Media Mentions

As the 2016 election season ramps up, Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 finds himself at the center of a political firestorm. Over the past month, Republican presidential hopeful and Law School graduate Ted Cruz denounced his former constitutional law professor Tribe as “a left-wing judicial activist” while speaking in a mid-January Republican debate, while rival candidate Donald J. Trump has tweeted and debated in support of Tribe...Tribe said he is not particularly invested in the question of natural born citizenship. Rather, Tribe said, his main interest is in “the Constitution and my sense of how dangerous it is when people play fast and loose with it in order to further their political positions.”

An op-ed by Einer Elhauge. The argument that Ted Cruz is eligible to run for president initially looked strong, then probable but uncertain. But closer examination shows it is surprisingly weak. The constitutional text provides that a president, unlike other elected officials, must be a “natural born citizen.” This language could not mean anyone born a citizen or else the text would have simply stated “born citizen.” The word “natural” is a limiting qualifier that indicates only some persons who are born citizens qualify. Moreover, when the Constitution was enacted, the word “natural” meant something not created by statute, as with natural rights or natural law, which instead were part of the common law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is the separation of church and state unconstitutional? You read that right. The U.S. Supreme Court said Friday that it would consider whether Missouri’s constitution, which bars state aid to religious groups, violates the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against religion. This claim sounds crazy, and to those who wrote the Missouri constitutional provision in the 1870s, it would’ve been. But the claim, in fact, isn’t utterly absurd -- if you consider the historical circumstances in which the provision was drafted.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. We now have our major Supreme Court story of the year: The justices will review the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s plan to defer deportations, stalled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The court’s decision to take the case, United States v. Texas, ensures major drama around the oral argument in April, and fevered anticipation in the run-up to the announcement of the court’s decision sometime in late June.

The Ethiopian government has reportedly ceased its plan to expand its capital, Addis Ababa, after protesters from Oromia demonstrated against the expansion plans over concerns that they would lose their homes...Many activists believe that there are even deeper political issues that no one is addressing. Kulani Jalata, a vocal activist for Oromo and a third year law student at Harvard Law School, believes that mainstream coverage of the protests is missing two key points. She stated those points in an interview with Truth In Media: “The first point regards the Ethiopian government’s illegitimacy. The Ethiopian government is entirely controlled by Tigrayan elites. The Tigrayan population is 4 million—Ethiopia’s population is 94 million.

The Labor Department on Wednesday waded deeper into the contentious issue of joint employment, seeking to clarify who is accountable for violations of employment laws when two different entities, like a manufacturer and a staffing agency, both have ties to the same worker...Conversely, plaintiffs’ lawyers may find the interpretation helpful when litigating cases. “You have a document you can present in court,” said Benjamin I. Sachs, a professor of labor and employment law at Harvard Law School. “You can say the administrator of the wage and hour division sees it this way.”

50 House Democrats wrote HHS and NIH last week that the government should exercise its march-in rights — handing over the patents on some high-priced drugs so that competitors can make cheaper versions. The government can invalidate intellectual property claims that are based on federally-funded research if the benefits of the products aren’t available to the public on “reasonable terms.” The lawmakers believe NIH guidance on when march-in rights would apply could discourage price gouging. Sounds like a good solution — but not so fast. The lawmakers believe NIH guidance on when march-in rights would apply could discourage price gouging. Sounds like a good solution — but not so fast. Rachel Sachs, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, writes. The government’s focus on basic research means its work may help lead to a drug’s development — but the drug may not actually be covered by patents derived from the federally-funded research.

At first glance, the navy spiral-bound tome known as the Bluebook seems rather unremarkable. But beyond its covers, the book details thousands of obscure and specific legal citation rules that require more than a thousand hours to compile. The massive, 582-page legal citation manual inspires both devotion and dread in its users—law students, scholars, and lawyers—who require its guidance for their professional work....Harvard Law Professor Jeannie C. Suk said the Harvard Law Review would not have grounds to claim copyright infringement unless BabyBlue copies specific examples used in the Bluebook. “It seems to me that trying to use copyright to protect the system of citation rules themselves is not promising, particularly given the already widespread adoption of those rules in the legal profession and by courts,” Suk wrote in an email.

Their names are familiar and unavoidable to students who inhabit the buildings and walk along the streets: Mather, Brattle, Holyoke. Their histories—as slaveholders—have largely been overlooked since the buildings were erected and streets paved, until recently. At both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, students, faculty, and administrators have begun reconsidering titles and symbols because of their associations with the legacy of slavery...Members of the advocate group demanding that Harvard Law change its seal, “Royall Must Fall,” though, disagree with Faust’s line of thinking. Law student Alexander J. Clayborne, a member of the Royall Must Fall and Reclaim Harvard Law School student activist groups, said that buildings and titles at Harvard should be reevaluated on a case by case basis. “The problem is the names on these buildings serve to honor these people; they serve to hold them up as someone to be imitated,” Clayborne said. “The fact of the matter is that these people engaged in morally reprehensible behavior and that shouldn’t be honored.”

The Citizens United decision, which amplified the role of money in American politics, also promised something like a level playing field. Both corporations and unions, it said, could spend what they liked to support their favored candidates. But last week’s arguments in a major challenge to public unions illuminated a gap in the Supreme Court’s treatment of capital and labor. The court has long allowed workers to refuse to finance unions’ political activities. But shareholders have no comparable right to refuse to pay for corporate political speech. At the arguments in the case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, the justices seemed poised to widen that gap by allowing government workers to refuse to support unions’ collective bargaining activities, too. The case should prompt a new look at whether the differing treatment of unions and corporations is justified, said Benjamin I. Sachs, a law professor at Harvard. “If we’re going to make this opt-out right for workers more and more muscular, which is what is going to happen with Friedrichs,” he said, “the question of symmetrical treatment of shareholders just becomes that much more important.”

After he left Wall Street to enter politics eight years ago, Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, began fielding the occasional question of when he intended to run for president. “It has come up in jest any number of times,” said Mr. Himes, who always has his answer ready. “There could be constitutional questions.” Mr. Himes, you see, was born in Peru in 1966 while his father worked for the Ford Foundation. That makes him one of at least 17 current members of Congress who, because of their birth outside the United States, could run afoul of the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” presidential requirement should they try to relocate down Pennsylvania Avenue...Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar, believes the “natural born” provision has outlived its original intent considering that the redcoats are no longer coming. “The worry that George III might come over and exert undue Germanic or British influence is no longer a threat,” said Mr. Tribe, referring to a motivating fear of the founding fathers. “There is no defense now for retaining the clause in the Constitution. It really needs to be removed.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. For most of the last thousand years, building mosques was a way of consolidating an Islamic empire’s prestige and spreading its beliefs. In recent decades, Saudi Arabia has been the leading global mosque builder, erecting sanctuaries and paying imams to spread its Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist state religion. Now Turkey and Iran have entered the mosque race, sponsoring new structures in their distinctive architectural styles. But they’re late to the game, at least if the score is tallied by discouraging disfavored ideology and spreading their own religious and political views.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. In October, a Kentucky judge dismissed criminal charges against a man who had shot down a drone flying over his property. Now the drone’s owner has brought a federal civil suit against the shooter, William Merideth, arguing that the Federal Aviation Administration is in charge of all airspace and that it allows drones to fly over private property. All this amounts to a legal mess. The law, both state and federal, is still pretty unclear about where you can fly a drone, and what you as a citizen may do if a drone -- probably with a camera on board -- is hovering above your home.

In two of Ted Cruz’s signature legal briefs before the supreme court, he cited the liberal law professor whom Donald Trump has invoked in questioning Cruz’s eligibility to be president. As Texas solicitor general, Cruz cited Harvard professor Laurence Tribe as “a prominent commentator” in his brief for Medellin v Texas, a case the senator invariably mentions on the stump. In Thursday night’s Republican debate, under fire from Trump, Cruz changed his tune about Tribe, who taught him constitutional law at Harvard, calling him “a leftwing judicial activist, [a] Harvard law professor who was Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush v Gore … a major Hillary Clinton supporter”...Cruz also cited Tribe in his brief for District of Columbia v Heller, a landmark 2008 case in which the court held that the second amendment provided for an individual right to bear arms...“Apparently Senator Cruz doesn’t think I’m too far left for him to cite me in his supreme court brief on behalf of 31 states as a principal authority on constitutional interpretation – when it suits his purposes,” said Tribe. “Somehow I don’t feel particularly complimented.”

The argument about Ted Cruz’s birth and eligibility to be president has become a major fight on the campaign trail between Donald Trump, Cruz and a prominent constitutional scholar from Harvard...Cruz says this is all settled law, but Harvard’s Laurence Tribe disagrees. “It clearly is not settled law,” Tribe said in recent an interview. Tribe brings an interesting perspective to this story. He obviously knows a lot about the law, but he also knows a lot about Cruz — because back in the mid-1980s, Tribe taught constitutional law to Cruz. “He was very colorful,” Tribe recalled. “He took me on all the time, always had his hand up, he always wanted to disagree. And he got an A, and there weren’t that many As in a class of 150 or so.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. One of Europe’s most liberal countries has joined the likes of Iran and Turkey in drawing the ire of Israel. Israel has officially let it be known that Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström isn’t welcome in the country because of comments she made in December warning that Israel might be committing “extrajudicial executions” in connection with stabbing attempts by Palestinians against Israeli citizens. Wallström defended herself in Sweden’s parliament this week, insisting that she “was making an argument based on principles of international law.” Her critics say she’s apologizing for terrorism and hiding behind the law.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be at the center of a jam-packed week of trade action, with the president likely to make a push for congressional approval of the pact during his State of the Union address on Tuesday (Jan. 12) and the International Trade Commission slated to hold a three-day hearing on the agreement starting Wednesday...The latest installment will take place Monday and will examine TPP's impact on the automotive sector, with a focus on the automotive rules of origin. The format will differ from the previous forums in that Levin will testify rather than moderate, and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) will also participate as a witness. The non-governmental witnesses are Mark Wu, a professor at the Harvard Law School and former intellectual property negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; Josh Nassar of the United Auto Workers; and Bill Hickey, chief executive officer of Lapham-Hickey Steel.

The Founding Fathers’ insistence that the presidency be limited to “natural born citizens” was based on their openly expressed fear that “foreigners were disloyal,” as law professor Malinda L. Seymore has written...Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, who Trump quoted during the debate Thursday night as raising “serious questions” about Cruz’s eligibility, said in response to an email from the Post after the debate that the answer depends on one’s approach to interpreting the Constitution. “The more of a genuine ‘originalist’ someone (like Cruz) is, the harder it becomes to resolve that ‘serious question’ in Cruz’s favor. The more of a ‘living constitutionalist’ someone (like me) is, the easier it becomes to conclude that ‘natural born citizen’ has gradually acquired the broader meaning on which Cruz necessarily relies.”

With the United States incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other nation on earth, a prison population that is larger than at any time in our history, and vast racial disparities in incarceration rates for African-Americans and whites, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch ’81, J.D. ’84, called criminal-justice reform “a transformative issue of our generation” in a talk Wednesday at Harvard Law School (HLS). The system is not only about litigating cases, but “just as important, how do we prevent people from interacting with the criminal-justice system? How do we stop them from making the mistakes that lead them into our system? And then, when individuals have served their debt to society, how do we make sure that they have a way to go home to their families, to their communities, to become productive citizens?” Lynch said during a conversation with Carol Steiker, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and Special Adviser for Public Service at HLS.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death penalty Tuesday, but if you think this is a harbinger of the end of capital punishment, think again. The 8-1 decision was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who have no intention of ever ruling death sentences unconstitutional as a general matter. The reason these archconservatives held Florida’s death-penalty system unconstitutional was highly specific. The state gave a judge, not a jury, final authority to decide facts that would determine a capital sentence.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Is the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico sovereign, like the 50 states? Or is it a mere territory of the U.S.? This problem in the metaphysics of colonialism has some relevance to the question of Puerto Rico’s ability to restructure its bonds using bankruptcy law, which will come before the U.S. Supreme Court later this year. But the justices will take up the matter directly Wednesday, in considering whether Puerto Rico and the federal government can separately prosecute someone for the same crime.