How Eviction Court Governs: A Statistical Analysis of Bargaining, Templates, and Debt in Philadelphia
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866911713873362944 |
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| author | Papamichalis, Marios Ruane, Regina |
| author_facet | Papamichalis, Marios Ruane, Regina |
| contents | We analyze downstream courtroom governance in Philadelphia eviction cases using 755,004 Municipal Court landlord--tenant records filed from 1969 through 2022. Post-filing case processing is organized by repeated courtroom relationships, judge and tenant-attorney regimes, reusable agreement templates, and repeated team-property units. Among both-represented, both-attorney-named cases, 58.2% involve a plaintiff-side and tenant-side attorney pair that had appeared against one another in the prior year, and greater prior pair exposure predicts lower default, higher judgment-by-agreement, and higher served-writ rates. Judge-linked cases display statistically distinct baseline outcome, continuance, fee, and award regimes; tenant-attorney identity explains meaningful variance in both case outcomes and agreement terms. Settlement text is highly standardized: reusable templates explain strictness, waiver, lockout-trigger, payment-plan, deadline, and time-is-essence language far more strongly than raw attorney identity. Monetary burden concentrates in repeated plaintiff-attorney-property units. Assignment-cell support and balance audits indicate that judge-linked evidence reflects institutional heterogeneity rather than a clean judge lottery, and judge--triad interactions are not estimable in this docket. Eviction court emerges as a repeated institutional field that organizes bargaining, text, debt, and enforcement after cases enter the courtroom pipeline. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24849 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | How Eviction Court Governs: A Statistical Analysis of Bargaining, Templates, and Debt in Philadelphia Papamichalis, Marios Ruane, Regina Applications We analyze downstream courtroom governance in Philadelphia eviction cases using 755,004 Municipal Court landlord--tenant records filed from 1969 through 2022. Post-filing case processing is organized by repeated courtroom relationships, judge and tenant-attorney regimes, reusable agreement templates, and repeated team-property units. Among both-represented, both-attorney-named cases, 58.2% involve a plaintiff-side and tenant-side attorney pair that had appeared against one another in the prior year, and greater prior pair exposure predicts lower default, higher judgment-by-agreement, and higher served-writ rates. Judge-linked cases display statistically distinct baseline outcome, continuance, fee, and award regimes; tenant-attorney identity explains meaningful variance in both case outcomes and agreement terms. Settlement text is highly standardized: reusable templates explain strictness, waiver, lockout-trigger, payment-plan, deadline, and time-is-essence language far more strongly than raw attorney identity. Monetary burden concentrates in repeated plaintiff-attorney-property units. Assignment-cell support and balance audits indicate that judge-linked evidence reflects institutional heterogeneity rather than a clean judge lottery, and judge--triad interactions are not estimable in this docket. Eviction court emerges as a repeated institutional field that organizes bargaining, text, debt, and enforcement after cases enter the courtroom pipeline. |
| title | How Eviction Court Governs: A Statistical Analysis of Bargaining, Templates, and Debt in Philadelphia |
| topic | Applications |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24849 |