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Route Fifty
Millions Could Be Evicted As Moratoriums End, Experts Say
One model by the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project estimated that as many as 23 million people could be vulnerable to eviction by the end of September. Housing expert Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest School of Law and chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction, said there needs to be a national response. “As an immediate measure, we need a nationwide uniform moratorium on eviction, and it has to be coupled with financial assistance to ensure that the renter can stay housed without shifting the debt burden onto the property owner.”
July 13, 2020
Vox
Breonna Taylor was killed by police in March. The officers involved have not been arrested.
Wake Forest Law professor Ronald Wright, who specializes in the work of criminal prosecutors, told Vox that Cameron’s comments regarding defunding the police are worth watching because they are relevant to how Cameron handles the case. “If he starts to sound like an advocate for law enforcement, voicing broad support for police officers and defending them in general terms, that would make me wonder if he can evaluate charges fairly in this case. It is tough to convince the public that you will hold the police accountable for their wrongdoing if you never find anything to criticize in their work.”
July 13, 2020
Xinhua News
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced a restrictive new visa policy for international students, prompting over 180 U.S. colleges and universities to launch or join legal action against it. “This ICE policy will have far-reaching detrimental effects on our students and communities,” said Wake Forest President Nathan O. Hatch, who urged more schools to join the movement and to “resist new federal restrictions that threaten the education and wellbeing of international students.”
July 12, 2020
The New York Times
10 steps to take to try to prevent your own eviction
Emily Benfer, a professor at Wake Forest School of Law, has assembled a large amount of helpful information on Local actions, with the help of many law and public health students. It’s collected in a publicly available Google spreadsheet.
July 11, 2020
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