Media Mentions

Black and Latino people in Massachusetts prisons receive significantly longer sentences than white people charged with similar offenses, according to a Harvard Law report released Wednesday. The research that found racial disparities across the Bay State’s criminal justice system comes in the wake of a nationwide racial justice reckoning following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other Black people dying at the hands of police. The Harvard Law report revealed that Black and Latino people sentenced to prison receive longer sentences than white people — with Black people receiving sentences that are an average of 168 days longer, and Latino people receiving sentences that are an average of 148 days longer. “Black and Latinx people charged with drug offenses and weapons offenses are more likely to be incarcerated and receive longer incarceration sentences than White people charged with similar offenses,” reads the report by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law. “This difference persists after controlling for charge severity and additional factors.”

Since the pandemic set in, Grace Riario and Melissa Morrone have witnessed a similar phenomenon at the libraries they work at in New York: people gathering around to try to catch the wifi outside their doors because indoor service is largely shut down...Riario oversees nine libraries in the Catskills region, where some areas don’t have access to broadband internet at all. Morrone is a supervising librarian in Brooklyn, where even if people do theoretically have access, many can’t afford it. They’re both seeing the real-life manifestations of the so-called “digital divide.” The divide is both rural and urban and tied to both access and inclusion. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 21 million Americans don’t have access to quality broadband internet, though some estimates suggest that number is much higher, even double. Millions of people simply can’t access broadband because the infrastructure isn’t in place. Then there’s the question of cost — just because a wire runs by someone’s house doesn’t mean they can use it...Many Republicans and Democrats have taken a lax attitude toward the telecom industry, allowing companies to get big and powerful — the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed for an enormous amount of consolidation in the industry. On top of that, at the local level, many municipalities have signed franchise agreements with ISPs to wire up their areas, further locking in monopolies with little negotiating power. “If you leave these guys to their own devices, they will divide up markets, consolidate, and charge as much as they possibly can,” said Susan Crawford, a law professor at Harvard and the author of multiple books about the telecom industry. Crawford has long advocated for nationwide high-speed fiber internet, which would allow for basically limitless amounts of data to travel...The good news, Crawford said, is that communities taking the issue of internet access into their own hands may help shame the federal government into a better policy eventually. The bad news is it’s likely to be a “heartbreakingly slow process.”

Bolivia is moving ever closer to the edge of a military regime. At every turn since Evo Morales was ousted last November, the interim president, Jeanine Añez, has decided to take an authoritarian stance rather than a conciliatory tone, most recently against demonstrators demanding elections who blocked the country’s main cities. Only free and fair elections, now scheduled for Oct. 18, but which are still far from certain, can get Bolivia out of its quagmire, which was brought on by Mr. Morales...When Mr. Morales fled surreptitiously to Mexico in November, it was understandable that vast segments of Bolivian society wanted something new. However, rather than guiding the country to elections as soon as possible (which is what Ms. Añez had initially promised) and secure her place as an important figure in the history of Bolivian democracy, she initiated a series of sweeping policy directives. Most of these have gone disastrously awry, like the suspension of the new school year. Elections have been pushed back four times since she took office in November, and Ms. Añez has only begrudgingly accepted the new October date. There has been an economic contraction of 5.6 percent. The Covid-19 crisis has been entirely mismanaged, and Bolivia now has more than 121,000 cases. There have been frequent cases of corruption, including the arrest of a health minister in connection with the overpricing of ventilators for the treatment of Covid-19. Moreover, as Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic and Amnesty International have shown, there have been widespread human rights abuses, including restrictions to freedom of speech and excessive use of force, during Ms. Añez’s tenure.

The Federal Reserve's Main Street Lending Program is falling short in its mission of providing support for financing to midsized businesses that are struggling during the coronavirus pandemic and needs urgent changes, members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee heard Wednesday. A trio of representatives from industry, labor and academia told senators that the emergency lending program's design is overly risk-averse, with the result that only a little more than $1 billion of its $600 billion lending capacity has been tapped after two months in operation. Unless the rules surrounding the program are relaxed, countless companies could be shut out and wind up having to shut down, the witnesses warned...The Main Street Lending Program is one of an array of Fed initiatives intended to help mitigate financial strains created by the COVID-19 pandemic and is backed with a $75 billion equity investment from the U.S. Treasury, drawing on funding authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. The program, which consists of several individual loan facilities and has been tweaked several times since it was unveiled in the spring, generally aims to facilitate the flow of credit to nonprofits and for-profit companies by purchasing qualifying loans from participating lenders. To qualify, a borrower must meet certain eligibility requirements, like having no more than 15,000 employees or $5 billion in 2019 revenues. A loan must also fit within certain size parameters, ranging from $250,000 to up to $300 million, depending on the facility, and it must have certain features, like a five-year maturity, two-year principal deferral and an adjustable interest rate of Libor plus 3%. In addition, participating lenders must hold on to a small piece of each loan they sell to the program, ostensibly helping to promote discipline on the part of lenders by ensuring they shoulder some of the credit risk. But with the program off to a relatively slow start, witnesses at Thursday's hearing called for the Fed and Treasury to broaden its eligibility rules, make its loan terms more attractive to potential borrowers and scrap its risk retention requirement, arguing that such reforms are need to maximize its impact before it is set to stop purchasing loans at the end of the year. "These facilities were not designed to take on credit risk," testified Hal Scott, emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and president of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation. "If you say the banks have to take 5%, they're going to apply normal credit standards and needy businesses are not going to get the money." DeBoer echoed Scott's point, saying that the program's risk retention requirement acts as a disincentive for participating lenders to extend credit to the borrowers that need it the most.

This summer, shortly after scores of camo-wearing, heavily armed federal agents descended on Portland, Ore., to attack protesters, Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, pondered the implications of what he was seeing on the streets. What he saw scared him; he remembered the use of paramilitaries by fascist leaders in 1930s Europe, where he was born, and he feared he was now witnessing a slide into paramilitarism in the United States. (His family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.) Fried felt that President Trump was using the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies in a way that was “very menacing. You might as well put brown shirts on them. It’s a very bad thing.”A Harvard Law School professor who still counts himself as a Republican and a board member of groups such as the Campaign Legal Center, Checks and Balances, and Republicans for the Rule of Law, Fried has grown increasingly worried in recent months about Trump’s willingness to stir chaos and violence as an electoral strategy in the run-up to November’s vote and about the willingness of his attorney general, William Barr, to burn the country’s democratic institutions to the ground to preserve this administration’s hold on power. Like earlier authoritarians, Trump could, Fried fears, utilize “agents provocateurs, getting right-wing people to infiltrate left-oriented and by-and-large peaceful demonstrations to turn them violent to thereby justify intervention.” Fried, a student of history who chooses his words carefully, has concluded that Trump and his team are “certainly racist, contemptuous of ordinary democratic and constitutional norms, and they believe their cause, their interests, are really the interests of the nation and therefore anything that keeps them in power is in the national interest. Does that make you a fascist? It kind of looks that way, doesn’t it?” Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, has come to share Fried’s conviction that Trump is a threat to the Republic, although Steele believes the Trump cult is more about naked political opportunism than any grand fascist ideology.

An article by Noah Feldman: The news that Justice Department lawyers are taking over the defense of Donald Trump against a lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in the 1980s, is even worse than it sounds. On the face of it, it’s outrageous that government lawyers should expend taxpayer dollars to defend Trump against charges that he defamed Carroll by saying he had never met her and that she is a liar. But underneath, in the legal nitty-gritty, the harm is greater still. The Justice Department isn’t just defending Trump. It’s poised to argue that Carroll’s suit should be treated under a federal law that protects government employees from being personally sued for acts taken within the scope of their official duties. This is a gross misconstruction of federal law. Trump’s denial that he ever met Carroll had literally nothing to do with his job as president. If a court were to find otherwise, it would effectively insulate presidents from a range of private lawsuits, undercutting the Supreme Court precedent that says the president may be sued civilly because he isn’t above the law. To understand why what’s going on here is so bad, you have to start with Carroll’s lawsuit. It doesn’t seek damages arising from the rape that she alleges, which she says happened long before Trump was president. There would be no conceivable way for the government to allege that Trump was acting in an official capacity then. Rather, Carroll’s core claim is that Trump falsely and maliciously smeared her when, on several occasions, he denied knowing her and said she was lying for personal gain, “to get publicity … or sell a book.” Carroll is represented by a brilliant and effective cause lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who gained national attention for representing Edith Windsor in her successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. Kaplan’s legal briefs in Carroll’s case made sure to specify that Trump was being sued only in his personal capacity, not for any conduct he might have committed as president.

Black and Latinx people account for a disproportionately high number of criminal cases in Massachusetts and tend to be given longer sentences than their white counterparts when convicted, according to a study released Wednesday by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard. Researcher Felix Owusu, who helped author the study, said his research shows racial disparities in charging, sentencing and every other step of the process. “When you go to a prison, you see that there are far too many people of color,” said Owusu, a PhD candidate in public policy at Harvard and a research fellow at the Criminal Justice Policy Program, in an interview with GBH News. “That's the end of several processes that generated that kind of outcome. We want to think about all the decision points that led to that outcome.” The report found that Black people, who make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population, make up 17.1 percent of defendents in criminal court cases; Latinx people make up 8.7 percent of the state’s population, and 18.3 percent of criminal cases; white people, 74 percent of the state’s population, make up 58.7 percent of those cases. “This really speaks to a couple of things; this overrepresentation in terms of who faces these outcomes, and adjudication at all,” Owusu said. “And then, conditional on having a court case, people of color tend to get harsher sentences. Initial charging decisions are an important driver of these large disparities in incarceration sentence length.” Researchers saw the biggest racial disparities in drug and weapons charges, and in cases where mandatory minimum sentences were applied. “We believe that this evidence is consistent with racially disparate initial charging practices leading to weaker initial positions in the plea bargaining process for Black defendants,” the report reads, “which then translate into longer incarceration sentences for similar offenses.” Brook Hopkins, another author of the study and the executive director of the criminal justice and policy program at Harvard Law School, said it’s important to view this process as a timeline, and any racial disparities along the way as factors that play a role.

Only a few years ago, Douglas Jones, who worked night shifts as a security guard at a nursing home in Roxbury, was hesitant to spend even $10 more than his typical budget allowed. Payments on his student loan debt were being withdrawn directly from his bank account. If the balance was short—for instance, if Jones hadn’t managed to get 40 hours at his job that week—the bank charged an overdraft fee...Along with millions of other Americans, Jones had fallen prey to the for-profit college industry, which is in essence a two-pronged system—federal loans at one end and for-profit schools designed to access those loans at the other...In 2016, Jones stumbled across an advertisement for the Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL) at Harvard Law School (HLS), and lawyers there helped him cancel his debt on the grounds that the Everest Institute had violated federal guidelines...Since its inception in 2012, PPSL has helped eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars of student-loan debt. HLS lecturer Toby Merrill, J.D. ’11, founded the project after seeing similarities between predatory-lending practices in subprime mortgages and for-profit colleges. She hoped tactics like those that lawyers used against the subprime mortgage industry—“litigating on behalf of individuals against underlying bad actors”—could be used against for-profit schools. PPSL does individual casework, but also pursues more systemic change: its “mission is to make it so that these schools can’t exist, that they can’t continue to perpetuate these predatory practices on students,” says Victoria Roytenberg, a senior attorney at PPSL. “We do that first and foremost with litigation; we do that in our work with policymakers and elected officials.” ...The for-profit college industry, explains Eileen Connor, PPSL’s legal director, preys on low-income and minority individuals, as well as single parents and veterans, for many of whom higher education seems like a distant dream. It is a relationship ripe for abuse, she says. When meeting with a for-profit college recruiter, few people realize they are dealing with a salesperson working on commission and thus are likely being taken advantage of, “because they’ve been conditioned over their entire lives to think education is something good and public-minded.”

Harvard Law School researchers published a sweeping study Wednesday that confirmed what many people of color and criminal justice reform advocates have been saying for years: Black and Latino people make up a disproportionately high percentage of criminal cases in Massachusetts and, when convicted, are given longer sentences than their white counterparts...According to the study, which reviewed criminal cases that passed through Massachusetts courts between 2014 and 2016, Black people account for 6.5 percent of the state’s population, but 17.1 percent of criminal court cases; Latinos are 8.7 percent of the Massachusetts population, but accounted for 18.3 percent of the cases. White people, who make up 74 percent of the Massachusetts population, accounted for 58.7 percent of criminal court cases. Black people are also imprisoned at a rate 7.9 times that of white people and Latinos at 4.9 times than white people. Researchers considered factors other than race that may have contributed to the longer sentences received by people of color, including the defendants' criminal history and demographics, initial charge severity, court jurisdiction, and neighborhood characteristics. “Even after accounting for these characteristics, Black and Latinx people are still sentenced to 31 and 25 days longer than their similarly situated White counterparts, suggesting that racial disparities in sentence length cannot solely be explained by the contextual factors that we consider and permeate the entire criminal justice process,” researchers wrote...The study took four years to complete, and turned out to be a laborious undertaking. Researchers often encountered missing data, difficult-to-compile paper records and PDF files, public safety agencies that did not respond to their records requests, and the limitations of the state’s antiquated record-keeping system. In all, It took painstaking work to fill in gaps, said Brook Hopkins, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School. “We were able to provide what I think is a good analysis, but that was hard. And it shows how the administrative criminal justice data is not collected in a way that makes this kind of analysis easy to do," Hopkins said.

Black and Latino defendants in Massachusetts are more likely than white defendants to be locked up for drug and weapons offenses and get longer sentences than white people sent to prison for similar crimes, researchers at Harvard Law School said in a report released Wednesday. In a yearslong study sought by the chief justice of Massachusetts’ highest court, Harvard researchers found significant racial disparities in the handling of weapons and drug cases, crimes they noted “carry longstanding racialized stigmas.” The disparities remain even “after controlling for charge severity and additional factors,” according to the report from the law school’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. The researchers found that racial disparities in the length of sentences are driven largely by the fact that that Black and Latino defendants tend to face more serious initial charges than white defendants. That puts Black and Latino defendants at risk of harsher punishments and can influence their decisions in plea negotiations, they wrote. “The penalty in incarceration length is largest for drug and weapons charges, offenses that carry longstanding racialized stigmas. We believe that this evidence is consistent with racially disparate initial charging practices leading to weaker initial positions in the plea bargaining process for Black defendants, which then translate into longer incarceration sentences for similar offenses,” the researchers wrote. The report comes amid a racial reckoning across the U.S. sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police earlier this year. “At this time of national reckoning about race, we hope this report will inspire Massachusetts to confront the racial disparities that permeate our criminal system,” Brook Hopkins, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, said in an emailed statement.

A new report prompted by the huge overrepresentation of blacks and Latinos in Massachusetts prisons zeroes in on disparities at various stages of the court system’s handling of cases that are factors behind the disparate incarceration rates. The report, commissioned by Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants and carried out by researchers at Harvard Law School, found that among those who are incarcerated, black and Latinx defendants receive sentences that are, on average, about five months longer than sentences for white defendants. Meanwhile, white defendants are more likely than black and Latinx defendants to have cases resolved through pretrial probation or other dispositions that don’t lead to incarceration. Four years ago, Gants highlighted the huge racial disparities in incarceration rates in his annual address on the state of the judiciary, and announced that Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow had agreed to launch an independent evaluation of the factors driving those inequities. In the report released on Wednesday, researchers from the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School found that racial and ethnic differences in the type and severity of the initial criminal charge against defendants account for over 70 percent of the disparities in sentence length. “The initial charging decision is in fact a huge driver of these large disparities in who is incarcerated,” said Felix Owusu, a Harvard PhD student and co-author of the report. It was already well known that people of color are overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons. A 2014 report of the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission found that the state was imprisoning black people at a rate of 7.9 times that of white people and Latinx residents at 4.9 times the rate of whites. The new report, using administrative data from the Massachusetts Trial Court, Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, and Department of Correction, attempts to break down racial disparities at various points as defendants move through the legal system.

A new stock exchange backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights is opening for business Wednesday. The Long-Term Stock Exchange can now trade all U.S. exchange-listed stocks, and it will now start soliciting new listings from companies that commit to policies around diversity, sustainability and long-term planning...Silicon Valley entrepreneur and "Lean Startup" author Ries designed the exchange to reward founders and investors who are thinking years down the road. Quarterly reports are still an SEC regulation, but the LTSE requires companies who list on the exchange to agree to a set of five principles designed to promote long-term thinking, including which stakeholders are important, a company's environmental and community impact, a company's approach to diversity, how a company invests in its own employees, and how it rewards them for its long-term success. The exchange doesn't set strict quotas or standardized rules, like requiring a woman on the board, but companies interested in listing have to set up policies that adhere to the principles to be eligible to list... "I'm in favor of experimentation, innovation and more competition — so I applaud those trying to make the LTSE work," Harvard professor Jesse Fried told Marker in February. "However, I have trouble seeing why the LTSE is necessary. R+D spending by public firms is at a record high in absolute terms and relative to revenues. Long-term investors have done and continue to do very well."

An article by Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita: In The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governnace, which we will present at the Stigler Center’s Political Economy of Finance conference later this week, we critically examine “stakeholderism,” the increasingly influential view that corporate leaders should give weight to the interests of non-shareholder constituencies (stakeholders).  Acceptance of stakeholderism, we demonstrate, would not benefit stakeholders as supporters of this view claim. Corporate leaders have incentives, and should therefore be expected, not to use their discretion to benefit stakeholders beyond what would serve shareholder value. Furthermore, over the past two decades, corporate leaders have in fact failed to use this kind of discretion to protect stakeholders. Our analysis concludes that acceptance of stakeholderism should not be expected to make stakeholders better off. Embracing stakeholderism, we find, could well impose substantial costs on shareholders, stakeholders, and society at large. Stakeholderism would increase the insulation of corporate leaders from shareholders, reduce their accountability, and hurt economic performance. In addition, by raising illusory hopes that corporate leaders would on their own provide substantial protection to stakeholders, stakeholderism would impede or delay reforms that could bring meaningful protection to stakeholders. Stakeholderism would therefore be contrary to the interests of the stakeholders it purports to serve and should be opposed by those who take stakeholder interests seriously.

On the eve of Labor Day, as we pay tribute to workers’ contributions to the strength and well-being of America, and grieve for the millions who have lost their jobs in the pandemic, can we also shed a tear at the sad news of the unexpected death of David Graeber, author of the landmark book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon + Schuster, 2018)? Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, put his finger on an uncomfortable fact: our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about...Graeber put his finger on an even more worrying issue: the holders of these pointless positions, often know that their work is pointless. “Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed — that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse ? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society?” ...Why didn't all the big old firms embrace Agile management? It was largely because they were hooked on the world's dumbest idea—maximizing shareholder value (MSV)...After the Business Round Table of August 2019, which condemned MSV, the executives had to pretend that they were actually helping all the stakeholders, even society as a whole, when the underlying reality remained the same: maximizing shareholder value. Thus, important research by Harvard Law professor Lucian Bebchuk and colleagues shows that firms that profess to be acting in the interests of all the stakeholders are mostly acting in the interest of the shareholders and the executives. Stakeholder capitalism is there “just for show.”

A group of prominent media veterans are advising a team of millennials who are launching a new company called "Column," which modernizes the placement of public notices. Why it matters: Public notices have been one of the biggest and most reliable revenue streams​ for local newspapers for centuries. Amid the pandemic, they are becoming more important to local papers that are seeing regular local advertising dry up. Catch up quick: Public notices are legally required updates from the government to citizens about different types of legal or regulatory proceedings, like ordinances, foreclosures, municipal budgets, adoptions, and public meetings. Like obituaries, the exact amount of revenue they deliver to the newspaper industry is debated, but they've long been considered a critical part of local newspaper businesses, due to a longstanding legal requirement for local governments to place them in newspapers...Details: The company has a full-time team of nine, and is supported and advised by many notable media experts, including David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance and Nancy Gibbs, the faculty director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and the former editor in chief of Time Magazine. It receives occasional informal advice from Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post. The company is advised by several Harvard professors and entrepreneurs, including Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and Henry Ward, founder and CEO of Carta.

Switching from eating ‘land-hungry’ meat and dairy produce to foodstuffs like beans, lentils and nuts could remove 16 years’ worth of CO2 emissions by 2050. Researchers from the US calculated that broad uptake of such plant-based protein alternatives could free up land to support more ecosystems that absorb carbon. At present, around 83 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is given over to meat and dairy-based production — much of which only produce low yields. Reducing this figure, the team said, is a better way to combat climate change than waiting for ‘unproven’ large-scale technologies like atmospheric CO2 extractors. "The greatest potential for forest regrowth, and the climate benefits it entails, exists in high- and upper-middle income countries," said paper author and environmental scientist Matthew Hayek of New York University. These, he added, are "places where scaling back on land-hungry meat and dairy would have relatively minor impacts on food security." In the study, Professor Hayek and colleagues mapped out the areas of the globe where land use for animal-sourced food production has squeezed out native vegetation, such as forests. This allowed the team to determine where a shift in our diets to more plant-based foodstuffs could allow natural ecosystems to be restored — helping to offset global carbon dioxide emissions in the process... "We now know that intact, functioning ecosystems and appropriate wildlife habitat ranges help reduce the risk of pandemics," added environmental social scientist and Helen Harwatt of the Harvard Law School, a co-author on the study. "When coupled with reduced livestock populations, restoration reduces disease transmission from wildlife to pigs, chickens, and cows, and ultimately to humans." The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Imagine, if you would, that it is Jan. 21, 2021, and that Joe Biden is president of the United States. The nation awaits his first executive order — a formal presidential decree, binding on the executive branch, that directs departments and agencies what to do. At 9 a.m., the executive order appears. Its name? “Scientific Integrity.” Here are its opening words: "Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security." It continues: "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public." But that’s just the start. President Biden’s order gives unprecedented authority to the director of a relatively obscure White House office, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to make scientific integrity real. It requires federal agencies to put new procedures in place, designed “to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised.” To ensure that political leaders do not politicize science, it calls for protection of whistle-blowers.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Adrian Hon, the CEO of the gaming company Six to Start, says the conspiracy theory QAnon is compelling to believers because it operates a bit like a virtual quest.

An article by Terri Gerstein: If you needed surgery and could choose your hospital, what questions would you ask in deciding where to go? You’d surely ask about insurance coverage and maybe about the success rate with your type of procedure. If you have enough money, you might ask about a private room. One question, though, that almost no one thinks to ask: Is the staff unionized? That omission is a mistake. Conservatives and corporations often paint a cartoonishly villainous picture of unions as greedily grabbing workers’ dues. This foolishness couldn’t be farther from the truth. Unions look out for their members, fighting for higher wages, better benefits and safer working conditions. They overwhelmingly deliver on those promises, including in the pandemic. But what’s discussed less often is the positive effects of unions that extend far beyond their members, benefiting the general public in surprising and unexpected ways. Want to improve health care? A study of California hospitals found that the risk of dying of a heart attack was 5.5 percent less in hospitals with unionized registered nurses. Another study compared patient outcomes at three sets of hospitals — those with successful, unsuccessful and no union drives — over a nine-year period. They found measurably better patient outcomes in the newly unionized workplaces in 12 of 13 categories potentially impacted by nursing care (urinary tract infections, hospital-acquired pneumonia or sepsis, wound infections and the like). Unions also fight for strict staffing ratios and higher wages, which can decrease adverse outcomes in nursing homes, including during the pandemic.

An article by Ben Waldman '23: Donald Trump bragged at the Republican convention that he “obliterated” ISIS “100 percent.” This victory has come despite Trump’s meddling, rather than as a result of it. In fact, he’s made many serious mistakes—and the sacrifice of others has camouflaged his blunders. For three years, Trump’s incompetence and affection for regional strongmen have endangered American lives and interests. Last month, even as Trump rehearsed his convention speech, four Americans were wounded during a confrontation with Russian forces in Syria. In the wake of Trump’s partial withdrawal from Syria last year, several nation-states and armed groups now struggle for territory—Russians, Syrians, Turks, Kurds, and Americans have dangerous encounters along Syria’s highways, jostling for regional control. In the most recent case, Russian vehicles charged at an American convoy, colliding with a U.S. vehicle at high speed. Northern Syria today is a gerrymandered mess, with different forces holding territory purely based on wherever they stood when Trump changed policy via tweet. In that jumbled terrain, Trump’s mismanagement has unthinkingly put Americans at risk, again and again. There’s been a clear pattern for Trump’s blunders in Syria: pro-authoritarian tweets from the White House, creating perilous experiences for American troops. Starting in 2017, Turkish-backed forces have continually shot at American patrols in northern Syria. U.S. troops sat exposed and outmatched in the town of Manbij, without the clear support of their own commander-in-chief, as Trump never condemned the treacherous behavior from a NATO ally. As we now know, Turkish president Recep Erdogan spoke to Trump as often as twice a week during this period. It’s unclear whether Trump was afraid, smitten, or some of each.

An article by Daniel Medwed and Samuel Magaram '21: It’s impossible to answer this question with precision. But, extrapolating from several studies that estimate the erroneous conviction rate nationwide at between 3 percent and 5 percent, Washington could be incarcerating upwards of 1,600 innocent people. Even if we don’t know the precise figure, we do know this: In a state rightfully proud of its progressivism, nearly nothing is being done to free them. This must change. Take the case of Deron Parks. Convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy and sentenced to life in prison, Parks secured his freedom only after petitioning the Washington state Supreme Court for a new trial. In the petition, Parks provided sworn statements from three witnesses that his appointed trial attorney failed to interview. They confirmed not only that Parks wasn’t there when the rape allegedly occurred, but also that the alleged victim had threatened Parks with false accusations. The puzzling aspect of Parks’s saga is not why he was convicted in the first place; rather, it is why prosecutors fought to keep him in prison so tenaciously and for so long in the face of compelling evidence of his innocence. The prosecutor who opposed Parks’ petition is still convinced of Parks’ guilt, explaining recently that she “believed the victim, and his account of what happened seemed credible.” This certitude illustrates the psychological factors and organizational pressures that prevent well-meaning prosecutors from recognizing wrongful convictions. Although judges are empowered to release wrongfully convicted persons, it is really prosecutors who can set the innocent free. Law professors Bruce Green and Ellen Yaroshefsky explain that “[t]he legal process holds out little hope for wrongfully convicted defendants … in the absence of help from prosecutors” to “evaluate, investigate, and respond to new exculpatory evidence.”