How Eviction Court Governs: A Statistical Analysis of Bargaining, Templates, and Debt in Philadelphia

2026-05-23

AI Summary

This study examines how institutional interactions within Philadelphia’s eviction court shape case negotiations, settlement terms, and debt enforcement. Drawing on over 750,000 landlord–tenant court records from 1969 to 2022, the authors employ large-scale statistical analysis, textual template identification, and variance decomposition to model the eviction court as a repeated-game institutional field—an approach applied here for the first time. The analysis reveals that 58.2% of cases with legal representation on both sides involve attorney pairings who have faced each other in court within the past year. Such repeat pairings significantly reduce default judgment rates and increase the likelihood of consent judgments. Moreover, settlement agreements exhibit high textual standardization, with debt burdens concentrated among recurring combinations of plaintiffs, attorneys, and rental units, underscoring the systematic influence of institutional structure on judicial outcomes.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• eviction court
• bargaining
• agreement templates
• debt
• institutional governance

Innovation

• eviction court
• repeated interactions
• legal templates
• institutional heterogeneity
• bargaining dynamics