Media Mentions

By donating U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's extensive papers to Harvard Law School on Monday, the Scalia family is giving his alma mater a unique challenge: preserving his digital as well as paper documents. "It is a safe guess" that this will be the first collection of a justice's papers that includes a large number of emails and digital documents, said Jocelyn Kennedy, executive director of Harvard Law School Library, after the announcement Monday.

The family of the late Antonin Scalia, J.D. ’60, who was a leading associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, announced Monday that it will donate his papers to the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library...“We are deeply grateful to the Scalia family for donating Justice Scalia’s papers to his alma mater,” said John Manning, deputy dean and Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at HLS and a former clerk to Scalia...Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS and also a former Scalia clerk, said, “Justice Scalia was, indisputably, the most influential and interesting justice of his generation, and a brilliant academic as well. His papers will be of surpassing value to future scholars, and it is fitting that they should find a home at Harvard Law School.”...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law and director of the library, said, “The Harvard Law School Library serves not only the campus community, but the world at large..."

President Trump replaced his controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries with a scaled-back version on Monday, narrowing its scope to block only new applicants for visas and removing Iraq from its coverage. The scaled-back ban represents a considerable defeat for the president, whose original executive order was met with protests and a stern rebuke from the federal judiciary...“Some of the challenges to the initial order would be blunted by the changes reflected in the newly issued travel ban, but the most fundamental constitutional infirmities in the original ban, stemming from its grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of danger, all remain,” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University constitutional law professor.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. That Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a false statement under oath before a congressional committee is clear. He said, “I did not have communications with the Russians,” when in fact he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The only question is what the consequences should be. Making a false statement under oath before Congress is a crime punishable by five years imprisonment when three tests are satisfied: (1) The statement is false, (2) it concerns a material fact, not a minor or incidental one, and (3) the speaker has made the statement willfully and knowingly. The first two are not debatable.

...President Trump has empowered federal agents to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, no matter where they reside, and insists that local police officers be employed to help enforce the orders. He has pledged to cut off federal funding for communities that refuse — the so-called sanctuary cities — and his threat has had the desired chilling effect...There have been some exceptions, such as conditioning federal highway funds on states enforcing speed limits, but overall the court has said that the federal government cannot “commandeer” states to do its bidding. Laurence Tribe, the constitutional law scholar, says Trump’s threats — both overbroad and out of scale — are clearly suspect. “I think he’s violating the Constitution up and down,” Tribe said.

...An afternoon discussion touched on the recent controversy surrounding Harvard Law School’s shield. Last March, the University retired the shield, which was modeled on the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., an 18th-century slaveholder whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. History scholar Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently helped to publish a book on the first century of HLS, said his research brought him to Royall and also to Antigua, the West Indian island that was the home of his lucrative sugar plantation. “As we got into” the research, he said, “it got worse.”...His comment was in part a reference to Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s written response to the shield controversy, what he called “one of the most eloquent pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of his few statements since joining government, presidential adviser Stephen Bannon announced that one of the Trump administration’s principal goals was “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Given the critical role of federal agencies in protecting public health and safety, that’s pretty provocative. But President Donald Trump’s latest action suggests that reform is the aim, rather than deconstruction -- and the reform might even turn out to be reasonable.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The ongoing saga of contacts between Russian officials and the Donald Trump campaign assures that the subject of government leaks isn’t going away anytime soon. Although some critics have compared the career bureaucrats suspected of doing the leaking to the “deep state” that has bedeviled reformers in Egypt and Turkey, the First Amendment hasn’t been brought into the conversation. It should be. As it turns out, there are competing constitutional views about bureaucrats’ engagement with public affairs.

...On Friday, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stood at a lectern under a projection of Renty’s face and began a rather different enterprise: a major public conference exploring the long-neglected connections between universities and slavery. Harvard had been “directly complicit” in slavery, Ms. Faust acknowledged, before moving to a more present-minded statement of purpose...There were gasps when Daniel R. Coquillette, co-author of a recent history of Harvard Law School, recounted how Isaac Royall Jr., a West Indian planter whose financial gifts led to the founding of the school, helped brutally put down a slave rebellion on Antigua during which dozens were drawn and quartered or burned at the stake.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. The most successful protest movements in history have been the ones that have set their own agendas. Whether abolitionists, women’s suffrage advocates, or civil rights activists, progressive change movements have gained influence by disrupting politics as usual — not by slavishly aligning themselves with electoral parties. However, electoral politics — in particular, Democrats’ desire to win the next round of elections — is distorting conversations about the significance of the protests that have unfolded since the election of Donald Trump.

An interview with Niki Tsongas and Nancy Gertner. The Washington Post reported last night that Sessions spoke twice last year with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But when asked about communication with the Russians at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in January, Sessions said, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” Sessions revised that statement this morning, speaking to NBC News...Now, leading Republicans are joining Democrats in calling on Sessions to recuse himself from overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential campaign. Many have also called on Sessions to explain what his meetings were about.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, North Dakota has enacted four new laws clearly aimed at protesters. One of them stands out: The law makes it a misdemeanor to wear a mask or hood while committing a crime. That sounds reasonable -- anonymity can facilitate crime, and it makes sense to punish a masked bank robber more harshly than an unmasked one. Yet the law is more troubling in the context of the punishment of protesters, who sometimes cover their faces to make a political point. The mask law therefore raises a constitutional question: How should we think about laws that seem to be targeted at conduct but may actually be aimed at speech?

Hillary Clinton will be on Harvard's campus Friday to discuss her time as Secretary of State and dine in Kirkland House. Clinton will take part in an interview as part of the“ American Secretaries of State Project: Diplomacy, Negotiation, and Statecraft”, a joint project of the Kennedy School, Law School, and Business School, according to a statement from the Kennedy School...Law School Professor Robert H. Mnookin, Business School professor James K. Sebenius, and Kennedy School professor R. Nicholas Burns lead the project and will conduct the interview with Clinton.

Late Wednesday night, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential campaign, contacts he failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation hearings. "I did not have communications with the Russians," said Sessions during his sworn testimony...Can Jeff Sessions be prosecuted for perjury? The answer is not exactly cut and dry. At the time of his confirmation hearings, Sessions was still serving as a senator from Alabama. The Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause shields lawmakers from prosecution for lying during proceedings in the House or Senate...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe sees it differently. "That would be a laughable misuse of the Speech and Debate Clause," he says. "He was testifying under oath as an [Attorney General] nominee, not in the discharge of any Senatorial business of his own."

With Republicans and Democrats calling for him to recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and some Democrats calling for him to resign, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is fighting for his political life and livelihood...Second, so long as Sessions remains in the job, he will face pressure to resign and provide fodder for Trump critics suggesting that there is a cover-up. “The more I learn about this, the less I think Sessions has any choice but to resign or be fired,” Larry Tribe tells me. In his view, “it’s inconceivable that his error [in testimony] was an innocent one.”

It sounds like a contradiction in terms: Millions of Americans may be too broke to go bankrupt. But with studies showing that more than half of U.S. households can’t come up with $1,000 in cash in an emergency and a third have no savings at all, it shouldn't be surprising that the $1,300 cost of filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a hurdle many debt-ridden consumers can’t get over. That dilemma struck a Harvard sophomore named Rohan Pavuluri as odd – and a potential opportunity...Some experts estimate millions of Americans living below the poverty line could improve their finances by filing Chapter 7 and getting a fresh start. Pavuluri learned about this while working with Harvard Law School Professor James Greiner conducting research on legal self-help materials for low-income consumers.

...The ultimate form of American exceptionalism is the presidential system of government. After the 2016 election, the question haunting political scientists is whether America can continue to be the exception. When a demagogue can rise to power and win the presidency without a popular mandate, we must examine our system. Key flaws in presidential systems could lead to an unstable government and a decrease in civil liberties, such as free speech...To even ever dream of changing the American system of government, we would need a constitutional convention. “To have a constitutional convention, you need a lot of people that are really upset,” Mark Tushnet, expert on constitutional law at Harvard University and previous clerk for Thurgood Marshall said in an interview with The Politic.

President Donald Trump, in his first speech to a joint session of Congress last night, vowed to repair what he called the nation's "crumbling" infrastructure and initiate a "new program of national rebuilding."...But Larry Beeferman, the director of the Pensions & Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School, said Trump's words had "essentially no substance, in a policy sense." "Which infrastructure? And why? And how do you do it? He had nothing to say about that," Beeferman said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision that’s unusual for being almost unanimous, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday clarified the constitutional rule for the design of majority-minority legislative districts, perhaps the single most significant issue in contemporary voting-rights law. The districting in this case took place under the old rules, before the court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act. But the decision points the way to the constitutional doctrine of the future: voting-rights law that’s more consensual than has been the historic norm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court argument about whether sex offenders can be barred from social media had the justices observing that even the president uses Twitter. But the ubiquity of social media in politics is only the most superficial aspect of how new forms of publishing are challenging the First Amendment. In areas such as campaign finance and libel law, it’s a different legal ballgame than it was just a few years ago -- and the changes can be expected to multiply with time.

An op-ed by senior visiting fellow Chiraag Bains. President Donald Trump campaigned promising a return to “law and order.” Since taking office, he has attempted to fulfill that promise through policies that have been criticized as being thin on substance and out of touch with crime statistics. The president’s approach is misguided for another reason, however: he is targeting immigration as a driver of violent crime when it just might have the opposite effect. Most recently, Trump’s secretary of homeland security issued memos providing for the expanded use of detention, wide-scale deportation and the immediate design and construction of a southern border wall — all in the name of public safety. To justify such measures, Trump and his supporters point to cases such as that of Kate Steinle, a young woman killed by an undocumented immigrant who already had been deported five times. While stories like Steinle’s are undeniably tragic, when used this way they obscure rather than illustrate the broader truth regarding immigrants and crime.