Media Mentions

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. One puzzle that deepens with Mike Schmidt’s New York Times story on “Trump’s Struggle to Keep [a] Grip on [the] Russia Investigation” is why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has not recused himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation...Recall that Rosenstein is the acting attorney general for this matter because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself. As a result, Rosenstein appointed Mueller and, under the relevant Order and incorporated regulations, supervises him.

The Trump administration said Thursday it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters, giving energy companies access to leases off California for the first time in decades and opening more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard...Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School and a former Obama climate adviser, said the latest Trump proposal was more about sending a message. In the Arctic in particular, she said, low oil prices and the decision by Royal Dutch Shell to give up all but one of its federal oil leases indicate drilling is not on the near horizon. “But the decision is a signal, just like the one Congress sent with ANWR, that Republicans want to open the nation’s public lands and waters for business,” she said.

An op-ed by Marissa Brodney `18 and Meritxell Regué. On 15 December 2017, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Chamber II found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, former President and Commander-in-Chief of the UPC/FPLC, responsible for reparations in the amount of 10,000,000 euros — the largest ICC reparations order issued to-date. The Lubanga case was the first to reach the reparations stage — yet controversy surrounding procedural requirements delayed the Chamber’s determination of Lubanga’s monetary liability. Last month’s decision answered some of these procedural questions, and raised new ones.

The Trump administration is proposing to let small firms act more like big corporations to buy cheaper health insurance, a measure that would get around some of Obamacare’s requirements. The rule would broaden the availability of less-regulated health insurance coverage to more small employers, and to self-employed people...“This rule seems to err on the side of making AHPs broadly available without making any effort to embed the protections that people get from ACA-covered plans,” said Sharon Block, a former senior Obama administration Labor Department official who now runs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “You’re moving people towards less-quality plans and potentially doing harm to the people who stay in the ACA-covered plans.”

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?