news

What Law School Has Done to the Way I Read the News

/ Isabella Calise / Leave a comment

The other day, I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a video of a flight attendant walking down the aisle of a plane holding a cat.

Presumably, the cat belonged to one of the passengers. The flight attendant was holding it up and asking everyone, one row at a time, if it was theirs. It was one of those videos that was clearly supposed to make you smile. A cat had somehow gotten loose on a plane, a flight attendant was trying to reunite it with its owner, and everyone was apparently having a pretty good time.

The news story ended there.

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Curtailing Need-Based Scholarships for College in the Land of Opportunity

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

What the proposed cutbacks to Pell Grants would mean

This post has been republished from Professor Patricia McCoy’s Substack. Her new book, “Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All,” is available from The University of California Press.

In the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the House of Representatives voted to cut college scholarships for students from lower-income families. Other provisions in the bill would scale back health insurance benefits and food assistance for many of those same households. The fact that these reductions would pay for tax cuts for the wealthy has not been lost on Americans with opinions on the bill, who oppose it 2 to 1.

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In New Magazine Issue, Our Community Shines Through

/ Sangeeta Kishore / Leave a comment

BC Law Magazine has been writing about what makes our community special for over thirty years. I always look forward to a new issue, and the Winter 2025 edition is full of stories of alumni, faculty, and students doing pretty amazing work that speaks to our mission of delivering justice all over the world.

I found the cover story, “Then Came the Reckoning,” particularly compelling. It was not an easy read, telling the story of alumna Erica Brody fighting for justice for a group of children abused by their foster parents, but the results were truly astonishing–literally changing the way the system works in Massachusetts. One of the most frightening things about the case was not just what happened in those foster homes (one in particular over many years), but how the state agency involved in placements actively worked to cover everything up. And until Erica and her team fought for change, the agency was pretty well protected by state law. Well worth the read, but we should offer a trigger warning for depictions of abuse of children. 

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