Media Mentions

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.

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. “The courts are slow and political!” Trump said in one of a series of early-morning Twitter postings about his executive order prohibiting U.S. entry of anyone from six nations whose populations are almost entirely Muslim. The order is under review by both the Supreme Court and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco...But [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 Josh Pemberton LL.M. `17. Improving the rule of law has been at the centre of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s vision for democratic reforms in Myanmar. In last year’s New Year speech, she stated: “the administration of justice shall be fair and just and be in accord with the internationally accepted norms.” While establishing the rule of law is an ambitious goal that will take time to accomplish, the government could quickly take a major step towards ensuring accountability and transparency in the administration of justice by opening the doors of Myanmar’s courtrooms and welcoming the presence of the public.

Chimpanzees do not deserve the same rights as people, a New York state appeals court unanimously concluded on Thursday, as it refused to order the release of two of the animals to a primate sanctuary. The 5-0 decision by the Appellate Division in Manhattan is the latest defeat for the Nonhuman Rights Project and its lawyer Steven Wise in a long debate over whether caged chimpanzees are actually legal "persons" entitled like humans to bodily liberty...Tommy's and Kiko's cause drew support from Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe in a friend-of-the-court brief. Tribe suggested that nonhuman animals could face legal duties, citing a "long history, mainly from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking human beings and eating crops."

James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee lived up to its billing: In a blockbuster hearing, the former FBI director accused President Donald Trump of telling “lies” about the reason for his abrupt firing, and detailed what he viewed as the president’s attempts to shut down a federal investigation...It’s one man’s word against another, with nothing less than the presidency of the United States potentially at stake. To sift through the questions raised by Comey’s dramatic testimony, we asked a bipartisan group of legal experts to analyze his remarks and tell us what they mean for the president’s fortunes and the FBI’s ongoing investigation. Here’s what they said: [Laurence Tribe]: "Comey was totally convincing and completely fair both in what he said and in what he refused to say. I can’t imagine anyone doubting a word of what he said."

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe joins Lawrence O'Donnell exclusively to explain why being accused of abuse of power could be just as bad for President Trump as being accused of obstruction of justice… both are impeachable offenses.

Questions over whether President Donald Trump attempted to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe could hinge on testimony from the nation’s top intelligence chiefs. But this week, they refused to answer key questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, even as they admitted they had no legal justification for that refusal...One form of executive is the deliberative process privilege, which involves advice given to the president, for example during deliberations or the decision-making process of executive officials. Another form of the privilege applies to confidential presidential communications, but doesn’t apply to conversations of a criminal nature, which the witnesses were being questioned about during the hearing, explained Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

President Donald Trump's legal team, in the wake of damning testimony from James Comey, plans to file a complaint against the former FBI director with the Justice Department Inspector General and the Senate judiciary committee early next week, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, said that the "only impropriety, and perhaps illegality, in connection with the Comey release of his conversation with the President and of the memo recording was that of Trump, threatening the former FBI Director through Marc Kasowitz yesterday."

An op-ed by Alex Whiting. James Comey’s written and oral testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee raises many legal, ethical, and political questions that will have to be pondered in the coming days. But focusing just on the specific question of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, what are the likely next steps in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation? The answer is that Mueller will first pursue all available investigative avenues to corroborate (or not) Comey’s account before deciding whether to seek an interview of President Trump himself.

With former FBI director James Comey’s hearing Thursday, we heard it straight from the horse’s mouth that Comey interpreted President Trump’s “hope” that the FBI drop its investigation into then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia as a directive. This immediately brought up the question of whether Trump was obstructing justice by essentially ordering Comey to drop the investigation. I asked Just Security's Alex Whiting, who was a federal prosecutor before his career as a Harvard Law professor, and Duke University law professor Samuel Buell for their two cents..."I think Comey’s testimony, both written and oral, strengthened the case that Trump’s February 14 request to drop the Flynn investigation constituted obstruction."