Media Mentions

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.

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.