Media Mentions

Anti-Trump forces are preparing an unprecedented assault on the Electoral College, marked by a wave of lawsuits and an intensive lobbying effort aimed at persuading 37 Republican electors to vote for a candidate other than Donald Trump...“There might well be a clamor to get rid of the Electoral College altogether, a move that would have some disadvantages (like eliminating Hamilton's safeguard) but many advantages as well,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Anyhow, clamor and anger have become par for the course in this loony election year.”

...This fall, a new Harvard course has helped students become part of the effort to reform the nation’s criminal justice system. Schiraldi, Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, and Harvard sociologist Bruce Western are teaching a graduate seminar examining the origins of U.S. mass incarceration and helping students craft workable solutions for getting, and keeping, people out of prison...“Each of us in different ways has been teaching and working on the problem of criminal justice policy,” said Gertner, who served as a federal judge in Massachusetts for 17 years. “We thought there would be some unique value in bringing together three perspectives: the social science on problems of crime and criminal justice, the perspective of policy research and analysis, and law.”

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to cancel all federal funding for immigrant-friendly “sanctuary cities” — a move that could put him on a collision course with not just New York, but hundreds of jurisdictions around the country...“In terms of him completely defunding sanctuary cities by not giving them any funding whatsoever, it would be virtually impossible to do,” said Phil Torrey, a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together the administration that will help transform his campaign pledges — including those on immigration — into action, Harvard’s community is coming together around members who might be affected...The Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, based at Harvard Law School, is also planning a series of “know your rights” information sessions in the weeks to come, as well as specific sessions for students who want to fill out their DACA renewal paperwork, according to Deborah Anker, clinical professor of law and director of the program...Anker advised students to understand their personal situation, as they may qualify for different programs and alternate deferrals. One encouraging fact, Anker said, is that there is a strong pro-immigrant community in the area, with legal clinics not just at Harvard, but also at Boston University, Suffolk University, and Boston College. That community has mobilized quickly, she said, and she expects that as the weeks pass and Inauguration Day nears, a lot of resources will become available for those who need them.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of “one in, two out” has rhetorical appeal, but it’s going to be extremely hard to pull off. In the abstract, of course, it sounds like a gimmick, and it’s a pretty dumb idea. As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.

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.