Media Mentions

The FBI rejected a request from White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus last week to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to multiple US officials briefed on the matter. The White House denies any inappropriate contact occurred, claims the FBI initiated the conversation and insists Priebus only discussed the news story, not the underlying pending Russia investigation...Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe said that "the important fact is that the White House and the FBI were improperly discussing an ongoing investigation, particularly one that directly involves the President's inner circle and possibly the President himself, regardless of who initiated the communications at issue."

The Trump administration has broadened its search for a key regulatory job at the Federal Reserve, according to people familiar with the matter, meeting in recent weeks with at least two people about the post of Fed vice chair in charge of bank oversight. President Donald Trump hasn’t announced who he will nominate to the currently vacant post, and his decision won’t be final until that happens...The administration is still said to be considering David Nason, a former Treasury Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush...President Trump’s team also recently met with Richard Davis, the chief executive of U.S. Bancorp, and Hal Scott, a professor at Harvard Law School, according to people familiar with the matter...Mr. Scott declined to comment.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Trump administration has reversed the Department of Education policy on transgender bathroom use, the Supreme Court will probably dismiss the case it’s hearing on the matter rather than issue a decision. But even if that happens -- and it isn’t 100 percent certain -- the result may be better for transgender-rights advocates than judgment on the merits would have been. In the long run, the movement would be better off with a decision that reads federal anti-discrimination law as protecting against transgender bias than with a decision that makes protection depend upon the whims of the administration charged with implementing the law.

Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending has sued the federal government in an effort to access documents from the Education Management Corporation, an operator of for-profit colleges that settled a case with the U.S. Department of Justice in November 2015...“The documents from this lawsuit regarding EDMC’s recruitment practices are likely to strengthen claims for reliefs of hundreds, if not thousands, of former students of EDMC-owned schools,” wrote Amanda Mangaser Savage ’10, the Project’s attorney who filed the lawsuit, in a press release...Savage said the Law School Project’s lawsuit aims to benefit students who incurred debt from EDMC schools and also taxpayers whose dollars are going to for-profit colleges. The $95.5 million the case was settled for was “less than one percent of the more than $11 billion in taxpayer-funded federal student grants and loans that the government alleged EDMC received between July 2003 and the suit’s filing,” according to the Project’s press release.

A member of southern Alberta's Blood Tribe has become the first Indigenous student to head Harvard Law School's Legal Aid Bureau in the history of the 104-year-old organization. Julian SpearChief-Morris [`18] was recently elected president of the bureau, the second largest provider of legal aid services in the Boston area. The University of Lethbridge grad and second-year law student told the Calgary Eyeopener Wednesday "it means a lot" to hold the prestigious position. "I've gotten a lot of great feedback from my friends and family back in southern Alberta and it's been truly humbling," he said, speaking from Cambridge, Mass. SpearChief-Morris became involved in the bureau late in his first year of law school. "I've learned so much from the people that I was working with and I just wanted to take on a bigger role," he said.

The state is helping hundreds of veterans by awarding $350,000 in grants to four Massachusetts organizations. The grant funding will go to Community Legal Aid, Inc., in Worcester; Montachusett Veterans Outreach Center in Gardner; The Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in Boston; and Veterans Legal Services in Boston, Attorney General Maura Healey's office announced Wednesday...The Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School plans to hire an attorney to provide legal representation for discharge status upgrades and veterans benefits claims using the funding. That attorney will conduct outreach to veterans and present legal training on veteran and military law to services providers. The grant funding will provide nearly 50 veterans with legal representation. "Low-income and disabled veterans in Massachusetts have vast unmet legal needs," said Daniel Nagin, director of the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. "We are honored to receive grant funding from the Attorney General's Office to expand our ability to advocate for the men and women who have the worn the uniform and now face barriers to care, financial stability, and other critical supports."

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.”