Media Mentions

Just a few months ago, Republican attorneys general were aggressively taking the Obama administration to court, notching significant victories that blocked executive actions on immigration and the environment. Now that Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, it's Democrats' turn to wage legal battles over some of the very same issues...Democratic officials say the party's AG ranks are more active than they were under the last Republican president, George W. Bush. And in solidly blue states where Democrats have control over all the levers of government, money is flowing to the AG office, says former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, who is now a Harvard Law School lecturer focusing on state AGs.

Government officials from Mexico and Canada reacted with skepticism Wednesday to remarks by President Donald Trump suggesting he didn’t believe a deal to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement was possible...Threatening to pull out of Nafta is “clearly a hardball tactic” meant to gain leverage to the U.S. in the talks, and is typical of the president’s negotiating style, said Guhan Subramanian, a professor at Harvard University’s business and law schools and an expert in the negotiation of complex deals. “By describing the way you negotiate you can give visibility to the other side, but the difference here is that President Trump has repeatedly said that he really doesn’t like Nafta,” Mr. Subramanian said.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. For far too long, U.S. politicians have been promising to bring jobs to Americans. They should instead be encouraging Americans to move to jobs. The absurdity of tax incentives to "create jobs" reached new heights last month with Wisconsin’s deal to lure iPhone assembler Foxconn Technology Group -- which will reportedly cost taxpayers more than $100,000 per job. By promising to bring employment to depressed areas, politicians have convinced Americans that they have a right to a job where they live, and not that they should live where the jobs are. Even though labor-market incentives to relocate have increased over the past 50 years, with growing differences in wages and unemployment around the country, people actually move for work less and less.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If President Donald Trump pardons Joe Arpaio, as he broadly hinted at during a rally Tuesday in Arizona, it would not be an ordinary exercise of the power -- it would be an impeachable offense. Arpaio, the former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, was convicted of criminal contempt of court for ignoring the federal judge’s order that he follow the U.S. Constitution in doing his job. For Trump to pardon him would be an assault on the federal judiciary, the Constitution and the rule of law itself.

An essay by Annette Gordon-Reed. Sally Hemings has been described as “an enigma,” the enslaved woman who first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender, an enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson, wrote with racist virulence of “SALLY,” who lived at Monticello and had borne children by Jefferson. Hemings came back into the news earlier this year, after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced plans to restore a space where Hemings likely resided, for a time, at Monticello.

A letter to the editor by Sanford Levinson. With regard to Arizona’s affinity for President Trump and its rejection of political liberalism, one might at least point out that Arizona flourishes only as a result of handsome federal subsidies by and large financed by strapped taxpayers living elsewhere. In fact, in 2014, the Grand Canyon State received about 43 percent of its operating funds from the national government, the highest ratio in the country. Perhaps the most dismaying failure of liberal Democrats is their consistent inability to hammer home the extent that would-be rugged individualists (most of them white and disdainful of “welfare”) are in fact dependent on the kindness of strangers.

The top tax law writer in the U.S. House of Representatives insisted on Tuesday that tax reform will happen this year, despite concerns among some experts that a tax code overhaul could drag into 2018, or even collapse altogether. President Donald Trump is still seeking his first major legislative achievement and has focused on tax reform. But he has done little to advance it recently, amid constant distractions over Russia, North Korea and race relations..."The Republicans all agree on lower tax rates, just not on how to pay for them," said Stephen Shay, a Harvard Law School lecturer who advised on tax policy at the U.S. Treasury under former Democratic President Barack Obama. Shay put the odds of tax reform occurring before the November 2018 midterm congressional elections at 50-50.

There's a new kind of killer drone. Called TIKAD, it isn't like any lethal drones you're seen before. Because unlike the effective-yet-cumbersome MQ-9 Reapers, these multicopters can carry a sniper rifle, a grenade launcher, or a machine gun—the inevitable convergence of hobby drones and military weapons...Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and Senior Researcher in the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, is concerned that the TIKAD represents a step towards autonomous weapons which choose their own targets without any human understanding of the legal, moral, or social context. The UN is moving toward an agreement to limit such weapons, but at its own pace. "International law is slow," says Docherty. "Technology sometimes outpaces it."

Two members of Colorado’s Electoral College class of 2016 have filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Wayne Williams saying the Republican intimidated them into casting votes for Hillary Clinton in December. The plaintiffs in the suit are former lawmaker Polly Baca and Colorado Springs math teacher Bob Nemanich. Nationally known Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a political activist who briefly ran for president in 2016 on a campaign finance reform platform, filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Colorado this week..."Our view is that they had a constitutional discretion, which Williams interfered with through voter intimidation,” Lessig told The Independent in an interview Tuesday. “Just like if he had been there at the polls and said if you vote for the Democrat I’m going to beat you up.”

An interview with Randall Kennedy. This week on Freak Out And Carry On, Ron Suskind and Heather Cox Richardson respond to the violence in Charlottesville and President Trump's response. They also dive into the history of confederate statues with Randall Kennedy, law professor at Harvard University and author of "The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency", and Tony Horwitz, author of "Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War".

Though statues of former Chief Justice Roger Taney have been removed from prominent perches around the country in the aftermath of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., the infamous jurist remains safely interred in one high profile venue — the U.S. Supreme Court...Ian Samuel, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who cohosts a podcast about the Supreme Court, argues that the Court’s Taney imagery does not serve an exultant purpose, unlike other statuary. Samuel clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “Unlike valedictory statues in public spaces — where an editorial decision is made to praise a particular person among many — the Court’s practice is to have a bust and portrait of every Chief Justice,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In context, it constitutes neither praise nor blame but simply acknowledgement of the person’s status as one of the Chief Justices of the United States.”

After the eruption of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, extreme right-wing groups are planning to proceed with marches in Boston, California, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia in the coming weeks. Some local officials, fearful that even unrelated events organized by groups with similar messages could escalate into confrontations, are looking for ways to control or to mitigate the potential for mayhem. In Boston, where a so-called "free speech" rally is scheduled for this weekend, Mayor Martin Walsh declared, "I don't want them here, we don't need them here, there's no reason to be here," according to the Boston Herald...The fact that the event will go on underscores how, under the free speech protections of the First Amendment, cities face an exceptionally high bar to block groups from gathering, even – or especially – groups that espouse hate. "The city has to start out with the assumption that they have to grant a permit," says Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies constitutional law.

They said they had come to stand up for free speech, but in the end, their invited speakers addressed only a small group of sympathizers, on a bandstand surrounded by barricades, far from the throngs of counterprotesters, who could not hear them at all. By 12:45 p.m., only 45 minutes into their official program, organizers of the Boston Free Speech rally ended the event and were escorted by police out of the park, to chants of “Go home, Nazis” from the crowd. A Facebook post for the event listed 14 speakers and was scheduled to last for two hours...Those who study and advocate for the First Amendment were split on the city’s actions. “Free speech doesn’t guarantee that anybody listens to you,’’ said Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment specialist at Harvard Law School. She said the ideas of the rally came across because of the heightened attention to it.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed. President Trump has asked if the U.S. should take down statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers. Scott Simon speaks with historian Annette Gordon-Reed about their differences from Confederate leaders.

If you were concerned that American political discourse is very seriously broken, there's bad news: You're right, and the technological forces that shaped it can't be the ones substantively provide a fix. A new report on disinformation, partisanship, and online media released on Wednesday by Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society takes a grim view of the state of political discourse..."[T]he issue is even though people are forming false beliefs, they probably want to form those false beliefs because these stories are essential to constructing their political identities," Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and one of the authors of the report, told me in a phone interview.

An op-ed by Josh Craddock `18. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. The childish playground ditty is at least partly true: Mere words cannot break an arm or bust a nose. Words can be hurtful emotionally and psychologically, but they cannot be acts of violence because they lack physicality. Some academics and journalists need this reminder.

In the wake of the Charlottesville protests during which James Alex Fields Jr. killed one and injured numerous others with his car, a rally to be headlined by white supremacist Richard Spencer, which was scheduled to take place on September 11 at Texas A&M University, has been cancelled...The Dallas Morning News writes: "State Rep. John Raney, R-College Station, told reporters in Austin that the event was canceled after concerns about hate messages on Facebook and several reports of people saying they'd bring their weapons." In an effort to better understand the situation as it pertains to the First Amendment, The Daily Wire spoke with Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard. Tribe said that “more facts” would be necessary to properly assess any First Amendment violation, however, the “basic principles are clear.”

Activist investors who aggressively force change at companies are good for shareholders, according to fund experts, after claims from Hermes' chief executive Saker Nusseibeh that they can ruin longer term shareholder value in pursuit of short term gain...Adrian Lowcock, investment director at Architas, also welcomed investor activism. He pointed to data from the US showing that activist investors can improve longterm value. "Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk and two colleagues did analyse 2,000 incidents of activist investing. "In the five years that followed there was marked improvement of share price performance, compared to the three years beforehand, even taking into account any rally after news broke of the activists involvement," he said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Obscured by the tumult surrounding President Donald Trump’s horrendous response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the White House managed to take a significant positive step this week: issuing an executive order designed to lower regulatory barriers to infrastructure projects, and to speed up and simplify the process for obtaining necessary permits and clearances.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Morally, the only proper reaction to last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia, is outrage. Legally, the analysis has to be more nuanced. To help prevent further violence while preserving freedom of speech, we need to distinguish three categories, all of which seem to have been in play in Charlottesville: terrorism, peaceful protest and provocative action aimed at producing street violence.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. I came to Charlottesville, Virginia for the first time in 1995. After four months of feverish work, I had completed a manuscript about what I thought was the biased and, therefore, unreliable way in which historians had handled the question of whether Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at his plantation, Monticello...I mention these things to say that the national tragedy that unfolded in Charlottesville last week struck at every aspect of my being—a black person, a friend, an American, and a scholar who has devoted many years to studying Jefferson, slavery at Monticello, and, by extension, Charlottesville.