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CNBC
Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says
Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest School of Law, began her career representing homeless families in Washington, D.C. Her first case involved a family that had been evicted after complaining to their landlord about the holes in their roof. One of the times she met with the family, one of the children, a 4-year-old girl, asked her: “Are you really going to help us?” Benfer struggled with how to answer. “I’d met them too late. I couldn’t stop the eviction. They had already been sleeping on the subway, and in other people’s homes. And you could see the effects it was taking on them.”
July 10, 2020
CNBC
As state moratoriums on evictions come to an end, about 28 million Americans could be thrown out of their homes, a leading expert on evictions said. For comparison, 10 million people in the U.S. lost their homes in the Great Recession. CNBC spoke with Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest School of Law and chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the Covid-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, about the incoming crisis and what could be done to make it less devastating.
July 10, 2020
Oprah Magazine
Belonging, mentorship and race
Wake Forest psychology professor Shannon Brady was one of the researchers looking at the effects of a brief mentorship intervention on Black college students’ outcomes. Even just a one-hour session, said Brady, helps break down that hurdle because students see that their worries aren’t impossible to fix. “We give them a chance to reflect on it themselves, and broadly what we find is people find a way that it does connect.”
July 10, 2020
Voice Of America
Foreign students caught between COVID-19 and ICE
This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that F-1 visa holders will have to leave the country or risk deportation unless they take fall classes in person and not online only. This move affects around one million international students studying in the U.S., like Wake Forest senior Rafael Lima. Lima, a Brazilian student, is a communications major on a four-year, full-ride scholarship, one of only four awarded to a scholar in his country by a private donor from Brazil. “I just want to try to get back to my normal life,” Lima explained, calling the year so far “really chaotic.”
July 9, 2020
WRAL
Future of sports up in the air
The unknown question is what will happen to college’s big moneymakers, like football and basketball. “I’m skeptical of any plan working out in its entirety,” said Todd McFall, a sports economist at Wake Forest. The self proclaimed sports fan hopes for a return action, but admits it’s a tall task, “They’ll need to take a lot of precautions over the next couple of months to make sure all of the participants are safe either on court, on the fields or up in the stands.” Although McFall thinks it’s possible to bring college sports back, he said, “on a continuum of no fans to full houses, I would say it’s much more probable to have no fans.”
July 9, 2020
Associated Press
Cosby citing systemic racism as he fights assault conviction
Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity Jonathan Walton said that Bill Cosby undeniably boosted the representation of Blacks in American culture. Yet Walton, who teaches about African American social movements, said Cosby might not be the best messenger for today’s moment. “One should agree with him as it relates to systemic racism and the injustices of the ‘justice system,’ while also being suspicious of what seems to be a pattern of his, of only identifying problems when they personally benefit him.”
July 5, 2020
News & Record
Wake Forest Baptist COVID-19 antibody study finds higher positive percentage rate
Several prominent health law professors, including Wake Forest’s Mark Hall, are studying whether individuals who have recovered from the virus should play a major role in the reopening of the Local and U.S. economies. Hall and Stanford University’s David Studdert released a brief in May in the Journal of American Medical Association that discussed the concept of “an immunity passport.”
July 5, 2020
NPR
Health Justice Lawyer Argues For Nationwide Eviction Moratorium
When the pandemic first started shutting down parts of the U.S. economy, measures were passed to ease the pain for people who suddenly had no income – things like eviction moratoriums and extra unemployment assistance. But many of those protections are set to expire at the end of this month, and that’s leading to fears that millions of Americans could become homeless. Here to tell us more is Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest and co-creator of The Eviction Lab COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard. She joins us from New York City.
July 5, 2020
WRCB-TV
Housing advocates fear waves of homelessness as moratoriums expire
At the height of the pandemic, 42 states and the District of Columbia had statewide moratoriums on evictions in place, covering millions of renters, but presently, a little more than a dozen states have some kind of eviction protections in place, Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest, said. “So now, less than half the country is covered by an eviction moratorium that isn’t federal in nature. And as the unemployment insurance expires at the end of July, along with the majority of the remaining eviction moratoriums, we can expect to see a severe eviction crisis in the United States.”
July 4, 2020
Live Science
Looted skulls and human remains are being sold in black markets on Facebook
Most countries around the world have banned the looting of archaeological sites and graveyards. In the United States, “there is no law in any state which grants permission or acknowledges that it is legal to sell human remains. On the contrary, it is expressly illegal in a number of states,” said Tanya Marsh, an expert in cemetery and funeral law at Wake Forest School of Law. In the private groups, some sellers claimed that they got their bones from medical colleges; but even if those claims were true, “there are no exceptions for human remains even if there is documentation that they are from the collection of a medical school or museum.”
July 3, 2020
Newsweek
Facebook Investigates Sales of Human Skulls in Private Groups
Tanya Marsh, a professor at Wake Forest, who specializes in funeral and cemetery law, told Vice in 2018 regulations are vague because it doesn’t neatly fit the definitions of “people or property” in the U.S. legal system.
July 3, 2020
Ivanhoe Newswire
Elderly exercise: Losing weight safely as we age
“When people want to lose weight what they want to lose is fat, but some of what you lose is muscle and bone,” explained Kristen Beavers, assistant professor of health and exercise science at Wake Forest. Resistance training can prevent muscle and bone loss, so Beavers and her team developed a weighted vest that provides resistance for the wearer. They asked 40 seniors in the pilot study to wear the vest up to ten hours a day and found that those who wore the vest preserved their bone, especially at the hip.
July 2, 2020