Media Mentions

An essay by Cass Sunstein. The American colonies imported the idea of impeachment from England, where Edmund Burke called it the “great guardian of the purity of the Constitution.” But from 1750 to 1775 republican fervor was running rampant, and the colonists made the idea all their own. Long before shots were fired in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, colonial assemblies used impeachment as a homegrown weapon of republican government, rebuking the King’s agents for the abuse or misuse of power.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The Trump administration has a real opportunity to deliver on its promise to streamline the regulatory state. That opportunity comes from the proposed elimination of more than 50 regulations imposed on the airline industry -- many of them designed to protect safety. Air safety has been a sensational success story. In the U.S., commercial accidents have been at very low levels for years.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. As Donald Trump’s administration enters its ninth month, it’s worth considering a surprising possibility: Things have never been better in the turbulent period since the president took office. Trump’s most blatantly unconstitutional actions, like the travel ban on immigrants from a number of majority Muslim nations, have been blocked by the courts. Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn and Sebastian Gorka are out of power. The reasonable generals (John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis) are in. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act has failed (so far). A deal with Democrats on DACA, the policy allowing undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to stay, is in the offing. There will be no wall, paid for by Mexico or otherwise, on the southern border. Dangerously extreme tax reform seems unlikely to pass.

The Colorado Electoral College member who went rogue by not casting an official ballot for Hillary Clinton in December is suing Secretary of State Wayne Williams claiming Williams violated his constitutional rights by removing and replacing him and not counting his vote...National election law expert and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig filed the federal complaint in Denver district court in mid-August, and says he is filing a new one today adding Micheal Baca’s name...Lessig says the plaintiffs aren’t in the lawsuit for money and have capped their damages at a dollar. He says he hopes for a quick ruling that answers the question about whether members of the Electoral College can vote their consciences. “Regardless of what you believe the law is, it’s really important that it be clear before the next election,” he says.

Over the course of four centuries, Harvard has seen presidents of many stripes. They’ve been clergymen and classicists, ambassadors and governors, chemists and botanists, and secretaries of State and the Treasury. Their training and trades may have varied—but to date, all have been white. And, until current University President Drew G. Faust, male...Ten years later, some would like to see Harvard make history yet again. “The school has made wonderful strides with respect to the student population,” Law professor and Winthrop Faculty Dean Ronald Sullivan said. “There’s still work to be done with respect to the faculty, and there’s even more work that needs to be done with respect to the top levels of administrators at the University.”

Last November, some political commentators predicted that Donald Trump’s unconventional candidacy might give way to a much more conventional presidency. Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues that perhaps the opposite is true – that eight months into his term, Donald Trump is fundamentally changing the office of the president.

Amid the unwelcome glare of the Sept. 11 shooting death of Carlos Munoz Portal — a Narcos location scout killed on the job in the rural region north of Mexico City — Netflix must also contend with an ongoing trademark dispute with the family of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin dramatized in the hit series...According to Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who focuses on copyright and trademark law, it's unlikely that Escobar Inc. could have a trademark claim to "Narcos" — a word which has come to mean anyone involved in the drug-cartel trade. "It's possible to have trademarks that are the same for different goods and services. For example; Delta Airlines, Delta Dental, Delta Faucet," Tushnet says. "But at least some of the goods and services in the applications are overlapping.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. In January 2012, Sheriff Doug Gillespie of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sent a team to Washington, D.C. to ask the Justice Department for help. The LVMPD had been the subject of a five-part series published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal just months before. The paper’s investigation covered 20 years of shootings by the department. It concluded that many of the incidents were avoidable and accused the LVMPD of being an “insular” agency that celebrated “a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes.” Two weeks after the last piece ran, an LVMPD officer killed an unarmed, mentally ill, black veteran.

...the guests were witnessing the product of a clever and thoughtful arts collaboration between Clayton and the Harvard Art Museums. This year’s celebration was the fourth iteration of the popular event, which draws many returning students as well as a plethora of freshmen. The autumnal festivity introduces students to the museums and highlights the role that they can play in their lives...It was the first time at the museums for Harvard Law School students Cortney Robinson ’18 and Demarquin Johnson ’20. “I thought it was a good chance to be introduced to the museum,” said Robinson.

An interview with Noah Feldman. An Intelligence Squared debate about the most pressing global challenges facing the Trump administration. Prominent foreign policy experts debate what to do about North Korea, and our strategic relationships with China and other countries.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. In 2015, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern University, published a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Kipnis argued that students’ sense of vulnerability on campus was expanding to an unwarranted degree, partly owing to new enforcement policies around Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds. The new Title IX policies on sexual misconduct which were then sweeping campuses perpetuated “myths and fantasies about power,” Kipnis wrote, which enlarged the invasive power of institutions while undermining the goal of educating students in critical thinking and resilience. “If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method,” she concluded.

An article by Glenn Cohen, Sharona Hoffman, and Eli Y. Adashi. The mugger's demand “Your money or your life” is a familiar one. However, in an era of vast hospital computer networks and electronic health records, a novel risk to worry about is, “Your money or your patient's life.” This threat, known as “ransomware,” is an increasingly common experience for computer users around the world. The relevance of this hazard to health care became widely apparent on 12 May 2017 after a global attack effected by ransomware named WannaCry. Among those most severely affected were hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics of the British National Health Service.

If President Trump spoke with Paul Manafort while his former campaign manager was being wiretapped, experts say there's no quick legal route to disclose the existence or content of intercepted calls. Public disclosure isn't guaranteed because two reported wiretap orders targeting Manafort were issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, rather than via the ordinary criminal wiretap statute...Former federal judge Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said "the transcript will not be released unless there is an indictment and a public trial."

Harvard unveiled the list of students who will formally weigh in on the University’s ongoing presidential search Tuesday—the last of three advisory committees the search committee promised to appoint after University President Drew G. Faust announced she will step down next summer. Third-year Law student and Cabot House tutor Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 [`18] will chair the 18-member committee, which includes at least one representative from each of Harvard’s 12 degree-granting schools. Students will “provide advice to the presidential search committee” and “assist in ensuring broad outreach to the wider Harvard community,” according to the announcement.

Vanguard Group needs its hands-off investor base to pay attention. On Nov. 15 the world’s largest mutual fund company will stage its broadest shareholder meeting in eight years and needs enough individual investors to vote on measures such as installing three new fund board members including Tim Buckley, who is set to take over as Vanguard chief executive in January....Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, said fund governance rules, dating from 1940, could use an update to give investors more regular input. As things stand now, Vanguard’s investors “are not acclimated to participating,” he said. “There’s no track record of them having to do that.”

A School of Public Health student is among a half dozen undocumented young people suing President Donald Trump over his move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Filed in a San Francisco federal court Monday, the lawsuit charges that the Trump administration violated the due process rights of young people protected from deportation under DACA...The lawsuit’s other plaintiffs include two middle school teachers who work with at-risk youth, a formerly homeless attorney, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, and a law student. Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 is on the legal team providing the Dreamers pro bono counsel.

Joe Arpaio might have been able to stay out of prison after President Trump pardoned him last month, but that doesn’t mean the controversial former Arizona sheriff has free rein to harass his critics. Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop targeting undocumented immigrants, is threatening action against a Harvard Law School professor in a clear effort to use legal threats to deter opponents. The professor, Andrew Manuel Crespo, wrote a column in this newspaper earlier this month calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to challenge the pardon on constitutional grounds. In Crespo’s view, Trump’s pardon may have been unconstitutional because it interfered with the judiciary’s ability to protect constitutional rights.

An op-ed by Samantha Power. When George Washington gave his Farewell Address in 1796, he urged the American people “to be constantly awake” to the risk of foreign influence. In the wake of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 United States election, the president’s warning has a fresh, chilling resonance. The debate in the United States about foreign interference concentrates on who did what to influence last year’s election and the need for democracies to strengthen their cybersecurity for emails, critical infrastructure and voting platforms. But we need to pay far more attention to another vulnerability: our adversaries’ attempts to subvert our democratic processes by aiming falsehoods at ripe subsets of our population — and not only during elections.

When the Trump administration announced on Sept. 5 that it intended to upend the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which has banned deportation of many young immigrants, the move seemed to set a general course for what would come next...Opening the discussion on “DACA: What’s Next,” moderator Dan Balz, chief correspondent for the Washington Post and a fall resident fellow at the IOP, summarized recent developments, asking the panel members — Carlos Rojas, an immigrant rights advocate and special projects consultant for Youth on Board; Roberto G. Gonzalez, assistant professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Jason Corral, staff attorney, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical program — for their take on the social media back and forth...The DACA program itself was a compromise, said Corral, just as the BRIDGE Act, legislation now before Congress that would essentially legalize DACA, is a compromise. Calling the administration’s initial decision to suspend DACA “discriminatory, racist, nationalist,” Corral said, “It’s not the people that are broken, it’s the immigration law that is broken.”

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. The International Criminal Court very recently issued an arrest warrant for a militia leader in Libya which should catch the attention of U.S. policymakers, diplomats and prosecutors because of the possibility that his most senior commander—an American citizen by the name of Khalifa Haftar—ordered soldiers to commit war crimes. So has General Haftar been telling his subordinates to carry out the very acts that are part of the International Court’s arrest warrant, such as summary executions?

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. A federal judge in Arizona will soon consider whether to overturn President Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The answer to this question has consequences not just for Arpaio and the people he hurt but also for the entire country. And although the conventional legal wisdom has been that a presidential decision to grant a pardon is unreviewable, that is wrong. In this circumstance, Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio was unconstitutional and should be overturned.