Entities	Georgia (1)
Topics and Issues	Evictions (10)

A Vanderbilt law review article, Praxis and Paradox: Inside the Black Box of Eviction Court, from Lauren Sudeall, an Associate Professor of Law at Georgia State Univ. and the Director of its Center for Access to Justice, and Daniel Pasciuti, an associate professor of sociology at Georgia State Univ. The article

is based on a multi-year, mixed-methods study of three such dispossessory (eviction) courts in Georgia, positioned across the suburban-rural spectrum. In undertaking the project, we set out to better understand what court looks like for parties going through the dispossessory process outside of Atlanta, how the process in those courts might differ from the traditionally contemplated legal process, and how court structure and stakeholder approaches in such counties affect administration of the law, case outcomes, and the litigant experience.

Praxis and Paradox, 1367-68.  There are no specific references to tenant screening in the article.  There is no discussion of sealing of records.  The authors describe the eviction process in general, and in Georgia in particular, as an “assembly line” where an eviction court’s “primary functionary role [is] a vehicle for rent collection.”  Id., 1368.  Overall, “[w]hile smaller, lower-volume courts have fewer caseload pressures and appear to prioritize procedural justice, the process they conduct functions less like a traditional legal proceeding and more as a vehicle for rent collection. Paradoxically, elements typically associated with fair process—like the opportunity to respond to legal claims through filing an answer or the scheduling of a hearing on the merits—do not always manifest in substantively improved outcomes for tenants, given the structure of the underlying law.”  Id., 1366.

The article is data-intensive.  Across three Georgia counties, “County S is a large suburban county, still within the outer boundaries of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Its population[, including its Black population,] has grown rapidly from 2000 to 2018…County R, which is further south and further away from Atlanta, had a lower rate of expansion [and a] much less dense than County S.   Thirty-four percent of County R’s population was Black…On the most rural end of the spectrum is County r, with a [low] population density”, and 29% of its residents are Black.  Id., 1386-87.  Of the 2,257 cases the authors looked at, “[t]he vast majority of dispossessory filings did not result in an eviction recorded by the court. Thus, in our dataset, about 26% of cases had information through the issuance of a writ of possession, and 18.4% of cases contained information all the way through the eviction process with law enforcement.”  Id., n. 96.  This datapoint is interesting and helpful for us, but it is clearly outside the narrative the authors have built.