Media Mentions

Oracle, the California-based computer technology corporation, announced Monday that it will serve as a business partner, or "trusted technology provider," for the Chinese social media app TikTok. The ownership of TikTok has become politicized lately over unproven beliefs that the company shuttles private user information to the Chinese Communist Party, an assertion that President Trump appears to buy into and which administrative officials say motivated him to sign an executive order that would force TikTok to divest its assets in the United States and relinquish data it had gathered in the US. The news about Oracle partnering with TikTok broke shortly after Microsoft announced that it had been unable to close a deal to purchase the app's US operations...Neither Oracle nor TikTok elaborated on the nature of their arrangement, including whether or not it involves Oracle outright purchasing the company or striking some kind of partnership with them. Oracle itself has strong financial and legislative ties with two congressional Republicans close to the Trump administration, Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte, both from Montana. TikTok has faced fire from the Trump administration since July, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hinted that Trump was thinking of taking action against TikTok and declared that Americans should only use the short-form video app "if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party." Pompeo made these remarks shortly after TikTok users embarrassed the president by leading a successful campaign to reserve hundreds of thousands of tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa, which caused the president's campaign to significantly overestimate their anticipated attendance and left most of the stadium empty... "The threat by Donald Trump to shut down social media platforms that he finds objectionable is a dangerous overreaction by a thin-skinned president. Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email at the time. "That doesn't make the threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run."

Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett G. Price III called into Boston Public Radio on Monday and weighed in on the findings of a Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program study published last week, which shows stark racial disparities throughout the Massachusetts prison system. Among other conclusions, the study — which took four years to complete — found that Black residents are imprisoned at a rate nearly eight times that of whites, while Latinx people are are imprisoned nearly five times as frequently as their white peers. “In this season of America, who do we want to be?” Price said. "Are we going to be the land of equal opportunity, the land of freedom for all, or are we going to continue to be a disparate and differential nation where certain people have privileges that others don’t?” Monroe agreed with the sentiment of her co-host, and criticized Gov. Charlie Baker for not yet responding publicly to the report's findings. "I think that Baker’s silence behind it does a couple of things. It maintains not only the status quo, but I think in many ways it’s pandering to a police force,” she said, "and a justice system that sorely needs to be reformed.” "This is a bigger kind of sea change or paradigm shift that we’re asking for, that for centuries this country has been resistant to do,” she added.

Last week, Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program issued a long-awaited report on racial disparities in the state’s criminal legal system. After a four-year quest to unearth and analyze this data, the study definitively proves what so many people entangled in the system have been saying for a long time: The definition of justice in Massachusetts changes depending on the color of your skin. After controlling for all other factors, such as neighborhood and prior criminal history, the researchers found that Black and Latinx people accused of crimes are charged with greater severity, face more and longer mandatory minimum sentences, and are sentenced to significantly more jail and prison time than their white counterparts. The heart-wrenching outcomes of these racial inequities are exacerbated and perpetuated by the lack of a coordinated effort to collect and share data that oversight agencies need to identify racial, ethnic, gender, and other biases. You cannot fix what you do not measure. The study’s authors go to great lengths to reveal that the Massachusetts criminal legal system has shrouded itself in darkness. Their findings show that the Commonwealth makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint when and where the law — and those who enforce it — are failing to provide equal treatment. In the study, police departments would not or could not provide the researchers with aggregated arrest reports. The district attorneys either would not or could not share vital information, such as when they reduced charges or dropped cases. The Trial Court does not electronically track bail amounts or fines and other penalties, including probation, the most common sanction. They also don’t collect information on judges, to analyze sentencing disparities from courtroom to courtroom, courthouse to courthouse. Across agencies, case records lack a common identifier to track individuals through the system, and there are no unified standards for recording race and ethnicity consistently. The state still does not capture gender, and only records a person’s sex assigned at birth.

An article by Vivek Wadhwa: Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn’t the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. “If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the researchers said. But if genetic engineering wasn’t behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world’s dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What’s even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.

In a famous article written 50 years ago this week, Milton Friedman argued ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’. The statement remains a lightning rod for the debate on ‘corporate purpose’ – whether public corporations should be managed just for the benefit of shareholders or for a broader set of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers and the community.  We continue to go back and forth. In 2019, to much fanfare, 181 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable publicly committed to manage corporations for stakeholders – reversing their 1997 statement that upheld shareholder primacy! Not so fast, countered Harvard Law Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, who argued that stakeholderism can backfire in insulating corporate leaders from external accountability and compromising economic performance… to the detriment of broader stakeholders! Friedman’s essay was necessarily of its time. In 1970, Friedman was one of the leading economists of his day. However, and not really his fault, he presided over a discipline profoundly shaped by a reductionism that was then the deep guiding force of social sciences, but which has since revealed limitations. Economics was not alone in being so waylaid, but was arguably most affected. The extraordinary explanatory power of reductionism in the hard sciences over the preceding centuries had drawn all fields with scientific pretensions in the direction of physics and its methods. Social scientists were eager for their own simple, universalizable laws and for the prestige which might follow such discoveries.  But, fifty years on, general laws in the social sciences remain elusive, and another development from the 1970s clarifies why. Even as Friedman was penning his op-ed, a new science – ‘complexity science’ – was emerging. It – and its associated ‘systems thinking’ – announced itself with the formation of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984.

BigLaw had never been on Jason Williamson's radar. He'd gone to law school intending to become a public defender and help people from his community. Then, he learned his wife was pregnant with twins. "That really just changed everything," he said. "It turns out it's hard to make a living on a public interest lawyer's salary." He ended up at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP, where he would make good money for a few years while focusing on the firm's robust pro bono practice...Williamson was able to cross back over, and now, as a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, he sees the considerations that go into hiring young lawyers. Working in BigLaw, he said, can raise questions about commitment, like, "How sure can we be that you're going to really hang in there and do this work after we invest resources in training you?" On the other hand, he knows from personal experience that not everyone can afford to devote their entire lives to public interest law. And by writing off people who may have needed the money BigLaw offers, social justice organizations may exclude attorneys from the very low-income communities they seek to represent...There are many ways to demonstrate that commitment, says Catherine Pattanayak, Harvard Law School's assistant dean for public service. Students can summer with public interest organizations, take social justice-related clinics, volunteer with student practice organizations, or do pro bono work as BigLaw summer associates. Once at a firm, Pattanayak recommends young attorneys take pro bono assignments, join membership organizations and take volunteer opportunities. Pattanayak herself moved from Ropes + Gray LLP to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and said while she didn't face any stigma for her corporate career, she had to build a case for herself. "I knew when I began applying for public interest jobs that I would need to explain why I was interested in making a transition, and back up that explanation with evidence through my pro bono work and law school experiences," she said. "Government employers tend to be particularly open to prior law firm experience."

Across the University, the graduate and professional schools spent the summer taking a hard look at what they were doing and why, to ensure that students will not miss a beat in their education or experience.

The numbers from a study of racial disparities in the Massachusetts criminal justice system are disturbing, but not a surprise. Behind the numbers, however, are real people, Black and Latino people, many of them serving sentences far longer than their white counterparts. So the question facing leaders in this state is what happens next? What can police, district attorneys, the courts, and, yes, the governor himself do to set things right at a time when tens of thousands have taken to the streets to demand racial justice and equitable treatment under the law? The Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program study, undertaken at the request of Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants, has been four years in the making, and researchers readily acknowledge that even the enormous amount of data they had access to was less than they would have wanted. Recalcitrant police departments, an uncooperative Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, and court data systems that are perpetually a work in progress contributed to their frustration. But still, based on facts they were able to gather, the team found that, between 2014 and 2016, Black people were imprisoned at a rate of 7.9 times that of white people and Latinos at 4.9 times that of white people. “Black and Latinx defendants tend to face more serious initial charges that are more likely to carry a mandatory or statutory minimum sentence,” the report noted. Most often those involved drug and weapons charges, “offenses that carry longstanding racialized stigmas,” according to the report. Even after accounting for criminal histories, court jurisdictions and demographics, the researchers found “Black and Latinx people are still sentenced to 31 and 25 days longer than their similarly situated White counterparts.” No doubt court officials didn’t order up the report only to have it gather dust. But systemic change — change that demands the attention of police who make the initial arrests and prosecutors who largely determine what charges those defendants will face — demands a coordinated approach.

An article by Noah Feldman: The news that Elizabeth Holmes’s lawyers plan to present an insanity defense in her federal trial for criminal fraud is frankly astonishing. Maybe the evidence against her is so strong that her lawyers are desperate. Or maybe they are hoping to follow a strategy of making the jury feel sympathy for her, giving them an excuse to acquit. But the reality is that it is extremely difficult for a defendant to prove insanity in federal court. The criteria are extremely difficult to satisfy. A tougher test was adopted after outrage about the successful insanity defense of John Hinckley, the man who shot President Ronald Reagan. The statute says that a defendant can be found not guilty by showing that “at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.” This is an affirmative defense, which means that the defendant has to prove it to the jury by clear and convincing evidence. The federal version of the insanity defense is sometimes called a “cognitive” test. That means it asks about the defendant’s mental state. And it bifurcates mental state into two parts: whether the defendant knew what she was doing, and whether she knew it was wrong. The first question allows an acquittal for a defendant who literally did not know what she was doing when she committed the crime. For example, a defendant who fired a gun while believing she was actually waving hello would count as being unable to appreciate the “nature and quality” of her act. She could be acquitted under the federal definition. I can think of no conceivable way this part of the defense could apply to Holmes. She was running a company and making public statements about her product, and certainly knew that those were the activities in which she was engaged.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The world is soon likely to confront a serious new challenge to the fight against Covid-19: vaccine hesitancy. In the U.S. and U.K., large numbers of people — at least 30 percent — have said in recent surveys that they would hesitate to take or refuse a vaccine that could protect them from the coronavirus and slow its spread. These numbers probably understate the problem. People might tell a researcher that they will get vaccinated even if they won’t. And the problem might be even worse if a vaccine is made available under a speeded up “emergency use” exception to the usually lengthy approval process, amplifying public concerns about rushing it out. What can be done? To answer that question, we need to understand why some people are reluctant to take vaccines. Research explores the influence of three factors, often known as the three Cs. The first is convenience. Human beings suffer from inertia, and they also procrastinate. If it’s not so easy to get vaccinated, many people won’t do it. Physical proximity to vaccination sites helps; so do short waiting times. Long lines hurt. So do paperwork requirements and administrative obstacles. If widespread immunity is the goal, officials must not underestimate the importance of eliminating inconveniences, both small and large. The good news is that when vaccines are easily available, the rate of vaccination increases greatly, even among people who have doubts. The second factor is complacency. With respect to diseases, a lot of people tend to think that their personal risk is low. “Optimism bias,” as it is called, makes vaccination seem unnecessary. The third factor is confidence: public trust in the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, and also in the motivations and competence of those who are behind it.

Shortly after Wirecard collapsed this year, renowned short-seller David Einhorn hit out at auditors for failing to find a fraud that was “hiding in plain sight”. The German payments group, which had been investigated by the Financial Times for years, filed for insolvency after admitting that €1.9bn of its cash probably did not exist. EY, Wirecard’s auditor, had signed off the group’s financial accounts for more than a decade. In a letter to investors, Mr Einhorn, head of hedge fund Greenlight Capital, lambasted EY. “Rather than investigate the fraud allegations, the auditors continued signing the annual financial statements.”  The Wirecard scandal, along with the collapse of businesses such as Carillion, the outsourcing group, and Patisserie Valerie, the café chain, have shone a fresh spotlight on the audit role and whether its ultimate clients — company shareholders — are being properly serviced...Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, goes further. “There is a global crisis in audit. Much of what audit has been doing in the past is now less relevant.” ...Mr Davis argues that the audit industry needs a reset in order to be relevant today — and that shareholders have a role to play in that. “Maybe in the aftermath of Wirecard there might be a fundamental rethink of audit at the European level,” he says. “It’s not just about an audit missing fraud — although a huge issue — it is about risk and opportunities that are relevant to companies in the 21st century.” But he adds that even though audit functions are meant to be done for shareholders, investors do not show enough interest in the subject. “Most asset managers aren’t staffed with the resources or skills to be able to take full advantage of what the audit [function] can do.”

Roughly 30 to 40 percent of food produced is wasted and that’s a big problem for society and the planet due to unnecessary resource use, failure to feed hungry people, and harmful greenhouse gases emitted as unused food rots in landfill. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office, food waste is responsible for nearly 8 percent of global emissions, making it the single greatest way to solve climate change. Upcycling food helps minimize this problem by creating new, high-quality products from otherwise wasted – but perfectly nutritious – ingredients.  According to the Upcycled Food Association (UFA), 60% of people want to buy more upcycled food products, and 95% of this group want to do their part to reduce food waste. However, many Americans don’t understand the concept of an upcycled food. To educate them, the UFA is holding a free official Climate Week NYC 2020 virtual event on Tuesday, September 22, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern: Positive Climate Action Through Upcycled Foods: What Are They, How Do They Help, and Where Can I Get Some? The event will be moderated by Turner Wyatt, CEO of the Upcycled Food Association. Wyatt will moderate a discussion with Emily M. Broad Leib, Clinical Professor of Law, Founding Director, Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, Caue Suplicy, Founder and Chairman, Barnana, a banana-based snacks company and founding member of the UFA, and Caitlin Leibert, Director of Sustainability, Chipotle Mexican Grill...Climate Week 2020 UFA event panelist and definition report task force member Emily M. Broad Leib explains, “Task force members are committed to helping consumers understand upcycled foods and to providing a framework of requirements to help standardize the industry and avoid greenwashing.” BroadLeib will discuss the five agreed-upon voluntary standards for items to officially be considered an upcycled food while emphasizing their climate-beneficial power.

Harbor from the Holocaust is the story of nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, to the Chinese port city of Shanghai. Explore the extraordinary relationship of these Jews and their adopted city of Shanghai, even through the bitter years of Japanese occupation 1937-1945 and the Chinese civil war that followed. Featuring Harvard professor Laurence Tribe.

On Tuesday, Danny Diaz, who ran former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, told POLITICO’s Tim Alberta that if there’s an “October surprise” in this election, “it’s something abroad. It’s a foreign policy-oriented development.” We asked the experts: if it’s China-related, what might it look like? A Phase One trade deal collapse is the most likely China-related event to upend the U.S. election. Harvard Law School’s Mark Wu says President Donald Trump could declare China “off track in meeting the purchase commitments.” Eurasia Group’s Paul Triolo says Trump “has become progressively less interested in the trade deal,” while E14 Fund’s Calvin Chin says ditching the deal is the “easiest to pull off [with] good electoral bang for the buck.” The Bay Area Economic Council’s Sean Randolph tells China Watcher that “while this might look like a failure at one level, Trump could try to show that he's in control, tough on China, and looking out for U.S. interests.” The deal would be (bureaucratically) easy to unwind, according to Asia Society’s Wendy Cutler. “Legally, the agreement requires a 60-day advance notification period before withdrawal,” she tells China Watcher, “but as we’ve seen to date the legalities would be overshadowed by a surprise announcement.” Trump can get the electoral pop from an announcement his administration intends to leave, even if it’s not official until after the election. U.S. and Chinese multinational companies could be frozen out. Heritage Foundation’s Klon Kitchen says China could block a TikTok sale and possibly remove “one or several industry leaders” among U.S. tech companies in China. Schmidt Futures’ Christopher Kirchhoff says Chinese ruler Xi Jinping could “move to ban Apple products in China.” Syracuse University’s Mary Lovely says a Trump move against WeChat could see Beijing retaliating against U.S. firms in China.

Blacks and Latinos sent to prison in Massachusetts receive longer sentences than their White counterparts sentenced for similar crimes, says a new report by Harvard Law School researchers. They're also more likely than White people to get arrested and convicted on drug and weapons charges. "People of color are overrepresented across all stages of the criminal system relative to their share of population in the state," Felix Owusu, a research fellow at the university's Criminal Justice Policy Program and an author of the report, told The Harvard Gazette on Thursday. The release of "Racial Disparities in the Massachusetts Criminal Justice System" coincides with America's racial reckoning stemming from the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans. So the findings shouldn't be surprising. "The report speaks to the need to consider policies outside of the courts entirely, such as how we structure our communities, economically, socially, how we police our communities, and what kinds of activities to criminalize at all," Owusu told the university's news website. The 100-page report highlights a yearlong analysis of more than one million cases. A Massachusetts Sentencing Commission review of 2014 data found the state locked up Black people at a rate nearly 8 times that of White people and Latinos at 4.9 times that of White counterparts. The researchers said they took on the task after Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts asked for a deeper look at the disparities. "The report reveals how institutional racism permeates the whole criminal justice system and ends up playing a big role in the racial disparities in incarceration rates in the state," Brook Hopkins, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, told the website. "It's not just disparate treatment by police, prosecutors, or judges once somebody is in the system. There is also a legislative piece."

If anyone still believed that justice is blind in Massachusetts, their faith has been officially upended. A report commissioned by Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants and released last week confirmed what many observers had long suspected: that Black and Latino defendants are punished more often, and more harshly, than their white counterparts. The study, conducted by researchers at Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program, found that Black and Latino people make up a disproportionate share of defendants that cannot be explained away by mitigating factors such as criminal history or court jurisdiction. They found, in other words, that the court system is fundamentally racist in its treatment of Black and brown defendants. This research isn’t the first alarm bell sounded about our court system. For years, Black judges railed against an evaluation ratings system that saw them receive unfairly low rankings from the (mostly white) attorneys who practiced before them. Those evaluations were mercifully placed on hold a few years ago, in an acknowledgment by court leaders that they were biased and invalid. The latest study, which analyzed criminal cases from the years from 2014 to 2016, was clearly a slog to produce. These researchers ran into the same roadblocks that have greeted other analysts, including reporters, activists, and prosecutors. Namely, an antiquated record-keeping system that mostly serves to obscure what’s really going on in courthouses across the Commonwealth. It’s almost as if they don’t want us to know what’s going on. The latest report was greeted with predictable vows to do better. Trial Court Chief Justice Paula Carey told the Globe the report “will help us continue to move forward in our ongoing efforts to root out racial and ethnic bias and inequity in our criminal justice system.” The greatest sign of optimism is coming from district attorneys. Facing voters who are increasingly sensitive about inequality, they have a clearer understanding than their predecessors that business as usual can’t continue.

An article by Nancy Gertner:In this summer of our racial discontent, with nationwide demonstrations against police shootings of Black people and systemic racism across all institutions, a study released Wednesday by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School, where I teach, could not be more significant. Harvard researchers were enlisted in 2016 by Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants to look at the factors that contribute to the large racial disparities in incarceration rates. The Massachusetts Sentencing Commission had found that, in 2014, Black people in the state were imprisoned at a rate nearly eight times that of white people, and Latinx people nearly five times that of white people. In fact, Massachusetts had the dubious distinction of outpacing national disparity rates, ranking the highest in disparities for Latinx and 13th highest for Black people. Though hampered by the poor record-keeping of public agencies, the bullet points were jaw-dropping: White people make up roughly 74 percent of the state’s population while accounting for 58.7 percent of cases in the Harvard study’s data. Black people make up just 6.5 percent of the population and account for 17.1 percent of cases. Black and Latinx people were not simply overrepresented in the criminal caseload, they also received more severe treatment. They were less likely than white people to have their cases resolved through less severe dispositions like pretrial probation. They received longer sentences than their white counterparts — an average of 168 days longer for Black people and 148 days longer for Latinx people. The differential treatment could not be explained by the nature of the charges: Black and Latinx people charged with drug offenses and weapons offenses received longer sentences than white people charged with similar offenses. Even when Black and Latinx people were charged with offenses carrying mandatory minimum sentences, they were more likely to receive longer sentences than white people facing identical charges.

A new report by the Criminal Justice Policy Program analyzes why Black and Latinx people are overrepresented and receive tougher sentences.

Black and Latino people make up a disproportionately high percentage of criminal cases in Massachusetts, and those who are convicted face longer sentences, according to a new study published by Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. Black people account for 6.5% of the state's population but 17.1% of criminal court cases, the report found. Latinos are 8.7% of the Massachusetts population, but account for 18.3% of the cases. White people, who make up 74% of the Massachusetts population, are defendants in just 58.7% of criminal court cases. Even after weighing other factors such as a criminal record or the severity of the charge, the study found Blacks and Latinos were sentenced to 25-31 days longer than white defendants.

An article by Noah Feldman: You’d think it would be easy to determine whether Kyle Rittenhouse can successfully plead self-defense after killing two people and injuring a third during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Turns out that it’s actually pretty complex. Here’s why: When gun rights get involved, the law tends to depart radically from common sense. The legal framework on its own is relatively straightforward. In Wisconsin, as in many other states, you can use deadly force in self-defense if you reasonably believe it’s necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to yourself or others. You can’t avail yourself of the self-defense argument if you’ve provoked other people into attacking you. Some states have a rule that says before you use lethal force in your own defense, you have a “duty to retreat” — in other words, you have to try to run away before killing your assailant. Wisconsin does not impose this duty. The jury is, however, allowed to consider whether it was possible for you to run away as part of its determination of whether you acted reasonably. The trouble begins when you start applying the legal rules to someone in Rittenhouse’s situation, namely, someone who has carried an AR-15-style weapon to what is intended to be a peaceful protest. In a commonsense universe, this act itself would appear to be a provocation. Yet under Wisconsin law, adults are entitled to carry around their licensed firearms in public places. An open-carry law means that prosecutors would have a tough time convincing a jury that simply carrying an assault rifle counts as a provocation. True, Rittenhouse was only 17, and the law bars minors from gun possession. But there is no reliable way that bystanders could have known that Rittenhouse was underage just by looking at him.

For roughly a decade, Jorge Villalba has been contending with student debt that he believes — and the government has confirmed — he was illegally misled into borrowing. Villalba, 39, attended ITT Technical Institutes, a major for-profit college chain, from 2006 to 2010. Just six years after he graduated, ITT filed for bankruptcy, amid allegations the school used misleading job placement and graduation rates to convince students to sign up for classes and take on the loans that would pay for them. Those are tactics Villalba said he experienced first hand. When he visited a California ITT campus for a tour, he heard about the school’s robust career services and relationships with the types of major companies where he hoped to work in animation following graduation...The pandemic has only heighted those challenges. Villalba lost his job as a graphic designer in March. He’s looking for work and worries that his ITT diploma is costing him again.  “The school committed a crime, it committed fraud,” Villalba said. If the federal loans were discharged because the government “realized that it was fraud,” then the private loans “should be in the same situation,” he said. Now Villalba is suing Navient NAVI, -2.48%, which currently holds his private student loans, and Sallie Mae SLM, -1.32%, the company’s corporate predecessor, accusing the firms of collecting on debt that’s invalid. In addition, the lawsuit filed on behalf of Villalba by Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, alleges that the company misled Villalba, telling him he couldn’t seek cancellation of the debt, even though he has a legal right to do so.