impact of legal counsel on outcomes for poor tenants in New York City's Housing Court: Results of a randomized experiment, The

Law & Society Review, 2001 by Seron, Carroll, Van Ryzin, Gregg, Frankel, Martin

Having said all of this, if resources were extended so that all eligible clients received legal representation, would the findings reported in this study be sustained on a larger scale, extended over a longer time frame and across other jurisdictions? Of course, without empirical analysis a definitive answer is impossible. Nevertheless, in this pilot program, where clients were represented by CLO attorneys or by pro bono attorneys working closely with CLO colleagues, the results are extremely robust. The findings reported here suggest that replication of this program in other jurisdictions coupled with rigorous empirical evaluation is warrented.

References

1 For the duration of the Project, five legal aid staffers: two full time staff attorneys, one supervising staff attorney, and two full time paralegals were responsible for assisting volunteer attorneys and administering the project's operations.

2Eligibility for legal aid services is based on federal poverty guidelines as established by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, in 1993-1994, HHS established poverty at $18,500 for a family of four (45 CFR 1611).

3 See Appendix A for teh original and complete definition of reprsentation, assistance, and advice caes.

4 See page 421, where other findings show that about 12% of tenants in Housing Court are represented by an attorney.

5It should be noted that a court order to require that a landlord make repairs to a building is the necessary first step in the process of securing actual repairs. Resources for this study did not permit systematic analysis of whether the repairs were actually made, but without the first step actual repairs are not possible.

6 The IV results, which appear in Tables 4 and 5, were produced using two-stage, least-squares (2SLS) regression. The first-stage equation is...and the second-stage equation is... where Xi is an indicator variable for legal representation (the treatment itself), ..is an indicator variable for initial assignment to treatment or control conditions, and... is the outcome of interest. In the second-stage equation, the predicted values for...are substituted for the observed values. Tables 4 and show and as the adjusted means for the control group and treatment group, respectively.

References

Angrist, Joshua D., Guido W. Imbens & Donald B. Rubin (1996) "Identification of Causal Effects Using Instrumental Variables," 91 J. of the American Statistical Association 444-55.

Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1989) "Preventing Homelessness Through Representation of Tenants Faced with Eviction," Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Berk, Richard A., Gordon K, Smyth & Lawrence W. Sherman (1988) "When Random Assignment Fails: Some Lessons from the Minneapolis Spouse Abuse Experiment," 4 J. of Quantitative Criminology 209-23.

Citywide Task Force on Housing Court (1986) "5 Minute Justice: `Aint Nothing Going on But the Rent!'" A Report of the Monitoring Subcommittee of the Citywide Task Force on Housing Court. New York: Citywide Task Force.