Media Mentions

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.”

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.