Media Mentions

In 2002, President George W. Bush slapped steep tariffs on steel imports, warning about the collapse of the U.S. steel industry, then lifted them 21 months later to avoid a trade war with the European Union and Japan. Sixteen years later, President Trump is imposing steel tariffs of his own — but this time, the most powerful potential trade war foe is China...China's domestic demand for steel is falling as its economy slows, and that excess steel is disrupting the world market, Mark Wu, a professor of international trade law at Harvard, tells Axios. "China has to do something [in response to Trump's tariffs] just to signal its own resolve," Wu says. But they likely won't retaliate with the full brunt of their capability, with China content to let the West fight it out among themselves, he says.

In 2005, Jaime Mann was cited for several traffic violations in Craighead County — not having insurance, not wearing a seatbelt, and hazardous driving. She was charged about $500. She paid some of it, but then she started racking up fees and fines for the money and community service hours she owed...Mann was caught up in a system that has now come under scrutiny. Last year, two Craighead County judges opted to grant amnesty to many probationers, and that prompted the company to sue the county for lost income...According to Harvard Law School fellow Chiraag Baains, the private probation business model presents a conflict of interest. The companies communicate directly with judges about probationers’ progress and have influence. “For example, the company may decide, 'We’re not getting paid here. We want this person to spend some time in jail and maybe they’ll work harder to pay us,'" said Bains.

Trade associations opposed to President Donald Trump’s tariffs are exploring whether to try to block the tariffs order in court, using as a template the successful efforts to challenge the president’s travel ban...“One possible argument that an industry association might raise would be that the president has exceeded the bounds of what’s permissible under the congressional statute,” says Mark Wu, a trade expert at Harvard Law School. But given the careful way the president’s tariff proclamation was worded to refer to national security, he says, “it would be difficult for such an argument to prevail in court.”

Revelations this week that President Donald Trump spoke to key witnesses in the Russia investigation about matters they discussed with the special counsel Robert Mueller's team has legal experts baffled. They say it may open Trump up to potentially serious risks that could contribute to a criminal case against him...Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School and a longtime former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC and Boston, said it's possible Trump has been talking to witnesses in the investigation all along. "That wouldn't surprise me," he said, "because he is obviously consumed by the investigation and is completely undisciplined when it comes to following rules and basic norms."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Office of Special Counsel, the federal ethics watchdog, has found that President Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act last year by endorsing Republican candidate Roy Moore and opposing Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race. Conway did arguably break the rules. But the provision of the law that she broke seems at least borderline unconstitutional as applied to her. The circumstances of the case show why the First Amendment should be interpreted to protect a federal employee who is talking politics in a public forum.

...Nudges — tiny changes that have surprisingly large effects on how we act — offer policymakers a way to gently push us toward doing the right thing: Automatically sign up drivers as organ donors, or enroll employees in the company retirement plan, unless they opt out. Put the fruit at eye level and hide the cake and candy somewhere inconspicuous. These nudges work because real-world humans don't make decisions like coldly rational Mr. Spocks, but like flawed, idiosyncratic Captain Kirks. Nudges are essentially ways to harness our less-than-rational behaviors to help ourselves, or those around us...The idea first came to public view a decade ago through the best-selling book Nudge, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein...“The biggest change is the sheer explosion of initiatives, from private and public sectors alike,” says Sunstein, of Harvard University.

Here’s a disturbing fact to consider in 2018, the year women supposedly began to topple the patriarchy: Gun owners in the United States, a majority of whom are men, have better constitutional rights than women. Gun owners have the Second Amendment, in place since the 18th century. The U.S. is one of only three countries that offer constitutional protection to gun owners. Women, meanwhile, have been fighting for an equal rights amendment for decades. That’s because the Constitution does not actually grant women equal rights under the law, setting the country apart from 131 other nations that explicitly guarantee gender equality in their constitutions...“This amendment is the only legal initiative expansive enough to support what the Me Too revelations have shown is needed,” said Catharine MacKinnon, the legal scholar who first conceptualized the notion of sexual harassment in the courts and who sits on the advisory council of the current ERA Coalition.

Worker cooperatives are a viable alternative to corporate capitalism, yet they are rarely brought up in political discourse, two speakers at a Harvard Law Forum event argued Wednesday. Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at University of Colorado Boulder, and Jason Wiener, a worker cooperative lawyer, came to the Law School to argue the case for democratic cooperatives—speaking on how they work, why they’re important, and why so few people have heard of them...Harvard Law Forum President Peter D. Davis ’12 [`18] said the talk aimed to explore one way to approach a larger dilemma. “If you don’t like state communism, and you don’t like corporate capitalism, what do you like?”

...Tuesday’s testimony marked the first time that a former head of state of a foreign country faced trial in a U.S. civil court for human rights abuses, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the Mamani family...The couple belongs to one of eight families suing the former Bolivian government leaders under the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows suits for extrajudicial killings in foreign lands. The suit was filed in South Florida, where the two former politicians now live after fleeing Bolivia in 2003. The legal wrangling over the case has lasted for nearly a decade, and the trial is expected to last several weeks before U.S. Judge James Cohn. The relatives of the slain Bolivians are represented by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and several high-powered private law firms.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. President Donald Trump has shown little or no respect for the independence of the nation’s institutions. That lack of respect is what distinguishes him from his recent predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, and above all it is what demonstrates an authoritarian disposition. Reasonable people can differ about the Trump administration’s policies on taxes, regulation, abortion and government spending. For those who strongly support those policies, some of Trump’s less appealing personal characteristics, including a lack of grace, might seem relatively unimportant, a matter of detail.

Donald Trump owes his presidency to the Electoral College more than any other factor, even Russian interference. This constitutional quirk also gives a hint of irony to an unusual bill passed earlier this week by Maryland’s Democratic-controlled State Senate. The senators voted 28-17 on Monday, largely along party lines, to require presidential candidates to file copies of their tax returns with the state board of elections two months ahead of Election Day, so the filings can be made public...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor and frequent critic of the Trump administration, described Maryland’s bill as a “neutral, even-handed way” to allow voters to assess the “financial and ethical history” of would-be candidates. He also viewed its constitutional footing as more secure.“It’s not an interference with any federal prerogative, nor does it filter out in advance any set of presidential candidates who meet the Constitution’s age, residence, and other qualifications,” Tribe said.

Life for undocumented immigrants is full of risks. Any encounter with law-enforcement officials — on the sidewalk, while they are driving, or in their homes in the middle of the night — can lead to arrest and possible deportation. But in all such cases, undocumented immigrants have rights...At a workshop on immigrants’ rights held Monday morning at the Memorial Church, attorneys Jason Corral and Cindy Zapata of the Harvard Immigration & Refugee Clinical Program shared legal advice on how to deal with the more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws under the Trump administration. Corral has provided legal services to at least 60 undocumented students studying at Harvard. “In this new day and age, any evidence you can provide, you can end up in removal proceedings,” said Corral.

An interview with Diane Rosenfeld. College campuses continue to be unsafe for women. Its estimated that one in five female students will be sexually assaulted during her time in college. It’s a disturbingly common problem, yet so few of the accused perpetrators end up facing criminal charges. A former Yale student is currently standing trial for the alleged rape of one of his classmates. It could be one of the few times a campus rape case is decided in court. Why do so few accused perpetrators end up facing criminal charges?

When the movement began in 1992, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was considered quixotic, its proponents unrealistically idealistic, its efforts doomed to fail. Twenty-five years and one Nobel Peace Prize later, more than 180 countries have signed its 1997 treaty, agreeing not only to avoid using the weapons but to help remove them from areas where they have been abandoned and remain a danger to life, limbs, and livelihoods...“Everybody said it was impossible to do,” said Goose, looking back at the long road to the 1997 landmine treaty. “After we finally did it, people said, ‘Oh, that wasn’t that hard. It was a one-off. Circumstances allowed that to happen.’” They also, he reported, said its success could not be replicated. Monday’s discussion was designed to prove that false. Indeed, this first public event of Humanitarian Disarmament: The Way Ahead (moderated by Bonnie Docherty, associate director of Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic) started off by outlining the similarities — and the successes — of other recent campaigns.

A new data-driven tool made to determine bail is currently being tested in Dane County courts. The Public Safety Assessment, which was developed in conjunction with Harvard University and The Arnold Foundation, uses solely objective information and takes into account a variety of factors to generate a report for a court to consider when setting bail for defendants. Data collection for the study began in April 2017 and individuals will continue to enter the study until April 2019, Chris Griffin, Harvard law professor and co-director of the study, said...“What the study is attempting to do is very simple: We are trying to evaluate whether this tool from the Arnold Foundation is a useful piece of information for judges to have at their disposal,” Griffin said.

A Harvard Law School professor whose past clients include the family of the 18-year-old fatally shot in 2014 by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, has joined the prosecution team in the criminal case against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Circuit Judge Rex Burlison on Monday approved Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner's motion to have Ronald S. Sullivan join the prosecution. Greitens was indicted in February on felony invasion of privacy. He is accused of taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he was having an affair without her permission in 2015, before he was elected.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump says trade wars are easy to win, but that hasn’t always been true in U.S. history. To the contrary, for the first 40 years of the republic, the founders struggled desperately to establish international trade agreements that Americans would find acceptable. The need for trade leverage was the first factor motivating James Madison to call for a new Constitution. And trade wars had a way of turning into shooting wars. The War of 1812, the first declared war in U.S. history, was the result of a trade fight that the Americans seemed unable to win with economic sanctions alone.

An article by Jack Goldsmith. Tuesday is the release date for an extraordinary collection of essays published under the title: Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America...My essay traces the history of the national security Deep State from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to the present; shows how the Deep State’s reaction to Trump has been norm-defiant and damaging yet at the same time possibly necessary; and concludes pessimistically by explaining how and why the battle of “Trump v. Deep State” has been harmful to our national security institutions. Collections of essays are often dull affairs, but this one isn’t.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. Is there a fundamental weakness in the potential case of obstruction against President Donald Trump?...The relevant federal criminal provision — 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) — makes it a crime to obstruct “any official proceeding, or attempt[] to do so.” The statute specifies that “an official proceeding need not be pending or about to be instituted at the time of the offense.” However, as Estreicher and Moosman argue, relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, prosecutors bringing charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1512 must at a minimum show that an official proceeding, such as a grand jury investigation, was foreseen, and that the defendant knew that his actions would likely affect those proceedings.

Robert Adler was a thirtysomething attorney at a small Washington firm in the late 1970s when a woman arrived in his office to discuss her problems at work. The woman, Sandra Bundy, was an employment specialist at DC’s Department of Corrections, where she helped former inmates find jobs after their release. About four years earlier, she explained, her superiors had begun making repeated—and unwanted—sexual advances toward her. After she rebuffed them, things got worse...As Adler listened to her story, however, he felt compelled to act. In 1977, Bundy sued the director of the Corrections Department in federal court. “I had no optimism that we were going to win this thing, because we were really in uncharted waters,” Adler says. “But I didn’t care.” Today, some 40 years after she first walked into Adler’s office, Bundy’s lawsuit is considered a seminal event in the establishment of sexual harassment as a legal concept in America. “What is so incredibly significant about the case was finding that sexual harassment itself—the doing of it—was sex discrimination,” says Catharine MacKinnon, a University of Michigan law professor and a leading scholar on the issue. “That has been world-changing.”

Race-related activism is re-emerging at Harvard Law School after a group of Law students wore pink armbands and hung posters last month to “stand in solidarity with people of color” following incidents of racism at Stanford Law School in the fall...First-year Law student Felipe D. Hernandez [`20], along with 11 other students who chose to remain anonymous, wrote a Feb. 2018 letter published in the Harvard Law Record arguing the Law School also struggles with racism...While the campaign was not officially organized by any formal affinity groups, president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association Jazzmin A. Carr [`18] praised it in an emailed statement, writing her group “stands in solidarity” with its organizers...The Harvard Law Record letter specifically criticized the structure of the financial aid system, the perception that the school is not geared toward public interest, and the first-year curriculum. Law School Dean of Students Marcia L. Sells emphasized the school takes these issues seriously and is working to improve the school’s culture and offerings. “The student financial services office advisory group is looking at the Loan Income Protection Plan. LIPP is something that is always being looked at,” Sells said in an interview last week, addressing criticisms of the school’s financial aid and public interest programs.