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.
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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].
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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.
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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
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