Media Mentions

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. All Spider-Man fans will recognize the line, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We need to act now on that maxim’s converse: When great power is placed in the hands of one who cannot be trusted to act responsibly, we must take that power back. That means starting now to trim President Trump’s power to do irreparable harm to the nation and, ultimately, the world. That’s why I’ve previously raised 25th Amendment questions about Trump’s ability to “discharge the powers and duties of his office” and have recently called for immediate initiation of impeachment investigations — akin to convening a grand jury to consider returning a criminal indictment.

The revelation that Donald Trump allegedly urged former FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into former adviser Michael Flynn fueled speculation the president may have obstructed justice, but any penalty would likely come from Congress and not the criminal justice system, lawyers said Tuesday..."It's the longstanding position of the executive branch that the president cannot be indicted while in office," said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. "The remedy for a criminal violation would be impeachment."

Long before a person arrested and charged is found guilty or innocent, they face a choice with myriad consequences: Find a way to post bail, the median of which the Justice Department pegs at $10,000, until they show up to court to get their money back, or wait in jail, making a post-trial sentence an estimated three or four times likelier. There is another option for the generally low-income and disproportionately African American or Hispanic people who make up the 467,000 pre-trial detainees in the U.S., and a few global corporations are raking in billions from it...“In reality, taxes do pay for it — we spend billions of dollars to incarcerate people,” said Chiraag Bains, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. Either way, he added, “we should have a justice system that we are morally comfortable with paying for.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If President Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and his ties to Russia, that’s obstruction of justice. But let’s be clear: It’s the impeachable offense of obstruction. It’s probably not the criminal version of that act. With the evidence now available, it’s extremely unlikely that an ordinary prosecutor could convict Trump. This is an outstanding example of a crucial distinction that Americans badly need to keep in mind. High crimes and misdemeanors, to use the Constitution’s phrase, aren’t the same as ordinary crimes. What makes them “high” is their political character. High crimes and misdemeanors are corruption, abuse of power, and undermining the rule of law and democracy.

One question is now gripping much of the U.S.: Did President Donald Trump commit a crime in his first month in the Oval Office? Democrats say reports that the president asked former FBI Director James Comey to drop a criminal investigation into one of his former top aides amount to obstruction of justice, if true. Some legal experts aren’t so sure...Laurence Tribe, Dershowitz’s Harvard colleague, is among those who view Trump’s request for Comey to end the probe as potentially criminal. When asked by email if Trump’s comments amounted to obstruction of justice Tribe said, “I believe it does, quite strongly.”

An interview with Jack Goldsmith. The executive has a lot of legal power vested by the Constitution and Congress but what happens when the executive is careless with information, overreaches that authority or no longer has the full trust of the rest of the government?

An op-ed by Mark Tushnet...Designing investigations into high-level misconduct is extremely difficult. Every nation has tough choices to make, and none has come up with a perfect solution — though it’s clear that the US system is uniquely bad. The problems Donald Trump has created for himself have put into motion the US version of the investigations in Brazil and South Africa. We are watching our political system contort itself as politicians and bureaucrats search for a credible way to investigate the depth and nature of his campaign’s connection with the government of Russia...Perhaps because we wrote our Constitution more than two centuries ago, it doesn’t set out principles for investigating high-level corruption...Modern constitutions have drawn upon two centuries of experience. We should do what we can to draw on that experience, too.

Every day, American families throw out tons of spoiled food — or food they think is spoiled because they misunderstand “sell by” labels. Restaurants dispose of usable leftovers, and farmers toss imperfect produce. In the United States, about 30 to 40 percent of all food is not eaten. About 95 percent of that wasted food, 38 million tons in 2014, ends up in landfills or incinerators, where it produces methane, a gas that is one of the most potent contributors to climate change...The Food Waste Reduction Alliance, which represents the food industry and restaurant trade associations, recently worked with Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic to simplify and standardize “use by” and “sell by” labels, which befuddle many consumers. People toss a lot of edible food because they misunderstand the difference between the two terms. “There has been an enormous amount of change over the past two or three years,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the clinic.

Black students at Harvard University are organizing a graduation ceremony of their own this year to recognize the achievements of black students and faculty members some say have been overlooked. More than 700 students and guests are registered to attend Harvard's first Black Commencement, which will take place two days before the school's traditional graduation events. It isn't meant to replace the existing ceremony, student organizers say, but rather to add something that was missing...Organizers of the Black Commencement say it's partly meant to highlight racial disparities on campus. But ultimately it's a celebration of achievement, said Jillian Simons [`18], a law student and president-elect of the Harvard Black Graduate Student Alliance. "We want to acknowledge how far we've come," Simons said.

Nearly 40 years after the world was jolted by the birth of the first test-tube baby, a new revolution in reproductive technology is on the horizon -- and it promises to be far more controversial than in vitro fertilization ever was. Within a decade or two, researchers say, scientists will likely be able to create a baby from human skin cells that have been coaxed to grow into eggs and sperm and used to create embryos to implant in a womb...Three prominent academics in medicine and law sounded an alarm about the possible consequences in a paper published this year. “I.V.G. may raise the specter of ‘embryo farming’ on a scale currently unimagined, which might exacerbate concerns about the devaluation of human life,” Dr. Eli Y. Adashi, a medical science professor at Brown; I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor; and Dr. George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia `19. I am from the Rio Grande Valley, an area in South Texas defined by its blue collar, hardworking citizens and its close connection with Mexico. Positioned right on the U.S.-Mexico border, the Rio Grande Valley has many of the low-cost labor benefits that Mexico offers, with access to the full contract enforcement and specialized labor market that the U.S. offers. As a result, economic growth in the RGV has been explosive, and even endured through the 2008 recession. However, that robust growth may now be in serious peril since Texas may have ceded its advantage of easy access to cheap labor. How did this happen? It is a result of the state’s recent enactment of Senate Bill 4, a law meant to secure borders by abolishing sanctuary cities.

An interview with Alex Whiting. The Washington Post broke the story: US intelligence has been sent into a mad scramble after Donald Trump gave the Russian foreign minister and ambassador intel about the IS group that came courtesy of an ally of Washington. Does the most powerful nation on the planet have a president who can't keep a secret?

...Legal and national security experts, including Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith, say violating this oath of office alone is grounds for impeachment...Impeachment is a constitutional process by which Congress removes a president from office for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours". "It's very hard to argue that carelessly giving away highly sensitive material to an adversary foreign power constitutes a faithful execution of the office of President," they wrote on the blog Lawfare. "Legally speaking, the matter could be very grave for Trump even though there is no criminal exposure." They suggested Mr Trump could feasibly face "a hybrid impeachment article alleging a violation of the oath in service of a hostile foreign power".

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. Ransomware isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular and profitable...The ransomware that has affected systems in more than 150 countries recently, WannaCry, made press headlines last week, but it doesn’t seem to be more virulent or more expensive than other ransomware...The lessons for users are obvious: Keep your system patches up to date and regularly backup your data. This isn’t just good advice to defend against ransomware, but good advice in general. But it’s becoming obsolete.

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. The Department of Homeland Security is rumored to be considering extending the current travel ban on large electronics for Middle Eastern flights to European ones as well. The likely reaction of airlines will be to implement new traveler programs, effectively allowing wealthier and more frequent fliers to bring their computers with them. This will only exacerbate the divide between the haves and the have-nots -- all without making us any safer.

...Because every error is someone else’s fault, President Trump — who went through three campaign leaders — is reportedly thinking about a major shake-up — or at least threatening a shake-up in his already shell-shocked White House...If the president is engaged in obstruction of justice, partially through his lies to the public, then aides who knowingly lie are implicated as well. At the very least, close aides may need to lawyer up before they enter the White House. Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe warned, “Unlike POTUS, they’re all subject to federal prosecution, indictment, trial, criminal conviction and ordinary sentencing for conspiring with, aiding and abetting, or helping cover up federal crimes.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Oh for the days when Donald Trump wasn’t taking the presidential daily brief -- and didn’t know highly classified information that he could give to the Russians. But a bit bizarrely, Trump’s reported disclosure of Islamic State plans to two Russian officials during an Oval Office visit last week wasn’t illegal. If anyone else in the government, except possibly the vice president, had revealed such classified information that person would be going to prison. The president, however, has inherent constitutional authority to declassify information at will. And that means the federal laws that criminalize the disclosure of classified secrets don’t apply to him.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Outside the headlines, something remarkable is going on in Syria. The Kurds, making a long-term play for an autonomous region, seem to have decided that their best bet is to buy it from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And the U.S. is signaling that it may be on-board -- a startling reflection of its pro-Russian, anti-Turkish policy. The evidence for this reading of events starts with the upcoming fight for Raqqa, the headquarters of Islamic State. The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group of fighters dominated by the Syrian Kurdish force known as the YPG, has reportedly gotten the green light to go ahead not only from the U.S. but also from Assad and Russia.

An interview with Kristin Turner `17. Why are mixed-race colleges having black-only graduation ceremonies? We’ll ask. Harvard will host its first ever university-wide black commencement. On campuses across the country, there are also Lavender Ceremonies for LGBT students and RAZA celebrations for Latino students. Student organizers say the goal is to have a safe space to honor unique student achievements. Critics say it's segregation and there should be one commencement for everyone. This hour On Point, a big rethink of graduation ceremonies.

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had to decide in 2006 which wetlands and waterways make up the "waters of the U.S." protected by the Clean Water Act, he reached for his trusty Webster's New International Dictionary: Second Edition. What, he asked Webster's, is the meaning of the word "waters"? The dictionary, which the late conservative icon loved so much it appears in his official Supreme Court portrait, was the basis for Scalia's opinion in Rapanos v. United States, concluding that Clean Water Act protection extends only to relatively permanent surface waters and wetlands connected to larger water bodies...Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus agrees, saying arguing about Webster's dictionaries "is probably not a viable argument" as long as Kennedy remains on the bench. But dictionary definitions of "waters" could once again become significant if Kennedy leaves the court during the Trump administration, Lazarus said.

The National Football League should consider providing treatment to any player caught using performance-enhancing drugs, according to a new Harvard University study. The recommendation was one of several put forward by researchers from the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School...“NFL football has a storied history and holds an important place in this country,” the authors wrote, while noting the NFL is the top-grossing pro sports league in the United States with 2017 revenues expected to reach $14 billion. “The men who play it deserve to be protected and have their health needs met and it is our fervent hope that they will be met.”