Eviction by Design: The Role of Court Documents, Self-Help Materials, and Judicial Actors in the Tenant Experience of Summary Eviction Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Bernal, Daniel William Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 07/10/2021 09:26:00 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/636536 EVICTION BY DESIGN: THE ROLE OF COURT DOCUMENTS, SELF-HELP MATERIALS, AND JUDICIAL ACTORS IN THE TENANT EXPERIENCE OF SUMMARY EVICTION by Daniel W. Bernal __________________________ Copyright © Daniel W. Bernal 2019 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2019 1 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Almost four years ago, I participated in a program called Simpla Phi Lex, led by Judge Dean Christoffel and Professor Barbara Atwood, designed to make the courts more accessible. This dissertation—and much of my future research agenda—was inspired by that first court encounter. I am grateful to Judge Christoffel and Professor Atwood and to all those I have since encountered in Arizona and California and all around the world who are passionate about designing courts to work better for the people who use them. I am inspired each and every day by the intentionality, creativity and passion that academics and advocates and court staff bring to civil justice reform. In addition, this work would not have been completed without the financial and institutional support I have received from the University of Arizona, the James E. Rogers College of Law, Stanford Law School, the Arizona Bar Foundation, Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, and the National Science Foundation. Thank you for your investment in this project and in my future. I am very grateful to all of the people who have invested in the direction and impact of this work. To my dissertation chair, Matthew Abraham, thank you for your insightful questions and your flexibility. I could not have negotiated two institutions without your staying force. To my other committee members, Kathie Barnes, John Warnock, and Susan Miller-Cochran, thank you for your comments and critiques and for challenging me to see civil justice from diverse perspectives. To Christopher Robertson and Chris Griffin and Stacy Butler at the James E. Rogers College of Law, thank you for your empirical reviews and your community engagement. To Jacob Goldin, Deborah Rhode, Rob MacCoun, John Donohue, and Juliet Brodie at Stanford Law School, thank you for helping me to orient my scholarship towards a legal audience and for investing in my development as an empirical legal scholar. To Bernadette Meyer and Barbara 3 Fried, thank you for opening up your home bi-weekly to our Legal Studies Workshop. Many of these ideas were first shared in that safe space amongst insightful friends. And finally, to Andy Yuan, thank you for being my partner in this randomized experiment of ours. The legal self-help materials that formed the randomized study portion of this dissertation could not have been produced without the support of many advocates. Thank you to Margaret Hagan for taking me on as a fellow designer, teacher, and collaborator at the Legal Design Lab. Knowing you has made me think entirely differently about the kind of problems I want to help solve and the ways I want to give back to my community. The classes we’ve co-led together about justice design have revolutionized the way I think about civil justice. I could not have completed this work without you. Thank you to Metin Eskili for programming the website and to Carolyn Hampe for the beautiful design. Thank you to Kevin Ruegg and Chris Groninger, and Alvaro Flores at the Arizona Bar Foundation for agreeing to support the project, for hosting the website, and for co-designing the materials. Thank you to Pam Bridges at Community Legal Services and Stacy Butler at Step Up to Justice and James Daube at Southern Arizona Legal Aid and Melissa Benjamin at Our Family Services for help developing our materials. Much of this work happened within the walls of Pima County Justice Court. I’d like to particularly thank Micci Tilton, Jay Dennis, and the whole host of judges and court staff that shared their data and allowed us to use their facilities. I am always inspired by this court’s desire to improve access for all members of their community. In addition, I would like to thank all of my thirteen interns who have worked with me in some capacity over the past several years: Timothy Reyna, Alexander Relich, Ireland O’Connell, Jack O’Sullivan, Madz Smith-Ledford, Vi Ramassini, Katherine Rybiy, Eric Roshak, Lillian Vu, Sabrina Etcheverry, Marilyn Ipema, Kaitlyn Grace, and Jess Blazewicz. I’d particularly like to thank Alexander Relich and Ireland 4 O’Connell for staying with me for over three years. It has been my honor to work in this space with you and I am excited for you to start your own law school careers. In addition, I would like to thank all of the tenants, landlords, and judges who participated in the studies described in the following pages. It takes courage to be willing to speak with strangers about our most vulnerable moments. Thank you for taking that risk. Thank you for being partners in this work. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for their support. Thank you for laughter and warm meals and thoughtful words. I wouldn’t have wanted to do this without you. 5 DEDICATION For a redesigned housing court. 6 Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………............. 8 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………….... 10 Chapter 1 Eviction by Design……………………………………………………………………………….19 Chapter 2 Redesigning Justice Innovation: A Standardized Methodology………………………………..102 Chapter 3 Self-Help is No Panacea: A Field Experiment on the Impact of Self-Help Mailers in an Arizona Court……………………………………………………………………………...……144 Chapter 4 Evicting the American Underclass: Housing Court and the Erosion of Public Confidence in the Judiciary…………………………………………………………………………………184 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………….... 284 7 ABSTRACT This project aims to understand how Arizona tenants experience the judicial process of summary eviction and whether that experience might be meaningfully improved. While the psychological, social, and economic effects of eviction are currently in the national spotlight, few scholars have investigated the legal documents that quietly shunt tenants out of their houses and the justice innovations designed to help them resist. In addition, there has been surprisingly little qualitative research of tenants during the eviction process that investigates why they choose to attend their hearing, how they perceive housing court, and whether they are able to accomplish their stated goals through their attendance and participation. Through this analysis of the tenant experience, I provide recommendations for redesigning housing court more equitably. This project is comprised of four stand-alone studies. Chapter 1 describes a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the documents that evict. As a case study, I analyze the notice and pleading documents most filed in an Arizona housing court, measure their real-world impact, and present model eviction notice and pleading forms. Chapter 2, written with Margaret Hagan, integrates existing expert-oriented and user-centered approaches to designing justice innovation and presents a first attempt at establishing a standard methodology for creating and vetting new justice interventions. We present the methodology used to create the eviction self-help materials used in this project as an example and argue that a human-centered, participatory approach should become the standard in justice innovation design. Chapter 3, written with Andy Yuan, describes the results of a randomized study to provide self-help information to tenants facing eviction in one Arizona court. We find no evidence that provision of self-help improved court attendance or case outcomes; in contrast, treated tenants were significantly more likely to owe their landlords more money. In Chapter 4, I present findings from qualitative interviews with tenants after their eviction hearing and posit recommendations for housing court redesign. 8 9 Introduction I met Diego1 minutes after the judge evicted him from his home. He is around 60. Peppery hair, dark brown complexion. His English is peppered, too, with the border-Spanish of my Nana and Tata. His hands are rough and scarred and shaking. His checkered shirt is buttoned up to his mischievous, disarming smile. When we start talking, he opens up his folder and lays out the documents and pictures of his trailer on the table as if he were making his case. Even though his case is already over. He lost without knowing it. Like most of the tenants I spoke with, this was not Diego’s first interaction with the courts. He spent over 10 years in jail for drug distribution, and, these past 6 years he’s been out, he has struggled to survive. When he finally saved enough money, he put a down payment on a trailer and has been making monthly payments ever since. He is proud of this trailer, his lifeline. Still, it isn’t easy to make the payments. He only gets $750 per month for his disability and rent costs him $450, with utilities around $200. To supplement, he does all the landscaping around the trailer park for a $100 reduction in rent each month. He also sells the tomales he makes on his stove. He’s close to owning his home outright, close to getting his clean start.