New Legal Clinics Help Tenants and Recipients of Public Benefits

Rutgers Law School's Clinical Program in Newark has created two new clinics—the Housing Justice and Tenants’ Solidarity Clinic and the Economic Justice and Public Benefits Clinic—to better serve Clinic clients, particularly those in the greater Newark commu nity, and to better define clinical offerings for law students.

The two new Clinics will replace the former Civil Justice Clinic, co-taught by multiple faculty. Professor Jon Dubin will teach the public benefits portion, while the housing component is being taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Greg Baltz.

The new Housing Justice and Tenants’ Solidarity Clinic, which will be open to thirdyear law students, will teach law students to strategically employ law in support of organizing for housing justice. The Clinic will work in partnership with community-based organizations while representing individuals and groups of lower income clients confronting an array of housing justice issues. Clinical students will carry their own caseload of eviction defense and diversion matters while pursuing projects including facilitating collective action by tenant associations; helping tenants obtain safe and sanitary housing conditions; fighting unlawful rent increases; challenging housing discrimination; challenging the loss of affordable public and subsidized housing units; and securing the rights of persons and families encountering homelessness.

The Housing Justice component of the former Civil Justice Clinic worked diligently to halt evictions for New Jersey residents, particularly during the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, the Clinic urged the governor to impose a moratorium on evictions. Clinic faculty and their housing partners—Newarkbased housing activist Victor Monterrosa (RLAW ’15) and Nina DePalma (RLAW ’20) who started the Newark Housing Coalition—organized a “Twitterstorm,” calling on New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy to institute a moratorium on evictions in the state. Sample tweets were sent out to community partners, clients, and members of the law school community. All of those involved began tweeting at the Governor at the same time. The next day, March 14, evictions in New Jersey were halted. The Clinic had also worked with housing advocates to

support various efforts that would provide rent relief to New Jersey residents.

In addition, the Clinic recently launched an Eviction Diversion Project with a $1.1 million state grant to address the potential flood of eviction proceedings due to the end of the eviction freeze necessitated by the COVID19 pandemic and the problem of large rental arrearages accumulated in that time period. This project will be subsumed within the new Housing Justice and Tenants’ Solidarity Clinic.

The Economic Justice and Public Benefits Clinic will represent lower-income clients and client groups in cases involving public benefits—principally the federal Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Disability Benefits programs. It will also take on some issues involving state public assistance cash-benefit social welfare programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other food/nutrition programs, and unemployment compensation. Additionally, the Clinic will pursue challenges to inequitable and excessive fines and fees and other practices undermining access to justice and the economic well-being of low-income persons and families.

Professor Dubin is an expert in Social Security Disability law and an author of several books on the topic and multiple law review articles cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. He teaches a classroom course in Social Security Law. He also created and teaches a course in Poverty Law to address economic and distributive justice in law more broadly and will address some issues in that course in the new

Clinic. He will lead third-year Clinic students in direct client service in formal federal court appeals, administrative hearings with crossexaminations of expert witnesses, many forms of less formal client work and administrative advocacy, and some projects pursuing broader law reform.

According to Professor Dubin, “The new Clinics reflect reorganizations and expansions of the existing Civil Justice Clinic to better reflect our Clinical representation of low-income clients in issues involving housing and other basic human needs and life necessities in these times, and to provide greater clarity for law students, clients and community partners alike of what we do and can do.”

Professor Baltz states, “Students engaged in the Housing Justice & Tenant Solidarity Clinic will have the opportunity to serve low-income New Jersey residents facing eviction, develop crucial practice skills they will employ throughout their careers, and come to understand lawyering’s place amidst the broader advocacy ecosystem fighting for housing justice.”

Both Clinics will work cooperatively with the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic, directed by Professor Laura Cohen. A joint seminar for all three Clinics will instruct students in a full range of lawyering skills, including interviewing, counseling, developing case theory, cross-cultural competency, fact investigation, negotiation, witness examination and trial practice skills. The new Clinics went into effect in May 2022.