Media Mentions

While watching a sneak preview of Democracy Through the Looking Glass – a dismal report card on the media’s primary coverage last year – I realized that we all need to share in the blame. We, the media, sometimes missed the bigger issues, too often choosing to cover topics of little importance. You, the truth-seeking audience, drove TV ratings and posted stuff online, falsehoods that drove the narrative...Bloggers blog and websites report, each looking for clicks to generate cash, leaving the mainstream media to change its philosophy in the name of online traffic. “Racing to events that will get the most ad revenue,” Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, notes in the film.

...Trump’s critics are actively exploring the path to impeachment or the invocation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows for the replacement of a President who is judged to be mentally unfit...Over the years, the use, or misuse, of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has been irresistible to novelists and screenwriters, but political observers dismiss the idea. Jeff Greenfield, of CNN, has described the notion that Trump could be ousted on the basis of mental health as a “liberal fantasy.” Not everyone agrees. Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told me, “I believe that invoking Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool—not immediately, but well before 2020.”

Maine Attorney General Janet Mills has joined Democratic colleagues from other states in filing legal challenges aimed at stopping the Trump administration from weakening environmental regulations. The suits reflect a growing trend of partisan alliances among states’ attorneys general...Former Maine Attorney General James Tierney, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, says attorneys general have historically cooperated on various legal issues affecting the states without regard to partisan affiliation. “States are supposed to be different than the federal government, that’s why our country is set up that way. So there is always going to be friction between state governments and the federal government regardless of who is the president,” he says.

Alumni, faculty, administrators, and students flocked to the Divinity School this weekend, celebrating its two centuries of existence with lectures, a panel of Harvard deans, and a bicentennial party, concluding a years-worth of festivities...Several hundred people also attended the panel “Religion Matters: HDS at Harvard University” on Friday, which was moderated by Divinity School Dean David Hempton and featured Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and Graduate School of Education Dean James E. Ryan...Minow joked that “religion is present at the Harvard Law School before every exam” and detailed the connections between governmental and religious legal traditions. “For a law school to be situated in the United States, the temptation is to think that there is only one legal system. We’ve worked really hard to locate the United States and the 50 states inside of many legal traditions,” she said.

Capital Markets Regulation President Hal Scott discusses U.S. trust for Wall Street and government regulatory positions that need to be filled. He speaks with Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Surveillance."

Your law school is about to hit a major milestone, but how to celebrate?...Harvard Law School is also ramping up for its 200th anniversary, which it's celebrating throughout the coming academic year. The festivities kick off in September with a two-day arts celebration featuring performances, exhibitions and talks by law alumni and students in the arts. The following month is a two-day "intellectual summit" bringing back prominent alumni and thinkers to address a host of legal issues. For now, Harvard is staying mum on whether a certain high-profile alum who recently vacated the Oval Office, as well as his extremely popular alumna wife, will be in attendance. And in April, the school is hosting "HLS In The Community," which will highlight its public interest, pro bono and community contributions.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT technology specialist, celebrated the emergence of “the Daily Me” – a digital news service tailored to each reader’s specific interests. With the Daily Me, he suggested, you would no longer rely on newspapers and magazines to curate what you saw, and you could bypass the television networks. Instead, you could design a communications package just for you, with topics and perspectives chosen in advance...But let’s hold the celebration. The Daily Me is an enemy of democracy. Representative government depends on shared experiences, common knowledge and a host of unanticipated, unchosen encounters. All too often, information cocoons become echo chambers, which make mutual understanding impossible and which promote dogmatism, polarisation and the fragmentation of society.

...Google Fiber, which is now officially called Alphabet Access, has since expanded across the state line to Kansas City, Mo. It has also added another eight cities and plans to build networks in two more. But last year, the company put all other expansion plans on hold. It hired a new CEO and laid off hundreds of workers, leading some watchers to speculate that Google might be getting out of the fiber business altogether...“People got all excited about Google Fiber, which was very useful, because it opened people’s eyes to the country’s need for world-class, cheap data. But Google Fiber was never going to reach every city in America, because it’s not in their company’s interest to build basic infrastructure,” says Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor who specializes in Internet and communications law.

Corporate America prides itself on rewarding success and punishing failure. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer does not fit comfortably into that narrative...But when Yahoo’s sale to Verizon becomes official in June, with the restructured company renamed Oath, Mayer will walk away with $186 million, according to a regulatory filing released this week. That includes shares of Yahoo stock Mayer owned, stock options, and a $23 million “golden parachute” of cash, restricted stock units, and medical benefits. Mayer did relinquish $14 million while taking responsibility for the Yahoo Mail data breach, but she’ll get 13 times that amount just to no longer remain part of the company...The new compensation standards naturally served to weaken resistance to hostile takeovers, as bundles of cash took the sting out of the loss of employment and prestige. Indeed, a 2012 study from Alma Cohen, Charles Wang, and Lucian Bebchuk confirms that companies offering golden parachutes are more likely to be acquired in a merger.

An op-ed by fellow Nikolas Bowie. Ask any member of the Trump administration what’s so bad about sanctuary cities, and he’ll likely respond with the same answer: They’re violating a federal law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a), which requires cities to jail people suspected of entering the country illegally. For example, right before Sean Spicer recently said that San Francisco and cities like it “have the blood of dead Americans on their hands,” he cited § 1373(a) by name and implied that sanctuary cities violate that statute when they “block their jails from turning over criminal aliens to Federal authorities for deportation.”...But § 1373(a) doesn’t say what Spicer or Sessions thinks it says. In fact, it says nothing about the administration’s chief complaint with sanctuary cities.

The Truth or Dare Podcast invites leading experts to share from their life’s best work in order to help listeners boost their social health. Today’s featured guest is Sheila Heen. Sheila teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where she’s been part of the Harvard Negotiation Project for 2 decades. In addition to being the co-author of Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback, Sheila also serves as CEO of Triad Consulting.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behavior. Governments have taken notice -- and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The next fight over the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive orders will be about the designation of national monuments. Trump’s order to review all major monument declarations in the last 20 years sets the stage for reversal of some or all of President Barack Obama’s designations. Previous presidents have treated those decisions as irreversible. But Trump seems poised to break that tradition by claiming the implicit power to reverse anything a prior president has done.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. The liberal West heaved a collective sigh of relief when the results of the first round of the French presidential election came in. After leading in the polls for weeks, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front ended up in second place, while Emmanuel Macron, a centrist political independent, finished first. Macron, the fresh face of Europe’s democratic center at just 39 years old, is expected to prevail handily in the second-round runoff on May 7. With Macron’s victory in France following Dutch voters’ rejection of the right-wing populist Geert Wilders earlier this year, most observers are treating the result as another rebuke to the populist revolt that fueled the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and US President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Many seem convinced that the populist tide has crested.

An op-ed by Samuel Garcia '19...Senate Bill 4, the bill to eliminate sanctuary cities in Texas, was passed through the Texas House despite vehement opposition — and that means a lot of horrible changes are soon to come to the lives of undocumented immigrants in Texas. SB4, like many immigration-reform bills, was passed off as a way of “securing our border.” I believe it actually stands to make border towns and Texas as a whole inherently more dangerous. This is because local officers may now inquire into the immigration status of any victim or witness that they interview as long as it is “necessary to investigate the offense” — which could arguably be the case in basically every offense they investigate.

...The 14-day rule is an ethical line past which cultured human embryos are not to continue developing outside the body. It is protected by law in 12 countries, including the United Kingdom, and acts as a guideline in five, including the United States....Some critics view calls to re-evaluate the 14-day rule as a pernicious moving of the goalposts. How meaningful can they be, the line of reasoning goes, if scientists want to change rules as soon as they bump up against them? “There were disagreements about the rationale and validity of the 14-day rule before this point, but no one in the research community really pushed the issue because it was not particularly important,” says Glenn Cohen, a Harvard bioethicist. “There is nothing wrong with pragmatic necessity driving us to start a re-examination process.”

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.