Eviction

Because housing is a fundamental necessity and the point of access for political, social, cultural, and economic connections to the broader community, displacement through eviction often has devastating economic, psychological, and physical consequences. Eviction—the forced removal of people from their homes, usually of tenants by landlords—is commonplace throughout the world yet has been increasingly recognized by the international community as a violation of basic human rights. The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, an international nongovernmental organization, has documented thousands upon thousands of incidents of forced eviction on each continent.

Although there is global interest in the issue of evictions, the legal norms governing evictions and social forces giving rise to evictions tend to be local. In the United States, depending on the jurisdiction, eviction can be known also as unlawful detainer, summary possession, summary dispossess, forcible detainer, ejectment, or repossession. In the United States, the contemporary landlord-tenant relationship derives—as the nomenclature for the parties indicates—from the legal norms of feudal English land tenure. Like its feudal counterpart, the core of the modern landlord-tenant relationship, the leasehold interest, is a legal transaction for dominion over territory. That territory is, in the modern day, more likely to be an urban apartment than acreage of land, and legal reforms such as the implied warranty of habitability and rent regulation have given present-day tenants greater rights than their feudal counterparts. But ultimately, the tenant's hold on that territory—his or her home—remains temporary, conditional, and subordinate to the rights of the landlord. When the temporary term has ended, when the condition for use has not been met, or when permission to use has been revoked, a landlord can obtain physical and legal possession from a tenant through eviction. The root of the English word evict is the Latin word, vincere, which means to conquer or overcome completely.

Under English common law (legal precedents established by judges), a landlord did not need a court order to evict and was permitted to use self-help, as long as the landlord used no more force than necessary to regain possession. Although this centuries-old principle remains in effect in many parts of the United States, most jurisdictions now require a landlord to commence a court proceeding and obtain a judge's order before he or she may evict a tenant. In these jurisdictions, a self-help eviction is a tort, or civil wrong, and a tenant who has been put out of his or her home without court process can go to court and obtain an order to be restored to possession. The wrongfully evicted tenant can also seek monetary damages. Under a municipal law in New York City, a self-help eviction is a crime as well as a tort, and a landlord who removes a tenant without a court order is subject to criminal as well as civil penalties.

For the most part, the court procedures used for evicting tenants are summary proceedings—that is, streamlined legal procedures that move at a far more accelerated pace than ordinary civil litigation. These [Page 194]expedited and simplified summary eviction proceedings were instituted legislatively throughout most of the United States in the early 19th century as an alternative to the more drawn-out court proceedings that are applicable to most civil disputes. By providing landlords with a relatively quick method of obtaining court-ordered evictions, legislatures hoped to encourage landlords to seek court orders rather than use self-help to evict.

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