Karl Klare

Betsy Ehrenberg

Ira Sills

Judy Scott

PHOTOS: GLENN COOPER

Two Students Awarded Top NU Honors

Megan Bremer ’07 and Lydia Milnes ’06 were recognized this spring with Northeastern University Outstanding Graduate Students Awards. Bremer, who is enrolled in the law school’s joint JD/MPH program with Tufts University School of Medicine, was honored in the Practice Oriented Education category. She has completed co-ops with the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka; UNICEF’s Child Protection Unit in Darfur, Sudan; and was unable to attend the award ceremony because of her spring co-op with No Peace Without Justice in Brussels, Belgium.

Milnes received the Community Service Award. She is an active volunteer with the Shelter Legal Services Foundation, which provides legal assistance to homeless and low-income women in Boston at Rosie’s Place on issues ranging from eviction to divorce to immigration. Following a co-op with Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, Milnes also signed on as a volunteer representing an inmate in a prison disciplinary hearing at a Massachusetts state prison.

In lieu of attending the ceremony, Bremer sent an acceptance letter, saying “If the ideas and convictions born in the classroom are not applied beyond the four walls, our education has benefited nobody. ... I don’t just want knowledge for myself, I want an education that enables me to affect positive change.”

Summer 2006 | Newsbriefs

Getting Labor to Think Globally, Act Locally

On February 9, the Northeastern Law Forum’s Discussions on Contemporary Legal Issues presented “The Future of the Labor Movement: A View from the Trenches and the Academy,” a panel including Professor Karl Klare; Judy Scott ’74, general counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Ira Sills ’77, a partner at Segal, Roitman & Coleman; and Betsy Ehrenberg ’89, a partner at Pyle, Rome, Lichten, Ehrenberg & Liss-Riordan.

Klare began by describing the nearly 400 percent decline in private-sector union membership since 1945, a result of dramatic changes in the organization and production of work, soured political climate, and the export of capital to third-world countries. What labor needs, he suggested, is a new vision, focusing on new forms of worker representation based on new conceptions of the meaning of work.

The other panelists, agreeing with Klare’s assessment, expressed optimism for organized labor’s future. Scott pointed to grassroots inroads the SEIU is making with 100 unions operating in 30 countries. Sills stressed the importance of concentrating on previously underrepresented employees, including janitors and adjunct faculty members. Ehrenberg observed that labor lawyers are becoming more versatile, learning to work with class actions concerning immigration and state wage and hour law.

Questioned on the inherent contra-diction in emphasizing the local and the international, panelists concluded that both were vital for unions to thrive. As an example, they cited a Boston union having difficulty bargaining with a French corporation. A call to union represen-tatives in Paris quickly brought about concerted activity in France that resulted in a compromise within 24 hours.

Tobacco Control Resource Center Joins Public Health Advocacy Institute

The Tobacco Control Resource Center (TCRC) and Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), two of the law school’s most distinguished programs, joined forces this spring to improve the understanding, commitment and effectiveness of policymakers and lawyers in protecting the public health.

TCRC, a leader in tobacco control research and policy for 26 years, is the parent organization of the Tobacco Products Liability Project (TPLP). PHAI was founded in 2002 by faculty at the School of Law and at Tufts University School of Medicine’s public health department as an independent research and advocacy institute. The merged organization will be known by the more encompassing title: the Public Health Advocacy Institute. With its combined decades of experience in public health and law, the merged institute is focusing on a variety of initiatives, including the Law and Obesity Project, which explores the use of the law in slowing obesity and reversing the epidemic of obesity-related diseases and injuries, as well as continuing the tobacco policy work of TCRC.

In April, PHAI’s Motor Vehicle Hazard Archives Project released a list of motor vehicles with low predicted crash death rates. The list, developed by a leading injury epidemiologist, provides a unique resource for consumers concerned with the safety of automobiles. It is posted in the new “For Consumers” section of www.AutoHazardInfo.org. “We are delighted to be able to apply and share the expertise developed over many years in tobacco control and motor vehicle injury control to various public health challenges, including obesity,” said Professor Richard Daynard, longtime chairman of TPLP and president of TCRC, who is the new president of PHAI.

How Sweet It Is: PHAI Says So Long to Soda

In May, the country’s top three soft-drink companies announced that beginning this fall they would start removing sweetened drinks like Coke, Pepsi and iced teas from school cafeterias and vending machines in response to the growing threat of lawsuits and state legislation.

“Sugared drinks have been demonstrated to be a major contributing cause of the adolescent obesity epidemic,” said Professor Richard Daynard, who helped lead the nationwide charge against soda in schools.

Under an agreement between beverage makers and health advocates, students in elementary school would be served only bottled water, low-fat and nonfat milk, and 100 percent fruit juice in servings no bigger than eight ounces. Serving sizes would increase to 10 ounces in middle school. In high school, low-calorie juice drinks, sports drinks and diet sodas would be permitted; serving sizes would be limited to 12 ounces.

The agreement was brokered by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a collaboration between the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association. It is similar to an arrangement that the industry had been negotiating with the law school’s Public Health Advocacy Institute, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a coalition of lawyers that had threatened to sue if an agreement could not be reached.

“Though the companies didn’t settle with us, our insistence that we would sue if Coke and Pepsi didn’t disappear from the schools provided the motivation for the agreement,” said Daynard.

PHOTO: MARK GABRENYA