was prevented from executing his many pledges—both on the campaign trail and in office—to violate the law. As predicted, courts, the press, the bureaucracy, civil society, and even Congress were aggressive and successful in stopping or deterring Trump from acting unlawfully. But will these checks continue to work in the new year?

Congressman Devin Nunes has been running around Washington acting like a guilty maniac for most of 2017. He used his role as the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try and sabotage the Trump/Russia investigation, and even got removed from legislation, which caused him to launch his own rogue investigation into clearing Trump. New evidence now suggests that Nunes was in on the Trump-Russia conspiracy from the beginning, and Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law Professor, thinks Nunes is going to be arrested for it...Trump put Devin Nunes on his transition team in hopes that he would help protect him against Nunes’ committee when they came digging for evidence.

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, activist investor Albert Frere's investment vehicle, became fashion group Burberry’s largest shareholder on Nov. 10. Activists’ bargaining power at companies with controlling shareholders is not always as limited as it appears, according to a 2016 paper by Kobi Kastiel, a fellow at Harvard Law School. Forces that facilitate activism include the right to nominate directors, the right to veto going-private transactions, and the use of litigation to put pressure on those in control, Kastiel concludes.

When allegations of serial sexual misconduct by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein broke in October, they triggered an intense national reckoning over sexual harassment and assault in the workplace and beyond...Today [Catharine Mackinnon] the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School tells the Gazette she is “inspired by the brilliance, heart, and grit of all the survivors who are speaking out and reflecting on their experiences of sexual violation, and being listened to.” And she said the downfall of so many powerful men is stunning, “especially given decades of stonewalling and recalcitrance and siding with abusers.”...“When you take a higher view of everything that’s going on, a meta-analysis, you can see that that is absolutely the way that defense works. Anytime somebody comes forward, there’s an attempt to discredit her,” said [Diane] Rosenfeld.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has suddenly found himself in the middle of Washington's biggest political firestorm, and there are growing signs that he may not be able to avoid being consumed by it. Rosenstein is the man responsible for overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government...Despite these recent controversies, Rosenstein has long been considered an apolitical straight shooter by those who’ve worked with him....Philip Heymann, Rosenstein’s former professor at Harvard Law School and later his colleague, told me. “He says what he thinks, but he’s always fair.”