Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, North Dakota has enacted four new laws clearly aimed at protesters. One of them stands out: The law makes it a misdemeanor to wear a mask or hood while committing a crime. That sounds reasonable -- anonymity can facilitate crime, and it makes sense to punish a masked bank robber more harshly than an unmasked one. Yet the law is more troubling in the context of the punishment of protesters, who sometimes cover their faces to make a political point. The mask law therefore raises a constitutional question: How should we think about laws that seem to be targeted at conduct but may actually be aimed at speech?

Hillary Clinton will be on Harvard's campus Friday to discuss her time as Secretary of State and dine in Kirkland House. Clinton will take part in an interview as part of the“ American Secretaries of State Project: Diplomacy, Negotiation, and Statecraft”, a joint project of the Kennedy School, Law School, and Business School, according to a statement from the Kennedy School...Law School Professor Robert H. Mnookin, Business School professor James K. Sebenius, and Kennedy School professor R. Nicholas Burns lead the project and will conduct the interview with Clinton.

Late Wednesday night, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential campaign, contacts he failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation hearings. "I did not have communications with the Russians," said Sessions during his sworn testimony...Can Jeff Sessions be prosecuted for perjury? The answer is not exactly cut and dry. At the time of his confirmation hearings, Sessions was still serving as a senator from Alabama. The Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause shields lawmakers from prosecution for lying during proceedings in the House or Senate...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe sees it differently. "That would be a laughable misuse of the Speech and Debate Clause," he says. "He was testifying under oath as an [Attorney General] nominee, not in the discharge of any Senatorial business of his own."

With Republicans and Democrats calling for him to recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and some Democrats calling for him to resign, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is fighting for his political life and livelihood...Second, so long as Sessions remains in the job, he will face pressure to resign and provide fodder for Trump critics suggesting that there is a cover-up. “The more I learn about this, the less I think Sessions has any choice but to resign or be fired,” Larry Tribe tells me. In his view, “it’s inconceivable that his error [in testimony] was an innocent one.”

It sounds like a contradiction in terms: Millions of Americans may be too broke to go bankrupt. But with studies showing that more than half of U.S. households can’t come up with $1,000 in cash in an emergency and a third have no savings at all, it shouldn't be surprising that the $1,300 cost of filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a hurdle many debt-ridden consumers can’t get over. That dilemma struck a Harvard sophomore named Rohan Pavuluri as odd – and a potential opportunity...Some experts estimate millions of Americans living below the poverty line could improve their finances by filing Chapter 7 and getting a fresh start. Pavuluri learned about this while working with Harvard Law School Professor James Greiner conducting research on legal self-help materials for low-income consumers.

...The ultimate form of American exceptionalism is the presidential system of government. After the 2016 election, the question haunting political scientists is whether America can continue to be the exception. When a demagogue can rise to power and win the presidency without a popular mandate, we must examine our system. Key flaws in presidential systems could lead to an unstable government and a decrease in civil liberties, such as free speech...To even ever dream of changing the American system of government, we would need a constitutional convention. “To have a constitutional convention, you need a lot of people that are really upset,” Mark Tushnet, expert on constitutional law at Harvard University and previous clerk for Thurgood Marshall said in an interview with The Politic.

President Donald Trump, in his first speech to a joint session of Congress last night, vowed to repair what he called the nation's "crumbling" infrastructure and initiate a "new program of national rebuilding."...But Larry Beeferman, the director of the Pensions & Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School, said Trump's words had "essentially no substance, in a policy sense." "Which infrastructure? And why? And how do you do it? He had nothing to say about that," Beeferman said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In an important decision that’s unusual for being almost unanimous, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday clarified the constitutional rule for the design of majority-minority legislative districts, perhaps the single most significant issue in contemporary voting-rights law. The districting in this case took place under the old rules, before the court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act. But the decision points the way to the constitutional doctrine of the future: voting-rights law that’s more consensual than has been the historic norm.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court argument about whether sex offenders can be barred from social media had the justices observing that even the president uses Twitter. But the ubiquity of social media in politics is only the most superficial aspect of how new forms of publishing are challenging the First Amendment. In areas such as campaign finance and libel law, it’s a different legal ballgame than it was just a few years ago -- and the changes can be expected to multiply with time.

An op-ed by senior visiting fellow Chiraag Bains. President Donald Trump campaigned promising a return to “law and order.” Since taking office, he has attempted to fulfill that promise through policies that have been criticized as being thin on substance and out of touch with crime statistics. The president’s approach is misguided for another reason, however: he is targeting immigration as a driver of violent crime when it just might have the opposite effect. Most recently, Trump’s secretary of homeland security issued memos providing for the expanded use of detention, wide-scale deportation and the immediate design and construction of a southern border wall — all in the name of public safety. To justify such measures, Trump and his supporters point to cases such as that of Kate Steinle, a young woman killed by an undocumented immigrant who already had been deported five times. While stories like Steinle’s are undeniably tragic, when used this way they obscure rather than illustrate the broader truth regarding immigrants and crime.

An op-ed by fellow Delcianna Winders. The soon-to-shutter Ringling Bros. Circus just rolled into Brooklyn for the last time. On March 3, the curtain will close on the circus’ final New York City show. After the lights go down and Ringling finishes up its final national tour, what’s to become of the dozens of animals used in the circus?...These majestic animals, who have endured so much, deserve better than jail— much better. That means they also shouldn’t be shipped off to zoos to be used as breeding machines, as Ringling has recently done with a handful of elephants.

...Starting this week, Slate is partnering with Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project to create “Trials and Error.” Our collaboration will attempt to illustrate the reality of the justice system via thorough, fair, and accurate investigative journalism and policy analysis...Trials and Error will also feature academic voices, including Ron Sullivan...

As part of a bold effort at bail reform, the state of New Jersey replaced bail hearings with algorithmically informed risk assessments this year. Anyone’s eligible for release, no money down, if they meet certain criteria. To ensure unbiased, scientific decisions, judges use a machine-generated score. The automated recommendation serves as a guide and doesn’t replace judicial discretion. Still, the program raises questions about the claimed neutrality of machine reasoning, and the wisdom of reliance on mechanical judgment...Harvard Law School’s criminal justice policy program published a primer on bail reform (pdf) in 2016, laying out the legal and social dangers of economically premised release and calling for its widespread abolition.

Katie M. Derzon,the College’s recently-appointed undocumented student fellow, has partnered with other College administrators to present "a series of concrete recommendations" for supporting undocumented students by the end of the semester. Derzon, a sociology graduate student and tutor in Leverett House, assumed her position earlier this month. She said she meets with undocumented students “one-on-one to work to answer questions as they occur.”...So far, Derzon said she sees connecting students to legal resources as her first priority. She pointed to Jason M. Corral, a staff attorney at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, as one of those resources.

The final two jurors were selected Monday in the double murder trial of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez, paving the way for opening statements in the highly anticipated case on Wednesday...Ronald Sullivan, a lawyer for Hernandez, said outside court during the lunch break that his client is looking forward to the start of the trial. “He’s looking forward to vindication,” said Sullivan, a Harvard Law professor. “To demonstrate to this jury and to the public that he is not guilty of the charged crimes.”

It has been 27 years since the first black man, an older student by the name of Barack Obama, was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. It has been even longer — 41 years — since the first woman, Susan Estrich, was elected to the position. Since then, subsequent presidents have been female, Hispanic, Asian-American, openly gay and black. Only now, for the first time in the history of the venerable 130-year-old journal, is the president a black woman. ImeIme Umana [`18], 24, the third-oldest of four daughters of Nigerian immigrants, was elected on Jan. 29 by the review’s 92 student editors as the president of its 131st volume...“It still feels like magic that I’m here,” Ms. Umana said in an interview, though her fellow students said it was not magic at all but her sharp legal mind, intense work ethic, leadership ability and generosity of spirit that catapulted her to the top.

The Harvard Law Review is among the most prestigious legal journals in the world, but the 130-year-old publication had never elected a black woman as its president — until now. That honor has gone to ImeIme Umana [`18], a 24-year-old daughter of Nigerian immigrants who has been voted president by the Law Review’s 92 student editors. Twenty-seven years ago, a Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama was elected the publication’s first black male president.

An op-ed by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Last week, the Trump Administration did exactly what many dreaded regarding transgender students. The Justice Department and the Education Department issued a letter that withdrew the Obama Administration’s letters directing schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity (rather than genitalia, chromosomes, or sex assigned at birth). The same day, the Office of the Solicitor General sent a letter asking the Supreme Court to take note of this about-face in the government’s position on what Title IX requires of schools. The Supreme Court was set to resolve two questions this term in the case of the Gloucester County School Board against Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen-age boy: first, whether the federal government’s view on transgender bathroom use was entitled to deference by courts; and, second, whether the government’s interpretation was correct.

An op-ed by Nancy Gertner. President Trump frequently complains about Washington leaks. But what he is really concerned about is that these leaks are not random. He believes that they are being deployed to harm his administration. (Of course, he had no problem with WikiLeaks’ leak of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign. “I love WikiLeaks,” he said.) But the pattern of leaks is uneven and, in one area, that inconsistent pattern may well redound to Trump’s advantage: Despite all the information that has come out of this leaky administration, his tax returns remain confidential (except for a single year reportedly leaked by one of Trump’s former wives).

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s war on the news media violates the spirit of the free press. How far can he go before he violates the letter of the First Amendment? Case in point: the exclusion of CNN, the New York Times, Politico and other media outlets from a White House press briefing Friday. It violates the basic constitutional ideal that the government can’t discriminate among various speakers on the basis of their viewpoints. Under existing case law, however, the exclusion probably doesn’t violate the Constitution, because the news outlets remain free to speak despite losing a degree of access.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Under existing doctrine, a federal district judge was probably right to temporarily block a California law designed to stop certain websites from listing actors' ages. But why shouldn't your age be a private fact you can keep to yourself? Not only can your age be used against you discriminatorily, but you also have a First Amendment right to lie about your age provided you aren’t engaging in fraud. This is an instance of a genuine, deep conflict between privacy and free speech. And in this instance, our system may have set the balance too far toward speech.