Media Mentions

An interview with Nancy Gertner. Where do we draw the line between words and physical harm? That's what we're left wondering after the verdict in the Michelle Carter trial, announced last Friday. Twenty-year-old Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her friend to commit suicide in a series of texts. In his decision, Judge Lawrence Moniz cited the fact that Carter texted Conrad Roy III to "get back in" after he had left the truck where he planned to kill himself with carbon monoxide.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. During Kevin Steele’s successful election campaign for District Attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 2015, he attacked the longtime incumbent, Bruce Castor, for having “refused to prosecute Bill Cosby” and promised “tough sentences for sexual predators.” After taking office, District Attorney Steele immediately moved on his promise to vindicate Bill Cosby’s victims, arresting and charging Cosby for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand, one of nearly sixty women to have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. But Cosby’s criminal trial, on three counts of indecent assault for the 2004 incident, ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury, after six days of deliberations produced neither conviction nor acquittal.

Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for sending 18-year-old Conrad Roy dozens of text messages that encouraged him to commit suicide. He died in 2014 of carbon monoxide poisoning, after he drove to a secluded parking lot and killed himself. Many legal experts were surprised by the judge's decision, and say from the very onset this was a very strange case, compounded by intense media scrutiny...John Palfrey, the headmaster of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a law professor and co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says many adolescents feel an emotional disconnect when using their devices and will say many hurtful things they'd never say in person. "I think the hard news for young people and their parents is things that young people do everyday on text or social media have extraordinary consequences - those can be life and death consequences, or that can be legal consequences," he says.

...If what you're hearing and reading and watching runs the gamut of what's referred to these days as the "mainstream media" -- center-right to partisan left -- then professor Yochai Benkler, at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, has concluded that all of you are consuming pretty much the same material. He recently completed a study of coverage of the Trump-Russia story throughout May 2017. "If you look and compare the words that are typical of places like the Wall Street Journal or Fortune or what we would normally think of as center-right; sites that are the three networks, the Times, the Post; all the way to Huffington Post and Daily Kos and things that are more partisan left -- they all used very similar words."

In a lawsuit filed against President Trump, the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland seek to pierce the web of Trump-related proprieties and force him to make a choice: the presidency or his business empire? The suit adds four critical elements to the legal fight over Trump’s refusal to liquidate domestic and foreign holdings that put him in violation of the Constitution...Constitutional expert Laurence H. Tribe explains, “The attorneys general of states and of the district are in a particularly good position to emphasize the domestic emoluments prohibition inasmuch as the Article II ban on extra compensation to the president from any state and from any part of the federal government is directly and dramatically concerned with sparing the states and federal agencies and departments from the distracting and resource-draining consequences of interstate and interagency competition for presidential attention and priority, so the kind of harm they can allege and prove directly illustrates the evils against which the Article II domestic emoluments clause was designed to shield them.”

Donald Trump confirmed on Friday he was the subject of an investigation over his firing of former FBI director James Comey, as the US president appeared to accuse the number two official at the justice department of orchestrating a “witch hunt."...Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional law expert and former Harvard University professor, has argued that Mr Trump would be within his constitutional rights to order the end to an FBI probe, because of rights derived from his position as head of the executive branch of government. But Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and former colleague of Mr Dershowitz, said he “strongly disagreed.”...“On Alan’s view, a president would even have a constitutional right to bribe FBI agents with offers of hush money to destroy evidence of presidential perfidy,” said Mr Tribe.

For someone on the job barely a month, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand was already facing plenty of incoming fire from her critics. Her big problem now: Her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, could soon be among them...“Brand is in a very tricky spot,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes wrote in a joint blog post on Friday. Both men know Brand and “admire her a lot.” But they said they were worried by her lack of experience as a prosecutor “or even a background in criminal law.” They said she might now be confronting the “tough task of insulating the investigation from the erratic and inappropriate behavior of President Trump.”

For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility...“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

Even though the Trump Administration gave Dreamers a bit of a reprieve last week through its continuance of DACA — the Obama-era program that lets certain young people brought to the United States illegally as children to remain in the country and work — Dreamers still shouldn’t get too comfortable...Philip L. Torrey, managing attorney at the Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, raised concerns about the still-tentative nature of DACA. “I think it’s certainly good news for DACA recipients that the administration will be issuing work authorization extensions,” Torrey said. However, Torrey noted that President Donald Trump could alter the DACA policy “at any moment” — which he said shows the need for Congress to act on immigration reform.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Amid the controversies dominating the news last week, hardly any attention was paid to the confirmation hearing for Neomi Rao, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. If confirmed, Rao, a law professor at George Mason University, will play a key role in overseeing federal regulation in areas such as environmental protection, food safety, health care, occupational safety and transportation policy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is President Donald Trump trying to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein without actually firing him? That’s the logical inference from the president’s tweet Friday morning asserting that he’s being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the person who told him to fire Comey, namely Rosenstein. The immediate effect of the tweet is to pressure Rosenstein to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rosenstein will now have to do so -- soon.

President Trump’s “travel ban” has drawn much scrutiny for its attempt to prohibit citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. But the executive order — which this week was struck down by a second federal court and seems headed to the Supreme Court this summer — has another important part: a reduction, by more than half, of refugee admissions, to 50,000 from 110,000. This provision is bad for the country for security and economic reasons. As discussed in a forthcoming report by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, it also potentially violates international commitments and American laws.

Harvard is an old institution. Founded in 1636, it's the oldest college or university in the country, and 10 years is a short time in that history. But Drew Faust, who announced Wednesday she's stepping down in 2018, has left her mark. Ten years ago, she became the first woman to lead Harvard...At the law school, Micah Nemiroff also had praise for Faust on Wednesday. He works at the career services office. "There's been a lot of great developments since she's taken over, including the way that the university recruits and accepts students from different backgrounds," Nemiroff said.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. Imagine police officers enter your home, without permission and without warning, while you’re sleeping. In a daze, you might think they were criminals breaking in. You might even seek to exercise your Second Amendment right to protect yourself and your family. But if the officers shoot you upon seeing that you’ve raised a weapon in self-defense, have they used excessive force? In other words, are police officers allowed to unreasonably provoke a response that will cause them to open fire?

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib. "Eat your fruits and vegetables” is a simple-enough piece of nutritional advice most Americans have heard since they were young. When you look at America’s food policies, however, that straightforward missive gets incredibly complicated. Though our national nutrition guidance recommends that fruits and vegetables make up more than 50% of our dietary intake, the lion’s share of federal funding for farmers goes to soy, cotton, and corn. In fact, as a nation we produce 24% fewer servings of fruits and vegetables than would be necessary for us to meet that nutrition guidance.

An op-ed by fellow Terri Gerstein...What happens when kids get sick, from strep throat to a sprained ankle? And what happens when elderly parents fall and break a hip or a knee? Most of us would drop everything to take care of our children or parents, but some people don’t have that ability. They lack earned sick leave, so they can’t take the time off from work. There is only one federal law on this subject: the Family and Medical Leave Act. It guarantees 12 workweeks of leave for personal illness or to take care of close family members. But this leave is unpaid, and is available only for employees who work for a large company and have worked enough annual hours. These requirements exclude approximately 40 percent of the workforce from coverage.

...Mr Trump, a fan of seeing people in court, now faces four different lawsuits over his conflicts of interest...The Department of Justice has already responded to a challenge from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group, by urging the court to dismiss charges. CREW does not have the right to sue, the administration argued, and courts have no authority to stop presidents carrying out their “official duties”. This back-of-the-hand response will be harder to support in the suit brought by the states, which features sovereign entities as plaintiffs and which, according to Joshua Matz, a lawyer, and Laurence Tribe, a professor of law at Harvard, has an “exceptionally powerful” justification for legal standing.

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.