Media Mentions

State and local prosecutors across the United States are increasingly bringing criminal charges against employers who violate their workers’ rights by stealing wages or providing unsafe work environments, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive, Washington DC-based think-tank. “This is happening now in large part because worker organisations – like unions and advocacy groups – have pushed for it in many instances. This is happening now also because we have in our country a growing understanding of how extreme workplace violations have become,” Terri Gerstein, a senior fellow at EPI and the report’s author, told Al Jazeera. Prosecutors are also reconsidering their roles and thinking of ways they could use their prosecutorial power to pursue economic and social justice by holding bosses who violate the law to account, Gerstein added. Gerstein’s paper is the second in EPI’s New Enforcers series, which focuses on players at the state and local levels working to uphold and promote employee rights. The firstreport released last year, also authored by Gerstein, argued for increased state and local enforcement of workers’ rights.

Three transgender protesters who were arrested last year and taken to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center (TGK) in Miami-Dade County say they faced gender discrimination and severe mistreatment from officers. Now represented by a host of nonprofit advocacy groups, the three are seeking an overhaul of jail policies and compensation for their experiences. Christian Pallidine, Gabriela Amaya Cruz, and Jae Bucci were arrested at separate Black Lives Matter protests in Miami last summer and detained at TGK, where they allege that officers with the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) subjected them to genital inspections and humiliation because of their gender identities. In an April 28 letter to County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, lawyers from the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic asked the mayor to enter into a structured negotiation, an alternative to a lawsuit wherein both parties try to resolve a claim without going to court. The advocacy groups want to discuss holding the officers responsible for violating MDCR's own policies on transgender people.

Several states, including Illinois and Nebraska, recently put in place restrictions that cap interest rates at 36% on consumer loans, including payday loans. Advocates claim these restrictions protect consumers from getting in over their heads with these traditionally high-cost loans, but opponents maintain that these types of laws will reduce access to credit by forcing lenders out of business with unsustainable rates, leaving people nowhere to turn when they’re short on cash... “In our estimation, banning payday loans harms consumers on net, but regulations that allow payday lending, but limit repeat borrowing, can help consumers,” says Hunt Allcott, one of the study’s lead researchers and a visiting professor of law at Harvard University...Implementing a 30-day “cooling off period” for payday loans allows consumers access to credit when they need it, but it also forces them to pay back the loan sooner (rather than continue reborrowing the loan), which is in line with what borrowers say they want for themselves in the long run, Allcott says. The cooling off period has to be at least a month because it has be long enough to actually force borrowers to go a pay cycle without getting a payday loan, Allcott says. “Most people, in the days after they’ve gotten paid, have a lot of money in their bank account. It’s not until you get within a few days of your next paycheck that you’re actually short of cash and need a loan to make ends meet,” Allcott says.

Parler, the conservative-friendly “free speech” social media app, is back in the Apple App Store. But like anything involving social media and free speech, its return is complicated. Beginning on Monday, Parler is available for download on iPhones and iPads. This comes around four months after Parler was banned or limited by Apple, Amazon, Google, and virtually every other major tech company for allowing some of its users to openly organize violence following the 2020 US election — namely at the January 6 US Capitol insurrection... “It’s going to be an interesting story to watch in a number of ways,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies content moderation online. “There’s the story of what happens with Parler itself, whether it does get more serious about policing hate speech and violent content, and then what does it mean for Apple to get into the content moderation game.”

A podcast by Jill Lepore: During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally. She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting to turn them against their country and the American war effort.

In her new book, “On Juneteenth,” Annette Gordon-Reed explores the complexities of the past and how we think of them.

While the story of her home state is a large part of the focus of historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s latest work, “On Juneteenth,” it is also a very personal project. Gordon-Reed’s new, 144-page book is named for the holiday commemorating the moment when news of legalized slavery’s end in the U.S. finally reached African Americans in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — about 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation. A blend of history and memoir, it shines a light on some of her early experiences in the segregationist South — she became the first Black student to attend a white school in her town — and how the country’s largest state “has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.” Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor, is famed for her groundbreaking “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997), in which she showed that the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, had fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved. Her 2008 follow-up, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” chronicled the lives of Hemings and her children, earned her a Pulitzer Prize in history and a National Book Award. The Gazette recently spoke with Gordon-Reed about her latest work.

Amanda Kulka expected her six-year fight for student loan cancellation would be over by now. Powerful allies, including a state attorney general and a federal judge, agreed that she and other students in Massachusetts had been defrauded by the defunct for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges. The courts even granted all 7,200 of them a full discharge of their debt in June, rebuking former education secretary Betsy DeVos’s attempt to block their request for relief. The Trump administration appealed the decision, bringing the order to a standstill. But with the arrival of a new administration, one with a keen interest in consumer rights, Kulka believed the case would soon be over. She was wrong... “I’m shocked that more than 100 days in we’re still in an active appeal on something that is so opposed to what the Biden administration claims it’s about,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing borrowers in multiple Trump-era cases, including the class-action lawsuit in which Kulka is involved. She added: “We won the case so all they have to do is follow the law. It’s incredibly frustrating to our clients who have been waiting for so long for someone to do the right thing.”

Dozens of colleges and universities across the country have announced COVID-19 vaccine mandates for returning students...The question: Can colleges and universities legally require students to get vaccinated for COVID-19? The answer: In general yes, with a few exceptions for medical and religious exemptions...Our experts say that federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require that schools make reasonable accommodations for those with medical conditions. There are also some arguments for religious exemptions, but that’s going to depend on the state and how courts apply existing statutes. "Some colleges and universities may say, all right, if you don't want the vaccine, we have a reasonable accommodation, which is you will continue to be on Zoom every day," Carmel Shachar said. Shachar and David Bloomfield said that even though the vaccines are only authorized under emergency use, rather than full FDA approval, it shouldn't change much legally.

For years, Facebook has grappled with the thorny question of who should be the ultimate “arbiter of truth” when it comes to moderating content on its near ubiquitous social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and ultimate decision maker, has agreed that it should not be him — semi-outsourcing the problem to a group of his own making, called the Facebook Oversight Board...It is currently funded — through a $130m trust — by Facebook. And it has binding authority over a very narrow type of case: whether a removed piece of content should be reinstated or an offensive post should come down, and whether users should remain banned. It only hears a handful of these a year. “It’s still looking at that very narrow slice of what content moderation is, namely how Facebook treats individual posts,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It doesn’t look at things like groups, pages, down-ranking decisions, how the news feed works in terms of prioritisation, how Facebook treats entire accounts.”

Norfolk Southern Corp. shareholders yesterday approved a resolution calling on the coal-reliant railroad company to report on how its lobbying aligns with the Paris Agreement. The resolution was the fifth political influence-related proposal at a Fortune 250 firm to gain a majority of shareholder support this annual meeting season, according to data compiled by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. The string of shareholder victories comes as banking giant JPMorgan Chase and Co., oil major Exxon Mobil Corp. and tech titan Amazon.com Inc. are set to face similar resolutions later this month. Experts think momentum is building in favor of greater disclosure of corporate spending on lobbying and politics...Shareholders rarely approve public-interest proposals, according to a new research paper from Roberto Tallarita, the associate director of Harvard Law School's program on corporate governance. He defines those as ones focused on political, social and environmental issues. In Tallarita's review of more than 2,400 resolutions presented to S+P 500 companies over the past decade, "only a minuscule fraction of public-interest proposals obtain a majority of votes (about 1% in my 10-year sample)," he wrote in an email. In that context, a handful of successful political influence resolutions already this year is remarkable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on May 13 updated its guidance regarding mask-wearing for people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19...The question: Is a business asking a customer about their vaccination status a violation of HIPAA? No, most businesses would not violate HIPAA by asking about a customer’s vaccination status...HHS says protected health information under HIPAA includes information that relates to a person’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition. HHS has a list of what information is protected on its website. While HIPAA rules apply to covered entities and specific business associates, the rules don’t extend to most businesses, according to Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Because the average business is not a covered entity or a business associate of a covered entity within the meaning of HIPAA, the statute does not prohibit them asking them about vaccination status,” Cohen said in an email to the VERIFY team.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Here come the psychedelics. A striking new study published in Nature Medicine argues that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy represents “a potential breakthrough treatment” for post-traumatic stress disorder. Other studies are in the works considering the potential therapeutic applications of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD and cannabinoids. These follow well-received books on different forms of psychedelic use by such mainstream figures as food writer Michael Pollan, novelist Ayelet Waldman, and columnist Ezra Klein. If you’re a reader of mainstream news media, expect to hear more and more about this topic over the next few years. And even if you are a buttoned-down rule-follower, expect to hear an increasing number of your friends and acquaintances expressing interest in psychedelics — and maybe even experimenting with them. None of this is happenstance. It’s the product of a sophisticated, loosely coordinated effort to encourage the gradual re-legalization of psychedelics via medicalization and cultural normalization. The movement doesn’t seem to be motivated mainly by money, although there is doubtless money to be made. Instead, the psychedelic community is broadly motivated by a genuine belief that these substances — “medicines,” as many refer to them — contribute meaningfully to human well-being and are not addictive or dangerous when properly used.

A book review by Kenneth Mack: Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840” is the rarest of things — a constitutional romance. Amar, an eminent professor of law and political science at Yale, has great affection for his subject as a text that is worthy of loving engagement by scholars and the public at large. His 700-page narrative covers the “main constitutional episodes” that Americans faced as they revolted against Britain, created a Constitution and Bill of Rights, and built a new nation. Amar argues that the rebellious British subjects sparked a decades-long “constitutional conversation,” which eventually drew in men such as John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall. His book appears at a time when the Constitution has been criticized for its suppression of the revolution’s popular impulses, its undemocratic features such as the electoral college, its embeddedness in slavery and its deliberate exclusion of so many from its iconic invocation of “We the People.” Amar’s story is more celebratory, but the strength of his argument depends on whether his central metaphor of a conversation accurately captures what is at stake in this book.

Defense attorneys hope the Supreme Judicial Court’s recent decision on the constitutionality of a virtual suppression hearing winds up as just a footnote in history given the court’s concession that even the most fundamental of rights may be curtailed in response to the exigencies of a public health crisis...Katharine Naples-Mitchell, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, pointed out that the SJC was careful to narrow the scope of its ruling. “It’s a complex decision that I think is really limited to the moment that we are in. The court has built in a lot of qualifiers throughout the opinion, noting explicitly that it’s just limited to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Naples-Mitchell, who co-authored an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the institute, Boston Bar Association and Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

A recent decision from the Supreme Judicial Court weighed in on the fraught issue of how to ensure defendants’ rights are not being put at risk by public safety measures implemented to address the coronavirus pandemic. The defendant in the case, John Vazquez Diaz, was charged with trafficking in more than 200 grams of cocaine, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years in state prison. He filed a motion to suppress evidence obtained as part of a controlled delivery of a package to his home. Due to court closures required by COVID-19, the trial judge sought to move forward with a virtual hearing...As an amicus brief filed by the Boston Bar Association, Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School noted, any abrogation of the right to confront witnesses is likely to fall disproportionately on people of color. That’s because suppression motions are most often filed in narcotics or weapons possession cases, which disproportionately involve Black and Hispanic defendants.

A startup called Orchid is offering a spit test that tells a couple the odds that their children will grow up to have certain conditions...It’s sending the message that people affected by these diseases are not desired by society, says Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School who specialises in bioethics. “What the company is really saying is, we're going to help determine if your child has schizophrenia, and then we’re going to affirm your view that having a child who has some risk of schizophrenia is not a child you want to have, and we're going to empower you to replace it with a child you prefer.” Cohen refers to this as “liberal eugenics” – the idea that individuals are empowered to voluntarily choose what kind of children they want to have. “If you're really concerned about what the life of a person with schizophrenia looks like in America or the UK, the solution is not to empower more parents to avoid children with schizophrenia – the solution ought to be to find ways to improve the lives of people with schizophrenia,” Cohen says. “I would love to hear what kind of work the company is doing to contextualise these polygenic risk scores in a way that actually helps people understand the disorders in question, rather than merely says, here's your number – good luck.” Siddiqui and Orchid failed to respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment. The company does have a number of blog posts on its website that feature the perspective of people whose loved ones suffered from some of these conditions.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: On New Year’s Eve of 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance premiered, featuring lovable corsairs relegated to the eponymous Cornish seaside resort. It marked quite an image makeover from the beginning of the century, when — in 1801 and again in 1815 — the U.S. fought two naval wars in the Mediterranean against piracy, known as the Barbary wars. How piracy went from menacing seaborne threat to charming comic opera over the course of the 19th century should give policymakers some clue about how to prevent attacks by cyber pirates, like the ransomware attack that crippled the Colonial Pipeline this week. Whether the pirates are in Russia or North Korea or elsewhere, the U.S. is going to have to engage in some old-fashioned hard-power geopolitics to change those government’s incentives. It’s no exaggeration to say that ransomware attacks have quietly become an industry. But it’s one that’s managed to maintain a low profile until now, because neither victims nor pirates are eager to share information on the scale or frequency of hacks. (That reticence could be one reason the FBI reports numbers that are almost laughably low.) Now, with the latest attack causing a pipeline shut-down and raising east coast gas prices, the national security side of the phenomenon is front and center.

Early in the morning of April 1, Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who represents a rural district in the northeast part of the state, posted a video to Twitter from the Capitol in Austin... “It’s a little after 2:30 in the morning and the Texas Senate has just recessed,” he said. “The Senate passed Senate Bill 7, which is an omnibus election integrity bill. This bill is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” ... The For the People Act faces its own anti-democratic hurdle to passage—not one concocted by the Republican Party, but the legislative filibuster, a long-standing feature of the Senate that the Democratic caucus has the power to eliminate or change...Jonathan Gould of the University of California Berkeley School of Law and Harvard’s Kenneth Shepsle and Matthew Stephenson have been working on a fix for the filibuster that might unshackle Democrats while preserving their ability to resist minority rule if they lose power in Washington. “The essence of the proposal is to use the same tool that has given us the dysfunctional current filibuster—that is, the Senate power to determine its own rules of proceedings under Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution—to move the Senate in a pro-democratic direction,” Stephenson said. “And that would be by replacing the current supermajority filibuster rule with what we call a popular majoritarian cloture rule, under which debate in the Senate on a measure could end only with the support of a majority of senators who collectively represent a majority of the population—or, more accurately, a larger share of the population than those senators in opposition.”

Guest: Michael J. Klarman is Kirkland + Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, and his latest, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.

The man accused in the Atlanta spa shootings was indicted on murder charges, yesterday. The prosecution says it will be pursuing a hate crime penalty. We recently sat down with our resident legal scholar, Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, to help us understand the complexity of defining and prosecuting hate.