By Michael Fisch
innovation
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Photograph courtesy of Grace Barlow Enchill
winter 2023
As yet another coronavirus variant swept through the U.S. in the summer of 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland made a national plea to assist struggling Americans facing eviction. “Over three million households that are behind on rental payments believe they may be evicted in the next two months,” he wrote in an open letter to the legal community.
This past spring, he met with a half-dozen Massachusetts law students, including Grace Barlow Enchill, JD ’22, to learn about the steps Bay State schools had taken to lessen the impact of the eviction crisis and to take note of innovations that might be useful to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice.
Enchill was a fitting choice to debrief the attorney general. During her time at Suffolk Law, she covered a lot of ground, serving as a Suffolk Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab Fellow; a student attorney in the Accelerator to Practice (A2P) in-house firm; and a tester in the Housing Discrimination Testing Program (HTDP). She also was an Accelerated JD student and completed her degree in only two years.
She spoke with Garland about the Suffolk team’s creative and practical approaches to eviction, including:
The LIT Lab’s mobile phone tool, which was used by thousands across the country to determine if they qualified for eviction relief from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and to produce customized letters for their landlords. The New York Times featured the tool in its primer on the CDC Eviction Moratorium.
LIT Lab Practitioner-in-Residence Quinten Steenhuis’s Massachusetts Defense for Eviction (MADE) mobile-friendly web app, which was listed in a White House fact sheet on eviction resources in January 2022.
The A2P firm’s representation of tenants who have been at risk of losing their housing, living in unsafe conditions, or subject to unlawful discrimination during housing searches. The A2P firm works hand-in-hand with the Law School’s HDTP, which provides undercover testing across greater Boston to assess discrimination claims.
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All of these programs and tools have made Suffolk Law a leader in addressing the eviction crisis during the pandemic and a model for how innovation can address future housing crises.
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