Nicole Summers

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Volume 93.1
Settlements of Adhesion
Nicole Summers
Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center; Affiliated Scholar, American Bar Foundation.

For very helpful feedback on prior versions of this piece, I thank Russell Engler, David Luban, David Hoffman, Tal Kastner, Timothy Mulvaney, Michael Pollack, Tanina Rostain, Kathryn Sabbeth, Emily Saltzberg, Emily Satterthwaite, Jessica Steinberg, Neel Sukhatme, and Josh Teitelbaum. This Article benefited from presentations at the Harvard-Yale-Stanford Junior Faculty Forum, the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, the 2024 Access to Justice Roundtable, the Property Worksin- Progress Workshop, the State and Local Courts Workshop, and the State and Local Government Law Workshop. Emmeline Basco provided excellent research assistance and Yi Yao provided excellent assistance with data analysis. I am very grateful to the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for their outstanding editorial work. All errors are my own.

Eviction cases make up over a quarter of all cases filed in the federal and state civil courts and have enormous consequences for tenants, who are nearly always unrepresented by counsel. These cases overwhelmingly settle, yet settlement scholars have entirely overlooked eviction both empirically and theoretically. The Article presents results from the first empirical study of eviction settlement negotiations. The study involved rigorous analysis of an original dataset of over one thousand hand-coded settlements, observations of settlement negotiations in the hallways of housing court, and dozens of interviews. The findings demonstrate that unrepresented tenants—who make up the vast majority of tenants in the eviction system—have no meaningful influence over settlement terms. Rather, the terms are set by landlords and their attorneys. Drawing on the empirical findings and scholarship about contracts of adhesion, the Article develops the theoretical concept of “settlements of adhesion.”

Contract Law Contracts Empirical Analysis Housing
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87.1
The Limits of Good Law: A Study of Housing Court Outcomes
Nicole Summers
Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor, Harvard Law School; Research Affili- ate, New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. JD 2014, Harvard Law School; MALD 2014, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; AB 2008, Brown University.

I thank Vicki Been for substantial support in designing the study that is the subject of this paper and for insightful comments at all stages of the writing process. For very helpful feedback on prior drafts of this piece, I am grateful to Yun-chien Chang, Russell Engler, Renagh O’Leary, Cristina Rodrigues, Jessica Steinberg, Paul Tremblay, and the participants in the NYU Colloquium on the Law, Economics, and Politics of Urban Affairs, the Harvard Law School Clinical Scholar- ship Workshop, and the Works in Progress Session at the American Association of Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education. I am indebted to Maxwell Austensen, Maria (Mili) Chapado, and Xingzhi Wang for performing the data analyses used in the study. I also thank Rob Collinson and Luis Herskovic for providing additional data sup- port, and Alisa Numansyah for heroically collecting and scanning over one thousand case files across all five boroughs of New York City. Scott Davis, Ethan Fitzgerald, Andrew Gerst, and Alex Wilson provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I thank the Office of Court Administration and the New York City Department of Housing Preserva- tion and Development for providing data used in the study.

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