Media Mentions

NPR's Kelly McEvers speaks to Cass Sunstein about his new book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. He says democracy needs people to come across a variety of viewpoints, and much of social media limits that exposure.

The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom...Time, and perhaps shame, erased all physical evidence of her presence at Jefferson’s home here, a building so famous that it is depicted on the back of the nickel...“You’re in the home of the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who criticized slavery but was a slaveholder,” said Harvard law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” The story of Monticello is at its core “about the complicated nature of America’s founding,” she said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump has threatened to prosecute leakers and bring in an outsider to review the intelligence agencies after reading unfavorable stories about his administration day after day in the news media. But he’s learning the hard way that there isn’t much he can do to stop government leaks. That may surprise Trump, because in the private sector, the tools to stop leaking are generally pretty effective. It’s an anomaly of the legal system that in government, where the stakes are arguably higher than in business, it’s easier to get away with leaking.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration that targeted Muslim countries, now halted by federal judicial order, was worrying enough. But another executive action has been floated that would be far more devastating for Muslim individuals and organizations in the U.S.: a directive to the State Department to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as an international terrorist organization. When coupled with a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2010, the designation could lead to widespread prosecution of American Muslims and others for material support of terrorism -- a disaster for civil liberties and free speech that could dwarf the Trump administration’s early initiatives.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic filed Thursday an amicus brief challenging President Donald Trump’s seven-country immigration order. A team of clinic staff, Law School students, and attorneys at New York-based firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom filed the brief supporting a New York lawsuit against Trump’s order, which has faced legal challenges across the country. They argue that Trump’s order violates federal immigration statutes...Nate MacKenzie '17, a Law School student who directed the team of student researchers who worked on the brief, said the clinic filed it to help the court better understand the various statutory arguments related to the suit...MacKenzie said he worked closely with Phil Torrey, a clinical instructor at the Law School, and Sabi Ardalan, the assistant director of HIRC, along with four student research teams, to send memos to the law firm, which turned the research into the formal brief submitted to the court.

...A "sanctuary", though commonly known as a place of refuge, has no legal definition in the US. "Sanctuary cities" became a term used to describe jurisdictions that employ varying policies of lawful non-cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Some declared themselves sanctuaries, but not all did. After the 2016 elections, a small number of colleges, including Swarthmore, also declared themselves sanctuaries in opposition to US President Donald Trump's stance on immigration. Like sanctuary cities, these schools employ differing policies of noncompliance with ICE, experts say...Trump's executive order denying federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions also did not clearly define a "sanctuary", which has led to further confusion and fear, says immigration expert Phil Torrey, of Harvard Law School.

When China awarded President Donald Trump a long-coveted trademark of the “Trump” brand this week, it violated its own regulations. Chinese legal standards prohibit trademarks of the names of foreign leaders. Trump secured exclusive rights for the use of his name for “building construction services” in China on February 14 after a 10-year legal battle. But he had little success in his quest for a Chinese trademark before he became the Republican nominee last summer. The apparent preferential treatment for the U.S. president could land Trump in legal trouble back at home...If China granted a trademark to Trump in violation of existing Chinese legal standards, it “would seal Trump’s fate from an emoluments clause perspective because it would show beyond doubt that this unusually valuable trademark was indeed a ‘present,’ and not simply a recognition of Mr. Trump’s preexisting rights under the law of China,” Laurence Tribe, a nationally renowned constitutional scholar and a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told ThinkProgress.

A letter by Howell Jackson and Christopher Healy '17.  Re “Student Debt Past Age 50” (editorial, Feb. 13): As your editorial rightly laments, senior citizens are increasingly finding themselves in default on student loans. These defaults can lead to the garnishment of Social Security benefits, pushing many elderly toward poverty. The garnishment of Social Security benefits is particularly unfair to today’s retirees because until the mid-1990s Social Security benefits were fully exempt from such levies. So, for much of their working lives, many seniors could not reasonably have anticipated that their Social Security retirement benefits would become susceptible to garnishment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. For the last several years it has been increasingly common to hear Israelis and Palestinians alike say that the two-state solution to their struggles is dead and that the time has come to discuss a one-state solution. U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged that trend during a news conference Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by saying that he is “looking at two states and at one state” while remaining open to whichever suits the parties. There’s just one problem: “One-state solution” means something almost completely different on each of the two sides. Years of negotiation and debate have created the general contours of a two-state solution, but when people speak of one-state options, they lack that common ground.

Fifty-eight people were excused from jury service Thursday in the upcoming double murder trial of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez. That tally brought the total number of dismissals to 184 over the past three days, out of 538 people who reported to the first round of jury selection in Suffolk Superior Court....Robert Proctor, a Harvard Law lecturer who is also defending Hernandez, also introduced him on a positive note in court Thursday, telling the jury pool that he had “the honor of representing” him.

Seven finalists were named for the $50,000 George Washington Prize — which recognizes works written about the founding era in American history — and six of the works have authors with New England ties...Three Harvard professors are also among the finalists. Annette Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, wrote “ ‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination” with Peter S. Onuf. Historian Jane Kamensky published “A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley,” and law professor Michael J. Klarman was cited for “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.”

An op-ed by Delcianna Winders. As a longtime animal law practitioner, I’ve represented various parties in lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). But I’d never sued the agency—or anyone else—myself. Until this past Monday. Like many, I was stunned when the USDA deleted thousands of Animal Welfare Act-related records from its website. The same day that the blackout occurred, law reviews opened up their submission season and I was gearing up to submit two pieces scrutinizing the USDA’s implementation of the Animal Welfare Act through close analysis of the now-deleted records. If the agency’s goal had been to stymie my work, it couldn’t have timed things better.

The majority of Americans have no clear idea what “sell by” labels are trying to tell them. But after 40 years of letting us guess, the grocery industry has made moves to clear up the confusion. On Wednesday, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the two largest trade groups for the grocery industry, announced that they’ve adopted standardized, voluntary regulations to clear up what product date labels mean...“I think it’s huge. It’s just an enormous step,” said Emily Broad-Leib, the director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. “It’s still a first step — but it’s very significant.”...Of course, that is just a drop in the waste bucket: To make a real dent in America’s food waste problem, Broad-Leib said, more will have to be done. The Food Law and Policy Clinic is arguing for several federal interventions, including policy changes that make it easier for companies and farms to donate food and incentives to encourage them to do so.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. The sheer volume and rapidity of successive Trump outrages, cascading swiftly past one another, keeps even the most attentive among us from properly paying attention to any one of them, much less to their cumulative significance.

The detention of a young undocumented immigrant who was granted protection from deportation under an Obama Administration policy has sent a "chilling" message to other immigrants, his lawyers said...."The signal that his release on habeas corpus would send is a sigh of relief, but as of now, I think immigrants generally — including 'DREAMers' and DACA immigrants — are just holding their breath," Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, told TIME. "I think this is a brutal, inhumane and unlawful seizure of a person, and it sends a terrifying and chilling message to the country," he added.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In light of the recent White House controversies, it is inevitable that some people are starting to wonder whether, at any point, President Donald Trump might be impeachable. The best way to answer that question is to bracket controversies about any particular president and to ask: What, exactly, does the Constitution say about impeachment? As we shall see, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, was altogether wrong to proclaim that the president cannot be impeached unless he has broken the law. But Gerald Ford was even more wrong to say, in 1970 (when he was minority leader), that the House of Representatives can impeach the president on whatever grounds it likes.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If the U.S. Supreme Court were to reverse Roe v. Wade, individual states could still permit abortion. But, in theory, the Supreme Court could go further, and rule that laws permitting abortion violate the equal protection rights of unborn fetuses. That may seem far-fetched -- but in his book on assisted suicide and euthanasia, Judge Neil Gorsuch lays out an argument that could easily be used to this end. Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, carefully avoids discussing abortion rights directly in his book. Yet his disparagement of what he calls “ageism” amounts to a principle that could easily be applied to fetuses.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn grew out of Department of Justice concerns that he had violated the Logan Act, a law from 1799(!) that bars private citizens from engaging in international diplomacy. The law as written applied to Flynn even though he was working for the president-elect when he engaged in a phone call with Russian ambassador to the U.S. But there’s a more serious problem, which should be kept in mind in case there’s an investigation of whether Donald Trump violated the law: It is probably unconstitutional. Enacted by the Congress that brought you the Alien and Sedition acts, the law is too vague for enforcement. And it violates free-speech standards that are the law today but went unrecognized by the John Adams administration.

The six largest U.S. banks could see annual profit jump by an average of 14 percent if President Donald Trump delivers on his promise to cut corporate taxes. The lenders, which stand to benefit more than other industries because they typically have fewer deductions, could save a combined $12 billion a year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Trump has called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent...While the cost of borrowing has been low since 2008, interest expenses can be much higher. Banks incorporate net-interest income -- interest earned on assets less interest paid on deposits and other debt -- in their revenue calculations. Revenue would balloon if interest expenses were excluded from this calculation. "Without the interest-expense deduction, many mainstream banks would go out of business," said Mark Roe, a professor at Harvard Law School. "They'd be paying tax on gross revenue, not profits."

Black children account for eight out of 100 Los Angeles County children, yet they make up 28 out of 100 foster children, according to Department of Children and Family Services data. The reason for that difference is a subject of dispute among child welfare professionals...Elizabeth Bartholet, the director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, was among the skeptics of the path Los Angeles had chosen. As a young lawyer, Bartholet had worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and had, over her career, mentored a generation of civil rights attorneys. Bartholet marshaled data to argue that when poverty and neighborhood characteristics are used to analyze foster care rates, race disappears as an explanatory factor.

There could soon be something new to check out at your grocery store. The food industry is working to simplify labels on perishable food. Date stamps like “best by,” “sell by,” “use by” and “best before” can be confusing for shoppers...“There’s always this habit of going to the back of the shelf and taking the milk with the date that’s furthest out,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. “I think this will really help consumers know when does that date matter and when does it not really matter for safety reasons.”