> CB: * * * How exactly does an attorney
> prevent an eviction for non-payment of rent
> if the client doesn't have any money for rent,
> or their heat back on for back bills if they don't
> have any money etc. ? :>)
Knowknot: Subject of course to very serious (structural) caveats (re. which, see last comment below),by comparably doing for the indigent client exactly what the good/creative attorney for the moneyed client would do: Based on knowledge/experience adopt/use insofar as ethical and otherwise appropriate to the case other sorts of defenses - e.g., what might be any number of procedural and, if you will, related "technical" ones - besides the just addressing the simple-minded, "Does s/he have the money to pay the rent as claimed?" in a way that takes account of the prevalence of the (in part perhaps not sufficiently appreciated) below noted reality to the indigent client's (at least: short-term) advantage.
^^^^ CB: Yes, there is a warranty of habitability defense, if the conditions of the place are so bad that it is uninhabitable , then it can be argued that no rent is due. Of course, it has to be _really_ bad to be uninhabitable. In fact, it has to be someplace you don't want to stay in. However most indigent people are on month-to-month leases, and, a landlord can just wait to the next month and just terminate, not renew for the next month. When I first got out of law school and went into legal services in 1979, there was a lot more use of "technicalities" like not giving the right number of days after serving a notice to quit and the like but now all the judges here don't seem to pay much attention to many technicalities, and I don't hear that type of thing much. But those technical defenses still only buy time, buy time to move without having the stuff put on the curb by the sheriff. The eviction is going to take place eventually, if the landlord wants it to happen. It's the judges who are simpleminded or singleminded on the money. If it was up to me , they could stay in ( I'm so generous for somebody who doesn't own any apartments)
> By and large, civil cases are about money,
> and people without much money are going
> to lose most of them.
That's right, sort of. But this sort of vague/generalized comment may not sufficiently address some related considerations (and, at that, not just even if but especially because most "civil cases are about money"):
Many judges - including, certainly judicial administrators who monitor what trial judges do - are sensitive about the dollar costs of judicial administration to The System overall, too, and so can be enlisted, in any particular case or group of cases, in helping achieve a con sensual resolution that might result in a disposition the (non-structurally/non-politically thinking) indigent client might consider a "victory" and, in fact, may (at least in the short term) be that (of sorts).
^^^^^^ CB: With due respect, this is not my experience, although I'm not entirely clear on what you getting at. The judge doesn't have to save money by pushing for a settlement between the parties. They always seem ready to go to trial if necessary to me. Eviction trials are summary process, fast, fast, fast relief. But I may not get what you are saying.
^^^^^^
Also, the example posited above - a hypothesized landlord-tenant relationship and dispute - appears implicitly to presume that the landlord will be able and willing to spend $$ in any particular case including for an actually ethical and otherwise competent attorney; but this hardly is always so, and the knowledgeable/creative tenant's lawyer may know and understand how to perceive and, if present, exploit whatever is the reality in this respect to the tenant client's advantage.
^^^^^ CB: Most landlords I know of seem willing to hire an attorney who will get the people out. Also, there are landlords who go pro se, represent themselves, and the judges are very accomodating to them, chummy even. Judges and landlords are in the same class stratum, and the judges are quite aware of it, in general.
^^^^
The above-noted caveat nonetheless does remain and perhaps ought not just be noted parenthetically, however, and it is also illustrated by the presumptive example above: that the "victory" of preventing an eviction of a tenant from a heatless and vermin/rat-infested apartment does not address (and arguably in any number of ways might contribute to) the reality that such a "win" gets for the economically poor tenant . . . what? - . . . the right to continue reside there as, meanwhile, the "System" is hardly designed to encourage rent-strikes (much less well-organized ones) or increase actually livable housing stock in anything close to a structural manner.
^^^^^ CB; Yea, being poor ain't no joke.