Ronald Sullivan

For Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the galvanizing event was a family health emergency. For Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, it was picking up from failure and…

A coalition of immigrants’ rights groups filed a lawsuit against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his Department of Transportation secretary in response to their sending…

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials are being sued in federal court by immigrant rights groups who challenge the constitutionality of the state’s migrant…

Three immigration rights groups, represented by Southern Poverty Law Center and a Harvard Law School organization, sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in federal court Thursday,…

Massachusetts Democrats couldn’t have asked for a better week. The party recaptured the governorship, swept the statewide offices, maintained its dominance of the state Legislature,…

A year ago, attorney Alex Spiro helped rapper Jay-Z win a lawsuit over perfume royalties. This week, he was part of a team that fired…

The Washington Post – Former President Barack Obama told the Harvard men’s basketball team on Friday that the sport taught him “it wasn’t just about…

A federal judge’s extraordinary decision on Monday to interject in the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive government documents at…

An international coalition of activists and human rights attorneys on Wednesday announced they filed an appeal to the United Nations on behalf of African refugees facing racial discrimination in Ukraine and Poland. The filing follows numerous reports from Black refugees who said they faced segregation, racism and abuse as they tried to flee for safety from war-torn Ukraine to Poland. ... Ronald Sullivan, of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, called it "offensive" and said the media is comparing pain and suffering of different communities. "It is grotesquely ahistorical as well. Europe certainly cannot claim that it has been immune from the pillages of war," Sullivan said Wednesday. "It cannot stand as it's somehow superior in that regard to the Middle East and parts of Africa. So, they're [the media] not only getting the history wrong, but they're perpetrating a very ugly form of racial stereotyping."

An op-ed by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.: When Laura Coates was a federal prosecutor, she learned that the victim in a car theft case she was prosecuting had an outstanding immigration warrant. He had illegally crossed the border at 16, but in the 20 years since then had worked, started a family and lived a law-abiding life. Coates was instructed by her superiors to have the witness come in as planned for the trial, but, instead of testifying, he would be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What do the results of these three different cases say about the American criminal justice system and the country's so-called “racial reckoning”? Ron Sullivan, Harvard Law professor and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard and Renée Graham, Boston Globe columnist and associate editor, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss.

Friday afternoon, the jury in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse came back to deliver the final verdict, not guilty. WORT Assistant News Director Nate Wegehaupt is joined by Harvard Law Professor Ron Sullivan to discuss the verdict, and the parallels to other cases here in Wisconsin.

An op-ed by Ronald S. Sullivan, Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law: In a two-week trial that reignited debate over self-defense laws across the nation, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting three people, two fatally, during a racial justice protest in Kenosha. ... As a professor of criminal law, I teach my students that the law of self-defense in America proceeds from an important concept: Human life is sacred, and the law will justify the taking of human life only in narrowly defined circumstances. The law of self-defense holds that a person who is not the aggressor is justified in using deadly force against an adversary when he reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury. This is the standard that every state uses to define self-defense.