Media Mentions

The conflict between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community could have profound repercussions. We spoke recently about the issue to Matthew Olsen, who spent two decades working in senior posts in intelligence and national security for Democrat and Republican administrations. Olsen, 54, served most recently (from 2011 to 2014) as director of the intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center. Before that, he was the general counsel of the National Security Agency. In 2009, he was executive director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force for the Justice Department...Today, he’s an executive at IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm he co-founded, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

There is a growing movement in criminal justice reform to re-examine how bail and pretrial detention is used...Pennsylvania may soon join that movement. As part of justice reinvestment in the state, a recommendation has been made to review how bail is handled. “Our view is that rethinking the bail system provides significant opportunities for making it more effective, doing a better job in ensuring the integrity of the justice system and ensuring the safety of the community, at the same time solving these really intractable problems when systems use money which just results in unfair outcomes,” said Larry Schwartztol, executive director of the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program. Harvard did not contribute to Pennsylvania’s justice reinvestment recommendations but has focused research on bail extensively.

As President Barack Obama prepares to leave the Oval Office, we ask experts how the 44th president of the United States will be remembered. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the Daniel P.S. Paul professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law; and Jim Demers, a political consultant with The Demers Group in New Hampshire join Under the Radar to discuss how Obama’s policies, popularity and grassroots revolution changed American politics.

Law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy has an extra play in its client-relations playbook, which points to the growth of a new arena in business development, and also a new market for executive education providers. Milbank invites and pays for clients it seeks to build relationships with to attend a 4-day business and leadership executive education program at Harvard, including modules in strategy, finance, accounting, leadership, and macroeconomics. The program is developed and run in association with the Harvard Law School (HLS) Executive Education, with crossover to the business school...Milbank specifically invites the General Counsel or Senior General Counsel of its client firms, in other words its key relationship holder inside the target firm. It had 23 such client delegates from across Asia, Europe, South America and the U.S. on its Corporate Counsel program in 2015, and the same numbers again on a second program in 2016.

A letter by Delcianna Winders, fellow. To be clear, we animal advocates aren't "cheering the end of the circus" per se ("It's a sad day when the circus music stops," 1/16), but the end of nearly 150 years of abuse and exploitation by Ringling Bros. We've long lauded the many circuses that featuring only consenting human performers and will continue to do so. If we're going to honestly "reflect on what the show has provided America since its origin in the 1880s," we would be remiss to overlook the fact that Ringling has profited off the backs of virtually enslaved African Americans, humans with all manner of congenital anomalies, and elephants, lions, tigers, and other animals who have spent many hours and even days on end tightly confined and who have been forced to perform through violent, routine beatings.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects people 40 and older. But is it ageism to discriminate against people over 50 compared with those in the 40-to-50 bracket? A federal appeals court has said yes -- but because several other circuit courts have said no, the case is very likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future. The issue raises questions about how discrimination should be measured when it might exist along a continuum.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Muslim girls can be required to participate in swimming classes alongside boys despite their parents’ religious objections, according to the European Court of Human Rights. The outcome would have been the opposite in most U.S. jurisdictions, which have emphasized students’ rights ever since Jehovah’s Witnesses were exempted from the Pledge of Allegiance during World War II. The decision made this week marks the very different situation in contemporary Europe, where children’s interests are contrasted with their parents’ rights, and the schools’ goal of “integration” is getting special weight amid a wave of Muslim immigration.

As we reported, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, announced at a press conference on Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump’s “fix” to his ethics and emoluments clause problems didn’t fix anything...Laurence Tribe also sees this as thinly veiled intimidation. “For a member of Congress to make veiled threats to the federal ethics chief for publicly criticizing the President-elect’s plan to comply with the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause and to avoid ethical conflicts – a plan that Director Shaub of the Office of Government Ethics rightly slammed as meaningless – is profoundly disturbing,” said the legal scholar and litigator. “Such threats can only chill fully protected speech and expression of opinion that is vital to our republic. Nothing about the job description of the Director imposes a gag or compels him to keep his concerns to himself or to limit those concerns to purely internal government memos. Chaffetz has truly gone off the reservation here.”

Dear Betsy: Even students who’ve been accused of sexual assault deserve the chance to defend themselves. Betsy DeVos is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education...In an information vacuum, all sexual assault cases look the same. As Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen declared in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month, “In essence, the federal government has created a sex bureaucracy that has in turn conscripted officials at colleges as bureaucrats of desire, responsible for defining healthy, permissible sex and disciplining deviations from those supposed norms.”

...you’d expect the Obama Department of Education to be doing whatever it could to nurture, support, and protect colleges and universities. But instead, it seems to be acting almost as if it were controlled by . . . a cabal of its enemies. For example, in the area of Title IX enforcement Obama’s Department of Education has taken a statute that simply reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” and turned it into an Orwellian nightmare of what Harvard law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk call bureaucratic sex creep.”

At long last, Donald Trump on Wednesday unveiled his plan to separate himself from his business interests while president, something he previously promised would be oh-so simple to do at the same time he was finding reasons to delay taking any clear action on the matter. Based on what Trump shared Wednesday, the plan wasn’t worth the wait...“His elaborate-looking scheme constitutes at best a Potemkin trust, to coin a semi-Russian phrase,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Slate.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The world's most dangerous flashpoint got much more dangerous Thursday when China sent its lone aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan scrambled fighter jets in response. This is how accidental wars start: provocation and counterprovocation in an environment with too much uncertainty. The uncertainty arises from not knowing the Donald Trump administration’s answer to a pressing foreign policy question: Would the U.S. defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Republicans are putting a great deal of pressure on President-elect Donald Trump to fire Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He should resist that pressure. Any effort to discharge Cordray would be illegal -- and it might even precipitate something close to a constitutional crisis.

It didn’t take long after BuzzFeed leaked an intelligence dossier detailing shocking allegations of collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign (as well as claims that Russia has sexual blackmail against Donald Trump himself) for critics of the president-elect to start dropping the “t” word...But when I asked a few lawyers specializing in national security about the BuzzFeed memorandum, they mentioned that its contents — if true, which is a very big “if” indeed — could bring other laws into play. It’s much too early to speculate about actual indictments, but if the dossier is confirmed, there are a few statutes that would be worth examining. One, according to Harvard law professor and Lawfare co-founder Jack Goldsmith, is the Logan Act, an obscure 1799 law that prohibits citizens of the United States from negotiating with foreign governments and trying to influence their policies vis-a-vis a dispute with the United States...Many legal observers don’t take the Logan Act particularly seriously, however, given that it seems to rather clearly violate the First Amendment and would stand a good chance of being struck down should it even actually lead to a prosecution, according to Goldsmith and other legal observers

...A group of scientists and bioethicists is concerned with how one new reproduction technology in particular might make a future of designer babies far more relevant...“What does IVG change? It is really its combination with CRISPR gene editing,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law professor and one of the authors of a new editorial in Science Translational Medicine that warns IVG may be the bearer of a set of “vexing policy challenges” and ethical dilemmas. “Right now CRISPR is still very much in its infancy, but one could potentially imagine a future a long way off where it was much more sure fire at selecting traits.” IVG, he said, might allow you to very easily produce a large number of embryos, and CRISPR might allow you to then easily edit those eggs and simply select the most attractive genetic options prior to implantation. “It is a little like the difference between Michelangelo painting the sistine chapel, and someone trying to create a similar piece of art on their computer with Photoshop,” Cohen told Gizmodo.

An essay by Samuel Moyn. The foreign policy consequences of Donald Trump’s election are agonizingly unpredictable. As with any schoolyard braggart, Trump says so much that nobody can ever know which parts he might actually mean. Unlike the devil we knew, Trump defies any attempt to forecast his choices, and therefore to anticipate a response. But if progressives stick to a popular front strategy, uniting in a grand coalition allowing liberals and neoconservatives to define a more responsible approach to Trump’s foreign policy, they could miss the ripest opportunity they have had in a generation to indict the Democratic Party’s profound mistakes.

Sugar was in the dock at Harvard Law School this week, accused of a prime role in the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes sweeping the country. Science journalist and author Gary Taubes ’77 made his case that sugar consumption — which has risen dramatically over the last century — drives metabolic dysfunction that makes people sick. The hour-long talk was sponsored by the Food Law and Policy Clinic and drawn from Taubes’ new book, “The Case Against Sugar.”

Staffers from Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic clarified definitions of “sanctuary” spaces in an online seminar Wednesday, offering Harvard’s undocumented students individual legal consultation as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office. Philip L. Torrey, a Law School lecturer who led the seminar, said the label “sanctuary” could mean a number of things in practice, ranging from the physical prevention of immigration enforcement officials from entering a space to the guarantee that those officials have valid warrants before entering. “The term ‘sanctuary’ has no specific legal definition,” Torrey said...Torrey and fellow Law School lecturer Sabrineh Ardalan also briefed attendees on how to navigate immigration issues as Trump transitions to the White House.

Past comments by President-elect Donald Trump are prompting some to think that his administration may lessen enforcement of laws prohibiting bribery of foreign officials. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, enacted in 1977, generally prohibits paying bribes to foreign officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. For the last five years, biopharmas have been in the cross-hairs of the Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission, which jointly enforce the FCPA...What will Trump advocate once he is sworn in as president? Matthew Stephenson, a law professor at Harvard University, told me in an interview for my special report that he was more pessimistic than others. "I don’t expect much to change in the short term, but I am concerned about the mid- and long-term. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” he said.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court took up this challenging policy question Wednesday: How much is a school district obligated to educate a disabled child? The justices will have to choose from a smorgasbord of options offered by the lower courts, the Department of Justice, and the parents and schools in the case. The choices range from just a little more than nothing to the same level of education available to other kids. The outcome will have major consequences for tens of thousands of students -- and for the schools where they study.

Well-known legal scholar, recognized constitutional law expert and member of the faculty at Harvard Law School, Professor Laurence Tribe, went on a Twitter rampage for the ages on Wednesday. It was all in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s major press conference at which his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, was tasked with explaining the plan devised by Trump’s legal team for how his businesses will be run while he is serving as president. Tribe even went on to tell LawNewz.com that “the whole phony setup would make President Trump a living, walking, talking, tweeting violation of the Emoluments Clause each time banks or funds linked to foreign sovereigns are allowed to take steps that Trump will necessarily know are enriching the total value of his family’s mega-business.”