Law & Public Policy Blog

Tenant Right to Counsel Has Transformative Potential—and Is Worth the Price

Sarah Connor, Law & Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2021 On November 14th, Philadelphia became the fifth city in the nation to establish a right to counsel for low-income tenants in eviction court. As Barrett Marshall, Director of the Philadelphia Eviction Prevention Project and attorney at Community Legal Services, testified in favor of the legislation, “The eviction crisis is. . .tearing apart long-standing communities. [ . . .] We know that legal representation has the power to change this. The …

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The Global Leadership Vacuum

Alexander Rojavin, Law & Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2020 The difficulty of writing a bi-weekly op-ed on some matter of policy is that since I began writing, several breaking news stories have shed new light on my subject. As I prepare to publish this, several more continue to break. Finding a moment’s peace from global developments has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for someone trying modestly to keep a finger on the world’s pulse. And yet, let us …

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The Fall of the Wall: Commemorating the Emergence of International Order

Peter Konchak, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2021 Saturday, November 9, 2019, marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the physical barrier that surrounded West Berlin and separated it from the Soviet satellite of East Germany between 1961 and 1989. The crystallization of the pro-democratic revolutions that swept across the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, the fall of the wall symbolizes a series of events the historical consequence …

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Western Withdrawal: Implications of the Runet’s Chinese Trajectory and the West’s Response to Foreign Cyber Threats

Alexander Rojavin, Law & Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2020 On October 19, Kremlin press secretary and hand watch enthusiast Dmitry Peskov announced that the country was not “technologically ready for a sovereign Runet,” even though in April, the Duma (the Russian parliament) passed by 307 votes to 68 the final version of a law that would isolate the Runet—the Russian segment of the internet—from the rest of the world. Per the law, beginning on November 1, the Russian analogue …

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Patience and Time: A Defense of America’s Involvement in the Middle East

Peter Konchak, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2021 “You have the watches. We have the time.” So goes an insurgent’s aphorism about the alleged futility of his adversary’s campaign against him. The statement bears some truth: since the onset of the first modern counterinsurgency campaigns waged by the European great powers during the “second age of imperialism,” attrition has been recognized as a means by which guerillas may defeat great powers. In this paradigm, the objective of …

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Zelensky’s Rhetorical Policy in the Face of Putino-Trumpian Disinformation

Alexander Rojavin, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2020 Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has confirmed what we already knew—that in an act of policymaking staggeringly harmful to the United States’ interests, the White House froze nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine’s young administration helped fabricate a case against former Vice President Joe Biden. (No, it had nothing to do with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s reviled former attorney general who got the …

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De-Prioritizing Social Studies Education Was a Huge Mistake

Noelia Rivera-Calderón, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2019 As a former middle school teacher, I can’t resist starting with a little pop quiz: In which core school subject can you learn to distinguish between fact and opinion, analyze international relations, practice media literacy and source analysis, understand differing points of view and bias, consider how history has impacted race relations, and be trained to become civically and politically involved? Which core school subject (not counting the “non-core,” …

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Joint Filing and Tax Reform

Hope Kildea, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2019 With the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the federal legislature grappled with changes to some fundamental aspects of our tax system. Talks of eliminating deductions for charitable contributions, medical expenses, and student loan interest put into question the values reflected in our tax code. One area of our tax structure that was not addressed through the TCJA was filing status. The Internal Revenue Code …

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Nigeria Must Do More To Protect Its Children

Miriam Abaya ’17, Law & Public Policy Fellow  In April 2014, 276 girls were kidnapped from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria by Boko Haram. The kidnapping sparked the global social media campaign #BringBackOurGirls. Today, 163 girls have either escaped or been released, leaving 113 unaccounted for. Nigerian parents have pled and protested, demanding that the Nigerian government do more to find their daughters. Four years later, on February 19, 2018, Boko Haram insurgents kidnapped 110 girls in Dapchi, adding …

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Reflections on Race and School Discipline

Noelia Rivera-Calderón, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2019 We all know we are doing school discipline wrong. We see the statistics on racial disparities in discipline: Black and Latino students are suspended and expelled at significantly higher rates than white students. When it comes to finding solutions, though, well-intentioned but misguided policies from all points in the political spectrum—from zero tolerance to suspension bans—end up leaving us little better than we started, taking one step forward and …

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