Media Mentions

Testimony continued for the fourth day in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin as witnesses offered often emotional testimony on the death of George Floyd. Alan Jenkins, a professor of practice at Harvard Law School, joins CBSN with more on how this case could change accountability for police officers.

President Joe Biden has requested that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona prepare a report on the president’s legal authority to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt per borrower, White House chief of staff Ron Klain said in an interview on Thursday with Politico...On the campaign trail, Biden said he supported $10,000 in student loan forgiveness, but he is under mounting pressure from members of the Democratic Party, advocates and borrowers to go further by canceling $50,000 per person and to do so through executive action...During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to forgive student loans in the first days of her administration, including with the announcement an analysis written by three legal experts, based at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, who described student debt forgiveness through executive action as “lawful and permissible.” Others say Biden would run into court challenges if he tried to nix the debt on his own.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The “For the People Act” currently being proposed by House Democrats would transform the way the U.S. runs federal elections. Known as H.R. 1, the bill would make it substantially easier to vote. It would also counteract restrictive legislation enacted by Republican state legislatures in recent years. One provision stands out from the rest: the one that would end state-level gerrymandering by requiring that all legislative districts be set by independent, nonpartisan commissions, rather than by the state legislatures. The good news is that this provision would do more to restore election fairness than all the rest of the act taken together. Its benefits would be worth the cost of breaking the filibuster. The bad news is that a conservative Supreme Court might hold that it is unconstitutional for Congress to prescribe a system for states to design districts. That would undercut the legislation and allow gerrymandering to continue. The framework for assessing what Congress can do about state electoral districting is Article I, section 4 of the Constitution, which says: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

A letter by David J. Harris and Katy Naples-Mitchell: Who counts when it comes to “mass shootings” and gun reform? The March 24 editorial “A new window for gun reform” misconstrued the crisis of gun violence. In particular, we take issue with the statement that “the last mass shooting incident in a public place was in March 2020.” Over the past year, if one defines a mass shooting as one in which there are multiple victims, there have been hundreds, more than in recent years, including at restaurants, gas stations, bowling alleys, and grocery stores. However, few have captured the national spotlight. Nearly 50 percent of these unprecedented yet unnoticed mass shootings have targeted Black people and communities of color. Evidently they don’t register when, as professor Charles Ogletree pointedly questioned more than 30 years ago, we “expect them to happen there.” According to data released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, young Black men and teens are killed by guns at a rate 20 times their white counterparts. Black women and girls are also at highest risk: four times more likely to be killed than white women and girls. Stricter gun control laws won’t solve this public health crisis.

Aaron Mukerjee joined the Harvard Law School Voting Rights Litigation and Advocacy Clinic to fight for voting rights for Asian Americans who have long been ignored and disenfranchised.

Kelly Loftus has a knack for finding open vaccine appointments online. The Franklin school teacher knew she could help people who weren’t as computer-savvy, so she created the Facebook group, MA Covid Vaccine Scheduling. The group now has 390 members. Loftus said she’s helped more than 100 people get the vaccine...In the first few months of the vaccine rollout, a glut of third-party sites offered to guide people through the frustrating process of booking an appointment. Many of the sites are run by volunteers who ask for personal information, including names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, emails and health insurance information. Loftus said she understands the process can make some uneasy... “It comes down, I think, to a matter of trust,” said David O’Brien, Assistant Research Director for Privacy and Security at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “Looking at this in the best light, this could be a situation where you have websites that are trying to do something good for people and they don’t mean to do harm,” O’Brien said. But once you go outside of a government-operated website or the healthcare system to find the vaccine, O’Brien said it’s hard to guarantee your information will be protected. “Be discerning, check out the website, do your due diligence, and think about whether this is really for you,” he said.

President Joe Biden’s call to spend $400 billion to expand home and community-based care is raising advocates’ hopes that Congress may finally address long-standing challenges the industry, the elderly and people with disabilities face...Demand for home health services is already high: almost 820,000 people in the U.S., most of them people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, are on waiting lists to get home or community-based care...The government could shrink or eliminate waiting lists by making home support and care services mandatory for Medicaid programs, which are funded by a combination of federal and state funds and run primarily by individual state governments, Ari Ne’eman, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said. That change would likely need to be paired with added money. Currently states are required to provide people on Medicaid access to institutions, such as nursing homes, if needed, but not home-based care, Ne’eman said. States have the option to set up their own models for delivering home services to those who don’t want to enter long-term care facilities. “Some people are on these waiting lists for years,” he said. The problem has only been exacerbated by the spread of Covid-19, which hit nursing homes and other congregate care settings hard, Ne’eman said. “If there’s one big takeaway from Covid: you do not want to get stuck in a nursing home,” he said.

The new top federal prosecutor in Washington is standing by a Trump-era Justice Department policy of charging certain gun crimes in federal court instead of locally, continuing an initiative that draws stiffer prison sentences and has concerned some city leaders and criminal justice reform advocates...Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo, one of Reed’s lawyers, said it was disappointing that the new leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office was retaining an approach that has been “widely criticized by people who are fighting for racial justice and racial equity in the District and who care about D.C. rights.” “There’s a broad consensus that mass incarceration doesn’t work and doesn’t make us safer,” he said. “President Biden said that his first week in office and he is right. But this is straight out of the old mass incarceration playbook that President Biden was criticizing a few weeks ago.” The government’s assertion that it is now targeting only people deemed violent, Crespo said, is inconsistent with its decision to keep prosecuting his client in federal court.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the early nineteen-nineties, I went to the university’s gymnasium one evening each week for a women’s self-defense class. We were instructed on how to fight off would-be rapists with physical force, using our knees, elbows, fingernails, and keys, being sure to mark an attacker’s face for police identification. Walking to my dorm in the dark, I was alert to not being a victim. It was part of the informal feminist curriculum that also included Take Back the Night marches and the slogan “No Means No,” one that dates me to an era when women were trying to defy vulnerability. As a rape counsellor in those days, I remember chuckling with feminist peers when we heard about a new Sexual Offense Prevention Policy at Antioch College. The rules said that consent had to be asked for and given at each new level of sexual activity, with silence conveying a lack of consent. Saturday Night Live mocked the policy: “May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks?” “Yes, you have my permission.” This stilted picture of how sex should proceed seemed absurdly unrealistic and made a small college’s policy a national punch line, despite its serious and understandable aim to prevent rape. At the time, even the category of “date rape,” on which I was trained to educate others, mostly envisioned a forcible act or one imposed on an incapacitated person.

While its billion-dollar basketball championships serve as a platform for players to voice their disapproval of its rules, the NCAA will polish and present its weathered case for amateurism to the U.S. Supreme Court this week in what legal experts describe as a crucial moment in the century-old journey toward athlete compensation. Attorneys in NCAA v. Alston are expected to make their oral arguments before the high court on Wednesday in a case that goes to the heart of the NCAA’s slow-to-evolve rules...All of the legal proceedings — the Supreme Court case, state laws and federal bills — create a very busy and confusing intersection of legislation. Among lawmaking bodies, who has the most power? Who trumps whom? If the Supreme Court rules for the NCAA, for example, could Congress still enact NIL reform? Yes, in fact, it can. “Congress can trump the Supreme Court,” said Peter Carfagna, a Harvard Law professor who is the faculty supervisor of the school’s sports law clinical program. “That’s unequivocal.” ... The Supreme Court “makes a lot of statements about the critical role the NCAA plays and the maintenance of the revered role of amateurism,” Carfagna said. The NCAA “holds on to that like a bulldog and it is still the crutch to this day.”

The murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, accused of killing 46-year-old Black man George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, began March 29. It comes 10 months after the killing sparked ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and a national reckoning over racial equality and the long history of police brutality, especially against non-white people, in America. Chauvin’s trial also takes place about 75 years after a similarly extreme case of police brutality that helped shape the modern civil rights movement, when a Black Army veteran was blinded in police custody after being beaten in the eye with a billy club. The incident, which resulted in a trial over whether excessive and unnecessary force was used, is the subject of a new American Experience documentary, The Blinding of Isaac Woodard, premiering Mar. 30 on PBS...Then, as now, police violence against Black Americans was “routine, unaddressed and overlooked,” and Black WWII veterans were often targets, as Kenneth Mack, a professor of law and history at Harvard University who appears in the PBS documentary, tells TIME.

Every 10 years, after the collection of census data, states are required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to ensure that they remain equal in population. The process — as readers of this newspaper know — is vulnerable to gerrymandering, in which districts are redrawn to give favored parties, office holders or constituencies an advantage in elections...As states await census data to guide redistricting, there is one wild card in the mix: the possible enactment of voting rights reform, HR 1 or the For the People Act of 2021 — the measure that passed the House on March 3 on a 220-210 vote, but faces the threat of a filibuster in the Senate. I asked Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard whose specialties include election law, about the bill. He emailed me to say that: “The voting legislation currently before Congress would revolutionize the redistricting process if it passed. It would require all states to use truly independent commissions, effective immediately. Separate from this structural reform, the bill would also include quantitative partisan bias thresholds that maps wouldn’t be allowed to exceed. These thresholds would have real teeth.” At the same time, Stephanopoulos continued, the legislation would put the brakes on voter suppression laws: “The bill affirmatively requires a series of participation-enhancing policies for congressional elections: automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, at least 15 days of early voting, expanded mail-in voting, restrictions on voter purges, restrictions on photo ID requirements, etc.”

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Alec MacGillis, award-winning ProPublica journalist and author of the new book “Fulfilment: Winning and Losing in One Click America,” explains Amazon’s role in deepening America’s regional wealth disparities. He also discusses the recent efforts to unionize some Amazon fulfillment centers and the threat that unionization poses to the company.

For years, Larry Nassar sexually abused female athletes under the guise of medical treatment while serving as the doctor for USA Gymnastics...If someone like Nassar were abusing children in Massachusetts, officials at a private athletic organization or a higher education institution would not be required under the state’s mandated reporter law to report him to the Department of Children and Families – because they are not considered “mandated reporters.” ... A 2018 report by a legislative committee recommended the state update its mandated reporter law to fix what it called a “glaring loophole” that puts youth athletes at higher risk for abuse...Michael Gregory, who teaches education law at Harvard Law School and is managing attorney at the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, which helps traumatized children succeed in school, said the proposed changes represent “a sweeping expansion” of the mandated reporter law. He worries that the law could “become a major source of surveillance” if, for example, a television repair person entering a home becomes a mandated reporter. “The more people you have participating in that surveillance, the greater the likelihood that racial disproportionality will increase, particularly when it’s non-professionals, those not trained in working with children, who would be rendering reports to DCF,” Gregory said.  Gregory also voiced concerns about removing the poverty and disability exemptions from the definition of neglect. “Nobody’s saying that families experiencing poverty, or where disability is a factor, shouldn’t be entitled to lots of support. They should,” he said. “But whether an agency that can take your children away from you is the place they should be getting support is another question.”

A first-of-its-kind study of Suffolk County criminal cases found that declining to prosecute some low-level offenses can actually lead to less crime. We discuss the results with Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who made this a central issue while running for the office in 2018. We also break down the study's findings with WBUR's Ally Jarmanning, and hear legal analysis from Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR Legal Analyst. Historian Tobey Pearl tells a deeply personal history of a 1638 murder trial in Providence. Her new book is: "Terror To The Wicked: America's First Trial By Jury That Ended A War And Helped To Form A Nation."

No sooner had Joe Biden won the Presidential election than Republican state legislatures began introducing measures to make voting more difficult in any number of ways, most of which will suppress Democratic turnout at the polls. Stacey Abrams, of Georgia, has called the measures “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Congress has introduced the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1. Jelani Cobb looks at how the bill goes beyond even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its breadth, and how it will likely fare in the Senate. And Jeannie Suk Gersen speaks with David Remnick about the Supreme Court’s views on voting rights. The Court is currently weighing an Arizona case that will help decide what really counts as discrimination in a voting restriction.

The pandemic has brought grinding frustrations for parents, educators and students across the country. But perhaps no place has matched San Francisco in its level of infighting, public outrage and halting efforts to reopen schools...Critics of San Francisco’s brand of liberal politics have long pointed to a disconnect between elected officials’ lofty rhetoric about social justice, and the reality of a city where fabulous wealth lives side by side with extreme poverty and despair, exemplified by the homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness on the city’s streets...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an alumnus of the San Francisco public school system, said the board had used “cultural distractions” as a way of covering up its inability to get schools reopened. “It’s clear,” he said, “that the internecine conflict among relatively privileged liberals sometimes leaves behind people that they genuinely believe they are concerned about.”

The state Ethics Commission has dropped its investigation into the alleged Christmas Eve road rage incident involving Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, telling the woman who filed the complaint that after “a careful review” the office has determined that “the matter doesn’t warrant further action by this office.” ... Ronald Sullivan, a private lawyer who represented Rollins in the investigations, said in a statement that the commission’s finding fully vindicated Rollins: “This few-second traffic encounter has been thoroughly reviewed and not a single criminal, civil rights, or ethical violation occurred. The District Attorney is not surprised by these outcomes, and sincerely hopes we can all return to the far more pressing matters facing the Commonwealth.”

In this episode of Third Degree, Elie Honig is joined by Harvard Law student and former Trump administration speechwriter Eli Nachmany ‘22 to discuss the conduct of former DC Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and the potential for sedition charges against the Capitol insurrectionists. Plus, Elie tells stories from the legal trenches of his former office, the Southern District of New York. Join Elie every Monday and Wednesday on Third Degree for a discussion of the urgent legal news making the headlines. Third Degree takes on a bit of a different flavor on Fridays, when Elie speaks with a rotating slate of America’s most impressive law school students, exclusively for members of CAFE Insider.

Harvard Law students and alums are working to battle gerrymandering and other bars to voting access throughout the United States.

Harvard Law School’s Carmel Shachar weighs in on the morality nuances of those who are cutting vaccine lines.