Media Mentions

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.

Donald Trump has faced an impressive array of lawsuits in his first half-year as president; July 11th brought him one more. Knight First Amendment Institute et al v Donald Trump, Sean Spicer and Daniel Scavino challenges the 45th president’s habit of blocking Twitter users whose 140-character critiques are too biting, or too popular...Mr Trump “uses his Twitter account as the principal platform for official presidential pronouncements”, Mr [Laurence] Tribe says, which makes the legal theory underlying Knight Institute v Trump at least “plausible”, though Mr Tribe says he isn’t yet sure “the suit ought to succeed."

After an Australian woman was shot dead by police in Minneapolis, experts are questioning why the officers' body cameras were not turned on during the encounter. Justine Ruszczyk, who used the last name Damond, reportedly called 911 after hearing a noise near her home on Saturday, according to her stepson-to-be. She was fatally shot by one of the responding officers..."I think a point that gets lost is that these body cameras also have the benefit of protecting officers who rightly use force, because it has this ability to record a situation and visually show that force is justified," Ronald Sullivan Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, told NBC News.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Debates over policies to deal with sexual assault on college campuses have been fraught in the best of circumstances. But under President Donald Trump’s Administration, such debates bring with them a particularly toxic backstory. There was, of course, the “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump boasting about kissing and grabbing women by their genitals without their consent, and at least a dozen women have publicly accused him of sexually harassing or assaulting them. Many people are understandably skeptical of policy moves on sexual misconduct that may emerge from his Administration.

A year after racially-focused protests rocked Harvard Law School, a student, faculty, and alumni task force has recommended changes to improve diversity and inclusion across the school. Though the task force was appointed by former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, the school’s new dean, John F. Manning ’82, sent the report to Law School affiliates July 5, writing that he is “delighted” to have the opportunity to make use of the report’s findings...Cameron D. Clark [`18], a student member of the task force, said he did not sign the report because he thought it fell short of addressing what the task force had been asked to investigate. “I did not sign on to the Task Force Report because, in my opinion, the report did not reflect the critical investigative rigor expected of us in the Dean’s charge,” Clark said. “Whether by necessity or by choice, we failed to engage all stakeholders in the academic community.”

As an economist, Mihir Desai has gained wide recognition for his expertise in tax policy and international and corporate finance. His writing and teaching have covered such topics as proposed reform of the U.S. tax system and the misuse of high-powered incentives and their impact on American competitiveness. But Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and a professor at Harvard Law School, has set aside his usual academic work in a new book, “The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return.”...The Gazette spoke to Desai about the book and the argument he advances in it that finance and the humanities have much to gain from reaffirming and strengthening the connections between them.

It was a performance art piece that became famous: A woman who felt that Columbia University had mishandled her charge of rape against a fellow student turned that anger into her senior arts thesis, a yearlong project in which she carried a 50-pound mattress whenever she was on the Morningside Heights campus...The policies led the government to investigate many universities and colleges, including Columbia, over their handling of sexual assault cases under the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination by any school that receives federal funding...Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School who has been among the critics of that university’s sexual misconduct procedures, said she was not sure what to think of Columbia’s promise to review its policies. “I can’t tell from this statement whether they’re promising to suppress the speech of someone like Emma Sulkowicz,” she said.

...Reporters from the outlet tracked down Rinat Akmestshin, a Russian American lobbyist who reportedly once was a Russian spy (he denies it). He confirmed his participation in the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But, here’s the shocking part. Despite Trump Jr. claiming she provided no supporting information, the lobbyist told them that the Russian attorney actually did bring with her a plastic folder with “printed-out” documents detailing illicit funds allegedly being funneled to the DNC...“If it’s accurate, it obviously adds considerably to the already strong case that Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort violated a number of federal criminal prohibitions through soliciting illegal foreign assistance to a U.S. presidential campaign (and, in Jared’s case, through falsely and incompletely filling in SF86 in obtaining security clearance) and, again on the premise that this report is accurate, this information shows that they not only solicited but indeed received such assistance,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told LawNewz.com.

...Now, a small group of scientists and thinkers believes there could be an alternative, a way to save the president—and the rest of us—from him- or herself. As soon as technology advances far enough, they think we should put a computer in charge of the country...Jonathan Zittrain, an internet law professor at Harvard Law School, thinks that even with A.I.’s flaws, computers could serve as checks against human biases. “A.I., properly trained, offers the prospect of more systematically identifying bias in particular and unfairness in general,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

...Over the past few decades, political scientists have concentrated their study of norms on developing democracies, where they came to see such informal structures as tricky things — the lack of clear-cut consequences for violating them made them permeable. But in a 2012 paper, the political scientists Julia Azari and Jennifer Smith argued for a return to studying norms in American politics, an idea that turns out to have been prescient: In 2017, our attention has been snapped back to norms by a president who seems completely unconstrained by them..."I detest much of the president’s norm-defying behavior," Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, wrote on the blog Lawfare. "But I worry at least as much about norms related to our governance that have been breached and diminished as a result of, or in response to, Trumpism."

Donald Trump Jr.’s explanation this week about why he and other top Trump advisors met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who promised “information helpful” to his father’s US presidential campaign raises more questions than it answers...Trump Jr. has hired New York criminal defense lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in any Russia-related probes. Futerfas says his client has done nothing wrong...Legal experts told Quartz they see a wide scope for criminal investigation...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told Quartz that “a properly conducted presidential election” could be construed as what was taken by illegal means.

Can President Donald Trump interfere with a merger because he hates CNN? His feud with the outlet probably hasn’t peaked...John Coates, a Harvard Law School professor who has done consulting services for the DOJ, told LawNewz.com point-blank that interference would break the law. “The DOJ has a long and sensible tradition of independence from the White House on enforcement policy, particularly in technical areas such as antitrust enforcement,” said Coates, who teaches a course on mergers and acquisitions.

An op-ed by fellow Jordan Brennan. The stern rebuke issued by some business groups over the proposed minimum wage increase is out of step with both popular opinion and with the bulk of economic research. Polling indicates that a strong majority of Torontonians support a $15 legislated minimum (70 per cent overall, including 84 per cent of low-wage workers). The Ontario Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Federation of Independent Business, for their part, have called on the government to undertake a cost-benefit analysis before proceeding. Fortunately, the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in economics.

The rulings on online speech are coming down all over the world...Experts worry the biggest risk is that the whole internet will be forced to comport with the strictest legal limitations. “There’s a risk of a race to the bottom here,” says Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who specializes in international internet governance. “Anything that’s mildly controversial is probably illegal in some authoritarian country. So we could end up with a really sanitized internet, where all that’s left is cute cat photos.”

In a rebuke to President Trump’s disengagement from worldwide climate change efforts, Gov. Jerry Brown told an international audience Thursday the president “doesn’t speak for the rest of us” and unveiled plans for a global environmental summit in San Francisco next year...The federal government is crucial for policy to succeed in the long run, but states can fill a role while Trump is in office, said Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor who served as White House counselor for energy and climate change in the Obama administration. “This is just is of a piece of that effort to say, ‘Look, the U.S. isn’t stalling even though the Trump administration is committed to these rollbacks of climate and energy policy,’” Freeman said.

An op-ed by Heidi Gardner. Collaboration can be painful. Most people have had a bad team experience. Perhaps someone needed to work overtime to compensate for a free-riding colleague, or sat in a meeting convinced they could be doing a better, speedier job on their own. Others hesitate to even start a collaborative project, worried that teammates might make mistakes, fail to deliver on time or steal credit for the project’s success. Is all that trouble really necessary and worthwhile? In short, yes; at least it is when we’re trying to tackle today’s most complex and multidisciplinary issues.

An op-ed by Charles Fried. Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case in which Wisconsin seeks to overturn a decision of a lower court holding that the state assembly district map is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Wisconsin’s effort should fail. The lower court got it right. Although Democratic and Republican voters in Wisconsin are about evenly divided, the state legislative districts are so manipulated that Republicans gained 60 percent of the seats in the assembly, despite receiving less than 49 percent of the statewide vote in 2012 — a result that has remained largely unchanged in subsequent elections. And it is that gerrymandered assembly that Wisconsin wants to keep in office so it can draw a new map for itself and for the state’s members of Congress in 2021.

A federal court today threw out the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's approval of a rate structure in a decision that some analysts said could limit the regulator's ability to modify electricity market designs...But Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School, said he didn't see the ruling as limiting FERC's ability to set market designs. "In this case, it appears that FERC could have achieved the same result by rejecting PJM's filing entirely, explaining exactly why it was rejecting it, and then suggesting that PJM submit the same filing but with the suggested changes," he said.

Mark Weidick thought it had to be some kind of mistake. In late May, the CEO of HiQ Labs, a data analytics startup in San Francisco, received a letter from LinkedIn, ordering his company to stop using data from user profiles. LinkedIn, the Sunnyvale professional networking company now owned by Microsoft, might as well have told Weidick to just fold up HiQ, because the startup relies on that information in its algorithm to help businesses identify and retain talent...HiQ’s situation is not merely a dispute between two companies. Though early, the case could well end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision would ultimately guide courts on how to meld high-minded ideas about freedom forged in the 18th century with the 21st century digital economy. But don’t take my word for it. The case could very well establish “a lasting precedent on applying constitutional principles to social media,” famed Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe told me.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. For leaders as well as friends, spouses and colleagues, grace is a precious characteristic. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s policy choices, our nation has never had a president more lacking in grace. Whether or not Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president, he was certainly its most gracious...On the eve of victory, Lincoln avoided triumphalism or crowing. Instead he rejected malice and called for charity. He backed his firmness with both humility (“as God gives us to see the right”) and tenderness (“to care for him who shall have borne the battle”).

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump still seems to think that pressuring China to rein in North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is the best way to push back against the rogue state’s nuclear expansion, most recently in the form of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach Alaska. This approach hasn’t worked so far, and there’s a reason: Chinese President Xi Jinping has no strong reason to object to a North Korean nuclear insurance policy against the threat of being overthrown by the U.S.