Ruminations hasn’t researched commercial eviction law as it exists in every state, but wherever it has, one principle stands out. Eviction is an equitable, not a legal, remedy. Courts don’t have to evict a tenant and won’t do so for minor defaults. This approach is a subset of a legal “equitable” maxim: “Equity abhors a forfeiture.” A tenant’s “leasehold estate” is a property interest, and taking away a valuable property over a triviality is not what courts are supposed to do. Volumes have been written about this (and other) legal maxims. Not here; not today.
As to evictions, what varies from court to court, even in the same jurisdiction, is what judges consider to be “minor.” We’ll illustrate that today using “failure to maintain lease-required insurance coverages” as an example. [Read more…]
Print
Should a landlord be concerned about trademark or copyright law? Perhaps, not overly concerned (considering how many other challenges they face), but the answer is: “Yes.” Simply stated, a landlord can be liable to legitimate product suppliers if a tenant is selling counterfeit goods. Is it as simple as that? Well, no – but that’s the law, and there are court decisions that have cost some landlords “big bucks.”
When a tenant’s property is ruined by rain coming through the roof of its leased space, what caused the damage? Was it the water or was it the landlord’s failure to repair the roof? That’s today’s issue to Ruminate about.
Does a tenant have a duty to occupy the leased space? No, not unless the lease requires it to do so. So, what should a lease say in that regard? We begin by contrasting two terms, vacate and abandon.
Knowing what you don’t know is a good thing. A practical application of that statement comes when you are trying to figure out how a particular jurisdiction will treat a particular agreement such as a lease. There are some legal principles that suffuse state law throughout the United States. The law of damages is NOT one of those principles. Yes, the generality of “damages” is pretty much the same all over, but the details are not. Here’s an example from a just-decided Colorado case from its Supreme Court.
We are aware that in New Jersey, if a lease doesn’t denominate a particular tenant’s financial obligation as some version of “rent,” then the landlord can’t get the tenant evicted for non-payment of that item. The reason we are aware of this is because we’ve seen case law that denies a landlord such relief. While the landlord can sue to collect such charges, for example, common area charges, it can’t evict the tenant if the lease doesn’t say that such charges are “rent” or “additional rent.” It doesn’t matter that Ruminations thinks that’s just plain silly. That’s the way it works even if everyone other than the court knows that such items are part of a tenant’s rent.
Recent Comments