The pandemic and resulting economic depression disproportionately devastated our client community. Low-wage Black workers and workers of color throughout the District saw their incomes decimated and slow to recover, forcing them to make difficult choices between basic necessities like putting food on the table and paying their rents or mortgages. The District’s COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) ended in July, putting DC residents at greater risk as critical protections tied to the PHE are being lifted.
At this unprecedented moment in history, Legal Aid, our partners, and – most importantly – DC residents from impacted communities, rose to the challenge to advocate zealously with the DC Council on a series of critical issues.
Read more about these critical systemic advocacy efforts throughout our report:
Barbara McDowell Appellate Advocacy Project
Legal Aid’s Barbara McDowell Appellate Advocacy Project provides appellate representation and participates in important appellate matters as amicus curiae before the DC Court of Appeals each year. The Project is currently focused on appellate issues created or exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past year, Legal Aid has actively litigated numerous appeals regarding unemployment benefit claims, as well as handled cases involving housing conditions and subsidies, domestic violence, foreclosure and consumer credit, and public benefits beyond unemployment compensation. Earlier this year, Legal Aid successfully represented a coalition of legal services providers working to preserve the District’s moratoria on eviction filings and actual evictions as amici curiae.
The Project also continues to serve as a resource to the broader legal services community on appellate issues more generally, and continues to pursues an affirmative anti-poverty law reform agenda, litigating cases that have the potential to influence the development of decisional law in a manner that will protect and advance the rights of low-income individuals.
An Important Victory at the DC Court of Appeals
In 2020, Legal Aid and our partners successfully advocated for a moratorium on all new eviction filings during the public health emergency, a critical lifeline for low-income tenants in the District whose financial lives were further decimated by the pandemic and the resulting economic depression. Not long after it went into effect, landlords challenged the constitutionality of the moratorium. Legal Aid and our partners joined forces as amicus curiae to assist the District in defending the law.
After an unfortunate loss in Superior Court – the Court found that the moratorium unconstitutionally interfered with landlords’ right of access to the courts – the District appealed the lower court’s ruling to the DC Court of Appeals. Legal Aid participated in the case’s briefing and oral argument, arguing that the eviction filing moratorium easily passes constitutional muster. Only three weeks after the argument, the Court issued a ruling in record time, overturning the lower court’s decision. The Court concluded that the landlord’s right of access was not burdened at all. This means that, should the Council need to institute a filing moratorium in the future, it will still be available as a tool.
“Because there is no constitutional right to eviction on a specific timetable, much less a fundamental one, we conclude that the temporary filing moratorium does not burden the right of access to the courts.”
THE DC COURT OF APPEALS