Media Mentions

When the next financial crisis hits — an event that may be years or decades away — we will learn whether this Congress and the president drew the right lessons from the 2008-09 financial crisis. Congress is arguing over whether government can avoid “bailouts” of large financial institutions and still prevent a full-blown crisis. With all of President Trump’s trials and tribulations, hardly anyone is paying attention... A letter from 122 law professors and economists, led by Jeffrey N. Gordon of Columbia Law School and Mark J. Roe of Harvard Law School, argued that the House proposal is unworkable and could trigger the panic that the legislation aimed to avoid.

An op-ed by Charles Fried. In its opinion of May 25 enjoining enforcement of the revised Trump administration travel a majority of the judges of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals latched on to two key words of a phrase in U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1972 and 2015: In judging denials of entry of aliens into the United States the Supreme Court said judges may not “look behind ... the facially legitimate and bona fide” exercise of executive discretion. The Fourth Circuit judges mined a rich trove of explicit statements by Donald Trump as candidate and later as president-elect, and found that the travel ban was not issued in “good faith” because, while “speak[ing] vague[ly] of national security ... in context his [words] drip with religious intolerance.”

John Manning will be the next dean of Harvard Law School. University leaders announced Thursday that Manning, a conservative scholar who has been on the faculty of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, law school since 2004 and served as deputy dean since 2013, will replace outgoing dean Martha Minow on July 1...Manning said in an interview Thursday that he wanted the dean job in order to help shepherd the law school into its third century. (Harvard Law is celebrating its bicentennial this year.) “I care very much about Harvard Law School,” Manning said. “It’s a great place. It produces leaders, generation after generation, year in and year out, who want to go out and make the world better. It’s an exciting, vibrant place to work.”

A former UMass graduate student will be sentenced Wednesday in the heroin overdose death of another student. Jesse Carrillo was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and distribution after Eric Sinacori died from heroin supplied by Carrillo. Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan said that going after drug dealers for manslaughter has become more common across the country, but he questions the legal approach. "For a manslaughter case, the government has to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the seller acted so recklessly that death was foreseeable," he said.

Donald Trump spent 131 days contemplating what life would be like if the United States left the Paris climate agreement. Ultimately, he seemed to like what he saw, and followed his gut. On Thursday, the president made official his long-rumored decision to withdraw the United States from the 195-nation accord...The Paris deal "is more fair to the U.S. than previous agreements because it includes all the major economies of the world, not just the rich countries, so both developed countries and developing countries have skin in the game," Jody Freeman, a Harvard Law School professor and director of the school's Environmental Law and Policy Program, said.

Harvard Law School has a new dean. John Manning, a deputy dean and constitutional law professor, will take over as the school’s next dean on July 1, the law school announced on Thursday. His appointment, to succeed Martha L. Minow, who will step down on June 30, drew praise from Elena Kagan, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, who served as the law school’s dean from 2003 to 2009...In an interview on Thursday, he said that he planned to consult with faculty, students and alumni to look at the law school curriculum, ways to ensure students have the skills to be excellent lawyers and how to diversify the field of applicants. “We want to make sure we are drawing on students from a diverse applicant pool,” he said. “We want to have a diverse community, which makes for a more lively community.”

John F. Manning, a public law scholar on Harvard Law faculty since 2004 will take over as dean on July 1, the school announced on Thursday. Manning, 56, has been the deputy dean of Harvard Law School since 2013 and also is the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law, with an expertise in statutory interpretation and constitutional law. “I love this institution and it has done a lot of good in the world to train excellent lawyers and leaders,” said Manning, in an interview. “And it’s a vibrant intellectual community. I am grateful to be working with a great group of students, staff, alumni and professors.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can President Donald Trump block former FBI Director James Comey from testifying before Congress by invoking executive privilege? The answer turns out to be surprisingly tricky, despite the precedent of U.S. v. Nixon, in which the U.S. Supreme Court made President Richard Nixon hand over the Watergate tapes to a federal judge. On the one hand, a congressional investigation is different from a criminal case -- which makes it less likely that a court would allow Comey to testify if Trump refuses. On the other hand, Trump has spoken about his conversations on Twitter -- which arguably waives his privilege to protect a private conversation with his adviser. The only thing certain is that, if Trump invokes privilege regarding Comey, we’re in for a wild legal ride.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In an early executive order, President Donald Trump told government agencies that if they issue one regulation, they must take two away. Four months later, we are seeing how the “one in, two out” rule will play out in his administration. In effect, the federal government now has a regulatory moratorium (with modest exceptions), accompanied by episodic efforts to undo rules of the Obama era. The best projections are that the moratorium will continue and that the episodic undoing efforts will slow down.

President Trump awakened this morning (if he slept at all last night) and decided it would be a good idea to seize on the London terror carnage to launch a fresh Twitter attack on the courts and on his own Justice Department. In so doing, he may have given opponents of his immigration ban more ammunition against it in court...Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in various legal posts in George W. Bush’s administration, told me in an email this morning that Trump’s new tweets are “significant in at least two ways.”

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...Trump also said his Justice Department “should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted” to the Supreme Court. He appeared to be deriding the revisions that his lawyers have asked the court to uphold...[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 Laurence Tribe. Donald Trump's tweets in the wake of the London massacre Saturday night have become the subject of much speculation: Will they reduce the administration's chances of victory for its executive order banning travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim countries when the ban is taken up by the Supreme Court? Predictions either way are perilous, but one thing seems clear: It's not the President's return to calling his executive order a "travel ban" rather than a "pause" that matters in the tweets he has sprayed all over the globe.

In Israel, the author of the new book 'Butterfly Politics' talks to Haaretz about her 40 years intervening for social equality through law.

Pioneering lawyer and activist for women’s rights Catharine A. MacKinnon argues that seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations. Catharine MacKinnon is a pioneer of legal theory and practice, a groundbreaking activist for women’s rights, and one of feminism’s most significant figures. For over forty years MacKinnon’s intellectual, legal, and political pursuits have been defined by a driving motivation: to end inequality, including abuse, in women’s lives. Many of her ideas are now staples of legal and political discourse. Others urge changes that have yet to be realized.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously suggested, in defense of free speech, that “every idea is an incitement.” But are words themselves violence? The striking acceptance of the notion that some speech can constitute violence—and therefore has no place on a university campus—has coincided, this year, with the eruption of actual physical violence over speech.

The Syrian war is probably the most documented conflict ever, but with no end in sight, the civilians and activists who have collected millions of photos, as well as thousands of videos and casualty lists, are quickly losing faith in international accountability mechanisms...Evidence gathering has become much more sophisticated, says Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in international criminal prosecutions. For example, SJAC developed an in-depth database to ensure that each piece of data is verified, classified, protected and linked to existing evidence.

Rodrigo Duterte is not afraid of the International Criminal Court — or so he likes to say. Asked about the possibility of an ICC investigation, the Philippine president dismissed it with a curse. When a critic vowed to submit evidence of possible crimes against humanity, he told him to go ahead...“I think that the situation is ripe for the prosecutor to start an investigation,” said Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who previously worked in the Office of the Prosecutor. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.”

Eric Goode, 59, is a New York entrepreneur who is an owner of downtown establishments like the Bowery Hotel and the Waverly Inn. He was a creator of Area, the art-gallery-nightclub from the 1980s. He is also a conservationist with something of an obsession for turtles. And now he is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that accuses President Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, a once-obscure provision intended to prevent federal officials, including the president, from falling under the influence of foreign powers...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar who is among the lawyers representing CREW, said the addition of Mr. Goode helped buttress the suit’s legitimacy. “It makes it inconceivable that this lawsuit would be tossed out,” he said, offering a bit wishful thinking, as the Justice Department, which is representing Mr. Trump, will almost certainly try to move at some point to have the case dismissed.

John F. Manning, the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law and deputy dean at Harvard Law School (HLS), an eminent public-law scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation and structural constitutional law, will become the School’s next dean on July 1...“I feel honored and grateful to President Faust for the opportunity to lead Harvard Law School as we enter our third century,” said Manning. “And I feel privileged to work alongside our exceptional students, staff, faculty, and alumni, whose invaluable contributions to legal scholarship, education, and practice inspire me every day.

Just as technology is changing the way we live and work, it also affects the way we use and move our money. In this podcast, lawyer and bitcoin expert Patrick Murck of Harvard University tells us that financial technology, or fintech, is poised to revolutionize the way the world does business. "The real story of fintech is that we are democratizing the creation and the administration of markets," he said. "We see it in lending marketplaces and with 'robo advisors' who are allowing people to participate in markets in ways they could not before."