A Hard Look

Today, we are excited to feature a current law student on the Podcast. Grace DeBoer is a third-year student at American University Washington College of Law, and she is also currently an Articles Editor on the Administrative Law Review.
Grace studied Biology as an undergraduate, and she is interested in health law generally, and Health Insurance-related law, Fraud and Abuse, and Food and Drug law specifically. These interests led her to write her comment for Administrative Law Review on the regulation of drug compounding, where she argues that FDA should take stronger action to regulate excessive compounding of GLP-1 drugs now that the GLP-1 shortage has ended. 
On this episode, Grace walked through how GLP-1 compounds are regulated and the tension between access and safety that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) balances.

Our guests from Phillips Black return to give an update after a month of having their report and law review article published!

Today, we are excited to feature a current law student on the Podcast. Joining us is a second-year law student, Jo Ross.
Jo is a junior staffer on the Administrative Law Review at American University Washington College of Law, and as part of his graduation requirements, has written an incredible paperdiscussing the Environmental Protection Agency’s wastewater monitoring practices.
Specifically, Jo analyzed whether the EPA needs to be doing more from a data privacy perspective to ensure that American’s privacy rights are not being violated through wastewater monitoring systems.

On this episode, we take a profoundly hard look at the ethical landscape of criminal defense lawyering through the lens of a Pennsylvania-specific criminal post-conviction procedure called the Finley “No-Merit” letter.
With us for this discussion is an esteemed group of individuals from Phillips Black, a nonprofit public interest law practice dedicated to providing the highest quality of legal representation to incarcerated individuals in the United States sentenced to the severest penalties under law.
Joining us are two Phillips Black staff attorneys, Thomas Roberts and Elie Kirshner, both HarvardLaw graduates, as well as their colleagues, Yahya Moore and Stephen Lazar, both of whom were wrongfully convicted of second-degree murder, which, in Pennsylvania, meant that they were automatically sentenced to life without parole. Yahya was incarcerated for 27 years, and Stephen for 16, before both of their convictions and sentences were later vacated. Yahya and Stephen both now work as paralegals helping petitioners navigate post-conviction.
If you want to learn more about Finley letters after listening, you can check out Phillips Black’s comprehensive Finley Report at phillipsblack.org/finleyreport, or you can read Yahya and Thomas’s co-authored article about Finley letters published by the Harvard Law Review.

Today, we are excited to feature another current law student on the Podcast. Joining us is second year law student, Nicole Paredes-Cisneros.
Nicole is a junior staffer on the Administrative Law Review at American University Washington College of Law, and as part of her graduation requirements, has written an incredible paper discussing the regulatory landscape surrounding social media design, with a particular focus on “dark patterns.” As many of the social media giants face landmark trials on child safety, Nicole’s Comment is more relevant than ever.