Sua Sponte

Summer 2022

Eviction Advice Clinic

Over the past academic year, Duke Law student volunteers spent more than 250 hours helping Durham residents who faced eviction due to the COVID-19 pandemic understand their legal options and determine whether they qualified for assistance from an emergency fund established by the city and county governments.

Forty law students helped about 120 tenant families who sought assistance at Duke’s Friday morning walk-in Eviction Advice Clinic at the Durham County Courthouse between mid-September and late January, when funding for the Durham Emergency Rental Assistance Program expired. They were supervised by Clinical Professors Charles Holton ’73 and Jesse McCoy, the director and supervising attorney, respectively, of the Civil Justice Clinic. Amanda Joos ’23 served as the clinic coordinator.

Finding ongoing high demand from tenants for advice on evictions since the expiration of the federal eviction moratorium, the Civil Justice Clinic team restarted the weekly courthouse pop-up clinic in late April in association with Legal Aid of North Carolina and the North Carolina Central University Law School’s Civil Litigation Clinic. 

Two students looking at a laptop