Professor Martha Davis, an internationally recognized expert in human rights, is of counsel on an amicus brief filed in November in a New Mexico case, Atencio v. State, in which plaintiffs assert that the State of New Mexico and other state defendants violated the plaintiffs’ rights under the New Mexico Constitution by continuing to authorize and promote oil and gas production without assuring environmental protection. The plaintiffs are all frontline community members (people living near oil and gas production sites), Indigenous peoples, youth and environmental organizations. Davis co-authored the brief in her capacity as faculty co-director of Northeastern Law’s Center for Global Law and Justice. Students Owen Doherty ’25 and Eleazar Loyo ’25 provided pro bono research assistance on the brief. “Our amicus brief surveys the justiciability of environmental claims and other positive rights under state constitutions and argues that New Mexico’s ‘pollution control amendment’ should be deemed to create enforceable rights,” said Davis. “Work on climate issues is one of the center’s core programs, and our amicus brief puts the New Mexico state constitutional provision in national and international contexts.”

In December, Professor Aliza Hochman Bloom, an expert on criminal procedure, along with Caitlin Glass, director of Boston University School of Law’s Antiracism and Community Lawyering Practicum, and Robert Chang, director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at UC Irvine School of Law, filed an amicus brief before New York State’s intermediate appeals court on behalf of Dalen Joseph. The brief focuses on the “manifest injustice that flows from the felony murder doctrine,” explaining how this injustice is “put into stark relief” by Joseph’s case.

According to the felony murder doctrine, if someone is killed during the commission of a felony, all participants in the crime can be charged with murder. Hochman Bloom and her co-authors state, “The felony murder doctrine is premised on the supposed foreseeability of the risk that death might occur from the commission of a felony. But it is difficult to see how Mr. Joseph could have anticipated the tragic cascade of events that would result in him killing a man who came at him with a knife — an act that the jury found constituted self-defense.”

Hochman Bloom wrote the section on “the constitutional rights to present a justification defense to the charge of felony murder, and a heightened concern about the unavailability of a justification defense to charges of felony murder in light of data demonstrating the racialized application of the felony murder doctrine.”

“The felony murder doctrine disproportionately leads to extremely harsh punishments without taking into consideration intent,” said Hochman Bloom, who previously served as an assistant federal public defender. “It’s particularly concerning that those who are charged under this doctrine typically come from marginalized communities. We hope the court will listen to precedent, data and common sense.”

Professor Daniel Medwed, a leading authority on criminal law, recently co-authored an amicus brief in a Pennsylvania Supreme Court death penalty case in which the state attorney general intervened, attempting to stop the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office (DAO) from conceding error in the trial of Lavar Brown, who was convicted of a 2003 murder. Medwed and co-authors John A. Freedman and Jeremy Karpatkin of Arnold & Porter argue that the current leadership of the DAO “acted according to its constitutional and ethical obligations in seeking to vacate the conviction, which was fatally infected by Brady violations and false testimony.”

“Prosecutors are supposed to be ministers of justice. The voters of Philadelphia have spoken quite clearly — by electing a progressive prosecutor as their DA not once, but twice — that they want a law enforcement leader who is committed to looking anew at specious cases. The fact that state officials have decided to interfere with an elected county official’s legitimate exercise of discretion strikes me as not only bad policy, but also potentially dangerous precedent,” said Medwed, author of BARRED: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 2022), an award-winning book in which he reveals how convoluted legal procedures — essentially technicalities — make exonerations nearly impossible.