Media Mentions

Amid concerns that Russia helped sway the 2016 presidential election, several states are considering legislation that would bar companies with significant foreign ties from contributing money in state campaigns. A long-standing federal statute bars noncitizens and foreign companies from donating directly to candidates or political parties at the federal, state and local levels. Another law prohibits businesses from directly donating to federal-level candidates or political parties. But the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case cleared the way for corporations and unions to pay for political ads made independently of candidates’ campaigns...“The board of a public company generally conceives of themselves as working for the shareholders,” said John C. Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School who testified in favor of the bill in Connecticut.

Harvard Law School soon will allow students to apply for admission using their scores from the GRE standardized test, a break from tradition that's meant to draw a wider range of candidates to the school. For decades, Harvard and other law schools have required students to take the Law School Admissions Test, known as the LSAT, to be considered. Other graduate programs often rely on the Graduate Record Examination, commonly called the GRE..."Harvard Law School is continually working to eliminate barriers as we search for the most talented candidates for law and leadership," Martha Minow, the school's dean, said in a statement. "For many students, preparing for and taking both the GRE and the LSAT is unaffordable."

An interview with Cass Sunstein. A well-functioning democracy depends on people interacting with a wide range of people and ideas. As the internet and social media grow ever more sophisticated and targeted, they threaten democracy by creating “echo chambers” and “information cocoons.” So says a Harvard professor of behavioral economics, who offers practical and legal solutions.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. A Republican president takes office, vowing to eliminate job-killing regulations issued by his Democratic predecessor. In his first weeks, the automobile industry publicly asks him to eliminate specific regulations that are, in its view, crushingly burdensome. He agrees. Sound familiar? It should. But we’re speaking of 1981, not 2017, and of Ronald Reagan’s decision to repeal one of the central achievements of the Jimmy Carter administration: a rule designed to reduce highway deaths and injuries by requiring “passive restraints,” such as airbags, in motor vehicles.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Are there do-overs in the White House? That’s the question that will determine the fate of President Donald Trump’s new and improved executive order on immigration from six majority-Muslim countries. The state of Hawaii has filed suit challenging the order on essentially the same grounds that the federal courts used to block the first iteration. Whether the second order is similarly blocked depends on whether the court looks solely to the content of the new order or to the entire context of its birth.

One of the nation’s most noted lawyers, Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe, has joined Rep. William Lacy Clay’s lawsuit seeking to re-install a controversial painting on a public wall in the Capitol complex. The first hearing on that lawsuit is scheduled for next Wednesday, March 15, Clay said Wednesday. Clay, D-St. Louis, announced Wednesday that Tribe would defend on 1st Amendment grounds the right of former St. Louis student David Pulphus to have his painting hang with other congressional painting contest winners.

David Nason, a General Electric (GE.N) executive and former Treasury Department official, has told the White House he is no longer interested in serving as the Federal Reserve's bank supervision chief. Nason, who heads GE's Energy Financial Services division, had been seen as a leading candidate for the vice chair for supervision position, a critical role in efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump to revamp financial rules...Harvard Law School professor Hal Scott, whose work has focused on financial firms, regulation and capital markets, is still in the mix for the job, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Scott is director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, a research group made up of financial industry representatives and academics that has been critical of financial regulations.

Harvard Law School announced on Wednesday that starting in the fall it will accept the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT from applicants seeking to enroll in the school. Harvard becomes only the second American Bar Association-accredited law school to accept the Graduate Record Exam. The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law announced last February that it would accept either the Law School Admission Test or the GRE in an attempt to expand its applicant pool. The school admitted 12 current students who submitted GRE scores...Jessica Soban, associate dean for admissions and strategic initiatives at Harvard Law, said in an interview Wednesday that accepting the GRE should help the school draw more students with science and technology backgrounds, which are sorely needed in the legal profession, and applicants who already have graduate degrees. Those students most likely will have already taken the GRE.

Harvard Law School will allow applicants to take the Graduate Record Examination test as part of a pilot program that could potentially challenge the Law School Admissions Test’s longstanding, national dominance over law-school admissions. The law school announced Wednesday that applicants seeking to join its entering class of fall 2018 could take either the GRE or the LSAT. Administration officials said they would decide later whether to make the LSAT permanently optional. Harvard said the move is intended to expand and diversify its applicant pool, making it a more attractive option for international students and those also pursuing graduate degrees outside of law.

Harvard Law School, moving to open its doors to a larger, more diverse pool of applicants, said on Wednesday that it would accept the graduate record examination, known as the GRE, for the admission of students entering its fall 2018 class...The change “will encourage more students in the United States and internationally from a greater degree of disciplines to apply,” said Jessica Soban, assistant dean and chief admissions officer. Applicants who want to can still submit LSAT scores. The GRE test is offered many times each year and in numerous locations around the world, Ms. Soban said in an interview. In addition, she said, “many prospective law school applicants take the GRE as they consider graduate school options.”

For 70 years, the LSAT has been a rite of passage to legal education, a test designed to gauge students’ ability to learn the law. But its dominance could change. Beginning this fall, Harvard Law School will allow applicants to submit their scores from either the Graduate Record Examination or the Law School Admission Test...Harvard, by contrast, saw a 5 percent increase in applicant volume both last year and this year, said Jessica Soban, associate dean for admissions and strategic initiatives. “Regardless of the number of applicants we have, this initiative is about making sure the most qualified candidates continue to consider us,” she said.

WikiLeaks’ publication of hacking tools purportedly used by the Central Intelligence Agency highlight the stakes in a debate about the merits of basing cybersecurity on offense vs. defense., experts said Tuesday. A focus on the tools of attack can create certain kinds of risks because such tools may be difficult, if not impossible, to keep secure. “Eventually, this will all make us safer because finding and publishing (vulnerabilities) is always a good thing,” cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier said. The latest WikiLeaks publication showed that the federal agency was hoarding previously unknown cyber vulnerabilities, known as zero days. Mr. Schneier said that the sharing of such information could be beneficial.

President Trump's new executive order sets up a court battle that could create a long-lasting precedent for presidential power — and not just on immigration law. Trump rewrote his travel ban order Monday, hoping to fortify it against court challenges that have argued that it discriminates against Muslims. A key question now is: If the first order was discriminatory in its intent, can a rewrite of the order make that intent go away? "This case about the president's authority will undoubtedly be tremendously consequential for the scope of executive authority going forward," said Richard Fallon, a Harvard law professor.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a powerful opinion that will become part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s ever-growing liberal legacy, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a split opinion Monday that a jury’s verdict may be reopened if there is evidence of racial bias by the jurors. The decision confronted a legal contradiction between the interest in treating jury verdicts as a black box not to be opened and the imperative of racial justice -- and opted for the latter. The decision is unusually honest and direct about how race in America has historically tainted the fairness of the judicial system.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman. One of the signal achievements of the Obama administration was reaching an agreement with the auto industry to dramatically increase fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, doubling them to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The industry now wants to renege. At its behest, the Trump administration is expected to initiate a rollback. Weakening these standards would be a mistake for consumers, the environment and the auto industry itself. They are the most important action the United States has taken to address climate change and reduce the nation’s dependence on oil.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has made no secret of the fact that he is a very vocal critic of President Donald Trump. He has disagreed with many of Trump’s policies, argued that Trump has repeatedly violated the constitution during his first six weeks in office, claimed Trump is mentally unfit to remain office, and at least twice claimed there are grounds for impeachment of the 45th president. The latest impeachment call from Tribe came early Tuesday morning in response to comments he seemingly did not agree with on the Morning Joe show when the subject of whether Trump could be impeached for his recent tweets claiming the Obama administration attempted to wiretap and bug Trump’s offices.

President Trump scaled back his executive order barring migrants from several predominantly Muslim countries Monday, in an attempt to insulate the controversial rules from a flurry of legal challenges and critics. The new executive order, which will be phased in starting March 16, removes Iraq from the list of original list of seven banned countries. The switch came after the Iraqi government, a key ally in the fight against the Islamic State, decried the initial order and worked with the State Department on mutually agreeable vetting procedures...However, Deborah Anker, an immigration law scholar at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, said she still expects the order to run into substantial legal challenges.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.

About two dozen students gathered at Harvard Law School for a conversation with James Wharton, a Conservative member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament and advocate for the U.K.'s exit from the European Union...“I think that it is very valuable, even as a [British citizen] studying in the US, to get a British perspective on British and European politics on this side of the Atlantic,” said Samantha R.E. Henderson ['17], a Law School student. “I think that is valuable for the U.S. audience and for a Brit who has been away from Britain for some time now to hear about the developments there.” Matteo Mantovani, a visiting Ph.D. student from the University of Cambridge, said he disagreed with Wharton’s reasoning, and that Brexit is not in the best interest of the British people or the rest of Europe.

Rod Rosenstein has spent years prosecuting US public officials suspected of wrongdoing. He may soon get a chance to use those skills in the nation’s capital. Mr Rosenstein, nominated for the number two position in the US Department of Justice, is in line to run the investigation into alleged ties between Trump campaign aides and the Russian government, now that attorney-general Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the probe. “He’s stepping into a terrific hot seat, a real hot seat,” says Philip Heymann, who taught Mr Rosenstein at Harvard Law School and supervised him at the DoJ. “These are extremely difficult things to handle well.” 

The Trump administration’s new travel ban “appears to be reverse engineered from the appeals court decision blocking the old one,” writes Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. “It remedies multiple legal infirmities and narrows the order’s scope.” But Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, emails Global Briefing that the key shortcomings of the original ban – and their grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of likely danger -- all remain. Tribe notes that the new ban is still limited to six Muslim-majority nations.