Media Mentions

Robert Mueller's appointment as special counsel to lead the Russia probe in May caught President Donald Trump by surprise. He was given no heads up and, according to The New York Times, said, "what the hell is this all about?...Even if Trump cannot dispense with Mueller easily, the very idea that he might try exposes an inherent flaw in the US Constitution's design, says Harvard Law School Professor Noah R. Feldman. Feldman points out that the president is ultimately in charge of law enforcement as the head of the executive branch -- a structural arrangement that works just fine until the president or those close to him come under investigation. So if the President tries to fire Mueller or gets him fired, "it would expose a deep flaw in constitutional design" says Feldman, because it shows the ability of the president to successfully block an investigation -- not a sign of a democratic society.

Mark Erlich was a familiar figure at construction sites as executive secretary of the state’s carpenters union. Now Erlich is hitting the hallowed halls of Harvard. He’s joining the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School as a fellow. He’ll be working with professors and researchers at Harvard and other universities on issues of wages and the underground economy. It’s a topic, he said, that is important not just for the construction industry but for the broader economy.

Economic and Harvard professor Mihir Desai uses philosophy, film, literature, and history to analyze finance as an institution built on morality and humanity. His book explores how the financial industry can be understood through culture, and how deeply finance impacts our personal lives.

The White House’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, isn’t scoring high marks from the school he brags about attending. A Harvard Law School professor was stunned to see Scaramucci bragging on his national television debut Sunday about getting good grades in his constitutional law course about 30 years ago. “I was surprised to hear Anthony Scaramucci mention on CNN the A- he received in the constitutional law course he took from me at Harvard in the late 1980s,” Professor Laurence Tribe told the Daily News. “The syllabus that year apparently didn't cover the issues associated with abusing the pardon power to obstruct justice. Either that, or Mr. Scaramucci has forgotten some of what he learned.”

An op-ed by Andrew Crespo. The New York Times recently unearthed a thorough legal memo, prepared twenty years ago for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, that advances the view that a sitting president can be indicted while still in office. For those keeping score, this new memo sharpens an internal divide within the Department of Justice on this important question. Two memos authored by the Office of Legal Counsel—one in 1973, in the midst of the Nixon impeachment saga, the other in 2000, on the heels of the Clinton impeachment saga—take the view that a sitting president is immune from indictment. By contrast, two different memos—authored by the Office of Special Counsel investigating Nixon, and the Office of Independent Counsel investigating Clinton—reach the opposite conclusion.

...The practice of commissioning a cheaper surrogate from a poorer country has long been a controversial one...While it’s impossible to know “what’s presented to you versus what’s really occurring,” Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen said, fertility tourists should ask about the welfare of surrogates, including the conditions of their housing, how much of the fee they’re allowed to keep and whether they’ll be penalized for getting an abortion if something goes wrong with the pregnancy. The commissioning couple also should ask about guarantees that their sperm and eggs will be used to make their embryos. Additionally, they should investigate the parentage laws of the country they’re visiting ― and returning home to ― and whether both people in a same-sex marriage will be listed on the birth certificate.

In June, Canada's Supreme Court came down on Google—hard. It ruled that the tech giant must take down certain Google search results for pirated products. And not just in Canada, but globally. Now, Google is going south of the Canadian border to push back on this landmark court ruling. The tech giant filed an injunction Monday with the US District Court for Northern California, arguing that globally removing the search results violates US law, and thus Google should not be forced to comply with the Canadian ruling...But staunch resistance won’t solve its problems, says Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who specializes in international internet governance. “Yes, Google may end up getting a favorable decision from a US court. But it won’t stop the plaintiff from seeking enforcement in Canada,” says Krishnamurthy.

A Democratic watchdog group is accusing President Trump's top environmental law enforcer of misusing funds to rail against the Paris climate agreement. In a letter to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) sent Thursday, the American Democracy Legal Fund said Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, one of the Trump administration's most outspoken critics of the climate deal, violated an obscure grassroots-lobbying law called the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending federal money before it has been appropriated by Congress (or in excess of such funds)...The issues raised in the letter "will likely, in my view, be taken seriously by the comptroller general and his staff," said Howell E. Jackson, a law professor and expert on federal budget policy at Harvard, referring to GAO head Gene L. Dodaro.

Since taking power in 2015, PiS has set about dismantling the country’s checks and balances. It has reduced the public broadcaster to a propaganda organ, packed the civil service with loyalists and purged much of the army’s leadership. It has undermined the independence of the judiciary by stacking the Constitutional Tribunal with its cronies. In response, the European Commission warned Poland’s government last year that such changes pose “a systemic risk to the rule of law."...In fact, Polish courts are not especially slow. Critics believe PiS simply wants to stuff them with judges who will rubber-stamp its policies. From now on, judges will owe their careers to the governing party. “It’s shockingly brazen,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton University who has analysed similar changes in Hungary.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norman Eisen. Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree. The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.

The debate over whether the president of the United States can be charged with a crime is as old as the country itself...The words of the Constitution aren't much help either. It talks about impeachment, removing a president from office. But the document is vague on the issue of whether a president can be indicted while he holds the office. "We tend to talk about it as one big on-off switch," explained Harvard Law School professor Andrew Crespo. "But, really, the question ought to be: Can he be investigated, can he be indicted, can he be made to stand trial, can he be sentenced? And the burdens imposed by each of those steps of the process are different."

A group of prominent lawyers is behind a new lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of Democratic donors against President Donald Trump and Roger Stone, who has advised Trump in an informal capacity. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was organized by the nonprofit United to Protect Democracy. In addition to the Protect Democracy team, other lawyers include Keker, Van Nest & Peters partner Steven Hirsch, former federal judge and Harvard professor Nancy Gertner and Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan law school. All three are working on the case pro bono.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Trump administration has repeatedly vowed to reduce the level of federal regulation. Naomi Rao, who was confirmed this week as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, will play a central role in that effort. In her first year, Rao, who was a law professor at George Mason University, should consider reviving a creative idea pioneered in the George W. Bush administration -- one that could enlist OIRA's expertise to spur cost-saving deregulation, an administration priority, as well as to promote life-saving regulatory initiatives.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai. While lots of attention is directed toward identifying the next great start-up, the defining tech-industry story of the last decade has been the rise of Apple and Google. In terms of wealth creation, there is no comparison...But the greatest collision between Apple and Google is little noticed. The companies have taken completely different approaches to their shareholders and to the future, one willing to accede to the demands of investors and the other keeping power in the hands of founders and executives.

...Traitors, even just accused traitors like Gadahn, are exceedingly rare in American history. That's because treason is actually a very narrowly defined crime that's awfully hard to commit. And despite the latest wild revelations in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga—Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised information as part of a Russian government effort to damage Hillary Clinton—legal experts say there is no way Junior or any Trump associate will ever get charged with treason...Even Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, inveighed that Junior's meeting had the "stench of bribery & treason."...Noah Feldman, a Harvard legal historian who previously suggested Trump may have committed impeachable offenses, agreed. "It's defined in the Constitution, and this isn't even close," he emailed me Tuesday about a possible "treason" charge.

With the disclosure of a June 2016 email in which he welcomed direct assistance from the Russian government to help his father’s campaign, Donald Trump Jr. leapt Tuesday from the frying pan of political danger into the fire of potential legal peril. The president’s eldest son became a central figure in questions about interference in last year’s election after The New York Times revealed Monday that he met with a Russian lawyer after learning she had damaging information to offer about Hillary Clinton....More to the point Tuesday is whether Trump Jr. could be vulnerable under this federal election provision. “Those regulations define contributions to include ‘anything of value,’ and I would expect dirt on one’s opponent during a presidential election to qualify easily,” Chiraag Bains, a Harvard Law School fellow and former federal prosecutor, told me.

While Donald Trump once vowed to “do a number” on Dodd-Frank, Washington’s central piece of post-crisis financial legislation, his regulatory appointees will probably prove more effective agents of change than Congress, which remains locked in a legislative logjam. The administration on Tuesday named one of the key figures in its quest to ease the load of regulation, nominating Randal Quarles to be vice-chair for financial supervision at the Federal Reserve...Hal Scott, a Harvard professor who was himself a contender for the Fed post, said the choice of Mr Quarles was an excellent one. But he added: “It is not like he is the Tsar; he is the vice-chair. He has to get the support of the board for whatever he does.” 

An op-ed by Adrian Perkins `18. The lack of diversity at tech companies is well-established: Less than 10 percent of workers at Google and LinkedIn are non-Asian minorities, for example, and only 31 percent of employees at Google are women. But the technology industry is guilty of another serious blunder that hasn't spurred the same volume of national conversation: a lack of interest, and failure to invest, in the capacity of small and mid-sized cities to shape technology’s evolution.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly denied colluding with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign. Yet, the revelation of a meeting last year—between his son, his campaign chairman, his son-in-law and a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government—suggests that the question of collusion is an open one; according to emails arranging the meeting, Trump’s son Donald Jr. was aware of that promise and said in response, “I love it.” And, of course, special counsel Robert Mueller is still investigating this very matter... [Alex Whiting]: Collusion will likely come in the form of the solicitation or encouragement of any improper assistance to the Trump campaign from a foreign source, in this case from Russia.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. In recent months, the Trump administration and members of Congress have called for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that separated commercial banking from investment banking. That would be a serious mistake. Instead, Congress should repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform’s “Hotel California” provision, which prevents large banks from voluntarily separating their commercial and investment banking activities. The biggest problem with the calls for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall is a lack of understanding about Glass-Steagall itself.

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. The criminal investigations of the Trump administration seem largely to have followed two separate paths: on the one hand, whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interference with the election, and on the other hand whether President Trump obstructed justice. Commentary has alternated between these inquiries, but has not always connected the two. In part that is because of the piecemeal way the evidence has emerged. In part it is because the two inquiries have distinct legal elements and can, in fact, exist separately. However, at a moment when our attention is focused on the question of possible collusion, it is worth remembering this obvious point: the two investigations are, in fact, very much connected.