Deal or No Deal: An Empirical Analysis of the Settlement Dynamics of Landlord-Tenant Disputes

Abstract

This paper seeks to combine three different strands of legal scholarship: the literature about the New Haven Housing Court, the alternative dispute resolution literature on the normative and positive dimensions of settlements, and the methodological practice known as docketology, which is the concept of mining court docket sheets for data. The focus of this paper will be on using data from the New Haven Housing Court docket sheets to empirically investigate how different factors influence the probability that a case is resolved via settlement rather than through litigation to final a judgment.