Media Mentions

Prosecutors and states are increasingly trying to tackle wage theft through criminal action against employers, seeing it as a necessary complement to civil enforcement and an instrument of public safety, experts say. ... The need for criminal prosecution of wage theft and other employment law violations has become all the more imperative, said Terri Gerstein, the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program. "I think that the situation of working people in our country has become dire," she said. "One of the benefits of criminal prosecution is it just sort of changes the calculus … there's a whole other set of consequences other than just, 'OK, I'm going to pay money and keep on violating the law.'"

Food and Drug Administration officials said in July that Pfizer’s application for full approval of its COVID-19 vaccine would enjoy “priority review,” and set a target deadline for finishing by January 2022. They beat the deadline easily, licensing the shots in late August. That’s faster than other vaccines and drugs that have been marked as priorities for the agency. ... “EUAs were used pretty sparingly till recently. There was some use in 2009 related to H1N1, but other than that you don’t see many notable uses,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a health expert at Harvard Law School. “In terms of its pre-history, you might trace it to some of the pressure FDA faced during the AIDS crisis at being too slow to meet the needs of the infected, which among other things prompted it to introduce a priority review designation and accelerated-approval program in 1992.”

Ten years after the end of "don’t ask, don’t tell, former members of the military who were forced out of the service for being gay say they still face repercussions from the policy that one lawmaker called “a dark chapter in the history of our nation’s military.” On Wednesday, members of a House subcommittee heard testimony about the lingering effects. Some ex-service members suffer from debilitating depression and trauma disorders. Others struggle to find work, and many don’t have access to the benefits other veterans receive — a discrepancy that leaves them at higher risk of mental health issues. Studies have found that 15 percent of LGBTQ veterans attempt suicide, compared with less than 1 percent for the entire veteran population. ... Peter Perkowski, a clinical instructor at the Veterans Legal Clinic of the WilmerHale Legal Service Center of Harvard Law School, said he’s met many LGBTQ veterans who are still suffering, “and some of them weren’t traumatized by their work,” Perkowski said. “They weren’t traumatized by going to war or on a deployment. They were traumatized by being investigated. They were traumatized by being witch-hunted. They were traumatized by being harassed, and they were traumatized by how they were treated on the way out.”

When a Massachusetts woman and her partner learned neither of them could carry a child, the women turned to their Facebook friends for help. “[W]ho wants to pop out a baby for my [fiancee] and I?!” the Massachusetts woman posted in early 2017, according to court documents. It wasn’t long before she received a private message. “Hey, if you and [fiancee] were serious about a baby … then I would do it,” wrote a woman who said she was childhood friends with the fiancee. ... “This case is truly amazing,” Janet Halley, a Harvard law professor, told The Post. “The court had no law to apply.”

A novel lawsuit challenging the federal judiciary's handling of sexual harassment is "emblematic" of all that is wrong with the courts as a workplace, say advocates, who warn that a ruling favoring the judiciary could leave its employees with few options to combat misconduct. ... That lack of statutory protections is one of the reasons why Roe's suit claims the judiciary's failure to address her harassment complaints violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth Amendment, according to professor Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School, who is serving as lead counsel on Roe's appeal. “Roe cannot bring a claim under Title VII, or any other federal employment statute, because it does not cover the 30,000 federal judiciary employees,” Gersen said. “That would be an unacceptable gap in legal protection against employment discrimination, if the Constitution did not protect those employees from discrimination.”

Health apps have to tell their users about any data breaches or risk a hefty fine, the Federal Trade Commission clarified in a policy statement last week. The rule that requires that transparency is a decade old, but it hasn’t been enforced before. The new guidance serves as a warning to the many companies elbowing into the health app space: the FTC is taking issues around health data privacy seriously — even if it won’t be able to tackle all the privacy gaps on its own. ... The FTC’s new focus on making sure companies follow the rule could trigger internal changes at health apps, says David Simon, a research fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It’s going to force them to at least put systems in place, if they’re not already in place, to figure out when these breaches occur and then notify people,” Simon says. The rule says that groups have to report any data breaches that they should have known about, not just that they do know about — so they have to have ways to monitor data.

This month saw the publication of the inaugural issue of The American Journal of Law and Equality, a project developed by three Harvard Law School professors in collaboration with MIT Press. The first issue features a variety of views from legal, academic and philosophical scholars, including its three editors and founders: 300th Anniversary University Professor Martha Minow; Michael R. Klein Professor of Law Randall L. Kennedy; and Robert Walmsley University Professor Cass R. Sunstein ‘78.

The podcast After Hours joins the TED Audio Collective’s growing roster of programming, alongside shows like Body Stuff with Jen Gunter, Design Matters with Debbie Millman, Worklife with Adam Grant, ZigZag and The TED Interview with Chris Anderson. ... Hosted by acclaimed Harvard Business School professors Youngme Moon, Mihir A. Desai and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, After Hours discusses and debates current events that sit at the crossroads of business and culture.

Millions of Americans receive support from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to purchase healthy food. SNAP benefits, also commonly called food stamps, act as a safety net for low-income households during personal challenges like a job loss and national economic crises like the coronavirus pandemic. ... The prevalence of food insecurity, meaning a family's access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other resources, remained consistent at 10.5% from 2019 to 2020 in spite of the coronavirus pandemic. But Emily M. Broad Leib, clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, says issues around equitable access to food assistance hurts some populations more than others. "We're pumping money into SNAP and school meals, and yet there's still extremely high rates of food insecurity," Broad Leib says. "Black and Latino families have two and three times the rates of food insecurity as white households. Families that have households with children, the food insecurity rates increased, so the overall number doesn't really show how in certain segments there is real concern."

A new voting bill from Senate Democrats seeks to immediately address the most egregiously gerrymandered maps as states begin the once-a-decade redistricting cycle. ... If the bill passes — a big if given Democrats’ slim margins in the Senate — it could stave off a number of attempts at gerrymandering just as states are beginning the process of redrawing district lines. “The new bill is really, really clear to the point of being mechanical,” Nick Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School, told The Hill.

John C. Eastman, one of the lawyers who advised President Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, reportedly presented Trump with an exquisitely Trumpian plan to have Vice President Mike Pence do his dirty work: Pence should lie. ...By the time he got to Step 3, Eastman dove into territory that Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has described as “jaw-droppingly stupid.”

An argument that I have ... made a lot around here over the last couple of years is that, as all the stocks are increasingly owned by the same handful of giant diversified index and quasi-index investors, those giant investors will think of themselves less as owners of particular companies and more as owners of the economy. ... If you are a diversified owner of the world’s economy, you have to take a broader view. And so BlackRock is constantly talking about climate change, and explicitly arguing that it cares because of its economic interests as a long-term diversified shareholder. I think that this stuff is interesting but you can definitely be a skeptic. Roberto Tallarita of Harvard Law School is a skeptic; here is his recent paper on “Portfolio Primacy and Climate Change”: 'Climate change is a quintessential market failure. Individual companies do not have economic incentives to reduce their carbon emissions and therefore produce more emissions than is socially desirable. However, according to a theory that is gaining increasing support among academics and market players, large asset managers (and, in particular, index fund managers) can become “climate stewards” and force companies to reduce their impact on climate change. ... This Article offers the first systematic critique of this theory.'

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.