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The Value of Counsel: 20 Years of Representation before a Public Housing Eviction Board

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Karl Monsma  and
Richard Lempert
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Abstract

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Research into the effects of legal representation is rare because in many settings in which people might have lawyers, legal representation is either so common or so unusual that it cannot serve as a variable. Moreover, such research as exists is often poorly controlled or otherwise methodologically deficient. Our data set, derived from the case files of a public housing eviction board, allows us to overcome most of the difficulties that plague prior studies because it is relatively large and unusually rich in information about individual cases. We model the effects of various tenant and case characteristics on lawyer involvement as well as the effects of legal representation on case outcome. We find that lawyers tend to handle more difficult cases and that the likelihood that legal representation will aid a tenant depends on case type and changes over time. Our results, though likely to be context dependent, suggest how the effects of legal representation may be studied in other settings and the kinds of variables that may condition such effects.

Type
The Context of Litigation
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , 1992 , pp. 627 - 667
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This research was supported by the Law and Social Science section of the National Science Foundation (SES-8617981) and the Cook and Cohn Funds of the University of Michigan Law School. An earlier version was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Madison, Wis., June 1988. We thank William M. Mason, Lynn Mather, Christopher Winship, and Yu Xie for comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Frank Munger and anonymous reviewers for their comments. The cooperation of the Hawaii Housing Authority was essential to this research. We would like to thank the many people associated with the Authority who facilitated this investigation. All findings and opinions expressed in this paper are the authors' and should not be attributed to the National Science Foundation, the University of Michigan Law School, or the Hawaii Housing Authority.

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