Media Mentions

When Donald Trump recently asked his supporters in Ohio to keep an eye out for voter fraud on election day, his plea came with a knowing suggestion: “When [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”...Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School agrees that Mr Trump’s “First Amendment defence would no longer be airtight” if his campaign advocated racial harassment at “a rally in close proximity to the time and place where people were waiting to cast their ballots”.

Lawrence talks to Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars and lawyers, about his offer to provide free legal help to any of Donald Trump's accusers.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The new South Africa has been a bastion of respect for human rights, and its decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court is a sign that something is terribly wrong with the tribunal. And it’s no secret: Since 2005, when it first issued arrest warrants, the court has indicted 39 people, every one of them African. There are various explanations for this, some of them defensible. But the bottom line is that it was an inexcusable mistake for the court not to pursue other cases. It wouldn’t have been tokenism, because there are, unfortunately, plenty of non-African war criminals. Yet even if it were, the tokenism would have been justified to show that the court is more than the imperialist agent of regime change that many Africans consider it.

An op-ed by Dean Peacock and Emily Nagisa Keehn. For decades, women in rural South Africa have shouldered the burden of caring for mineworkers who return home with silicosis contracted in South Africa’s gold mines. These women do the back-breaking and emotionally taxing work of caring for men who are dying slow and painful deaths, their lungs irreparably scarred by the silica dust they breathe in underground...These conditions are the predictable outcome of deliberate mining policies.

...With the presidential election around the corner, Science asked experts in computer science, business, and law to weigh in on how companies like Google and Facebook, which function as the primary gateway to online information for millions of voters, could influence the outcome...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, has written about Facebook’s unique ability to mobilize voters by placing reminders in their newsfeeds. If it wanted to, Facebook could mobilize users likely to vote in line with the company’s interests (as it tried to do in India) based on their demographic group and geographic location—a sort of digital gerrymandering capable of garnering hundreds of thousands of additional votes.

...At which law schools do the top music lawyers gain that expertise? These 10 stand out as the alma maters of the majority of the music ­industry's most accomplished attorneys...For the past two decades, aspiring attorneys at Harvard Law School have offered pro bono legal advice to young musicians, producers and other music professionals through the student-run Recording Artists Project. RAP has an affiliation with Boston's Berklee College of Music and offers its students guidance on matters from contracts to copyrights. Among those who have benefited is Berklee alumna Esperanza Spalding.

Once a champion of the International Criminal Court (ICC), South Africa dealt a blow to the world tribunal Friday by announcing its intention to withdraw, a move that came on the heels of a similar move by Burundi. Here are five key questions following Pretoria's announcement: Is this the end of the ICC? Not according to Harvard law professor Alex Whiting. "International criminal justice has always had its ups and downs and setbacks in the past. This is another setback, but the court is not going to disappear," he told AFP.

An op-ed by Winston Shi `19. In a year of the unexpected, one thing surprises me more than anything else: Cosmopolitan America is trying to take the white working class seriously. The white working class has spoken. It spoke for Bernie Sanders and it spoke for Donald Trump. And so in the run-up to Election Day, the media’s been churning out feature after feature on “forgotten middle America.” Even Foreign Affairs is getting in on the action! But at Harvard, cosmopolitan America’s most famous training ground, while there are plenty of Sanders voters to be found, there are almost no Trump supporters at all.

In what was supposed to be a major policy speech on his first 100 days as president, Donald Trump’s only new proposal was vowing to sue the women who have accused him of sexual assault. But in response, some prominent First Amendment attorneys are vowing to defend Trump’s accusers pro bono, or free of charge. Ted Boutrous of the law firm Gibson Dunn and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe have thrown their hats into the ring on social media, and Boutrous says there are others willing to follow suit.

Professor Charles Ogletree was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several months ago and he and his family want to stress the importance of education and of early diagnosis. Professor Ogletree has been a professor at Harvard Law School for the past 30 years. He's an advocate for continued education and empowers children to chase their dreams. His work has been recognized all over the world and dozens of schools have been named after him.

Although the death penalty is still considered constitutional by the Supreme Court, Americans’ appetite for this barbaric practice diminishes with each passing year. The signs of capital punishment’s impending demise are all around...Since there were about 14,000 murders around the country last year, it’s easy to imagine that the small number of newly condemned people shows that the justice system is focusing on the “worst of the worst.” But that’s wrong. In fact the crimes of the people sentenced to death are no worse than those of many others who escape that fate. Rather, nearly all of last year’s death sentences came from a tiny fraction of counties with three common features: overzealous prosecutors; inadequate public defenders; and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion. This was the key finding of a two-part report recently issued by the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School.

When Susan Benesch began looking at how speech could incite mass violence, her research took her to far-flung places like Kenya and Burma. Lately, she’s been unable to ignore a case study at home in the United States. The American University law professor and Harvard University faculty associate has grappled for months with whether Donald Trump’s rhetoric constitutes dangerous speech as she has come to define it...Rob Faris, director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, where Benesch is a research associate, described her work as “innovative” in how it attempts to delegitimize dangerous speech rather than try to stifle it, thus protecting freedom of speech.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House narrowing, it’s not too soon to ask: If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in November, what attitude should Democrats and Republicans alike take toward Trump voters? It will be tempting to excoriate or patronize them, or to woo them to your cause. But all of these approaches would be mistaken. A much better strategy -- for both parties -- is to engage in selective memory, and to treat Trump voters as though the whole sorry episode of his candidacy never occurred. That may seem counterintuitive, especially because there’s no doubt that Trump’s candidacy shows the system needs fixing. But it’s based on the solid intuition that Trump voters, many of them alienated already from mainstream party politics, will only be further alienated by anything that associates them with a candidate whose brand was victory and who delivered defeat.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If Donald Trump loses the election and doesn’t concede, it won’t violate the U.S. Constitution. But it would break a tradition of concession that dates back more than a century and has achieved quasi-constitutional status. And like most enduring political customs, its value goes beyond graciousness: It helps ensure the continuity of government and offers a legitimating assist to democracy itself.

...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who was a member of Gore’s legal team, said in an email that the timing and nature of Trump’s statements made comparisons to Bush v. Gore “off-point.” “Launching challenges after the election based on such demonstrated irregularities bears no resemblance to deliberately withholding the standard agreement that, once the official results have been certified after all postelection challenges have been resolved, one will abide by the final outcome,” Tribe said. Asked if he would accept the election results, Trump said at the debate that he would “look at it at the time.” He later said that he would accept the results if he won. Tribe said that the candidate’s comments were “totally disqualifying.” “To create mystery and suspense over one’s willingness to live by democracy’s verdict after repeatedly claiming that the only way one could lose would be as a result of a ‘rigged election’ is to challenge the very principles that have made our national transitions of power peaceful throughout our history,” Tribe said. “It is to invite nothing short of civil war.”

Native Americans currently represent 1 percent of the U.S. population, but thousands of years ago they were the indigenous inhabitants of the territory known to some of them as Turtle Island and eventually to others as North America. Today, there are 567 federally recognized tribes. The largest are the Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation. Harvard Law School, the Harvard University Native American Program, and the Harvard Native American Law Students Association held a conference last week to examine relations between Native Americans and state and federal governments. Keynote speakers included University of Colorado Law School Dean S. James Anaya, Quinault Indian Nation President Fawn Sharp, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Keith Harper. The Gazette interviewed Kristen Carpenter ’98, Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law at HLS, Council Tree Professor at University of Colorado Law School, and one of the event organizers, on the history of American Indian law, the friction between federal and tribal laws, and the rise of the indigenous rights movement in the United States.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As the countdown to the November 8 election proceeds, one major party candidate continues his jihad against American democracy, twisting the knife ever deeper not just into himself and his unhinged quest for the most powerful position on the planet but into the very heart of our body politic. And he defends doing so by deliberately misapplying what happened 16 years ago in Bush v. Gore, a case in which I represented Vice President Gore both as lead counsel in all the briefs filed on his behalf in the Supreme Court and as the oral advocate in the first of the two Supreme Court arguments in that fateful case.

...America's bail system has become a central issue in the fight to reverse mass incarceration and to ease the disproportionate burden shouldered by the poor and minorities. In courthouses, statehouses and ballot boxes across the country, civil rights lawyers and progressive policymakers are working to curb the practice of demanding money in exchange for freedom before trial, an effort tied to a broader crackdown on other money-based penalties, such as fees and fines...Larry Schwartztol, executive director of the newly formed Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School, said he sees it happening already. "There's been this amazing pendulum swing from what had been a bipartisan coalition in the 1990s for a punitive approach to criminal justice to a broad convergence now of people thinking about ways to be smart on crime, to move away from mass incarceration and to account for the harmful effect the criminal justice system has had," Schwartztol said. He added, "I think there may be a tipping point for sweeping change."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Senator John McCain may not have meant to say that a Republican Senate would refuse to vote, either up or down, on any Supreme Court nominee put up by Hillary Clinton. But what if Republican senators just said they would vote down any candidate Clinton nominated? Would the resulting political standoff amount to a constitutional crisis?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: t’s hard to imagine a presidential election with higher stakes than the current one: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer radically different ideas about the country's direction, and many people believe that one or the other would be catastrophic. Yet new evidence raises the possibility that we will see an unusually low voter turnout.

With racial disparity in incarceration rates greater in Massachusetts than the country as a whole, Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants on Thursday said the courts are taking steps to study and address that issue. ... "We need to find out why," Gants said. Gants said Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School has agreed to investigate ethnic disparity in the state's incarceration rate.