Professor Luke Herrine was selected as one of four Marguerite Casey Foundation 2025 Freedom Scholars for his work as a pioneer of mass student debt cancellation. Read Marguerite Casey Foundation’s full press release here.
Professor Herrine was one of the first scholars to conceptualize a legal framework for student debt cancellation. During law school, he worked with Debt Collective to organize for-profit college students to fight for debt cancellation, working on a legal team that came up with an innovative strategy that led to the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars of debt for students who had been misled and mistreated by their schools. While working with Debt Collective, he began thinking about what other provisions of federal student loan law would allow for the Department of Education to cancel student debt, which culminated in his article, The Law and Political Economy of a Student Debt Jubilee (68 Buffalo Law Review, 2020). This article caught the attention of then-presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren and eventually helped to inform multiple efforts at debt cancellation during the Biden Administration.
Professor Herrine’s most recent article, The Student Debt Reset (with Jonathan Glater), is forthcoming in California Law Review. This Article lays out the Biden Administration’s efforts in student debt cancellation and the U.S. Supreme Court decision that upended them, and provides an explanation of the current state of affairs for student debt relief. Additionally, Professor Herrine has appeared in CNBC, Business Insider, TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other major media outlets to offer expert analysis on the legal frameworks of efforts to forgive millions of dollars in student debt and provide relief for borrowers across the country.
Beyond student loan cancellation, Professor Herrine’s writing on the history and theory of consumer protection at the federal level was influential at both the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Biden Administration when those agencies began to adopt more proactive regulatory postures. He has also consulted with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on regulation of power inequalities in the meatpacking industry. Professor Herrine’s papers are available on SSRN.
About Marguerite Casey Foundation
Marguerite Casey Foundation supports leaders, scholars and initiatives focused on shifting the balance of power in society — building power for communities that continue to be excluded from shaping how society works and from sharing in its rewards and freedoms. Its board members, leadership and staff are committed to building a just economy and fully realized democracy, and to providing unfettered support to the bold strategies and leadership that are required to bring about major change in our lifetime.