Media Mentions

A federal judge has ordered US Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to cancel the student loan debt of more than 7,200 Massachusetts students who attended Everest Institute, part of Corinthian Colleges’ defunct national chain of for-profit schools, capping a prolonged legal battle. In a 73-page decision, US District Judge Leo T. Sorokin ruled that the Department of Education must approve a 2015 application by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey seeking a discharge of the students’ federal loans based on allegations of widespread illegal conduct and deception by Corinthian. The order also applies to Parent Plus loans obtained on the students’ behalf. “Thousands of Massachusetts students cheated by Corinthian have finally had their day in court, and they have won,” Healey said in a statement Friday. “This landmark victory for students will cancel the federal loans for thousands of defrauded borrowers, mostly Black and Latinx students, targeted by a predatory for-profit school and abandoned by Secretary DeVos and the Trump Administration. For five years, our office and the Project on Predatory Student Lending have fought to win students the relief they deserve and today we have won decisively.” ...The ruling was issued in a case the Project on Predatory Student Lending Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School had filed on behalf of five students who had attended Everest Institute, which had campuses in Brighton and Chelsea. It went bankrupt in 2015 after running afoul of state and federal regulators. In his ruling, Sorokin granted the plaintiffs’ request for class-action status, expanding his order to include more than 7,200 students who attended the school. “This ruling is a clear and powerful statement of the rights of student borrowers, and a resounding rejection of the Department of Education’s ongoing and across-the-board refusal to recognize these rights and cancel fraudulent student loans,” said Toby Merrill, who directs the Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Could a slaveholder also be an advocate for equality for all? That is the riddle left behind by one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Jon Meacham join Walter Isaacson to discuss Jefferson's monuments and whether or not they should come down.

An article by Charles Fried and Edward J. Larson: Many observers breathed a sigh of relief when Bill Barr was confirmed as attorney general. Here was a respected professional who had served in the post once before in an honorable administration. Now, just a year and a half later, what a disappointment he has proved. The man cannot be trusted. Think of the intentionally misleading account he gave of the Mueller report, at a time when the public and Congress had only Barr’s word to go by. Or the brief he allowed his Justice Department to file with the Supreme Court in the case about including a citizenship question on the 2020 census, whose rationale the Court later characterized as “contrived” and “pretextual.” Or his false account of the use of armed forces to clear Lafayette Square for the president’s photo op. Or his statement that U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman asked to step down, when Berman had done no such thing. And now we have damning testimony this week about the politicization of the Department of Justice in the prosecution of the Trump ally Roger Stone. The attorney general is entitled to his opinion on the policies underlying these matters, and to argue forcefully for them. But as a lawyer, as a high official, as an officer of the court, he must not misrepresent the facts or the authorities. Americans need not agree with the attorney general’s arguments or conclusions, but they must have absolute confidence that he will not try to deceive them.

The consumer goods company Unilever and telecommunications corporation Verizon have both announced that they will boycott advertising on Facebook as a way of addressing the social media giant's permissive attitude toward hateful content on its platform. Unilever, which manufactures everything from soap and laundry detergent to ice cream and mayonnaise, referred Salon to a statement explaining that the company wishes to address social issues in a responsible way and has developed a "Responsibility Framework" to guide its policies. The statement argued that, because of the "divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the U.S.," the company is taking its social responsibilities very seriously and avoiding advertising on prominent social media platforms...Even before he retaliated against Twitter, Trump began threatening the platform. Salon spoke with Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe by email about whether his rhetoric violated Twitter's First Amendment rights. "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," Tribe explained. "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." Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California–Irvine, echoed Tribe's view.

An article by Aditi Shah '20: From the outset, the coronavirus pandemic posed a unique and immediate threat to incarcerated people—including noncitizens in civil immigration detention. As the pandemic goes on, lawsuits have proliferated across the country challenging the inadequate response of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the spread of the coronavirus. Since mid-March, when many cities and states began instituting stay-at-home orders, more than 100 lawsuits have been filed in federal courts seeking relief on behalf of noncitizens in ICE custody at heightened risk of serious illness or death due to the virus. The lawsuits have asked for a range of remedies, from ordering ICE to comply with guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to reduce the risk of detainees contracting the virus, to seeking temporary release for detainees at greater medical risk. With ICE failing to create safe conditions and refusing to release at-risk detainees, detained noncitizens across the country have turned to federal judges, who have been entrusted with resolving this facet of the national public health crisis. These cases offer insight into a crucial function of the judiciary during the pandemic, balancing traditional competing interests of detainees and the government while incorporating a modified definition of “public interest” in light of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, the respiratory disease the virus causes.

Police unions have emerged as the leading opponent of reform efforts as lawmakers respond to weeks of protests over the police killings of Black people across the country. Despite years of demonstrations against police violence, data shows that law enforcement agencies killed more people last year than they did five years ago. Black people are killed at a far higher rate than white people. The rise comes even as violent crime has plummeted across the country for decades. Despite the falling crime numbers, America's policing budget has nearly tripled over the last 45 years...Police unions have increasingly come under fire after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Bob Kroll, the president of the Minneapolis Police union, defended the officers charged in Floyd's murder and described protesters as a "terrorist movement." Kroll complained that the officers involved in Floyd's death were "terminated without due process" and that "what is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd," whose criminal history mostly involved just nonviolent drug and theft charges...As a result, many in the labor movement have pushed to disassociate police unions from other public sector unions. In Seattle, the King County Labor Council, a coalition of 150 unions representing 100,000 workers, expelled the Seattle police union last week.  "The consequence of police abusing [collective bargaining] power is that people end up dead," Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law and a member of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, told Vox. "That is happening at a significant rate and that's just a completely different context from the rest of the public sector."

"Bloomberg: Balance of Power" focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. Guests: PGIM CEO David Hunt, Ford COO Jim Farley, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein.

Dwindling access to reported news threatens to undermine democracy, warns former Law School dean and 300th Anniversary University Professor Martha Minow.

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: On Tuesday, President Donald Trump began his day as he usually does—by tweeting. In this case, Trump fired off a threat of using “serious force” against hypothetical protesters setting up an “autonomous zone” in Washington, D.C. Twitter, in response, hid the tweet but did not delete it, requiring readers to click through a notice that says the tweet violated the platform’s policy “against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.” Twitter’s placement of such a “public interest notice” on a tweet from the president of the United States was just the latest salvo in the company’s struggle to contend with Trump’s gleefully out-of-bounds behavior. But any response from Twitter is going to be the least bad option rather than a genuinely good one. This is because Trump himself has demolished the norms that would make a genuinely good response possible in the first place. The truth is that every plausible configuration of social media in 2020 is unpalatable. Although we don’t have consensus about what we want, no one would ask for what we currently have: a world in which two unelected entrepreneurs are in a position to monitor billions of expressions a day, serve as arbiters of truth, and decide what messages are amplified or demoted. This is the power that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have, and they may well experience their own discomfort with it. Nor, though, would many of us wish for such powerful people to stand idly by when, at no risk to themselves, they could intervene to prevent misery and violence in the physical world, by, say, helping to counter dangerous misinformation or preventing the incitement of violence.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Dr. Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, brings us up to speed on the latest coronavirus research. Plus, Noah analyzes the Supreme Court DACA ruling.

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: Last month I wrote a short essay covering some of the issues around standing up contact tracing across the U.S., as part of a test/trace/quarantine regime that would accompany the ending of a general lockdown to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic...In the intervening month, some things have remained the same. As before, tech companies and startups continue to develop exposure notification apps and frameworks. And there remains no Federally-coordinated effort to test, trace, and isolate — it’s up to states and respective municipalities to handle anything that will happen. Some localities continue to spin up ambitious contact tracing programs, while others remain greatly constrained. As Margaret Bourdeaux explains, for example: “In Massachusetts, many of the 351 local boards of health are unaccredited, and most have only the most rudimentary digital access to accomplish the most basic public health goals of testing and contact tracing in their communities.” She cites Georgetown’s Alexandra Phelan: “Truly the amount of US COVID19 response activities that rely solely on the fax machine would horrify you.” There remain any number of well-considered plans that depend on a staged, deliberate reopening based on on testing, tracing, and supported isolation, such as ones from Harvard’s Safra Center (“We need to massively scale-up testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine — together with providing the resources to make these possible for all individuals”), the Center for American Progress (calling for “instantaneous contact tracing and isolation of individuals who were in close proximity to a positive case”), and the American Enterprise Institute (“We need to harness the power of technology and drive additional resources to our state and local public-health departments, which are on the front lines of case identification and contact tracing”).

Growing up in Roxbury, Feliciano Tavares’ family shuffled in and out of shelters and subsidized housing, seeking stability amid the turbulence of poverty. But Tavares’ precarious home life was a secret to his classmates and most of his teachers in Weston, an affluent, mostly white suburb west of Boston, where he went to school through Metco, the state’s voluntary integration program for students of color. Those years going to school in Weston, Tavares said, exposed him to the “full spectrum of the American experience,” one divided along unrelenting racial and economic lines, where white children in Weston have access to every resource and opportunity imaginable, and Black children like himself can’t walk to a well-funded school in their own neighborhood. “When I hear ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I really want to focus on the ‘lives’ part of that statement,” said Tavares, who is now 42 and raising his own son and daughter with his wife in Roslindale...Organizers, city councilors, and community advocates have criticized Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s proposal to reallocate 20 percent — about $12 million — of the police department’s ballooning overtime budget to a variety of social services as woefully inadequate. “If you took the entire police budget, it wouldn’t be enough of an investment in terms of what we need,” said David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School. He pointed to a detail from the 2017 Globe Spotlight series on race in Boston, which cited a jaw-dropping statistic: According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School, the median net worth for nonimmigrant Black households in the Greater Boston region is $8, compared with $247,500 for white families. “That is the reality of life in Boston,” Harris added. “It speaks to the scale of what we face.”

In this episode, Craig Budner interviews Dr. Heidi Gardner. Growing up just outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania in Amish Country, Dr. Gardner went on to live and work on four continents, including as a Fulbright Fellow, and for McKinsey + Co. and Procter + Gamble. She earned her B.A. degree in Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and a second master’s and Ph.D. from the London Business School. Over the past decade, she has conducted in-depth studies on numerous global professional service firms and performed empirical research on organizational collaboration. Dr. Gardner published the results of her work in Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos in January 2017. Listen to how collaboration, especially during crisis, enables proactive leadership and offers better client solutions.

When you look up the hashtag #Karen on Instagram, a search that yields over 773,000 posts, the featured image on the page is a screenshot of a white woman staring intensely into the camera, pursing her lips into a smile as she touches a finger to her chin, a movement that’s at once condescending and cloying...The archetype of the Karen has risen to outstanding levels of notoriety in recent weeks, thanks to a flood of footage that’s become increasingly more violent and disturbing...The historical narrative of white women’s victimhood goes back to myths that were constructed during the era of American slavery. Black slaves were posited as sexual threats to the white women, the wives of slave owners; in reality, slave masters were the ones raping their slaves. This ideology, however, perpetuated the idea that white women, who represented the good and the moral in American society, needed to be protected by white men at all costs, thus justifying racial violence towards Black men or anyone that posed a threat to their power... “If we’re thinking about this in a historical context where white women are given the power over Black men, that their word will be valued over a Black man, that makes it particularly dangerous and that’s the problem,” says Dr. Apryl Williams, an assistant professor in communications and media at the University of Michigan and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who focuses on race, gender and community in digital spaces. “White women are positioned as the virtue of society because they hold that position as the mother, as the keepers of virtuosity, all these ideologies that we associate with white motherhood and white women in particular, their certain role in society gives them power and when you couple that with this racist history, where white women are afraid of black men and black men are hypersexualized and seen as dangerous, then that’s really a volatile combination.”

When Egyptians gathered in 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to the regime of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak, they did more than topple an unpopular dictator. Through their bravery, they sent a message to their fellow Arabs and to the world at large that change, finally, was coming to the Middle East. Today the heady dreams of 2011 seem from another era. A military coup in Egypt returned that country to tyranny, a Saudi military intervention on behalf of the regime in Bahrain ended the hopes of demonstrators there, and civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen have made a bloody mockery of visions of a new era of democracy. The only democratic revolution still standing is in Tunisia, where the protests began and the first dictator fell. As Noah Feldman contends in his important new book, “The Arab Winter: A Tragedy,” “the Arab spring ultimately made many people’s lives worse than they were before.” A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman served as an adviser to U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraq occupation and after 2011 engaged with Tunisians seeking help as they designed their first real democratic constitution. “The Arab Winter” reviews four major incidents of the Arab Spring — the Egyptian uprising and coup, the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State “caliphate,” and Tunisia’s fitful progress toward democracy — to make its main points. Feldman’s book is a reflection on the Arab Spring and, as its title suggests, its disastrous ending. “The Arab Winter” is not a history. Rather, it is an argument, in the best sense of that word, couched in political philosophy. To get the most out of the argument (for who doesn’t want to argue back?) the reader should be somewhat familiar with the Middle East. An engaged Washington Post reader would appreciate the book, but it’s not for the uninitiated.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday temporarily restricted shareholder payouts by the nation’s biggest banks, barring them from buying back their own stocks or increasing dividend payments in the third quarter as regulators try to ensure banks remain strong enough to keep lending through the pandemic-induced downturn. The decision to limit payouts is an admission by the Fed that large financial institutions, while far better off than they were in the financial crisis, remain vulnerable to an economic downturn unlike any other in modern history. With virus cases across the United States still surging and business activity subdued, it remains unclear when and how robustly the economy will recover. Some of the Fed’s own loss projections for banks, in fact, suggest that the eventual hit to loans in a bad scenario could be far worse than in the aftermath of 2008...Others felt that the Fed could have gone further to shore up the financial system. Officials could have placed formal restrictions on shareholder payouts earlier in the coronavirus crisis, and the decision to do so now is a sign that regulators believe the financial system could face threats if the downturn drags on. But the fact that the Fed’s demands are not stricter could limit the amount of buffer that banks have on hand to absorb losses and make loans to households and companies should borrowers struggle to repay debts over the coming months. “A lot of this seems to be about preserving options,” said Daniel Tarullo, a former Fed governor and the original architect of much of the stress-testing regime who is now at Harvard. “That’s inconsistent with the idea of acting early in response to a major shock.”

Public-sector unions were largely able to stave off a membership exodus in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court barred them from collecting mandatory fees, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of federal disclosures. The court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME on June 27, 2018 that unions could no longer collect mandatory “fair share” fees to cover the costs of collective bargaining, reversing a 40-year precedent that let unions charge partial dues. These agency fee payers, as they were known, paid a lower rate than full members, whose dues also support the union’s political activity. But the high court sided with conservative petitioners, who argued that fair share fees in the public-sector violated the First Amendment. The Labor Department disclosures show that many unions were able to convert passive fee payers into full-time members, though the results vary by union. Questions remain whether the unions’ strategy is sustainable in the long run, particularly during a pandemic that has wiped out local government budgets and snarled traditional organizing efforts. “The tax base is just cratering—you have so much reduced economic activity, people aren’t paying,” said Sharon Block, a former Obama administration official who directs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “State and local governments have to have balanced budgets, they can’t pass a trillion-dollar relief bill, so any shortfall is devastating.” The impact of the Janus decision could take on new proportions if the justices agree to consider whether public-sector unions have to pay back previously collected mandatory agency fees. Lower courts thus far have rejected a slew of lawsuits seeking refunds, finding that unions relied on what was then valid law when they required nonmembers to pay fees.

An article by Noah Feldman: In a sweeping decision with worrying implications for all immigrants, the Supreme Court has held that asylum-seekers rejected by immigration officials under an expedited system do not have the right to go to court to challenge their exclusion from the U.S. The majority opinion, by stalwart conservative Justice Samuel Alito, relied on originalist historical analysis to whittle down the meaning of habeas corpus to its most minimal protections. Along the way, Alito minimized and arguably misrepresented the most famous antislavery judicial decision of all time: Somerset v. Stewart, a 1772 case in which the greatest English common law judge of the era held that an enslaved Jamaican could not be forced to return to the West Indies but must be allowed to live freely in England. The specific law at issue in today’s case, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, is a provision of the wordily named Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act, known as IIRIRA. The law says that when a person enters the U.S., is detained at or near the border and seeks asylum, an immigration officer can interview the person and make a decision about whether the asylum-seeker has a “credible fear” of persecution that would qualify for asylum. If the answer is yes, the asylum-seeker gets a full hearing. If the answer is no, then the seeker’s case is reviewed by a supervisor and, if the asylum-seeker asks for it, by an immigration judge. This process is known as expedited review — and under the federal law, there is no way for the asylum-seeker to go to a regular federal court and seek review of the decision.

President Donald Trump isn’t a cop, and he definitely didn’t/doesn’t serve in the military. Wouldn’t that make him a civilian? Not according to White House spokesman Judd Deere, who explained that Trump will not follow New Jersey’s quarantine order because the “president of the United States is not a civilian.” But virtually every other authority leads to the conclusion that the president is — actually — a civilian. The controversy is this: the president plans to visit his New Jersey golf club days after returning from Arizona, a state where coronavirus cases are spiking. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), along with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D), announced on Wednesday that visitors who traveled to COVID-19 hotspots would need to self-quarantine for 14 days. The White House responded to a question about the president’s post-Arizona visit to N.J. by saying 1) the president is not a civilian and 2) adequate precautions would be taken...Given on all of the above, Law and Crime asked constitutional law expert and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe if it was the case that the Constitution was set up in such a way as to ensure that the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces would be a civilian. “To say that the president isn’t a ‘civilian’ is absolute bunk, to use a more polite word than the ones that come more immediately to mind. Of course the president is a civilian, fully subject to the civil and criminal laws of this nation regardless of whatever temporary immunity from prosecution he might enjoy while holding office,” Tribe said. “And you’re certainly right that the whole structure of the Constitution points to the central conclusion that the President of the United States, even and perhaps most especially in his role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, would have to remain a civilian and not himself or herself be a member of the military or of any militia.”

University students across America are calling for their universities to sever ties with outside law enforcement agencies and defund any resources currently spent on policing. Thousands of university students, graduate workers, faculty and student organizations have signed petitions, issued statements, held protests, and are organizing to compel universities to carry out their demands. Campaigners want funding currently spent on campus policing to be diverted to community-based alternatives, programs for education, youth and mental health services, and affordable housing...At Harvard, students and alumni have renewed calls to abolish the school’s private police force, the HUPD, as officers from the school were seen being utilized against protest demonstrations in the city of Boston. “Harvard University has not justified the need for a police force. Around 95% of HUPD’s caseload is property crimes, offenses,” said Joanna Anyanwu '21, a student at Harvard Law School and organizer with the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign. In January 2020, Harvard’s student-run newspaper, the Crimson, published a feature on racism within HUPD, outlining complaints and lawsuits alleging racial discrimination within its ranks over the past two decades. “The call to abolish HUPD is an acknowledgement that policing doesn’t keep us safe,” said Amber Ashley James, an organizer with the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign. James argued funding toward the police should be redirected to programs such as mental healthcare provided to students and faculty on campus, a crisis response team, and programs to support the homeless.

An article by Tyler Ambrose '22, Zarinah Mustafa '22, and Sherin Nassar '22: Corporations, newsrooms, and political institutions have faced public pressure to denounce and combat racism as activists nationwide have pushed for police reform. However, there is an institution guilty of perpetuating racial inequality that we have yet to scrutinize: American law schools. These institutions produce the legal professionals we rely on to interpret and uphold the law, such as the district attorneys who prosecute the police. Yet, they are overwhelmingly misguided and underinformed on issues of racism in the law. And it is not entirely their fault. Law schools are complicit. As rising second-year Black and brown students at Harvard Law School, we are keenly aware of our privilege. While America is embroiled in a people’s movement for justice long denied, we recognize and embrace our responsibility to challenge the racially sterile curriculum of law school classrooms. We cannot allow these legal institutions to continue producing race-illiterate lawyers. The consequence of this illiteracy is not hypothetical. It is police killing Black people with impunity, and harsher sentences for Black and brown men, women and children. It is judges selling Black boys to prisons for profit. It is protesters marching for weeks during a pandemic. Law schools can no longer refuse to depart from the status quo while in the same breath claim they believe Black lives matter.