Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. When my colleague Lawrence Lessig argued at Medium that members of the Electoral College should break faith and vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump, I chalked it up to the brilliantly contrarian Larry being brilliant and contrarian -- even if wrong. But when, over the holiday weekend, the Washington Post published his op-ed making the same argument, it made me think serious people might take his argument seriously -- which would be dangerous for democracy and bad for the republic. So with great respect for Larry’s ideals and values, here’s why faithless electors would subvert, not sustain, the democratic values that underlie the U.S. presidential election system.

A letter by fellow Delcianna Winders. The U.S. Department of Agriculture must accept responsibility for facilitating cruelty at places like Black Diamond Kennel instead of making specious appeals to due process...Due process doesn’t require trial-type hearings before the revocation of an Animal Welfare Act license.

Once sworn into office, Donald Trump will be in a strong position to dismantle some of President Barack Obama's efforts to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions. But experts say delivering on campaign pledges to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and bring back tens of thousands of long-gone coal mining jobs will likely prove far more difficult for the new president...Dismantling EPA regulations is difficult, especially if the rules have already been finalized and implemented. "The agency has already built up a very strong record to support those rules," said Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School. "It can be very hard to do an about-face."

Jill Stein is on track to raise twice as much for an election recount effort than she did for her own failed Green Party presidential bid. Fueled by the social media hashtag #recount2016 and millions of dispirited Hillary Clinton voters, Stein's recount drive had already netted $6.3 million by Monday, according to her campaign website. That's close to the $7 million she posted as a goal and millions more than the roughly $3.5 million she raised during her entire presidential bid...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, said that although recounts are "entirely within the law," Stein's effort is probably aimed more at "trying to gain attention and establish herself as a national player."

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig sparked a national debate with a Nov. 24 Washington Post op-ed arguing that members of the electoral college should choose as president popular vote winner Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump on the grounds that everyone's vote should count equally. A number of his colleagues within the legal academy have now weighed in with their own opinion pieces and blog posts, and most warn that such a move by the electors would be unfair and damaging—or at least contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

In the first few months of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, if recent history is any guide, intelligence officials will meet to discuss a terrorism suspect living abroad. This suspect might become the next target for the nation’s not-so-secret drone force. Or maybe, Mr. Trump’s advisers could decide, he is worth trying to capture....Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former war crimes prosecutor, said much has changed since 2002, when Justice Department lawyers accepted C.I.A. assurances that there would be no long-term consequences for prisoners. “Evidence showing that the techniques employed by U.S. officials after 9/11 resulted in lasting psychological trauma will make it much more difficult for future lawyers to sanction these techniques as not amounting to torture,” he said.

An article by David E. White Jr. `17. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) remains one of the most acclaimed American artists of the 19th Century. Although producing noteworthy works as an illustrator, oil and watercolor painter, Homer’s artistic skill is just one part of his illustrious place in history. At a time when it was virtually unthinkable, Homer painted black subjects, and he did so frequently. Moreover, Homer endowed his black subjects with an unmistakable sense of agency, beauty, and personhood—humanistic characteristics conspicuously absent from other works of the era featuring black subjects. Sea Garden, Bahamas (1885) represents Homer’s admirable effort to exhibit blacks as possessing citizenship in a global community, and such an effort, in the face of abject dehumanization, constitutes an act of restorative justice.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Those who urge progressive tech policy have no more ideas than anyone about how the surprise results of the 2016 election will affect the issues about which they care the most. But in one area, I see reason for hope. Donald Trump and his colleagues are reportedly warming to the idea of an infrastructure bank, although we don’t have much information about how that bank would operate. We do know that we don’t want the “third world” of today’s LaGuardia Airport — a talking point on which Trump and Vice President Joe Biden are in heroic agreement. I have some specific suggestions for how that bank (or a system of regional or state infrastructure banks) could genuinely drive economic growth in the US.

An op-ed by Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker. Even as the United States remains the only Western democracy that executes its citizens, the Supreme Court has exempted certain categories of our most vulnerable individuals from execution, including those with intellectual disability. Texas, however, routinely fails to enforce this protection. An upcoming case gives the court the opportunity to bring Texas in line with constitutional requirements.

“This could be one of the most unrestrained governments that we’ve seen in this country in who knows how long,” Ryan Shapiro warned. Shapiro has been described as a “FOIA superhero” — one of his many monikers. The punk-turned-transparency advocate has filed thousands of Freedom of Information Acts requests and sued major government agencies over their refusals to abide by transparency laws. Now he has his sights set on the impending administration of President-elect Donald Trump...When he is not filing FOIA requests, writing his dissertation for MIT or listening to hardcore punk, Shapiro is also a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

An op-ed by Alyson Warhit `17. Dear Ivanka, You don’t know me, but last year I passed you on Fifth Avenue outside of Trump Tower. I was on the way to my job and you were presumably on the way to yours. I had the impulse to stop you and talk with you, woman to woman, about the role you were playing in your father’s campaign. I wanted to plead with you to denounce your father’s hateful rhetoric and to honor the Jewish values that you adopted upon your conversion. I wanted to implore you to use your newfound public platform for good. But instead, I kept walking. I told myself that I shouldn’t hound a complete stranger on the street to tell her things she probably already knows. I assumed your relationship with your father’s campaign was complicated and in due time you would say that a ban on Muslims entering the country was certainly not in line with your values as an American or as a Jew. I knew that you would condemn the way your father talked about immigrants, women, veterans and the disabled. She’ll come around, I told myself.

Law professor Mark V. Tushnet ’67 landed on a “watchlist” of liberal professors created by the conservative nonprofit organization Turning Point USA last week. According to the group’s website, the goal of the list is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Turning Point USA aims to instill conservative principles such as support of free markets and limited government in college students...Tushnet said he was unperturbed by his inclusion on the list. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “It comes with the territory.”

Constitutional lawyers and White House ethics counsellors from Democratic and Republican administrations have warned Donald Trump his presidency might be blocked by the electoral college if he does not give up ownership of at least some of his business empire....Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said in an email that the “electors who are to cast their votes for president on 19 December not as automatons but in light of constitutional constraints and principles cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump as president of the United States unless he fully divests himself of economic interests dependent on the fortunes, for good or ill, of the private Trump empire”.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Donald Trump is inheriting a more powerful presidency than any of his predecessors. And if history is any guide, he will seek to expand the power of the office. But how will he do it? One clue lies in noticing how the personalities of the last two presidents were reflected in their techniques of expansion. Barack Obama’s administration took a very different route to its expansion of executive authority than did George W. Bush’s -- and Trump’s will probably be different still.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In the free marketplace of ideas, true ideas are supposed to compete with false ones until the truth wins -- at least according to a leading rationale for free speech. But what if the rise of fake news shows that, under current conditions, truth may not defeat falsehood in the market? That would start to make free speech look a whole lot less appealing. The rise of fake news therefore poses a serious challenge to our basic ideas about the First Amendment. Much of the debate in recent weeks has focused on social media and search engines. But whether the market for ideas is failing is more fundamental than whether Facebook or Google can be blamed for algorithms that promote and spread false stories.

The Foreign Emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution — you might have skipped over it in social studies — says that no person holding any office of profit or trust can receive gifts from foreign powers. The idea was to prevent meddling in U.S. policy by other nations. Some scholars [including Laurence Tribe] argue it doesn't apply to the president, but presidents have certainly acted as if it does. And many scholars say it and statutes like it are a mine field for the future Trump Presidency.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, the legal community has begun to ponder and prepare for the changes the incoming administration may make...Adrian Vermeule ’90, J.D. ’93, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, sees two possible prospects for administrative law under Trump. One involves what he called “bipartisan retrenchment.”...Four major signposts during the first 100 days will show whether the Trump administration will transform executive authority or not, said Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. First, how does the Trump administration handle ostensibly independent regulatory commissions such as the Security and Exchange Commission or the Federal Reserve?...With the executive branch’s role leading the trends in America’s criminal justice system and criminal justice reform, the effect that Trump’s presidency will have in this realm, given that his positions on a number of issues are either unformed or shifting, is still unknown, said criminal law professor Andrew Crespo.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Conventional wisdom tells us that the electoral college requires that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president. That view is an insult to our framers. It is compelled by nothing in our Constitution. It should be rejected by anyone with any understanding of our democratic traditions  — most important, the electors themselves.

...What is an adequate solution for the dark and persistent threat of sexual violence on campus? And what should colleges and universities expect from a very different administration, headed by a president who has himself been accused of sexual assault?...But the Obama approach has its critics. Harvard Law professors Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen say it resulted in a “sex bureaucracy,” placing more and more ordinary behavior under federal oversight. And feminist legal theorist Janet Halley, their colleague who has contested the OCR's process in the Harvard Law Review, describes the “Dear Colleague” letter as a case of “administrative overreach.” Halley, who has participated in sexual-violence cases at Harvard, has had concerns about their fairness from the beginning. She took pains to say that she cares deeply about sexual assault, but she worries about an overcorrection, prompted by OCR, that moves universities from ignoring the rights of accusers to trampling on those of the accused.

Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless he sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents...Eisen’s conclusions are shared by Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars. Tribe told ThinkProgress that, after extensive research, he concluded that “Trump’s ongoing business dealings around the world would make him the recipient of constitutionally prohibited ‘Emoluments’ from ‘any King, Prince, or foreign State’ — in the original sense of payments and not necessarily presents or gifts — from the very moment he takes the oath.” The only solution would be to divest completely from his businesses. Failing that, Tribe elaborated on the consequences:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to dismantle many of the signature policies put in place by the Obama administration to fight the effects of climate change...Under the control of the new administration, the office could slow President Obama’s latest regulatory initiatives by repeatedly sending them back for additional work. “It has been a brake on agency regulation throughout its lifetime,” said Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on environmental regulation. “Some presidents have used it as more of a brake than others.”