Law schools are answering Justice Department's call for eviction help - Reuters

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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

• Forty schools have joined a new tenant assistance planning group
• Evictions are expected to spike with the end of the federal moratorium

(Reuters) - Mere hours after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a call Monday for the legal profession to step up and help those facing eviction, Randy Hertz, New York University School of Law’s director of clinics, put out a query on a listserv for clinical professors across the country: Would anyone be interested in joining forces to share notes and ideas on how law students can get involved?

They were. Within two days, Hertz had heard from clinicians and externship supervisors at about 40 law schools and another 20 or so organizations that deal with housing issues, saying they wanted to join in a national planning group focused on how law students can help tenants.

“A lot of law schools already have housing law or housing rights clinics or externships and most of them are already helping tenants in this eviction crisis,” Hertz said in an interview with Reuters. “Our planning group is designed to help all of them hear about strategies that are working in other places, so they can expand what they are doing and be more effective.”

Garland’s Aug. 30 letter to the legal profession warning of a potential eviction surge came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a federal moratorium on residential evictions enacted early in the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 6 million households reported being behind on rent on a recent U.S. Census Bureau survey, Garland wrote, and lawyers have an ethical responsibility to help the most vulnerable.

Millions of dollars in rent have gone unpaid during the pandemic and promised federal rent aid has been slow to be disbursed, said Sateesh Nori, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society who co-teaches NYU Law’s Housing Rights Clinic.

“All signs point to a massive crisis on the horizon,” he said in an interview.

Garland laid out three specific ways that attorneys can assist tenants. They can help tenants apply for funds through the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program; they can volunteer with local legal aid providers; and they can help courts implement eviction diversion programs. Each option presents opportunities for law students, Hertz said, but law schools can also find other ways to help, depending on their local and state evictions processes and programs. They could develop know-your-rights materials for tenants, conduct public education campaigns, and lobby for legislation that would better protect tenants, he said.

It’s not just those facing eviction who benefit from these pro-bono efforts, said Legal Aid Society attorney Julia McNally, who co-teaches NYU’s Housing Rights Clinic with Nori. The experience of helping tenants enables law students to gain a real-world perspective on the law and make what they learn in the classroom more tangible. It can also impact their career paths, she said.

“Working with tenants and vulnerable populations to provide assistance can really help shape students' sense of themselves as public interest lawyers and their sense of having a future in public interest law,” McNally said. “Even for students who don’t pursue public interest law, they are going to become professionals who have a sensitivity to what poor people in our country experience.”

Read more:

U.S. Supreme Court ends CDC's pandemic residential eviction moratorium

U.S. urges lawyers to volunteer to fight feared surge of evictions

Delivering justice from home

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