Media Mentions

Larry Lessig, a Harvard University constitutional law professor who made a brief run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, claimed Tuesday that 20 Republican members of the Electoral College are considering voting against Donald Trump, a figure that would put anti-Trump activists more than halfway toward stalling Trump’s election. Lessig’s anti-Trump group, “Electors Trust,” has been offering pro bono legal counsel to Republican presidential electors considering ditching Trump and has been acting as a clearinghouse for electors to privately communicate their intentions. “Obviously, whether an elector ultimately votes his or her conscience will depend in part upon whether there are enough doing the same. We now believe there are more than half the number needed to change the result seriously considering making that vote,” Lessig said.

More than 40 liberal law professors sent a letter to President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, voicing “great concern” with his commitment to the nation’s constitutional system and opposing the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama to be the next attorney general. The letter identified seven areas in which Trump has shown “complete ignorance or indifference toward constitutional values,”...Among the signers are...former federal judge Nancy Gertner of Harvard Law School...Most of the signers are board members or advisers to the liberal American Constitution Society, which posted the letter on its site Tuesday.

...In October, second-year Law students Pete Davis and Nate Szyman launched an initiative called “The Third Century Project.” It challenges the dominance of corporate law firms in shaping Law School students post-graduate plans and aims to create a “Harvard Law School centered on legal vocation-building in the public interest.” The first stage of the students’ project, called HLS 200, asks students and faculty to identify inspiring alumni, current legal challenges, and goals for the future. The Law School student government has committed to supporting the initiative as their official bicentennial activity, student government president Nino Monea said.

The website, Professorwatchlist.org, catalogs 200-some professors from universities across the U.S. who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” the About page states. The list details professors’ alleged views on everything from abortion to the Holocaust, and was created by conservative group  Turning Point USA, which aims to spread conservative ideals to young activists. ... Mark Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, echoed Douglas’ sentiments. “I doubt that this list as such will have any effect on what professors on the list do,” Tushnet said. “I certainly don’t intend to modify my teaching or scholarship as a result of being on it.”

From the moment Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he began to disappoint those who had believed in his message of change. ...Two days after the election, we sat down with five leading historians and political observers in the New Republic’s offices in New York City, overlooking Union Square. At the table were Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard and Nell Painter of Princeton, two of America’s preeminent scholars on American history.

Change is inevitable. As issues in law continue to evolve and emerge, law schools must update their curriculum to prepare their students to practice in a modern landscape. ... Like Berkeley, Harvard Law also understands the value of technology. According to The Crimson, Harvard Law has actively been seeking law students with STEM backgrounds, and they have already created programs such as the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics to bridge science and the law. “This is the direction that the world is headed. Some of the most interesting questions in law right now are driven by science moving faster than the law does,” Harvard Law School chief admissions officer Jessica L. Soban told The Crimson. “The profession needs—and Harvard Law School kind of driving that needs—people who are able to engage on these topics and are interested in these topics.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: In 2000, Republican lawyers, desperately seeking a way to stop the recount in Florida, crafted a brilliant equal protection argument against the method by which the Florida courts were recounting votes. Before that election, no sane student of the Constitution would have thought that there was such a claim. When the claim was actually made, every sane lawyer (on Gore’s side at least) thought it was a sure loser. But by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court recognized the claim, and held that the Equal Protection Clause regulated how Florida could recount its votes. That conclusion led five justices to conclude the recount couldn’t continue. George Bush became president.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If Russia really tried to throw the U.S. election to Donald Trump, what then? Did the hacking violate international law? And if so, what can the U.S. do to retaliate? The short answer is that trying to change the outcome of another country’s election does violate a well-recognized principle of international law, and the U.S. would be legally justified in taking “proportionate countermeasures.” But, in a painful twist, the best precedent comes from a 1986 case the U.S. lost and never accepted.

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes, Harvard Law School and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Professor Yochai Benkler, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Alaska State Senator Bill Wielechowski may not agree on everything, but they agree on this: Cash handouts have the potential to help Americans and the American economy. Given the challenges posed by automation and globalization, which are replacing workers and leading to stagnating wages, direct payments to workers may, in fact, be the only solution.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In January of 2014, three weeks after Bill de Blasio was sworn in as New York City Mayor, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton sent his first tweet. Bratton had just finished updating his staff about CompStat, a system he’d launched years before to follow crime spikes and allow police leaders to direct their resources accordingly...The action might seem slight, but inside the NYPD the tweet had significant impact. In the past, police were expected to refrain from sharing information with the public.

A desire to learn more about three subjects led me to read the five new books I most enjoyed this year. In this moment of high anxiety about the state of American politics one can receive useful perspective by studying Michael Klarman’s magisterial “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Presidents should generally be allowed to choose their own employees. Unless nominees fall below reasonable standards for honesty and competence, senators should vote to confirm them, even if they disagree intensely with their views. Obstructionism makes it hard for the executive branch to function; it also discourages good people from entering public service. But that doesn't mean the Senate should give a blank check to Donald Trump. Senators should not confirm nominees who reject the mission of the very department they seek to lead.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Last week, the Ohio legislature passed a law banning abortion after the first fetal heartbeat can be heard. Texas enacted rules requiring that aborted fetuses be buried or cremated. And in Louisiana, a private trust purporting to act on behalf of 5-day-old frozen embryos sued the actress Sofia Vergara demanding that they be implanted in a uterus so they could be born. All three developments are legally questionable, to say the least. The Ohio bill is clearly unconstitutional, the Texas law may be, and the Louisiana lawsuit would cause upheaval in the assisted reproduction community should it succeed. Yet all three signal the durability of the idea that the unborn have legal rights -- a position the U.S. Supreme Court has never adopted.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Here’s a surprising headline you could have written this week: “Judge on Trump’s Supreme Court List Allows Gay-Straight Alliance in Middle Schools.” Yet remarkably, it’s true. Judge William Pryor wrote an appellate opinion holding that Florida middle schools (grades 6-8) offer “secondary” education, and are therefore bound by a federal law that requires them to allow equal access to all extracurricular groups, including GSAs.

For over a year, a global mystery has been growing: Why are so many governments around the world collapsing amid corruption scandals? Attention is now focused on South Korea, where the Parliament voted Friday to impeach President Park Geun-hye...“The normal institutions of justice — the courts, the prosecutors, the auditors, the ombudsmen, you name it — are themselves so thoroughly corrupted that you can steal with impunity,” said Matthew C. Stephenson, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies corruption. That batters public trust, and strengthens the perception that corruption is universal and unavoidable.

President-elect Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns during the campaign and there is no sign that he will, ever. He broke longstanding tradition and set a terrible precedent for future presidential candidates. Good government groups have been wringing their hands about what to do. Now comes an excellent idea from a New York State senator, Brad Hoylman, a Democrat from Manhattan, that would could force candidates to disclose their tax returns by making it a requirement for getting on the ballot...As drafted, the bill should withstand constitutional scrutiny, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard. “Ballot access requirements vary significantly from state to state, and it seems that N.Y. might be able to simply add tax disclosure as a procedural ballot access requirement,” he wrote in an email.

At least three dozen so-called sanctuary cities across the country are standing firm against President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to crack down on them, according to a Politico analysis...Phil Torrey, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and the supervising attorney of the Harvard Immigration Project, explained that the Tenth Amendment gives broad powers to the states that include the ability to set policy agendas for local law enforcement, while it gives broad powers to the federal government to decide how to tax and spend dollars. The Supreme Court comes in when these powers collide, and the court has established precedent that the federal government cannot be overly coercive, Torrey said.

Way back in 2001, in China’s view, the United States promised it would treat the Asian country as a “market economy” starting in December 2016. President-elect Donald Trump indicated on Dec. 8 that “China is not a market economy,” and the issue could escalate already-tense trade relations between Beijing and Washington...Many others, including the U.S. government, argue that China’s economic transformation has not gone far enough. Mark Wu, a Harvard law professor, describes how a “China Inc.” has emerged. The Chinese government and the Communist Party have made strategic adjustments but remain actively involved in banking, energy and raw materials — and this allows them to implicitly subsidize other sectors of the economy.

After Donald Trump’s election, some universities echoed with primal howls. Faculty members canceled classes for weeping, terrified students who asked: How could this possibly be happening? I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become...Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor, conducted a fascinating study of how groupthink shapes federal judges when they are randomly assigned to three-judge panels...The weakest argument against intellectual diversity is that conservatives or evangelicals have nothing to add to the conversation. “The idea that conservative ideas are dumb is so preposterous that you have to live in an echo chamber to think of it,” Sunstein told me.

On Jan. 20, 2017, the following words are likely to be uttered, "I, Donald J. Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."...And two prominent Constitutional Law professors told me that a Muslim registry would violate that amendment. According to my interview with Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, implementing a Muslim registry would violate the First Amendment. What's more, Mr. Tribe believes that Mr. Trump would violate the First Amendment whether he signed a law sent to him by Congress that created a Muslim registry or implemented one through an executive order. And Mr. Tribe believes that Congress and/or the courts would have the power to stop such an executive order if Mr. Trump issued it.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig will support members of the Electoral College who don't cast their vote the president-elect. NPR's Scott Simon asks him why he's decided to take up this cause..."What we're trying to do is to give counsel to electors who are trying to exercise what the constitution gives them the right to exercise, which is, as Justice Jackson said, independent, nonpartisan judgment when they decide who to elect and who to vote for."