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The Dynamics of Informal Procedure: The Case of a Public Housing Eviction Board

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Richard Lempert
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Abstract

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This paper examines a public housing eviction board and asks how the decision to prosecute cases informally affected both board action and the implications of that action. It argues that board decisions were patterned and that apparently similar procedures produced different outcomes at different points in time. Informality is seen as compatible with rule-oriented decisionmaking and as a factor that affects the ways that rules and outcomes may be changed and manipulated. Informal justice is not defined, but certain features, such as the quality of discourse in a tribunal, are posited as keys to judgments of informality. It is argued that these keys determine whether a tribunal is perceived as formal or informal but that the actual quality of tribunal need not fit this neat dichotomy, for it is a complex function of whether prosecutors, defendants, and judges take informal or legalistic stances toward the procedural and substantive issues that arise in a case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , 1989 , pp. 347 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I have accumulated more than the usual intellectual debts in writing this paper. My work was supported by grant SES-8617981 from the Law and Social Science Program of the National Science Foundation and by the Cook Funds of the University of Michigan Law School. I received valuable comments from Rick Abel, Edward Cooper, Shari Diamond, Robert Ellickson, Bruce Frier, Joel Handler, Shelly Messinger, Jeffrey Paige, Lawrence Rosen, Fred Schauer, Barbara Yngvesson, Mayer Zald, and a person whose name I cannot attach to a helpfully annotated draft that was returned to me. I also benefited from the opportunity to present this paper to groups of scholars at the Boalt Hall, Cardozo, and Columbia law schools and at a Law and Contemporary Problems Symposium at Duke Law School. The cooperation of the Hawaii Housing Authority was essential to this research. I would like to thank the many people associated with the Authority who facilitated my investigation. All findings and opinions expressed in this paper are mine and should not be attributed to the National Science Foundation, the University of Michigan, the Hawaii Housing Authority, or the preceding list of helpful critics.

References

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Cases Cited

Thorpe v. Housing Authority of the City of Durham, 336 U.S. 670 (1967).Google Scholar

Regulations Cited

Hawaii Administrative Rules § 17.501.2(c) (effective January 1, 1981).Google Scholar
Hawaii Revised Statutes § 360–4 as amended in 1980.Google Scholar