“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this
—you haven’t.”
THOMAS EDISON
Housing
Using Data to Drive Reforms in Landlord-Tenant Court
For nearly five years, Lowenstein lawyers have worked with a coalition of tenant advocates to promote due process in eviction proceedings. This year we joined with other advocates to urge the New Jersey Supreme Court to adopt and enforce more thoroughgoing procedures for reviewing eviction complaints for deficiencies that should prevent their filing.
We partnered with the Housing Justice Project of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School, Volunteer Lawyers for Justice, and the Housing Justice Program at Rutgers Law School to conduct a study and issue a report, Unjustified Residential Evictions in New Jersey, which received significant press coverage.
Based on data collected and analyzed by the coalition, the report concluded that landlord-tenant courts enter as many as 29,000 eviction judgments or defaults against tenant families each year in cases where the landlords’ complaints fail to comply with the applicable rules and laws for filing. These judgments rest on quicksand because the New Jersey courts, historically protective of the rights of tenants, have long held that they lack jurisdiction in cases where the complaint does not meet the standards for filing.
Tenant lawyers and other legal professionals working with the coalition collected the data in the late spring and summer of 2024. The team reviewed a substantial sample of residential eviction complaints filed on eCourts, the public access site for court filings, and assessed their compliance with the laws and court rules that govern such filings. They then shared preliminary data with the Administrative Office of the Courts, which identified some errors. Experienced tenant lawyers then went back into eCourts and rechecked all the data, making corrections as needed.
After reviewing 1,378 complaints, including samples from each county in New Jersey, the coalition found that:
- 69 percent of eviction complaints filed by landlords contained at least one significant legal deficiency;
- 15 percent of complaints filed had three or more legal deficiencies; and
- the courts issued deficiency notices in only 11 percent of the cases in which landlords had filed deficient complaints.
Notably, in landlord-tenant courts across New Jersey, 97 percent of residential tenants do not have a lawyer to defend them from eviction. Without legal representation, self-represented tenants have little to no capacity to identify the legal deficiencies that regularly lead to dismissals in the few cases in which tenants have lawyers.
The report’s findings highlight the pressing need for continued reform and oversight to ensure that eviction judgments are entered in landlord-tenant courts only when there is a sound legal basis to do so. In response to the report, the judiciary and stakeholders are collaborating on reforms that we hope will ensure that eviction complaints are legally compliant before the entry of judgment.