Media Mentions

Harvard Law School has a new dean. John Manning, a deputy dean and constitutional law professor, will take over as the school’s next dean on July 1, the law school announced on Thursday. His appointment, to succeed Martha L. Minow, who will step down on June 30, drew praise from Elena Kagan, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, who served as the law school’s dean from 2003 to 2009...In an interview on Thursday, he said that he planned to consult with faculty, students and alumni to look at the law school curriculum, ways to ensure students have the skills to be excellent lawyers and how to diversify the field of applicants. “We want to make sure we are drawing on students from a diverse applicant pool,” he said. “We want to have a diverse community, which makes for a more lively community.”

John F. Manning, a public law scholar on Harvard Law faculty since 2004 will take over as dean on July 1, the school announced on Thursday. Manning, 56, has been the deputy dean of Harvard Law School since 2013 and also is the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law, with an expertise in statutory interpretation and constitutional law. “I love this institution and it has done a lot of good in the world to train excellent lawyers and leaders,” said Manning, in an interview. “And it’s a vibrant intellectual community. I am grateful to be working with a great group of students, staff, alumni and professors.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can President Donald Trump block former FBI Director James Comey from testifying before Congress by invoking executive privilege? The answer turns out to be surprisingly tricky, despite the precedent of U.S. v. Nixon, in which the U.S. Supreme Court made President Richard Nixon hand over the Watergate tapes to a federal judge. On the one hand, a congressional investigation is different from a criminal case -- which makes it less likely that a court would allow Comey to testify if Trump refuses. On the other hand, Trump has spoken about his conversations on Twitter -- which arguably waives his privilege to protect a private conversation with his adviser. The only thing certain is that, if Trump invokes privilege regarding Comey, we’re in for a wild legal ride.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In an early executive order, President Donald Trump told government agencies that if they issue one regulation, they must take two away. Four months later, we are seeing how the “one in, two out” rule will play out in his administration. In effect, the federal government now has a regulatory moratorium (with modest exceptions), accompanied by episodic efforts to undo rules of the Obama era. The best projections are that the moratorium will continue and that the episodic undoing efforts will slow down.

President Trump awakened this morning (if he slept at all last night) and decided it would be a good idea to seize on the London terror carnage to launch a fresh Twitter attack on the courts and on his own Justice Department. In so doing, he may have given opponents of his immigration ban more ammunition against it in court...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in various legal posts in George W. Bush’s administration, told me in an email this morning that Trump’s new tweets are “significant in at least two ways.”

Even as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide the constitutionality of the revised travel ban proposed by President Trump, he went out of his way Monday to criticize the courts, and he seemed to suggest he would favor Christian refugees over Muslims...Trump also said his Justice Department “should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted” to the Supreme Court. He appeared to be deriding the revisions that his lawyers have asked the court to uphold...[Laurence] Tribe told The Chronicle that Trump’s preference for his earlier order could “properly increase judicial skepticism over his claim that individuals subject to the ban could rely on the discretionary waiver provision to reduce the risk of undue hardship.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Donald Trump's tweets in the wake of the London massacre Saturday night have become the subject of much speculation: Will they reduce the administration's chances of victory for its executive order banning travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim countries when the ban is taken up by the Supreme Court? Predictions either way are perilous, but one thing seems clear: It's not the President's return to calling his executive order a "travel ban" rather than a "pause" that matters in the tweets he has sprayed all over the globe.

In Israel, the author of the new book 'Butterfly Politics' talks to Haaretz about her 40 years intervening for social equality through law.

Pioneering lawyer and activist for women’s rights Catharine A. MacKinnon argues that seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations. Catharine MacKinnon is a pioneer of legal theory and practice, a groundbreaking activist for women’s rights, and one of feminism’s most significant figures. For over forty years MacKinnon’s intellectual, legal, and political pursuits have been defined by a driving motivation: to end inequality, including abuse, in women’s lives. Many of her ideas are now staples of legal and political discourse. Others urge changes that have yet to be realized.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously suggested, in defense of free speech, that “every idea is an incitement.” But are words themselves violence? The striking acceptance of the notion that some speech can constitute violence—and therefore has no place on a university campus—has coincided, this year, with the eruption of actual physical violence over speech.

The Syrian war is probably the most documented conflict ever, but with no end in sight, the civilians and activists who have collected millions of photos, as well as thousands of videos and casualty lists, are quickly losing faith in international accountability mechanisms...Evidence gathering has become much more sophisticated, says Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in international criminal prosecutions. For example, SJAC developed an in-depth database to ensure that each piece of data is verified, classified, protected and linked to existing evidence.

Rodrigo Duterte is not afraid of the International Criminal Court — or so he likes to say. Asked about the possibility of an ICC investigation, the Philippine president dismissed it with a curse. When a critic vowed to submit evidence of possible crimes against humanity, he told him to go ahead...“I think that the situation is ripe for the prosecutor to start an investigation,” said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who previously worked in the Office of the Prosecutor. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.”

Eric Goode, 59, is a New York entrepreneur who is an owner of downtown establishments like the Bowery Hotel and the Waverly Inn. He was a creator of Area, the art-gallery-nightclub from the 1980s. He is also a conservationist with something of an obsession for turtles. And now he is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that accuses President Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, a once-obscure provision intended to prevent federal officials, including the president, from falling under the influence of foreign powers...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar who is among the lawyers representing CREW, said the addition of Mr. Goode helped buttress the suit’s legitimacy. “It makes it inconceivable that this lawsuit would be tossed out,” he said, offering a bit wishful thinking, as the Justice Department, which is representing Mr. Trump, will almost certainly try to move at some point to have the case dismissed.

John F. Manning, the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law and deputy dean at Harvard Law School (HLS), an eminent public-law scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation and structural constitutional law, will become the School’s next dean on July 1...“I feel honored and grateful to President Faust for the opportunity to lead Harvard Law School as we enter our third century,” said Manning. “And I feel privileged to work alongside our exceptional students, staff, faculty, and alumni, whose invaluable contributions to legal scholarship, education, and practice inspire me every day.

Just as technology is changing the way we live and work, it also affects the way we use and move our money. In this podcast, lawyer and bitcoin expert Patrick Murck of Harvard University tells us that financial technology, or fintech, is poised to revolutionize the way the world does business. "The real story of fintech is that we are democratizing the creation and the administration of markets," he said. "We see it in lending marketplaces and with 'robo advisors' who are allowing people to participate in markets in ways they could not before."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The revelation this week that U.S. surveillance in 2016 had captured Russian officials talking about influencing Donald Trump’s advisers might be an important piece of evidence in a growing chain that could lead to Trump himself. But there’s another strong possibility: that Trump and even his campaign advisers were unwitting beneficiaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plot against Hillary Clinton. After all, if American intelligence was listening to the Russians, why haven’t we been told already that there is direct evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign?

Bill Cohen was certain of one thing in June of 1974: The voters of Maine would not send him back to Congress. The 33-year-old Bangor mayor had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives less than two years earlier but had done something unthinkable to many of his Republican colleagues and constituents: He’d voted to hold a president of his own party accountable to congressional investigators, opening a path that could lead to his impeachment...Harvard University law professor Richard Fallon was then Cohen’s press secretary. “I was 22 years old and had not even graduated from college yet,” he recalls. “It’s striking to me in retrospect how hugely junior his staff was, with no lawyers on it. My sense was that he just took those transcripts and went off by himself and pored over them so he could be as prepared as he could be for every set of questioning. He wrote all his Watergate speeches, and he handled almost all the national media stuff himself. My role was pretty much limited to cranking out press releases for the Maine media.”

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. There is plenty of blame to go around for the WannaCry ransomware that spread throughout the Internet earlier this month, disrupting work at hospitals, factories, businesses, and universities. First, there are the writers of the malicious software, which blocks victims’ access to their computers until they pay a fee. Then there are the users who didn’t install the Windows security patch that would have prevented an attack. A small portion of the blame falls on Microsoft, which wrote the insecure code in the first place. One could certainly condemn the Shadow Brokers, a group of hackers with links to Russia who stole and published the National Security Agency attack tools that included the exploit code used in the ransomware. But before all of this, there was the NSA, which found the vulnerability years ago and decided to exploit it rather than disclose it.

Hasan Mashkoor recalled he was among only a few of the roughly 165 people in the Iraqi jail cell who had room to lay down...For five years, Mr. Mashkoor said he was imprisoned without charges or on false charges. He said he was tortured and mistreated by militia-affiliated members of the Iraqi security forces. Today, as a refugee in Worcester, he bears the physical and emotional scars from this experience. But he is trying to rebuild his life by telling his story...Mr. Mashkoor has met with the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, a clinical program that handles pro bono cases and advocacy projects to protect the human rights of clients and communities around the world...Clinical instructor Salma Waheedi said the clinic is in the process of evaluating the case and studying Mr. Mashkoor’s options...“Mr. Mashkoor has explained that those involved in his torture are in Iraq and are highly unlikely to come to the United States,” said Ms. Waheedi in an email.

The finance industry, long plagued by distrust among the public, has reached a tipping point, according to Stephen Davis, associate director and senior fellow of the Harvard Law School program on corporate governance and co-author of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How to Fix It. At the 70th CFA Institute Annual Conference, Davis said that the public's anger, fueled by a belief that they've been unjustly "separated from their money," has helped to usher in a new "discipline of ownership." His assessment of state of the financial industry struck a tone of cautious optimism.