Hoffman & Strezhney: Longer Trips to Court Cause Evictions
In Longer Trips to Court Cause Evictions, authors David A. Hoffman (Pennsylvania Law) and Anton Strezhnev (Political Science, Chicago) analyze access to courthouses for those subject to eviction, revealing how the physical location of a courthouse and its relationship to transit can affect individual case outcomes.
This article provides the first large scale account of default judgment rates in relation to courthouse location. The authors focus specifically on Philadelphia residents and consider almost exclusively the experiences of urban tenants facing eviction. However, this account of the relative importance of physical courthouse access may have important implcations for rural residents, too.
To conduct their study, the authors use over 200,000 eviction proceedings from 2005 to 2021 in Philadelphia’s landlord tenant court. The article looks specifically at the distance of the subject housing from the courthouse, factors in public transit resources, and the timing of the court hearings. In particular, the authors looked for any correlation between access to courthouses by tenants and the tenant’s likelihood of receiving a default judgment. A default judgment occurs when the plaintiff (i.e., the landlord) receives a favorable judgment in their eviction proceeding by default when the defendant (i.e., the tenant) does not appear or appears late to court.
From their sample, the authors determined that the typical tenant could expect a commuting time between 25 and 50 minutes, with a handful of defendants facing commuting times of over an hour. The results of the study show that for every 10 minutes tenants must commute to a courthouse, the tenant is possibly between .65 and 1.4 percentage points more likely to default. Further, the results identify a large relationship between commuting time and default rates appearing among properties between 5 and 10 kilometers from the courthouse.
The authors argue that default judgments that result from failing to show up – or just as often, appearing late – to eviction court in Philadelphia and elsewhere should matter to policymakers. The results indicate that policymakers should consider the distributive effects of rules which forfeit legal rights conditional on showing up to the courthouse by a particular time. The authors advocate for alternatives such as remote hearings, easy rescheduling, and no-excuse reopening. The article highlights that learning from structural features of the adjudication process that harms tenants is informative to other important areas of research such as structural legal barriers preventing disadvantaged people from flourishing, how justice operates in lawyerless courts, the effects of housing instability on various social ills, and the effect of remote hearings on legal outcomes.
Again, the authors never mention the plight of rural residents in eviction courts. However, the results raise important potential comparisions to rural people and places, where courthouses may be even more physically distant and transit options more limited. If the authors’ finding that mere minutes affect the likelihood of a tenant’s success at an eviction hearing, this could bode unwell for rural tenants, particularly poor and working-class rural residents who may lack transportation, accommodating jobs, sufficient internet access, and more. More insight onto the experience of struggling rural tenants is needed, where even the authors’ suggestion of remote (online) hearings, for example, could instead present new roadblocks.
