Dr. Luke Herrine, OC ’10, is an assistant professor of law at the University of Alabama and was named a 2025 Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar for his role as a legal architect behind mass student debt cancellation. He devised legal strategies that helped trigger the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in public student debt and reshaped the national conversation about broader debt relief. Herrine holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, a J.D. from NYU, and a doctorate from Yale Law School. He previously served as legal director of the Debt Collective, clerked on the Second Circuit, and was managing editor for the Law and Political Economy Blog.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re credited with shaping legal arguments that made billions in student debt cancellation possible. How did you start working on this?
I first got started with doing student debt cancellation work when I was in law school around 2013. In 2014, I started working with a group called the Debt Collective that was working to organize students that had gone to for-profit colleges. The effort was to think about this as a way to experiment with organizing student debtors to be more confrontational with the debt system overall and to try to build power toward a system that pushed for broader debt cancellation and free college. We combined some organizing and some legal strategy to get pretty far, to get some initial debt canceled, and to push the Department of Education to rethink its approach to this issue.
Out of that work, I was working directly with the Debt Collective, and then I took some time off and went to graduate school. In graduate school, having been exposed to some thoughts about how broader debt cancellation might happen under existing legal authorities, I worked out an argument in more detail about what that might look like. I got lucky … Elizabeth Warren thought it was worth picking up as part of her presidential campaign. Then it became a broader issue in the ether, as it were.
Where do you feel like you are now with this work?
Once COVID-19 hit and there was a payment pause, the terrain for organizing became more favorable. This idea was out there, but the real work in making the Biden administration attempt it — since the administration wasn’t going to do it on its own — was through organizing. I did very little organizing work myself, but that’s how debt cancellation was attempted, and some of it succeeded during the Biden administration. Where I am with it today is a more complicated question, but I would say my academic work has pivoted to thinking about how the student loan system is in the middle of collapse. What I’m trying to do is articulate what a vision of rebuilding would be, what some of the challenges would be, and bring people together who are thinking about other parts of that issue to strategize together. I try to do work that is useful, that opens up new possibilities and approaches issues in different ways, but also that is in conversation with people on the ground who are trying to make change happen more directly.
As an Oberlin alum, how do you think your time here shaped your intellectual or political trajectory?
Of course I did think about student debt to some degree when I was at Oberlin, but not especially — I wasn’t that thoughtful about higher education finance. I think my time at Oberlin shaped the way I thought about how to relate to people and what it means to cooperate and to use scholarship in a thoughtful and engaged way. That shaped me in a way I didn’t fully appreciate when I was at Oberlin because it was sort of the water I swam in. The more I’ve been out in the world and seen how differently people view the purpose of education and the appropriate way to engage in politics, even in simple things like how to make decisions about what food to eat and cook, … the more I appreciate having been at Oberlin and being exposed to people who were engaging thoughtfully with a lot of difficult questions.
Many people feel frustrated about student debt. How does your work address this, and what advice do you have for them?
I think a lot of folks at Oberlin now probably don’t appreciate how taken for granted student debt was, even when I was in college. If there were problems with student debt, the assumption was that the problems lay with the individuals taking it on. So I think it’s worthwhile recognizing how far we’ve come in reframing it and how many new things have been tried. I’d say it’s useful to think about this moment as one of flux. Many new things may be possible — we don’t know exactly what they are.
This brings me to where you can act. There will be opportunities to plug into organizing. You can still get involved with the Debt Collective. You can even engage on a lighter basis — commenting on regulatory proceedings, for example. But this isn’t a moment where short-term change is likely. The task now is building toward something bigger and helping build collective power. There will be people in government thinking broadly about how to reshape things. If you care about student debt now, you can’t be a single-issue person — you have to believe in building power on the left. If you’re getting involved in any way, you should also have hope about the future of higher education finance, because it’s in disarray, and there will be plenty of opportunities to reshape it.
What have been the key highlights of combining academic work with organizing, and which people or organizations have most shaped your sense of impact?
I originally went to law school after Oberlin. When I was at Oberlin, I thought I wanted to be an academic, and I didn’t think of myself as that political. That changed toward the end of my time there. After I graduated, I thought I was going to law school not to be an academic, but to be involved in more practical efforts, including working with organizers. When I got lucky enough to work with the brilliant people who were starting the Debt Collective, it was super motivating. I learned so much about what people are struggling with, things they don’t often talk about outside of a context where it’s explicitly brought up.
I learned how hard it is to organize. I learned what it means to think against the grain on a whole number of different issues. I also learned that I’m just not that good an organizer, and my temperament is much more that of a scholar. Part of what I learned is that there’s good scholarly work to do that is interesting and important in itself, but also that there’s so much ground that can be opened up by exploring new possibilities in more depth and in a scholarly way. It is so important to be in touch with organizers, with what they’re seeing on the ground and the constraints they face. Even though I don’t feel as in touch with that today as I once did, it always informs what types of questions I ask. It informs how I think about what type of impact I want my scholarship to have. I don’t necessarily think about my scholarship as itself having an impact; I think about how my scholarship might work together with what other people are doing to have an impact. Even as a scholar, I try to organize other scholars to think collectively about a set of problems none of us can analyze individually.
