Media Mentions

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to sue the federal government over the recently enacted tax bill on grounds that it violates constitutional principles will face significant challenges, legal experts say...Thomas Brennan, a tax professor at Harvard Law School, said Cuomo’s plan to sue the federal government over the tax plan would be “difficult.” “My own thought is it would be a challenging thing to challenge this law on constitutionality, at least the SALT (state and local taxes) restriction,” Brennan said of the proposed Cuomo administration lawsuit. “I imagine the strategy would be to argue about an infringement on states’ rights of some sort.”

While drafting the Constitution, James Madison strove to ensure the protection of minority rights but also proposed that a slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. The contradiction, etched into the Constitution, would come to define Madison and a nation irreconcilably founded both on slavery and the ideals of liberty and justice. This paradox lies at the heart of “The Three Lives of James Madison,” by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who charts Madison’s life as the “father of the Constitution,” a political partisan, and ultimately a statesman in his roles as secretary of state and president.

The New York Times reported Thursday that President Donald Trump had his White House counsel try to convince Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the Times and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, tell William Brangham what the revelations mean for the president and whether they amount to obstruction of justice.

While many players kicked back to relax on their day off Friday, safety McCourty had a different approach. As part of the NFL’s players coalition, he led a “listen and learn day” at Harvard Law School, joined by teammates Johnson Bademosi, Matthew Slater and Harmon as well as team president Jonathan Kraft. They met with criminal justice advocates to learn about, and explore solutions to, systemic issues that lead to racially and ethnically disparate outcomes with incarceration in Boston and Massachusetts, with special attention on the juvenile justice system. The group also visited the Haley House, a non-profit organization and café that hires and gives support to formerly incarcerated individuals.

A review by Zalman Rothschild `18. The notion of zera kodesh, “holy seed,” appears only twice in the Bible, both times in reference to the people of Israel as a whole. For Hasidim, however, it has a more restricted meaning. It denotes what Samuel Heilman, in his new book Who Will Lead Us? The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America, calls the “genealogical sanctity” of the offspring of rebbes, a characteristic that qualifies them (and almost them alone) to succeed to any vacant thrones of Hasidic courts.

An op-ed by Samuel David Garcia `19. In the past, economic opportunity in the Rio Grande Valley grew at an incredible pace as trade between the United States and Mexico flourished, but as domestic and global affairs have shifted, trade with Mexico has unfortunately become a source of economic volatility for the Rio Grande Valley.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has just gotten a lot worse, and the only real solution -- which,of course, is not a solution -- is to throw them all away and buy new ones that may be available in a few years. On Wednesday, researchers announced a series of major security vulnerabilities in the microprocessors at the heart of the world's computers for the past 15 to 20 years. They've been named Spectre and Meltdown, and they operate by manipulating different ways processors optimize performance by rearranging the order of instructions or performing different instructions in parallel. An attacker who controls one process on a system can use the vulnerabilities to steal secrets from elsewhere on the computer.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Above all else, the First Amendment is a barrier to “prior restraints” – injunctions and licensing requirements aimed at preventing speech from entering the public domain at all. Just as a new Steven Spielberg film, "The Post," is celebrating the vindication of that principle in the Pentagon Papers case, President Donald Trump’s lawyers have formally demanded that a publisher cease publication of a new book.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If President Donald Trump would actually sue Steve Bannon for violating a nondisclosure agreement made with his campaign, it would be great for the freedom of speech. That may sound strange, because Trump’s threatened lawsuit is precisely aimed to silence Bannon and other potential leakers who worked on the campaign. Bannon has been extensively quoted in excerpts published this week from the journalist Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” But Trump’s suit would almost certainly fail, and that’s why it would serve free speech.

When the Supreme Court hears a major election-law case next week, the Justice Department will argue that nothing prevents Ohio from canceling the voter registration of citizens who don’t confirm their eligibility after not voting for two years...It’s not unusual for the department to adjust some legal positions under a new administration. But legal analysts say the shifts since President Donald Trump took office have been particularly numerous and pronounced. “Every administration does, and certainly in my time we did do, the occasional U-turn—but with great reluctance,” said Harvard law professor Charles Fried, who, as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan represented the government before the Supreme Court and in select lower-court litigation.

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.