Media Mentions

Student loan cancellation has happened thanks in part to these heroes. There are also many non-profit organizations who have helped lead the charge and defend the rights of student loan borrowers, including those who have been misled by their college or university. These champion advocates are shaping the future of student loans and tirelessly working to ensure that student loan borrowers get a fair shake. There are many to recognize, but some include the Project on Student Lending at Harvard Law School, Student Debt Crisis and Student Borrower Protection Center, among others.

Leah is joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen and Deeva Shah to discuss an important case, Roe v. United States, about the procedures for addressing workplace misconduct in the federal courts.

On op-ed by Sabi Ardalan and Azadeh N. Shahshahani: One year ago, Project South and other immigrants’ rights advocates filed a civil rights complaint revealing shocking medical abuse and invasive gynecological procedures suffered by women held in immigration detention in Georgia, and across the country. It’s been one year since that complaint made national news, prompting horrified members of Congress to demand an investigation; one year since the women who survived this abuse called for justice, and wondered if anything would be done about it.  Almost one year later, the answer is “No”. Not a single official has been held to account. A new report provides chilling in-depth, first-hand stories from multiple women, illustrating just how brutal medical abuse in immigration detention can be.

The COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech was the first to reach American arms, and it accounts for more than half of the 380 million doses administered in the U.S. so far. ... Still, analysts don’t expect Mr. Biden to speak on behalf of Pfizer. His team spent months saying a similar vaccine from Moderna and a one-shot option from Johnson & Johnson were highly effective against COVID-19. “Why the ecumenical attitude? First off, they don’t want to tell Americans who received one up until now they have to be revaccinated. Second, J&J, with its one-dose regimen, for example, has been preferred by some communities. And when people are hard to reach or mildly vaccine skeptical, the ability to provide only one, not two, doses may be a big plus,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a health care expert at Harvard Law School. He said emerging data suggests the vaccines perform differently for fighting the delta variant or maintaining immune responses. “So we may reach a point where the administration will more strongly endorse one over the other. But at the moment, I don’t see them going there, and I think it would take a lot for them to get to that point,” he said.

Michigan's first-ever citizen redistricting commission is finding itself on a steep learning curve as members race against the clock to draw new maps ahead of the 2022 election, crunching a months-long process into a matter of weeks following an unprecedented delay in census data. ... While some states include competitiveness in their redistricting criteria, the commission isn’t required to draw districts that ensure that candidates from each political party have an equal chance of winning. But the maps overall can’t give any party a leg up. The result is that Democratic and Republican voters will be treated fairly, said Ruth Greenwood, the director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said during a recent event held by Voters Not Politicians. While those who make up a political minority in their district might not feel represented by the legislator from their district, Greenwood noted that individual voters are also represented by the entire legislative body. "When they make a decision, it doesn’t matter what your rep has said, it matters what the whole body does," she said.

Facebook (FB.O) is taking a more aggressive approach to shut down coordinated groups of real-user accounts engaging in certain harmful activities on its platform, using the same strategy its security teams take against campaigns using fake accounts, the company told Reuters. The new approach, reported here for the first time, uses the tactics usually taken by Facebook's security teams for wholesale shutdowns of networks engaged in influence operations that use false accounts to manipulate public debate, such as Russian troll farms. ... An expansion of Facebook's network disruption models to affect authentic accounts raises further questions about how changes might impact types of public debate, online movements and campaign tactics across the political spectrum. "A lot of the time problematic behavior will look very close to social movements," said Evelyn Douek, a Harvard Law lecturer who studies platform governance. "It's going to hinge on this definition of harm ... but obviously people's definitions of harm can be quite subjective and nebulous."

An op-ed by Terri Gerstein, fellow and director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program: Earlier this month, Tyson Foods and the United Food and Commercial Workers announced that Tyson meatpacking workers will, for the first time, be entitled to paid sick leave, as long as they’re vaccinated. They’ll also get paid time off for vaccinations and for any side effects. The deal resulted from a negotiation between the multinational and the UFCW in relation to the company’s new vaccination mandate. Given that lack of paid sick days is an impediment to vaccination, the deal is a great example of how union negotiation over vaccine mandates can lead to better outcomes for workers and for public health.

A Sept. 18 rally outside the Capitol in support of those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection is the first major test for law enforcement authorities since that infamous date. ...The rally comes as a bitter partisan divide has emerged over Jan. 6: Republicans have sought to discredit the work of the Jan. 6 select committee and some House Republicans have gone so far as to prop up and support the accused insurrectionists. ...Conversations with constitutional experts and lawyers with whom the Jan. 6 committee staff has consulted point to several potential obstacles to the investigation — the biggest one being Trump himself. ...But even with potential stonewalling by Trump, investigators will still be much less constrained when pursuing documents compared to when Trump was in office, according to Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School who testified in the first public impeachment inquiry into Trump. “It's a lot simpler when you have an administration in office who is not the one you are investigating,” said Feldman.

An op-ed by Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School: “We don’t have any more time” was Joe Biden’s outcry last week as he urged climate action after visiting hurricane-wracked New Jersey. The storm made landfall in Louisiana before roaring up the East Coast. Along the way, it unleashed flash floods, fast-moving tornadoes, and high speed winds that prompted the evacuation of thousands and caused over 50 deaths. Biden’s response? A public spending hike he says will better protect Americans. The president’s $1.2tn infrastructure deal and a $3.5tn spending package — which are working their way through Congress — is stuffed with green goodies like power lines that can carry more renewable energy, upgraded insulation for homes and, most notably, subsidies for electric autos. ...Luckily, when it comes to curbing emissions, there’s a solution. It doesn’t rely on electrification, automation, or any other technological knowhow, but it’s got teeth. It’s called ride-sharing. Our work shows that were the public to forego individual trips in favour of communal ones, emissions would fall and fall fast.

With the arrival of the 2020 Census redistricting data, voting maps have become the latest front in America’s never-ending, two-party battle for control of Congress and statehouses. ...Attorney Ruth Greenwood shares Bradlee’s and Duchin’s belief that better and more data can improve redistricting outcomes, but she brings a different skill set to this challenge. The director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, she is actively engaged in election law litigation, and took two partisan gerrymandering cases from trial to the Supreme Court. Greenwood is a co-founder of PlanScore, a free online resource that measures partisan gerrymandering against four distinct measures. ... “When we started, it would take 10 minutes to run a plan, which was still amazing compared to my many hours of work to analyze a plan,” says Greenwood. Since then, the software has evolved to be able to accomplish this task in under 90 seconds.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: When people say they are motivated by conscience, even implausibly, employers and government have no morally defensible choice but to take their word for it.

Amazon.com Inc. is facing a unionization effort at a fulfillment center in Canada, just months after defeating a similar drive in the U.S. ...Amazon will have less time and less discretion to carry out an anti-union campaign in Alberta than it did in Alabama, said David Doorey, an associate professor at York University in Toronto. Authorities in Alberta are more likely to deem an onslaught of mandatory anti-union meetings illegally coercive, he said in an email. “Canadian labor law has less tolerance for aggressive anti-union campaigning by employers than the U.S. model,” said Doorey, who is also a research associate at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and former attorney for the United Steelworkers.

The National Park Service issued a record of decision Monday in response to reports of tule elk dying at Point Reyes National Seashore, allowing the continuation of commercial cattle ranching on park lands while making “improvements” to the elk population’s management...Environmental and animal rights activists have criticized the National Park Service over the last year for its handling of the tule elk population, arguing that more than 150 elk have died on park lands since last year, amounting to more than one-third of the species’ population. At the root of the criticism, underscored in a lawsuit filed in June by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, is a fence on park service land that prevents the elk from grazing in the southern portion of their habitat, which is leased to private commercial ranchers.

An op-ed by Randall Kennedy: A string of professors have been condemned, disciplined, even fired for saying the N-word in full.

Small businesses in Massachusetts employ more than 1.5 million people here. Some of those employers will now have to require their employees to be vaccinated, or test negative for COVID once a week, under new rules issued last week by President Joe Biden. Governor Baker has also mandated that more than 40,000 public sector employees in the commonwealth be vaccinated, with no testing option. In the face of more mandates, some are turning to religious exemptions: citing faith as a way to skip the shots...We turn to Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR's Legal Analyst.

An op-ed by Mark Roe and Michael Troege: The Liberal party announced its plan to raise the corporate tax rate on large banks and insurance companies from 15 per cent to 18 per cent. Maybe the banks should pay more taxes; maybe not. But if banks need to be taxed more, this is not the right way to do it. It will incentivize them to take on more debt, creating unnecessary dangers if an economic crisis hits the Canadian banking system.

An unusual coalition is banding together in a petition to release an 84-year-old former Black Panther convicted for his role in the killing of a police officer. Sundiata Acoli was sentenced in 1974 to life without the possibility of parole until after 25 years for the first-degree murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster...Acoli’s supporters include the ACLU of New Jersey, the Center for Constitutional Rights and even four Black law enforcement organizations, including the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice and the Blacks in Law Enforcement of America. That group filed a brief last month in the case co-authored by lawyers at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Jesse M. Fried and David H. Webber: Since Unilever subsidiary Ben and Jerry's announced an Israel boycott last month, triggering numerous state anti-boycott laws, Unilever's market capitalization has fallen by almost $14 billion. Unilever's contractual rights give it a strong basis for overturning the boycott. Its puzzling failure to do so shows immense disregard for its own investors.

Rachel Maddow tells the story of how Cambridge, Massachusetts bar, Grendel's Den, whose case to obtain a liquor license over the objections of a neighboring church was argued before the Supreme Court and won by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, setting a precedent that could put an end to the new Texas abortion ban. ... Tribe: The whole case arose because of this arbitrary power that was given to a private entity. It happened to be a church. But the issue is the same whether it's a church or not. There are cases in which the Supreme Court said you cannot give governmental power over peoples' lives or liberty to private bodies, that have no public accountability.

Republican candidates and conservative activists are planning to attack President Joe Biden's COVID vaccine mandates in court and on the campaign trail, but they face uphill battles in trying to block the plan. ... Laurence H. Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said the threatened lawsuits reflect "ideological commitments rather than genuine constitutional analysis." The threatened lawsuits are more political than legal, he said, adding that Republican comments on the Biden plan are in sharp contrast to "the far greater willingness to support unilateral executive actions by former President (Donald) Trump."

On Thursday, the Biden administration delivered some long-anticipated tough talk on behalf of America’s sane majority. It came from President Biden directly on covid-19 mandates, and from the Justice Department on constitutional order. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “By emphasizing the affront to federal supremacy and the rule of law inherent in S.B. 8’s intentional blockage of women’s ability to vindicate their own rights, the complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law.” In laymen’s terms: Enough is enough. Texas simply cannot do this.