Attorneys at the Legal Services Center represent thousands of low-income clients every year to protect their rights. Our attorneys also bring their expertise and passion to bear through publications that raise awareness of critical issues and promote our client community’s legal rights. Recent publications from LSC staff members have covered topics ranging from protections for low-income taxpayers, people victimized by predatory for-profit schools, and tenants facing economic exploitation.
This summer, Victoria Roytenberg of LSC’s Project on Predatory Student Lending published “How Trustees Can Make Sure Former Students of Predatory For-Profit Schools Are Served by the Bankruptcy Process”in the American Bankruptcy Trustee Journal (Summer 2019 issue, Vol. 35, Issue 03). In this article, Roytenberg describes five ways bankruptcy trustees can work effectively with counsel for students to help what is the largest and most important group of creditors in the for-profit schools scandal.
Toby Merrill, Eileen Connor and Josh Rovenger, all of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, were among the co-authors of an article on the Harvard Law Review blog entitled “For-Profit Schools’ Predatory Practices and Students of Color: A Mission to Enroll Rather than Educate.” In it they highlight the particularly pernicious ways in which for-profit schools have targeted racial minorities, those who are the first generation in their family to go to college, and other low-income individuals — and how the federal Department of Education has abetted them in this effort. Read the blog here.
Keith Fogg of LSC’s Federal Tax Clinic, has been a longtime editor of Effectively Representing Your Client before the IRS, the desktop bible for advocates representing low-income taxpayers before the IRS. Together with two co-authors, he also writes the widely followed blog Procedurally Taxing that regularly considers developments in regulations and case law that affect tax procedures and tax administration. You can read the blog at https://procedurallytaxing.com/
And LSC’s housing specialists Julia Devanthery and Maureen McDonagh have written chapters for the manual Legal Tactics: Private Housing, an easy-to-understand, comprehensive handbook on Massachusetts tenants’ rights for lay audiences, edited by Annette R. Duke of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. This manual, available free and online, focuses on private rental housing and answers questions on everything from security deposits and last month’s rent to rent and utilities, repairs, evictions, housing discrimination, lead poisoning, mobile homes, and tenants in foreclosed properties. You can find the manual here.