Media Mentions

Constitutional scholars Laurence Tribe & Elizabeth Foley debate the legal issues that emerged from Comey's testimony, from his firing to Trump's impeachment.

The Post is reporting that President Trump is now personally under investigation by the special counsel for possible obstruction of justice, and this morning, Trump is in full meltdown-martyr mode over it...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe emails me: "The conversation Trump had with Rosenstein and Sessions just before firing Comey would clearly be important to Mueller’s probe into whether Trump obstructed justice because it would bear directly on whether Trump acted “corruptly” in “endeavoring to influence or impede the due administration of justice” (to use the language of 18 USC 1503) by firing Comey."

Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian who announced plans Wednesday to step down as president of Harvard University, has pushed the institution over the past decade to face its own complicated history, presiding over an era in which the elite university’s wealth and traditions ­— long its greatest assets — became rich targets for critics of inequality...Apart from building buildings, some professors argue that Ms. Faust helped to build an unwieldy bureaucracy at Harvard — one that may impede faculty input in university governance. "We just have buildings full of provosts, assistant provosts, deputy assistant provosts, associate provosts, presidents, vice presidents, assistant vice presidents," said Charles Fried, a professor in Harvard’s law school. "It’s just an enormous bureaucracy, which quite recently never existed. And that’s because those functions were performed mainly within the faculty."

A single mother of four whose wages are being garnished by the government over student loans she took out to attend a college that’s since been accused of fraud is entitled to a swift answer about whether her loans are eligible to be discharged, a federal court ruled Friday...In the meantime, Dieffenbacher has remained in limbo until the case is resolved, said Toby Merrill, the director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending and one of the lawyers representing Dieffenbacher. “She’s had this fraudulent debt hanging over her for more than two years,” Merrill said, adding that Dieffenbacher has taken all of the steps available to her under the law to challenge the debt and get her claims adjudicated, but still hasn’t gotten any clarity.

During his blockbuster testimony Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey made several remarkable claims before the Senate Intelligence Committee: that President Trump directed him to drop his investigation into Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and that the president fired Comey in an attempt to alter the course of the FBI's Russia investigation..."There's not going to be an impeachment at this point, in this Congress, unless fellow Republicans get really sick of him and there's no sign that that's happening," Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard and former solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, told Business Insider.

An interview with fellow Leah Plunkett. We can now live-stream events through programs like Facebook Live and YouTube, turning us all into potential quasi-celebrities. But what are the ethical implications of sharing our personal lives or even criminal acts online? How has the role of bystander changed in the digital era, and how should social media companies deal with objectionable material?

We’re all aware of the deal we make when we sign up with Facebook: we get somewhere to post vacation photos and stalk friends, and Mark Zuckerberg gets to sell your passion for fishing trips to fishing equipment retailers. What you might not realize is how deep or extensive the tracking goes—so let’s shed some light on it...“Even if people are aware of what data they’re telling Facebook about themselves, they’re unaware about the types of correlations that Facebook can make based on that data,” Bruce Schneier, a security expert and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, told Gizmodo. “This is normal—we tend to focus on the data collection because that’s easier to see. I think the real problem are the correlations, which are much harder to see.”

A personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that the president is considering whether to get rid of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the former FBI director who has been assigned by the Department of Justice to pursue and oversee the Russia investigation. Legal experts however say this would be incredibly difficult, and if Trump succeeded it could trigger a crisis in American institutions...Legal experts agree it would be a mistake and have laid out why it could throw the nation into crisis if it succeeded. “This seems like such a bad idea—for the nation, and for the President—that I have a hard time believing it is a live possibility,” wrote Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense, in a blog post Monday.

Lousy incentives for corporate stewardship is a flaw at the heart of our system of delegated asset management. What’s more, index funds, which are rapidly becoming the dominant force in investment management, have the lowest incentive to spend money to chivy the companies whose shares they hold to perform better...“Investment managers of mutual funds - both index funds and actively managed funds - have incentives to under-spend on stewardship and to side excessively with managers of corporations,” Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst, both of Harvard Law School, and Alma Cohen of Tel Aviv University write in a newly revised study.

James Comey may not have added much new detail in testimony on Thursday about his one-to-one meetings with Donald Trump but he did add something: he set the scene, and law professors say that could be a missing piece in an obstruction of justice case against the president. Mr Comey, the former director of the FBI, gave three hours of evidence in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, describing personally for the first time the series of exchanges with the president that led to his sacking last month...Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law professor and former federal prosecutor, said the oral testimony gave new and legally significant insight into how Mr Comey interpreted the president's words in the moment. "The critical aspect of an obstruction case is assessing the intent of the speaker and whether it was corrupt," Mr Whiting said.

She stood in their shoes a mere seven years ago, an academic standout with a slew of accomplishments to her credit and ambitions for the future brimming within. On Thursday night, Imelme Umana [`18] stood among the ranks of the Susquehanna Township High School community except this time she was there to impart some of the wisdom amassed thus far in her nascent foray at what promises to be a brilliant career. A 2010 graduate, Umana, Susquehanna's commencement keynote speaker, expounded on virtues required to succeed in life in a speech titled "Conviction and Courage."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s maiden opinion was superficially easy, a decision interpreting a consumer protection statute for the unanimous Supreme Court. Beneath the surface, the opinion has historic significance -- and not just because of the unusual way that Gorsuch got on the court. The case gave Gorsuch the chance to apply pure textual analysis of the law, ignoring policy interests and deciding in favor of big banks that buy up debts and then try to collect them. The fact that all the justices, even the liberal ones, were on board, symbolizes the emerging victory of Justice Antonin Scalia’s practice of ruling on a law’s text alone over approaches that interpret Congress’s purpose in passing the law. That development is unfortunate -- because it rests on an unrealistic assumption about Congress’s ability and willingness to amend ambiguous statutes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Kudos for creativity to the new Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which has alleged that the First Amendment bars President Donald Trump from blocking followers on his Twitter account. Unfortunately, the law runs to the contrary. There’s no right to free speech on Twitter. The only rule is that Twitter Inc. gets to decide who speaks and listens -- which is its right under the First Amendment. If Twitter wants to block Trump, it can. If Trump wants to block followers, he can.

In advance of his highly anticipated hearing Thursday, the testimony of former FBI director James B. Comey has been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. (That, in and of itself, is a favor to the White House, allowing it to prepare.) The testimony is not the same as the individual memos Comey wrote, but presumably those support the narrative he tells in a gripping account of five of his nine interactions with the president...Constitutional lawyer and Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe observes, “Comey’s recollections strongly suggest that the President deliberately sought to create the impression with Comey that the best way to get his wish of retaining his position as Director was to back off in his investigation of Flynn and to assure Trump that he would not later become a target of the Russia investigation.”

Project Veritas, the conservative activist group famous for damaging undercover videos that recently forced two Democratic operatives out of their jobs, has been hit with a potentially expensive problem — a $1 million conspiracy lawsuit. The allegations: Project Veritas infiltrated a Democratic consulting firm under false pretenses, secretly recorded private conversations and published deceptively edited footage...Mason Kortz, an instructional fellow at Harvard University's Cyberlaw Clinic, said what will likely be a hurdle for Democracy Partners is the manner in which the conversations were recorded. Was Maas a bystander recording other people's conversations? Or was she a part of the conversations? If it's the latter, federal and Washington wiretapping laws' “one-party consent” could give Maas some reprieve, Kortz said.

Donald Trump should be on a major hiring binge right now. His government is uniquely underpopulated, with only 123 out of 558 key positions requiring Senate confirmation either nominated or confirmed. Some departments are almost entirely vacant of political appointees below the cabinet-level positions...At this point, the question may be, who would take any of those jobs? Talking to people who’ve held them in the past, the answer seems to be: just about nobody...In other Justice positions, there’s the challenge of having to defend in court a president who seems bent on tweeting away his own defense. “I would’ve thought until just recently that one would be willing to take the job of solicitor general even in a Trump administration,” said Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general.

Alt-right events are harvests of hate. They draw militants seeded by Donald Trump, fertilized in the muck of the internet, and nurtured by the more than 900 hate groups around the United States. Take the “March against Sharia” on June 10. It was organized by ACT for America, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist group. It planned more than 20 events around the country, and according to media accounts most rallies drew a few dozen at most...Speakers and attendees obsessed over women’s sexuality, conflating Sharia with honor killings, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and pedophilia. In actuality, the use of Sharia ranges widely in Muslim-majority countries and usually applies only to family and inheritance law, according to Intisar Rabb, a legal scholar. She says under the U.S. system of jurisprudence, “there is no threat that Sharia, or any other religious law, will supersede the laws of the state.”

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has closed, but it still needs to find new homes for some of its animals. Ringling’s recent bid to export protected lions, tigers, and a leopard to a German circus reveals deep flaws in the way the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is being enforced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). All of these animals are imperiled in the wild and, as such, are supposed to be protected by the ESA. The ESA applies equally to captive and wild animals for good reason. When it was enacted, Congress recognized the connections between the exploitation of captive animals and species survival. Every day we learn more about how deep these links run, including how exhibits featuring endangered species in close contact with humans can undermine legitimate conservation efforts.

It’s one thing for President Donald Trump to criticize a sitting judge because he disagrees with a ruling the judge has made, legal historian Michael J. Klarman said Friday as he wound up a history presentation about the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. It’s quite another to attack a judge, Klarman said, calling the president’s remarks after a travel ban ruling “disgraceful.” “You’re going to see more attacks on the judiciary” by Trump, Klarman said to roughly 300 Kansas judges and justices from Kansas appellate and district courts during the Kansas Judicial Conference in Topeka.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey gave two and a half hours of highly anticipated testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey was repeatedly asked about details revealed in his written testimony, submitted Wednesday. Specifically, he was asked why he took it upon himself to write memos of every visit and call he made with President Trump. "I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting," said Comey. "So I thought it really important to document." Comey also confirmed the serious nature of the Russian hacking in the 2016 election.

Conservative groups are wasting little time in trying to deal a crippling blow to labor unions now that Justice Neil Gorsuch has joined the Supreme Court. A First Amendment clash over public sector unions left the justices deadlocked last year after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But union opponents have quickly steered a new case through federal courts in Illinois and they plan to appeal it to the high court on Tuesday...For unions, the loss of millions in fees would reduce their power to bargain for higher wages and benefits for government employees. "This is an aggressive litigation campaign aimed at undermining unions' ability to operate by forcing them to represent people for free," said Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in labor law.