Following the Vatican’s rejection of the death penalty, faculty sponsor of the Capital Punishment Clinic Carol Steiker and co-author Jordan Stieker discuss how the U.S. could catalyze progress towards global abolition of capital punishment if the Supreme Court constitutionally abolished the practice.
By Alvin Powell, August 10, 2018
Nearly 100 leaders and faculty members at Harvard and its affiliated hospitals have signed a letter calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw its proposed rule on scientific “transparency,” saying that the change would drastically limit the scientific and medical knowledge that underlies a host of EPA regulations that protect human health.
The letter’s 96 signatories include Harvard President Larry Bacow, the deans of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the presidents of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear. It says that the EPA’s push to require studies to reveal the material that supports their conclusions would bar the best available science from being considered in the regulatory process.
“It does not get at what they’re trying to do,” said Francine Laden, professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School and one of the signatories. “Having data available for anybody to look at does not guarantee you have validity.”
The letter was drafted by Wendy Jacobs, Emmett Clinical Professor of Environmental Law and director of Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, together with clinic staff and with input from faculty members about the rule’s potential scientific and health ramifications. It was submitted to the EPA on Tuesday during the public comment period on the proposed rule, which is called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”
The letter, which concludes by urging the EPA to withdraw the draft rule, is one of two that Jacobs said the clinic will submit. The second will focus in more detail on what she described as the rule’s numerous legal deficiencies.
The rule would require that the raw data supporting scientific conclusions on which EPA regulations are based be publicly available. Supporters of the move — including former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who submitted the proposal in April — argue that the rule would allow the underlying science to be independently validated. In announcing the proposal, Pruitt hailed the end of “the era of secret science at the EPA” and said the reproducibility that it would enable is “vital for the integrity of the rulemaking process.”
The proposal quickly drew criticism from analysts and scientists concerned about its impact on EPA regulations. In May, members of the EPA’s own Science Advisory Board criticized the proposal, saying it was drafted without input from scientists. A month later, then-Harvard President Drew Faust wrote to Pruitt that his criticism of “secret science” misrepresented a process that has an obligation both to use private health information for the greater good and to protect subjects’ privacy.
By Peter J. Brann, August 6, 2018
Source: Wikimedia Commons
We’ve seen this movie before. President Trump nominates someone to the Supreme Court. The nominee declines to answer questions about Roe v. Wade, or any other hot button issue on the grounds that the issue may come before the Court. Indeed, other than imprecisely praising Brown v. Board of Education, the nominee declines to express a view about any decision that the Supreme Court has issued since its founding in 1789. Instead, the nominee offers fulsome, if vague, support for respecting precedent. As we watch this pas de deux between the nominee and Congress over how much the nominee respects precedent, and wonder whether Roe v. Wade and numerous other precedents will be swept aside, we should compare the statements of Supreme Court nominee Judge Gorsuch to the actions of Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch.
In his confirmation hearing, Judge Gorsuch repeatedly expressed his strong support for precedent. “Precedent is the anchor of the law.” “For a judge, precedent is a very important thing. We don’t go reinvent the wheel every day.” Judges must “start with a heavy, heavy presumption in favor of precedent,” but in “a very few cases,” precedent may be overruled. In deciding whether to overrule a precedent, judges should consider “the age, reliance interests, and the workability of the precedent, among other things.”
Apparently the “other things” that judges should consider are whether the judge simply disagrees with the precedent. In his first term on the Supreme Court, Justice Gorsuch joined virtually every call to overrule a prior precedent, and he suggested that precedents be overruled in nearly 10% of all the cases decided by the Court.
This year, in Janus v. AFSCME, Justice Gorsuch joined a 5-4 majority to overrule Abood v. Detroit Bd. of Ed., 431 U. S. 209 (1977), on union agency fees. In South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., Justice Gorsuch joined a 5-4 majority to overrule National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue of Ill., 386 U. S. 753 (1967), and Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U. S. 298 (1992), in a Commerce Clause case concerning taxation of remote sellers. In SAS Institute, Inc. v. Iancu, Justice Gorsuch, writing for a 5-4 majority in a patent case, stated that whether the administrative deference rule in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837 (1984), “should remain is a question we may leave for another day.” Abood, Quill, and Chevron have been settled law for decades, and each has formed the basis of a significant part of our economy and society.
In concurring and dissenting opinions this year, Justice Gorsuch was willing to go further than his colleagues in dismantling other long-standing precedent. In Carpenter v. United States, Justice Gorsuch dissented alone in the cellphone warrant case to urge the Court to overrule the Fourth Amendment approach taken by the Court in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U. S. 735 (1979), and United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (1976). In Byrd v. United States, Justice Gorsuch joined a concurring opinion of Justice Thomas expressing “serious doubts about the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test” from Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 360–361 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring), which has been the touchstone of Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure cases for generations.
In Sveen v. Melin, Justice Gorsuch dissented alone in a Contracts Clause case in which he questioned whether modern Contracts Clause cases, such as Energy Reserves Group, Inc. v. Kansas Power & Light Co., 459 U. S. 400 (1983), were properly decided. In Jesner v. Arab Bank PLC, Justice Gorsuch wrote separately in an Alien Tort Statute case to state that he harbored “serious doubts” about the “suggestion” in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U. S. 692 (2004), that courts could create new causes of action under the statute, which is as old as the Supreme Court itself.
While Judge Gorsuch told Congress during his confirmation that “precedent is the anchor of the law,” Justice Gorsuch had no problem immediately unmooring precedents dating back over 50 years in a wide swath of law, including the Fourth Amendment, Commerce Clause, Contracts Clause, labor law, administrative law, and international law. And this was just his first year on the Court.
In evaluating Judge Kavanaugh, Congress shouldn’t be satisfied with empty platitudes about respect for precedent. Instead, it should take its cues from The Who, who warned us over 45 years ago: “We Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
(Additional disclosure: our firm represented Wayfair and the other respondents in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., although I did not personally work on that case.)
Credit: Dana Smith
With 29 clinics in a wide range of fields of law and policy, students develop skills in an experiential program that constantly adapts to their interests, as well as to new approaches and areas of the law. “Our clinics have a particular power because students aren’t mere interns or simply second-chairing cases—we are grooming them for leadership in the world,” says Clinical Professor Daniel Nagin, vice dean for experiential and clinical education and faculty director of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center.
Over 1,000 students enrolled in clinics this past year, either at one of 18 in-house clinics supervised by clinical faculty or through 11 externship clinics, including one that is focused on the role of state attorneys general, which, in an era rife with debate over states’ rights, is in huge demand. Some 700 students engaged in pro bono work through one of the 11 in-house Student Practice Organizations, which assist clients from Cambridge to the Mississippi Delta.
The HLS clinical program is one of the largest providers of free legal services in New England. In Boston and Cambridge alone, 3,556 clients were served in 2016, and hundreds more were represented in other parts of the state and country, and internationally.
“The level of expertise of the faculty and staff, the incredible students, and the phenomenal resources of the law school allow us to be a nimble program that can respond to the needs of clients and, more broadly, to the rule of law in the world,” says Lisa Dealy, assistant dean for Clinical and Pro Bono Programs.
For a glimpse of the clinics today, here are accounts of four projects connected to pressing legal and social issues: environmental protection, gentrification of low-income neighborhoods, immigrants’ rights, and prisoners’ rights in an age of mass incarceration.
Credit: Lindy Drew
There is no shortage of serious legal issues facing poor people in Greater St. Louis, especially people of color, says Blake Strode ’15, who was born and raised in the area. Just three years out of HLS, Strode is back home fighting the criminalization of poverty as executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis that has filed landmark cases that have already improved the lives of tens of thousands of low-income people.
Strode, who majored in international economics and Spanish at the University of Arkansas and toured the world for three years as a tennis professional before law school, always planned to go into public interest law. At HLS, he represented prisoners in disciplinary and parole hearings through the Prison Legal Assistance Project, helped fight evictions and foreclosures in Boston through Project No One Leaves, and was a student in the Housing Law Clinic at the Legal Services Center.
Not long after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Strode read a white paper on the over-policing of people of color in north St. Louis County that ArchCity Defenders had just published. The paper, which presaged a later Department of Justice report, “was the first time I’d seen that level of analysis of that problem in St. Louis,” he says. He reached out to the organization’s executive director and co-founder, Thomas Harvey, and soon found himself back in his hometown with a Skadden Fellowship to do housing-related work.
ArchCity had recently filed several cases challenging the constitutionality of modern-day debtors’ prisons—the jailing of poor people because they are unable to pay court fines and fees—and Strode changed his focus to helping build the organization’s civil rights litigation unit through impact litigation targeting this practice as well as police misconduct and inhumane jail conditions. In his short time there, he and his colleagues have filed more than 30 civil rights lawsuits in federal court, partnering on some with Civil Rights Corps in Washington, D.C., founded by Alec Karakatsanis ’08. Strode played a significant role in obtaining a landmark judgment against the city of Jennings for imprisoning people unable to pay municipal fines: $4.75 million for a class of about 2,000 people. Settled in 2016, the case resulted in sweeping policy changes that serve as a model for legal reforms in other courts.
In January 2018, at the age of 30, Strode was named ArchCity’s new executive director when Harvey decided to leave.
“My goal is the same as our organizational goal: to combat the criminalization of poverty and state violence against poor people and people of color,” he says.
“Our clients are poor and overwhelmingly people of color, which in St. Louis means overwhelmingly black. We are seeking systemic change with and for them, which is only possible through a concerted effort of both legal and nonlegal advocacy. We’re calling for nothing less than that.”
ArchCity, which relies heavily on private donations, was primarily a volunteer organization until a few years ago; it now has a full-time staff of 20, half of whom are lawyers, Strode says. Yet there is so much need in the community that growth is a top priority, he adds. That means building capacity in order to represent more clients and expanding to other parts of the state. ArchCity is a holistic provider, so growth also means expanding advocacy in housing, access to education, and consumer matters.
And while ArchCity’s victories are heartening, “even those, we have to work very hard to hold on to, and those gains aren’t enough,” Strode says. The work can be especially difficult in a politically conservative area like Missouri, “where millions of people face the greatest systemic challenges on a day-to-day basis because those challenges are institutional and deep-seated.” However, he adds, “The ways our clients engage in fighting back are really inspiring and inspire us to remain committed.”
By Catherine Ordoñez
A coalition of legal organizations in Boston, including Greater Boston Legal Services(“GBLS”), Justice at Work, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (“HLAB”), and Volunteer Lawyers Project, in collaboration with community groups in Boston, is bringing justice to victims of wage theft in Boston Municipal Court (“BMC”) Central’s small claims court. The coalition has engineered an approximation of a specialized court for wage theft there by strategically stacking the court’s docket with wage theft cases on second and fourth Fridays of the month. The goal is to quickly vindicate workers’ rights to wages owed, to increase the literacy of small claims court clerk magistrates in Massachusetts wage law, and ultimately to make the court a better-tapped resource for victims of wage theft. Staff attorneys Joey Michalakes of GBLS and Maggie Gribben of Justice at Work shared some insight on the project.
While in law school Cassie Chambers devoted herself to clinical work at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. In 2016, after a clerkship year, she received a Skadden Fellowship to work on domestic violence issues in Kentucky. There she discovered that her divorce client, who was a survivor of domestic violence, was required to pay for a divorce attorney for her incarcerated spouse. Cassie worked to change that.
Credit: Heratch Ekmekjian
Tabitha Cohen (left) and Edith Sangueza, two of the many students recognized during the Class Day 2018 ceremony for various accomplishments during their time at Harvard Law School. Cohen and Sangueza (along with Annie Manhardt, not pictured) were awarded with the Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Award, given each year to students who demonstrate an extraordinary commitment to improving and delivering high quality volunteer legal services in low-income communities.
A number of Harvard Law students from the Class of 2018 received special awards during the Class Day ceremony on May 23. They were recognized for outstanding leadership, citizenship, compassion and dedication to their studies and the profession.
This year’s Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award was presented to Tabitha Cohen, Annie Manhardt and Edith Sangueza. (Read more)
Edith Sangueza contributed nearly 2,000 pro bono hours by working with three student practice organizations – Harvard Immigration Project (HIP), Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, and Project No One Leaves – in addition to working as a student attorney for four semesters with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB). She spent her 2016 Spring Break volunteering with South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, in Harlingen, Texas, and her 2017 Spring Break volunteering with American Gateways, in San Antonio. Her commitment to social justice also extended throughout her summers – she worked with Instituto para las Mujeres en la Migración, in Mexico City, and with the Bronx Defenders, in New York.
Credit: Lorin Granger
Tabitha Cohen and Annie Manhardt
At Harvard Law School, Tabitha Cohen and Annie Manhardt both participated in the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP) and the Criminal Justice Institute (CJI). At PLAP, they spent hundreds of pro bono hours as co-executive directors, managing a multitude of daily internal governance and programming issues. Throughout their time, they demonstrated tireless effort and dedication to advocating for the needs of prisoners by conducting investigations, counseling and interviewing clients, and presenting compelling arguments at hearings.
In a precedent-setting case for an elderly disabled parole client Cohen argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court whose ruling extended the Americans with Disabilities Act to mentally and physically disabled prisoners seeking parole. As a result of the case, the state must now help parolees get support systems in place in the community.
While at HLS, Manhardt also worked with Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts and the Office of the Defender General in Vermont. Cohen worked with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program , the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Florida and La Fundacion para el Acceso a la Justicia de Puerto Rico in San Juan.
The Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award is granted each year in honor of Professor Andrew Kaufman ’54, who has been instrumental in creating and supporting the Pro Bono Service Program at HLS. J.D. students in the graduating class who demonstrate an exemplary commitment to pro bono work receive the award and an honorarium.
HLS requires all students to perform 50 hours of pro bono services but most go far beyond. This year, 10 students exceeded 2,000 hours of service and 112 students volunteered more than 1,000 hours.
In total, the Harvard Law School Class of 2018 contributed 376,532 hours of pro bono legal work.
Credit: Mark Ostow
Natalie Trigo Reyes ’19
After Hurricane Maria roared over Puerto Rico in September 2017, crippling the island where Natalie Trigo Reyes ’19 grew up and where much of her family still lived, she felt “completely overwhelmed.” Within days, however, she put together an event that raised about $40,000 for relief efforts, collected enough emergency goods to fill three large trucks, and joined Harvard Law Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo ’08 and Lee Mestre of the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs to plan the school’s response to the disaster.
Using her contacts (Trigo Reyes co-founded a non-profit in San Juan in 2012 to support public-private partnerships), she helped to organize a mission to Puerto Rico over the law school’s spring break to provide legal and humanitarian aid. “Natalie was our connection to this world of different NGOs, community leaders and charitable organizations,” says Crespo. “Any time we hit some sort of issue, bump, or question, Natalie said, ‘I’m on this.’”
Months after Maria hit, tens of thousands of Puerto Rican residents are still living without adequate shelter. About a dozen of the 29 Harvard Law students on the trip helped to repair houses damaged by the storm. The others, including Trigo Reyes, worked with local lawyers in the Federal Emergency Management Agency Disaster Recovery Centers located around the island, helping residents file appeals to try to claim disaster relief they had been denied. About 60 percent of the claims filed with FEMA by Puerto Rico’s residents for money to rebuild homes have been rejected for insufficient documentation, according to reports. Many houses have been passed informally from generation to generation, so much of the work focused on establishing a chain of ownership through affidavits, old land registry forms, or death certificates. This was complicated by the fact that Puerto Rico, which was a Spanish colony until 1898, has a legal code different from the rest of the U.S., based partly on the Spanish civil system. Trigo Reyes and the other students tried to get through as many FEMA appeals as they could—she remembers one morning when she filed 11—yet at the same time they wanted to take time for people who were traumatized by the storm and its aftermath, and needed to tell their stories. “Having the opportunity to go to these remote locations and help people claim [what is] rightfully theirs was really emotional for me,” says Trigo Reyes. “These are U.S. citizens, and they are entitled to these FEMA benefits.”
The work she did in Puerto Rico grew naturally out of her personal values and professional experience. She came to HLS with a degree in economics and six years of work in federal government, including in the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Chambers of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (as special assistant to the justice, she accompanied her on two trips to Puerto Rico). The HLS trip this spring also tied in with Trigo Reyes’ quest to seek out creative ways to use the law on behalf of vulnerable communities.
Via International Human Rights Clinic
April 3, 2018 – In a landmark decision today, a federal jury found the former president of Bolivia and his minister of defense responsible for extrajudicial killings carried out by the Bolivian military in September and October 2003. The decision comes after a ten-year legal battle spearheaded by family members of eight people killed in what is known in Bolivia as the “Gas War.” It marked the first time in U.S. history a former head of state has sat before his accusers in a U.S. human rights trial. The jury awarded a total of $10 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiffs.
Both the former Bolivian president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and his former defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, have lived in the United States since they fled Bolivia following the massacre known as “Black October.” During that period, more than 50 people were killed and hundreds were injured. In Bolivia, in 2011, former military commanders and government officials who acted under Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín’s authority were convicted for their roles in the killings. Both Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín were indicted in the same case, but could not be tried in abstentia under Bolivian law.
The lawsuit originated in the International Human Rights Clinic, and dozens of students have worked on the case since 2006.
“After many years of fighting for justice for our family members and the people of Bolivia, we celebrate this historic victory,” said Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, a plaintiff and member of the indigenous Aymara community of Bolivia, who were victims of the defendants’ decision to use massive military force against the population. “Fifteen years after they fled justice, we have finally held Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín to account for the massacre they unleashed against our people.”
In Mamani v. Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín, the families of eight Bolivians who were killed filed suit against Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín in 2007. Today’s verdict affirms the plaintiffs’ claims that the two defendants were legally responsible for the extrajudicial killings and made decisions to deploy military forces in civilian communities in order to violently quash opposition to their policies.
“To me, it was the biggest honor of my life to work with the plaintiffs and learn from them in their struggle for justice,” said Thomas Becker ’08, who brought the idea for the lawsuit to IHRC after spending time in Bolivia and learning about the massacre there. “It’s an extraordinary privilege to witness this and be a small part of this.”
The three-week trial included the testimony of 29 witnesses from across Bolivia who recounted their experiences of the 2003 killings. Twenty-three appeared in person. Eight plaintiffs testified about the deaths of their family members, including: Etelvina Ramos Mamani and Eloy Rojas Mamani, whose eight-year-old daughter Marlene was killed in front of her mother when a single shot was fired through the window; Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, whose pregnant wife Teodosia was killed after a bullet was fired through the wall of a house; Felicidad Rosa Huanca Quispe, whose 69-year-old father Raul was shot and killed along a roadside; and Gonzalo Mamani Aguilar, whose father Arturo was shot and killed while tending his crops.
One witness, a former soldier in the Bolivian military, testified about being ordered to shoot at “anything that moves” in a civilian community, while another recounted witnessing a military officer kill a soldier for refusing to follow orders to shoot at unarmed civilians. Witnesses recounted how tanks rolled through in the streets and soldiers shot for hours on end. Others testified about how the president and minister of defense committed to a military option instead of pursuing dialogue with community leaders to reach a peaceful resolution.
In 2016, a U.S. appeals court held that the plaintiffs could proceed with their claims under the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), which authorizes suits for monetary damages in U.S. federal court for extrajudicial killings. Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín then sought and were denied a review by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017, and the case moved forward in U.S. District Court. After a review of the evidence gathered by both sides, District Court Judge James I. Cohn ruled on February 14 that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.
“There are just no words for what the plaintiffs have done over the past ten years to seek justice for their lost loved ones as well as many others who were killed in Bolivia,” said Tyler Giannini, Co-Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. “Today the jury gave the plaintiffs a huge victory, and showed that the former president and his defense minister are not above the law.”
“When I heard the verdict, I almost couldn’t believe it,” added Susan Farbstein, Co-Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic. “The only thing I could think of was: We didn’t let down the plaintiffs, we didn’t disappoint them, we did our jobs.”
The plaintiffs and their litigation team.
As co-counsel, the International Human Rights Clinic has been involved in all phases of the litigation from the outset, including researching and drafting for the complaint and various motions and briefs, assisting with oral arguments, and undertaking more than a dozen investigative missions to Bolivia since 2007. Over the past year, during the discovery phase, students traveled to Bolivia numerous times, and assisted with document review, interrogatories, and the depositions of plaintiffs, witnesses and experts; more than a half dozen students worked on every facet of the case during the three weeks of trial.
“It was fascinating to work under the legal team and have complete faith in their talent and ability to manage such a complex case,” said Amy Volz ’18, who traveled to Bolivia on four fact-finding trips. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
After the jury announced its verdict, the defendants made a motion asking the judge to overturn the jury’s finding of liability against both defendants. Both parties will submit briefing on this issue in the coming weeks.
“We’re not one to leave halfway through the fight,” said Baltazar Cerro. “We will struggle until the last moment.”
In addition to the Clinic, a team of lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firms of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Schonbrun, Seplow, Harris & Hoffman, LLP, and Akerman LLP are representing the family members. Lawyers from the Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia) are cooperating attorneys.
Published August 1, 1969
A Harvard-sponsored office which provides legal said to low-income residents of Cambridge will soon be guided by a policy-making board composed largely of representatives of the community served by the office.
This week, the Community Legal Assistance Office (CLAO) sent letters to 15 community organizations–including local planning teams, a tenant seat, and a welfare rights organization–and asked each organization to designate a representative for the board.
Of the board’s initial 29 members, 17 will be community representatives, while most of the remainder will be Harvard Law School students and Faculty, and representatives of City and state bar associations.
The powers of the policy-making board have not yet been defined, but it is expected that the board will have a major say in determining the future course of the legal aid office.
“As the board considers policy issues, it presumably will develop more and more insight into what the most productive and responsive relationship between community and law school can be for a joint venture in legal services. One can anticipate, therefore, that the most appropriate formal relationships among everyone involved with CLAO will come into sharper and sharper focus as the board continues to function,” the office’s letter said.
Founded in October, 1966, the CLAO office is funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity and by the Harvard Law School. The bulk of CLAO’s financing comes from the OEO, while the law school pays primarily for handling criminal cases, which Congress had forbidden OEO to pay for.
The Law School brigade outside San Juan. Courtesy of Thinlay Chukki
A few weeks after Hurricane Maria swept Puerto Rico last September, Harvard Law School (HLS) student Natalie Trigo Reyes ’19 visited the island where she grew up, and found an unrecognizable landscape.
“Everything was brown, barren, leveled to the ground,” said Trigo Reyes on a recent morning in Wasserstein Hall. “It looked as if the island had been hit by a nuclear bomb.”
Six months later, Puerto Rico is still reeling from the devastation, but to Trigo Reyes, who just came back from a weeklong trip as part of a humanitarian and legal brigade, the outlook is hopeful.
“Now, there is vegetation, and you can see the green,” she said, “and even though the government response has been slow and insufficient, there is a sense of hope.”
Trigo Reyes led a group of 29 HLS students who traveled to Puerto Rico over spring break to lend a hand to local residents who are still struggling to obtain disaster relief aid. Puerto Rico is a U.S. self-governing territory and its inhabitants are American citizens, although they can’t vote in presidential elections or elect representatives to Congress.
The HLS trip was spearheaded by Andrew Crespo ’08, assistant professor of law, and coordinated by the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, led by Lee Mestre. The students joined forces with local groups such as Fundación Fondo de Acceso a la Justicia, Ayuda Legal Huracán María, Caras con Causa, and ConnectRelief, all of which are working to protect the rights of Puerto Rico residents to federal assistance, employment, and housing protection.
Via The Christian Science Monitor
Harvard law student Kevin Ratana Patumwat helps hurricane victims sort legal documents at a FEMA help center on March 14, 2018 in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. Six months after hurricane Maria hit, students spent their spring break helping victims navigate the FEMA system.
—Mallory Gibson, a music-business major at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC), has spent her junior-year spring break surrounded by sand, surf, and palm trees. But her experience has been pretty far from typical.
“This is exactly what I wanted to do,” says Ms. Gibson, who moments earlier put down a nearly two-foot-long machete that she was using to whack apart a fallen palm tree. She’s covered in a thin film of dirt and, like everyone else here, drips sweat under the midday sun. Just a few hundred yards away the Caribbean laps the sandy shore of the Cabezas de San Juan Nature Reserve, but she won’t dip her toes in the water until her seven-hour work day wraps.
“We’re tackling a small drop in the large ocean of things that need to be done” to help Puerto Rico get back on its feet, she says.
Gibson is the co-leader of a 22-person team from her university that traveled to Puerto Rico to volunteer six months after hurricane María, cleaning up debris and helping regenerate parts of the forest destroyed by the Category 4 storm.
These college students aren’t alone in eschewing traditional spring break activities like sunbathing and partying to help Puerto Rico recover. From the more than 100 Boy Scouts from across the mainland US helping to rebuild a scout camp in Guajataka to 31 Harvard law students providing pro-bono legal aid and humanitarian work, spring break in Puerto Rico this year is a far cry from lazing on the beach.
Credit: Heratch Ekmekjian
In early March, international experts gathered for “Humanitarian Disarmament: The Way Ahead,” the inaugural conference of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative (ACCPI) at Harvard Law School.
Earlier this month, about two dozen international experts gathered for “Humanitarian Disarmament: The Way Ahead,” the inaugural conference of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative (ACCPI) at Harvard Law School.
Drawing on their own involvement in creating international law, conference participants reflected on the development of the humanitarian disarmament movement, which strives to end civilian suffering caused by inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, and discussed where the movement should go from here. Humanitarian disarmament is a key focus of the ACCPI, which formally launched under the leadership of Associate Director Bonnie Docherty ’01 on March 5.
“I was thrilled to have the key players in humanitarian disarmament on campus, and the energy they brought was inspiring,” said Docherty. “It was the perfect way to kick off the ACCPI.”
Among the Countertenor Law Symposium presenters were Christopher Anzalone (first row, third from left) a scholar at the Kennedy School of Government and Dr. John Park (first row, fourth from left), Director of the Korea Working Group.
On March 3, Harvard Law School hosted the third annual Symposium on Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations. The day-long symposium was organized by John Fitzpatrick, JD ’87, a Senior Clinical Instructor at Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP) and Staff Sergeants Lisa Baskall and Derek Piatt of the Army’s 3rd Legal Operations Detachment. Over two dozen active duty and reservist uniformed Army Judge Advocates and Paralegals attended the day-long presentations by several speakers from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School.
Fitzpatrick teaches and supervises hundreds of HLS students in PLAP, and is also a Major in the US Army Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He has previously taken leaves of absence for an active duty Army tour in Afghanistan and for human rights-related assignments in Congo and Niger. Fitzpatrick said he is excited about organizing this annual event, which aims to break down barriers and build bridges between private academia and the military.
“These communities of knowledge benefit exponentially from a greater awareness of what is going on over the other side of their proverbial fences” he said. “Such an increased situational awareness makes our military that much more an effective fighting force, and in turn allows our academic communities to be better-informed about current perspectives and concerns in our military.”
The speakers included Christopher Anzalone, an International Security Program scholar at HKS’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Dr. John Park, Director of HKS’s Korea Working Group. Mr. Anzalone, a leading authority on the Somalian insurgent factions addressed current political, legal and cultural aspects of the Somalian conflict. Dr. Park, a renowned specialist on North Korea and frequent news commentator discussed developments in the Korean crisis.
“It was an honor and a pleasure to participate in the Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations Symposium” Anzalone said. “I spoke about the complex interaction between politics, different societal groups and actors, and the political, financial, and military involvement of the US, UN, EU, and African Union in the ongoing insurgency in Somalia and why it is vital to understand how US involvement affects state-society relations on the ground.”
Anna Crowe, LLM ’12 being introduced to Counterterror Law Symposium attendees by Harvard PLAP’s John Fitzpatrick, JD ’87.
Mr. Anzalone and Dr. Park were followed by two HLS speakers from the Human Rights Program, Anna Crowe, Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law in the International Human Rights Clinic, and Yasser Hamdani, a Visiting Fellow in the Human Rights Program. Ms. Crowe spoke about the legal and practical hazards confronting noncombatants in the active battle space and other areas of armed conflict, as well as challenges facing refugees displaced by armed conflict. “The Symposium sparked rich discussions on crucial legal questions that arise in and after armed conflict, and I was so glad to have the opportunity to be part of these discussions, and help in the goal of building bridges between the military and academia,” she said.
Human Rights Fellow Yasser Hamdani (left) shown with John Fitzpatrick, JD ’87.
Mr. Hamdani, a well-known Advocate in Pakistan’s High Courts, a news media commentator on law and politics, and member of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, spoke about the future and possibilities of the rule of law in Pakistan. “The Symposium gave me an opportunity to interact with the legal minds in the US Army and to bring attention to key issues in the often fraught and contentious US-Pakistan equation. I was glad to have had the opportunity to present my point of view as a Pakistani who is personally invested in greater cooperation between the two countries.”
Fitzpatrick said the experts brought impressive depth of knowledge and insight to the Symposium. “We are incredibly grateful to them for their generous time and helping make this event a success.”
Etelvina Ramos Mamani, far left, and her husband, Eloy Rojas Mamani, and their children in Bolivia. They are suing the country’s former president over the death of their 8-year-old daughter, Marlene. Thomas Becker Center for Constitutional Rights
On a rocky and impoverished rural slice of Bolivia, the noise sounded like corn popping loudly.
Etelvina Ramos Mamani was lying on her bed, weak and feverish. She heard a scream from next to the window. Her 8-year-old daughter, Marlene, suddenly collapsed and tilted her head back, desperately trying to suck air into her lungs — pierced by a bullet fired by Bolivian soldiers.
“Blood was coming out of her chest like a fountain,” Ramos testified Tuesday.
Outside, the government soldiers were charging through the small village, firing away. Hours passed before the shooting stopped. By then, as her relatives held an impromptu wake in the dark, Marlene was dead — an innocent victim of the violent unrest that wracked Bolivia in the fall of 2003.
Ramos took the witness stand Tuesday not in South America, but 3,000 miles away in a Fort Lauderdale federal courtroom.
Her testimony marked the start of a landmark court battle that pits relatives of the poor, mostly indigenous people killed in the chaos against Bolivia’s ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and his former defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzain.
Tuesday’s testimony marked the first time that a former head of state of a foreign country faced trial in a U.S. civil court for human rights abuses, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the Mamani family.
“My daughter was innocent. She had not even gone out. She was playing inside the house,” said Ramos, who sported two long braids, a pink sweater and a turquoise skirt typical to the indigenous people of her region.
Her husband, Eloy Ramos Mamani, recalled soldiers chasing and firing on unarmed villagers. “Like scared rabbits they escaped to the hills,” he told jurors.
The couple belongs to one of eight families suing the former Bolivian government leaders under the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows suits for extrajudicial killings in foreign lands. The suit was filed in South Florida, where the two former politicians now live after fleeing Bolivia in 2003.
The legal wrangling over the case has lasted for nearly a decade, and the trial is expected to last several weeks before U.S. Judge James Cohn. The relatives of the slain Bolivians are represented by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and several high-powered private law firms.
Legal Services Center volunteer tax attorney Dale Kensinger has been named recipient of the Janet Spragens Pro Bono Award from the American Bar Association’s Tax Section. He will receive the award at a luncheon on February 10, when the Tax Section holds its mid-year meeting in San Diego, California.
The ABA Tax Section established the award in 2002 “to recognize one or more individuals or law firms for outstanding and sustained achievements in pro bono activities in tax law. In 2007 the award was renamed in honor of the late Janet Spragens, who received the award in 2006 in recognition of her dedication to the development of low income taxpayer clinics throughout the United States.”
Credit: David M. Barron/Oxygen Group Photography,br> Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III with Shayna, Stacy and Lev Grossman.
On Saturday, November 20, family, friends, students and colleagues of the late Harvard Law School Clinical Professor David Grossman gathered at HLS to celebrate his life, honor his community activism and support his fight for social justice at the second annual David A. Grossman (DAG) Fund fundraiser.
Grossman, who passed away in 2015 after a long battle with cancer, was a passionate and tireless advocate for low-income residents in Boston and beyond who were threatened with displacement from their homes. An expert in housing law, he dedicated his career to fighting on behalf of struggling tenants, homeowners, and communities.
As the managing attorney of the Housing Unit at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and later as the faculty director and managing attorney of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, Grossman fought for the rights of underprivileged Bostonians who could not otherwise afford legal counsel to challenge unfair housing practices, while mentoring and inspiring hundreds of law students at Harvard Law School to do the same.
In honor of his commitment to protecting those in need, Professor Grossman’s widow, Stacy Grossman, founded the DAG Fund for Social Justice in 2015 to support first-year HLS graduates using the power of the law to advance social justice and effect positive community change.
Via Health Law and Policy Clinic
Originally published by Reuters on December 7, 2017. Written by Robert Greenwald, faculty director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School and Ryan Clary, executive director of the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable.
The American epidemic of opioid abuse is finally getting the attention it warrants. While policy solutions continue to be inadequate, the decision by President Trump to declare a national opioid emergency has helped to increase discussion about the problem and how the country can solve it. But the conversation also needs to address a dangerous—and largely ignored—interconnected public health crisis wreaking havoc among young Americans.
The problem is that more Americans than ever are injecting opioids and inadvertently infecting themselves with hepatitis C. Shared needles mean shared blood-borne infections—and that’s how the opioid crisis has created a new generation of hepatitis C patients. The number of reported hepatitis C infections nearly tripled from 2010 to 2015, with the virus is spreading at an unprecedented rate among young people under 30—who are now, for the first time, the most at-risk population for contracting and transmitting hepatitis C.
In the United States, an estimated 3.5 million people, and likely more, are currently living with hepatitis C. The virus kills nearly 20,000 Americans each year—more than HIV and all other infectious diseases combined.
The Project on Predatory Student Lending’s Director of Litigation, Eileen Connor, has been selected for the 2017 “Rising Star” award from the National Consumer Law Center for her significant contributions to consumer law. Eileen’s award comes as a result of her Second Circuit victory in the case Salazar v. King. Her clients were defrauded by the predatory practices of the now-defunct Wilfred Beauty Academy.
Wilfred, a for-profit chain of cosmetology and business trade schools, came under government investigation in the 1980s for the misuse of student aid funds and the falsification of loan applications. The result of the investigation was an overwhelming amount of evidence proving Wilfred’s fraud in certifying students’ eligibility for loans. In 1996, the Department of Education found that Wilfred’s fraudulent practices were widespread and recommended that all Wilfred students who were improperly enrolled receive a loan discharge, reimbursement for money they had paid, and a restoration of their credit. Despite its own recommendation, the Department continued to collect on these loans, including through involuntary collection methods such as seizing tax refunds and garnishing wages.
Photo by Caroline Lauer
Vik Bakshi (left), Caroline Lauer, and Yuan Zhang were part of a team of graduate students that traveled to Alaska to develop an innovative plan for reducing carbon emissions by preserving existing forest land.
How could preserving forests in Alaska or reducing nitrogen fertilizer runoff on farms in the Midwest help an organization interested in mitigating climate impact?
This was one of the questions posed to diverse teams of graduate students brought together as part of the new, multidisciplinary “Climate Solutions Living Lab” course launched by Harvard University last spring to help push forward the transition to a carbon-free future that supports planetary and human health.
Led by Wendy Jacobs, the Emmett Clinical Professor of Environmental Law and director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, and developed in collaboration with the Harvard Office for Sustainability, the three-year research and teaching project was funded by the University as part of its living lab initiative to use the campus as a test bed for innovative sustainability solutions that can then be replicated across much broader levels.
“No single professional discipline can tackle climate change in isolation; collaboration is critical,” said Jacobs. “We designed this course to address real-world challenges faced by climate leaders who are interested in investing in off-site emissions-reduction projects that can be proven to deliver environmental and social benefit.”
The course’s outcomes are expected to offer Harvard clear strategies for how it can most effectively pursue high-quality, off-site emissions projects in the short term as part of the University’s longstanding commitment to modeling how organizations can dramatically reduce the climate impact of their operations. These same strategies, says Jacobs, can be implemented by other organizations.
In many ways, Jane’s life in Kenya was idyllic. She was an educated, confident professional woman with a flourishing career. She owned her own perfume business, and was four months into a prestigious new job in the banking sector. She was an active member of a close-knit church community, and she was raising a daughter she dearly loved, whom she had named “Angel” after her miraculous recovery from infant health problems.
There was only one problem in her life: her husband. In the privacy of their home, he had become increasingly violent and abusive.
When her husband deliberately burned their four-year-old daughter’s hand, and then brutally beat Jane and tried to strangle her, she realized that he was truly capable of killing her. She knew that he had powerful connections, and could find her anywhere in Kenya. Using a tourist visa she had obtained to visit her brother in the U.S. later in the year, she and her daughter quickly booked a flight to Boston, with no long-term plan.
After landing, Jane took her daughter directly to the Boston Children’s Hospital to have the dressing changed on her burned hand. There, a social worker put her in touch with Greater Boston Legal Services.
Malene Alleyne posing with her Outstanding Young Lawyer award
Jamaican human rights lawyer Malene Alleyne is the latest recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year award from the International Bar Association (IBA).
The award was presented recently at an awards breakfast at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, Australia.
This award is presented annually to a young lawyer who has shown not only excellence in his/her work and achievements in his/her career to date but also a commitment to professional and ethical standards as well as a commitment to the larger community.
“I am honoured to take this award home to Jamaica,” said Malene. “This award highlights the important contributions that Caribbean lawyers have made and continue to make to the global community.”
Malene has had a stellar career as an academic and human rights lawyer. She earned an LLM from Harvard Law School, where she specialised in international human rights law, and a Master of Advanced Studies in International Relations with a specialisation in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.
Malene received her law degree from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and a Legal Education Certificate of Merit from the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica.
Before studying law, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Eckerd College.
Malene is a former associate at the Jamaican law firm Myers Fletcher and Gordon. She began her human rights career in 2013 when she joined the inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC.
At the commission, Malene reviewed human rights complaints against Organisation of American States members.
“I believe that respect for human rights is the cornerstone of democratic governance,” said Malene.
“Human rights must be mainstreamed through every aspect of government, business, and social life. This is the wish I have for Jamaica, the Caribbean and the world.”
In 2016, Malene decided to pursue an LLM at Harvard, but she maintained a close connection to human rights practice through her work with the Harvard International Human Rights Clinic and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.
Almost a century ago, a young Boston lawyer named Reginald Heber Smith published a landmark book called Justice and the Poor. It was about how people struggling economically were faring in the American legal system and why American lawyers needed to provide them with free legal aid. He wrote, “Nothing rankles more in the human heart than the feeling of injustice.” At the time, there were only 41 legal-aid organizations in the country, with a total of about 60 lawyers. The Boston Legal Aid Society, founded in 1900, was one of them. As a student at Harvard Law School, Smith had spent his summers as a volunteer there. When he graduated in 1913, he became the leader of that four-lawyer office and instituted a “daily time sheet”—on which lawyers recorded the hours they spent on cases—as a tool for increasing efficiency in addressing the 2,000 or so cases the society had on behalf of clients.
Smith’s book recounted how American lawyers had devised a system of substantive law and legal procedure so convoluted that it denied access to justice to anyone who didn’t have a lawyer to navigate it. That system, he contended, had to be fixed by greatly multiplying the number of legal-aid societies. Smith wrote, “It must be possible for the humble to invoke the protection of the law, through proper proceedings in the courts, for any invasion of his rights by whomsoever attempted, or freedom and equality vanish into nothingness.” His goal was to give “reality to equality by making it a living thing.” He warned that “denial of justice is the short cut to anarchy.”
Daniel Nagin
Photograph by Jim Harrison
If the bar provided lawyers for free, the poor would have access to justice and society would benefit. Smith’s vision was of lawyers for the poor providing the full range of legal services that lawyers for the rich were expected to deliver. His book’s introduction summarized his view: “Class hostilities would diminish, the turbulent marketplace would return to stability, and the poor’s disposition toward righteous conflict would be diverted. Society would be cleansed of its anarchistic elements, and the confidence of poor people in lawyers and the legal system would be re-established.”
Smith’s vision has never been realized in the United States, but it haunts the debate about how best to serve the legal needs of poor and low-income Americans—and about whether we even know what works best to solve the problems of this group. Poverty’s effects on human health are well documented: lives tend to be sadder, harder, and shorter. But the effects on poor and low-income people’s lives of needing a lawyer and not having one are not well documented at all.
Two members of the legal team that settled a lawsuit earlier this year against the psychologists who designed and implemented a Central Intelligence Agency torture program spoke Friday afternoon at the Law School about their work on the landmark case.
Paul L. Hoffman—a civil and human rights lawyer and lecturer at the Law School—and criminal defense lawyer Lawrence S. Lustberg played major roles on the American Civil Liberties Union’s litigation team in Salim v. Mitchell, filed on behalf of three former CIA detainees. The case accused two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, of designing “cruel, inhuman” interrogation techniques that were used against detainees Suleiman A. Salim, Mohamed A. Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman in secret CIA prisons.
The case, which was settled in August, is one of the most high-profile attempts to date to hold the U.S. government accountable for using techniques considered to be torture in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“Numerous detainees have filed lawsuits challenging torture by the US government. Mr. Salim, Mr. Ben Soud were the first ones to ever have their case get this far, get to the eve of trial, get to a settlement,” Lustberg said. “Nobody had ever entered into a settlement with a CIA operative before in the history of the nation.”
More broadly, Lustberg said, the case illustrated the tension in public interest litigation between a client’s best interest and a litigation team’s cause.
Haben Girma, a Harvard Law School alum and alum of LSC’s Disability Litigation Unit (now the Safety Net Project), is featured on the cover of the September issue of the American Bar Association Journal for her consulting and public speaking work encouraging companies to hire people with disabilities and to develop fully accessible products and services. Girma has worked with organizations ranging from Apple and Google to Pearson Education and the American Alliance of Museums.
Before going into consulting, this former Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom fellow practiced litigation for more than two years with the nonprofit organization Disability Rights Advocates.
Girma is a first-generation immigrant who has both limited hearing and vision and refers to herself as “Deafblind.” She was named one of the ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels.
Credit: Emmanuel Huybrechts via Wikimedia Commons
Last week, in a victory for the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program’s Crimmigration Clinic, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts issued a significant ruling on the question of whether Massachusetts police can detain and arrest someone for a U.S. immigration violation.
The court ruled in the case of Lunn v. Commonwealth that the Commonwealth’s law enforcement officers do not have the authority to arrest and detain an individual solely pursuant to a Detainer–a request from federal immigration authorities that a person placed under arrest by local authorities be further detained if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) believes the person may be deportable. The court arrived at the ruling based on the fact that there is no state statutory law or common law authorizing such an arrest.
In March, HIRC’s Crimmigration Clinic filed an amicus brief in Lunn v. Commonwealththat discussed the lack of legislative authorization for Massachusetts law enforcement officers and courts to arrest and detain an individual solely pursuant to an ICE Detainer. Specifically, the brief analyzed other civil arrest and detention authority under Massachusetts law and noted that procedural protections in those instances are absent when someone is held pursuant to an ICE detainer.
Crimmigration Clinic Supervisor and Lecturer on Law Phil Torrey, who is also HIRC’s managing attorney, and supervising attorney for the Harvard Immigration Project, filed the brief with Mark C. Fleming ’97, a partner at WilmerHale and vice-chair of the firm’s appellate and Supreme Court litigation practice.
Following the court’s decision, Torrey said, “In this landmark decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has recognized what advocates have been saying for years — there is no legal authority for Massachusetts law enforcement officer to detain someone solely pursuant to an ICE detainer. It is unlawful.”
Five HLS students helped write the brief: Tess Hellgren ’18, Emma Rekart ’17, Madelyn Finucane ’19, Harleen Gambhir ’19, and Alexander Milvae ’19. Hellgren and Rekart described the case and the brief, from which parts of the decision were drawn, on the HLS Clinical and Pro Bono Programs blog.
The decision, is the first ruling by a state’s high court on the question of whether state or local authorities can detain individuals based solely on a request by federal immigration authorities.
For additional coverage, visit
The New York Times: Court Officers Can’t Hold People Solely Under ICE Detainers, Massachusetts Justices Rule
WBUR: “Mass. High Court Rules Local Authorities Can’t Detain People Solely On ICE Detainers”
Via Food Law and Policy Clinic
Originally published on huffingtonpost.com on July 26, 2017. Written by Emily Broad Leib, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, Deputy Director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.
This week, I am excited to join a group of advocates and chefs from Food Policy Action, the National Resource Defense Council, ReFed, and the James Beard Foundation in Washington, D.C. to put food waste on the plates of Congress.
In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and United States Department of Agriculture announced a national goal to halve food waste by 2030, but these agencies and Congress have not yet adopted policies to help us meet this ambitious goal. We are now approaching a critical opportunity to implement such policy change: the U.S. Farm Bill, expected to pass in 2018. This legislation shapes our food and agriculture system, covering everything from rural broadband to food assistance programs—yet the last Farm Bill, enacted in 2014, didn’t put a single dollar towards food waste reduction efforts.
Along with other food waste advocates, we have been working tirelessly to change that. Food waste is a drain on our economy and our environment, and reducing this waste has demonstrated triple bottom-line results: sending healthy, wholesome food to those in need, reducing the negative environmental impacts of food waste, and creating jobs and economic activity. These are the types of solutions our communities and our businesses want to see from Congress.
Behind the success of every artist — from the industry mainstays and chart-toppers to rising stars — is a lawyer fielding the deals and disputes that are a constant part of today’s ever-evolving music business. With the rise of new business models and the growing dependence on brand licensing and streaming, attorneys are more important than ever. The scope of their legal expertise is also wider, moving beyond issues of contract law to questions of intellectual property in the digital age and social justice in entertainment.
At which law schools do the top music counselors gain expertise? These 12 stand out as the alma maters of the majority of music’s most accomplished litigators.
Harvard Law School
City: Cambridge, Mass.
Enrollment: 1,771
Tuition and fees: $66,142 per year
Alumni who represent music artists will be on the bill for a two-day arts festival in September celebrating Harvard Law’s bicentennial year. The fest will include performances by clients represented by the school’s long-running Recording Artists Project, a legal-services clinic through which students provide pro bono legal services for Boston-area musicians. RAP and the Committee on Sports & Entertainment Law complement such courses as a new music and digital media class, which under Professor Christopher Bavitz explores music and the way legal principles manifest themselves in practice in the music industry.
Alumnus: Horacio Gutierrez, general counsel, Spotify
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