At what stage in history did intervention of courts become required for tenant evictions? In England and other common law jurisdictions (I assume throughout most of the world in fact) a tenant doesn't automatically lose entitlement to their home once they stop paying rent for whatever reason, or otherwise peeve the landlord. Or, perhaps they do, but a court order is almost always a prerequisite of enforcing this loss of entitlement to occupation of the premises. When did this come to be the case? I imagine at some point during medieval times or before them, that if a tenant stopped paying rent to their landlord, it might have typically started to get somewhat ugly fairly quickly, and without any intervention of the court. Am I correct that (at least 'justified') self-help evictions would have once been legal, and if so, then at what point did this stop being the case?
This is only a partial answer and admittedly doesn't establish when residential and commercial leases for money rent came to be enforced by court evictions rather than by landlord self-help. But it does establish an earliest time period in which this could have happened by describing when residential and commercial leases for money rent came into widespread use, which is much later than the question supposes. At some point during medieval times or before them, that if a tenant stopped paying rent to their landlord Court evictions for non-payment of rent or a termination of a tenancy under a lease didn't arise until some significant period of time after leases of that type came into use in the post-feudal era. In Europe While something bearing a fair similarity to modern real property law concepts and economics existed in the Roman Empire, this conception of real property law largely disappeared after the Roman Empire collapsed, during the Middle Ages in Europe, for the better part of a thousand years. Residential and commercial leases of real property with buildings on it for money rent by ordinary people that don't amount to serfdom, i.e. quasi-slavery, from which eviction is not the usual remedy for non-payment of rent, mostly post-date the Medieval era. During the era of serfdom, the goods and services provided by serfs to their lords was indeterminate in character between rent and taxation as almost all land was owned by feudal lords who were also the sole source of governmental authority. As noted at the Wikipedia link to serfdom above: Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century. Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually though they could, depending on the area, be sold together with land. The kholops in Russia, by contrast, could be traded like regular slaves, could be abused with no rights over their own bodies, could not leave the land they were bound to, and could marry only with their lord's permission. Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads. The manor formed the basic unit of feudal society, and the lord of the manor and the villeins, and to a certain extent the serfs, were bound legally: by taxation in the case of the former, and economically and socially in the latter. The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the widespread plague epidemic of the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347 and caused massive fatalities, disrupting society. Conversely, serfdom grew stronger in Central and Eastern Europe, where it had previously been less common (this phenomenon was known as &quot;later serfdom&quot;). In Eastern Europe, the institution persisted until the mid-19th century. In the Austrian Empire, serfdom was abolished by the 1781 Serfdom Patent; corvées continued to exist until 1848. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861. Prussia declared serfdom unacceptable in its General State Laws for the Prussian States in 1792 and finally abolished it in October 1807, in the wake of the Prussian Reform Movement. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, feudalism was never fully established, and serfdom did not exist; in Denmark, serfdom-like institutions did exist in both stavns (the stavnsbånd, from 1733 to 1788) and its vassal Iceland (the more restrictive vistarband, from 1490 until 1894). In the Middle Ages in Europe, outside of a few &quot;free cities&quot;, renting a house or apartment, that wasn't a farm that you and your descendants were forever bound to serve your lord working, were mostly not a thing. Also, for most or all of the Middle Ages in England and the rest of Europe, your landlord was also your lord (i.e. the government) and he was the court before which all civil and criminal disputes involving his subjects and activities taking place on his land were resolved, so he had no need to resort to his own justice. In the early Middle Ages in England, real property disputes between aristocrats, who were mostly the only people who had interests in land other than as serfs, for example, over disputed boundaries or title, were mostly resolved in trials by combat. While some more modern real estate concepts were starting to emerge in England in the 13th century, culminating in what would be the status quo for the next several hundred years with legislation adopted in 1290 CE, this didn't have much impact on the common man and residential and commercial money leases of improved real estate remained rare. Serfdom was almost completely abolished only by 1485 CE in the Elizabethan era. See generally here. In continental Europe, the period after the end of serfdom and feudalism and before industrialization occurred, was called the &quot;early modern period.&quot; This is also the period in which a legal regime based upon Roman law was restored to widespread use in continental Europe on a piecemeal basis in a process called the &quot;reception&quot; of Roman law. Even when true serfdom ended, most leases were initially long term or indefinite term sharecropping leases of farms by tenant peasants from the lords who had previously held them in slave-like hereditary servitude, not money leases of a residence or commercial workplace (often combined in one building) in the modern sense, where eviction for nonpayment of monthly rent or a termination of a short term lease was the norm. In sharecropping situations, shortfalls of rent basically amounted to theft of the landlord's property and were punished in that model, and evictions mostly arose as aristocratic lords and merchant landholders converted peasant farmland to other purposes. A near modern market based understanding of real property as a commodity that can be bought, leased, sold, or inherited on a widespread basis by ordinary people was later than that. Widespread modern commercial rentals of a house or apartment or non-farming business, that was not a sharecropped farm, in exchange for money rent, came into use largely in connection with urbanization and industrialization, although merchants and skilled craftsman started the early stage of this process in the early modern period in the late 1400s and early 1500s. As an aside, Ireland, like the rest of Europe, eventually transitioned to urban money lease arrangements for many of its people as its economy evolved, but when it attained independence that was recognized by the U.K. effective in 1922, only 1% of the land in Ireland was owned by Irish people, with the rest owned predominantly by absentee British landlords. Farmlands in those regions would have been mostly sharecropped at that time. In the Americas There were substantial swaths of the Americans in the colonial era, and in the early United States, where a large share of all workers were literal chattel slaves, and another very large share were sharecroppers with leases of indefinite duration and no fixed money rent. Widespread slavery, of course, persisted until 1865 in much of the United States, and sharecropping was widespread in parts of the United States into the early 20th century. The percentage of the workforce engaged in farming has increased significantly in the United States (and in the colonies that preceded it) in almost every decade since the 1700s. For example, in 1820, 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million was engaged in farming, almost all as freehold owners of their farms, as sharecroppers, or as slaves. Likewise, in urban areas, a very significant share of residential and commercial real estate was either owned by the occupants or was inhabited by indentured servants. So, residential and commercial leases for money rent were just starting to come into widespread use in the 1700s in the colonies that would ultimately come to be the United States. In Asia In most parts of the Southeast Asia and East Asia, serfdom (or a close equivalent of it) persisted longer than it did in England. For example, in Japan, most free peasant farmers were downgraded to serfdom starting ca. 1185 CE when the Kamakura Shogunate established feudalism in Japan. Cracks in this system were starting to develop during the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 CE–1868 CE) which is also called the Edo Period (after the historic name of the capital in Tokyo), but the institution of serfdom wasn't completely dissolved until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, about four centuries after serfdom had reached a comparable level of near complete abolition in England. In Japan, as in England, widespread rentals of houses and apartments for money rent separate from a sharecropped farm, largely coincided with urbanization, which took place in Japan mostly in the Edo and Meiji periods. According to the Wikipedia link on serfdom above: According to medievalist historian Joseph R. Strayer, the concept of feudalism can also be applied to the societies of ancient Persia, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt (Sixth to Twelfth dynasty), Islamic-ruled Northern and Central India, China (Zhou dynasty and end of Han dynasty) and Japan during the Shogunate. Wu Ta-k'un argued that the Shang-Zhou fengjian were kinship estates, quite distinct from feudalism. James Lee and Cameron Campbell describe the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644–1912) as also maintaining a form of serfdom. Melvyn Goldstein described Tibet as having had serfdom until 1959,but whether or not the Tibetan form of peasant tenancy that qualified as serfdom was widespread is contested by other scholars. Bhutan is described by Tashi Wangchuk, a Bhutanese civil servant, as having officially abolished serfdom by 1959, but he believes that less than or about 10% of poor peasants were in copyhold situations. The Maoist revolutionary movements in India are seeking to address the residual inequalities in land ownership that arose from feudal serfdom-like practices there that persisted in some Indian states in substance although not in form, into the 20th century. One of the reasons that there are few surnames that are widely used in countries like China, Korea, and Vietnam is that in those countries serfs were assigned the surname of the dynasty of their feudal lords, and their surnames were changed if their lord was conquered by another lord during a period of consolidation of aristocratic power.
Any eviction order (for non-payment) will not be enforced by the sheriff (as ordered by the court), and that is how evictions would happen. This is also required under the governor's order of March 20. Foreclosure entails eviction – though the order prohibits the enforcement of an associated eviction order, and doesn't prohibit starting action against a property owner. Theoretically, you could file for eviction against your tenant and at some point the petition could be granted, and the sheriff would enforce it. Those are the current legal options. Current (optimistic) projections are that evictions could happen in the second half of May.
You should have seen this coming. This might vary a bit from place to place, however it would generally be accepted that if you are in a rented place, you have to pay rent. Most jurisdictions would have some law which requires pro-rata'd payment for the time you actually stay, there would not be any requiring the landlord let you stay free. An uninvested third party might ask "Why would a landlord provide you with 5 days free rent". Another way to look at it is that one of the elements of a contract is consideration (think payment) - Thus in contracting to stay in his place longer you should expect to provide consideration - and pro-rata'd rent would be typical.
Unfortunately, your relative is more in the wrong here First, the COVID situation does not change anyone's rights and obligations under a contract (see What effect does an event like the current Covid-19 pandemic have on contractural obligations?). So the landlord (through their agent) is obliged to provide the property and your relative is obliged to pay the rent and to occupy the premises (most residential leases contain a requirement for the tenant to live in the premises and not leave it empty). Your relative (through you) has indicated that she will be in breach of her contract. The agent has considered her position and has offered two (IMO generous) alternatives: Allow her to continue with the lease without taking possession providing the rent is paid. To release her from her obligations under the contract and return the rent. To put it in perspective, if your relative simply "walked away", she would be liable for the rent until a new tenant was found and, if that new tenant was paying less rent than she was, the difference for the duration of the lease plus the costs of finding a new tenant - advertising, agent's fees (usually 1 month's rent) etc. Now, the landlord has an obligation to minimise your costs so advertising the property could just be prudent. However, if they lease it when your relative's contract has not been properly terminated then it is they who are in breach. Surely they can't take the rent and offer to re-let the property at the same time? Surely they can. What they can't do is relet the property without properly terminating your relative's lease. Would they even be entitled to retain the deposit under these circumstances? Absolutely. The deposit is to cover their losses if your relative breaks the lease - as she has indicated she is going to do (this is called anticipatory breach). Finally, I'd rather not go down this route but is there any protection for my relative for not being forcefully 'evicted' - since she's paid the deposit, rent - and those haven't been returned? Having never taken possession, she is not being evicted.
You have acknowledged that the house was in "new" condition, which establishes a baseline for determining if the present state is normal wear and tear. The lease and California law agree that normal wear and tear is not the responsibility of the tenant. You may then need to sue the landlord in small claims court to get the remainder of the deposit (the above guide will be useful). The thing that is not clear is exactly what constitutes "normal wear and tear". The state guide tends to emphasize extreme forms of damage such as dogs chewing the woodwork, or cigarette burns. If you do ordinary cleaning on the walls, windows, carpets etc. then it is more likely that the judge will find in your favor.
We don't want this issue to adversely affect our credit and got legal consulting which suggested we should pay the debt collector to protect our credit score, and then sue the landlord for the money back in small claims court. I'm a little worried about this strategy since it requires to hand away the money first, and am trying to get second opinions. The debt collector is probably either the owner of the claim against you, if it is an assignee of the claim, or an agent of the landlord for purposes of collection. Thus, payment to the debt collector is equivalent to payment of the landlord. The law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction regarding whether payment constitutes of waiver of a right to sue over the debt. Sometimes it is necessary to designate the payment "under protests" or "reserving all rights", but that is not a uniform rule of law that applies in all jurisdictions, and I do not have the time and familiarity with that state's law to research Massachusetts case law on that point accurately.
I assume you are not legally emancipated. To evict anyone, there is a legal process – nobody can just kick a tenant out, without the appropriate court order. These guys describe the process for evicting an adult child (where the child does not have a lease and is a tenant at will). A custodial parent has a legal obligation to provide, among other things, a place for the child to live. Kicking a child out is contrary to that obligation, and could constitute child abandonment ("neglect" under CRS 19-3-102), and that is a crime. A court would not grant a parent's motion to evict a minor child. If a landlord takes the law into his own hands, as it were, he can be sued under CRS 38-12-510.
Is there any way I can persuade the new landlord to start renting apartment as close as possible to the end of 30-day period? If you already signed a contract with the "immediate move-in" clause, it is going to be difficult to persuade the new landlord. That is because the landlord would have no incentive to postpone his source of income and there is no statute or legal provision available to you on that. If you have not signed the contract, then you two can still negotiate until either party leaves or you reach an agreement. Under contract law, the latter is referred to as knowingly and willfully entering a contract.