Christine Desan

Cheryl Straughter spends at least 12 hours each weekday in the kitchen at her Roxbury restaurant, Soleil, cooking southern classics like shrimp po-boy sandwiches, ribs and fried chicken. When Straughter, who’s Black, set about opening the restaurant three years ago, she did what a lot of businesspeople do to get off the ground: apply for a loan. But banks refused her requests, saying she didn’t own enough assets that could serve as security for the loan. Ultimately, she cobbled together enough funding through grants from the city of Boston, money from relatives and $50,000 of her own savings. Straughter said she felt like a salmon swimming upstream. ... “There are many borrowers who don’t fit the metric that makes them an obvious candidate for a loan from a commercial bank,” [Christine] Desan said. “Those borrowers tend to be shut out even though they would contribute enormously to our economic development as a commonwealth.”

Massachusetts is less than a week away from lifting its remaining COVID-19 businesses restrictions. But even as companies emerge from more than a year of immense losses and pandemic-induced rules, leaders in the local Black business community aren’t looking forward to a return to normal...So, the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, or BECMA, unveiled a policy agenda last week for a post-pandemic “new normal” in the hopes of ensuring communities of color not only bounce back but also close those existing racial gaps...Without having to maximize profits for shareholders, advocates say the government-run institution could help meet a currently unfulfilled need for capital estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars in Massachusetts. “The commonwealth really is leaving money on the table,” said Christine Desan, a professor at Harvard Law School...Going forward, Desan says the bank could also help generate revenue in addition to the return on loan interest rates. “What’s fascinating about a public bank is, if you can actually spark and support economic development in a city, the returns are not just the returns on their own bit they’re also returns — because the communities begin to prosper — of more tax revenue,” she said.

Members of the Harvard Law School faculty published an open letter to students and Harvard affiliates Monday criticizing President Donald J. Trump for calling for a military response to ongoing protests against police brutality. The letter received signatures from 160 faculty members, including former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha J. Power. It was reopened for signatures on June 2 after requests from additional Law School teaching faculty and law librarians. The authors of the letter denounced a tweet posted by Trump on May 29 which included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in reference to nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. They argue the president’s language encourages violence by private citizens. “By legitimating lawless action by public officials, the President’s tweet invites other individuals to take similarly destructive action,” the letter reads. The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Law School professor Christine A. Desan, who worked on drafting the letter, said Trump’s tweet signified a commitment to using violence against citizens involved in the protest. She said she finds the message problematic since Trump speaks as the Commander in Chief of the Army. “We don't under our Constitution live in a society where even if somebody is stealing something they get shot,” she said. “To have him pledge to use excessive state violence against people indiscriminately is really unlawful — deeply unlawful.”

Sixty-five Harvard law professors have condemned President Trump's actions in response to protests over the killing of George Floyd. In a letter, the professors say the president's tweet saying "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," commits federal authority in a way that violates the law. Harvard law professor Christine Desan signed the letter and also denounced the president's threat to deploy the military to quell protests. "One message I hope the letter sends is to remind us all that the Army — and for that matter the police forces — are not his army," Desan said. "It's not Trump's army that he’s deploying. It’s our army, our military, and we have the right and responsibility to make sure that that military is used responsibly." The letter was addressed to Harvard law students.

MMT (Modern Monetary Theory—a form of post-Keynesian economics) is everywhere these days. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders embrace it; Paul Krugman and George Will write about it; the Financial Times, Forbes, and The Economist have all run columns about it. Even the men’s parenting website Fatherly had an article on it. Do historians have anything to add?  ...MT, along with the euro crisis and awareness of  austerity’s social effects, has done much to open monetary and fiscal debates to wider audiences. Simply recognizing that money is political and historical (central, as Harvard Law Professor Christine Desan likes to say, to how a polity constitutes itself) is a difficult breakthrough for most people. On the other hand, seeing money in this way doesn’t—in a fractured polity characterized by demagoguery and high levels of inequality—make policy any easier to write or implement.

Roughly two dozen Harvard Law School professors have signed a New York Times editorial arguing that the United States Senate should not confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Harvard affiliates — including former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and Laurence Tribe — joined more than 1,000 law professors across the country in signing the editorial, published online Wednesday. The professors wrote that Kavanaugh displayed a lack of “impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land” in the heated testimony he gave during a nationally televised hearing held Sept. 27 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee....As of late Wednesday, the letter had been signed by the following: Sabi Ardalan, Christopher T. Bavitz, Elizabeth Bartholet, Christine Desan, Susan H. Farbstein, Nancy Gertner, Robert Greenwald, Michael Gregory, Janet Halley, Jon Hanson, Adriaan Lanni, Bruce H. Mann, Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, Robert H. Mnookin, Intisar Rabb, Daphna Renan, David L. Shapiro, Joseph William Singer, Carol S. Steiker, Matthew C. Stephenson, Laurence Tribe, Lucie White, Alex Whiting, Jonathan Zittrain

To our students and the wider HLS community, We write to condemn a series of acts by President Trump that incite violence and are inconsistent with a democratic legal order. On November 29th, the President circulated unverified videos that explicitly vilified members of a religious community as dangerous. In his tweet, the videos appeared without any comment, context, or explanation, as if the fact that they concerned “Muslim” actors itself established their relevance. In that way, the videos justified hostility towards individuals on the ground of their faith alone. The President’s message further endorsed violence insofar as it expressly retweeted, thus apparently approving, a source convicted of religiously aggravated harassment...Christine Desan, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, John Coates [and 78 more HLS faculty and administrators].