Media Mentions

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.

In normal times, Timothy Tymkvoich, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, treats his clerks like an extended family. They sit around his chambers kicking around cases and, outside of court, go out for dinner or ski together. These days, Tymkvoich has to be more careful due to the Covid-19 pandemic, taking precautions in his chambers and not requiring clerks to come in every day. In-person mentoring and cross-chamber interactions are much harder for now, and Tymkovich worries that his newest clerks are “going to be missing some of that X factor that other classes of clerks have enjoyed.” The pandemic has forced federal judges and courts from the Supreme Court on down to adapt everything from the way nearly 3,200 law clerks are hired and integrated into courts to how they do their jobs on a daily basis. The remote clerkship poses the biggest challenge to what many consider the best part of the experience: the intimate face-to-face contact and mentorship-on-the-job that often creates life-long bonds between judges and clerks...Law school officials also said remote clerkship interviewing has been a positive feature that they hope outlasts the pandemic. Remote interviewing “was a huge relief to most applicants” that “leveled the playing field in a way many hope will continue as a new normal, even post-pandemic,” said Kirsten Solberg, Harvard Law School’s director of judicial clerkships. It has allowed students “to pursue more opportunities without worrying about cost or having to make choices to juggle travel,” said Janet Siegel Brown, lecturer and director of judicial clerkships at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Having won landmark cases to protect borrower rights, recover money owed, and cancel fraudulent debt since 2012, Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending continues to tackle the for-profit college industry on behalf of hundreds of thousands of students across the country.

Today the Criminal Justice Policy Program (CJPP) at Harvard Law School released a report nearly four years in the making, on racial disparities in the Massachusetts criminal system. In October 2016, Ralph Gants ’76, J.D. ’80, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, asked Harvard researchers to examine the vastly unequal imprisonment rates among white, African American, and Latinx defendants...A group of scholars at CJPP—executive director Brook Hopkins, J.D. ’04, fellows Elizabeth Tsai Bishop, Chijindu Obiofuma, and Felix Owusu—set out to understand why these numbers are so disparate. They were granted unprecedented access to Massachusetts criminal data from several agencies, including the Massachusetts Trial Court, the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, and the Department of Correction. The data allowed the researchers to get a picture of several different stages of the criminal system, from charging and bail to adjudication and sentencing. The researchers found that more than 70 percent of the racial disparity in sentencing length is driven by differences in the initial charges brought against defendants, which can differ significantly from the final offense they are later convicted of. Cases for black and Latinx defendants tended to have more serious initial charges than those for their white counterparts, the researchers reported. Those disparities are sometimes mitigated by adjudication and plea bargaining, but the initial-charge differences continue to influence sentencing—even when defendants of color are not convicted of the more serious crimes they were initially charged with.

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.