News Archive

Professor Emily Benfer, ’05, will serve in the Biden administration as a Senior Policy Advisor to the White House and the American Rescue Plan Implementation Team. The announcement came in mid-August. Professor Benfer is taking a leave of absence from her current positions: Visiting Professor of Law and Public Health at Wake Forest University, Visiting Research Collaborator at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, and (pro bono) Chair of the ABA Committee on Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity.

Benfer was the subject of a profile in the ABA Journal’s Members Who Inspire section. The piece highlights Professor Benfer’s work toward preventing evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has been tracking the eviction moratorium since March 2020 and examining the effects of COVID-19 evictions on racial health equity and advocating for interventions to help support the hardest-hit communities.

“Racial, housing and health justice are inseparable,” Benfer said in the story. “The effects of our country’s sordid history of racially discriminatory laws and policies continue today and can be seen in disproportionate rates of housing loss among Black and Hispanic families and the lasting poor health outcomes it causes. Justice in any of these areas requires justice in all of them.” The profile was published in the August/September 2021 issue.

Benfer was awarded a Presidential Commendation by the ABA for “extraordinary leadership and dedication to expand access to justice as the Chair of the Evictions Committee of the ABA Task Force on Legal Needs Arising from the 2020 Pandemic.”