Article Spotlight: “Who Says Evictions Should be Efficient?”

Prof. Kathryn Sabbeth Shows How Fast-Moving Court Eviction Dockets Reveal a Deep Bias

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

This newsletter has shared our reviews of books on housing justice, including Gregg Colburn’s Homelessness is a Housing Problem and, very soon, Tracy Rosenthal’s and Leonardo Vilchis’s important new book, Abolish Rent. Since many of the most important writing on housing comes in a shorter form—such as Patrick Fealey’s powerful first-hand account of homelessness-- we are going to also regularly spotlight articles that inspire and educate.

Our first “Article Spotlight” is Kathryn Sabbeth’s “Who Says Evictions Should be Efficient?” published in the LPE (Law and Political Economy) Project blog. (LPE describes its work as “rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated and that both are constructed in essential respects by law.”) As will be the case with all of our spotlights, we strongly encourage you to read the full, original article.

Prof. Sabbeth is a law professor who teaches and writes on housing justice. She is a member of the faculty of Rutgers Law School, where she co-directs the Housing Justice & Tenant Solidarity Clinic. You can learn more about her work, including several very important articles on the courts and housing and a forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, at her Rutgers bio page here.

We have described the “fast/cheap/easy” eviction process here before. But Prof. Sabbeth’s LPE blog article drills down deeper on the nature of the hearings where families lose their homes:

The process can include entry of default judgment in seconds, with no evidentiary showing, (and) as few as two days between service of a summons and complaint and trial . . ..Evidence indicates that on average eviction trials last less than two minutes from the time the judge calls the case to the time they enter judgment.

Beyond this remarkable speed, Sabbeth points out the injustice inherent in the scheduling of eviction trials. For evictions, multiple cases are set at the same time, causing tenants to often wait for hours for their cases to be heard, and cases are often bunched together to accommodate the schedules of landlords’ attorneys.

This is “efficient” only from the perspectives of the judges and landlords, Sabbeth writes. “To deem it efficient to keep tenants waiting is to determine that their time has less value than that of the judges, or that it is socially useful to keep down the costs for plaintiffs pursuing evictions.”

Foreshadowing the theme of her forthcoming book, Courts and Capital: How Market Power Shapes Law and Justice in the Civil Legal System, Prof. Sabbeth says it is no accident that this process advantages one side over the other. The so-called efficient eviction system is a powerful example of the state transferring resources from communities of color to largely white-controlled corporations. “In eviction court, efficiency means more profit for those with capital and less justice for those without,” she writes.

If you want to see for yourself, your community likely has an eviction court watching program like the one in my hometown of Indianapolis. Court watching often leads to informed advocacy for change, a necessary step on the path to a far more just system. And please read Prof. Sabbeth’s full article here, and look for her other articles here.