Value of Counsel: Twenty Years of Representation Before a Public Housing Eviction Board

• NCJ Number: 141294
• Journal: Law and Society Review Volume: 26 Issue: 3 Dated: (1992) Pages: 627-667
• Author(s): K Monsma; R Lempert
• Date Published: 1992
• Length: 41 pages
• Grant Number(s): SES-8617981
• Sponsoring Agency: University of Michigan; National Science Foundation
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Madison, Wis., June 1988.

Annotation

The study reported in this article examined the public housing eviction process on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, with attention to the effects of defense counsel on case outcome.

Abstract

The study covered the period from 1966 through 1985, during which time eviction actions were commenced against 1,268 tenants, 108 of whom acquired lawyers or paralegals at some stage in the eviction process, although nine of the represented tenants never had a hearing, and 12 of them acquired lawyers only after exhausting their right of appeal within the Housing Authority. The study considers both lawyers and paralegals as "lawyers," because those paralegals who represented tenants worked along with and under the general supervision of attorneys for the Legal Aid Society of Honolulu and were trained in the law relating to housing evictions and in welfare law generally. The eviction process includes two levels of hearings. The first, or trial level, hearing occurs before the Hawaii Housing Authority's eviction board, a lay panel that has much in common with the various welfare benefit tribunals that have been studied in Britain. The eviction board is charged with deciding whether to evict tenants from public housing projects administered by the Authority on Oahu. The second, or appellate level, hearing is held before the Authority's Board of Commissioners, which is ultimately responsible for all the Authority's business. Only tenants dissatisfied with the judgment of the hearing board can appeal to the commissioners. The study found that lawyers tend to handle more difficult cases and that the likelihood that legal representation will aid a tenant depends on case type and changes over time. The results, although likely to be context dependent, suggest how the effects of legal representation may be studied in other settings and the kinds of variables that may condition such effects. 9 tables and 43 references