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Full-Text Articles in Law

Eviction Court Displacement Rates, Nicole Summers Aug 2022

Eviction Court Displacement Rates, Nicole Summers

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay introduces the concept of eviction court displacement rates, defined as the percentage of eviction filings that result in tenant displacement. The Essay argues that a jurisdiction’s eviction court displacement rate provides crucial insight into the role of its legal system in driving substantive eviction outcomes. The Essay then compiles existing data on court displacement rates and compares those rates across jurisdictions. This comparison reveals massive variation in court displacement rates nationwide. In some jurisdictions, a tenant’s likelihood of displacement upon receiving an eviction filing is approximately one in twenty. In other jurisdictions, it is higher than one in …


Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk Apr 2020

Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records because it …


Families Belong Together: The Path To Family Sanctity In Public Housing, Mckayla Stokes Jan 2020

Families Belong Together: The Path To Family Sanctity In Public Housing, Mckayla Stokes

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In its 2015 landmark civil rights decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court finally held that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the United States Constitution guarantee same-sex couples’ marital equality. The Court’s unprecedented declaration that the right to marry is a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause strengthened married couples’ right to privacy because it subjects government actions infringing on marital unions to heightened scrutiny. The Supreme Court has the option to minimize the impact of Obergefell by interpreting the right to marriage very narrowly—as only encompassing the right to enter into a state-recognized union …


Rental Home Sweet Home: The Disparate Impact Solution For Renters Evicted From Residential Foreclosures, David Lurie Dec 2016

Rental Home Sweet Home: The Disparate Impact Solution For Renters Evicted From Residential Foreclosures, David Lurie

Northwestern University Law Review

At the end of the last decade, a drastic spike in residential foreclosures brought unprecedented attention to the damage that mass foreclosure often brings to primarily low-income, minority–majority communities. Much of this attention—in both the media and in the legal arena—has been devoted to homeowners disadvantaged by predatory loans and other unsavory practices. However, a recent body of scholarship has shown that the brunt of mass foreclosure often falls on renters, who often have little or no procedural protection from speedy and unexpected eviction from their homes, regardless of lease status or tenure. This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s …