Media Mentions

More than 150,000 former students of for-profit colleges filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday, claiming the agency is depriving them of the student debt relief to which they’re legally entitled. The plaintiffs, represented by Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending and Housing & Economic Rights Advocates, accuse the Department of Education under DeVos of failing to implement an Obama-era regulation known as “borrower defense, ” which allows students to have their federal student loans cancelled if their school misled them or engaged in other misconduct. “The law is clear: Students who experienced fraud should not be required to pay back federal loans that should never have been made by the Department in the first place,” said Toby Merrill, director of Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

As a union boss, Mark Erlich became known for his efforts to help authorities crack down on construction companies for labor abuses such as misclassifying workers as independent contractors or illegally paying them under the table. Some of those bad actors must have breathed a sigh of relief two years ago. That’s when Erlich finally retired from his influential job running the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, and moved on to the confines of academia. Maybe they shouldn’t get too comfortable. Erlich quietly continued his crusade, though it no longer involves picket-line signs or giant inflatable rats. Erlich instead spent the past year researching and writing a report on payroll fraud with coauthor Terri Gerstein, a former labor law enforcer in New York, for Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program.

Here’s some cool news. Harvard Law School has become the first law school to join VetLink, a group of top colleges and graduate programs actively seeking to increase their veteran enrollment. VetLink is an initiative of Service to School—a nonprofit that aims to help veterans get into those schools by offering free application counseling and peer guidance to veterans. (It was co-founded by Anna Ivey, a former admissions dean at the University of Chicago Law School.) Until recently, VetLink focused on undergraduate programs. But the George Washington University School of Political Management and Harvard Law are now the first two graduate programs to join the initiative. Here’s what Harvard’s assistant dean for admissions, Kristi Jobsen, had to say about the new collaboration: “Today, we are proud to host one of the largest communities of U.S. military veterans of any law school in the country. Harvard Law School is excited to form this new partnership with Service to School, and to add the VetLink program to our many efforts to connect with veterans thinking about a career in the law.” So just how is Harvard doing when it comes to veteran enrollment? Well, last year vets numbered 45 out of about 2,000 students. That figure is poised to grow, with 20 more veterans expected in the incoming class.

Facebook Inc. appears to be moving ahead with the Supreme Court-like content oversight board it has been discussing for a year. It’s a worthy step but also a 1% solution for a unimaginably vast problem...Facebook has solicited feedback on the structure for this Supreme Court-like body, and Bloomberg News on Monday described some of the company's deliberations to come up with the best structure and policies. (Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, pitched the concept of an independent oversight board to Facebook. I haven’t spoken with him about this oversight body.)

Courts have sided repeatedly with student loan borrowers demanding the U.S. Education Department process their applications for debt relief, yet more than 180,000 people are still waiting for a decision. Now, some of them are again turning to the courts for help. On Tuesday, seven borrowers sued Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her agency after the department failed to take action on their applications, some of which have languished for years...“It’s not like they’re working through the backlog and it’s just taking time. The department doesn’t think they have to do anything with these claims, and that’s why people are coming forward,” said Eileen Connor, an attorney representing the borrowers. “What they want is for the court to tell the department: ‘You have to do something. You can deny them. You can grant them. But you have to do something.’”...Connor, director of litigation at the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, argues that the court injunction does not prevent the Education Department from creating a new methodology to deny claims or grant full relief. The Project on Predatory Student Lending brought the California case.

President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question. Trump’s announcement, in tweets sent from Japan, came hours after the Supreme Court put on hold his administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, saying it had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information. ... Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said Trump did not appear to be suggesting a marginal adjustment of the census schedule for purposes of litigation but rather was trying try to mold the process to his needs. Tribe called it an indication of “the administration’s contempt of the rule of law.” “The combination of the president’s abject ignorance and manipulative flexibility on these matters is, at a minimum, quite telling,” Tribe said. “It suggests all matters — constitutional and legal — are subject to his whim.”

A hot real estate market in Boston and surrounding cities is fueling rent hikes and evictions in what has long been one of the cheapest housing options in poor neighborhoods — rooming houses. Housing advocates say rooming houses — also known as SROs, meaning 'single room occupancy' — are a vital source of affordable shelter for minimum-wage workers, the elderly and people with disabilities or mental illness. But as urban real estate values surge, some investors and property owners are raising rents, evicting tenants and trying to shift away from low-income residents. “People are being thrown out, and that's happening across the city, because these properties are now so valued,” said Eloise Lawrence, an attorney at Harvard Law School's Legal Aid Bureau who has defended tenants. “What was once considered housing at the last resort is now seen as desired and profitable.”

Rejecting a request from President Trump, a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday cleared the way for nearly 200 Democrats in Congress to continue their lawsuit against him alleging that his private business violates an anti-corruption provision of the Constitution. ...Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe expressed delight upon hearing of the ruling: “That is splendid news for the Emoluments Clause cases — and for the rule of law.” He added, “Today’s ruling confirms that the Trump strategy of denying, delaying, deflecting, and dissembling while continuing to defy the Constitution has all but run its course and that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.”

President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question. ...Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said that Trump did not appear to be suggesting a marginal adjustment of the census schedule for purposes of litigation but rather was trying try to mold the process to his needs. He called it an indication of “the administration’s contempt of the rule of law.” “The combination of the president’s abject ignorance and manipulative flexibility on these matters is, at a minimum, quite telling,” Tribe said. “It suggests all matters — constitutional and legal — are subject to his whim.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: The U.S. Supreme Court issued an important decision Wednesday narrowly declining to overrule an important doctrine of administrative law, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the liberal justices solely on the basis of stare decisis — the principle that precedent should be respected, even if you don’t agree with it. For those who care deeply about the future of the administrative state, the first half of that sentence is the interesting one. The court is now fully engaged in an epic battle over whether to dismantle administrative law as we know it.

Jaha Dukureh was having breakfast with her friends when the idea came to her. She wanted Muslim clerics to deliver a fatwa against child marriage – a religious opinion issued by one or more Islamic legal scholars. It was June 18, the last day of the African Summit on Female Genital Mutilation and Child Marriages in Dakar, Senegal. Dukureh, a Gambian women's rights activist and founder of the nonprofit Safe Hands for Girls, was the chief organizer of the event. It was a challenge to get the summit off the ground. ... Other fatwas have been issued against child marriage. "This is not the first time in Islamic history," says Salma Waheedi, associate director at the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard University.

It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition. The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably. In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism. How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?

The Trump administration on Wednesday replaced former President Barack Obama’s effort to reduce planet-warming pollution from coal plants with a new rule that would keep plants open longer and undercut progress on reducing carbon emissions. The rule represents the Trump administration’s most direct effort to protect the coal industry. It is also another significant step in dismantling measures aimed at combating global warming, including the rollback of tailpipe emissions standards and the planned withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement...Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University and a former legal counsel in the Obama administration, said it would be “a blockbuster” if the Trump rule reached the Supreme Court and justices endorsed the administration approach. “It could foreclose a new administration from doing something more ambitious,” she said. “No matter how you slice it, this is a dramatic retrenchment” Ms. Freeman said. “It’s not just that they’re doing very small, modest steps to reduce emissions. It’s that they’re not creating momentum to substitute renewables and substitute natural gas for coal. That’s what the Obama rule was doing, and it had a long-term view to bigger emission cuts over time.”

Donald Trump’s administration is finalizing plans to roll back the US government’s only direct efforts to curb coal-fired power plant pollution that is heating the planet. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will replace an Obama-era climate change rule with a regulation that experts warn could help some of America’s oldest and dirtiest coal plants to keep running...Joe Goffman, a Harvard professor and former EPA general counsel, called EPA’s legal arguments “tortured” and “deceptive”. Goffman said the rule “demonstrates the Trump administration’s determination not only to avoid taking action to address climate change but also to obstruct current and future efforts by states and successors to cut greenhouse gas pollution”.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a final rule Wednesday that will undo Obama-era climate requirements for coal plants in a way the Trump administration insists will still reduce emissions. The new rule gives individual states wide discretion in deciding whether to require limited efficiency upgrades at individual coal-fired plants. The rule amounts to one of the Trump administration's biggest rollbacks of environmental rules, replacing a landmark Obama-era effort that sought to wean the nation's electrical grid off coal-fired power plants and their climate-damaging pollution...Joseph Goffman, an EPA official under President Barack Obama, said he feared that the Trump administration was trying to set a legal precedent that the Clean Air Act gives the federal government "next to no authority to do anything" about climate-changing emissions from the country's power grid. The Obama rule, adopted in 2015, sought to reshape the country's power system by encouraging utilities to rely less on dirtier-burning coal-fired power plants and more on electricity from natural gas, solar, wind and other lower or no-carbon sources.

The Trump administration on Wednesday issued its long-awaited replacement for former President Barack Obama's most ambitious climate change regulation, rolling back rules in an effort to salvage the declining role of coal in the nation's power supply. Critics charge that the new rule would cripple the fight against climate change — which has emerged as a major issue for Democrats in the 2020 presidential race — and undermine any future White House efforts to use the Environmental Protection Agency to address the problem...Environmentalists and climate scientists say the EPA plan falls far short of the dramatic cuts that are needed in the next several years to avoid the worst effects of a warming planet, rising seas and more destructive weather events. “The final ACE rule will yield virtually no reductions” of carbon dioxide, said Joseph Goffman, the architect of the Obama EPA's Clean Power Plan.

President Donald Trump has made a habit of undoing his predecessor's accomplishments, especially environmental regulations. Now, his EPA has replaced the only rule meant to limit greenhouse gas emissions — and potentially caused the death of thousands of people in the process...“It’s a classic ideological exercise in the sense that this EPA and this administration thinks that government action, and any government action, is the biggest problem,” said Joe Goffman, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School and the former EPA Associate Assistant Administrator for Climate. “That’s the problem that has to be solved, not the problem of climate change.”

The Trump administration on Wednesday finalized its replacement for a cornerstone Obama climate rule, the Clean Power Plan, which placed heavier regulations on coal plants. The replacement, known as the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, does not require states to reduce overall emissions. Instead, it gives states flexibility to set performance standards and implement efficiency improvements at individual facilities. States will have three years to prepare their plans, which the administration will approve...Joseph Goffman, who also worked at the EPA during the drafting of the Obama-era rule, said that utilities cannot be expected to make decisions with the public interest as their top priority, as the government should.

A who's who of high-powered lawyers appeared in court in 2016 to debate the meaning of "best system of emission reduction," a technical Clean Air Act term that steers EPA's response to climate change. Nearly three years later, the correct interpretation is still an open question, and the stakes have never been higher...Much of the BSER legal debate will arise again in litigation over the Affordable Clean Energy rule."I glanced through the transcripts of the oral arguments in the last couple days and have been trying to think about the atmospherics of the oral argument," said Joe Goffman, an Obama-era EPA official now at Harvard Law School. He noted that even though the Trump administration has replaced the Clean Power Plan and the broad BSER interpretation that went with it, the D.C. Circuit judges were immersed in those arguments in 2016 and will likely keep them in mind as they consider whether the Trump EPA's narrow BSER approach is appropriate. "That's going to, if not legally than psychologically, create a real overhang for the EPA, particularly if they go in front of the court and say that the only possible interpretation of Section 111 and BSER is that it must be applied exclusively within the fence line," he said.

The Trump administration has lauded its Clean Power Plan replacement rule as a more legally defensible option for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. An…

NPR's Rachel Martin talks to Joseph Goffman, of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard, about the end of the Clean Power Plan, which he worked on in the Obama administration...MARTIN: Is the director of the EPA, Andrew Wheeler, right? Do fossil fuels still occupy a necessary place in America's energy landscape? GOFFMAN: They occupy a place within a large, diverse and flexible electric grid. They can be - or should be - and to some - to a large extent, are being paired with much cleaner energy sources. MARTIN: So what is your response to this decision? You had to have seen this coming. GOFFMAN: Yes. I think - we did see it coming. I think there are multiple responses. First, this is pretty devastating in terms of its impact on climate change policy because what the EPA did yesterday was really two things.