Media Mentions

Joe Arpaio might have been able to stay out of prison after President Trump pardoned him last month, but that doesn’t mean the controversial former Arizona sheriff has free rein to harass his critics. Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop targeting undocumented immigrants, is threatening action against a Harvard Law School professor in a clear effort to use legal threats to deter opponents. The professor, Andrew Manuel Crespo, wrote a column in this newspaper earlier this month calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to challenge the pardon on constitutional grounds. In Crespo’s view, Trump’s pardon may have been unconstitutional because it interfered with the judiciary’s ability to protect constitutional rights.

An op-ed by Samantha Power. When George Washington gave his Farewell Address in 1796, he urged the American people “to be constantly awake” to the risk of foreign influence. In the wake of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 United States election, the president’s warning has a fresh, chilling resonance. The debate in the United States about foreign interference concentrates on who did what to influence last year’s election and the need for democracies to strengthen their cybersecurity for emails, critical infrastructure and voting platforms. But we need to pay far more attention to another vulnerability: our adversaries’ attempts to subvert our democratic processes by aiming falsehoods at ripe subsets of our population — and not only during elections.

When the Trump administration announced on Sept. 5 that it intended to upend the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which has banned deportation of many young immigrants, the move seemed to set a general course for what would come next...Opening the discussion on “DACA: What’s Next,” moderator Dan Balz, chief correspondent for the Washington Post and a fall resident fellow at the IOP, summarized recent developments, asking the panel members — Carlos Rojas, an immigrant rights advocate and special projects consultant for Youth on Board; Roberto G. Gonzalez, assistant professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Jason Corral, staff attorney, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical program — for their take on the social media back and forth...The DACA program itself was a compromise, said Corral, just as the BRIDGE Act, legislation now before Congress that would essentially legalize DACA, is a compromise. Calling the administration’s initial decision to suspend DACA “discriminatory, racist, nationalist,” Corral said, “It’s not the people that are broken, it’s the immigration law that is broken.”

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. The International Criminal Court very recently issued an arrest warrant for a militia leader in Libya which should catch the attention of U.S. policymakers, diplomats and prosecutors because of the possibility that his most senior commander—an American citizen by the name of Khalifa Haftar—ordered soldiers to commit war crimes. So has General Haftar been telling his subordinates to carry out the very acts that are part of the International Court’s arrest warrant, such as summary executions?

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. A federal judge in Arizona will soon consider whether to overturn President Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The answer to this question has consequences not just for Arpaio and the people he hurt but also for the entire country. And although the conventional legal wisdom has been that a presidential decision to grant a pardon is unreviewable, that is wrong. In this circumstance, Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio was unconstitutional and should be overturned.

It’s not surprising that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is interested in the role Facebook played in Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 election. Yet, the news that broke over the weekend that his team had obtained a search warrant to access information about Facebook’s recently disclosed Russia-linked ad spending is the clearest sign yet of the breadth of his probe, the pace at which its moving along and what kind of case he might be trying to build, regardless of whether he ultimately brings criminal charges...Getting a search warrant is a higher bar for Mueller to clear than a grand jury subpoena, another tool Mueller is using to obtain documents and testimony. “To get a search warrant like that, you have to show a judge that there is probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found at the location,” said Harvard Law professor and former federal prosecutor Alex Whiting.

The technologist who ran Donald Trump's automated ad campaign on Facebook says "unsupervised" software can bring out the best and worst of humanity. Darren Bolding, chief technology officer of Cambridge Analytica, told the crowd at the third annual Internet Summit in San Francisco on Thursday that "algorithms will find the worst in us if you let them go nuts." His comments came during an interview onstage with Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig in front of several hundred people gathered to hear him discuss the campaign.

Almost nothing is publicly known about the American ISIS fighter who is now in the custody of the U.S. military, but one fact has already made the case extraordinary: The Trump Administration has declared him an enemy combatant, according to a military spokesman...The designation of the American ISIS fighter as an enemy combatant would become more consequential if the Trump administration seeks to detain him indefinitely under that status, legal experts say. If that happens, "then it's a big deal," said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Bush administration lawyer.

A Pennsylvania federal judge on Thursday appointed Harvard Law School professor William B. Rubenstein to address several questions surrounding attorneys’ fees payouts in the uncapped NFL concussion settlement, overruling concerns that his involvement may create a conflict of interest...U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody said Rubenstein must conclude whether a cap can and should be implemented in relation to the percentage any class member must pay his attorney, while also making a determination on how high the cap should be...

Easing challenges created for veterans who receive “bad paper” discharges will require changes in practices and procedures at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, some experts said Friday...Dana Montalto, a fellow at Harvard Law School, is petitioning for change to VA regulations concerning veterans with other-than-honorable discharges. The VA in July began providing urgent mental health care to those veterans – aid that wasn’t available previously. Though VA Secretary David Shulkin’s announcement was a shift in how government officials talked about veterans with bad paper, critics argued the policy didn’t go far enough.

Facebook lives and dies by its algorithms. They decide the order of posts in your News Feed, the ads you see when you open the app, and which which news topics are trending. Algorithms make its vast platform possible, and Facebook can often seem to trust them completely—or at least thoughtlessly. On Thursday, a pitfall of that approach became clear. ProPublica revealed that people who buy ads on Facebook can choose to target them at self-described anti-Semites...To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, that story suggests the entire way that tech companies currently sell ads online might need an overhaul. “For categories with tiny audiences, with titles drawn from data that Facebook users themselves enter—such as education and interests—it may amount to a tree falling in a forest that no one hears,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump has to decide what to do with an American who was fighting for Islamic State, captured by Kurdish forces in Syria and handed over this week to the U.S. military. The best solution is also the simplest: Charge him with material support for terrorism, convict him and lock him up in an appropriate U.S. prison for many, many years. In any sane, nonpartisan world, this decision would be a no-brainer. The other options are all flawed -- practically, or legally, or both.

From the Great Recession to Libor and PPI, money laundering to mis-sold rate swap deals, the world of finance has, in many cases, earned its crown of thorns. But Mihir Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group professor of finance at Harvard Business School, thinks bankers get a bad rap. I caught up with him on a recent trip to London to discuss his book, the Wisdom of Finance. There is, he says, a deep connection between morality and money. I suggest that given recent years, more than a few will disagree. “Oh of course they will, but that’s what I’m trying to change. In fact part of the idea of the title, the Wisdom of Finance, was to put together two words people don’t usually associate.”

The combination of huge amounts of personal data on all of us and tools to analyze it can do great good in medical and scientific applications. But the same technologies also threaten the social and political order of our country, critics say. Technology can be "the best and worst of times at the same time," said Harvard Law School professor (and former presidential candidate) Lawrence Lessig, speaking the Cloudflare Internet Summit Thursday in San Francisco. Lessig, who has long worried about the state of U.S. democracy, thinks that data science poses a new and dangerous threat.

The House this week quietly pushed aside some of the most controversial proposals in President Trump’s budget request...By throwing out an enormous initial proposal for non-defense cuts, Trump may have made it easier for Congress to adopt cuts that are nonetheless significant. Psychologists call the strategy “anchoring,” because it anchors the first number— in this case $54 billion in discretionary non-defense cuts — at the center of a negotiation. “It’s a hugely powerful tool, as behavioral economists and psychologists have proven,” says Gabriella Blum, a negotiations expert at Harvard Law School. “Once you throw a number out there, it serves as a very powerful anchor that your mind is drawn to. It forces the conversation around it.”

Today is "Constitution Day," marking the anniversary of the adoption of the US Constitution on September 17th, 1787. James Madison is considered the "father of the Constitution," and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman is coming out with a new book about him in October titled, "The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President." Feldman says James Madison was a politician with a long-term view. He wanted a government of the people, a republic, but not an empire. Madison left office more popular than any of his predecessor presidents. Feldman spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado on June 26, 2017.

Despite rainy weather, crowds of Harvard Law School students, staff, faculty, alumni, and their families gathered in Jarvis Field Friday night for an event recognizing the school’s contributions to the arts as part of its bicentennial celebrations. The event, called “HLS in the Arts,” spanned two days and is one of the first in year-long series to celebrate the Law School’s 200th birthday...Richard J. Lazarus, a Law School professor and the faculty chair of the bicentennial planning committee, said that this year’s celebrations have been in the works since as early as 2014, when he began meeting with faculty, staff, and students to brainstorm ideas for how best to commemorate this milestone in the school’s history. His said his intention was for the school to spend the year recalling its own achievements, but instead actively showing what makes it so “iconic.”

An essay by Andrew Crespo. Last week, I wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe suggesting that a private attorney should be appointed to challenge the constitutionality of former Sheriff Joseph Arpaio’s pardon—a suggestion that has now been formally presented to the judge in Arpaio’s case. This week, Arpaio, through his attorney, threatened to sue me if I did not issue a retraction...Given the tendency of late for our political leaders to threaten lawsuits as a way to try to suppress speech that they find critical or unflattering, I have decided to publish here the complete letter that I received from Mr. Arpaio’s attorney, along with my response.

An op-ed by Stephen Davis. Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s big announcement Tuesday that it will pull up stakes and relocate to Boston could well be about planting itself in a more fertile biotech environment, as CEO Ludwig Hantson asserted on a conference call Tuesday with market analysts. But it could also be something else: an expensive exercise in corporate misdirection — that is, doing something shiny and new to distract observers from the ugly and old. If so, New Haven and environs will wind up paying a steep price in lost jobs so Alexion can buy time ahead of financial woes and investigations.

The NBC Latino 20 honors achievers who are making our communities and our nation better...The first-ever Latino president of the Harvard Law Review, Andrew Manuel Crespo has clerked at the Supreme Court and represented children as a public defender. He has seen firsthand the chasm between our legal ideals and the reality on the ground. "We've told ourselves that whether you are imprisoned for years should not depend on whether you are rich or poor," says the Harvard Law professor, "but any lawyer who has set foot in a courtroom would probably agree that resources and money do make a tremendous difference."

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week announced plans to revise the nation’s guidelines on campus sexual assault, the predictable din of outrage drowned out the applause from some unlikely corners of college campuses: Many liberals actually approve...“Betsy DeVos and I don’t have many overlapping normative and political views,” said Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and expert on sexual harassment who supports the change. “But I’m a human being, and I’m entitled to say what I think.”...Also among them were four feminist professors who wrote a letter to the Department of Education last month beseeching DeVos’s department for a revision of the rule. Definitions of sexual wrongdoing are now far too broad, they wrote...The authors — Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, and Jeannie Suk Gersen — have all researched, taught, and written about sexual assault and feminist legal reform for years. Halley, who has represented both accusers and the accused in campus cases, said her colleagues maintain universities should have robust programs against sexual assault.