Media Mentions

An op-ed by Vivek Krishnamurthy. Since President Trump’s surprise firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday evening, there’s been a lot of talk about appointing a special prosecutor to continue investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, but little discussion of who should be the next FBI director. Important as it is to have an impartial investigation of whether a foreign power tilted the last election, it’s even more important that the nation’s next top law enforcement official be a woman or man of the utmost integrity who has the courage to stand up to an imperious president.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. Somewhere in the United States right now, an entrepreneur is having trouble getting a small-business loan for expansion. The reason? The bank is committed to keeping a large portion of its money in government debt instead. After the financial crisis, the government, in the form of the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, imposed liquidity requirements that force American banks with assets over $50 billion to hold huge amounts of government debt as liquid assets...American banks are truly awash in government debt at five times pre-crisis levels. If President Trump wants to follow through on his promise to increase lending to small businesses, he should start by scaling back these requirements.

An interview with Laurence Tribe. President Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey has led to renewed calls by Democrats for a special prosecutor to investigate Russia's influence on the presidential election and ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. There are also calls for the president's impeachment.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner and fellow Chiraag Bains. Last week, Attorney General Jeff Session instructed the nation’s 2,300 federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges in all but exceptional cases. Rescinding a 2013 policy that sought to avoid mandatory minimums for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, Sessions wrote it was the “moral and just” thing to do. Sessions couldn’t be more wrong. We served as a federal prosecutor and a federal judge respectively. In our experience, mandatory minimums have swelled the federal prison population and led to scandalous racial disparities. They have caused untold misery at great expense. And they have not made us safer.

The Trump administration's story of why FBI director James Comey was fired, which began to twist almost as soon as it was told, took another turn on Thursday when the president said this to NBC News:"And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'"...That has led to speculation that the president may have obstructed justice - a criminal offense. But experts say that suspecting obstruction of justice and proving it are two very different things...The key legal statute in this case is 18 US Code Section 1512, which contains a broad definition allowing charges to be brought against someone who "obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so". "The statutes are quite broadly written," said Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor and law professor at Harvard Law School, "but the key factor, certainly in this case, is intent."

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. More than two decades ago, with the aim of “foster[ing] democracy by ensuring public access to agency records and information,” Congress amended the Freedom of Information Act to require agencies to proactively post frequently requested records online. As the legislative history makes clear, the purpose of this mandate was to “prompt agencies to make information available affirmatively on their own initiative in order to meet anticipated public demand for it.”...Now, in an attempt to persuade a court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by myself and others challenging the blackout, the USDA has asserted that it was never under any legal duty to post the records — this despite the clear statutory mandate that agencies proactively post frequently requested records, the agency’s acknowledgement that the records at issue were the single most frequently requested, and even its prior recognition that it was legally required to post the records.

Leading civil rights and education groups directed a torrent of criticism at a Malden charter school Friday for disciplining black and biracial students who wear hairstyles that administrators say violate the school’s dress code...The school’s desire to erase economic differences among students — to, in effect, create a level playing field — is reasonable, said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a Harvard Law School professor who teaches education law and policy. But such policies, she said, can rub up against the equally reasonable imperative to be non-discriminatory. Brown-Nagin said courts have given employers and schools wide discretion in grooming codes but have challenged schools’ discretion when grooming codes infringe on cultural expression. “It strikes me as a laudable goal to try to reduce visible economic disparities among students,” Brown-Nagin said.

Since the news broke on Tuesday that Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe has been arguing that the president’s conduct, in and of itself, is illegal and amounts to impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Tribe has been acting as citizen attorney general in the “shadow Cabinet” formed by progressive leaders in response to the Trump Administration and tweeting from the @ShadowingTrump handle. Tribe’s tweets (from @tribelaw) have become their own form of must-see TV for the resistance.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena of Michael Flynn’s private documents sets up a potential battle between the legislative and executive branches over whether the Justice Department will enforce Congress’s will. The Justice Department is charged with enforcing congressional subpoenas. But it is led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the Flynn subpoenas are related to investigations of Russia’s involvement in last year’s election, a sore spot for President Trump...Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general of the United States, says that practically speaking the Congress doesn’t have much recourse if the Justice Department refuses to enforce a contempt citation. “They can declare various officials in contempt," Fried noted but ultimately “Congress has no power of prosecution.”

Harvard constitutional law Professor Laurence Tribe and former U.S. Solicitor General Ken Starr weigh in on the fallout of former FBI Director James Comey's firing.

An op-ed by Hal Scott. Over the past 10 years the number of initial public offerings in the US, and the total amount of equity raised by them, are way down on historical averages. If these had held there would have been more than 3,000 new public companies in the past decade. Instead, we have had fewer than half the number of IPOs. Against that, private companies in the US, including the likes of Lyft and SpaceX, are raising a record amount of equity capital in private markets. Private companies raised almost $120bn through private offerings in 2016, according to the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, a policy group. Last year US IPOs raised $24bn in equity, compared with a historical average of nearly $60bn.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe The time has come for Congress to launch an impeachment investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice. The remedy of impeachment was designed to create a last-resort mechanism for preserving our constitutional system. It operates by removing executive-branch officials who have so abused power through what the framers called “high crimes and misdemeanors” that they cannot be trusted to continue in office. No American president has ever been removed for such abuses, although Andrew Johnson was impeached and came within a single vote of being convicted by the Senate and removed, and Richard Nixon resigned to avoid that fate.

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe tells Joy Reid why it is critically important to put the impeachment process in motion now, before it is too late.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Listening to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai go on about “net neutrality” last week felt just like Alice’s encounter with Humpty Dumpty in Wonderland. The large, contemptuous egg says, scornfully, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Pai says, essentially, that he is looking for a new legal route that will satisfy consumers who care about their internet transmissions being treated fairly and, at the same time, that will lift old-fashioned Ma Bell-era regulation from the dynamic, shiny, wonderful businesses of AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and CenturyLink. It’s all nonsense.

Lower-income Nutmeggers saddled with debt have few options for dealing with their fiscal troubles, but a major study is about to find out whether new strategies could help. Set to launch within the next few weeks, the research could be crucial for determining the right resources to support Americans in financial straits. Led by a team of law professors from the University of Connecticut, Harvard and the University of Maine, the Financial Distress Project will assess how at least 1,200 state residents fare while using legal aid, financial counseling or self-help materials to tackle their debts...“We’re never going to have enough resources to give everyone a lawyer who would need one,” said Harvard Law professor Jim Greiner, one of the study’s leaders. “We’ve got to find ways that make the legal system accessible and usable for folks who can’t afford to hire a lawyer.”

The New York Times is now reporting that according to “associates” of former FBI director James B. Comey, President Trump asked Comey at a private dinner in January to pledge his loyalty. Comey told Trump that he could not do that, the sources say, and now blames this in part for Trump’s decision to fire him...In an interview with me this morning, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, a persistent Trump critic, argued that this demand for loyalty, if it happened, could constitute an effort to obstruct justice, particularly when viewed in the light of the subsequent firing of Comey. “The demand for loyalty from the head of the organization investigating those around you, when you have the power to fire that person — if you wrote a novel about obstruction of justice, this would almost be too good to be true,” Tribe told me.

Kordel Davis, a member of Beta Theta Pi at Penn State University, says he told his fraternity brothers to call 911 after noticing a 19-year-old pledge who had been drinking tumble down the stairs, then end up comatose on a couch. Nobody called for 40 minutes, and the young man, Timothy Piazza, was later pronounced dead. Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, says Mr. Davis should have done more than just urge someone else to call for help. Mr. Guiora is leading a push to impose a duty on bystanders to take affirmative action to assist those they see in peril... “Prosecutors rarely if ever actually prosecute persons for these crimes,” said John Goldberg, a law professor at Harvard University. Mr. Goldberg said there’s a difference between pressing someone to alert authorities if they see a person being beaten from a distance and demanding they step forward to try to stop murder by agents of a genocidal government.

For five years in the Army, including one in Afghanistan, David E. White Jr. was zealous about leadership and public service. At Harvard Law School, he added to his passionate pursuits. “At the end of the day, it’s about justice,” said White, J.D. ’17. “In everything I pursue, my goal is to do justice.” The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, White said, deepened his desire to serve something greater than himself with character and integrity. At Harvard, hoping to discover the power of the law to create peace, he found he aspired as strongly to justice. “The Law School is a training ground a little bit as West Point was, but it’s quite different,” said White, a 2009 West Point graduate. “Here, no one is going to shoot at you, but it’s where you learn to take your rights back.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation...Sessions may have some explanation for why he chose to participate in the firing of Comey. But the attorney general may now be in considerable legal peril...So Sessions faces a host of serious, potentially career-ending questions. “As I see it, the President’s discharge of FBI Director Comey on a clearly pretextual basis for the obvious purpose (even if unlikely to be achieved) of shutting down the FBI’s then-accelerating investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was on its face an obstruction of justice, the very same charge that the first Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon made,” says constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe.

President Donald Trump says he asked former FBI Director James Comey if he was under investigation. Constitutional expert Laurence Tribe takes issue with that and other Trump actions he says are likely impeachable offenses.

Some critics of President Trump have accused him of obstruction of justice in his firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, amid the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. Here is a look at the complex legal concept. Several federal statutes criminalize actions that impede official investigations. While some examples of illegal ways to thwart the justice system are specific — like killing a witness or destroying evidence — the law also includes broad, catchall prohibitions...“To prove that he did it not because Comey was grandstanding or showboating or all the other excuses he has given, but because he wanted to impede the investigation, that would be awfully hard to prove,” said Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law at Harvard Law School.