Media Mentions

An article by Bruce Schneier: Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people’s Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter’s system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly. The hacker used that access to send tweets from a variety of popular and trusted accounts, including those of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as part of a mundane scam—stealing bitcoin—but it’s easy to envision more nefarious scenarios. Imagine a government using this sort of attack against another government, coordinating a series of fake tweets from hundreds of politicians and other public figures the day before a major election, to affect the outcome. Or to escalate an international dispute. Done well, it would be devastating. Whether the hackers had access to Twitter direct messages is not known. These DMs are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that they are unencrypted inside Twitter’s network and could have been available to the hackers. Those messages—between world leaders, industry CEOs, reporters and their sources, heath organizations—are much more valuable than bitcoin. (If I were a national-intelligence agency, I might even use a bitcoin scam to mask my real intelligence-gathering purpose.) Back in 2018, Twitter said it was exploring encrypting those messages, but it hasn’t yet. Internet communications platforms—such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—are crucial in today’s society. They’re how we communicate with one another. They’re how our elected leaders communicate with us. They are essential infrastructure. Yet they are run by for-profit companies with little government oversight. This is simply no longer sustainable.

Massachusetts House leaders reviewing the Senate policing bill received hundreds of emails Friday with testimony ranging from police officers opposing changes to qualified immunity to civil rights activists who say the bill does not go far enough to tackle institutionalized racism in law enforcement. The Senate approved a massive omnibus bill early Tuesday after an all-night session debating the provisions, including how the bill would change qualified immunity standards when misconduct is alleged...Katy Naples-Mitchell, legal fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, urged the legislature to extend its session beyond July 31 to ensure the omnibus bill includes provisions that involve the input of people affected by institutionalized racism. One concern Naples-Mitchell raised was the proposed temporarily facial recognition ban exempting the Registrar of Motor Vehicles. “The Registry may continue to suspend people’s licenses using a technology we know to be racist and unreliable, which the chief of police in Detroit says misidentifies people 96% of the time,” Naples-Mitchell’s testimony states. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns she raised was that the bill would create several commissions and councils to study problems she said are already known to exist, based on existing data and research. “These commissions are nothing but a delay tactic and a way to preserve power for an elite professional class, putting off for tomorrow what this body refuses to do today,” Naples-Mitchell wrote.

Donald Trump announced this week one of the biggest rollbacks of established environmental law in a generation, declaring in a speech in Atlanta that his administration was moving forward with a fundamental overhaul of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)...Trump’s overhaul of NEPA reverses those protections and processes. If it survives the expected legal challenges, it will undo 50 years of NEPA precedent and interpretations by federal agencies and the courts and make it much more difficult for communities burdened by pollution or worried about climate change to push back on destructive projects.  “Less projects will now go through environmental review, and when an environmental review is performed, many impacts will be excluded from discussion, consideration, and public knowledge,” Caitlin McCoy, a fellow for the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra. “We will not have a full accounting of the impacts of these projects, how they will affect our health, environment, and communities.” ...In the past, projects could be evaluated for their impact on the environment in the future, such as on climate change. When projects emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, those gases build up in the atmosphere over time and cause damage over time. Under the new regulations, impacts that occur either later in time or are geographically removed in distance from the project can no longer be considered. “Climate change is a tremendous and breathtaking threat to our planet and our lives,” McCoy said. “There is almost no deeper irony than the fact that these changes to our foundational environmental statute are laser focused on excluding climate impacts from environmental review. And it’s happening now during a global pandemic, which seems to be more deadly if you breathe polluted air, when we’re reckoning with racial justice, and, at a time when the climate crisis is accelerating.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made two decisions yesterday that affect renewable energy, prompting starkly opposing reactions from wind and solar supporters. In a unanimous vote, FERC rejected a contentious petition that sought to end nationwide net metering, a practice that requires utilities to pay rooftop solar owners for the extra electricity they generate. That sparked praise from renewable groups that also blasted the agency for a separate, final rule updating the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), a 1970s energy law meant to promote the adoption of small-scale, independent wind and solar projects...Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program who has been critical of NERA's petition, said in general, he doesn't see the commission picking the issue back up, however. "Although perhaps yes if [Republicans] hold the majority for another five years, which might provide enough time for someone to file a more specific petition/enforcement action," he wrote in an email. Peskoe said Danly seemed to suggest parties might now bring lawsuits in federal court to challenge net metering. "Perhaps he knows something. His premise is that various courts might draw different conclusions about FERC's jurisdiction, and that would be a bad result," he said. "He therefore appears to suggest that FERC ought to weigh in, to ensure a uniform national approach to FERC's jurisdiction." He added that a court faced with a net-metering lawsuit could simply ask FERC to weigh in as has happened in the past.

It’s well over a hundred days into the Covid-19 crisis, and I have to make a confession. I hate doing everything over video chat. I hated it at the start, and I hate it in new ways now. You’ve probably heard of the term “Zoom fatigue.” I’ve transcended Zoom fatigue. At this stage in the pandemic, I’m experiencing something more advanced, like that moment on a long run when you’ve fought through fatigue, tapped into your body’s store of endorphins, and also lost a toenail. Whether I like it or not, most of my work life and social life will happen via webcam in the weeks and months to come. Despite my complaints, however, this does not have to be a bad thing. Even when the pandemic ends, video chat will play an increasingly important role at work, for school, in health care, and in our relationships with friends and family. The pandemic not only pushed this technology into new scenarios of our daily lives but also forced everyone to learn how to use it...Zoom fatigue is the feeling of utter hopelessness you get after your ninth video call of the day, and experts say it’s brought on because the technology overtaxes your brain. Presented with a cropped, often blurry image of a human and a few milliseconds of lag throughout the conversation, your mind splits its attention between what people are saying and what’s happening on the screen, longing for nonverbal cues that just don’t cross over. Some call it “Zoom burnout,” though the “fatigue” descriptor better encapsulates how we’re tired of video calls but have to keep doing it. Others suggest the real problem is that we’re all depressed by the state of our lives in the pandemic. Regardless, video chat has always had fundamental flaws that make it prone to creating unsatisfying experiences. “We are constantly presented with the promise of instantaneous connection that seamlessly connects us with the people we love and the people we work with, and that’s always a fiction,” Jason Farman, a faculty associate with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, explained. “I think we’ve seen that promise for well over 100 years.”

The Trump administration gave its final rewrite of a rule on how agencies conduct environmental reviews a better chance of surviving legal challenges by backing away from clear language that may have been vulnerable to attack, but in doing so, it may have created new problems by leaving certain terms up to agencies to define. The White House on Wednesday stepped back from the proposed rule's total ban on consideration of a project's "indirect" effects on the environment during a National Environmental Policy Act review, while declining to completely spell out what types of projects are exempt from NEPA reviews. By avoiding hard-line positions that environmental groups and more liberal states could have challenged as arbitrary or capricious, the White House Council on Environmental Quality gave more protection to its final rule from one line of attack. Yet the choice to be less clear leaves blanks for federal agencies to fill — and that opens a Pandora's box of potential litigation, experts say. "So much is going to depend on the way that this is implemented," Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney with the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said. "By opening up a lot of different elements of these regulations to interpretation in order to avoid taking hard positions that could be challenged as arbitrary, CEQ is just exposing all of the agencies to a huge round of litigation." ...That means while the rule might be more legally sound and helps fulfill the goal of narrowing the types of projects that require NEPA reviews — creating more certainty for project proponents and speeding up the process — there still will be lots of chances for opponents to thwart those aims at the agency level, McCoy said.

An article by Margaret Bourdeaux, Beth Cameron and Jonathan Zittrain: As Covid-19 cases surge to their highest levels in dozens of states, the nation’s testing effort is on the brink of paralysis because of widespread delays in getting back results. And that is very bad news, because even if testing is robust, the pandemic cannot be controlled without rapid results. This is the latest failure in our national response to the worst pandemic in a century. Since the Trump administration has abdicated responsibility, governors must join forces to meet this threat before the cataclysm that Florida is experiencing becomes the reality across the country. Testing should be the governors’ first order of business. Despite President Trump’s boast early this month that testing “is so massive and so good,” the United States’ two largest commercial testing companies, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, have found themselves overwhelmed and unable to return results promptly. Delays averaging a week or longer for all but top-priority hospital patients and symptomatic health care workers are disastrous for efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Without rapid results, it is impossible to isolate new infections quickly enough to douse flare-ups before they grow. Slow diagnosis incapacitates contact tracing, which entails not only isolating those who test positive but also alerting the infected person’s contacts quickly so they can quarantine, too, and avoid exposing others to the virus unwittingly. Among those who waited an absurdly long time for her results was the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. “We FINALLY received our test results taken 8 days before,” she tweeted last week. “One person in my house was positive then. By the time we tested again, 1 week later, 3 of us had COVID. If we had known sooner, we would have immediately quarantined.”

The impact that pretrial risk or risk and needs assessment (RNA) tools have on criminal justice decisions is usually relative to each jurisdiction. After all, states use different tools at different times for different purposes. How much risk assessment tools exacerbate or mitigate bias within criminal justice processes, therefore, often comes down to how they’re designed, validated and considered by a judge or correctional officer. But outside of individual implementations, the use of risk assessments as a whole, and the value—or lack thereof—they provide is a matter of intense debate...Both judges and assessment tools are “relying [on] and using court-provided and criminal information, [and] both sources of those information are biased,” says Colin Doyle, staff attorney at the Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, who works on pretrial reform and bail issues. “Whether you’re a judge or an algorithm, that bias is baked into your thinking about predicting future crimes.” Are risk assessment tools, then, inherently biased? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer: ones that are designed and validated poorly certainly can be...Essentially, the data used on these risk assessment tool “is not neutral,” Doyle says. “It’s a record of police activity and not people’s activity. When you use that to evaluate people’s risk, whatever police do will distort your system.” ...Others have said that if local criminal justice systems continue to use risk assessment tools, then at the very least, there needs to be more open discussions about how they work. “We probably have to do a better job of communicating about these tools,” Doyle says. He notes, however, that some jurisdictions, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, have allowed for community involvement and transparency in their risk assessment roll-outs.

President Trump's rewrite of a Nixon-era environmental law — if it withstands expected legal challenges and the November election — could have major implications for energy projects, including oil and gas pipelines nationwide. Trump yesterday announced the completion of rules to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, vowing the move would lead to quicker turnarounds for buildings and "better roads, bridges, tunnels and highways." He reserved his remarks on energy to bash his presumed Democratic presidential challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, using the second official White House event in two days to accuse Biden of pitching an energy plan that "would kill" oil and gas development...As critics expected, the final rule excludes the word "cumulative" effects from the NEPA review process. The plan stated a project's effects that are "remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain" should generally not be considered. That means impacts like greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to larger problems over time are less likely to be weighed in consideration of projects. The rule also stated effects under the purview of the law "do not include those effects that the agency has no ability to prevent due to its limited statutory authority." Caitlin McCoy, an attorney at Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program, said the language in the final rule is "intentionally vague." "It'll be up to the agencies," she said...McCoy noted that the final rule states that projects using "minimal federal funding" would not trigger a NEPA review. The catch, she noted, is that the rule gives no dollar amount for what counts as "minimal."

Environmental regulation is shaping up as a defining issue in the presidential race, with President Trump doubling down on his bid to ratchet back government oversight and former Vice President Joe Biden promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. The rivals this week outlined diametrically opposed views. Mr. Trump ordered a streamlining of environmental reviews and said he would keep shrinking the reach of government to help business. Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, released a $2 trillion clean-energy plan he said would spur job growth through investments in new technology...Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump also issued a hiring freeze designed to starve agencies through attrition. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which investigates and regulates workplaces for health and safety issues, has the lowest number of inspectors in more than four decades and has seen inspection tallies plummet. The Environmental Protection Agency has seen similar decreases in inspections when compared with the Obama era, according to government reports. “The administration came into office with an unnervingly good understanding of how the machinery of regulation works and they did a pretty effective job of sabotaging it,” said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. The approach will make it tougher for a new administration to carry out its objectives.

The Trump Administration wants faster reviews of pipeline and other large projects, but its latest move to achieve that leaves the question of climate impact assessment for such projects unclear. Overhauling NEPA marks the Trump Administration's latest efforts to cut down on what it sees as "mountains and mountains of bureaucratic red tape in Washington, D.C.," the president said in his Wednesday speech. His administration first proposed its changes to the 50-year-old law in January, and in June Trump signed an executive order loosening compliance requirements for the law in response to COVID-19-related delays. Fundamentally, the law's changes are twofold, Caitlin McCoy, staff attorney at Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Utility Dive: it would reduce the number of projects subject to NEPA review and exclude certain effects of the project from being considered significant. For a project to trigger NEPA review, it needs to pose "significant" impacts to environmental quality or be federally funded, but under revised NEPA standards, projects would be exempt if they received "minimal federal funding" or "involvement" from the government, said McCoy. It's unclear whether a pipeline would trigger NEPA under these rules, she said — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission needs to issue a certification for interstate pipelines, but "it has no control over whether the project is ultimately built or not, how it operates, pipeline safety or security." ... If a project does trigger NEPA, it is less clear how climate impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, hydrofluorocarbon emissions and other climate-related incidentals common to major infrastructure projects would be considered, said McCoy. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) initially proposed reviews focus only on "direct effects" of a project, but now says effects "generally not be considered if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain." The word "generally" has been added since the change was first proposed and could leave the door open to considering potential climate impacts, McCoy said.

On Wednesday, President Trump achieved a longstanding goal in weakening environmental protection: The administration significantly narrowed the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires the government to study the impact of federal projects on the communities and wild areas around them. By skipping steps and shortening deadlines, these changes help to fast-track fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines and highways, a move that leaves out the voices of poor neighborhoods and people of color on the pollution in their communities...Twice a year, the administration publishes a Unified Regulatory Agenda that details its plans for new regulations and rollbacks. The experts who keep track of environmental rollbacks for Harvard’s Regulatory Tracker noticed an exceptionally long list in the recently updated agenda from early July. It shows 317 items  in proposed or final stages lined up for both the Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency. Of those 317, the rules in final stages are most important to watch, because they close enough to the finish line that Trump could conceivably rush them out the door before January if he loses the election. There are 64 EPA rules and 74 Interior rules in the final stage, according to the same list, slightly higher than the EPA and Interior had planned for the fall. “If they meet their schedule, virtually every big ticket item will be across the finish line,” says Harvard University’s Joseph Goffman, who was a senior clean air attorney under the Obama EPA... “If that happens, if there ever is a Democratic administration coming in that has any kind of ambitious regulatory agenda,” Goffman says, “they’re going to have to overcome whatever of those restrictive legal interpretations that were upheld by the courts.”

The Trump administration is rolling back major environmental protections that require the US government to comprehensively analyze how proposed projects like pipelines and highways affect surrounding communities. Trump announced the changes on Wednesday afternoon from a UPS airport hub in Atlanta, where he backed the widening of commercial truck lanes on Interstate Highway 75. The White House said projects like the Atlanta expansion would have taken seven years to permit and now should take less than two years. The White House Council on Environmental Quality finalized the changes to the regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), which the Republican president Richard Nixon signed into law in 1970. The new rules reduce the number of projects subject to review, narrow the scope of reviews and exclude effects related to climate change from being considered significant...Less than 1% of projects funded or permitted by federal agencies require full environmental impact statements under the law. But those that do are significant. Before Nepa, “you could wake up one day and see half your neighborhood bulldozed,” said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney for the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard. In 1956, the federal government demolished hundreds of houses in an African American neighborhood in St Paul, Minnesota, to make room for Interstate 94. “We’ve spent so much time talking about the Trump administration’s ‘rollbacks’, and most of that has been focused on how the Trump administration has sought to undo regulations that were put in place under the Obama administration … but this one is really significant because these regulations have been in place since 1978 and only small changes have been made over the years,” McCoy said. “It shows how far the Trump administration is willing to go and how emboldened they feel three and a half years in.”

People start lining up as early as 6 a.m. these days outside an emergency food pantry in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. Theresa Gilbert, a 61-year-old in-home care giver waiting in line on a recent scorching-hot day, said money has been tight since March, when she caught a cold on the job and the agency she works for sent her home. She hasn’t worked since, and the food she gets here helps make ends meet. “Whatever I have, I make it do,” Ms. Gilbert said. Demand for the free vegetables, milk and canned goods on offer here has surged since the coronavirus pandemic torpedoed the U.S. economy, closing businesses and thrusting millions out of work...Hunger-relief organization Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, estimates the pandemic could push an additional 17 million people into what it calls food insecurity this year. More than 82% of U.S. food banks are serving more people than they were last year, with an average increase of 50%, according to a June survey by the group. “The pandemic is putting pressure on a system that was already struggling to make sure all the food we are producing finds its way to people,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

How far has the diplomatic relationship between the United States and China sunk? It’s gotten to the point where China watchers are increasingly invoking a fuzzy but extreme concept: “decoupling.” In its purest form, the term refers to a halt in the flows of information, money, ideas, and people between the world’s two powers. And there’s plenty of evidence the two countries are headed in that direction...But how realistic is a pure decoupling – and what does decoupling, in any form, mean for our collective future? To help answer this question, I gathered a group of China experts with backgrounds in finance, trade, government and technology...Joining me for the virtual discussion...[is] Mark Wu, Vice Dean and professor of international trade at Harvard Law School... "When we use the term decoupling, we have to think of it as a spectrum. There are a range of options and it will differ depending on which sector. What's the nature of that company? It will also differ based on where that company earns its revenue globally. One possibility is definitely the zero-sum choice that Samm alluded to. But for other companies, this is a question about simply not putting all your eggs in one basket. So you've seen some companies depend overwhelmingly on either Chinese or American suppliers. And now [they are] thinking, we better have other sources in case unexpected developments happen. Then there is another alternative, which is to say nothing's going to change about how we operate currently, but we may have to change our future plans. Chinese companies right now who operate with a 'China for China' type of strategy may now be thinking about going towards a 'China for the world' strategy."

An article by Noah Feldman: The blockbuster Supreme Court term that just ended was a (nearly) unmitigated disaster for movement conservatives. Chief Justice John Roberts declined to overturn precedent on abortion rights. Conservative activist Justice Neil Gorsuch showed he would join the court’s liberals when the statutory text tells him to. The natural question then is, what’s next? What are the implications for the future of the court? The short answer is that the court’s future direction is in flux like no other time in recent memory. And what happens next will be determined by the 2020 election and the justices’ health. The first crucial point here is that, had Roberts and Gorsuch not crossed the court’s ideological lines in the most high-profile cases of the term, we would be looking at an extremely conservative court for the foreseeable future, regardless of the outcome of the November vote. The court has five conservative justices who — until this term — seemed capable of acting as an unassailable voting bloc for the indefinite future. (The oldest, Justice Clarence Thomas, is only 72.) This bloc was formed after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate blocked a confirmation vote on Judge Merrick Garland during the Obama administration, allowing a newly elected President Donald Trump to appoint Gorsuch. The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing voter who repeatedly delivered liberal-friendly results on issues like gay rights, abortion, and Guantánamo, then allowed Trump to appoint Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is (so far) a much more reliable conservative. This conservative majority was the first on the court in nearly a century, and conservative activists anticipated that it would overturn Roe v. Wade and hold the line on cultural issues like transgender rights.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Jennifer Bradley, the Founding Director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute, discusses how the coronavirus has changed cities, in some ways for the better. Plus, in his Playback column, Noah gives his take on the Supreme Court's decision on Trump's tax records.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce his final plans to expedite permitting for major infrastructure like oil pipelines and road expansions in Atlanta on Wednesday, a move that environmentalists say will bypass public input. The proposal to update how the 50-year old bedrock National Environmental Protection Act (here) (NEPA) is implemented is part of Trump’s broader campaign to cut environmental regulation to boost industry and fast-track projects that often take years to complete - an effort that has been blocked or slowed down by courts...The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) proposed the changes to NEPA in January, kicking off a public comment period. Officials had called the proposal “the most significant deregulatory proposal” of the Trump administration. Just last week (here), a federal judge ordered the Dakota Access pipeline to shut down because the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to do an adequate NEPA impact study and the Supreme Court blocked construction of the Keystone XL line from Canada pending a deeper environmental review. The CEQ received over 1 million comments after the January proposal, many of which opposed the changes and offered evidence that they could have “harmful results,” said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney for the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. This could make the rule vulnerable in lawsuits, she said. “CEQ will need to show that it grappled with these adverse comments and considered all of the important aspects of making these changes, otherwise aspects of the regulations could be ruled arbitrary and capricious,” she said.

Brandi Collins-Dexter is the senior campaign director at the advocacy organization Color of Change and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Here, she speaks with Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic and Evelyn Douek about her new report with the Shorenstein Center, “Canaries in the Coal Mine: COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities,” which follows the emergence and dissemination of coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation among Black social media users in the United States. They also discuss Color of Change’s role in the #StopHateForProfit Facebook ad boycott.

Since February of last year, tens of thousands of patients hospitalized at one of Minnesota’s largest health systems have had their discharge planning decisions informed with help from an artificial intelligence model. But few if any of those patients has any idea about the AI involved in their care. That’s because frontline clinicians at M Health Fairview generally don’t mention the AI whirring behind the scenes in their conversations with patients. At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools...Hospitals and clinicians “are operating under the assumption that you do not disclose, and that’s not really something that has been defended or really thought about,” Harvard Law School professor Glenn Cohen said. Cohen is the author of one of only a few articles examining the issue, which has received surprisingly scant attention in the medical literature even as research about AI and machine learning proliferates...Harvard’s Cohen said he wants to see hospital systems, clinicians, and AI manufacturers come together for a thoughtful discussion around whether they should be disclosing the use of these tools to patients — “and if we’re not doing that, then the question is why aren’t we telling them about this when we tell them about a lot of other things,” he said. Cohen said he worries that uptake and trust in AI and machine learning could plummet if patients “were to find out, after the fact, that there’s a rash of this being used without anyone ever telling them.” “That’s a scary thing,” he said, “if you think this is the way the future is going to go.”

One area of significant contention in the state senate's recently passed police reform bill was whether to limit "qualified immunity,"a legal doctrine that protects police and other public employees from lawsuits. Qualified immunity has been both a lightning rod in local and national police reform debates, and a source of confusion about what it actually entails. We turn to Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, WBUR legal analyst and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, on what qualified immunity is, and why many law enforcement officials are trying to hold on to it.