PETER F. NERONHA, R.I. attorney general, was recently elected to the American Law Institute. The institute is an independent organization producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize and otherwise improve the law.
What do you hope to bring the institute in your role as a member? I look forward to participating in the work of the American Law Institute and hopefully being able to contribute in some small way. Although I’m sure some of it will be from a 50,000-foot, directional approach, I think there will also be an opportunity to get deeper into it and really have a direct impact on where the law should be headed. I see the opportunity with ALI as an extension of work my office is already doing to advocate for improvements in the law.
Where do you feel the laws in Rhode Island need to be improved the most? For the past three years, we have submitted legislation to try to fix Rhode Island’s consumer protection statute but we haven’t gotten it over the finish line. Why is that legislation important? I can point to the National Grid gas outage on Aquidneck Island a few winters ago and the ensuing calls by legislators and gas customers for my office to look into what happened. With the way our state’s consumer protection statute is currently interpreted, my office cannot investigate any entity regulated by a federal or state agency. Another improvement would be to allow Rhode Island grand juries to release reports on their investigations, whether they hand down an indictment or not.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the urgency to improve the law? If so, how? From the beginning, COVID-19 presented unprecedented challenges to the criminal justice system and virtually every aspect of society. The pandemic has really laid bare many inequities and challenges that were already there. I think the consumer issues facing Rhode Islanders stemming from the pandemic will be with us for a long time. When things shut down, people couldn’t go to their gyms, people had gift cards for restaurants that closed, travel was canceled, events were postponed. Stimulus checks and the large amount of people collecting unemployment benefits have created a perfect storm for scammers and fraud. Time will tell how our systems, and our laws, need to adapt.
What challenges need to be cleared for the laws to be improved? Again, over time I think you start to see the need for laws to change in a particular way. For example, we have long believed as an institutional legal culture that you present your evidence in the courtroom and not in the press. But the state of where we are as a country right now, we know that “putting evidence out there” can sometimes tamp down the tensions that stem from the need for accountability. How to balance those factors – the rights of the accused, the public’s right to know, the interest of the press in what happens, and the credibility of law enforcement – really involves cutting-edge emerging issues that we need to take on as a country and as a state.
