About: David Halperin
Twitter: @DaHalperin
Bio: David Halperin is the co-founder and editor of Republic Report. Halperin, a self-employed lawyer based in Washington DC, engages in public advocacy, investigative work, and legal representation on a wide range of issues, including higher education, climate change, democracy, corruption, open government, and national security. He also advises organizations and companies on strategy, policy, communications, and legal matters. He is of counsel to Public.Resource.org, a non-profit focused on making legal and government materials available for free to the public.
Halperin’s investigative and advocacy work on predatory for-profit colleges since 2010 has spurred reforms in policy and regulations, triggered law enforcement investigations, and led to the closure of numerous deceptive schools.
Halperin was from 2004 until 2012 the founding director of Campus Progress and senior vice president at the Center for American Progress. Before that, he was: senior policy advisor for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign; founding executive director of the American Constitution Society; White House speechwriter and special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton; co-founder of the Internet company Progressive Networks (now called RealNetworks); counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee; law clerk to U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell (D.D.C.); research assistant to Robert S. McNamara; and research analyst at the Arms Control Association.
Halperin has represented clients in the U.S. Supreme Court and various state and federal courts. Among many other efforts, Halperin helped represent Greenpeace in an unprecedented 2004 Miami criminal jury trial over protest activity, resulting in a directed verdict of acquittal; aided climate groups facing investigation by the House Science Committee during 2015-16; and represented Public Resource in landmark copyright litigation from 2012 to 2024 over efforts to make federal regulations publicly available online without charge.
Halperin writes at Republic Report, and his articles also have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Politico, Slate, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. In recent years he has testified before the House Oversight Committee and at several federal agencies, and he has spoken at major conferences and events across the country. Halperin has served since 2007 on the board of directors of Public Citizen.
Halperin graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School.
Earth Day 2017: The New EPA and the Looming Climate Apocalypse
This is a guest post by Dick Russell, author of a new book, coming out next week: Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying Life On Earth – And What It Means To Our Children, edited and with an Introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Closing in on half-a-century since the first Earth
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Chemical Security: Protecting Syrians, But Leaving Americans Exposed
This piece was written by Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré, US Army (Ret), the former commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, and founder of the GreenARMY; Major General Randy Manner, US Army (Ret), a former acting director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; and David Halperin, a lawyer and former staff member of the National
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Nursing Students Cry Foul At Schools’ New Testing Rules
In nursing schools across the country, students are complaining that administrators have suddenly sprung on them new requirements that they pass comprehensive tests before they can graduate. Some of these students charge that their school has added these new test requirements mid-course to weed out students who might be in danger of flunking the national
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Corruption In Action: Koch Brothers Position Themselves for Mar-a-Lago Chat with Trump
Politico reports that on Saturday night Donald Trump had “a friendly chat” at his Mar-a-Lago resort with conservative mega-donor David Koch and his brother William Koch, both heirs to the giant Koch Industries chemical and fossil fuel conglomerate. It seems the Koch boys just happened to be having dinner at Trump’s club with conservative publisher
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Breaking: DeVos Opposes Court Challenge to Obama Rule on For-Profit Colleges
It might just be career government lawyers doing their jobs, and doing them well, until the Trump Administration can catch up and work its malevolence, but in court papers filed today, the Trump Justice Department defended the Obama Administration’s gainful employment rule, a measure aimed at curbing predatory abuses by for-profit colleges. The rule penalizes
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Operator of Corinthian Campuses in Public Tussle With Overseer
ECMC, the student debt collection operation that took over many of the campuses of notorious, collapsed for-profit Corinthian Colleges, is in a public spat with Clark Kent Ervin, the well-regarded lawyer charged with monitoring the integrity of programs at ECMC’s education subsidiary, Zenith. The dispute — a sharp back-and-forth in written exchanges — suggests what can
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For-Profit Colleges Renew Efforts to Destroy Key Accountability Rule
Buoyed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, America’s predatory for-profit colleges are renewing their multi-front fight to destroy a key measure to hold them accountable: the gainful employment rule. The new battle plan includes pushes in Congress and before the Betsy DeVos Department of Education, plus two new lawsuits aimed at the regulation, including one, in Arizona,
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Pentagon Yields to McCain, Delegates College Probes to PriceWaterhouse
The U.S. Department of Defense has announced a new policy for addressing misconduct by colleges that receive DoD Tuition Assistance (TA) money to educate military service members. According to a report in Military Times, in unveiling its plan at a military education conference last week, “DoD stressed that its primary goal is to identify potential problems and
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