COVID-19

Harvard Law Today recently spoke to Professors Terry Fisher and Ruth Okediji about COVID-19 vaccine challenges in the global south, waiving drug-maker patents, and what they propose to reform the system in time for the next pandemic.

Michael Ashley Stein ’88, executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, says the Department of Education should go beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act in investigating state bans against mandating face coverings in schools.

Harvard Law Professor and Federal Reserve Board veteran Daniel K. Tarullo discusses inflation and the United States’ economic recovery.

Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Courtney J. Brunson and Vincent Montoya-Armanios discuss the impending expiration of the federal pause on evictions.

The Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and the American Bar Association have jointly released a report on best practices for eviction diversion.

Knowing that people with disabilities would be especially vulnerable during the pandemic to problems with healthcare access and other issues, the Harvard Law School Project on Disability turned its attention early on to COVID-related initiatives and advocacy.

Keith Fogg, clinical professor at Harvard Law School, and his students in the Federal Tax Clinic, answered questions about some common issues taxpayers are facing this pandemic year, helping low-income taxpayers, and President Biden’s proposed tax code changes.

I. Glenn Cohen ’03 and Carmel Shachar J.D./M.P.H. ’10 of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics discuss the Biden administration's healthcare agenda.

The effect of COVID-19 on the law has been transformative and wide-ranging, but as a Harvard Law School panel pointed out on the one-year anniversary of campus shutdown, the changes haven’t all been for the worse.

Disheartened by tales from family and friends frustrated by his home state of Pennsylvania's vaccine distribution system, Seth Rubinstein ’22, a second year student at Harvard Law School, knew he wanted to get involved.

Despite working remotely, first-year students with Harvard Law School's Tenant Advocacy Project gained meaningful skills and successfully helped clients during the fall semester student practice organization.

Should smoking be among the pre-existing health risks that qualify people for priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine? Harvard Law public health expert Carmel Shachar says the answer is yes. 

In their new report, An Evaluation of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition highlight opportunities to make the program more equitable and effective amid the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

The Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School is joining forces with the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, its counterpart at Yale Law School, to host a seminar series reflecting on ethical and legal issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the only team members on their International Human Rights Clinic project, Laura Soundy ’22 and Rehab Abdelwahab ’21 have learned how critical it is to talk about subjects other than law. In doing so, they learned they were both quarantining in Texas, and have formed a plan to safely meet in person next year.

Even if there was no COVID-19, online courts would still be the wave of the future: This idea was the starting point for a recent webinar, “Online Courts: Perspectives from the Bench and the Bar,” a half-day event convened by the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.

HLS faculty on COVID-19 and the pressing questions of racism, racial injustice, and abuse of power that have driven this difficult year—and that are the focus of three new lecture series at the school.

Despite the pandemic, the 2020 Chayes International Public Service Fellows pursued projects around the world.

In an effort to combat multiple potential vectors of attack on the 2020 U.S. election, two Berkman Klein Center affiliates have published a package of “tabletop exercises,” freely available to decisionmakers and the public to simulate realistic scenarios in which disinformation threatens to disrupt the 2020 election.

In an interview with Harvard Law Today, Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, says that political interference in the FDA’s process for ensuring that a vaccine is both safe and effective “opens the door to a public health disaster.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the health disparities that result from systemic and structural racism. But while the law has created these disparities, it may also provide opportunities to correct them.

Sharon Block and Ben Sachs of Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program discuss COVID-19’s continued impact on the workplace and worker’s rights to a safe and healthy work environment.

Cass Sunstein ’78, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, has been tapped by the World Health Organization to chair its Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health.

“Confused,” “frustrating,” “fragmented,” “acute,” and “a reckoning” were just some of the ways three health care experts described the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic during a recent Berkman Klein virtual discussion.

Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program recently spoke with Professor Gerald Neuman about how he sees the landscape changing for countries with populist leaders in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 presents a unique threat to people in prisons and jails, agreed panelists at “Incarcerated Populations and COVID-19: Public Health, Ethical, and Legal Concerns,” a webinar hosted by Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.

In a Q&A, Yee Htun, clinical instructor in the International Human Rights Clinic, talks about systemic discrimination and violence against ethnic Rohingya in Myanmar and how Rohingya refugees are coping in the midst of a global pandemic.

Lee Mestre helped to coordinate Harvard Law School student aid efforts after natural disasters in New Orleans and Puerto Rico. Now she's using that experience to help law students support people in Massachusetts affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Mark Roe and John Coates recently spoke with Harvard Law Today about what could be done to lower the chances of a U.S. bankruptcy backlog and how other corporate governance challenges posed by the pandemic should be handled.

Student fellows at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics recently celebrated their fellowships’ end virtually when their capstone meeting moved to Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jody Freeman discusses the progress the nation has made in protecting the environment since Earth Day was founded in 1970, the Trump administration’s efforts to undo Obama-era federal climate regulations, and COVID-19’s urgent lessons for the planet’s health.

Born and raised in Nepal, Sabrina Singh ’20 has been speaking out about how the COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate conditions in her home country.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is currently taking the lead in the effort to explore the ways data can be mined to increase understanding of COVID-19 and to fight it more efficiently.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, joined 21 other conservative or libertarian attorneys in a statement condemning inspector general Michael Atkinson’s ouster as part of a “continuous assault on the rule of law.”

HLS students reflect on their first week of online classes.

Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable—and ultimately the rest of us—are fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Harvard Law School J.D. Admissions Office announced last week that the deadline to apply for the School’s Junior Deferral Program has been postponed by two months, and clarified that pass/fail grades in spring 2020 will not harm an applicant’s chances of admission.

In a Q&A, scholars at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School raise important legal and ethical questions about health care delivery and the enactment of extraordinary public health measures in response to the ongoing epidemic.

In the Berkman Klein Center's Medium collection, BKC fellow and S.J.D. candidate Beatriz Botero Arcila talks about governments' use of digital technologies and big data analytics in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen discusses switching her classroom to remote learning.

As federal and state governments take measures to curtail public activity during the COVID-19 outbreak, Charles Fried and Nancy Gertner agree that the restriction on individual freedom is largely appropriate for the circumstance.

Noah Feldman and Richard Lazarus ’79 discuss public health and civil liberties in the time of COVID-19 on Feldman's Deep Background podcast.

Harvard University and Harvard Law School will shift to remote teaching and learning on March 23 as part of efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus in the community while continuing to educate its students. Matt Gruber, Harvard Law School dean for administration, discusses the “unprecedented move to deal with unprecedented circumstances.”