harvard thesis law

While Sandel argues that pursuing perfection through genetic engineering would decrease our sense of humility, he claims that the sense of solidarity we would lose is also important.

This thesis summarizes several points in Sandel’s argument, but it does not make a claim about how we should understand his argument. A reader who read Sandel’s argument would not also need to read an essay based on this descriptive thesis.  

Broad thesis (arguable, but difficult to support with evidence) 

Michael Sandel’s arguments about genetic engineering do not take into consideration all the relevant issues.

This is an arguable claim because it would be possible to argue against it by saying that Michael Sandel’s arguments do take all of the relevant issues into consideration. But the claim is too broad. Because the thesis does not specify which “issues” it is focused on—or why it matters if they are considered—readers won’t know what the rest of the essay will argue, and the writer won’t know what to focus on. If there is a particular issue that Sandel does not address, then a more specific version of the thesis would include that issue—hand an explanation of why it is important.  

Arguable thesis with analytical claim 

While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake” (54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well” (51) is less convincing.

This is an arguable analytical claim. To argue for this claim, the essay writer will need to show how evidence from the article itself points to this interpretation. It’s also a reasonable scope for a thesis because it can be supported with evidence available in the text and is neither too broad nor too narrow.  

Arguable thesis with normative claim 

Given Sandel’s argument against genetic enhancement, we should not allow parents to decide on using Human Growth Hormone for their children.

This thesis tells us what we should do about a particular issue discussed in Sandel’s article, but it does not tell us how we should understand Sandel’s argument.  

Questions to ask about your thesis 

• Is the thesis truly arguable? Does it speak to a genuine dilemma in the source, or would most readers automatically agree with it?  
• Is the thesis too obvious? Again, would most or all readers agree with it without needing to see your argument?  
• Is the thesis complex enough to require a whole essay's worth of argument?  
• Is the thesis supportable with evidence from the text rather than with generalizations or outside research?  
• Would anyone want to read a paper in which this thesis was developed? That is, can you explain what this paper is adding to our understanding of a problem, question, or topic?
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Law is a Moral Practice

Scott Hershovitz, Law is a Moral Practice , Harvard University Press, 2023, 236pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674258556.

Reviewed by Brian Leiter, University of Chicago

In the first chapter of his often entertaining but rather exasperating book, Scott Hershovitz gives two different formulations of its central thesis that “law is a moral practice.” In one formulation, “legal practices—like legislation and adjudication—are the sorts of activities that might , in the right circumstances, rearrange people’s moral relationships. That is what I mean when I say that law is a moral practice” (28, emphasis added; cf. 132). This view, however, is trivially true: all kinds of practices (not just legal ones) “might, in the right circumstances” change our moral relationships with each other. (If my neighbor regularly leaves garbage on my lawn, this will change our moral relationship, e.g., I will be morally justified in bringing a civil action against him, and I will no longer have an obligation to be neighborly towards him.)

In other places, he states the thesis differently: “law is a moral practice, in that it aims to adjust our moral relationships” (36, emphasis added; cf. 103) or, similarly, “When I say that law is a moral practice, I mean that we employ legal practices in an effort to adjust who owes what to whom” (24, emphasis added; cf. 96) (morality, for Hershovitz, concerns “what we owe each other” (21), by which he means the moral realist thesis “what we genuinely owe each other, not what we believe we owe each other” (22)); or, “legal practices are tools for adjusting our moral relationships, and they  are typically employed for the purpose of doing so” (18, emphasis added). This latter view does not seem trivial, nor is it (contrary to Hershovitz (27)) one everyone in jurisprudence accepts (Hershovitz cites only Joseph Raz in the text—who may accept it on one understanding—but he makes no mention in this regard of any of the major figures of 20th century jurisprudence like H.L.A Hart, Hans Kelsen, Norberto Bobbio, and Alf Ross who do not accept it). In what sense, though, does the law “aim” or have as its “purpose” the altering of moral relationships?

On a natural reading, Hershovitz seems to mean that legal actors typically intend to alter moral relationships through the law, but this seems implausible. An alteration in moral relationships might be an effect of legal actions, but where is the evidence that it is the typical intention? On the standard public choice account of legislation, for example, law makers intend only to satisfy the interests of their largest donors who make their campaigns for reelection possible. On one kind of Marxist account, law makers intend to promote the interests of the ruling class. Although there is plentiful evidence for both the latter accounts (Hershovitz seems to think, without explanation or evidence, that such possibilities are “deviant” (28)), one need not accept them to still be skeptical of the claim that legal actors typically intend to alter moral relationships.

Perhaps, for example, people employ law primarily for self-interested reasons (to get what they want, without any regard for moral relationships)? Again, adjusting the moral rights and obligations may be a consequence, but not the reason (or motive), for employing law. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was intended to cut taxes (for self-interested or other reasons), but its proponents would be astonished to learn that their actual intention was to change moral relationships, even if the effect of the Act can be redescribed in those terms. They have no de dicto intention to change moral relationships, even if, by Hershovitz’s lights, we can ascribe to them a de re intention to do so. But as with the first formulation in terms of possible effects in the right circumstances on moral relationships, this interpretation now seems to make the claim, once again, trivial: once you define morality the way Hershovitz does, it follows that any law (or any other activity) which changes people’s rights or obligations has a “moral” effect (or can be described as “moral”), even when no one de dicto intends that (Hershowitz finally admits as much at 192). This makes law a “moral practice” in the same sense that Mafia protection rackets are “moral practices”: they certainly change people’s rights and obligations. [1]

The tautological character of the book’s central thesis plays a large role. For example, it is true on this reading that “the questions posed in court are moral questions as well as legal questions” (38). The problem is they are answered legally, not morally, at least when the law is determinate. When it is not, of course moral considerations may affect a court’s decision in a particular case, but no one has ever denied that latter point. Dworkin advanced the view that one must always rely on moral considerations to say what the law is, and it seems Hershovtiz does too: “judges must rely on their moral views to resolve the cases that come before them” (56, emphasis added; cf. 175: “moral assessment is internal to legal judgment”), i.e., not just in cases where the law runs out.

His main argument for this latter claim appears in Chapter 2 and is based on a reading of a U.S. Supreme Court case, King v. Burwell (2016), involving interpretation of the Affordable Care Act. Hershovitz observes that the late Justice Antonin Scalia offered normative arguments for textualism as a theory of statutory interpretation in his extra-judicial writings, primarily based on the rule of law value of “publicity” (and fair notice) and the constitutional requirement of separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature. Hershovitz seizes (63–64) on some language at the end of Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, and Justice Scalia’s dissent, in Burwell to suggest that their disagreement was really a moral one, “over competing visions of democracy and the proper role of judges within one” (65). In fact, most of both opinions concerned the meaning of the statute, with Scalia laser-focused on one word in one sentence, while Roberts argued that Scalia’s reading would render the statute self-defeating given the other parts of the text. Even if we take the concluding remarks in the opinion as evidence of the more ambitious moral debate, as Hershovitz does, this does not show “judges must rely on their moral views to resolve the cases that come before them” (56). It may only show that Burwell , like many cases that end up in the Supreme Court (cf. Leiter 2015), had no right legal answer, so unsurprisingly the judges had to exercise moral and political judgment to resolve it.

Chapter 3 is Hershovitz’s most explicit attack on legal positivism, “the thesis that the content of the law is determined by social facts” (84). [2]   Hershovitz claims that “positivism. . .is false when it comes to the set of norms that is contested in court” because “courts attempt to ascertain and apply the norms that are authoritative. . .[i.e.,] in virtue of moral principles that establish their authority” (85). The latter is obviously false (courts purport to rely on the norms that are legally valid), although I suppose Hershovitz thinks Chapter 2 established it. It may be true that in some decisions by the appellate courts, where law is often indeterminate, judges avert to non-legal considerations, moral or otherwise. This shows nothing about what most courts do most of the time, and nothing about the nature of law. (Recall that one of Hart’s central claims was that law exists primarily outside the courts, as a way of guiding conduct; his was not a theory about appellate adjudication, but like Ronald Dworkin, Hershovitz does not notice.)

Hershovitz wants to deny that law is “a set of norms” in Chapter 3, but his reasons are obscure. He notices that the word “law” is polysemous (see esp. 93), and thus can pick out different sets of norms (one might add: it can also pick out things other than norms, e.g., laws of nature). He offers a list of possibilities, suggesting that Hart offers an account of law as “norms that are accepted by legal officials,” but not of “norms that are authoritative” (82), where “authoritative” means those we “have reason to comply with” (74, cf. 86). Hart’s actual theory—namely that where law exists there is a rule of recognition that specifies the criteria other norms must satisfy to count as norms of the legal system, and the criteria making up the rule of recognition are those that officials converge upon and treat as ones they ought to apply (i.e., that they treat as authoritative, rightly or wrongly)—is not fairly represented on Hershovitz’s list of possibilities. To use Hershovitz’s terminology, Hart’s view is that in modern municipal legal systems, our shared concept treats law as the “norms that are accepted as authoritative by officials,” although even that is not quite right for reasons we can consign to a note. [3]

Hershovitz, I think, would reject even the latter. He makes the astonishing claim that “the original sin among philosophers of law is the rigid insistence that this and not that set of norms counts as the law of the community” (83). One can, of course, reject a central question of general jurisprudence for at least two centuries—namely, what is the difference between those norms that are legal and those norms that are not—but there should be a good reason for doing so. [4]   After all, when I want to make a valid will in Illinois, I go see my lawyer and not a moral philosopher: I want to know what legal norms govern the making of wills in my jurisdiction, not what norms morally ought to govern them, even in light of past institutional actions in Illinois. Hershovitz says that “What’s at issue” in court “is the norms that are [morally] authoritative” (83), but this is not true: all that matters is the norms that are legally valid, regardless of whether we have all-things-considered reasons to comply with them. That’s why morally indifferent lawyers can do good legal work.

In Chapter 4, Hershovitz considers laws and legal systems that are immoral and argues that “some aspects of immoral practices may [nonetheless] generate genuine [moral] obligations” (111). He does not offer a general theory of when bad laws generate moral obligations (which is what his theory would seem to require), but does discuss some suggestive examples. Citing Nazi Germany and some others, he observes that a legal system can be so immoral “that it is worth casting the system aside and seeking something better, even if that risks the abyss” (104). No one, including legal positivists, disagrees with that. Do those places have “legal systems”? Hershovitz doesn’t say, not wanting to commit the original sin I suppose.

Chapter 5 offers a nuanced exploration of the “moral consequences our legal practices might have” (132), although for reasons I do not understand, Hershovitz frames this as a dispute with the more familiar question about whether there is an obligation to obey the law just because it is the law. He says the latter is a question of “marginal importance” (112), even though an affirmative answer would be rather significant, which no doubt explains why so many luminaries, past and present, have addressed it. Despite the peculiar dismissal of the traditional question, Hershovitz offers, among other things, an interesting account of how legal prohibitions on otherwise immoral conduct nonetheless are morally important because they give the state standing to prosecute crimes (122–127).

I did, however, find Hershovitz’s use of (morally) “wrong” in this chapter somewhat confusing. He says, for example, that if “I owe you $500. . .I would wrong you if I don’t [pay you]” even if “I need the money to pay for my child’s medical care” (121), although he says wronging you would be the right thing to do. But you would not be justified in blaming me, given that my child’s health is more important than the debt, and, indeed, you could blame me for not attending to my child’s health if I paid off the debt instead. Not all harms are wrongs. The difficulty here, I suspect, is that “wrong” does not have a lot of cognitive content, and that many of Hershovitz’s judgments on particular cases are more ethnographic data about the etiquette norms of his class and milieu than philosophical insights. But Hershovitz is a moral realist, [5]   and so takes his moral feelings quite seriously.

Chapter 6 argues “that the rule of law requires a shared moral outlook. Officials and (to a lesser extent) laypeople must see legal practices as sources of morality” (147–8). The “rule of law” is glossed in terms of Lon Fuller’s principles of legality (143) and the idea that political power is constrained by public norms and procedures (142). The shared “moral outlook” recognizes that efficacious legal institutions (which the rule of law makes possible) can generate moral obligations by facilitating coordination, resolving disputes peacefully, giving voice to everyone, and so on (144, a theme taken up in earlier chapters as well, but without a clear theory of when this is true).

Hershovitz purports to illustrate the latter with a story of how Alabama legal officials removed former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore from office for failing to abide by the decisions of the federal courts on matters of federal constitutional law. Hershovitz makes the fanciful claim that they did this because Alabama legal officials shared the preceding “moral outlook” (143). What actually happened—namely, Alabama legal officials sanctioned a judge for breaching his clear legal duty by defying the order of a federal court over which it had jurisdiction—is dismissed by Hershovitz as merely the “official reason” (138) for his removal. Hershovitz, hell bent on moralizing every legal decision, notes that the “official reason” also mentioned that Moore “sought legal redress by appealing to the limit of judicial review; he was bound by, and had the duty to follow, the rulings of the federal courts” (138). Hershovitz adds that this “is a moral claim every bit as much as it is a legal one” (138). It could be construed as a moral claim, of course, but there is no evidence that is how Alabama officials thought about it. One could ask: is there a good moral reason for Alabama to insist that judges honor their legal obligations? But Hershovitz, in keeping with the trivial reading discussed at the start, simply insists the legal questions are moral ones. [6]

Chapter 7 defends the view that lawyers are “moral experts.” Given the preceding, this seems mostly unsurprising: if “law is a moral practice,” after all, and lawyers are legal experts, then they are moral experts. Once again, the trivial reading of “law is a moral practice” is doing all the work. Hershovitz starts by explaining how moral philosophers can be moral experts despite their disagreements. He cautions that “we should be careful not to exaggerate the extent of the disagreement” (152), which he then proceeds to wildly understate (cf. Leiter 2021 for the contrasting view). We can put that aside. More oddly, given Hershovitz’s moral realism, he invokes a 1972 defense of moral expertise by Peter Singer (then a moral anti-realist), according to which moral experts are good at collecting all the facts and then drawing valid inferences from them given “whatever moral view” one holds (154). One might have hoped moral experts also know which moral view is true! This discussion was quite superficial.

Hershovitz then turns to the question of whether lawyers are “assholes,” although the real issue is whether the existence of morally bad or indifferent lawyers is compatible with the thesis that “law is a moral practice.” Of course it is compatible, since his actual thesis is that any deontic talk in law can be recast in moral terms. He concludes by suggesting that “We ought to invite lawyers to see law as a moral practice—to see themselves as part of a moral endeavor” (167). As Herlinde Pauer-Studer (2020: 205) reminds us, the notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler would have agreed: “There can be no divide between a requirement of law and a requirement of morality. For requirements of law are requirements of decency.” This does not show Hershovitz is wrong, but it does suggest that speculating about how a thesis about the nature of law will affect practice is a fool’s errand. (Hart did not, contrary to Hershovitz's presentation, rest his defense of legal positivism on any such speculation; he touched on the topic only in response to Fuller’s opposite speculation.)

Hershovitz’s authorial voice is conversational and inviting, and his writing is often clever and funny. I suspect this will make the book effective with readers who know little about general jurisprudence or its history. [7]   Hershovitz professes to wanting to avoid “clutter,” but serious scholarship (including in jurisprudence: e.g., Kelsen, Hart, Raz) often involves “clutter,” i.e., acknowledging the history of a problem, the positions and distinctions others have thought important, the reasons for them, and the arguments against them. This book does almost none of that, so it cannot be recommended to anyone new to the subject, who will simply be left in the dark about the actual questions and problems in general jurisprudence. Despite Hershovitz’s professed interest in discouraging readers from “dig[ging] in and cheer[ing] for a team” (15), Hershovitz is very clearly on a team: anti-positivist, Dworkinian, and moral realist. The book is an amusing, meandering sketch of what seem to me implausible views, with too little serious argument, and too little effort to consider objections, even obvious ones, from the other “teams.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Elena Di Rosa, Alma Diamond, Josh Kaufman, Richard Stillman, and Helen Zhao for illuminating and incisive discussion of the Hershovitz book in a reading group at the University of Chicago Law School during the 2024 Winter and Spring quarters; many of their excellent insights influenced this review, although none should be supposed to agree with it! I also thank Emad Atiq and Nina Varsava for comments on the penultimate draft.

Greenberg, Mark. 2004. “How Facts Make Law,” Legal Theory 10: 157–198.

Leiter, Brian. 2011. “The Demarcation Problem in Jurisprudence: A New Case for Skepticism,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 31: 663–677.

-----. 2015. “Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the Supreme Court as Super-Legislature,” Hastings Law Journal 66: 1601–1615.

----. 2021. “Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, and Inference to the Best Explanation,” Ethical Theory & Moral Practice : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-021-10219-y

-----. Forthcoming. “The Metaphysical Turn in Recent American Jurisprudence,” in Leiter, From a Realist Point of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Pauer-Studer, Herlinde. 2020. Justifying Injustice: Legal Theory in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

[1] Another possibility (suggested by Hershovitz’s discussion of promising at 28) is that he thinks that legal practices, by their nature (as it were), aim to change people’s moral relationships, regardless of the actual practice and intentions. Some recent legal philosophers, like Mark Greenberg and Mark Murphy, do hold something like this view, although only Murphy has an argument for it. Hershovitz offers no argument for it, so I suspect it is not what he means. Even later (186), he suggests his view is “that we see our legal practices as (in part) efforts to adjust what we [morally] owe each other.” Anyone could take that approach, so it would tell us nothing about the nature of law or legal reasoning. This seems less “Law is a moral practice” than “let’s view law as if it were a moral practice.”

[2] This idiosyncratic formulation comes from Mark Greenberg (2004), but Greenberg speaks of the “ existence and content” of law. Hershovitz’s truncation is striking. In the 20th century, the positivist thesis concerned the existence question (when does a norm exist as a norm of the legal system, i.e., when is it valid); Raz added the question of how content is determined, and Greenberg runs with that. On the general problems with this framing, see Leiter (forthcoming).

[3] What officials accept as authoritative are criteria of legal validity that tell us which norms are part of the law, but particular judges can be mistaken about the application of these criteria and thus deem norms legally valid that are not so. Hershovitz’s evidence against Hart’s view is supposed to be how courts talk in hard cases (a Dworkinian move, that is hardly decisive for a theory of law) and a faculty lounge conversation among his law colleagues about whether Trump could pardon himself (89–93).

[4] My own view (Leiter 2011) is that the best answer to the question “What is law?”—Hart’s answer—invariably yields fuzzy borderline cases, especially in the highest appellate courts, and it is a mistake to think that eliminating the “fuzz” in those cases is relevant to the question we are really concerned about: namely, what ought the court do? My sense is Hershovitz thinks we should only be asking, all the time, “What ought the court do?” with the past decisions of legal institutions being relevant only to the extent they affect our moral reasoning, as past events sometimes do. This would be the end of the legal system as we know it, of course.

[5] Hershovitz’s occasional comments on moral anti-realism are silly and superficial (e.g., 24, 194–195): “I have met people who acted as if they did not owe anything to others. But I have never met anyone who acted as if she wasn’t owed anything by others” (194). Nothing in moral anti-realism requires one not to have attitudes about obligations (to others or oneself); it just denies their objectivity. He also claims, bizarrely, that if you are “skeptical about moral claims, you should be skeptical about legal claims” ( id. ) even though the latter are, on a positivist view, just certain kinds of institutional or social facts: skepticism about moral reality does not entail skepticism about social reality.

[6] At the end of the book (192–194), Hershovitz allows that one could deny that “legal” rights/duties are just “moral” rights/duties and admits that he has “not argued against” this possibility, “at least not directly” (193). Since this is probably the central question raised by his book, this is a remarkable admission. Hershovitz claims that treating moral and legal duties as distinct is “needlessly complicated” (193), although I would have thought his book was evidence of needless complication both metaphysically (he needs moral realism), and conceptually (e.g., he goes to great length, in two different chapters, to explain how it is that bad laws can nonetheless produce moral obligations, although he never offers a general theory of when this is so).

[7] Most of the dust jacket blurbs fall into that category; the exceptions are a diehard Dworkinian, as well as a former colleague, friend, and mentor.

What I teach Harvard Law School students about opening arguments

Professor of Law, Harvard University

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Though Hollywood movies about courtroom dramas often glamorize the closing arguments given by lawyers, in reality the opening statement is likely the most important single event of a trial.

Lawyers in the hush money case involving former President Donald Trump and alleged payments to porn star Stormy Daniels presented their opening statements on April 22, 2024, in New York.

In this case , Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an effort to influence voters’ knowledge about him before the 2016 presidential election. Trump entered a plea of not guilty.

Academic psychologists tell us that between 65% and 75% of jurors make up their minds about a case after the opening statement. What’s even more incredible is that 85% of those jurors maintain the position they formed after the opening statement once all evidence is received and the trial is closed.

More often than not, it is too late by closing arguments to win over the jury.

This phenomenon comes as no surprise to veteran trial lawyers. They are aware of two theories that define how jurors – indeed, people generally – process information: the concepts of primacy and recency

These ideas suggest that jurors best remember what they hear first and what they hear last. It is vitally important, then, for lawyers on both sides to start their opening arguments with a bang.

The psychology of jurors

I have taught a course on trial advocacy for the past two decades at the Harvard Law School. Part of my curriculum is to teach budding lawyers how to deliver effective opening statements.

If the idea is to win over the jury by the end of the lawyer’s opening statement, how, in practice, is that done?

Trial lawyers steeped in the research know that juries respond to a well-considered theory of the case, punctuated by a pithy theme.

A theory of the case is a brief, three- to five-sentence statement akin to what is known as an “elevator pitch.” The theme is a short, pithy summary of the theory of the case that is easy for a juror to remember. Often the theme is the first sentence out of the lawyer’s mouth, followed by a fuller description of the theory.

Indeed, in my class at Harvard, the very first skill I teach is how to develop theories and themes. In order to effectively convey a theory in a case, many lawyers start their opening statements with “This is a case about …” and then fill in the specific details.

For example, the prosecution in a murder case may start their opening like this:

“Members of the jury, this is a case about the death of an innocent young woman, witnessed by concerned citizens, who all identify the only person with a motive to kill her, the defendant.”

In stark contrast, the defense might start with something that is the complete opposite of the prosecution’s opening statement:

“Members of the jury, this is a case about a jealous ex-lover who shot a woman in cold blood, fled the country and left my client to take the fall.”

In each example, the jury is given enough information to frame the evidence they will hear throughout the trial.

After both sides have finished their openings, data shows that more than two-thirds of the jury will have come to a decision that will persist through the remainder of the trial.

Why do juries tend to behave this way?

Research also has taught trial lawyers that if you connect the jury with your theory of a case, at the beginning of the trial, jurors will process all the rest of the evidence – whether potentially helpful to the prosecution or to the defense – through the prism of that theory.

The importance of opening statements cannot be overstated. They set the tone and offer the jury a framework to understand the upcoming months of testimony they are about to hear.

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Digital Health Care outside of Traditional Clinical Settings : Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities

I. Glenn Cohen, Daniel B. Kramer, Julia Adler-Milstein, and Carmel Shachar Cambridge University Press May 2024 Pre-order now!

This edited volume is based on the Petrie-Flom Center’s 2022 annual conference, Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Diagnostics and Therapeutics Outside of Traditional Clinical Settings , which brought experts together to consider the recent explosion of at-home digital health care and explore the ethical, legal, regulatory, and reimbursement challenges and opportunities of this shift away from the 20th century focus on clinics and hospitals towards a more modern model.

This conference was organized in collaboration with I. Glenn Cohen ,  Julia Adler-Milstein , University of California San Francisco, and  Daniel Kramer , Harvard Medical School, and  Carmel Shachar , Harvard Law School. 

From the Publisher:

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, health care delivery was shifting away from the clinic and into the home, utilizing telehealth, wearable sensors, ambient surveillance, and other products. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the value of when “health care comes home,” accelerating trends such as aging at home for seniors and telehealth. In the coming years, patients will increasingly interact with digital products from the start of their care, such as by using wearable sensors to monitor changes in temperature or blood pressure, conducting home or self-directed testing before virtually meeting with a physician for a diagnosis, and then using smart pills to document their adherence to the prescribed treatment. This volume reflects on the explosion of at-home digital health care and explore the ethical, legal, regulatory, and reimbursement challenges and opportunities of this shift away from the 20th century focus on clinics and hospitals towards a more modern model.

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carmel shachar   digital health @ harvard   health law policy   i. glenn cohen  

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The LL.M. (Master of Laws) program is a one-year degree program that typically includes 180 students from some 65 countries. The Graduate Program is interested in attracting intellectually curious and thoughtful candidates from a variety of legal systems and backgrounds and with various career plans. Harvard’s LL.M. students include lawyers working in firms, government officials, law professors, judges, diplomats, human rights activists, doctoral students, business people, and others. The diversity of the participants in the LL.M. program contributes significantly to the educational experience of all students at the School.

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Two yale students named 2024 soros fellows.

Kristine Guillaume and Ananya Agustin Malhotra

Kristine Guillaume, a Ph.D. student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Ananya Agustin Malhotra, who will pursue her J.D. at Yale Law School are among 30 individuals selected as 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based program that supports graduate study for immigrants or children of immigrants.

Selected from 2,323 applicants, the 2024 Soros fellows are chosen for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across fields of study. They each will receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country.

Since it was founded 26 years ago, the fellowship program has provided more than $80 million in funding, and recipients have studied a range of fields from medicine and the arts to law and business. View the full list of 2024 fellows .

Kristine Guillaume , the daughter of Haitian and Chinese immigrants, was raised in Queens, New York, where her parents instilled in her the values of education and engaging meaningfully with communities near and far. Growing up, she developed a passion for storytelling — particularly the stories of marginalized people in society — that has motivated her paths in the fields of academia and journalism.

She graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in history and literature and African American Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she pursued independent research on the rise of mass incarceration in the United States through the study of Black prison writing. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the prison writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson, which examined how their respective periods of incarceration shaped their visions of Black liberation in the 1970s. At Harvard, she was a reporter for The Harvard Crimson and the paper’s first Black woman president. She has also interned at The Atlantic and CBS Evening News.

Guillaume continued her studies in African American literature and history at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed a master’s degree in English and American Studies (2021) and another in intellectual history (2022). Her postgraduate work, together with her undergraduate research, laid the foundation for research she is currently pursuing at Yale, where she is doing a Ph.D. in African American Studies and English.

Her research interests are in 20 th and 21 st century African American literature with a focus on Black prison writing, Black feminist theory, and print culture. Her research is grounded in questions about how prison writing across literary forms and genres might provide insight into how to remake conceptions of freedom, justice, and belonging. In addition, her interests in Black print culture and background as a journalist have informed how her research aims to examine the material constraints around prison writing — namely surveillance, censorship, and access to publishing — especially through a consideration of prison newspapers and periodicals. At Yale, Guillaume is also a research fellow for the Black Bibliography Project and volunteers with the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

Ananya Agustin Malhotra , whose parents came to the U.S. from the Philippines and India, and who was born and raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household Georgia, says she is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy.

Her interests lie at the intersection of global history, international law, and peace and security issues. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis, based on oral histories with New Mexican Downwinders, explored the human legacies of the 1945 Trinity Test and the U.S. nuclear age. At Princeton, she served as president of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Program, where she was first introduced to survivor-centered advocacy.

As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Malhotra earned an M.Phil. in modern European history with distinction, studying the histories of empire and anticolonialism in shaping international order. Her dissertation research explored the role of epistemology in the global intellectual history of decolonization and has been published in Global Histories and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. For the last four years, she has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction through her research, scholarship, and public commentary.

The 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows join a distinguished community of past recipients, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy 03 M.B.A. ’03 M.D., the nation’s first surgeon general of Indian descent, who helped lead the national response to Ebola, Zika, and the coronavirus. It was recently announced that Murthy will be Yale’s 2024 Class Day speaker during Commencement weekend.

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Governance Matters: The Proof Is in the Proxy

Bob Herr is Senior Vice President and Director of Corporate Governance on the Responsibility team and Ryan Oden is a Research Analyst for US Growth Equities at AllianceBernstein. This post is based on their AllianceBernstein memorandum.

Our research shows a correlation between strong governance and higher stock returns.

Investors have long theorized that companies with poor corporate governance practices may be more prone to mismanagement and weak returns. To investigate further, we’ve looked inward to a key data source: our proxy votes.

Specifically, we draw a correlation example between governance and returns through AllianceBernstein’s (AB’s) proxy-voting track record in recent years. We think proxy voting is one of the most expressive tools investors can use to communicate a view on the quality of a firm’s governance, providing that it’s based on careful analysis and accountability, not a rubber stamp.

Specifically, leveraging proxy voting and direct engagement* with companies can help to improve them, ideally resulting in better long-term outcomes. Several studies, which include our own findings, have made this connection much more apparent.

The Governance-Return Nexus

In one study, professors at  Harvard Law School  constructed an entrenchment index, or “E-index,” based on six key governance provisions. Their findings linked poorer E-index ratings with reductions in firm value and returns across US equities from 1990 to 2003.

More recently,  S&P Global  found that, between 2000 and 2017, companies in the bottom quartile of S&P Dow Jones Indices’ Governance Scores underperformed those in the top quintile by about 2% on an annualized basis.

Inspired by these observations and our own experience, we built an internal study to determine if a similar association exists between our proxy-voting record and returns. We found that on average companies for which we voted against management on any number of proposals later underperformed those with which we were more strongly aligned.

Standing Up for Governance—One Company at a Time

Evaluating governance isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. We utilize a proprietary proxy-voting policy to vet each company’s alignment with our basic expectations, followed by a collaborative review process that leverages analyst expertise and engagement data. This two-pronged approach enables us to incorporate company-specific fundamental insights to implement more constructive voting strategies.

When we surmise a company’s governance practices aren’t supporting our clients’ best interests, we may vote against management to signal our objection. For instance, seeing internal accounting problems, we may record our opposition to the chair of the audit committee; if executive compensation is misaligned with performance, we vote against it. Some governance issues may warrant a stance against the specific board member(s) responsible–also known as an “accountability vote.”

Entered into Evidence, Thousands of AB Proxy Votes

Within this backdrop, our study retraced approximately 34,000 shareholder meetings, consisting of votes on more than 266,000 individual proposals across global firms from 2018 through 2022. Then, we linked each proxy vote to the company’s total stock return the following calendar year.

To help categorize our degree of alignment with management, we grouped the companies into equal-weighted baskets based on our number of votes against management (VAMs). For example, zero VAMs may reflect stronger alignment based on what we believe is sound governance and oversight across the firm. One VAM indicates a single “no” vote on any of the proposed matters, from capitalization and audits to compensation and director elections. Two VAMs reflects our disapproval on two such measures and so forth.

Zero VAMs occurred in 45% of all shareholder meetings during the period, which means we pushed back—whether on minor issues or proposals of greater consequence—a majority of the time.  This reflects our rigorous standards and desire to improve upon the status quo. Multiple VAMs can be vital to voice material concerns, especially if a firm’s governance has been a growing issue for several years.

We found that zero-VAM companies—those we fully supported—outperformed those in the other VAM baskets by at least 250 basis points per year. We observed this general trend among similarly sized peers and across most—but not all—sectors and regions. For the five-year period, the average annualized return for zero-VAM companies was 11.5%, almost double that for companies in the three+ VAM basket (Display).

Past performance does not guarantee future results. Returns are USD-hedged and include dividends. Results are based on the total stock return of individual companies in the calendar year following a shareholder meeting, then grouped based on the number of management proposals AB voted against. The sample is comprised of 266,277 proposals across 34,034 shareholder meetings from 2018 to 2022, which break down as follows: VAM 0: 15,161; VAM 1: 10,285; VAM 2: 4,322; VAM 3+: 4,266. The proxy-voting period was 2018 to 2022 while returns, which have a one-year lag, were for the period 2019 to 2023. Source: Institutional Shareholder Services, International Data Corporation and AllianceBernstein (AB)

Mind over Matter—Proxy Voting Should Be Thoughtful

Proxy voting should be more than a compliance exercise. It’s a fundamental tool in active management, empowering investors to sway companies from pitfalls that can impede long-term performance. In matters of governance especially, we’ve found that well-thought-out proxy votes can make a positive impact on important business decisions, from leadership and disclosures to compensation and capitalization.

Landon Shea, Proxy and ESG Engagement Associate at AB, and Peter Højsteen-Ljungbeck, ESG Data Research Associate at AB, were instrumental in the research that formed the basis for this blog.

*AB engages issuers where it believes the engagement is in the best interest of its clients.

The views expressed herein do not constitute research, investment advice or trade recommendations and do not necessarily represent the views of all AB portfolio-management teams. Views are subject to revision over time.

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Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen discusses the rapidly evolving legal landscape since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

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Up next for Supreme Court on abortion: Idaho

Justices to hear case on near-complete ban amid shifting legal landscape after overturn of Roe

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, 21 states have enacted laws that strictly limit abortion.

Next week, justices will hear arguments over the first and among the most restrictive of those new laws. Idaho’s statute calls for a near-complete ban on abortion and prohibits anyone from performing or assisting one except when the pregnancy is ectopic or molar; a result of rape or incest; or a risk to the life of the mother.

The U.S. Department of Justice argues those restrictions conflict with a 1986 federal law requiring hospitals that participate in Medicare to provide stabilizing treatment to emergency room patients regardless of their ability to pay. Both the federal District Court and U.S. Court of Appeals in Idaho sided with the federal government and had blocked the state ban from going into effect. The Supreme Court lifted the injunction in January when it agreed to hear the case.

Several other abortion cases are moving through federal and state courts. Notably, Arizona’s top court upheld a Civil War-era law last week criminalizing abortion in all circumstances except to save a pregnant woman’s life.

The Gazette spoke with I. Glenn Cohen , James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law at  Harvard Law School  and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center  for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at HLS, about the legal landscape after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned Roe and what a decision for Idaho might mean for other states. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There has been a flurry of abortion-related legal challenges since the overturning of Roe. Can you describe some recent developments?

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the state’s 15-week ban, which, because of the way the law is written, means the state’s six-week ban will go into effect in 30 days. The Court also allowed a ballot initiative to go forward, so Florida voters will get to vote on abortion.

Last week, the Arizona State Supreme Court cleared an 1864 abortion law in the state to go into effect — a law that predates Arizona’s statehood that prohibits abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. An attempt by Democrats in Arizona’s legislature to repeal that 1864 law failed.

The state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, and some county attorneys have said they will not prosecute abortion cases under the law, but it is not clear whether providers will be willing to perform abortions even with those assurances.

Moreover, such assurances can change with changes in who is in charge. There is a proposed ballot initiative in Arizona that would enshrine some abortion rights protections in Arizona’s state constitution, so, as in Florida, voters will be able to have their say.

“When does federal law pre-empt state law? There are multiple types of pre-emption arguably raised in this case. The key question is whether any of those apply.”

In terms of what’s before the Supreme Court or making its way to the Supreme Court, I’d say there are three main cases to keep an eye on.

One is the mifepristone litigation, where oral argument happened on March 26, which is about whether FDA appropriately altered the drug’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies in 2016 and 2021. REMS are potential restrictions on the use of that drug that has been approved. That case is really about medical abortion.

We’ve got this case in Idaho, which is about states, in the wake of Dobbs, that have more narrowly limited their abortion laws such that there are now questions about emergencies and questions about exceptions for life and health of the pregnant person. This case presents that question squarely.

And then, floating in the background, but not yet squarely before the U.S. Supreme Court, is the Comstock Act. The question the Court may eventually have to answer is whether this very old act, more than 100 years old, restricts sending in the mail drugs used for abortion or even tools that could be used for surgical abortion.

We are seeing all these cases now in part because while these questions were always in theory there, there was a constitutional protection of abortion that restricted states from going below a certain minimum, such that very few such restrictive measures were active and had legal questions that needed to be resolved.

But now, in the wake of Dobbs, we’ve got states that have more or less completely limited abortion except under very narrow circumstances. What’s so interesting about the Idaho case is that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act is a general law about emergency treatment and stabilization. And so, we’re talking about how it intersects with what Idaho and other states may have done.

What’s the legal question at issue in this Idaho case?

Part of what makes the case complicated is the parties have slightly different views about what the state of play is. The federal government puts the question presented as “whether EMTALA pre-empts Idaho law in the narrow but important circumstance where terminating a pregnancy is required to stabilize an emergency medical condition that would otherwise threaten serious harm to pregnant women’s health, but the state prohibits an emergency room physician from providing that care.”

Idaho frames it as “whether EMTALA pre-empts state abortion regulations and requires hospitals to perform abortions disallowed by state law.”

One of the pieces of wrangling that has occurred throughout litigation is exactly what is prohibited by the Idaho Defense of Life Act. Questions about pregnancy termination related to ectopic pregnancies, pre-eclampsia, and stuff like that. So, the parties, I don’t think, are in complete agreement over the question about what the act prohibits or doesn’t prohibit.

What is there for the Supreme Court to consider? Doesn’t the Constitution already say that when federal law conflicts with state law, federal law prevails?

Exactly right. Under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, federal law trumps state law where they conflict. But what it means for the laws to conflict is a nuanced question. So, the question is: When does federal law pre-empt state law? There are multiple types of pre-emption arguably raised in this case — express, implied, and obstacle. The key question is whether any of those apply, which, in turn, depends on understanding what EMTALA requires.

On Idaho’s side of the case, their argument is there isn’t a conflict with EMTALA because EMTALA doesn’t reach this particular question. And on the other side, the federal government argues it definitely does apply here. So, part of this is an interpretation of what EMTALA does and does not require.

Has EMTALA been challenged before in other contexts?

There have been some EMTALA cases. There’s a famous case called the Baby K case from many years ago. Baby K was a Fourth Circuit case from 1994 about a baby born with anencephaly — missing a major part of the brain that is necessary for conscious thought — and whether a hospital could decline to provide a ventilator to the newborn if the newborn came to the ER.

There was a Fifth Circuit case from 1991, Burditt v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, unsuccessfully challenging EMTALA as unconstitutional. In the Supreme Court certainly, EMTALA cases been relatively few and far between.

The justices referenced EMTALA quite a bit during oral arguments in the recent mifepristone case, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Why do you think that is?

There was a lot of shadowboxing around the Idaho case in the mifepristone oral argument .

In particular, two things to highlight: One is this question about so-called “conscience clauses” and whether EMTALA could ever overcome legal protections for conscience and thus, require a physician to perform an abortion against her or his conscience.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar gave, I think, the correct answer, which is that EMTALA obligations sit on a hospital, not on a physician. And typically, hospitals have systems in place that if they have a physician who is conscientiously objecting to abortion and protections for that under law, it’s up to the hospital to find a substitute, which is, I think, a correct statement of the law, but one I’m sure there’s going to be some pushback on.

Second, there was some sniping at the mifepristone argument about whether the government has changed its position on the conscience question and whether they’ve changed their position and given different answers to this question at different stages of the litigation.

On the flip side, in the Idaho case, the federal government argues the state of Idaho keeps changing their position about what their theory of pre-emption is. So, I think there’ll be some nasty questioning — “has this always been your position, has your position changed” and the like. I don’t think it’ll actually make a difference to the outcome, but that’s something that I expect that we’ll hear at argument.

“In a state like Massachusetts, we’re not going to get the conflict we saw in this case. Elsewhere it looks different.”

A Supreme Court decision in Idaho’s favor could impact people in many other states. How might that unfold?

I wouldn’t say every state because many states have robust protections. In those states there may be some fairly robust protections regarding emergency exceptions for the health and life of the mother.

In a state like Massachusetts, we’re not going to get the conflict we saw in this case. Elsewhere it looks different. There was a parallel EMTALA case in Texas, and Texas won that one. So currently, the court in Texas has allowed Texas’s law to go into effect.

The Solicitor General, in her brief in the Idaho case, had a footnote listing the states they think this is going to be most relevant to. Texas is certainly one of them. Footnote 11 in the Solicitor General’s briefs says seven states, including Idaho, have laws that lack a health exception. They name Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. But it says several of those laws are in flux. So at least in those seven states directly relevant.

But there are some other states that have restrictions on health exceptions for abortion that are not as firm as the ones in Idaho but are narrower than what the federal government understands to be required by EMTALA, where this decision will also be relevant. Moreover, there may be some states that might see a win for Idaho in this case and learn and rewrite their statute to be narrower than it is now.

Does the federal government have any recourse if Idaho prevails? Could the government withhold Medicare reimbursements to those states, for example?

I think the answer is probably no, in part because the Supreme Court is giving the definitive reading about what EMTALA means.

If the government, under EMTALA, threatened to remove Medicare and Medicaid funding from the hospitals in a state that allegedly violated EMTALA, they would now say, “We’re not violating EMTALA. See the decision in this case.”

What would have to happen would be congressional action to change the language if Idaho wins. In such legislation, Congress could just say EMTALA requires that the health of the mother be considered in a particular way as a requirement of the statute.

Congress could also pass a freestanding statute that said the same thing. This sometimes happens — the Supreme Court gives an interpretation of a statute; Congress doesn’t like the interpretation; and Congress changes the statute.

In theory, that could happen here. In reality, the politics would require Democrats to have a majority in both houses and unless the filibuster is going to go away, would require a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and that’s quite unlikely.

The other thing that’s possible is, and this is going to be even more unlikely, is forget EMTALA. If there’s federal protection provided to abortion in general [through legislation], some federal backstop that says, “States have power to do some things, but not this. This is too far,” then the federal government could also include more protections for health and life of the mother exceptions.

One more thing that’s in play here: the interpretation of what does Idaho state law mean or what does Texas state law mean in terms of the breadth of the exceptions is typically not for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide because they’ve said when a decision rests on an independent adequate state ground, the Supreme Court will not review the case.

But there is a question under state law, what does the exception mean. Texas right now is having litigation in the Texas state courts about what its emergency exception for abortion covers. So, another possibility is the people of Idaho change their law, or the Idaho Supreme Court interprets the law in a way that is more friendly to abortion access. Those are also possibilities. Though as the failure of legislation to protect abortion in Arizona I mentioned before shows, in many states changing abortion law via ordinary legislation will be an uphill battle. 

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Harvard Law Faculty Letter Calls for Protection of Speech From Administrative Action

Updated April 21, 2024, at 7:40 p.m.

More than 30 Harvard Law School faculty signed onto a statement affirming their “commitment to protecting student speech” after some HLS student groups have been investigated for hosting gatherings in student spaces.

The statement called for the protection of student speech from “unreasonably expansive and historically unfounded interpretations of protest guidelines,” referring to “discriminatory enforcement of rules and viewpoint discrimination” from the administration. The letter was published Monday in the Harvard Law Record, an independent student newspaper at HLS.

HLS spokesperson Jeff Neal declined to comment for this article.

The Monday statement was part of a larger package addressed to the HLS administration and the University’s leadership. The presidents of HLS’s American Constitutional Society and the Federalist Society also sent a joint letter to interim HLS Dean John C.P. Goldberg.

Harvard Law professor Nikolas Bowie then issued a companion letter contextualizing the faculty statement and joint letter.

The package comes at a time when Harvard Law professors have publicly debated academic freedom and students have faced public retribution for voicing their opinions.

In emails to The Crimson, several HLS professors cited Bowie as one of the main forces behind the faculty letter.

In his companion letter, Bowie pointed to recent investigations and disciplinary actions HLS administrators have taken against student groups participating in campus activism. Some have gathered in the Caspersen Student Center lounge — a room historically used for student organizing , including against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the University’s investment in fossil fuels, according to Bowie.

Some HLS affiliates have dubbed the room “Belinda Hall” in honor of Belinda Sutton, who was enslaved by a prominent Massachusetts family whose donation in 1781 funded the Law School’s first professorship.

But unlike past student protests, Bowie wrote in his open letter, “recent invocations of Palestine have inspired a novel clampdown by the law school that is doing little to stop the protests but much to threaten Belinda’s character as a space for all students.”

Bowie wrote that University administrators have recently accused student organizers of violating a 1970 Harvard policy that prohibits “interference with members of the University in performance of their normal duties and activities.”

“I have now seen graceless attempts at suppressing students in Belinda for the first time because they are demanding an end to a genocide against Palestinians,” he wrote.

In particular, Bowie wrote about a February HLS’s Women’s Law Association event, during which students wrote Valentine’s Day cards to residents of a memory care center. Later, administrators in the dean of students’ office contacted organizers of the event because they “wanted to interrogate whomever was responsible.”

“Without realizing it, the card writers had joined a growing number of students who law school administrators have recently begun investigating, warning, or even threatening with formal discipline for gathering in Belinda Hall,” he wrote.

Bowie added that members of HLS’s Women’s Law Association told him they felt they received “unwarranted prosecution by the law school” for their event that pro-Palestinian student organizers later modeled their own after. After the second, pro-Palestine event was disrupted by HLS administration, the WLA was retroactively questioned for their “unchallenged” event.

“Rather than concede the inconsistency, law school administrators simply expanded their dragnet to intimidate the WLA and everyone else from using Belinda for gathering, too,” Bowie wrote. “At the same time, it’s no secret to them, me, or anyone else why they’re being investigated: Palestine.”

The joint letter from the HLS Federalist Society President Benjamin Pontz and American Constitutional Society President Morgan Sperry — which was sent several weeks prior to Bowie’s letter — acknowledged that they were writing as “the leaders of two organizations that have done little together over the past three years” to express their “shared belief that freedom of expression must lie at the core of Harvard Law School’s pursuit of truth and justice.”

The HLS Federalist Society describes itself as a “group of conservative and libertarian law students” that seeks to “foster balanced and open debate about the fundamental principles of individual freedom, limited government, and judicial restraint.” The American Constitution Society is a student organization that “promotes progressive legal change” in order to “realize economic and social justice and secure democratic freedoms,” according to their website.

“The law school should not use student conduct policies to protect law students from hearing what their peers want to see and do in the world,” Pontz and Sperry wrote in the joint letter.

“And any law school conduct policies that operate in service of any value other than protecting truth-seeking, open debate, academic freedom, and civic engagement are inappropriate,” they added.

—Staff writer S. Mac Healey can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on X @MacHealey .

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar .

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• Victor Mukhin

Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

Title : Active carbons as nanoporous materials for solving of environmental problems

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