Category: Uncategorized

When: Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 6-8pm

Where: Harvard Law School, Caspersen South

Join us for this annual celebration of the work students and faculty from schools around Harvard University are doing to improve economic, health, and social conditions in the Mississippi Delta! Open to anyone from the Harvard community – from those who have worked in the region to those who are simply interested in learning more about it. There will be ample time for mingling and networking. Hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine, and soft drinks will be served.

Wednesday, November 20th, 12-1pm, Hauser 104

The Mississippi Delta region of the United States has historically faced high rates of unemployment, poverty, and less access to higher education. Join us for an engaging discussion with Delta Regional Authority Chairman Christopher Masingill about his innovative work to promote economic and community development in the Delta region. President Obama appointed Chairman Masingill in 2010 as the Federal Co-Chairman of the Delta Regional Authority, a federal-state partnership whose mission is to help create jobs, build communities, and improve lives in the 252 counties and parishes in the eight states of the Delta region.

In his three years as Chairman, Masingill has implemented his innovative, bold ideas to place a greater emphasis on supporting small business and entrepreneurship ventures as well as investing in workforce training and education efforts. He’s leveraged more than $1.1 billion in private and other public sector investment; helping to create and retain 17,000 jobs within the region.

We look forward to seeing you there! Red Bones BBQ will be provided.

Hosted by the Mississippi Delta Project, HLS Democrats, and the Harvard Law and Entrepreneurship Project.

The Delta Directions Prize was created to recognize the exemplary legal and policy work of two student members of the Delta Project each semester. Students participating in the Delta Project engage in complex policy and legal analysis in areas ranging from mental health to micro-lending, with the ultimate purpose of making a positive impact on the Mississippi Delta. Given that about fifty students participate in the Delta Project each semester, the prize is very competitive.

Prize winners for this semester will be announced in late April and will receive a small monetary award.Prize winners will be chosen based primarily on the quality of their work, measured by the thoroughness of their research, the extent to which their final product meets the goals of their team project, and the quality of their writing.

 

When: Monday, Feb. 4^th, 12noon

Where: Harvard Law School, WCC 3018

 Lunch will be served!

Join us for a lunchtime presentation and discussion with Dr. Arthur Cosby, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor at MississippiState University and Director of Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center, who is working with a team of colleagues to develop software that uses social media as a source of scientific data to track natural disasters. In the fall of 2012, the software was beta tested with Super Storm Sandy.

The resilience of social media in the face of storm events and power failures makes it a particularly useful tool during major disasters. Dr. Cosby’s project collected over 4.5 million tweets and an estimated 400,000 images of the storm and its aftermath.

The application of this software has important implications for law and policy as we prepare for increasingly severe weather events in the years ahead. The software has myriad other uses for a range of investigations as social media utilization continues to increase, but there are also policy concerns relating to privacy as well as potential responsibility of researchers employing this information to assist those in imminent danger. This will be an exciting conversation about the intersection of technology, climate change, and public policy.

Dr. Cosby has numerous publications and presentations in the area of “public sociology,” as well as a long-term interest in research innovations for social science research. His work applies social science knowledge to real-world problems, and his research program has been supported by various agencies and foundations, including the American Cancer Society; the Department of Homeland Security; the National Institute of Education; the National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation; the Office of Rural Health Policy (HRSA); the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and the U. S. Department of Agriculture, as well as numerous state agencies. Dr. Cosby is currently focusing on the emergence of new sources of data that provide special challenges for social science research and application.

This event is cosponsored by the Mississippi Delta Project, the Cyberlaw Clinic, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Environmental Law Society, the Journal of Law and Technology, and the National Security Journal.

Date: Wednesday, November 28th

Time: 12pm-1pm

Where: Hauser 104, Harvard Law School

Lunch will be served! Let us know if you’re coming on Facebook!

Please join us for an engaging discussion with Bill Luckett, the Mississippi Delta Project Fall Speaker. Luckett is a leader in the state of Mississippi who has dedicated his career to empowering Mississippians with a mix of smart lawyering, community development, political advocacy, and entrepreneurialism.

Luckett works to increase small business development and cultural tourism in his home town of Clarksdale, MS, believing that with increased economic prosperity, Mississippi will see positive change in race relations, public health, and education. Luckett is also an entrepreneur in his own right, and is the founder and co-owner of the Ground Zero Blues Club, which he co-owns with actor Morgan Freeman. He has also served as an executive producer and director on numerous movie and documentary projects set in Mississippi.

Luckett ran for governor of Mississippi in 2011, running on policy issues such as improving early education and increasing local business incentives.

His life work is broad, but his focus has always been on increasing the opportunities and aspirations of his fellow Mississippians.

We hope to see you there!

Join us for this annual celebration of the work students and faculty from schools around Harvard University are doing to improve economic, health, and social conditions in the Mississippi Delta!

Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Time: 6:30-8:30pm

Where: Caspersen South (the glass-enclosed room upstairs in the Hark)

The event is open to anyone from the Harvard community – from those who have worked in the region to those who are simply interested in learning more about it.  There will be ample time for mingling and networking.

Hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine, and soft drinks will be served.

Another post from the student voices blog, including artwork of our Delta Fellow hard at work!  Thanks to all of our students who traveled to the region over spring break… and to all of the people in Mississippi who made them feel so welcome.

Student Voices: Eating Well in the Mississippi Delta

Over spring break, I was lucky to travel to the Mississippi Delta on a pro bono trip with eight other law students from Harvard and Ole Miss. As Kimberly’s post describes, we spent an unforgettable week researching property law, making friends, and immersing ourselves in the culture and climate of the Delta. We experienced a lot – everything from a one-man blues concert at Red’s to an all-day study session at Ole Miss Law School – and learned even more in the process. But one element of our trip really stood out: the food.

Of course, we consumed a ton of it. Starting with a visit to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken in downtown Memphis; continuing through visits to acclaimed Clarksdale restaurants like Abe’s (the best BBQ in all of Mississippi), Oxbow (a lunch spot that actually serves vegetarian options), and the Ground Zero Blues Club (where everything comes fried and with music); and finishing with elegant feasts at Snackbar in Oxford and Rendezvous in Memphis, we ate our way through the Delta… and washed it down with many glasses of Southern Pecan and sweet tea. It was a wonderful week of savory Southern cuisine.

Food is an amazing part of Delta culture. However, residents of the Delta don’t always have access to the kinds of fresh food we had at Mississippi’s best restaurants. Although the Delta has some of the country’s richest soil, the vast majority of it is used by to grow the big industrial crops – corn, cotton, and soy – much of which is exported outside the Delta. There are small growers throughout the Delta who are trying to grow local, sustainable, and healthy food, but these farmers often have trouble getting established in the face of confusing property issues and stiff competition from cheaper, less healthy alternatives.

Our work over spring break was designed to address these property issues. In order for small, local farms to be prosperous into the future, their owners should understand how estate plans, clear titles, and various easements can secure their land as farmland for generations to come. Our presentations to Delta farmers on our last day – and the accompanying legal manual we created – were designed with that goal in mind. We also made some policy suggestions for our partners (such as Delta Directions) who continue to work on these important issues in Mississippi.

We finally had to leave the Delta to return to Cambridge, and I know I can speak for my team in saying that we’ve all been craving some delicious Delta food ever since. (I, for one, am hoping to go back.) But in the meantime, it’s critical that the people who actually live in the Delta have access, every day, to the kind of local, sustainable food which we had during our week. I hope and believe that our work in the Delta over spring break will help them get there.

 

Join the Mississippi Delta Project at 6:30 pm as we welcome new leaders and celebrate the outstanding work of our four student teams. All are welcome. BBQ dinner will be provided!

Check out this “Student Voices” post, copied below, in which HLS student Kimberly Newberry shares her experiences on a spring break trip organized by Mississippi Delta Fellow Nate Rosenberg.

Student Voices: Learning About Land Rights in Mississippi

The Mississippi Delta is populated by more juke joints than Starbucks (and rightly so as the birthplace of the blues). Nightly strolls are accompanied by the faint strums of guitar in the distance and you can imagine how Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil right in the middle of it all. The blues are part of a shared cultural identity among the Delta’s inhabitants, and there is still plenty of heartache to keep the musical tradition alive.

Six of us headed down from HLS to Clarksdale, Mississippi for spring break, where we were joined by Ole Miss students. We were surprised to find that a lot of the regional heartache stemmed from concepts we had covered in our 1L Property classes – easements, color of title, types of estates, and even adverse possession (when a person who is not the legal owner of land can become its owner after having occupied it for a specified period of time). The seemingly difficult task of adversely taking someone’s land is frequently accomplished in parts of Mississippi, and with serious impact on the lives of farmers. From disputes between siblings about what to do with inherited land to questions about how to preserve farmland well into the future, we saw our textbooks come to life.

We also learned about the challenges faced by small, family-owned farms. A few days into our trip, we met with Dustin and Ali, two young farmers whose business growth is constrained by regulations designed for industrial farms but that also apply to them. As a result of Dustin and Ali’s commitment to sustainable farming, they run their farm under different standards than those adhered to by commercial sellers and, as a consequence, cannot sell their goods to larger, more popular grocery stores.  These mandatory standards are both prohibitively expensive and largely inapplicable to small-scale sustainable farming, to the detriment of the availability of locally and sustainably grown food. As Dustin put it, “We vote for our president once every four years, but we vote for what to put in our bodies three times a day. And what we vote for today will affect our children tomorrow.” Prior to running their own farm, Dustin and Ali interned at Polyface Farms, which is featured in Michael Pollen’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

After seeing how the issues of inheritance, ownership, and land use impacted the lives of residents, we had the opportunity to conduct additional research and then present a tutorial to the farmers. When the workshop was over, the farmers compared notes and shared their experiences with each other. Much was left unanswered but we appreciated the opportunity to learn more about property rights in Mississippi, contribute our knowledge, make a few friends, and soak in the culture and music of the Delta.

This Wednesday, the HLS Mississippi Delta Project is pleased to welcome Frank Laski, former Executive Director of the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee of Massachusetts.  Mr. Laski will discuss trends in mental health policy–from the criminal justice system to community based services–and their impact on low-income individuals. He will also offer potential solutions to improve mental health service delivery to disadvantaged clients.

The HLS Mississippi Delta Project is committed to improving well-being in the Delta Region and recently began a Mental Health/Substance Abuse Policy Initiative. Mr. Laski’s talk will raise awareness of the type of issues the Initiative is dedicated to addressing.

The event takes place at noon, 4/4, in Wasserstein 3019, and is cosponsored by the Human Rights Advocates, HLS Democrats, Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, and the Human Rights Journal.  All are welcome to enjoy the talk, and lunch will be provided.