Digital Commons Network^™

Genao V. Chen

All Decisions

The case involves a tenant petitioning for correction of violations of the Housing Maintenance Code (HMC). Following a Consent Order to Correct (OTC), the tenant filed an Order to Show Cause (OSC) seeking to restore the matter to the calendar for various relief, including penalties for non-compliance with the OTC. Despite service, the respondent failed to appear, leading to an inquest where the tenant provided evidence of non-compliance with the OTC. The court found the respondent in civil contempt for failing to correct a specific violation, ordering fines and potential incarceration if contempt was not purged within a specified time …

Ocean Bay Rad, Llc V. Baker

All Decisions

In a Holdover-Lease Expiration case before the Civil Court of the City of New York, Queens County, Judge Enedina Pilar Sanchez granted the tenant's motion to dismiss the holdover proceeding. The tenant argued that the predicate notice was fatally defective, citing Siegel v. Kentucky Fried Chicken, which holds that a notice must be properly authenticated to bind the landlord. The court determined that the notice to quit in this case lacked proper documentation of the agent's authority, rendering it incomplete and defective. As a result, the court granted the tenant's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice. This case underscores …

Ny Sandy3 Nbp4 Llc V. Pagan

All Decisions

In a Holdover-Nuisance case before the Civil Court of the City of New York, Bronx County, Judge Miriam Breier granted the tenant's motion for summary judgment, dismissing the proceeding with prejudice. The key legal point revolves around RPAPL §744, which prohibits the eviction of a tenant who is a victim of domestic violence. The court found that the tenant, met the criteria for domestic violence victim status and that the eviction would not have been pursued if not for the domestic violence perpetrated by her son. Therefore, the court granted the tenant's motion, emphasizing the legislative intent to protect victims …

Tatum V. Jack

All Decisions

In a non-payment proceeding before the Civil Court of the City of New York, Kings County, Judge Karen May Bacdayan granted the landlord's motion to vacate a stipulation of settlement entered into between the parties. The court found that although there was no clear evidence of mutual mistake at the time of the stipulation, there existed a material error that warranted vacating the agreement. Key legal points include the court's discretionary power to relieve a party of an agreement if it can be shown that the mistake is substantial and that vacatur is necessary to prevent unjust enrichment. Additionally, the …

Department Of Hous. Preserv. & Dev. Of The City Of N.Y. V. Belmont Ventures Llc

All Decisions

In a case brought by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development of the City of New York regarding violations and civil penalties for premises in New York, the court denied the respondents' motion for an extension to purge contempt. Despite the respondents' arguments about difficulties in correcting violations, the court found their efforts inadequate given the persistent and serious living conditions endured by tenants. Consequently, the court denied the motion and ordered the issuance of a warrant for arrest and commitment to civil jail as previously contemplated.

Matter Of Kunyoung Lee V. Office Of Temporary Disability Assistance (Emergency Rental Assistance Program)

All Decisions

Petitioner appealed an ERAP decision denying additional rent and utilities assistance. ERAP argued the appeal was untimely. The court found the petition moot because ERAP reopened the appeal and provided the additional rent requested.

Victoria V. Victoria

All Decisions

The court addressed a licensee holdover proceeding where the administrator of a cooperative apartment sought to evict occupants after the shareholder's death. The respondent, claiming partial ownership and residency, argued against the proceeding's jurisdiction in housing court. The court denied dismissal, citing that cooperative shares do not grant possession rights absent a proprietary lease transfer. Summary judgment for possession was denied due to insufficient evidence, with trial needed to determine the respondent's status as a licensee or otherwise.

Borinquen Rlty Llc V. Cruz

All Decisions

The court dismissed a holdover proceeding where the landlord attempted to evict the tenant based on licensee status under RPAPL §713(7). The decision invoked res judicata, barring relitigation of the same claim after the prior proceeding's dismissal due to the landlord's failure to prove licensee status. The tenant's motion to dismiss was granted, emphasizing that the landlord's alternative claim of squatting lacked support in the predicate notice, thus failing to sustain the new proceeding

No More Nixon: A Proposed Change To Rule 17(C) Of The Federal Rules Of Criminal Procedure, Norah Senftleber

Fordham Law Review

Today, the standard for subpoenas under Rule 17(c) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, espoused in United States v. Nixon, provides for limited, almost useless, pretrial subpoena power for criminal defendants. When subpoenaing a third party, a defendant must show (1) relevancy, (2) admissibility, and (3) specificity for documents that they have not yet gained access to. This narrow scope of Rule 17(c) has long engendered criticism from judges, scholars, and practitioners alike. Yet, Rule 17(c) has not been changed, either by judicial opinion or amendment.

Following years of criticism, the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules (“Advisory Committee”) …

Avoiding Rejection: Studying When And Why State Courts Decline Certified Questions, Rachel Koehn Breland

Fordham Law Review

In December 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declared Tennessee’s punitive damages cap statute unconstitutional under the state’s constitution. Nearly five years later, however, Tennessee state courts are still reducing punitive damage awards under the statute—and they must, because the Tennessee Supreme Court has never addressed the statute’s constitutionality. See, the Sixth Circuit’s decision was merely an Erie guess as to how Tennessee courts would resolve the unsettled state law issue, and the Tennessee Supreme Court has since indicated that it would reach the opposite conclusion. But the Tennessee high court had already had an opportunity …

Asymmetry Of Representation In Poor People’S Courts, Tonya L. Brito, Daniela Campos Ugaz

Fordham Law Review

This Essay examines the asymmetry of representation in poor people’s courts, specifically in child support enforcement cases involving the State. The asymmetry of representation is a common occurrence in various civil law fields, but it is notably prominent in family law, which has the highest number of unrepresented parties. As one of the authors has previously explained, we use “poor people’s courts” to refer to state civil courts that hear family, housing, administrative, and consumer cases. These courts present severe challenges to the civil justice system because they are characterized by a substantial volume of cases, socioeconomically disadvantaged litigants, and …

Should State Trial Courts Become Laboratories Of Upl Reform?, Bruce A. Green

Fordham Law Review

There is a growing “access to justice” movement that is principally driven by lawyers and judges. It has multiple objectives. One such objective is to make state court proceedings fairer, more reliable, and more accessible. This is important because state courts have a significant impact on peoples’ lives. They are where family members lose custody of children, where property owners obtain permission to evict tenants, where creditors are empowered to repossess people’s cars or garnish their wages, and (in some jurisdictions) where judges send people to jail to compel them to pay judgments or fees that they cannot afford to …

Foreword: The Legal Profession And Social Change, Atinuke O. Adediran, Bruce A. Green

Fordham Law Review

Fordham University School of Law’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics has collaborated with the Fordham Law Review every year since the late 1990s to encourage, collect, and publish scholarly writings on different aspects of the legal profession, including its norms, regulation, organization, history, and development—that is, on themes relating to what law schools loosely call “legal ethics.” The legal profession is an important subject of study for legal scholars, among others. Although one U.S. Supreme Court Justice, himself a former law professor, airily derided legal ethics as the “least analytically rigorous . . . of law-school subjects,” we dispute …

Aligning The Stars: Institutional Convergence As Social Change, Raymond H. Brescia

Fordham Law Review

In a democracy, in which the legal and constitutional systems should reflect popular will and individual and collective self-determination are the engines through which those systems are realized, what are the means by which individuals, organizations, and social movements might bring about meaningful and sustainable social change that makes that society more just, more inclusive, and more equitable? A common understanding of how social change happens, and who can bring about that change, is represented in an oft-quoted phrase, attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world: Indeed, it is the …

Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Fordham Law Review

This colloquium asks us to consider how social change is influencing the legal profession and the legal profession’s response. This Essay applies these questions to organizing around criminal injustice and the response from public defenders. This Essay surfaces the work of four innovative indigent defense organizations that are engaged with and duty-bound to the communities they represent. I call this “community responsive public defense,” which is a distinct model of indigent defense whereby public defenders look to their clients and their clients’ communities to help shape advocacy, strategy, and representation.

Methodologically, this Essay relies primarily on qualitative interviews with leaders …

Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe

Fordham Law Review

The public defender institution has trouble meeting its mission. This is partly because, despite the specific and clear purpose of representing indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, public defender offices rely on various centering principles to meet this objective. The institution falters if it chooses a centering principle that unwittingly complicates its ability to meet the institution’s central mission. For public defender leaders tasked with developing and maintaining an institutional identity for a particular office, neither legal nor professional regulations supply the type of considerations that guarantee that an adopted identity will comply with core institutional responsibilities. This project seeks to …

(How) Can Litigation Advance Multiracial Democracy?, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Fordham Law Review

Can rights litigation meaningfully advance social change in this moment? Many progressive or social justice legal scholars, lawyers, and advocates would argue “no.” Constitutional decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court thwart the aims of progressive social movements. Further, contemporary social movements often decenter courts as a primary domain of social change. In addition, a new wave of legal commentary urges progressives to de-emphasize courts and constitutionalism, not simply tactically but as a matter of democratic survival.

This Essay considers the continuing role of rights litigation, using the litigation over race-conscious affirmative action as an illustration. Courts are a key …

Extraordinary Punishment: Conditions Of Confinement And Compassionate Release, Meredith B. Esser

Fordham Law Review

People experience severe forms of harm while incarcerated, including medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, sexual and physical violence, and a host of other ills. But civil rights litigation under the Eighth Amendment—the most common vehicle through which people seek to redress these harms—presents significant practical and doctrinal barriers to incarcerated plaintiffs. Most notably, the Eighth Amendment’s “deliberate indifference” standard asks not whether a person has been harmed, but instead requires plaintiffs to demonstrate a criminally reckless mental state on the part of prison officials. Further, Eighth Amendment remedies are limited to damages or injunctions, which may not adequately redress a …

Charging Abortion, Milan Markovic

Fordham Law Review

As long as Roe v. Wade remained good law, prosecutors could largely avoid the question of abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has now placed prosecutors at the forefront of the abortion wars. Some chief prosecutors in antiabortion states have pledged to not enforce antiabortion laws, whereas others are targeting even out-of-state providers. This post-Dobbs reality, wherein the ability to obtain an abortion depends not only on the politics of one’s state but also the policies of one’s local district attorney, has received minimal scrutiny from legal scholars.

Prosecutors have broad charging discretion, …

Rereading Pico And The Equal Protection Clause, Johany G. Dubon

Fordham Law Review

More than forty years ago, in Board of Education v. Pico, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a school board’s decision to remove books from its libraries. However, the Court’s response was heavily fractured, garnering seven separate opinions. In the plurality opinion, three justices stated that the implicit corollary to a student’s First Amendment right to free speech is the right to receive information. Thus, the plurality announced that the relevant inquiry for reviewing a school’s library book removal actions is whether the school officials intended to deny students access to ideas with which the officials disagreed. …

Ending Exemption 5 Expansion: Toward A Narrower Interpretation Of Foia’S Exemption For Inter- And Intra-Agency Memorandums, Ryan W. Miller

Fordham Law Review

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) creates a judicially enforceable right to access almost any record that a federal agency creates or obtains. Its crafters aimed to strike a careful balance in promoting disclosure of government records to increase transparency while still protecting the confidentiality of certain information. Although any person can request an agency record, FOIA’s nine exemptions allow agencies to withhold records if certain conditions are met. 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) permits agencies to withhold “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters” that would normally be privileged in civil discovery. Through this exemption, Congress sought to prevent FOIA from …

“Major” Challenges For Lower Courts: Inconsistent Applications Of The Major Questions Doctrine In Lower Courts After West Virginia V. Environmental Protection Agency, Sarah A. Schmoyer

Fordham Law Review

Under the major questions doctrine, an agency requires clear congressional authorization to regulate on an issue of major national significance. Although a version of the doctrine has existed for several years, its rise in importance is recent. The U.S. Supreme Court invoked the doctrine by name for the first time in 2022 in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, warning that in certain “extraordinary cases,” the “history and the breadth” and the “economic and political significance” of the agency action may “provide a reason to hesitate” before accepting the agency’s authority. West Virginia has since inspired a wave of …

390 Riverside Owners Corp. V. Arthur Stout Et Al.

All Decisions

The co-op/landlord sought summary judgment against the tenants, who refused access for repairs to a leak allegedly originating from their apartment. The landlord, relying on the business judgment rule and a plumber's assessment, argued that the repairs were necessary under the terms of the proprietary lease. The court found in favor of the landlord, granting summary judgment, declaring the tenants obliged to provide access for repairs, dismissing their affirmative defenses and counterclaims, and referring attorney fees to a special referee. Key legal points include application of the business judgment rule to cooperative board decisions, tenant obligations under the lease to …

Come, Let Us Reason Together, Hon. Kent A. Jordan, James J. Brudney

Jurist in Residence Lectures

In his lecture, Judge Kent A. Jordan emphasizes the critical importance of civil discourse in addressing complex legal and social issues. He explores the dangers of abandoning reasoned debate for heated rhetoric and the negative impacts this can have on the legal profession and society at large.

Rock-Park 94 Llc V. Camba, Inc.

All Decisions

The court dismissed the landlord's complaint seeking a declaratory judgment that the premises were not rent stabilized, ejectment of the tenant CAMBA Inc., use and occupancy, and attorneys' fees. The court found the premises were subject to rent stabilization as the landlord's claimed exemptions were invalid. The waiver of rent stabilization in the lease was contrary to law and unenforceable. Without a proper termination notice under the Rent Stabilization Code, the ejectment claim failed. The ancillary claims for use and occupancy and fees were also dismissed.

Ladan Realty Corp. V. Kercy

All Decisions

In this holdover proceeding concerning a rent-stabilized premises, the landlord sought to recover possession based on the tenant's alleged non-primary residence. The landlord served a Notice of Non-Renewal and Termination of Tenancy, terminating the tenancy due to the tenant's purported absence from the premises. However, the court found the notice defective, as it contained speculative and generic allegations without sufficient detail or evidence to support the claim of non-primary residence. The court dismissed the proceeding, granting the tenant's motion, and denied the landlord's motion to vacate the ERAP stay, ruling in favor of the tenant. Key legal points include the …

Diversified Equities Llc V. Swint

All Decisions

Landlord initiated a holdover proceeding to evict tenant, claiming she was a mere licensee without succession rights after the death of the rent-stabilized tenant of record. Tenant argued she had succession rights as a long-term partner and caregiver of the deceased. The court found in favor of tenant, recognizing her family-like relationship and entitlement to the lease, thus dismissing the proceeding. Key legal points included the interpretation of family member succession rights under rent stabilization laws.

Singh V. Silva

All Decisions

In this holdover eviction case, the tenant successfully argued that the apartment was subject to Rent Stabilization due to the building's participation in the 421-a tax exemption program. The court found that the landlord failed to provide requisite notices regarding the tax exemption status, and the landlord's claim that the exemption had been revoked was unsupported. Consequently, the court granted the tenant's summary judgment motion, leading to the dismissal of the eviction proceeding without prejudice.

Madison Edj Llc V. Clerveaux

All Decisions

In this non-payment proceeding, the tenant successfully invoked the MDL §302-a defense due to ongoing rent-impairing violations, including leaks and pest issues, that persisted for over six months. The court found that the landlord did not adequately address these conditions, thereby barring rent collection from September 2022 to January 2024. The tenant's counterclaims for habitability breaches were recognized, leading to the case dismissal and the order for the landlord to rectify existing HPD violations within specified timeframes.

Gentile V. 2400 Johnson Ave. Owner, Inc.

All Decisions

Tenant sued landlord for retaliatory eviction and breach of fiduciary duty after complaining about water quality in their apartment. The court found the tenant sufficiently pleaded both causes of action and denied the landlord's motion for summary judgment. However, the court dismissed the tenant's claim for inspection of the building's books and records. Key legal points: 1) Tenants can sue for retaliation if they are evicted in response to good-faith complaints about habitability issues. 2) Board members of cooperatives owe fiduciary duties to the shareholders. 3) Landlords must meet a high burden of proof to win summary judgment on retaliation …