Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Well before Donald Trump, we had plenty of presidents who operated by instinct. Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all prided themselves on their ability to size up people and situations — and to do so accurately and quickly. Social scientists like to distinguish between two ways of thinking: fast and slow. In their terminology, System 1 is intuitive, rapid, and emotional. By contrast, System 2 is deliberative, reflective, and intent on calculation. System 1 operates effortlessly; System 2 works hard...On the basis of his first months, it seems clear that we have never had a System 1 president like Donald Trump — which accounts for his head-spinning combination of bold moves, big ideas, warm embraces, unseemly score-keeping, bizarre rages, and sudden reversals.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A federal district court in California ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s executive order on sanctuary cities would be unconstitutional if used to pull funding from municipalities that don’t do the president’s bidding in reporting undocumented people to the federal government. This result is heartening but not surprising: I predicted the result on constitutional grounds back in November, two months before the order was even issued. What’s noteworthy is how desperate the Trump Department of Justice was to avoid a defeat -- so desperate, in fact, that its lawyers told the judge that the executive order actually had no legal effect at all.

President Donald Trump and Republican foreign policy veterans in Congress are increasingly at odds over the U.S. response to a budding authoritarian movement in several NATO nations, confusing allies in the region and potentially undermining diplomatic efforts there. The contradictory signals coming from the White House, senior administration officials and U.S. lawmakers is creating confusion abroad about what U.S. policy is on issues like democracy and good governance, analysts and former and current State Department officials told CQ. “The lack of coherence of Trump policy in a lot of places in the world, what it’s doing is giving leaders in other countries plausible deniability,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University professor of international affairs.

It was bad enough when Hillary Clinton as secretary of state agreed to have meetings with people who had given to her foundation. Now, according to news reports, Ivanka Trump, while a federal employee, is soliciting donations for a new fund from foreigners. This comes on top of instances in which she sat with heads of state (from Japan and China) at a time that her business was doing deals in their countries...If true, this is egregious and potentially illegal, according to multiple ethics and legal experts. “If the donation would be a quid pro quo bribe, then asking for it is certainly solicitation of a bribe, which is every bit as criminal as the bribe itself,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells me via email.

A contribution by Simon Hedlin '19. “I am going to be honest with you and say that my most important advice on self-care is to have a geographic perspective. First, the Donald Trump phenomenon is not unique, but merely reflects a global uprising against globalization and technocracy. This movement has been growing for decades, and despite the negative impact of populism, the world is still a better place today than it used to be. I worked for the Swedish government when Sweden elected a party with neo-Nazi roots to Parliament in 2010, and I was in the UK right after the Brexit vote last year. We have seen populist insurgencies come and go through out history, and things have eventually, but always, turned out better. Trump is different only because America is the sole remaining superpower, which means that the stakes are much higher. However, based on other countries’ experiences with populism, I am convinced that America will muddle through.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What did the president know about the Mar-a-Lago advertisement that appeared for a time on official government websites? And when did he know it? These questions might sound trivial. They aren’t. The webpage about President Donald Trump’s private club, which had all the features of a marketer-drafted puff piece, is a prime example of corruption, namely the knowing use of government means to enhance the private wealth of the president. And corruption is the classic example of a high crime or misdemeanor under the impeachment clause of the Constitution.

Shareholders at scandal-scarred Wells Fargo & Co. voted Tuesday to keep all 15 of the bank’s directors, but in a stinging rebuke rarely seen in corporate elections did so in some cases by slim margins. After a three-hour annual meeting replete with shareholder outbursts and one unscheduled break to remove an angry investor, the San Francisco company announced voting tallies that showed the toll of the aggressive sales practices last fall that cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines...“The outcome is a wake-up call that directors at U.S. companies may no longer glide through a crisis without taking individual hits in reputation,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of Harvard Law School’s Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

Four Harvard Law School students are demanding that the Law School clarify how it considers applicants who have been accused or found guilty of sexual assault. Emma K. O’Hara , Shayna Medley , Dixie C. Tauber, and Kelly Jo Popkin ’11—all third-year law students in the school’s Gender Violence Policy Workshop—published the article in the Harvard Law Record Sunday, attaching a questionnaire they sent to Law School admission officers March 30...“I think we were all sort of motivated to want to do this particular topic now given that it’s admissions season,” Tauber said.

The shareholder vote against Wells Fargo directors on Tuesday was larger than anything seen at a big US bank during the financial crisis — but without Warren Buffett’s help the rebellion would have been even bigger. For four board members, only the support of the billionaire investor’s Berkshire Hathaway prevented them from being removed from office in the wake of the bank’s bogus accounts debacle...“There is a serious question as to whether any of the directors who received less than 60 per cent of the vote can stay on,” said Howell Jackson, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Early in his administration, President Donald Trump made Chicago a promise. "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on ... I will send in the Feds!" he blasted out in an evening tweet four days after his inauguration. The shootings in the city were a favorite talking point in tweets, speeches and even his joint address to Congress. "We're going to have to do something about Chicago," he said in January. "Because what's happening in Chicago should not be happening in this country."...Chiraag Bains, a former federal prosecutor at the Justice Department and now senior fellow at Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program, added that even if Justice Department does provide additional resources, "it'll take more than a punishment-oriented, law-and-order approach to improve public safety in Chicago."

Someone in the Trump administration recognized that even for the Trump clan, the latest act of self-promotion went too far. As NPR spelled out: An article on a State Department website about President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been removed after criticism that it was an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds...This time, the administration acted not just unethically but apparently illegally. “It manifestly violates 5 CFR 2635.702,” says legal scholar and litigator Laurence Tribe, referring to the statute that bars using public office for private gain. “Our emoluments case [challenging his receipt of foreign government monies derived from hotels] will put a stop to this sort of outrageous use of public office for private gain, which essentially puts the White House on the auction block and distorts U.S. government policy in the direction of foreign interests in ways that are opaque to public scrutiny.”

Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health expenses and lost portions of Social Security checks and tax refunds to their lender, the federal government...“This credit is being extended on terms that specifically, willfully ignore their ability to repay,” says Toby Merrill of Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “You can’t avoid that we’re targeting high-cost, high-dollar-amount loans to people who we know can’t afford to repay them.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to rewrite the First Amendment. In defending a civil suit against Trump by protesters who say they were roughed up in one of his campaign rallies, Trump’s legal team has advanced two claims that either misstate or substantially overstate constitutional doctrine.

On Inauguration Day, outgoing White House counsel Neil Eggleston visited his office in the West Wing one last time. He then went to Andrews Air Force base to say goodbye to his boss, Barack Obama, before taking a call from a former Kirkland & Ellis colleague to schedule a dinner the following week. Three months later, Eggleston has returned to private practice and to his old firm, Kirkland announced internally Monday...This time, Eggleston, who is 63, plans to build a practice similar to what he had before, plus teach at Harvard Law School and keep a calendar of public appearances and speeches. "Hopefully, I'll ramp up quickly. I've had former clients reach out and ask me when I'll be returning" to the firm, he said.

Family and high-profile friends of Aaron Hernandez, the convicted killer and former New England Patriots star who hanged himself in his prison cell last week, on Monday paid their final respects to the notorious felon during a private funeral service in his hometown....Hernandez’s attorneys, including Jose Baez, Ronald Sullivan, Linda Kenney Baden, Robert Proctor, Leontire, and Michelle Medina, exited the funeral home around 4 p.m. to read a brief statement on behalf of the family. Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor, read the statement, thanking the public for “its thoughtful expressions of condolences.” “The family wishes to say goodbye to Aaron in privacy,” Sullivan. “They love him and they miss him.”

...Thirty-five videos, featuring Harvard experts in science, business, law, health, economics, engineering, public policy, design, and the arts, have been assembled over the last year and a half as a resource for members of the public who want to learn more about climate change.....While every viewer will take home different lessons from the videos, Griswold was struck by the discussion of climate change economics and public policy from Associate Professor of Public Policy Joe Aldy and Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government Robert Stavins. He also pointed to perspectives on law from Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman

Former U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power is writing a memoir about her transition from writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning condemnation of foreign policy to becoming a leading public advocate for the government. Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had acquired Power's "The Education of an Idealist." A release date has not yet been determined..."Making the transition from critic of U.S. foreign policy to U.S. government official was not easy, but public service proved the most gratifying experience of my life," Power, now a professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, said in a statement. "I am looking forward to stepping back to explore the highs and lows, and to share ideas for how, even in troubled times, we can each do our part to shape a more humane future."

Why would Harvard Law School, one of the most elite law schools in the country, decide to change the admissions criteria that it has used for the past 60 years? One would be tempted to assume that it’s a response to the plummeting number of applicants at law schools around the country: even Harvard’s number of applicants is down 18% since 2011, though it still has far fewer spots than applicants. So why Harvard, why the change and why now?...It is to Harvard’s advantage to increase access to top talent and to be able to cast a wider net. As Jessica Soban, Harvard Law School’s Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions, put it, “Harvard Law School works to eliminate barriers to legal education for top talent. We seek that talent from a variety of backgrounds: across different academic disciplines, different countries, and different socio-economic backgrounds.”

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Jessica Brand of Harvard Law's Fair Punishment Project about the chronic problem of bad lawyering on capital punishment cases. All eight death row cases in Arkansas had examples of attorney failures, including drunk lawyers, a conflict of interest affair involving a judge, lawyers missing deadlines, and failure to disclose mental disorders.

Every day in courtrooms across the United States, lawyers rely on evidence to make their cases. But when it comes to what works in serving clients or enhancing access to justice, lawyers and judges are stubbornly resistant to evidence-based research. That, at least, is the premise underlying the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School, where director and Harvard Law professor James Greiner and his staff are working to compile rigorous evidence of what works in law and what doesn’t, using randomized control trials...In this regard, the legal profession today is roughly where the medical profession was in the 1940s, when insurers began demanding evidence of the efficacy of procedures and drugs, Greiner said at a recent showcase of the Access to Justice Lab’s work. Drug testing is a good example of why the “trust me” approach is unacceptable in medicine. Of all drugs that enter phase-one testing, only 10 percent make it to phase three. “But what do we do in law?” Jim Greiner asked. “We go from idea straight to the field. Why? Because we know. We’re professionals.”

Thousands of public records about animal welfare have vanished from the internet, part of a government database that included atrocious puppy mill conditions, improper veterinary care and other mistreatment of animals. Now activists are hitting back at the USDA in the courtroom and by posting deleted records online...Delcianna Winders, an academic fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, said that no new enforcement records had been posted online since 2016...Winders, who uses the documents for her own work at Harvard, sent thousands of the records she's saved to Kick to publish on his site. "The impact is huge, I don’t think it can be overstated," she said of the documents' removal.