Supreme Court Preserves Tenant Wrongful Eviction Claims

The decision follows a national trend in overthrowing longstanding precedents in order to benefit the rich and powerful. While the tenants’ right to sue for wrongful eviction survived, the decision reflects a hostility to tenants rights---and an encouragement to bad acting landlords---that is the norm among California’s judiciary.

The Action Apartments case involved a simple issue: does the state’s age-old litigation privilege, drafted to prevent litigants from being sued for defamation for what they say in court papers, apply to bar lawsuits against landlords trying to illegally evict and/or harass tenants?

The answer, for many reasons, was obviously no. Why would the State Legislature seek to protect wrongful landlord conduct through a statute of general application without specifically stating such?

Further, no appellate decision in California had ever applied the state litigation privilege to invalidate a local ordinance absent express statutory language. There is nothing about tenant evictions or harassment in the litigation privilege, while numerous state law provisions---including the Costa-Hawkins law---recognize localities traditional power over land use laws.

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