Media Mentions

...For months, Trump has insisted that the investigations into Russian meddling—investigations being conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller and by both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—amount to nothing more than fake news. But, as is so often the case when the President cries “fake news,” the truth soon emerges...The broad outlines of the grounds for impeachment are more or less settled. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, who recently published “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, “The Framers wanted some kind of check on the executive, but they didn’t want to see impeachments for routine disagreements between Congress and the White House. They wanted to preserve the separation of powers, so they tried to set out criteria which would not compromise the executive branch.” One rule that’s clear is that an impeachable offense doesn’t have to be an actual crime.

U.S. President Donald Trump was trying to defend himself. He made things worse. Perhaps significantly worse. The day after his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia, Trump decided, against the advice of his aides, to discuss the subject on Twitter...Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter that the situation feels a “lot like obstruction.” “The question of whether Trump committed obstruction of justice when he asked Comey to drop the investigation on Valentine’s Day will largely turn on Trump’s intent: was he just trying to put in a good word for Flynn, or was he in fact trying to end a criminal investigation?” Whiting said in an email.

Trump raised alarm bells in his published response to the news that his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The tweet published to Trump’s account clearly implied that he already knew that Flynn had deceived the Feds when he fired him back in February: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” That unleashed a frenzy of speculation about whether Trump had just admitted to obstructing justice, since it seems he must have known that Flynn had committed a felony when he was pressuring then-FBI director James Comey to ease up on the Flynn case...But then came word that maybe Trump didn’t write the tweet after all. The Washington Post reported that “Trump’s lawyer John Dowd drafted the president’s tweet, according to two people familiar with the twitter message.”...Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain noted, “I’ve seen lawyers write each. It’s not like, you know, ‘hung’ and ‘hanged.’” Indeed, both “pleaded” and “pled” are both considered acceptable by American usage guides—though, in many newsrooms, “pled” is considered a rookie mistake, which helps explain why some journalists seized on it.

With Massachusetts lawmakers considering sweeping criminal justice reforms, one legal scholar hopes the state will take decisive action. Harvard Law professor Ron Sullivan says there are key areas that lawmakers need to address — specifically, bail reform so people aren't jailed for financial reasons — and mandatory minimum sentences. Many of the proposed reforms before lawmakers are based on recommendations from a report that state public safety officials tout. That's because it shows Massachusetts has the second lowest incarceration rate in the nation.

Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., admitting he violated a law that also criminalizes lying to Congress. Scholars have mixed views on whether Flynn’s guilty plea is bad news for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who allegedly lied to Congress about his contacts with the same ambassador. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told the Washington Examiner that Sessions should be concerned about facing the same charge as Flynn...Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating. Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating.

A Harvard Law expert says former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn probably will not spend a day in jail for lying to FBI agents — and that may say a lot about what he had to offer prosecutors investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. “It is striking that he is just being charged with one count when there has been so much discussion of other crimes,” said Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor whose career has also included leading prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “Ordinary practice is to require cooperators to plead guilty to all the crimes they have committed and reward them at sentencing,” he said. “The fact that Flynn is being permitted to plead to just one count of lying suggests . . . that Flynn has very significant information to provide.”

The rapid rise of wind and natural gas as sources of electricity is roiling U.S. power markets, forcing more companies to close older generating plants...“Generators are just fighting for existing market share,” said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “The aging fleet of coal and nuke generators, combined with low prices, makes this intense.”

A few weeks ago, I read a short new book by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein titled, simply, “Impeachment.” The book doesn’t mention President Trump once. Sunstein started writing it, he told me, partly because he was alarmed by what he considered reckless talk of impeachment during Trump’s first weeks on the job, before he had started doing much. Sunstein’s goal was to lay out a legal and historical framework for thinking about impeachment, independent of any specific president.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. We’re nearing the end of 2017, which means that it’s time to announce the most coveted of the annual movie awards: the Behavioral Economics Oscars (Becons for short). Created just a few years ago, the Becons, as they are called, have taken the film industry by storm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news that Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to Russia-related offenses is striking, for several reasons. The lies he told the FBI were about asking the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, for political favors during the presidential transition, some of which the ambassador granted. The lies happened when Flynn was already national security adviser and Donald Trump was president. The fact that Flynn lied about contacts with Russia seems particularly suspicious. The content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations deepens the narrative that special counsel Robert Mueller has been building: Earlier guilty pleas revealed Russian efforts to connect with the Trump campaign; this one reveals official contacts between the Trump team and Russia after the election -- contact significant enough for Flynn to lie to the FBI about.

As some Harvard graduate students have loudly opposed a Republican tax proposal that could slash students’ earnings, others say they are concerned about the plan’s “devastating” elimination of deductions for interest on student loans...Law School student Suzanne Schlossberg [`18] said that the striking of the loan interest deduction would also discourage students from pursuing lower-paying jobs in the public sector after graduation...Kenneth Lafler, the Law School’s assistant dean for student financial services, wrote in an email that loan interest deductions are important for making tuition affordable for Law School students.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court are used to applying 18th-century principles to an America that would bewilder the constitution’s framers. Yet sometimes this is really hard. On November 29th the court considered how a 226-year-old rule, the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, bears on one arrow in the government’s investigative quiver: tracking people’s movements via their mobile-phone signals...Ian Samuel of Harvard Law School agreed. The colonial-era reference caught the government’s lawyer “entirely off-guard”, he says. Now the justices must reckon with how to find for Mr Carpenter—no mean feat in light of the competing interests of privacy and policing.

Imagine a stack of documents that need to be reviewed. And another. And another. Instead of paying a contract attorney to navigate the papers, companies and law firms now have a second option: they can delegate the job to a software (and, hopefully, let legal professionals do more meaningful tasks, instead of cutting their jobs). A company in the Harvard Innovation Labs’ batch, Evisort, is developing a series of algorithms that are meant to “organize, categorize, and draw insights” out of legal contracts, as their pitch says. Formed by four law students from Harvard, two data scientists from MIT and two computer scientists from Northeastern University, the company launched almost a year ago and currently has eight employees...Currently, Evisort provides six A.I.-powered modules that can extrapolate the contents and the meaning of 24 types of contracts. “Fundamentally, it’s a search tool: it’s basically Google for contracts,” Jerry Ting [`18], Evisort co-founder and CEO, said in an interview.

For a man who has alternatively been called the face, the leader, and the speartip of the progressive “resistance” to the Trump administration, Xavier Becerra seems comfortable working outside the spotlight. When Gov. Jerry Brown tapped Becerra to replace U.S. Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California’s attorney general, the 59-year-old congressman came with more than two decades of experience cutting deals and building coalitions as a high-ranking, but...little-known representative...Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, for one, says Becerra has demonstrated national leadership “even in cases where his name is not in the headlines.” The skills that he developed in the House, building consensus and holding a caucus together, seem to have served Becerra in building ties with attorneys general in other states, said Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who teaches a class on the role of attorneys general. “He knew from his congressional experience that everybody counts.”

As tough as it is for black lawyers to rise to the top in law firms, it’s even tougher for black female attorneys. Though black women have outnumbered black men in law schools for about two decades, they constitute only a fraction of the already tiny number of black partners at major firms: Less than two percent of Big Law partners are black, and 0.56 percent are female and black. Black women are the minority within the minority. Even the best-credentialed black female lawyers seem to fare poorly. According to a new Harvard Law School study of black alumni, male black alums were more likely to be partners than their female counterparts...“Black women have all the problems of black men plus what white women face,” says Harvard Law School professor David Wilkins, the author of the study about black alums.

...The Law School’s library will not change its hours during reading period, but it will limit which students may study there, according to Harvard Law School Library Executive Director Jocelyn Kennedy. “During fall and spring reading and exam periods, HUID access to the Harvard Law School Library is limited to Harvard Law School students, faculty and staff” according to the Harvard Law School Library website. Other HUID card holders "must check in at the Circulation Desk for access.”

A New Hampshire man who used his phone to record two on-duty police officers as they were searching his house was awarded $275,000 in a federal civil rights lawsuit. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who had filed the lawsuit, said Wednesday that the city of Manchester will pay Alfredo Valentin, who was arrested in 2015 on misdemeanor wiretapping charges after he used his phone to record the officers...Chiraag Bains, a former senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and who is now a visiting senior fellow at Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, said people “feel they have a right to know what the police, who are public servants after all, are doing.” “In many places, officers understand that being recorded when performing their public duties is a part of the job,” Bains said.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Adrian Vermeule. Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

The rapid rise of wind and natural gas as sources of electricity is roiling U.S. power markets, forcing more companies to close older generating plants. Wholesale electricity prices are falling near historic lows in parts of the country with competitive power markets, as demand for electricity remains stagnant while newer, less-expensive generating facilities continue to come online....“Generators are just fighting for existing market share,” said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “The aging fleet of coal and nuke generators, combined with low prices, makes this intense.”

An interview with Susan Crawford. Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford on the risks of the FCC’s plan to do away with net neutrality rules and why she believes the agency should be focused instead on ensuring that all Americans have access to cheap, world class internet access. Then, Charlie Savage of the New York Times on how President Trump is reshaping the U.S. judiciary.

Barker was speaking at an advance screening of his documentary “The Final Year"—which chronicles foreign policy initiatives in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidential administration—at the Harvard Art Museums on Wednesday night. The screening was followed by a question-and-answer session with Barker and former United Nations ambassador Samantha J. Power. The documentary, set to be released on Jan. 19, 2018, follows Obama and several of his senior officials, including Power, who is currently a professor of global leadership and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of practice at the Harvard Law School...“We need to draw people into public service and government,” Power said. She also encouraged young people and Harvard students to consider entering the foreign service.