Media Mentions

Opponents of President Trump’s travel ban have one big advantage — the Trump White House. If not for the confusion, lack of staffing (nary a deputy, let alone an undersecretary or assistant secretary, has been named in national security-related departments), organizational disarray, policy differences or all of the above, the administration might have put together on its first try a legally enforceable executive order...“By saying that the policy effects of the new travel ban will be essentially the same as those of the travel ban that so many federal judges found constitutionally suspect, Miller is effectively inviting federal courts to suspend the new one as well, given that the religiously discriminatory history of the ban can’t be ignored, much less erased, simply by purporting to start over again,” Supreme Court litigator and professor Larry Tribe tells me.

An op-ed by Mihir Desai and Edward Kleinbard. President Trump’s spokespeople have made it perfectly obvious that he will not release his federal income tax returns during his presidency. Appeals to the tradition of presidents publishing their returns will not change this president’s resolve. Nor is a more forceful approach likely to pry the returns into public view.

In early February the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) purged all animal welfare records from its website, preventing the public from easily seeing reports of mistreatment of animals at facilities nationwide. Now, after weeks of fierce criticism from lawmakers, activists, and the public, the agency has put a small fraction of the cache back online...USDA-APHIS says it will only restore records that have been fully reviewed, but Delcianna Winders, Academic Fellow with the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, says full adjudication can take years. She says a very small percentage of the documents in the original public database were actually adjudicated and that issuing warnings is the USDA’s primary means of enforcing the Animal Welfare Act.

Urs Gasser, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, is not worried about artificially intelligent deathbots. “We at Berkman Klein are less focused on the longer-term risks of ‘Big AI,’” he says, referring to the human-like intelligent systems seen in sci-fi movies. “[We are] more concerned about autonomous systems, algorithms, and other technologies that have an important effect on people’s lives right now.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Supreme Court made it easier on Wednesday for U.S. manufacturers to infringe patents held by competitors by manufacturing all but one of the infringing components abroad. The practical consequences could be significant, as could the court’s apparent view that the key U.S. appeals court for patent cases has been too sympathetic to patent holders.

[Laurence Tribe] explains what it would take to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from Office.

For many of America’s veterans, help is coming from an unlikely source—the local law school. From Harvard and Yale to Widener and Wake Forest, law students are providing legal assistance to veterans through clinical programs. The programs can be a win-win for students and the community. Students gain hands-on legal research and writing skills and apply their coursework to real-world challenges facing actual people, not classroom hypotheticals. The Veterans Law and Disability Benefits Clinic at Harvard Law notes that students will be exposed to practice areas including administrative, probate and constitutional law. As law schools endeavor to produce more “practice-ready” graduates, the Clinic notes that students will have opportunities to question witnesses, draft legal documents, present arguments, and engage in negotiations.

When human rights clinical instructor Anna Crowe first began documenting the legal challenges faced by Syrian refugees in Jordan, she found a tangled system that put their lives on hold. Thousands of refugees, stuck in legal limbo, were vulnerable to risks ranging from statelessness to relocation to refugee camps. .. “Documentation is the gateway to a variety of human rights, rights to health, education, nationality, and so on,” said Crowe, who teaches at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School (HLS).

An interview with Cass Sunstein. This week, Ian Sample explores the psychology behind ‘nudging’, its usage by governments, and some of the ethical quandaries involved.

The nation's regulation of oil and gas development is a mish-mash of disjointed state oversight that makes it difficult to quantify the environmental impacts of drilling. A new study highlights just how inconsistent spill reporting is, showing that the range in requirements makes it impossible to compare states or come up with a comprehensive national picture..."It's quite scattershot the amount of information being collected, the form in which it's being collected and the way in which it's being shared with the public," said Kate Konschnik, a co-author of the study and director of the Harvard Environmental Policy Initiative.

Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists. They found that there had been 6,600 releases from these fracked wells over a ten-year period in four states. The biggest problems were reported in oil-rich North Dakota where 67% of the spills were recorded. The largest spill recorded involved 100,000 litres of fluid with most related to storing and moving liquids..."Analyses like this one are so important, to define and mitigate risk to water supplies and human health," said Kate Konschnik, another author on the paper from Harvard Law School's Environmental Policy Initiative.

The Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School is suing the Justice Department for withholding documents that could help for-profit college students get their federal education loans canceled...“When the government settled this case, they hailed it as a victory for students and taxpayers. We are seeking these documents on behalf of students, but also on behalf of taxpayers who are the members of the public who have an interest in these documents,” said project attorney Amanda Savage. “There has to be oversight of how public dollars are being funneled toward for-profit corporations.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump is poised to announce a redrafted executive order on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. Will it pass legal muster? Or will the courts once again thwart the president’s will? Early reports suggest that the new order will be drafted to avoid many of the legal problems that were posed by the earlier version, and to make judicial review harder to obtain. But the crucial question is whether the courts will consider the political context in which the order was drafted to conclude that it is still a Muslim ban under another name. Whether the court should do so turns out to be a close legal question.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein...In the very month in which the nation’s capital seems to be overrun by deregulatory fever, it was announced that in 2016, more than 40,000 Americans died in accidents involving motor vehicles. That’s a significant jump from 2015, when traffic deaths also increased from the year before. The United States should not accept that level of human tragedy. The good news is that the Department of Transportation knows a lot about what might help -- and, yes, regulation is a part of the picture. In the coming year, the department’s new leadership and the White House ought to mount an aggressive effort, working alongside the private sector and state and local officials, to reduce deaths on roads and highways.

It looks like we haven't seen the last of leaderless blockchain-based companies. Despite the spectacular demise of The DAO, developers are still excited about the concept of one day creating decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), automated companies operated by hard-coded rules enforced on a blockchain...Outside of a rebranding effort, however, there is a recognition that the concept itself might need iteration. "It needs some more work," Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University research fellow Primavera de Filippi told CoinDesk. "The DAO showed that we cannot assume that the system will work as we expected it to work.”

During his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin March 20, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will face a thorough grilling about his legal philosophy. Among the topics likely to come up are his views on "natural law" and his relationship with John Finnis, the Oxford University professor who advised Gorsuch on his Ph.D. thesis and one the world's leading proponents of this arcane legal theory. Natural law is a loosely defined term, but to many of its conservative US adherents it is essentially seen as God's law—a set of moral absolutes underpinning society itself. In recent years, natural law believers have invoked this legal theory to defend a range of anti-gay policies. Natural law has been a source of controversy for at least two previous Supreme Court nominees in recent decades—for dramatically different reasons. In 1991, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas because he would be the "first Supreme Court nominee in 50 years to maintain that natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation."

An article by Tommy Tobin '16.. Is food medicine? The answer to this simple question is surprisingly complicated.The name of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seems to distinguish between foods and drugs. So too does the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, which helpfully defines “food” as “(1) articles used for food or drink for man or other animals, (2) chewing gum, and (3) articles used for components of any such article.”...Knowing whether an item is a drug or a food dictates whether it is regulated appropriately and even which laws apply to the item. From the definitions, it would seem that foods are categorically not drugs. Yet, sometimes foods do function as medicine. For example, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic argues that “for critically and chronically ill people, food is medicine.”

Of all the compelling information, interviews and realities contained in Ava Duvernay’s riveting, Oscar-nominated documentary on mass incarceration, “13th”, one particular statistic stands out: A startling 97 percent of those incarcerated never received their day in court. “That’s not something anyone should take lightly,” says Professor Robert Proctor, a criminal defense attorney and clinical instructor in Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute. Proctor believes our current court system relies far too much on the practice of plea bargaining, a negotiated agreement between a prosecutor and defendant where the latter agrees to plead guilty in exchange for reduced consequences.

An interview with Nancy Gertner. A ruling out of Concord District Court calls into question the accuracy of breathalyzer machine tests in Massachusetts and could impact 20,000 drunken-driving cases in the state. The cases occurred between June 2012 and September 2014. In a hearing decision issued last week, Judge Robert Brennan found that the state's Office of Alcohol Testing failed to prove its methodology for calibrating its breath-testing machines.

We’re just a month into the Trump presidency, and already so many are wondering: How can we end it?...Trump still has significant political support, so the obstacles are gargantuan. But the cleanest and quickest way to remove a president involves Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and has never been attempted. It provides that the cabinet can, by a simple majority vote, strip the president of his powers and immediately hand power to the vice president. The catch is that the ousted president can object, and in that case Congress must approve the ouster by a two-thirds vote in each chamber, or the president regains office. The 25th Amendment route is to be used when a president is “unable” to carry out his duties. I asked Laurence Tribe, the Harvard professor of constitutional law, whether that could mean not just physical incapacity, but also mental instability. Or, say, the taint of having secretly colluded with Russia to steal an election? Tribe said that he believed Section 4 could be used in such a situation.

An article by fellow Delcianna Winders. As animal lovers mourn the death of iconic Oregon Zoo elephant Packy, who was euthanized because he carried drug-resistant tuberculosis, while also fighting against the Department of Agriculture’s recent assault on transparency, we’d be wise to consider the links between the two seemingly disparate events. Packy’s unnecessary death should be a wake-up call about elephant-borne TB, and we should honor Packy by demanding that the Department of Agriculture do its job and address this serious issue instead of protecting the industries that own — and some that exploit — these animals.