Abstract
Between 2012 and 2015, an analysis of more than 300 rent escrow cases in the city of Baltimore revealed that neither judges nor plaintiffs in rent escrow cases understood or were correctly applying the relevant laws [1, 2]. Tenants didn’t understand the applicable laws or available remedies, and were unable to fill out their rent escrow applications accurately. Judges knew that the documents provided by tenants were probably filled out incorrectly, so they routinely ignored these documents. Thus, many rent escrow cases were decided based on established custom rather than on the facts of the case or relevant laws, and the results tended to favor landlords [1, 3]. A year of iterative design, testing, and re-design resulted in a rent escrow form that could (1) help tenants understand their options and provide accurate information to the court, and (2) provide judges with accurate information while simultaneously reinforcing their understanding of the applicable laws.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Some research suggests that using less usable forms is occasionally a deliberate strategy to reduce judicial caseloads. In Detroit, when the court experimented with “plain English” forms, the simpler forms led to an increased number of tenant claims, and the court subsequently reverted to legalese [10, 8]. Thus, there is a potential for opposition to improved forms to be driven by concerns about limited court resources [11].
- 2.
The REALM is one of several possible instruments for estimating adult literacy levels. It is comprised of a list of 66 words that a participant reads aloud as a facilitator keeps score of words pronounced correctly; the score is the number of correct words a participant pronounces. Although originally designed to measure health literacy, REALM has several advantages for field work—primarily in that it takes 2–5 min, requires minimal training to administer, and does not feel like a literacy test to participants. The REALM has been shown to reliably distinguish between adults at lower literacy levels [14], although it does not distinguish between adults at a 9th grade reading level or above. The REALM is also highly correlated with the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (r = 0.88), the revised Slosson Oral Reading Tests (r = 0.96), the revised Peabody Individual Achievement Test (r = 0.97, and the TOFHLA (r = 0.84) [15, 16]. The REALM also has a high test-retest reliability (r = 0.97) [12].
References
Cotton, M.: When judges don’t follow the law: research and recommendations. CUNY L. Rev. 19, 57 (2015)
Center, P.J.: Justice Diverted: How Renters Are Processed in the Baltimore City Rent Court (2015)
Bezdek, B.: Silence in the court: participation and subordination of poor tenants’ voices in legal process. Hofstra Law Rev. 20, 533 (1992)
Seron, C., Frankel, M., Van Ryzin, G., Kovath, J.: The impact of legal counsel on outcomes for poor tenants in New York City’s housing court: results of a randomized experiment. Law Soc. Rev. 35, 419–434 (2001)
Hannaford-Agor, P., Mott, N.: Research on self-represented litigation: preliminary results and methodological considerations. Justice Syst. J. 24(2), 163–181 (2003)
Sandefur, R.L.: The impact of counsel: an analysis of empirical evidence. Seattle J. Soc. Just. 9, 51 (2010)
Erlanger, H., Garth, B., Larson, J., Mertz, E. Nourse, V., Wilkins, D.: New legal realism symposium: is it time for a new legal realism? Wis. L. Rev., 335 (2005)
Super, D.A.: The rise and fall of the implied warranty of habitability. California Law Rev., 389–463 (2011)
U.S. Department of Education: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/StateEstimates.aspx
Rose, J.I., Scott, M.A.: “Street Talk” summonses in detroit’s landlord-tenant court: a small step forward for urban tenants. J. Urb. L. 52, 967 (1974)
Cotton, M.: A case study on access to justice and how to improve it. JL Soc’y 16, 61 (2014)
Davis, T.C., Long, S.W., Jackson, R.H., Mayeaux, E.J., George, R.B., Murphy, P.W., Crouch, M.A.: Rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine: a shortened screening instrument. Fam. Med. 25, 391–395 (1993)
Summers, K., Summers, M.: Reading and navigational strategies of web users with lower literacy skills. Proc. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 42(1) (2005)
Alqudah, M., Johnson, M., Cowin, L., George, A.: Measuring health literacy in emergency departments. J. Nurs. Educ. Prac. 4, 1–10 (2014)
Davis, T.C., Kennen, E.M., Gazmararian, J.A., Williams, M.V.: Literacy testing in health care research. In: Schwartzberg, J.G., VanGeest, J.B., Wang, C.C. (eds.) Understanding Health Literacy: Implications for Medicine and Public Health, pp. 157–179. Am. Med. Assoc., Chicago (2005)
Parker, R.M., Baker, D.W., Williams, M.V., Nurss, J.R.: The test of functional health literacy in adults: a new instrument for measuring patients’ literacy skills. J. Gen. Intern. Med. 10, 537–541 (1995)
Kutner, M., Greenberg, E., Jin, Y., Boyle, B., Hsu, Y., Dunleavy, E.: Literacy in everyday life: results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. NCES 2007-490. National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC (2007)
Summers, K., Langford, J., Wu, J., Abela, C., Souza, R.: Designing web-based forms for users with lower literacy skills. Proc. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 43(1), 1–12 (2006)
Summers, K., Langford, J.: The impact of literacy on usable and accessible electronic voting. In: International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 248–257. Springer International Publishing (2015)
Acknowledgments
Partial funding for this project was provided by the University of Baltimore and by the Center for Civic Design. Support was also provided by Sarah Frush of Maryland Legal Aid and C. Matthew Hill from the Public Justice Center.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Summers, K., Pointer, A., Cotton, M. (2018). Designing to Include Judges and Inner-City Tenants. In: Di Bucchianico, G., Kercher, P. (eds) Advances in Design for Inclusion. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 587. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60597-5_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60597-5_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60596-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60597-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)