Courting Justice: Ten New Jersey Cases That Shook the Nation

Marini v. Ireland (1970)

23 Within a thirty-four-day period in 1970, courts in Illinois, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey announced decisions that dramatically altered a central aspect of landlord-tenant law—the ability of landlords to summarily dispossess tenants for failure to pay rent. Each decision reached essentially the same conclusion: tenants were entitled to defend against summary dispossession if conditions in their residences endangered health and safety or if there were other unfair conditions imposed on their tenancies. These decisions opened the floodgates of change. Other reformist court decisions or legislative enactments followed in almost every state. The stories of the Illinois and D.C. decisions, Rosewood v. Fisher and Javins v. First National Realty, Corp., have been told elsewhere in great detail,1 and most first-year law students around the nation read Javins in their property law courses. But, surprisingly, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision in Marini v. Ireland has received much less attention.2 Placing that decision more solidly on the historical record is long overdue. The importance of a major case is difficult to measure without knowing something about the social, cultural, and historical background of the dispute. Marini arose out of the maelstrom that was New Jersey in the 1960s. When I arrived at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark during the summer of 1968 to begin my teaching career, Newark was in chaos. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April 4. From July 12 to July 17 the summer before, rioting had left the core of the city in shambles. Whites had already left the city in large numbers to move to the suburbs, and the flight accelerated after 1967. Within a few years of my arrival, many of the main businesses in the downtown core downsized or closed, leaving empty building hulks behind. Driving up Springfield Avenue—the main 1967 riot corridor—was to go through a depressing stretch of poverty, gutted buildings, empty lots, and littered streets. 2 Marini v. Ireland (1970) Protecting Low-Income Renters by Judicial Shock Therapy RICHARD H. CHUSED 24 RICHARD H. CHUSED Crime rates skyrocketed. The city, in short, was a wreck—the butt end of tragic jokes on television and devastating commentaries in the media. It routinely was placed on lists of the worst cities in America.3 Camden, Newark’s sister city in distress to the south and the site of the building that gave rise to Marini, also was in terrible condition. Riots sparked by the police beating and death of a Puerto Rican motorist erupted in August 1971, not quite a year after Marini was decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court. Major industrial facilities, including large plants run by RCA and the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, downsized or closed during the 1960s.4 Between 1950 and 1970 the town’s population declined by about 17 percent, and by an equal amount from 1970 to 1980.5 The alarming situations in Newark, Camden, and other inner-city areas of the nation’s most densely populated state had a palpable impact on the New Jersey Supreme Court’s desire to bring landlord-tenant disputes before it and on its overtly reformist resolution of the legal issues. Just as the relationships among poverty, politics, urban disturbances, and the law in Washington, D.C., profoundly influenced the decision in Javins, so too the desperate situations in Newark and other cities deeply affected judicial developments in New Jersey.6 In this chapter, I reconstruct some of that history—presenting a portrait of the times and describing some of the reasons the courts responded aggressively to the problems they perceived. To do that, I will take a four-stage journey . First, I will provide a few intimate, personal stories to bring to life how desperately bad the situation in Newark, and by implication other New Jersey cities, was in the late 1960s. Second, I will present a portrait of how the New Jersey Supreme Court responded to the crisis. That will entail a trek through landlord-tenant law as it was prior to the decision in Marini, as well as a look at the court’s decision in Reste Realty v. Cooper7 —a crucial opening gambit in the reforms Marini instituted a year later. That tour should make it easier to understand why, as a matter of traditional legal logic, the Reste and Marini opinions were partly untenable, if not incoherent. The extraordinary nature of the opinions symbolized the level of...