William A. Schnader Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Jan 10;120(2):e2210467120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2210467120. Epub 2023 Jan 3.
Studying ∼200,000 evictions filed against ∼300,000 Philadelphians from 2005 to 2021, we focus on the role of transit to court in preventing tenants from asserting their rights. In this period, nearly 40% of tenants facing eviction were ordered to leave their residences because they did not show up to contest cases against them and received a default judgment. Controlling for a variety of potential confounds at the tenant and landlord level, we find that residents of private tenancies with longer transit travel time to the courthouse were more likely to default. A 1-h increase in estimated travel time increases the probability of default by between 3.8% and 8.6% points across different model specifications. The effect holds after adjusting for direct distance to the court, unobserved landlord characteristics, and even baseline weekend travel time. However, it is absent in public housing evictions, where timing rules are significantly laxer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tenants had the opportunity to be present virtually. We estimate that had all tenants been equally able to get to the court in 10 min, there would have been 4,000 to 9,000 fewer default evictions over the sample period. We replicate this commuting effect in another dataset of over 800,000 evictions from Harris County, Texas. These results open up a new way to study the physical determinants of access to justice, illustrating that the location and accessibility of a courthouse can affect individual case outcomes. We suggest that increased use of video technology in court may reduce barriers to justice.
研究了 2005 年至 2021 年间针对 30 万费城人提起的约 20 万次驱逐诉讼，我们专注于交通在阻止租户主张权利方面对法庭的作用。在此期间，近 40%的面临驱逐的租户因未出庭应诉而被命令离开住所，并收到缺席判决。在控制了租户和房东层面的各种潜在混杂因素后，我们发现前往法院的交通时间较长的私人租赁房客更有可能违约。估计旅行时间每增加 1 小时，违约的概率就会增加 3.8%至 8.6%点，这在不同的模型规格中都成立。即使在调整了直接到法院的距离、未观察到的房东特征，甚至是基线周末出行时间后，这一效应仍然存在。然而，在公共住房驱逐中，这一效应并不存在，因为公共住房的时间规则要宽松得多，而且在 COVID-19 大流行期间，租户有机会通过虚拟方式出庭。我们估计，如果所有租户都能在 10 分钟内同样方便地到达法庭，那么在样本期间，将会减少 4000 到 9000 次违约驱逐。我们在另一个来自德克萨斯州哈里斯县的超过 80 万次驱逐数据集中复制了这种通勤效应。这些结果开辟了一种研究诉诸司法的物理决定因素的新方法，表明法院的位置和可达性可能会影响个别案件的结果。我们建议在法庭上更多地使用视频技术，以减少司法障碍。
