Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What did the president know about the Mar-a-Lago advertisement that appeared for a time on official government websites? And when did he know it? These questions might sound trivial. They aren’t. The webpage about President Donald Trump’s private club, which had all the features of a marketer-drafted puff piece, is a prime example of corruption, namely the knowing use of government means to enhance the private wealth of the president. And corruption is the classic example of a high crime or misdemeanor under the impeachment clause of the Constitution.

Shareholders at scandal-scarred Wells Fargo & Co. voted Tuesday to keep all 15 of the bank’s directors, but in a stinging rebuke rarely seen in corporate elections did so in some cases by slim margins. After a three-hour annual meeting replete with shareholder outbursts and one unscheduled break to remove an angry investor, the San Francisco company announced voting tallies that showed the toll of the aggressive sales practices last fall that cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines...“The outcome is a wake-up call that directors at U.S. companies may no longer glide through a crisis without taking individual hits in reputation,” said Stephen Davis, associate director of Harvard Law School’s Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

Four Harvard Law School students are demanding that the Law School clarify how it considers applicants who have been accused or found guilty of sexual assault. Emma K. O’Hara , Shayna Medley , Dixie C. Tauber, and Kelly Jo Popkin ’11—all third-year law students in the school’s Gender Violence Policy Workshop—published the article in the Harvard Law Record Sunday, attaching a questionnaire they sent to Law School admission officers March 30...“I think we were all sort of motivated to want to do this particular topic now given that it’s admissions season,” Tauber said.

The shareholder vote against Wells Fargo directors on Tuesday was larger than anything seen at a big US bank during the financial crisis — but without Warren Buffett’s help the rebellion would have been even bigger. For four board members, only the support of the billionaire investor’s Berkshire Hathaway prevented them from being removed from office in the wake of the bank’s bogus accounts debacle...“There is a serious question as to whether any of the directors who received less than 60 per cent of the vote can stay on,” said Howell Jackson, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Early in his administration, President Donald Trump made Chicago a promise. "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on ... I will send in the Feds!" he blasted out in an evening tweet four days after his inauguration. The shootings in the city were a favorite talking point in tweets, speeches and even his joint address to Congress. "We're going to have to do something about Chicago," he said in January. "Because what's happening in Chicago should not be happening in this country."...Chiraag Bains, a former federal prosecutor at the Justice Department and now senior fellow at Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program, added that even if Justice Department does provide additional resources, "it'll take more than a punishment-oriented, law-and-order approach to improve public safety in Chicago."

Someone in the Trump administration recognized that even for the Trump clan, the latest act of self-promotion went too far. As NPR spelled out: An article on a State Department website about President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has been removed after criticism that it was an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds...This time, the administration acted not just unethically but apparently illegally. “It manifestly violates 5 CFR 2635.702,” says legal scholar and litigator Laurence Tribe, referring to the statute that bars using public office for private gain. “Our emoluments case [challenging his receipt of foreign government monies derived from hotels] will put a stop to this sort of outrageous use of public office for private gain, which essentially puts the White House on the auction block and distorts U.S. government policy in the direction of foreign interests in ways that are opaque to public scrutiny.”

Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health expenses and lost portions of Social Security checks and tax refunds to their lender, the federal government...“This credit is being extended on terms that specifically, willfully ignore their ability to repay,” says Toby Merrill of Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center. “You can’t avoid that we’re targeting high-cost, high-dollar-amount loans to people who we know can’t afford to repay them.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to rewrite the First Amendment. In defending a civil suit against Trump by protesters who say they were roughed up in one of his campaign rallies, Trump’s legal team has advanced two claims that either misstate or substantially overstate constitutional doctrine.

On Inauguration Day, outgoing White House counsel Neil Eggleston visited his office in the West Wing one last time. He then went to Andrews Air Force base to say goodbye to his boss, Barack Obama, before taking a call from a former Kirkland & Ellis colleague to schedule a dinner the following week. Three months later, Eggleston has returned to private practice and to his old firm, Kirkland announced internally Monday...This time, Eggleston, who is 63, plans to build a practice similar to what he had before, plus teach at Harvard Law School and keep a calendar of public appearances and speeches. "Hopefully, I'll ramp up quickly. I've had former clients reach out and ask me when I'll be returning" to the firm, he said.

Family and high-profile friends of Aaron Hernandez, the convicted killer and former New England Patriots star who hanged himself in his prison cell last week, on Monday paid their final respects to the notorious felon during a private funeral service in his hometown....Hernandez’s attorneys, including Jose Baez, Ronald Sullivan, Linda Kenney Baden, Robert Proctor, Leontire, and Michelle Medina, exited the funeral home around 4 p.m. to read a brief statement on behalf of the family. Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor, read the statement, thanking the public for “its thoughtful expressions of condolences.” “The family wishes to say goodbye to Aaron in privacy,” Sullivan. “They love him and they miss him.”

...Thirty-five videos, featuring Harvard experts in science, business, law, health, economics, engineering, public policy, design, and the arts, have been assembled over the last year and a half as a resource for members of the public who want to learn more about climate change.....While every viewer will take home different lessons from the videos, Griswold was struck by the discussion of climate change economics and public policy from Associate Professor of Public Policy Joe Aldy and Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government Robert Stavins. He also pointed to perspectives on law from Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman

Former U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power is writing a memoir about her transition from writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning condemnation of foreign policy to becoming a leading public advocate for the government. Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishing, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had acquired Power's "The Education of an Idealist." A release date has not yet been determined..."Making the transition from critic of U.S. foreign policy to U.S. government official was not easy, but public service proved the most gratifying experience of my life," Power, now a professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, said in a statement. "I am looking forward to stepping back to explore the highs and lows, and to share ideas for how, even in troubled times, we can each do our part to shape a more humane future."

Why would Harvard Law School, one of the most elite law schools in the country, decide to change the admissions criteria that it has used for the past 60 years? One would be tempted to assume that it’s a response to the plummeting number of applicants at law schools around the country: even Harvard’s number of applicants is down 18% since 2011, though it still has far fewer spots than applicants. So why Harvard, why the change and why now?...It is to Harvard’s advantage to increase access to top talent and to be able to cast a wider net. As Jessica Soban, Harvard Law School’s Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions, put it, “Harvard Law School works to eliminate barriers to legal education for top talent. We seek that talent from a variety of backgrounds: across different academic disciplines, different countries, and different socio-economic backgrounds.”

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Jessica Brand of Harvard Law's Fair Punishment Project about the chronic problem of bad lawyering on capital punishment cases. All eight death row cases in Arkansas had examples of attorney failures, including drunk lawyers, a conflict of interest affair involving a judge, lawyers missing deadlines, and failure to disclose mental disorders.

Every day in courtrooms across the United States, lawyers rely on evidence to make their cases. But when it comes to what works in serving clients or enhancing access to justice, lawyers and judges are stubbornly resistant to evidence-based research. That, at least, is the premise underlying the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School, where director and Harvard Law professor James Greiner and his staff are working to compile rigorous evidence of what works in law and what doesn’t, using randomized control trials...In this regard, the legal profession today is roughly where the medical profession was in the 1940s, when insurers began demanding evidence of the efficacy of procedures and drugs, Greiner said at a recent showcase of the Access to Justice Lab’s work. Drug testing is a good example of why the “trust me” approach is unacceptable in medicine. Of all drugs that enter phase-one testing, only 10 percent make it to phase three. “But what do we do in law?” Jim Greiner asked. “We go from idea straight to the field. Why? Because we know. We’re professionals.”

Thousands of public records about animal welfare have vanished from the internet, part of a government database that included atrocious puppy mill conditions, improper veterinary care and other mistreatment of animals. Now activists are hitting back at the USDA in the courtroom and by posting deleted records online...Delcianna Winders, an academic fellow in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, said that no new enforcement records had been posted online since 2016...Winders, who uses the documents for her own work at Harvard, sent thousands of the records she's saved to Kick to publish on his site. "The impact is huge, I don’t think it can be overstated," she said of the documents' removal.

...Tibor Fischer is correct that media discussion of the Fidesz regime in Hungary would be better informed if more people spoke Hungarian. For readers who do not, I would suggest Éva Balogh’s Hungarian Spectrum blog, and Kim Lane Scheppele’s forensic analyses of Viktor Orbán’s “constitutional coup” in the academic literature, and her account of changes introduced to electoral rules to facilitate his re-election in her contribution to Paul Krugman’s blog in the New York Times.

The proportion of Harvard’s tenured faculty who are women or people of color jumped from 30.8 percent to 39.2 percent over the past decade, according to the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity’s annual report. The report, released on Monday, provides demographic statistics for each of Harvard’s schools and the four divisions of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences...Among tenure-track professors, the Divinity School and the Law School have the highest minority representation with 75 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

A conference on the evolution and current state of immigration to be held on the Western Kentucky University campus April 25 will feature a graduate of the college who’s now at Harvard Law School and working with teenage refugees from Central America. Mario Nguyen [`17] sees the refugee crisis first-hand in his work with Harvard Legal Aid. He says some people mistakenly think of the wave of immigrants from Central America as people coming to take American jobs. “In reality these are 14-year-old children I’ve been face-to-face with, 13-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 16-year-olds, who had to literally cross a few countries on their own on foot. A lot of them have been sexually abused or physically abused.” Nguyen says he’s been aware of immigration issues from an early age. His father was a refugee from Vietnam and his mother was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

No one wants murder videos on Facebook. But no one wants Facebook to censor their baby videos, either. Technology isn’t ready to step in and tell the difference. So what are the legal options for stopping videos like the appalling killing uploaded last week from hitting Facebook? None of them will be easy for Americans to swallow...“We want a free and open internet, and we want a space that we aren’t paying a subscription for,” says Kate Coyer, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an expert online extremism. “But we also don’t want to encounter some of the worst elements of humanity on there. … At a certain point we may have to make a compromise.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to news reports, is re-evaluating whether to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing leaked classified material in 2010. This raises a First Amendment flag. The department previously decided it wouldn’t proceed because it couldn’t distinguish WikiLeaks from the New York Times or the Washington Post. So what, really, is the difference between unlawfully leaking information to the press and publishing it directly to the public? If one is unlawful, why can’t the other be?