Media Mentions

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. Legal experts debate whether special counsel Robert Mueller has the authority to indict or prosecute a sitting President. Missing from any public discussion is a middle-ground option that is not necessarily precluded by any Justice Department legal opinion, and that was strongly endorsed by the Watergate special prosecutor’s legal team. What’s the option? Presentment. Grand juries have historically had the power not only to indict but also to issue presentments, which were more like reports of wrongdoing without a criminal charge.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford...I have a suggestion for you, Jeff Bezos. How would you like to become the Andrew Carnegie of our time? Yes, I am talking about libraries. Those places where books sit on shelves, not delivered by FedEx. And so much more. Carnegie made them the center of his philanthropy, and almost became synonymous with them. More importantly, he changed countless lives with his investments in libraries. I have heard that you’re looking for big ideas, and this is one.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. On Wednesday news broke that at the end of last month, FBI agents searched one of Paul Manafort’s homes for documents as part of the Russia collusion investigation, directed by special counsel Robert Mueller. What is the significance of this news, and why didn’t Mueller just obtain the documents by grand jury subpoena? Mueller’s use of a search warrant tells us that he was able to establish on the basis of evidence, and to the satisfaction of a United States Magistrate-Judge, that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of a specific crime or crimes existed in the location to be searched.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. President Trump is notoriously obsessed with leaks in his administration — so much so that Attorney General Jeff Sessions made leak investigation a Department of Justice priority. But one man’s leak is another man’s whistleblower. And, with a few exceptions, like the leaking of classified information, whistleblowing is often encouraged, even legally protected.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. The application process for schools, fellowships, and jobs always came with a ritual: a person who had a role in choosing me—an admissions officer, an interviewer—would mention in his congratulations that I was “different” from the other Asians...In a federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts in 2014, a group representing Asian-Americans is claiming that Harvard University’s undergraduate-admissions practices unlawfully discriminate against Asians. (Disclosure: Harvard is my employer, and I attended and teach at the university’s law school.) The suit poses questions about what a truly diverse college class might look like, spotlighting a group that is often perceived as lacking internal diversity.

Death, taxis and technology: titles in the running for this year’s Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year give a new twist to the old maxim about certainty. The 17 books on the 2017 longlist include analyses of the implications of world-changing innovations, from the iPhone to drones; a lively account of the rise of Uber; and a sobering history of the role war, plague and catastrophe have played in shaping our economies...The unexpected symbiosis of the apparently separate worlds of the humanities and finance is the subject of another longlisted title, The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir Desai, which uses literature, history, movies and philosophy to shed light on dry financial theories.

Earlier this week, Chicago made national headlines when it announced it was suing Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Department of Justice’s threat to pull some federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities...Phil Torrey, an immigration lawyer and Harvard Law School lecturer, says its likely other cities will follow suit with Chicago and bring similar lawsuits if the Justice Department doesn’t change its tactics. “Chicago has advanced a strong claim that the DOJ’s new restrictions were not contemplated by Congress when it appropriated [Justice Assistance Grant] funds and the DOJ is acting outside of its authority when placing new conditions on those funds that target sanctuary jurisdictions,” Torrey told Boston.com.

Donald Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he intends to “get rid of” the Environmental Protection Agency and many of its Obama-era regulations. And in its first six months, his administration has overturned or halted nearly two dozen environmental policies and significantly backed off enforcement of environmental pollution laws. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times in his previous post as attorney general of Oklahoma, has been leading the charge. But rolling back Obama-era environmental protections is actually not that easy. There are laws that govern how the EPA can change its policies. And the courts are proving to be a considerable obstacle to the Trump agenda...As Harvard law professor Jody Freeman told me by email, “Courts don't tend to believe in ‘alternative facts.’ Even conservative judges stick closely to the record and can be expected to look skeptically at a misrepresentation of the science.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Metro, alleging the transit agency’s restrictions on “issues-oriented” advertisements violate the First Amendment...Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, said the ACLU’s case against Metro is “extremely strong.” “They [WMATA] do seem to be acting pretty inconsistently, and they seem to not have a clear policy,” she said. “For a government institution that decides to have advertising, for better or for worse, you can’t have your standards for what is allowable based on the identity of the person in the advertisement.”

While Donald Trump and his surrogates were loudly campaigning against Robert Mueller on Twitter and on TV, the special counsel and his team of F.B.I. investigators has been quietly building their case, the details of which burst into public view Wednesday when The Washington Post reported that the bureau searched the home of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in a dramatic pre-dawn raid at the end of last month...As Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting writes for Just Security, “A pre-dawn search by F.B.I. agents of Manafort’s house could achieve this objective in a way that a grand jury subpoena just couldn’t. And if Mueller was hoping to send a message, it is one that will likely be received by others in addition to Manafort. If it was not clear already, it should now be plain that Mueller will use all the investigative tools at his disposal to fulfill the task that he has been assigned.”

The ugly and tragic events in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in the death of one 32-year-old woman who was hit by a car, have sparked rallies across the country — and the firing of at least one white nationalist marcher...Employees are legally protected from being fired based on discrimination, for their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from interfering in the free exercise of speech and religion, does not protect employees who make statements or donations in favor of causes their employers disagree with from being fired, said Mark Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School...Attending a rally — no matter what side you’re on — can get you fired. Private-sector employees are generally employed at the will of the employer, Tushnet said, and their employers can fire them as they see fit. “That includes disagreement with what they say in public,” he said.

In Chinese schools, students learn that the United States became a great nation partly by stealing technology from Britain. In the halls of government, officials speak of the need to inspire innovation by protecting inventions. In boardrooms, executives strategize about using infringement laws to fell foreign rivals. China is often portrayed as a land of fake gadgets and pirated software, where intellectual property like patents, trademarks and copyrights are routinely ignored. The reality is more complex...“There is an unmistakable national policy to boost the position of Chinese companies in cutting-edge areas,” said William P. Alford, a Harvard law professor and an expert on Chinese intellectual property laws.

The push for Internet businesses to remove hateful speech spread to an influential corner of the tech industry on Monday as web registration service GoDaddy delisted a prominent neo-Nazi site in the wake of violent clashes over the weekend in Charlottesville...Liberal activists and even some conservatives praised GoDaddy’s decision in the wake of Saturday’s attack, saying the move represented a shift by tech corporations to take more responsibility. “It’s well past time for platforms that already exercise some discretion to stop pretending they are just dumb pipes that allow all types of garbage to flow through them,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “It seems to me a significant move in a direction that is long overdue.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The consensus right and left seems to be that President Donald Trump’s apocalyptic threat of “fire and fury” should North Korea continue its provocations has actually brought the possibility of nuclear annihilation closer. But hardheaded analysis suggests that, however unpresidential his rhetoric, Trump’s words have not appreciably increased the risk of war between the U.S. and North Korea. True, the New York Stock Exchange closed slightly down after his remarks, and the Nikkei was down 1.3 percent. But those relatively mild reactions probably reflect a reminder that such a war is, in fact, conceivable -- not a change in its probability.

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. With news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has begun using grand juries to conduct his investigation, there are now questions about where it might all lead. Of course, it might lead nowhere: at the end of the investigation Mueller might conclude that the evidence is insufficient to warrant criminal charges. Or it might lead to somewhere significant: Trump campaign and administration officials being charged with crimes related to Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election or with other crimes discovered during the investigation.

President Trump is transforming the study of constitutional law. The nation’s law professors have spent the summer revising their courses to take account of a president who generates fresh constitutional questions by the tweet. When classes start in the coming weeks, law students will be studying more than dusty doctrine. They will also be considering an array of pressing questions...“Teaching the Constitution has never felt more urgent, like unraveling a mix of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but with the highest possible stakes,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and vocal critic of Mr. Trump, who also represents plaintiffs challenging foreign payments to Mr. Trump’s companies.

Harvard’s presidential search committee, comprising the 12 members of the University’s Corporation other than the president along with three members of the Board of Overseers, today announced the membership of the faculty and staff advisory committees for the search. The composition of a third advisory committee, consisting of students from across the University, will be announced later in the summer. The members of the faculty advisory committee are as follows...William Alford, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, director of the East Asian Legal Studies program, and chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (Harvard Law School).

John Essey and family live in a modest, two-story home on a tree-lined street in the suburbs north of Pittsburgh. From the outside, it looks like any other house in the neighborhood. But this house has a brain...While Essey's setup might sound a little like science fiction, it's a prototype of the future. Some critics are worried these devices won't be secure and that companies will use them to spy on us to make money..."Surveillance is now the business model of the Internet. Companies make money spying on you," says Bruce Schneier, an Internet security expert and the chief technology officer at IBM's cybersecurity arm.

Adrian Vermeule is Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, where he writes and teaches on administrative law and constitutional law and theory. He recently spoke with "First Things" assistant editor Connor Grubaugh about three books on constitutionalism from a Catholic perspective.

Billions of internet-connected things like smart light bulbs are expected to pop up in our homes and businesses in the coming years. And a group of senators wants to help make them more secure. The bipartisan group introduced a bill on Tuesday to address some concerns regarding the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). It would require any companies that provide the federal government with internet-enabled devices to meet basic security requirements...Also included in the bill is a provision that some security researchers should be able to look for vulnerabilities in smart devices without the threat of a lawsuit. Currently, researchers are hamstrung by certain laws. "It's an important step in vindicating the principal that one of the best ways to understand the vulnerabilities of something is to be able to tinker with it," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that President Donald Trump orchestrated his son Donald Jr.‘s initial statement regarding his meeting with a Russian attorney during the presidential campaign...Prof. Laurence Tribe is a known critic of President Trump, but he backed up his tweet by saying that POTUS knew that this topic would come up in a Justice Department investigation. Politicians are known to spin facts, and flat out lie to the media when it suits their purposes...“Not every politician — not by a long shot — is under a DOJ investigation that involves a son (and son-in-law) also under DOJ investigation when the politician concocts a lie for his son,” Tribe said.