The Harvard Law School Dean's Deafening and Dangerous Silence

Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.

Wrong!

The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.

I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first VIGOROUS PUBLIC INTEREST LAW DAY on April 1, 2025.

Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.

I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.

Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.

No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.

What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.

It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”

Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.

What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?

The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”

The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.

So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:

The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.

He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.

Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”

It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.

A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.

Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.

Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.