Media Mentions

Off Their Plate, a national effort to get meals to health care workers on the front line of the Covid-19 crisis and keep restaurant workers paid and working, has started a Chicago operation. The nonprofit will deliver 175 meals today to the Lawndale Christian Health Center. The group plans to deliver 500 additional meals to hospitals on the North and West Sides by the end of this week and more than 1,000 next week. The Chicago effort is headed by Adam Smith '20, a Harvard Law student who most recently served as campaign manager to Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jack Hagerty. Other team members include Stephen Brokaw and Saralena Barry, who worked as presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's national political director and special assistant, respectively; and Daniel Egel-Weiss '20, also a Harvard Law student and former chief of staff to state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz during her time in the state House.

A TED Talk by Jeannie Suk Gersen: To understand what makes marriages work, we need to talk about why they sometimes end, says family law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen. Follow along as she lays out three ways that thinking about marital decisions through the lens of divorce can help you better navigate togetherness from the beginning.

Harvard Law School will be hosting a “homeschooling summit” to discuss the “child maltreatment” and “educational deprivation” that happens when parents choose to homeschool their children. The invite-only “Homeschooling Summit: Problems, Politics, and Prospects for Reform” is scheduled to take place June 18-19 and will host speakers from education and child welfare policy backgrounds, as well as academics, policy advocates, and legislators to discuss the “problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or not oversight.” “Experts will lead conversations about the available empirical evidence, the current regulatory environment, proposals for legal reform, and strategies for effecting such reform,” the event page reads. Among the features speakers is Harvard Law’s Elizabeth Bartholet, a co-organizer of the event, who has written extensively about the “rapidly growing homeschool phenomena,” which she describes in the abstract for her 2019 essay — a recommended reading material for the event — “as a “threat” to “children and society.”  “Many homeschool precisely because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to public education and to our democracy. Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science. Many are determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives,” she writes.

Across the country and the world, communities are working feverishly to measure the coronavirus pandemic’s impact — struggling with shortages of tests and depleted health care capabilities to gauge the numbers of the infected, the sick, and the dead. Accurate data is the first vital step in understanding the scope of the problem and developing and calibrating the best response. But, as the world moves to lockdown and social isolation, what is happening to the approximately 2.3 million people behind bars in the United States and to the tens of thousands who work in those facilities — line officers, administrators, nurses, therapists, doctors? Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Public Policy Marcella Alsan and Harvard Law School Professor of Law Crystal Yang have teamed up with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) to conduct the first detailed survey on the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the country’s prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities. HKS discusses their groundbreaking work, what it tells us about the spread and treatment of the disease among some of the most vulnerable populations, and how this valuable data can guide practitioners and policymakers.

To prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus that’s killed more than 20,000 Americans, at least 316 million people across the country have been urged — and in some cases, ordered — to stay home. While most have voluntarily complied in an effort to protect themselves and others from COVID-19, scofflaws put police in a pickle: How do you enforce public health directives at a time when jails and prisons incubate the very disease you’re trying to suppress? “There’s the dilemma — you don’t want to put anyone in prison,” said Judge Nancy Gertner, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Detention facilities are petri dishes. You send someone to jail, it could be a death sentence.” Jail as capital punishment is no hyperbole: Cook County Jail in Illinois is the hardest-hit per-capita COVID-19 site in the country, with more than 350 cases and at least two inmate deaths. Rikers Island in New York City has had over 700 cases between inmates, staff and health care workers, including seven jail employee deaths and two inmate deaths.

The U.S. Education Department is promising to process student loan forgiveness claims for nearly 170,000 borrowers within 18 months as part of a proposed settlement announced Friday in a federal lawsuit. The suit alleges that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos illegally stalled a program known as borrower defense to repayment, which promises to forgive federal student loans for borrowers who are cheated by their colleges. When the lawsuit was filed in June 2019, it had been a year since the department issued a final decision on any claim. Most of the borrowers awaiting decisions attended for-profit colleges, and some have been waiting more than four years for a decision. Under the settlement, DeVos admits no wrongdoing but promises to issue decisions on all pending claims within 18 months, and to cancel debt for approved claims within 21 months...If the agency fails to decide a claim within 18 months, officials must cancel 30% of debt for every month they're overdue. And if the agency garnishes students' wages or takes their tax refunds while they're awaiting a decision, it must discharge 80% of the debt. “This settlement is a very important step that will allow them to finally get a decision and move forward," said said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University, which represented the plaintiffs. "The Department of Education’s refusal to cancel these loans quickly and in their entirety is a stain on the federal student loan program.”

An article by Hal Scott: The Federal Reserve has become the first responder for the U.S. economy. Normally, the Fed is concerned with the safety of the financial system. But its fate as an independent central bank may turn on whether it can preserve the real economy. To succeed, the Fed needs to put aside normal concerns about credit risk and picking winners and losers. Clearly no moral-hazard issues arise from this virus outbreak. The Fed must move quickly to get cash in the hands of business owners. Small businesses constitute almost 50% of the country’s workforce. Many have only a three- or four-week cash cushion. They need money now. The Fed is the perfect vehicle to save the economy. It’s trusted politically, staffed by skilled professionals, and has the experience of 2008 from which to draw. Most important, it can create money and operate with negative capital. The Fed can always pay its bills.

A survey by Crystal Yang and Marcella Alsan: A collaboration between Harvard University researchers and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care has yielded the first detailed survey on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on correctional facilities in the United States. The ongoing survey has so far collected data from more than 320 facilities housing approximately 10 percent of the country’s inmates across 47 states. While not necessarily representative of all correctional institutions, the results nonetheless are vital for policymakers responding to the pandemic in their own states and communities. Among the key findings: Correctional officers, like the general population, are at risk for contracting of COVID-19 infection, with a higher infection rate than inmates. Many protocols call for screening inmates and staff for COVID-19 on a regular basis, but a significant fraction of facilities still lack access to lab testing. The nationwide shortage of PPE as well as ancillary supplies (such as cleaning products and thermometer probes) is also a problem for correctional health care operations.

Law school clinics and programs have pivoted in recent weeks to focus on legal matters involving COVID-19—even as their own operations have transformed from in-person to online formats. Their efforts involve advocating to protect the health of prison inmates, ensuring access to food amid a pandemic, executing wills remotely, helping small businesses buffeted by the crisis and much more...The closure of universities, restaurants, and many other businesses due to social distancing requirements means that a lot of excess food isn’t getting into the hands of those who most need it. Enter Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, which is working to find ways to redirect that excess food to food banks; is seeking to inform public policy to ensure that government programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can facilitate food delivery; and is working to get government aid to food producers. It’s the type of work the clinic has been doing for years, but the pandemic has created a tsunami of food-related issues that need immediate attention...The clinic has produced a handout designed to help organizations donate their excess food. It has also produced a briefing for state and federal agencies on how to implement food delivery through existing nutritional assistance programs. And the clinic has also worked with a national agriculture advocacy group to help get appropriated funding into the hands of farmers and other food producers.

A New York investment firm pitched wealthy investors in recent days on a way to make returns of 22 percent to 175 percent using US government programs designed to help Americans keep their jobs and boost the coronavirus-stricken economy, according to a marketing document seen by Reuters. Following questions posed by Reuters, Arcadia Investment Partners, which has about $1 billion under management, said it had put its plans on hold. The idea was in “formative stages” and the firm was not “presently moving forward with this strategy given reasons that include uncertainty surrounding the regulations,” Dahlia Loeb, managing director at Arcadia, told Reuters in an e-mail on Wednesday. She did not elaborate further...Had Arcadia proceeded with its plan, its investors would have profited handsomely from a virtually risk-free investment. Arcadia typically generates returns to investors of between 8 percent and 12 percent, depending on the type of investment, according to a March regulatory filing. The potential returns would also be far above other options available to investors. The US 10-year Treasury note, for example, currently yields around 0.77 percent. Lucian Bebchuk, a corporate governance expert at Harvard Law School who reviewed key assumptions of Arcadia’s pitch for Reuters, said that the potential returns, assuming they are estimated correctly, “suggests a design flaw on the part of the government’s program.”

An article by Sean Quirk '21: Washington and Beijing are using their militaries to signal that neither is letting down its guard on Taiwan and the South China Sea during the coronavirus pandemic. Soon after Taiwan’s Vice President-Elect William Lai Ching-te visited the United States in early February, People’s Republic of China (PRC) military aircraft crossed the dividing line in the Taiwan Strait into Taiwan’s airspace two days in a row. The incursions included Chinese H-6 bombers, J-11 fighter jets and KJ-500 early warning aircraft. Taiwan responded by scrambling F-16s to shadow the Chinese aircraft out of Taiwan’s airspace. On March 19, both USS Barry (DDG 52) and USS Shiloh (CG 67) launched SM-2 missiles for a live-fire exercise in the Philippine Sea. Some Chinese military analysts deemed the exercise to be an uncommon “warning to the People’s Liberation Army [PLA].” Then, on March 25, USS McCampbell (DDG 25) conducted a Taiwan Strait transit—the third such transit by a U.S. warship in 2020. In response to McCampbell’s transit, the spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense called U.S. actions “a serious violation of international laws on freedom of navigation.” However, there is little legal grounding for this assertion.

A subsidiary of a JPMorgan-linked investment fund is purchasing Xcel Energy's 720 MW gas-fired power plant, which will again raise questions for federal regulators about the investment bank's legal affiliation to the fund. Southwest Generation, the buyer of the Mankato Energy Center (MEC), is owned by Infrastructure Investments Fund (IIF), a $12 billion investment fund advised and managed by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission declined to rule on whether JPMorgan is legally affiliated with IIF in its April approval of the fund's acquisition of El Paso Electric, but Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, says he plans to raise the issue again...The argument that FERC's failure to define the relationship may open a loophole for market manipulation is "plausible," Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard told Utility Dive in an email, though he's not sure how real and present that threat may be. "The concern is that since utilities typically recover costs of power [purchases] from captive ratepayers, the parent company could profit by having an affiliate sign un-competitive above-market PPAs with the utility," he said. "A utility could potentially enter into uncompetitive contracts [with] affiliates and would not have to follow [FERC's] rules since FERC wouldn't know that they are affiliates." But at the same time, FERC has specific rules in place around this sort of market abuse, he added. In 2016, for example, Ohio utilities filed for a waiver of these restrictions asking FERC to subsidize the utilities' merchant generation, which FERC rejected, Peskoe pointed out.

An article by Cass Sunstein: It has been almost a week since the Trump administration recommended that all Americans wear masks, or some face coverings, in public to protect against the spread of coronavirus. But the president himself is still not following that advice. As he put it, “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I just don't see it." Why doesn’t he “see it”? To answer that question, let’s ask another one. If you pass a neighbor on the street or in a grocery store, and if he’s wearing a mask, what do you think? Here are some possibilities: 1. He has coronavirus. 2. He is far more frightened than he should be. 3. He looks weird. 4. He is being prudent. 5. He is simply following the government’s recent recommendations. All over the country, people who wear masks are still producing reactions 1, 2 or 3. To be sure, those reasons were more common a few weeks ago than they are now -- but they continue to be widespread. Here’s the problem: If you know you’re going to produce one of the first three reactions, you’re less likely to wear a mask, even if it’s a sensible thing to do.

An article by Noah Feldman: Mail-in voting is the best way to ensure that the November 2020 election can proceed safely despite the coronavirus pandemic. It’s all too likely we’ll still be dealing with outbreaks then, and it’s well before we’ll have a vaccine. The U.S. needs to start making plans for mail-in ballots now; and yet President Donald Trump has begun to make it clear he intends to stymie any large-scale vote-by-mail efforts. Mail-in voting will become the key battleground because it’s essentially the only realistic option for holding an election during a pandemic. Donald Trump can’t delay the November 3 vote — that’s beyond his constitutional power. In fact, the Constitution doesn’t provide any option for suspending or delaying a presidential or congressional election. Congress “may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes,” according to the Constitution, but precedent makes it pretty certain that Congress won’t delay the presidential election either; it didn’t even do so in 1864, when the Civil War was in full swing.

In a growing number of cities and states, local governments are collecting the addresses of people who test positive for the coronavirus and sharing the lists with police and first responders...But some public health experts and privacy advocates have raised concerns about police departments maintaining a list of addresses of confirmed coronavirus cases. They say that it could make people reluctant to seek medical care or get tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, because of a fear of profiling by law enforcement. "With any infectious disease, there's going to be stigma and discrimination about who has it," Robert Greenwald, a professor and the director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School, said. "If you're in a situation now where the word starts to get out that if you get screened then your address goes on a list that goes to first responders, it discourages screening for people who don't want to be on this list." Greenwald and three other public health experts also questioned the usefulness of a list of addresses with confirmed cases, noting that since the coronavirus has spread so widely, first responders ought to assume anyone they encounter could be infected. Still, police officials and officers said this information is a helpful reminder to exercise extra caution in the field, beyond the usual safety measures.

Senate Democrats are urging the Trump administration to pause non-critical work like overhauling environmental policies during the coronavirus pandemic. But the proposal is dead on arrival with the Trump administration, which said the crisis highlights the need for regulatory reform to cut red tape holding back businesses across the economy. It also comes as the administration enters a critical window -- just weeks remain to formalize rules that cannot be easily overturned by Democrats, should they prevail in November's elections. By late May or early June, there is no guarantee, legal experts say...From the date a regulation is formalized, Congress has 60 legislative days when it can vote to overturn the regulation, and then seek a presidential signature or veto. Because of breaks, weekends, and other days Congress is not in session, experts say the Congress that assembles next year could reach back as far as June or late May. This scenario does not become a factor if Trump wins reelection, or Republicans control at least one chamber of Congress. The administration does not have time at this point to propose an entirely new rule, perform the required formal steps and avoid the possibility it is rejected by incoming Democrats, according to Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. Her team is tracking the Trump administration's regulatory changes and says the administration may have time to finalize several of its environmental priorities before the deadline.

With COVID-19 cases yet to peak locally, health care workers on the front lines of the growing outbreak face the possibility of having to make excruciating decisions about who gets care and who doesn’t. And in Missouri at least, doctors, nurses and others working under these crisis conditions currently lack any legal protections for such life-and-death decisions, worrying health experts and bioethicists. "When [health care workers] are making these decisions ... we do not want them thinking about medical malpractice or criminal liability. We want them to know ‘we have your back,’” Harvard Law Professor I. Glenn Cohen told KCUR in an email...“Denying patients such treatment, against their wishes, most likely will result in their death, but it will also make this scarce resource available to other patients who are more likely to survive if they receive ventilator support,” a recent opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association declared. The piece, by Harvard's Cohen, another Harvard law professor and a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh, says that even though the risks of legal liability in such crisis circumstances are low, “even a small chance of a serious lawsuit could push physicians toward a less ethical and less efficacious first-come, first-serve allocation system for ventilators, leading to a major loss of lives.” Cohen told KCUR that while the risk of getting sued is small, it’s “non-trivial.” “We are asking people to act heroically, to engage in some of the most difficult decisions and actions any physician will undertake – withdrawing a ventilator from someone who will benefit against their wishes,’” Cohen said in an email.

During the Great Plague of London in 1665, houses where the infection appeared were painted with a red cross and sealed, condemning the occupants to death. Now the idea of visibly identifying the infected is being turned on its head as governments around the world look at how to reopen economies shattered by the coronavirus crisis. With hundreds of millions forced to stay home to stop the spread of the virus, politicians and public-health experts are searching for safe mechanisms to allow people to return to work without sparking a second wave of infections. Officials and scientists in Italy, Germany, and other countries are considering giving certificates to people who’ve recovered from Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus...Wearing a bracelet or waving a piece of paper to show your immune status might sound like the plot of a dystopian novel, and scientists and public-policy experts are warning the prospect of “immunity passports” could make the current crisis worse. For one, they worry it could create a two-tiered workforce and perverse incentives for people to try to contract the virus, particularly millennials who might feel their chances of surviving it are high. “Like the ‘chickenpox parties’ of old, some workers will want to get infected,” says I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethics expert at Harvard Law School, referring to when parents deliberately exposed children to others with chickenpox at a young age, when symptoms tend to be milder. “That sounds crazy, but if having the antibodies becomes the cost of entering the job market and thus feeding your family, there may be workers who feel pressured into it.”

From the Bubonic plague in the Middle Ages to the 1918 flu epidemic, pandemics in the past have wreaked havoc on — and restructured — how society treats its workers. With pressure on mega-retailers like Amazon to deliver essential goods to people stuck at home — coupled with increased scrutiny over labor practices and a long-simmering labor movement that has been nipping at the heels of these huge suppliers — could this coronavirus pandemic bring about the labor reckoning that activists have been seeking? “It should,” said Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “I certainly hope that one of the lessons we’ll learn from this horrible experience is how important so many low-wage workers are, and how precarious their positions are.” ...Still, it seems like labor pressure may be building elsewhere. A group of warehouse workers in Chicago staged a demonstration on March 30 as well. Workers in Detroit did the same two days later, and Amazon quickly announced thereafter that they would provide masks and temperature checks in warehouses, the Verge reported. But Block told Digital Trends she was unsure if the labor movement can successfully leverage this moment to have its demands met. “Part of recovering from this nightmare will be giving workers the tools they need to have the voice they’re demanding,” Block said. A post-coronavirus world could offer opportunities for workers to snatch more rights for themselves.

An article by Noah Feldman: In the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump is taking ever bolder steps to gut the government structures designed to ensure the rule of law in the United States. In the last week alone, he’s fired two prominent inspectors general: the intelligence community inspector general who received the whistleblower complaint that sparked Trump’s impeachment; and the Defense Department inspector general who had just been named by a group of other inspectors general to oversee the coronavirus bailout effort. Technically, firing IGs is within the president’s constitutional ambit. They’re executive officials appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yet these firings fundamentally undercut the constitutional idea that the president and his appointees are governed by the law, not above it. The purpose of the 70-odd federal inspectors general is to provide rigorous scrutiny and oversight for federal agencies. That’s why the IGs are typically embedded in the agencies they supervise. It’s also why more than two dozen of the most important IGs, like those for defense and the intelligence community, aren’t hired and fired by the heads of the departments or agencies they oversee. Direct presidential appointment is supposed to make them more independent of the agency hierarchy than they otherwise would be.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: To mark the start of Passover, Idan Dershowitz, a biblical scholar and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, discusses the ten plagues of Egypt in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.