Media Mentions

WikiLeaks’ publication of hacking tools purportedly used by the Central Intelligence Agency highlight the stakes in a debate about the merits of basing cybersecurity on offense vs. defense., experts said Tuesday. A focus on the tools of attack can create certain kinds of risks because such tools may be difficult, if not impossible, to keep secure. “Eventually, this will all make us safer because finding and publishing (vulnerabilities) is always a good thing,” cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier said. The latest WikiLeaks publication showed that the federal agency was hoarding previously unknown cyber vulnerabilities, known as zero days. Mr. Schneier said that the sharing of such information could be beneficial.

President Trump's new executive order sets up a court battle that could create a long-lasting precedent for presidential power — and not just on immigration law. Trump rewrote his travel ban order Monday, hoping to fortify it against court challenges that have argued that it discriminates against Muslims. A key question now is: If the first order was discriminatory in its intent, can a rewrite of the order make that intent go away? "This case about the president's authority will undoubtedly be tremendously consequential for the scope of executive authority going forward," said Richard Fallon, a Harvard law professor.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In a powerful opinion that will become part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s ever-growing liberal legacy, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a split opinion Monday that a jury’s verdict may be reopened if there is evidence of racial bias by the jurors. The decision confronted a legal contradiction between the interest in treating jury verdicts as a black box not to be opened and the imperative of racial justice -- and opted for the latter. The decision is unusually honest and direct about how race in America has historically tainted the fairness of the judicial system.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman. One of the signal achievements of the Obama administration was reaching an agreement with the auto industry to dramatically increase fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, doubling them to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The industry now wants to renege. At its behest, the Trump administration is expected to initiate a rollback. Weakening these standards would be a mistake for consumers, the environment and the auto industry itself. They are the most important action the United States has taken to address climate change and reduce the nation’s dependence on oil.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has made no secret of the fact that he is a very vocal critic of President Donald Trump. He has disagreed with many of Trump’s policies, argued that Trump has repeatedly violated the constitution during his first six weeks in office, claimed Trump is mentally unfit to remain office, and at least twice claimed there are grounds for impeachment of the 45th president. The latest impeachment call from Tribe came early Tuesday morning in response to comments he seemingly did not agree with on the Morning Joe show when the subject of whether Trump could be impeached for his recent tweets claiming the Obama administration attempted to wiretap and bug Trump’s offices.

President Trump scaled back his executive order barring migrants from several predominantly Muslim countries Monday, in an attempt to insulate the controversial rules from a flurry of legal challenges and critics. The new executive order, which will be phased in starting March 16, removes Iraq from the list of original list of seven banned countries. The switch came after the Iraqi government, a key ally in the fight against the Islamic State, decried the initial order and worked with the State Department on mutually agreeable vetting procedures...However, Deborah Anker, an immigration law scholar at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, said she still expects the order to run into substantial legal challenges.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.

About two dozen students gathered at Harvard Law School for a conversation with James Wharton, a Conservative member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament and advocate for the U.K.'s exit from the European Union...“I think that it is very valuable, even as a [British citizen] studying in the US, to get a British perspective on British and European politics on this side of the Atlantic,” said Samantha R.E. Henderson ['17], a Law School student. “I think that is valuable for the U.S. audience and for a Brit who has been away from Britain for some time now to hear about the developments there.” Matteo Mantovani, a visiting Ph.D. student from the University of Cambridge, said he disagreed with Wharton’s reasoning, and that Brexit is not in the best interest of the British people or the rest of Europe.

Rod Rosenstein has spent years prosecuting US public officials suspected of wrongdoing. He may soon get a chance to use those skills in the nation’s capital. Mr Rosenstein, nominated for the number two position in the US Department of Justice, is in line to run the investigation into alleged ties between Trump campaign aides and the Russian government, now that attorney-general Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the probe. “He’s stepping into a terrific hot seat, a real hot seat,” says Philip Heymann, who taught Mr Rosenstein at Harvard Law School and supervised him at the DoJ. “These are extremely difficult things to handle well.” 

The Trump administration’s new travel ban “appears to be reverse engineered from the appeals court decision blocking the old one,” writes Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. “It remedies multiple legal infirmities and narrows the order’s scope.” But Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, emails Global Briefing that the key shortcomings of the original ban – and their grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of likely danger -- all remain. Tribe notes that the new ban is still limited to six Muslim-majority nations.

By donating U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's extensive papers to Harvard Law School on Monday, the Scalia family is giving his alma mater a unique challenge: preserving his digital as well as paper documents. "It is a safe guess" that this will be the first collection of a justice's papers that includes a large number of emails and digital documents, said Jocelyn Kennedy, executive director of Harvard Law School Library, after the announcement Monday.

The family of the late Antonin Scalia, J.D. ’60, who was a leading associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, announced Monday that it will donate his papers to the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library...“We are deeply grateful to the Scalia family for donating Justice Scalia’s papers to his alma mater,” said John Manning, deputy dean and Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at HLS and a former clerk to Scalia...Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS and also a former Scalia clerk, said, “Justice Scalia was, indisputably, the most influential and interesting justice of his generation, and a brilliant academic as well. His papers will be of surpassing value to future scholars, and it is fitting that they should find a home at Harvard Law School.”...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law and director of the library, said, “The Harvard Law School Library serves not only the campus community, but the world at large..."

President Trump replaced his controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries with a scaled-back version on Monday, narrowing its scope to block only new applicants for visas and removing Iraq from its coverage. The scaled-back ban represents a considerable defeat for the president, whose original executive order was met with protests and a stern rebuke from the federal judiciary...“Some of the challenges to the initial order would be blunted by the changes reflected in the newly issued travel ban, but the most fundamental constitutional infirmities in the original ban, stemming from its grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of danger, all remain,” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University constitutional law professor.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. That Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a false statement under oath before a congressional committee is clear. He said, “I did not have communications with the Russians,” when in fact he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The only question is what the consequences should be. Making a false statement under oath before Congress is a crime punishable by five years imprisonment when three tests are satisfied: (1) The statement is false, (2) it concerns a material fact, not a minor or incidental one, and (3) the speaker has made the statement willfully and knowingly. The first two are not debatable.

...President Trump has empowered federal agents to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, no matter where they reside, and insists that local police officers be employed to help enforce the orders. He has pledged to cut off federal funding for communities that refuse — the so-called sanctuary cities — and his threat has had the desired chilling effect...There have been some exceptions, such as conditioning federal highway funds on states enforcing speed limits, but overall the court has said that the federal government cannot “commandeer” states to do its bidding. Laurence Tribe, the constitutional law scholar, says Trump’s threats — both overbroad and out of scale — are clearly suspect. “I think he’s violating the Constitution up and down,” Tribe said.

...An afternoon discussion touched on the recent controversy surrounding Harvard Law School’s shield. Last March, the University retired the shield, which was modeled on the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., an 18th-century slaveholder whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. History scholar Daniel R. Coquillette, who recently helped to publish a book on the first century of HLS, said his research brought him to Royall and also to Antigua, the West Indian island that was the home of his lucrative sugar plantation. “As we got into” the research, he said, “it got worse.”...His comment was in part a reference to Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s written response to the shield controversy, what he called “one of the most eloquent pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In one of his few statements since joining government, presidential adviser Stephen Bannon announced that one of the Trump administration’s principal goals was “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Given the critical role of federal agencies in protecting public health and safety, that’s pretty provocative. But President Donald Trump’s latest action suggests that reform is the aim, rather than deconstruction -- and the reform might even turn out to be reasonable.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The ongoing saga of contacts between Russian officials and the Donald Trump campaign assures that the subject of government leaks isn’t going away anytime soon. Although some critics have compared the career bureaucrats suspected of doing the leaking to the “deep state” that has bedeviled reformers in Egypt and Turkey, the First Amendment hasn’t been brought into the conversation. It should be. As it turns out, there are competing constitutional views about bureaucrats’ engagement with public affairs.

...On Friday, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stood at a lectern under a projection of Renty’s face and began a rather different enterprise: a major public conference exploring the long-neglected connections between universities and slavery. Harvard had been “directly complicit” in slavery, Ms. Faust acknowledged, before moving to a more present-minded statement of purpose...There were gasps when Daniel R. Coquillette, co-author of a recent history of Harvard Law School, recounted how Isaac Royall Jr., a West Indian planter whose financial gifts led to the founding of the school, helped brutally put down a slave rebellion on Antigua during which dozens were drawn and quartered or burned at the stake.

An op-ed by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. The most successful protest movements in history have been the ones that have set their own agendas. Whether abolitionists, women’s suffrage advocates, or civil rights activists, progressive change movements have gained influence by disrupting politics as usual — not by slavishly aligning themselves with electoral parties. However, electoral politics — in particular, Democrats’ desire to win the next round of elections — is distorting conversations about the significance of the protests that have unfolded since the election of Donald Trump.

An interview with Niki Tsongas and Nancy Gertner. The Washington Post reported last night that Sessions spoke twice last year with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But when asked about communication with the Russians at his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in January, Sessions said, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.” Sessions revised that statement this morning, speaking to NBC News...Now, leading Republicans are joining Democrats in calling on Sessions to recuse himself from overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential campaign. Many have also called on Sessions to explain what his meetings were about.