Michele Coleman Mayes will deliver the keynote address at the School of Law’s 12th annual Women in the Law Conference on Friday, May 15, 2020. A renowned speaker on the topic of diversity and inclusion, Coleman Mayes is vice president, general counsel and secretary for the New York Public Library. She is a co-author of the book, Courageous Counsel: Conversations with Women General Counsel in the Fortune 500. In 2012, Coleman Mayes received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The American Lawyer. In 2014, she became chair of the Commission on Women in the Profession of the American Bar Association.

Professor Woodrow Hartzog says we need policymakers to pass laws that more effectively guard our privacy and give us control over our data. “Until then, we’re playing cat and mouse,” he tells The New York Times. “And that always ends poorly for the mouse.”

If we had easier and more affordable access to high-quality, evidence-based physical and mental health care, many, many fewer people would die, Jeremiah Goulka, a researcher and senior fellow at Northeastern Law’s Health in Justice Action Lab, tells Newsweek. “And it would also reduce the stigma toward seeking treatment for a lot of the problems that fall into the bucket of deaths of despair.”

The latest issue of Northeastern Law magazine is now available online. The Winter ’20 issue, featuring a cover story on the social implications of technology and healthcare for civil rights and historically marginalized populations, includes articles on criminal justice reform, public health impact litigation and much more.

Any US version of GDPR would, in practice, be something of a GDPR-lite, writes Professor Woodrow Hartzog in a co-authored op-ed for Wired.

Congrats to the law school’s magazine, Northeastern Law, which won Honors in the Mercury Excellence Awards 2019-2020 for magazines — overall presentation: non-profit. Read the latest issue now!

In the Hartford Courant, professors Jeremy Paul and Wendy Parmet write, “Battling diseases and other threats requires hard, unglamorous work by experts who have the trust of the community and the resources necessary to get the job done. Just the kind of efforts that don’t translate easily into sound bites or tweets.”

“When I’m feeling stressed about something it makes me feel calm when I take an inventory of the things that I own and I can see it in my head,” says Kathy Tu ’13, co-host of a WYNC podcast called the 10 Things That Scare Me. 

With a pandemic upon us, it doesn’t require compassion to ensure that our immigration policies don’t threaten public health, writes Professor Wendy Parmet. “It just requires common sense.”

“Non-citizens make up a very significant proportion of the workforce in healthcare, and particularly in places like nursing homes, where patients are especially vulnerable,” Professor Wendy Parmet tells Mother Jones. “If we want to protect those patients, it’s really important that the people who are caring for them, many of whom are immigrants… are comfortable with getting health care, getting tested. Otherwise, there’s potential for exasperating the outbreak.”