Media Mentions

An interview with Catharine Mackinnon. One of the tornados we're seeing today is against sexual harassment — and as the person who first got it recognised as illegal, what do you make of this moment? [Mackinnon]: We're seeing that cataclysm, and it's been building all along. It's about creating a perception that public disclosure will be heard, that women's voices will be listened to. It's partly that we are the backlash to Trump — that his open misogyny and white supremacist appeals were ultimately rewarded awakened a lot of people. Women like Ashley Judd made it possible for other women to speak about their experiences. That has set off this chain reaction, this butterfly effect that is bringing out all the pain, violation, hurt, anger and humiliation.

Donald Trump is increasingly vulnerable to charges of obstructing justice and may have inadvertently confessed following the prosecution of his former senior aide Michael Flynn, according to legal experts and senior Democrats. The US president said in a tweet on Saturday that he fired Flynn as national security adviser in February “because he lied to the vice-president and the FBI” about his discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the US last December. Flynn pleaded guilty in court on Friday to lying to FBI agents...“That’s a confession of deliberate, corrupt obstruction of justice,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor in constitutional law at Harvard University.

Blocks away from Harvard Law School, renowned civil rights attorney and law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. was at home with family, readying himself for a celebration in his honor...In his decades-long career, Ogletree’s mind has been his weapon in legal cases that took him from D.C. Superior Court to the U.S. Supreme Court. He represented Anita Hill when she made her 1991 sexual harassment claims against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. And he was a longtime moderator of a 1990s PBS series on ethics, where he challenged some of the nation’s top business and political leaders in debate...Now Ogletree’s mind is battling him. Four years ago, when he was 60, family and colleagues noticed he had begun stumbling over names and repeating stories. The following year, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease that usually ensnares victims 65 and older...Ogletree, sitting next to her, is optimistic. “This disease hasn’t done nothing. It doesn’t bother me,” he said with a large smile.

Colorado soon will begin treating needy hepatitis C patients with the latest antiviral drugs instead of waiting until they are sick enough to qualify. Friday’s decision by the state Medicaid department comes in the midst of a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and after top health officials asked the department to lift restrictions that determined which patients could receive life-altering treatment...Colorado’s previous policy, which required Medicaid recipients with the virus to have advanced liver damage in order to receive treatment, was “unconscionable,” said Kevin Costello with Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, a partner in ACLU’s suit. “Were a cure for cancer to be discovered, no one would tolerate insurance providers telling patients: ‘We need to wait until you get really sick before we treat you,'” he said in a statement after Colorado’s announcement.

Stamford’s largest biotech company is mostly known by government officials and the general public because of one drug. As the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma has been pummeled by controversy since the opioid hit the market in 1996. The company has poured many millions of dollars into promoting Oxy, and made billions in return. But an increasing number of public officials and medical professionals see the revenues as tainted because they say Purdue has knowingly stoked the escalating epidemic of opioid abuse by consistently making false claims about a drug linked to thousands of deaths...In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally misbranding OxyContin to mislead and defraud physicians and patients. The company agreed to pay some $600 million in criminal and civil penalties and other payments. Despite the perception that settlements represent at least some admission of guilt, companies see agreements with plaintiffs as preferable to the risks associated with a case going to trial. “Jury decisions are very unpredictable,” said John Goldberg, a professor at Harvard Law School. “It’s very possible that they’d lose their shirts if they went to trial. There could be some catastrophic punitive damages awarded. They want the closure. What businesses tend to hate the most is uncertainty.”

TV cameras swarmed a federal courthouse on Friday to witness former national security adviser Michael Flynn arrive to plead guilty to a felony count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The stunning news comes only a month after a federal grand jury indicted two top Trump campaign staffers—Paul Manafort and Rick Gates—on charges related to their foreign lobbying work, while lower-level aide George Papadopoulos also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Flynn is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the court documents say he had called Kislyak on the orders of an unnamed senior transition official...[Alex Whiting]: Flynn’s plea and cooperation agreement is a very significant development in the Mueller investigation for at least three reasons. First, Flynn admits that when he spoke with Russian Ambassador Kislyak in December 2016, in violation of the Logan Act, about sanctions imposed on Russia and a vote concerning Israeli settlements, he did so under the direction of senior Trump transition team officials.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Talk of impeaching President Trump surged after Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser and transition aide, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. But what is the real meaning of the Constitution’s mysterious provision authorizing removal of the president and other federal officials for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”? Is the growing interest in impeachment simply wishful thinking by Trump's political opponents?

...For months, Trump has insisted that the investigations into Russian meddling—investigations being conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller and by both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—amount to nothing more than fake news. But, as is so often the case when the President cries “fake news,” the truth soon emerges...The broad outlines of the grounds for impeachment are more or less settled. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, who recently published “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, “The Framers wanted some kind of check on the executive, but they didn’t want to see impeachments for routine disagreements between Congress and the White House. They wanted to preserve the separation of powers, so they tried to set out criteria which would not compromise the executive branch.” One rule that’s clear is that an impeachable offense doesn’t have to be an actual crime.

U.S. President Donald Trump was trying to defend himself. He made things worse. Perhaps significantly worse. The day after his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia, Trump decided, against the advice of his aides, to discuss the subject on Twitter...Alex Whiting, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter that the situation feels a “lot like obstruction.” “The question of whether Trump committed obstruction of justice when he asked Comey to drop the investigation on Valentine’s Day will largely turn on Trump’s intent: was he just trying to put in a good word for Flynn, or was he in fact trying to end a criminal investigation?” Whiting said in an email.

Trump raised alarm bells in his published response to the news that his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. The tweet published to Trump’s account clearly implied that he already knew that Flynn had deceived the Feds when he fired him back in February: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” That unleashed a frenzy of speculation about whether Trump had just admitted to obstructing justice, since it seems he must have known that Flynn had committed a felony when he was pressuring then-FBI director James Comey to ease up on the Flynn case...But then came word that maybe Trump didn’t write the tweet after all. The Washington Post reported that “Trump’s lawyer John Dowd drafted the president’s tweet, according to two people familiar with the twitter message.”...Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain noted, “I’ve seen lawyers write each. It’s not like, you know, ‘hung’ and ‘hanged.’” Indeed, both “pleaded” and “pled” are both considered acceptable by American usage guides—though, in many newsrooms, “pled” is considered a rookie mistake, which helps explain why some journalists seized on it.

With Massachusetts lawmakers considering sweeping criminal justice reforms, one legal scholar hopes the state will take decisive action. Harvard Law professor Ron Sullivan says there are key areas that lawmakers need to address — specifically, bail reform so people aren't jailed for financial reasons — and mandatory minimum sentences. Many of the proposed reforms before lawmakers are based on recommendations from a report that state public safety officials tout. That's because it shows Massachusetts has the second lowest incarceration rate in the nation.

Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., admitting he violated a law that also criminalizes lying to Congress. Scholars have mixed views on whether Flynn’s guilty plea is bad news for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who allegedly lied to Congress about his contacts with the same ambassador. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told the Washington Examiner that Sessions should be concerned about facing the same charge as Flynn...Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating. Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating.

A Harvard Law expert says former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn probably will not spend a day in jail for lying to FBI agents — and that may say a lot about what he had to offer prosecutors investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. “It is striking that he is just being charged with one count when there has been so much discussion of other crimes,” said Harvard Law School professor Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor whose career has also included leading prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “Ordinary practice is to require cooperators to plead guilty to all the crimes they have committed and reward them at sentencing,” he said. “The fact that Flynn is being permitted to plead to just one count of lying suggests . . . that Flynn has very significant information to provide.”

The rapid rise of wind and natural gas as sources of electricity is roiling U.S. power markets, forcing more companies to close older generating plants...“Generators are just fighting for existing market share,” said Ari Peskoe, a senior fellow in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “The aging fleet of coal and nuke generators, combined with low prices, makes this intense.”

A few weeks ago, I read a short new book by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein titled, simply, “Impeachment.” The book doesn’t mention President Trump once. Sunstein started writing it, he told me, partly because he was alarmed by what he considered reckless talk of impeachment during Trump’s first weeks on the job, before he had started doing much. Sunstein’s goal was to lay out a legal and historical framework for thinking about impeachment, independent of any specific president.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. We’re nearing the end of 2017, which means that it’s time to announce the most coveted of the annual movie awards: the Behavioral Economics Oscars (Becons for short). Created just a few years ago, the Becons, as they are called, have taken the film industry by storm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The news that Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to Russia-related offenses is striking, for several reasons. The lies he told the FBI were about asking the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, for political favors during the presidential transition, some of which the ambassador granted. The lies happened when Flynn was already national security adviser and Donald Trump was president. The fact that Flynn lied about contacts with Russia seems particularly suspicious. The content of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations deepens the narrative that special counsel Robert Mueller has been building: Earlier guilty pleas revealed Russian efforts to connect with the Trump campaign; this one reveals official contacts between the Trump team and Russia after the election -- contact significant enough for Flynn to lie to the FBI about.

As some Harvard graduate students have loudly opposed a Republican tax proposal that could slash students’ earnings, others say they are concerned about the plan’s “devastating” elimination of deductions for interest on student loans...Law School student Suzanne Schlossberg [`18] said that the striking of the loan interest deduction would also discourage students from pursuing lower-paying jobs in the public sector after graduation...Kenneth Lafler, the Law School’s assistant dean for student financial services, wrote in an email that loan interest deductions are important for making tuition affordable for Law School students.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court are used to applying 18th-century principles to an America that would bewilder the constitution’s framers. Yet sometimes this is really hard. On November 29th the court considered how a 226-year-old rule, the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, bears on one arrow in the government’s investigative quiver: tracking people’s movements via their mobile-phone signals...Ian Samuel of Harvard Law School agreed. The colonial-era reference caught the government’s lawyer “entirely off-guard”, he says. Now the justices must reckon with how to find for Mr Carpenter—no mean feat in light of the competing interests of privacy and policing.

Imagine a stack of documents that need to be reviewed. And another. And another. Instead of paying a contract attorney to navigate the papers, companies and law firms now have a second option: they can delegate the job to a software (and, hopefully, let legal professionals do more meaningful tasks, instead of cutting their jobs). A company in the Harvard Innovation Labs’ batch, Evisort, is developing a series of algorithms that are meant to “organize, categorize, and draw insights” out of legal contracts, as their pitch says. Formed by four law students from Harvard, two data scientists from MIT and two computer scientists from Northeastern University, the company launched almost a year ago and currently has eight employees...Currently, Evisort provides six A.I.-powered modules that can extrapolate the contents and the meaning of 24 types of contracts. “Fundamentally, it’s a search tool: it’s basically Google for contracts,” Jerry Ting [`18], Evisort co-founder and CEO, said in an interview.

For a man who has alternatively been called the face, the leader, and the speartip of the progressive “resistance” to the Trump administration, Xavier Becerra seems comfortable working outside the spotlight. When Gov. Jerry Brown tapped Becerra to replace U.S. Senate-bound Kamala Harris as California’s attorney general, the 59-year-old congressman came with more than two decades of experience cutting deals and building coalitions as a high-ranking, but...little-known representative...Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, for one, says Becerra has demonstrated national leadership “even in cases where his name is not in the headlines.” The skills that he developed in the House, building consensus and holding a caucus together, seem to have served Becerra in building ties with attorneys general in other states, said Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who teaches a class on the role of attorneys general. “He knew from his congressional experience that everybody counts.”