O n a balmy December morning in Boston, Richard Daynard is sitting at his dining-room table watching a livestream on his laptop. Daynard has been fighting big public-health battles for decades. Now, at 81, he is no less indignant about the way companies seem to put profits over customer well-being.
His latest objective is curtailing the excesses of sports gambling. Calls to problem-gambling hotlines have spiked. Emerging research suggests that sports betting depletes investment accounts of already financially vulnerable households, increases bankruptcy risk, and even contributes to upticks in intimate-partner violence. Daynard argues that sports-betting operators, much like tobacco companies, have engineered their product to foster addiction, through the constant stream of bonuses, promotions, and opportunities to microbetโon the speed of the next pitch, on the rebound totals of a particular player, on who will score the next touchdownโon your phone during a sporting event.
His approach to reining in the industry is twofold: litigation and legislation. In late PHAI filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of customers in Massachusetts accusing DraftKings, one of the biggest gambling operators in the U. Big Tobacco has stopped advertising to kids. People should think twice before even questioning his foresight.
A New York City native whose father ran a clothing business and mother worked as a public-school administrator, Daynard developed a smoking aversion when he was After attending the Bronx High School of Science, which counts more alumni as Nobel Prize winners than any other secondary school in the world, Daynard went to Columbia, where he majored in philosophy.
So he was off to law school, at Harvard. He spent one summer working for a fancy Manhattan firm, drafting a brief on behalf of a marquee client, Ford Motor Co. What will I have to say for myself? Daynard joined the Northeastern law faculty in He also got a Ph. While teaching a course on consumer protection, he solicited recommendations on what to do in his new gig.
