Media Mentions

Shortly after he became president-elect, at a time when most incoming leaders are greeting well-wishers and pondering their plans for the nation, Donald Trump reportedly tried to leverage his new status against a foreign leader to enrich himself. Argentine President Mauricio Macri was one of many such leaders to call Trump and congratulate him on his electoral college victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. According to a report in the Argentinian paper La Nacion...Trump asked Macri during this call to “authorize a building he’s constructing in Buenos Aires.”...Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe agrees. “If this report is accurate,” Tribe told ThinkProgress, “it’s both alarming and disgraceful and clearly implicates the principles at the core of the Emoluments Clause.” Though Tribe notes that “some scholars have made serious arguments to the effect that this Clause contains a loophole for the highest official in our Government,” Tribe finds those arguments unpersuasive. “In my view, the language of the Clause literally covers financial benefits foreign powers might bestow on the American President, and the anti-corruption and anti-divided-loyalty purposes of the Clause apply even more clearly to the President than to any less august officer.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Should President-elect Donald Trump decide to appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to a White House post, there are two potential nepotism problems: one legal and one moral. Neither should block the appointment. The law likely doesn’t cover White House appointments, and the ethical concern is outweighed by the value of transparency among the president’s closest advisers.

Donald Trump’s most senior advisers said on Sunday that he would not illegally use the White House for personal profit, as concerns mounted that he was already mixing business interests and official duties....Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard who taught Barack Obama, said on Twitter that Trump was risking legal action from business competitors if he did not move to stop the presidency benefitting him financially. Tribe described Trump as “uniquely suable” thanks to his current corporate setup.

The Philippines and Russia became the latest countries this week to announce their plans to turn their backs on the International Criminal Court — a move that's worrying experts who say it delegitimatizes the institution's quest for justice...Alex Whiting, a former prosecutions coordinator at the ICC who now is a professor at Harvard Law School, said Duterte's rationale is likely to avoid prosecution himself. For Russia, it's a signal that the country will not be supportive of any potential court investigation having to do incursions in Ukraine or Georgia.

On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to formally withdraw the country from the 124-member ICC, which is the world's only permanent court on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. As African nations increasingly reject the work of the ICC, Russia's withdrawal may have some clout in undermining the organization's prestige, according to legal experts...Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who formerly worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC, mentioned that after a spate of departures “all eyes were on Kenya and Uganda because leaders in both countries have talked about leaving.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The Republican Senate has blocked or delayed many of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees; his Supreme Court pick of Judge Merrick Garland is just the most visible. Now President-elect Donald Trump will be able to capitalize by filling those slots. And because of the Senate Democrats’ 2013 decision to exercise the “nuclear option” and eliminate the filibuster for all judicial nominees except for the Supreme Court, they won’t be able to filibuster Trump’s candidates.

For environmentalists and climate activists, the dangers of a Donald Trump presidency are myriad, particularly when his recent victory is combined with Republican Congress....“There’s no question there will be a regulatory rollback, the rhetoric will change dramatically, and climate change as an issue will not be as high on the agenda,” says Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental Law Program at Harvard University. “But we should be cautious and wait and see how dramatic the rollback will be… No administration can do everything at once. They’ll have to prioritize.”

Few people have had a more tumultuous 18 months than Nebraska’s ten death-row inmates. In May 2015 the Nebraska legislature voted to abolish capital punishment, which would have converted their sentences to life imprisonment. The governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation but was overridden. He then poured $400,000 of his family’s money into financing a referendum to reinstate the death penalty, which appeared on the ballot on November 8th and passed with 61% of Nebraskans’ support. The proposition was one of three pro-death-penalty measures on state ballots. Two passed with ample margins, and prospects for the third look promising...Carol Steiker, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-author of a new book entitled “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment”, says people rarely take the time to understand ballot initiatives (one voter in Palo Alto says it took him hours to educate himself about the 17 measures on California’s ballot). A better bellwether of what will happen to the death penalty, Ms Steiker says, is sentencing. In 1996, 315 convicts were given death sentences. In 2015 only 49 were. This suggests that prosecutors, jurors and judges have all grown warier of capital punishment.

...DuPont is one of dozens of American companies that have abandoned a long-term approach to doing business after being the target of so-called activist investors...Activist investors have some supporters. Lucian Bebchuck, a Harvard professor who is known as one of the most devout defenders of activist shareholder campaigns, says that activist interventions target underperforming companies, and that they improve the company’s performance in the long-run. “Policymakers and institutional investors should not accept the validity of the frequent assertions that activist interventions are costly to firms and their shareholders in the long term,” he writes, in a 2015 paper, “The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism.”

A year after a racially-charged act of vandalism shook the Law School and sparked an intense period of race-related activism, Law School student affinity groups are presenting a visual exhibit at the school to mark the anniversary of the incident...Now, a year later, leaders of student affinity groups, including the Black Law Students Association, the Native American Law Students Association, and the Women’s Law Association, produced the commemorative exhibit, entitled “Diverse Voices in Legal Education.” It consists of black-and-white photographs displayed throughout Wasserstein Hall of diverse legal scholars from across the country...Black Law Students Association President Kristin A. Turner said she and other affinity group leaders came together earlier this fall to brainstorm ways to highlight the anniversary of the incident and ensure that discussions about diversifying the faculty continue at the school.“We wanted to make sure that we were not only flagging the date itself but we were also shedding more light and bringing issues back to the forefront that are ongoing conversations at the Law School,” Turner said.

An op-ed by Harmann Singh `19. After working at a civil rights nonprofit organization defending the rights of Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and the broader Asian American community, I came to law school in Cambridge this year to learn how to better advocate for marginalized communities. I spent months working with people targeted by hate, but I was astounded to face such hate myself just blocks from where I am learning how to fight it. Over the weekend, I was confronted by a man who called me a “f***ing Muslim” and followed me around a store aggressively asking where I was from, and and no one in the store said a thing. I was on the phone with my mom the entire time, and we were both concerned for my safety as this man stood inches away from me. While deeply painful, what happened to me pales in comparison to the hate and violence many of my brothers and sisters have faced across the country. However, one thing is clear — there is far more positivity and love out there than hate.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. I remember well how I felt as dawn broke the morning after Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008. My hopes were boundless, my expectations unrealistic. That President Obama did not succeed in mobilizing the deeply transformative political dynamic I dared to anticipate is no doubt true, especially in light of this year’s election results. But looking back, I remain enormously proud of my former student and chief research assistant. Obama achieved great things both domestically and globally, all in the face of deeper recalcitrance and obstruction than most of us had imagined possible...The contrast with how I felt the morning after this election could not have been starker. The electoral vote victory of Donald Trump, a bigoted and ill-informed bully who called forth the worst impulses in many of his followers, and who inspired the emergence of the vilest elements of our society, including unabashed KKK racists and neo-Nazis, felt then and continues to feel utterly devastating.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t yet chosen the people whose job it would be to propose a U.S. Supreme Court nominee for him to choose. But that hasn’t stopped speculation about who will be picked to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. It would be a mistake to make a projection with any confidence at this stage. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the parameters and constraints that will go into the decision, which yields some scenarios with names attached. The only thing that can be said with confidence is that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee will be a conservative.

The Harvard Black Law Students Association hosted Justice for Black Women Week, a series of events centering around violence and inequality affecting black women and girls, in the hopes of bringing black women to the focus of nationwide conversation. HBLSA arranged four events starting Monday and continuing throughout the week, consisting of movie screenings, lectures, and open town-hall style discussions. “Whenever we hear about state violence against blacks or the problems that are plaguing the black community, it’s usually framed in a way that talks about black males… the reality is that black women are affected by a lot of the same traumas that affect black men,” said HBLSA’s Internal Vice President Adabelle Ekechukwu, who helped organize the week. “For example, when police brutality affects a black woman, when there aren’t enough reproductive justice initiatives to help black women. These are things that help black women that aren’t really focused on in the media.”

On the morning of Oct. 21, Netflix and Twitter were kicked offline by hackers – annoying binge-watchers and prolific tweeters for several hours. But the hacking of popular websites is a harbinger of what’s to come for consumers using devices connected to the internet, and Congress faces a tough question of how to protect consumers and businesses without over-regulating the tech industry...“Everything is a computer. Your phone is a computer that makes calls, your refrigerator’s is a computer that keeps things cold,” testified Bruce Schneier, a special adviser to IBM security and a lecturer at Harvard University. “Attack is easier than defense, complexity is the worst enemy of security, and the internet is most complex thing ever built.” Schneier argued that the federal government must regulate and set standards for devices connected to the internet like it does for the safety of cars. He wants to create a new government agency and argued that Republicans swiftly created the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 in response to safety threats.

A letter by Simon Heldin `19. USA Today’s Alia Dastagir is right that there is hope that we will eventually elect a woman president in her column “What Trump’s victory tells us about women.” I am actually quite optimistic about this, and could see America finally shattering the highest and thickest of glass ceilings in 2020. While Hillary Clinton, without a doubt, was supremely qualified for the job as leader of the free world, this should not be taken to mean that she was an outstanding campaigner. To the contrary, she was — and has always been — a relatively weak candidate. She has admitted herself that she is “not a natural politician,” and it is obvious that she is much better suited to run a government than to run for office. Widespread sexism combined with her idiosyncratically poor electability unfortunately made a surprise victory possible for someone as exceptionally unfit for the presidency as Donald Trump. But there is still some cause for optimism.

A recent spate of departures may prompt a change in approach for the International Criminal Court. On Wednesday, Russia issued a formal decree withdrawing from the ICC...“Until now, countries have joined the Court but none have left,” writes Alex Whiting, a professor at Harvard Law School who formerly worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, in an email to The Christian Science Monitor. “These withdrawals might make it easier for states to leave the Court in the future if there is a risk that they will fall under investigation, and that would in turn seriously undermine the legitimacy of the Court.”

On Wednesday’s Access Utah we’ll talk with acclaimed law professor and historian, Annette Gordon-Reed, as a part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative...Her new book, with fellow Jefferson scholar Peter Onuf, is "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,” which explores Jefferson’s vision of himself, the American Revolution, Christianity, slavery, and race.

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Christopher R. Deubert. From major media outlets to federal research funding to conversations among concerned spectators and parents, the nation is at a moment of unprecedented focus on the potential health consequences of playing football, especially at the professional level. There is a clear need to develop better preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for individual players. However, to truly protect and promote player health, it is essential to address individual factors and structural features simultaneously. One such structural feature is the relationship between players and the club doctors from whom they receive care. The system must do more to ensure that players receive excellent health care they can trust from providers who are as free from conflicts of interest as possible.

Doctors that work for professional football teams have conflicts of interest that could jeopardize players’ health, according to a report by Harvard researchers...“[Players] are treated by people who are well-meaning, don’t get me wrong, but operate in a structure that’s infected with a structural conflict of interest,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who coauthored the report. “That conflict of interest is that they serve two people — they serve the player and the serve the [team].” The report quotes an unnamed player who says that some players don’t trust doctors because they work for the team. Coauthor and Harvard Medical School professor Holly Fernandez Lynch said investigating individual instances of jeopardized decision-making fell outside of the scope of the report.

A new report from Harvard Law School proposes drastic changes in the way health care is administered in the NFL, urging the nation’s most popular sports league to upend its system of medicine and untangle the loyalties of the doctors and trainers charged with treating players...In interviews, the Harvard researchers say they were surprised by the league’s response. “I had expected we’d maybe be quibbling around the margins of how it would actually be implemented,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center and one of the report’s authors. “I did not expect that we would have to have this conversation about whether there is, in fact, a conflict because it’s so obvious on its face.” “Admitting you have a problem is the first step to get over,” added Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen, another of the report’s authors, “and while we think many of the people who serve as club medical staff are wonderful doctors and excellent people — this is not to besmirch them or their reputation — it is not going to produce a good system if you’re operating under an inherent structural conflict of interest and one that is corrosive to player trust.”