Matthew Heller at OnPoint News has been digging further into that Chicago landlord-tenant fight that culminated in a cause celebre lawsuit over a posting on Twitter (earlier). More: Marc Randazza.
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Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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Matthew Heller at OnPoint News has been digging further into that Chicago landlord-tenant fight that culminated in a cause celebre lawsuit over a posting on Twitter (earlier). More: Marc Randazza.
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Readers may remember Cyrus Sanai as the litigant with the big grudge against Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski who proceeded to launch a campaign trying to destroy Kozinski’s career (with some help from the Los Angeles Times). Now a California appeals court has issued the latest ruling in Sanai’s decade-long dispute with the owner of a Newport Beach apartment he once rented. Shaun Martin at California Appellate Report has details on the ruling, which sends the fight back to the lower courts. Martin calls it “a tale of litigation run amok. A tale that explains, in part, why some people hate lawyers; and, in particular, engaging in transactions with them.”
P.S. Sanai, in our comments section, says we’re wrong: for one thing, we described him as having sued the owner of the apartment he once rented when in fact “the complaint at issue is against UDR’s successor in interest, First Advantage Corporation, and UDR’s owner, Harvey Saltz”.
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Note that the proposal here is not to provide free lawyers in cases where careful case-screening establishes a fair argument that the eviction is in some way legally wrongful or unjustified. It’s to use taxpayer money to make sure that tenants who’ve trashed the apartment or stiffed the landlord on months of rent are also assigned a lawyer who will predictably use all the procedural leverage available to stall things out further, extract a payment as a condition for the tenant’s leaving, and so forth. NYU’s Brennan Center is pushing the scheme, which has 22 sponsors on the New York City council. (Manny Fernandez, “Free Legal Aid Sought for Elderly Tenants”, New York Times, Nov. 16). For more about “Civil Gideon” schemes, see this post (scroll) and this one (David Giacalone: “Attorney Employment Assurance Plan”).
P.S.: To clarify matters: for now, the program would apply to elderly tenants (which doesn’t mean all the occupants of the apartment will necessarily be elderly).
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