16 - Commentary on Phillips Neighborhood Housing Trust v. Brown

Summary

The 1960s began a sustained transformation of American residential landlord–tenant law that was long heralded as a “revolution.”¹ Through it, the status of residential tenants was (purportedly) improved substantially; and, it remains widely accepted, the law “escaped from the realm of private ordering, in which the stronger party typically has the advantage, and has become subject to regulation in the public interest.”² Due to the radical realignments of this period, almost all tenants now enjoy the legal right to residences fit for human habitation as a “just and necessary implication” of their leases.³ Arguably more important, the “extraordinary ferment”⁴ markedly curtailed landlords’ power to control unilaterally the terms, conditions, and performance under leases by, among other changes, expanding procedural protections against retaliatory, arbitrary, capricious, constructive, profiteering, or otherwise exploitative eviction.