Media Mentions

It's been a busy few days for the Trump Administration—the latest executive order he has signed formally withdraws the US from the TPP trade deal. But Donald Trump is also having to contend with continued criticism over his business dealings—with a group of leading constitutional and legal experts slapping him with a lawsuit overnight...Guest: Larry Tribe.

The President is being sued for allegedly violating the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution because his hotels may accept payments from foreign governments. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, joins Lawrence.

An op-ed by Urs Gasser. Artificial intelligence is everywhere, at times obscured and sometimes fully hidden...In this particular moment, the research, development, and deployment of AI is primarily taking place in the private sector, while governments around the world are increasingly contracting out their own use of these powerful technologies. In this context, the future role of universities emerges as one that is particularly meaningful when it comes to addressing these questions of social impact, ethics, and governance of AI.

...Politico Magazine asked historians to identify which moments in history most resemble this one, and what those moments can teach us about the presidency and the country today...Kenneth W. Mack, professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University...It is perilous, in the extreme, to compare our present to any past moment. But that has not stopped many commentators, and our new president himself, from invoking the inauguration of Andrew Jackson as historical precedent. There are real reasons for this. Jackson is, depending whom you ask, either our first populist president or a border ruffian who left us the Trail of Tears and a financial crisis that bankrupted ordinary Americans. He was, of course, both. Less prominent has been the comparison between Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached in the House. Both of these comparisons, however, are difficult.

The New York Times reported Sunday evening on the first of likely many lawsuits attacking President Trump’s apparent violation of the Emoluments Clause...The ACLU, which already filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any documents relating to Trump’s potential conflicts, reportedly is seeking entities more directly harmed (for example, a hotel competitor) for a separate suit...[Laurence] Tribe told Right Turn that if Hotel X in competition with Trump has to negotiate arm’s-length leases while Trump does not, then “there’s a good argument that both Hotel X and its employees are at a competitive disadvantage caused by Trump’s cozy violation of the terms forbidding leasing of that federal building to a federal official, which obviously includes POTUS Trump.”

One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was to announce a rollback of two Obama administration environmental efforts, one to protect waterways from pollution and the other to curb heat-trapping gases in the planet’s atmosphere. But while the Trump administration made the announcement on day one of his presidency, it may be years before his wishes can come to fruition, legal experts say. “He cannot roll all this back with the stroke of a pen,” Jody Freeman, professor and founding director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, told BuzzFeed News.

Forty-four years ago, the Supreme Court made a surprise ruling in favor of a young attorney, declaring abortion legal nationwide. Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade, says now that her legacy — and the law itself— has never been more at risk. ..."There's no immediate threat to Roe v. Wade, even with a single Trump appointment to the court, but in the long run, with the possibility of a second or third Trump appointment, there is a substantial threat to the core of Roe v. Wade," Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, told NBC News.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy. I am appalled by Donald J. Trump, particularly his willingness to elicit and exploit destructive social prejudices, including sexism, racism, and nativism. I see his ascension to power as a threat to the best features of American life. I applaud those who have committed themselves to resistance to Trumpism. Here I think especially of those, like Representatives Katherine Clark and Mike Capuano, who, at some risk, defied tradition and refused to attend the inauguration as a protest against the incoming president. Still, I must confess a certain grudging admiration for Trump’s performance of his inaugural address even as I loathe the baleful politics that his words simultaneously obscure and announce. Trump’s address was succinct, only 17 minutes, and benefited from the channeling of attention that brevity facilitates.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Americans have thought that for any new president, the first 100 days are critical, because he has a honeymoon period in which Congress will do what he wants. But in the modern era, the first 50 days are the defining ones. That’s when the new executive branch is just taking shape, and the White House has maximal discretion to act entirely on its own -- and to turn the government in its preferred directions. The Trump administration seems primed to exercise that discretion. But in a few months, it is likely to slow down, and for identifiable reasons.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With all eyes on the U.S. as it inaugurates a new leader, Turkey is preparing to amend its constitution to make its president even more powerful than the American executive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with replacing parliamentary government with a presidential system. The problem is timing and context: Turkey’s proposed changes, which will go to a national referendum after being approved by parliament, follow the unsuccessful coup against increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The crucial passage in President Donald Trump’s inaugural address Friday tracked John F. Kennedy’s swearing-in speech, with one huge difference: Trump’s America First message was 180 degrees away from Kennedy’s Cold War embrace of global leadership. The combination of homage to Kennedy and subversion of his liberal internationalist vision tells you a lot about what Trump’s presidency is going to look like -- much more than the populist rhetoric about giving America back to the people.

President Barack Obama won a series of major cases before the Supreme Court on health care, gay rights, affirmative action and abortion, helping to preserve significant parts of his legacy. But, over hundreds of cases in eight years, his reception at the court, on the whole, was chilly...Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard who served in the solicitor general’s office and has studied the rise of the private Supreme Court bar, agreed. “The solicitor general’s office, and therefore the president, still has terrific lawyers but has lost its comparative advantage,” he said. “And its loss of comparative advantage in expertise during the past three decades has likely decreased at a rate that fairly approximates the decrease in its win rate.”

A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments...The legal team filing the lawsuit includes Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar; Norman L. Eisen, an Obama administration ethics lawyer; and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. Among the others are Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel in the administration of George W. Bush; Mr. Gupta, a Supreme Court litigator who has three cases pending before the court; and Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former congressional candidate who has been studying and writing about the Emoluments Clause for nearly a decade.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Rick Perry’s chief qualification to be secretary of energy was that he called for the abolition of the department back in 2012. Thursday, at his confirmation hearing, Perry not only flipped but said that, after being briefed on the department’s “vital functions,” he regretted his recommendation. Behold a case study in why, rhetoric and nominations aside, President-elect Donald Trump can’t bring transformative change to the agencies and departments that make up almost all the executive branch: The gravitational pull of the bureaucracy is just too strong. Even before Trump’s appointees are confirmed, they understand that their relevance and power depend not on dismantling the bodies they run, but on enhancing their power.

A letter by fellow Delcianna J. Winders. Puppy mill advocate Center for Consumer Freedom’s claim that the federal Animal Welfare Act adequately protects animals (“Well-intentioned bill would hamper sale of cats, dogs,” Jan. 17) would be laughable if it didn’t have such dire consequences. The Department of Agriculture’s own Office of Inspector General has repeatedly condemned enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act as “ineffective.” Chronic violators — breeders who deny basic veterinary care to sick and injured dogs, for example — have their licenses renewed every year, facing nothing more than a warning for their violations.

An op-ed by Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco and Simon Hedlin [`19]. She was only a teenager when she was trafficked by her mother's drug dealer. Trafficked for sex over the course of almost 20 years, Jessica, as we'll call her, suffered from regular physical and mental abuse, including being shot in the leg by her trafficker. After she eventually summoned the courage to call the police, Jessica was the one who was arrested and charged with prostitution - not her trafficker.

When Clara Spera [`17] says she has looked up to Hillary Clinton her entire life, she’s not exaggerating: Clinton visited Spera’s day care when she was a toddler. Although she didn’t know it at the time, that chance encounter was the start of something for Spera. Now a student at Harvard Law School, Spera says she knew she had to be a part of Clinton’s campaign last summer. She was working in Paris and was stunned by the Brexit vote result. Her first thought the next morning was “If they can do this ... President Trump.” Spera got involved through a friend who was working on the campaign and rearranged her schedule so she’d only take classes two days a week. She spent the rest of her week commuting to Brooklyn and working as an intern on the campaign’s voter protection team. “I felt like it was my duty to do anything I could to try to prevent a Trump presidency,” she says.

Scientists spoke, the feds listened: With only two days left in office, the Obama administration on Wednesday issued new rules intended to protect people who participate in scientific research, stepping back from proposals that would have imposed significant new regulatory requirements on scientists...“This is a big win for science and therefore a big win for patients,” said bioethicist Holly Fernandez Lynch of Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Innocent men detained for months or years after the Sept. 11 attacks on suspicion of being Muslim got their day in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. The odds don’t look good. The court will probably dismiss their constitutional suit against the government officials who implemented the policies that arrested immigrants who had overstayed their visas and held them in abusive conditions until after they had been affirmatively proved innocent, and sometimes beyond. Yet this is one of those cases that deserves attention because it casts a harsh light on real-world facts that we’d rather forget. Call it the “It Can’t Happen Here” case. And remember: It can. And in 2001, it did.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What makes Chelsea Manning -- whose sentence for leaking classified military and diplomatic files was commuted Tuesday by President Barack Obama -- different from Edward Snowden, who will not be pardoned for his disclosures of classified National Security Agency information? Whatever the White House may have said, it isn’t just the degree of secrecy of the leaked documents, Manning’s guilty plea or her gender transition. The most important difference is simply this: Snowden’s freedom poses a foundational threat to the U.S. systems of national security and criminal justice. Snowden won’t be pardoned because he’s demonstrated serious gaps in both realms. If he were in prison today, however, by his choice or otherwise, there’s a good chance he would have had his sentence commuted.

...A celebration of Trump’s defeat on the day of his inauguration seems several stages beyond fanciful. The real estate billionaire did after all pull off one of the biggest electoral surprises of modern times. Yet the progressive inhabitants of Saranac Lake are not alone in such thinking. Across the country, a growing chorus of influential voices can be heard exhorting liberals not to wallow in despondency in the wake of the Trump ascendancy, but to embrace optimism and celebrate a victory of their own...Will President Trump hear all these messages as he takes his seat in the Oval Office? Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who made a brief bid in 2016 for the Democratic presidential nomination, predicts that Trump will ignore calls for him to show electoral humility, just as Bush did in 2001. “The Republicans are so good at the chutzpah of their claim to power – minority presidents acting as though they are dominant in the world. We have to develop a way of tamping down their arrogance – these are minority presidents who do not represent most Americans.”