Media Mentions

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.”

An op-ed by Elizabeth Bartholet and Chuck Johnson. The current State Department has developed policies that have been disastrous for children languishing in institutions abroad. There are many millions of such children, some of them orphaned, some abandoned by or removed from their birth parents. Most of these children have no likelihood of finding a family in their country of origin. International adoption provides their best prospect for a family, and the social science shows that such adoption works extremely well for children, helping repair damage done prior to adoption and enabling children adopted at early ages to thrive. By contrast the brain and social science shows that institutions cause mental, emotional and physical damage destructive of a child’s potential.

Around noon on Friday, the presidency of Barack Obama will officially be history, and for months the news media has been awash in considerations of the first African-American president’s legacy. But there’s one aspect of his record that has received less attention: his legacy as a historian...Kenneth Mack, a historian at Harvard Law School who has known Mr. Obama since they were classmates there, said that he was “the first president who has really been able to wrap the history of the civil rights movement into the fabric of American history,” while also pointedly hailing other marginalized groups’ push for inclusion in “We the people.” “It’s not just about commemorating the heroes of the past,” Mr. Mack said, “but also things Americans disagreed about, and still disagree about.”

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump promised to punish local governments that don’t comply with federal immigration authorities. In some so-called “sanctuary cities,” officials refuse to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation. ...Police and politicians in these areas say that honoring ICE detainer requirements could scare people away — they don’t want undocumented people to be afraid to contact the police if they need help. “They are relying on folks to not be afraid of the police to report crimes,” said Phil Torrey, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who specializes in criminal and immigration law.

Harvard supported shareholder proposals calling on corporations to be more transparent about political contributions and internal environmental benchmarks, among other issues, according to a report on shareholder responsibility released Wednesday...An advisory committee—a 12-member panel of faculty, students, and alumni—first considers each proposal before presenting its recommendation to the Corporation committee, whose four members cast votes to determine Harvard’s position...Harvard Law School professor Howell E. Jackson chaired the advisory committee.

Rather than commit to investigating President-elect Donald Trump’s ongoing conflicts of interest and his refusal to comply with the letter of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has decided to dragoon the head of the Office of Government Ethics, who spoke out about Trump’s ethical shortcomings, to a closed-door session....Laurence Tribe echoed that sentiment. “It’s crucial not only that the government’s chief ethics watchdog be permitted to do the vital job for which that independent officer was appointed but that the public be permitted to watch that job being done rather than having to sort, after the fact, through potentially misleading descriptions of who said what to whom at a closed meeting,” he told Right Turn.

...I contacted law professor Laurence Tribe, who has argued that under his current arrangement Trump will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause, and asked him what Democrats in Congress can do, if anything, to prod Republican leaders to exercise real oversight. Tribe emailed that their options are limited, but not nonexistent: "They can cajole and pressure and bargain and refuse to cooperate with Republicans on issues where the votes of the Democrats are needed. But there is no legal mechanism they can use to compel the congressional Republicans to perform their proper oversight role. Among the things Democrats can pressure Republicans to do, with uncertain success of course, is to share subpoena power with them on one or more joint investigative/oversight committees. They can certainly try to introduce impeachment resolutions despite their minority status in the House.

Harvard Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. advocated for criminal justice reform and an end to mass incarceration in a TEDx talk entitled “Justice is a decision,” arguing that wrongful convictions are widespread and often overlooked. Sullivan, who is also a Winthrop House Faculty Dean and former adviser to President Barack Obama, began the talk with stories from his personal experiences exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals in Brooklyn, N.Y. In some cases, wrongfully convicted individuals spent years in prison or died before their release, Sullivan said. In an interview Tuesday, Sullivan noted that although he considers the United States’s criminal justice system “the greatest legal system in the world, there still are very many people who fall through the cracks.”

An op-ed by Richard W. Painter, Laurence H. Tribe, Norman L. Eisen, and Joshua Matz. Last week, President-elect Donald Trump’s lawyers issued a brief, largely unnoticed memo defending Trump’s plan to “separate” himself from his businesses. We believe that memo arbitrarily limits itself to a small portion of the conflicts it purports to address, and even there, presents claims that depart from precedent and common sense. Trump can convince a lot of people of a lot of things—but neither he nor his lawyers can explain away the ethics train wreck that will soon crash into the Oval Office.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. This is the story of a dramatic failure of imagination and vision at the state level: Governor Charlie Baker’s apparent insistence that Massachusetts relegate small towns to second-rate, high-priced, monopoly-controlled (and unregulated) communications capacity. It’s a slow-rolling tragedy that will blight Western MA for generations. The likely outcome: Only those plucky, scrappy towns that elect to build on their own will escape the grip of unconstrained pricing for awful service. The rest will fade into irrelevance. What new American generations will stay in a place that is essentially unconnected to the world? What new businesses and ways of making a living will emerge there? None and none.

An op-ed by Yaacov Jake Meiseles `19. Rockland County Executive Ed Day is on a mission to keep 67-year-old Judith Clark behind bars. Clark was the getaway driver in the infamous 1981 Brink’s robbery in Nyack, in which a Brink’s guard and two police officers were shot and killed by her co-defendants. Clark was subsequently sentenced to 75-years-to-life in prison — one of the longest sentences of her six co-defendants. In a profound display of mercy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently commuted Clark’s sentence to 35-years-to-life. Consequently, a parole board will review her imprisonment status this March. Day has taken on the mission of keeping Clark locked up as his personal crusade.

(Translated from Spanish.)...Mark Wu, a professor at Harvard Law School, told BBC World, “Whether you agree with President-elect Trump’s tactics or not, the U.S. does indeed face a number of serious trade problems with China.” “These include China’s use of subsidies for certain sectors, China’s dumping of its excess capacity of its steel products overseas, and China’s imposition of export restraints on certain raw materials. These benefit Chinese producers at the expense of American firms and workers.” For the Harvard scholar, the key issue is that China’s economy is structured in such a way that not all trade problems can be dealt with effectively through litigation at the WTO. “The crucial question is: What is the best way to deal with these problems to ensure that China does not get a disproportionate share of the gains from trade at the expense of the United States?” “The incoming Trump Administration’s view is that only by taking a harder line and raising the threat of a trade war will China change its practices.”

When Maddy Moore arrived at Georgetown University as a freshman almost four years ago, she signed up to be a peer educator on sexual assault. At that time, there was growing momentum behind the issue on college campuses across the country...But with the election of Donald Trump, who confided on tape to a reporter that he can kiss and grab women by the genitals without their consent, Moore, now a senior, and her peers are concerned...For opponents of the 2011 directive, having schools step in for courts doesn't create a fair system of justice and may treat alleged perpetrators unfairly. Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who signed the May letter, said the new interpretation of the scope of Title IX has lowered the bar to serious consequences, such as expulsion. "Clearly [sexual assault] is a problem and should be addressed," Bartholet said in a phone interview. "At the same time, what the Obama Administration did in the Dear Colleague letter has gone way beyond."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. If American conservatives have an intellectual hero, it might well be Friedrich Hayek -- and rightly so. More clearly than anyone else, Hayek elaborated the case against government planning and collectivism, and mounted a vigorous argument for free markets. As it turns out, Hayek simultaneously identified a serious problem with the political creed of President-elect Donald Trump. One of Hayek’s most important arguments in his great classic, "The Road to Serfdom," involves the Rule of Law, which he defined to mean “that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand.” Because of the Rule of Law, “the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is it lawful to deport immigrants who commit “aggravated felonies”? Or is that language unconstitutionally vague? The U.S. Supreme Court considered the question Tuesday, in a case that’s proof of De Tocqueville’s dictum, “There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one." Although the legal issues are subtle, the atmospherics of the case are all about Donald Trump’s warnings of “bad hombres” illegally entering the U.S.

In the rapidly changing legal industry, it is no surprise that broad conceptions of what it means to be a rainmaker are also evolving. Dr. Heidi Gardner, Lecturer and Distinguished Fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, has been conducting research over the past decade on collaboration in law firms. Her findings have also revealed insights into rainmakers: what makes them successful, how their roles changed over time, and how the next generation of rainmakers can be primed to succeed...Based on her decades long research, Dr. Gardner’s answer to whether rainmakers are born is a resounding no. What makes someone a successful rainmaker is their ability to exhibit other sides of their personality, or other strengths and traits, depending on their audience.

The conflict between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community could have profound repercussions. We spoke recently about the issue to Matthew Olsen, who spent two decades working in senior posts in intelligence and national security for Democrat and Republican administrations. Olsen, 54, served most recently (from 2011 to 2014) as director of the intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center. Before that, he was the general counsel of the National Security Agency. In 2009, he was executive director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force for the Justice Department...Today, he’s an executive at IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm he co-founded, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

There is a growing movement in criminal justice reform to re-examine how bail and pretrial detention is used...Pennsylvania may soon join that movement. As part of justice reinvestment in the state, a recommendation has been made to review how bail is handled. “Our view is that rethinking the bail system provides significant opportunities for making it more effective, doing a better job in ensuring the integrity of the justice system and ensuring the safety of the community, at the same time solving these really intractable problems when systems use money which just results in unfair outcomes,” said Larry Schwartztol, executive director of the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program. Harvard did not contribute to Pennsylvania’s justice reinvestment recommendations but has focused research on bail extensively.

As President Barack Obama prepares to leave the Oval Office, we ask experts how the 44th president of the United States will be remembered. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the Daniel P.S. Paul professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law; and Jim Demers, a political consultant with The Demers Group in New Hampshire join Under the Radar to discuss how Obama’s policies, popularity and grassroots revolution changed American politics.

Law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy has an extra play in its client-relations playbook, which points to the growth of a new arena in business development, and also a new market for executive education providers. Milbank invites and pays for clients it seeks to build relationships with to attend a 4-day business and leadership executive education program at Harvard, including modules in strategy, finance, accounting, leadership, and macroeconomics. The program is developed and run in association with the Harvard Law School (HLS) Executive Education, with crossover to the business school...Milbank specifically invites the General Counsel or Senior General Counsel of its client firms, in other words its key relationship holder inside the target firm. It had 23 such client delegates from across Asia, Europe, South America and the U.S. on its Corporate Counsel program in 2015, and the same numbers again on a second program in 2016.