Media Mentions

Let’s say Kanye West actually ran for president in 2020, as he has halfheartedly hinted he may on Twitter — and that he won The first lady of the United States would then be Kim Kardashian, a celebrity who rose to that status through sheer force of will, who has built a self-reinforcing business empire predicated on her celebrity and business empire...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, answered that question by email. “If official White House functions are used to make money, whether through photographs at official events or through using the White House logo or image for advertising or in some other commercial way,” he said, “that risks violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of Article I and the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II.”

Two lawyers, three judges, thousands of ordinary Americans: On Tuesday night, oral arguments in Washington v. Trump attracted an unusually large audience for audio-only legal proceedings...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says there is case law that backs up Purcell's argument. "There is no precedent for the ridiculous suggestion that discrimination against members of a religious group becomes constitutionally acceptable whenever only a small percentage of that religious group is victimized," Tribe tells NPR. "The entire course of jurisprudence under the Religion Clauses is incompatible with any such arithmetic approach to the issue."

The president says comments in court over his travel ban are 'disgraceful,' and says the ban would only be blocked due to politics. Laurence Tribe discusses with Chris Hayes.

A growing chorus of legal experts on both sides of the border is calling on Ottawa to suspend a bilateral pact that bans asylum seekers from crossing border for protection, warning the U.S. is unsafe for refugees. A Harvard University Law School review is the latest to warn about the negative impact of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on refugees, and is urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reconsider the Safe Third Country Agreement. The report, released Wednesday by Harvard’s immigration and refugee clinical program, comes on the heels of the arrival of 22 asylum seekers from North Dakota, including a child and a baby, caught walking in thick snow across an unguarded border into Manitoba last weekend...“The new policies allow any state and local enforcement official, not just trained federal agents, to pick people up on mere suspicion, detain them in any remote location, subject them to an expedited removal process, where many if not most will be unable to express their fear of return and be screened,” said Deborah Anker, head of the Harvard program. “We are not going to tell the Canadian government what to do, but the finding that the U.S. is safe is wrong and unfounded, and should be blown out of the water.”

As President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch seems like an unlikely friend for many at Harvard Law School. ...As a judge, Gorsuch has similarly not explicitly shared controversial views. Law School professor Michael J. Klarman wrote in an email that Gorsuch’s views on a number of contentious legal topics remain unclear. “We don't know, based on his judicial opinions, what are Gorsuch's views on lots of issues, but he has given speeches suggesting courts have played too large a role on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and he has rendered decisions suggesting broad support for religious exemptions with regard to statutes that impose unwanted burdens on religious practices,” Klarman wrote. Klarman wrote that while he would have preferred Merrick B. Garland ’74, former President Barack Obama’s nomination to the Supreme Court whose confirmation was blocked by Republican senators, he didn’t have any particular preference about who Trump nominated. “I regard Justices as largely fungible votes. Any Trump appointee would vote the same way on abortion, affirmative action, gun control, etc., as any other,” Klarman wrote.

After some Harvard Law School students requested more rigorous involvement in the search for the school’s next dean, University President Drew G. Faust has organized a series of panels to hear student perspectives on desirable characteristics of the next dean and the state of the school...Three members of the faculty committee and about a dozen students attended the first panel, which was closed to the press, on Wednesday, according to Law School student attendee David D. Heckman [`17]. At the meeting, Heckman said students voiced opinions about what they would like to see in the new dean, discussed issues at the school they hope the next dean will address, and asked about the selection process itself...Following the panel, the Law School Student Council unanimously passed a resolution requesting that candidates for the deanship complete a ten-point questionnaire prepared by the Council. The Council is sending the resolution to Faust and the advisory committee.

The Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring future Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo Bay prison, despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group, according to administration officials and a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times...“It raises huge legal risks,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration. “If a judge says the Sept. 11 authorization does not cover such a detention, it would not only make that detention unlawful, it would weaken the legal basis for the entire war against the Islamic State.”

...for more than two weeks, President Donald Trump and his top White House aides have been obsessed with highlighting a threat that does not exist: jihadist refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It’s true that both worldwide terrorist attacks and terrorism-related cases against plotters in the United States have spiked since 2013, an increase largely attributed to the fallout from the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State...Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, who helped design the post-9/11 anti-terror legal architecture, recently suggested that Trump might actually want his travel ban to be overturned. That way, in the wake of an attack, he can use the judiciary as a bogeyman and justify any new efforts to push through more extreme measures. I asked Goldsmith and others what the menu of options might be for a President Trump empowered by the justifiable fears Americans would have in the aftermath of a serious attack. “If it is a large and grim attack, he might ask for more surveillance powers inside the U.S. (including fewer restrictions on data mingling and storage and queries), more immigration control power at the border, an exception to Posse Comitatus (which prohibits the military from law enforcement in the homeland), and perhaps more immigration-related detention powers,” Goldsmith wrote in an e-mail. “In the extreme scenario Trump could ask Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which would cut off the kind of access to courts you are seeing right now for everyone (or for every class of persons for which the writ is suspended).”

With Washington, D.C., in turmoil during the opening weeks of the Trump administration, state attorneys general have emerged as the vanguard of resistance to the new presidency...“The AGs consider themselves a thin blue line against federal overreach, there’s no question about it,” said James Tierney, the former attorney general of Maine who runs a blog about state attorneys general...Tierney advises many of the Democrats coordinating their efforts against Trump. The group is braced to file more suits in coming months. “It’s actually an essential part of federalism in that attorneys general will hold the president’s feet to the fire,” Tierney said.

By signing an executive order, President Trump has created confusion for many so-called "sanctuary cities" regarding their roles in enforcing federal immigration laws. Many cities, including a few here in Minnesota, are left to wonder what it might mean in terms of federal funding and community safety. MPR News host Marianne Combs spoke with...Phil Torrey, supervising attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project, about the confusion and the potential outcome for families, neighborhoods, communities and their safety.

The call was long distance. Niku Jafarnia [`19], a student at Harvard Law School, dialed her mother and father in the Bay Area, where the couple, who emigrated from Iran in the 1970s, has lived for over twenty years. Jafarnia asked them about President Donald Trump’s immigration suspension: A few days earlier, the president had signed an executive order barring immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran, for 90 days. She hoped for reassurance. In the past, her parents had always told her not to worry about “these types” of things. They had been through much worse, they said. This call was different. “For the first time in her life, my mother said, ‘You know what, maybe it’s a good idea for us not to be living in this country,’” Jafarnia says. Since its passage almost two weeks ago on Jan. 27, Trump’s order has sparked protests, lawsuits, administrative turmoil, and widespread uncertainty among United States residents with ties to the seven countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—on the president’s list.

“No matter whether the country follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns,” wrote the Chicago humorist and author Finley Peter Dunne in 1901. More than a century later, many legal scholars and historians take Dunne’s famous quip—which identified a relationship between Supreme Court decisions and popular opinion—as gospel...However, it may be important to distinguish between the ability and the willingness of justices to make sweeping decisions that challenge the status quo. Michael Klarman, a legal historian and professor at Harvard Law School, told the HPR that in a majority of cases, “[justices] have a lack of inclination to do things that are dramatically contrary to public opinion.” Klarman attributes this reluctance to a variety of reasons.

A letter by fellow Delcianna Winders. The Department of Agriculture’s stunning assault on transparency by removing thousands of animal-welfare-related records from its website (“Agriculture Dept. Removes Animal-Welfare Data From Website,” The Chronicle, February 6) leaves all of us in the dark about how animals across the country are being treated. As Harvard Law professor and former head of the federal government’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein has noted, “the Animal Welfare Act is designed partly to ensure publicity about the treatment of animals.” That purpose has now been thwarted, leaving consumers and state and local governments unable to find out if, for example, those seeking to sell dogs and cats locally have records of abuse, or circuses wanting to pitch their tents in town have histories of dangerous animal attacks or escapes.

Even before Donald Trump entered the White House, many were predicting federal courts would serve as an important check on his use of presidential power, particularly given his aggressive style and a GOP-led Congress that has so far been loath to confront him. But few expected the first constitutional clash would occur in Trump’s third week on the job...Jack Goldsmith, a national security lawyer in the Bush administration and professor at Harvard Law School, predicted Trump’s tweets “will certainly backfire” against him. “The tweets will make it very, very hard for courts in the short term to read immigration and constitutional law, as they normally would, with significant deference to the president’s broad delegated powers from Congress and to the president’s broad discretion in foreign relations,” Goldsmith wrote Monday on the Lawfare blog.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A law passed Monday by Israel’s Knesset potentially puts the country in violation of international law by retroactively legalizing 4,000 homes built by Jewish settlers on private Palestinian land. But remarkably, the possibility of war-crimes charges isn’t the most worrisome thing about the law. What’s more upsetting is that the Knesset passed a law that the country’s own attorney general had already determined was unconstitutional and in violation of 40 years of Israeli judicial rulings. That the law passed -- with the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government -- raises serious concerns about Israel’s direction as a rule of law society.

Martha Minow recently announced that she will step down as the dean of Harvard Law School at the end of this academic year. She began her tenure in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis. In the intervening years, the law school faced serious questions of diversity and racism. Minow ends her tenure this year, as parts of the legal profession is feeling a new ripple of energy around the Presidency of Donald Trump.

A group of lawyers on Tuesday filed a motion in federal court in New York asking a judge to force the Trump administration to disclose a list of any individuals detained by his ‘extreme vetting’ Executive Order. The motion also seeks the return of any individuals who were removed from the United States as a result of the order. The lawyers, in court paperwork filed Tuesday afternoon, accuse the Trump administration of failing to comply with prior judicial orders issued in the case..."If the allegations in this legal memorandum — allegations that are shocking but seem entirely plausible on their face and appear to be supported by the affidavits and other materials referenced in the memo — are indeed true, then the President and those acting under his direction have a great deal to answer for and are skirting ever closer to outright defiance of lawful judicial orders or perhaps even crossing the line. Needless to say, such defiance is powerful grist for the awesome mill of impeachment,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told LawNewz.com.

A letter by Ryan Cohen `17 and more than 100 HLS students. We are writing to commend U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Benjamin Sasse (R-Neb.) for their leadership in these troubling times (“Trump’s ban of refugees, travel from seven Muslim nations sparks chaos, protests,” Jan. 29). As a diverse group of students with political views on both sides of the aisle, we are heartened to see elected officials who are willing to stand up for what is right, irrespective of politics. Decisions that impact many individual lives as well as our national security should not be made lightly, and should account for the rights and values upon which our nation is built. We hope that other Senate Republicans follow these senators’ lead by speaking out in the face of irresponsibility and injustice, and thereby faithfully serving the nation that has elected them to represent it.

...The 45th president, Donald Trump, might pose the gravest threat to the constitutional order since the 37th. Of course, he might not...“Civil society had a huge and unprecedented impact during the Bush administration,” [Jack] Goldsmith told me. The networks that constrained Bush are still there, and Trump has put them on red alert. “Every single thing he does will be scrutinized with an uncharitable eye,” Goldsmith said. “That’s true of most presidents, but it’s true to an even greater degree with Trump.”

The costumed characters at George Washington’s gracious estate here are used to handling all manner of awkward queries, whether about 18th-century privies or the first president’s teeth. So when a visitor recently asked an African-American re-enactor in a full skirt and head scarf if she knew Ona Judge, the woman didn’t miss a beat. Judge’s escape from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 had been “a great embarrassment to General and Lady Washington,” the woman said, before offering her own view of the matter...“He’s a much more mythic figure than Jefferson,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello” and a Harvard professor. “Many people want to see him as perfect in some way.”But his determined pursuit of Judge, she said, as much as his will freeing his slaves, reflects the basic mind-set of slave owners. “It’s saying, ‘Whatever I might think about slavery in the abstract, I should be able to do what I want with my property,’” she said.

When it comes to the study of the Constitution, there is no one better to talk to than Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe...Listen to the podcast to find out why I called Tribe the Beyonce of constitutional law professors, hear what he thinks Democrats should do about the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the high court and what he expects the justices to do if presented with the legal excesses of Trump.