Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The revelation this week that U.S. surveillance in 2016 had captured Russian officials talking about influencing Donald Trump’s advisers might be an important piece of evidence in a growing chain that could lead to Trump himself. But there’s another strong possibility: that Trump and even his campaign advisers were unwitting beneficiaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plot against Hillary Clinton. After all, if American intelligence was listening to the Russians, why haven’t we been told already that there is direct evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign?

Bill Cohen was certain of one thing in June of 1974: The voters of Maine would not send him back to Congress. The 33-year-old Bangor mayor had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives less than two years earlier but had done something unthinkable to many of his Republican colleagues and constituents: He’d voted to hold a president of his own party accountable to congressional investigators, opening a path that could lead to his impeachment...Harvard University law professor Richard Fallon was then Cohen’s press secretary. “I was 22 years old and had not even graduated from college yet,” he recalls. “It’s striking to me in retrospect how hugely junior his staff was, with no lawyers on it. My sense was that he just took those transcripts and went off by himself and pored over them so he could be as prepared as he could be for every set of questioning. He wrote all his Watergate speeches, and he handled almost all the national media stuff himself. My role was pretty much limited to cranking out press releases for the Maine media.”

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier. There is plenty of blame to go around for the WannaCry ransomware that spread throughout the Internet earlier this month, disrupting work at hospitals, factories, businesses, and universities. First, there are the writers of the malicious software, which blocks victims’ access to their computers until they pay a fee. Then there are the users who didn’t install the Windows security patch that would have prevented an attack. A small portion of the blame falls on Microsoft, which wrote the insecure code in the first place. One could certainly condemn the Shadow Brokers, a group of hackers with links to Russia who stole and published the National Security Agency attack tools that included the exploit code used in the ransomware. But before all of this, there was the NSA, which found the vulnerability years ago and decided to exploit it rather than disclose it.

Hasan Mashkoor recalled he was among only a few of the roughly 165 people in the Iraqi jail cell who had room to lay down...For five years, Mr. Mashkoor said he was imprisoned without charges or on false charges. He said he was tortured and mistreated by militia-affiliated members of the Iraqi security forces. Today, as a refugee in Worcester, he bears the physical and emotional scars from this experience. But he is trying to rebuild his life by telling his story...Mr. Mashkoor has met with the Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, a clinical program that handles pro bono cases and advocacy projects to protect the human rights of clients and communities around the world...Clinical instructor Salma Waheedi said the clinic is in the process of evaluating the case and studying Mr. Mashkoor’s options...“Mr. Mashkoor has explained that those involved in his torture are in Iraq and are highly unlikely to come to the United States,” said Ms. Waheedi in an email.

The finance industry, long plagued by distrust among the public, has reached a tipping point, according to Stephen Davis, associate director and senior fellow of the Harvard Law School program on corporate governance and co-author of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How to Fix It. At the 70th CFA Institute Annual Conference, Davis said that the public's anger, fueled by a belief that they've been unjustly "separated from their money," has helped to usher in a new "discipline of ownership." His assessment of state of the financial industry struck a tone of cautious optimism.

The Constitution does not answer every question. It includes detailed instructions, for instance, about how Congress may remove a president who has committed serious offenses. But it does not say whether the president may be criminally prosecuted in the meantime...But would the Constitution allow Mr. Mueller to indict Mr. Trump if he finds evidence of criminal conduct?...Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard, has questioned whether the special-counsel regulations should be read that broadly. The regulations, he wrote on Take Care, a law blog, “focus more on administrative protocols and procedures than on legal analyses, arguments or judgments.”

Harvard Law Professor [Glenn Cohen] joins Sean to discuss a study he and a Harvard group did on player safety in the NFL, how the game can be made more safe, and the future of football.

Amid applause and light drizzle, journalists Judy Woodruff and the late Gwen Ifill received the Radcliffe Medal at the annual Radcliffe Day Ceremony Friday...Woodruff was joined onstage by Walter S. Isaacson ’74, CEO and President of the Aspen Institute and bestselling author of “Steve Jobs” and “Benjamin Franklin: an American Life.” Their discussion covered a broad range of topics, including Woodruff’s friendship with Ifill, career challenges for women and minorities in journalism, and changing conditions for young journalists...Many attendees praised the discussion for how it dealt with issues of gender, race, age, and truth. Lani Guinier ’71, a professor at the Law School, called the discussion, “Amazing, powerful, and emotionally difficult.”

The special prosecutor was convinced that Congress was on the verge of sabotaging his politically charged investigation—one that led straight into the White House and threatened to end with a president’s impeachment. And so he went to lawmakers on Capitol Hill with a plea: Do not grant immunity to witnesses in exchange for their testimony if you ever want anyone brought to justice...It would not be a surprise if other Trump advisers, beyond Flynn, now come forward to demand immunity in exchange for testimony, Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in criminal prosecution issues, told me—especially, Whiting says, because Mueller, by reputation, seems likely to conduct an aggressive criminal investigation that could last for years. “The shift into a criminal investigation could definitely make a difference,” Whiting says. “As more people get lawyers, the advice of the lawyers is always going to be to stay quiet and try to get immunity for yourself.”

More than 100 bankruptcy scholars, including Nobel prize winners and former Federal Reserve governors, are urging Congress not to undo the orderly liquidation authority, the provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill meant to protect the U.S. economy from a bank collapse as bad as Lehman Brothers', or worse. The group is calling the proposed action currently before the U.S. House of Representatives "a grave mistake." The letter was written by Jeffrey Gordon of Colombia Law School and Mark Roe of Harvard Law School and signed by Nobel prize winners Oliver Hart and Peter Diamond, former Federal Reserve governors and the so-called father of modern banking theory, Douglas Diamond.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In the U.S. and Europe, many people worry that if prominent politicians signal that they dislike and fear immigrants, foreigners and people of minority religions, they will unleash people’s basest impulses and fuel violence. In their view, social norms of civility, tolerance and respect are fragile. If national leaders such as President Donald Trump flout those norms, they might unravel.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Can the president fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? That question, considered Wednesday by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, would be of fundamental constitutional importance under any circumstances. But these aren’t just any circumstances. The case, PHH Corp. v. CFPB, involves the watchdog agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis. As established by the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB has an unusual independent leadership structure, with the president severely restricted in his ability to fire the director. One of the questions raised by mortgage lender PHH in its case challenging an insurance kickback fine is whether the CFPB setup violates the constitutional separation of powers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a remarkable 10-to-3 decision, a federal appeals court on Thursday affirmed the freeze on the second iteration of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration from six majority Muslim countries. The court said that national security “is not the true reason” for the order, despite Trump’s insistence to the contrary. It’s extraordinary for a federal court to tell the president directly that he’s lying; I certainly can’t think of any other examples in my lifetime.

If you want to know what a responsible approach to House oversight in response to substantial evidence of possible executive wrongdoing might look like, watch House Judiciary Committee Democrats...Constitutional litigator and Harvard law professor Laurence M. Tribe tells me: “This latest Trump gambit for wiggling out of a constitutional mandate certainly shows that liquidation is the only practical way for Trump to comply with the Emoluments Clauses. All he and his lawyers are doing is picking a course of action — donating selected profits to charities he favors — that is constitutionally defective to begin with and then complaining that it’s also infeasible to implement.”

An interview with Alex Whiting. Over the past few months, many revelations have surfaced surrounding the Trump administration. While the nature of those revelations varies, one name in particular, has repeatedly emerged in reporting: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Flynn was an adviser to Trump’s campaign and served as national security adviser before he was forced to resign in February...So if Flynn resigned in February, why does his name keep popping up in headlines? How do Flynn’s actions fit into the larger story surrounding possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia?

Why did Wall Street go astray? For most of the last several centuries, bankers and financiers were the pillars of society, the bastions of morality, the people in society that everyone respected. Of course, there was the odd rotten apple in the barrel, but by and large, bankers were trusted and looked up to. Yet over the last few decades, Wall Street has become almost a synonym of evil. What went wrong? What can be done to restore the financial sector to the level of respect that it once enjoyed? This week, I talked about these issues with Harvard Business School finance professor Mihir Desai, on the publication of his intriguing new book, The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2017).

...Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, says, “This is about Facebook’s determination to have billions of people treat its platform as The Internet… Facebook wants simultaneously to be viewed as basic infrastructure while ensuring its highly profitable ways of doing deals are unconstrained.” In the case of Facebook, or any other major platform, tech founders and leaders, who make billions off the affective digital labor of billions worldwide, have a distinct responsibility to imagine all the ways their platforms can be perverted in a world that includes murder, rape, child abuse, and terrorism, and those who will use platforms like Facebook to enact them.

An op-ed by Tyler Giannini, Mackennan Graziano `17, and Kelsey Jost-Creegan `17. When Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos met with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., discussion of the Colombian implementation of the peace deal took a backseat to other issues, including the importance of continued economic cooperation...In Colombia, however, conflict and business prospects have been historically entwined, and for peace and economic cooperation to progress, the legacy of U.S. businesses in fueling the country’s decades-long conflict must be addressed. Chiquita Brands International is a case in point.

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. In the wake of the curtain closing last week on Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, New York State and New York City are slated to consider critically important measures to protect wild animals used in circus acts and public health and safety. Earlier this week, the state Senate passed the Elephant Protection Act, banning the use of elephants in entertainment; the Assembly is set to consider the bill soon. Likewise, the New York City Council is considering a bill flat-out banning the use of wild animals for entertainment. These measures are crucial because despite Ringling’s closure, numerous exhibitors — virtually all of them with documented records of abuse and public endangerment — continue to haul animals into the city and the state

**Correction: This story was misattributed to Alex Whiting in yesterday's News@Law. An interview with Glenn Cohen. DNA kits are very popular these days with people wanting to know what countries their ancestors came from. But before seeking out the secrets of your family tree, make sure you read the fine print.

What has come to be called “fake news” is a hard problem to solve, if indeed it is solvable at all. This is because it is created by the interaction of human psychology with several forces: the affordances of digital technology, the business models of giant internet companies and the populist revolt against globalisation. But that hasn’t stopped people trying to solve the problem...Wikipedia, like any social organisation, has many flaws and problems, but it’s still better than any of us ever expected. Some years ago, a Harvard scholar, Jonathan Zittrain, published a remarkably prescient book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, in which he accurately predicted much of what would happen to the internet in the years following the invention of the smartphone. At the time, many readers were puzzled by the fact that Professor Zittrain devoted a chapter of the book to an extensive discussion of Wikipedia’s governance processes. In fact, it was a mark of his prescience.