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Abstract: Each year, millions of Americans default in their civil and criminal cases and face consequences such as arrest or eviction. Such default may not be intentional; indeed, informational interventions have decreased defaults and improved outcomes in many justice contexts, and, as a result, have become one of the most common interventions used by courts and advocates. Yet these interventions remain untested in many civil justice situations, including eviction, where power dynamics and complex choices may render them ineffective or even harmful. This Article reports on the results of the first large-scale field experiment to provide self-help to tenants facing eviction. In contrast to prior interventions in other contexts, we find no evidence that our self-help reduced default or improved outcomes. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that our self-help may have led to worse legal outcomes for Hispanic tenants and tenants with corporate landlords (as compared to non-Hispanic tenants and tenants with non-corporate landlords, respectively). These findings serve as a counterpoint to previous studies on legal interventions and suggest the limits of self-help in enabling litigants to take complex actions. They also suggest a mechanism by which self-help, by altering litigation costs for adverse parties, may unintentionally cause harm.
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